Having recently penned two articles featuring quotes on our problem (sin), and our remedy (salvation in Christ), it seemed worthwhile to do another piece or two, on what it is that bridges the gap. Faith and repentance are the major components of receiving the salvation freely offered to us by God through Christ. So this one will look at repentance, presenting 41 brief quotes by 27 Christians, plus a reading list of a dozen books.
Richard Baxter
“The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree?”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“[The Lord Himself] held that the only way to safeguard the gospel of forgiveness was by preaching repentance. If the Church refuses to face the stern reality of sin, it will gain no credence when it talks of forgiveness. Such a Church sins against its sacred trust and walks unworthily of the gospel. It is an unholy Church, squandering the precious treasure of the Lord’s forgiveness. Nor is it enough simply to deplore in general terms that the sinfulness of man infects even his good works. It is necessary to point out concrete sin. . .”
Thomas Boston
“Repentance is a continuous act. The issue of godly sorrow must not be quite stopped till death.”
Thomas Brooks
“The work of repentance is not the work of an hour, a day, or a year, but the work of a life. A sincere penitent makes as much conscience of repenting daily, as he does of believing daily; and he can as easily content himself with one act of faith, or love, or joy, as he can content himself with one act of repentance.”
John Calvin
“Repentance is the true turning of our life to God, a turning that arises from a pure and earnest fear of Him; and it consists in the mortification of the flesh and the renewing of the Spirit.”
“True repentance is firm and constant, and makes us war with the evil that is in us, not for a day or a week, but without end and without intermission.”
D. A. Carson
“There is no alternative to repentance, no other way to experience the blessing of the Lord. The nature of repentance in Scripture precludes the nonsense of partial repentance or contingent repentance. Genuine repentance does not turn from one sin while safeguarding others; partial repentance is as incongruous as partial pregnancy. Loyalty to God in selective areas is no longer loyalty, but treason. To repent of disloyalty in select areas, while preferring disloyalty in others, is no repentance at all. God does not ask us to give up this or that idol while permitting us to nurture several others; he demands, rather, that we abandon idolatry itself and return to the God against whom we have ‘so greatly revolted’.”
Sinclair Ferguson
“Repentance is a characteristic of the whole life, not the action of a single moment.”
The Grace of Repentance (Redesign) (Today's Issues)by Ferguson, Sinclair B. (Author)
Vance Havner
“The last word of our Lord to the church was not the Great Commission. The last thing He said to the church was ‘Repent.’ He said that to five out of seven [churches in Revelation].”
“Repentance is almost a lost note in our preaching and experience and the lack of it is filling churches with baptized sinners who have never felt the guilt of sin or the need of a Saviour. . . . We are trying to get young people to say, ‘Here am I’ before they have ever said, ‘Woe is me!’”
Matthew Henry
“Some people do not like to hear much of repentance; but I think it is so necessary that if I should die in the pulpit, I would desire to die preaching repentance, and if out of the pulpit I would desire to die practicing it.”
Douglas Kelly
“The Puritans called repentance ‘the twin sister of faith.’ They go together in a genuine salvation experience.”
R. B. Kuiper
“The call to repentance must come first in evangelism.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“If we go back and read the great story of the Christian church in every period of revival and reawakening, we will find that this note of repentance has always been central and it has always been primary.”
“The business of evangelism is not just to solve people’s problems; psychology does that, the cults do that, many things do that. The thing that separates the gospel from every other teaching is that it is primarily a proclamation of God and our relationship to God. Not our particular problems, but the same problem that has come to all of us, that we are condemned sinners before a holy God and a holy law. That is evangelism. It must, therefore, always put repentance first.”
Martin Luther
“Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ … willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.”
John Owen
“Evangelical repentance is that which carries the believing soul through all his failures, infirmities, and sins. He is not able to live one day without the constant exercise of it. It is as necessary unto the continuance of spiritual life as faith is. It is that continual, habitual, self-abasement which arises from a sense of the majesty and holiness of God, and the consciousness of our miserable failures.”
James I. Packer
“God promises to pardon and restore all who repent of their sin. Because sin, both of omission and of commission, in motive, aim, thought, desire, wish, and fantasy even if not in outward action, is a daily event in Christians’ lives (you know this about yourself, don’t you?), regular repentance is an abiding necessity. Repentance must be thorough, coming from the heart just as did the sin.”
“It needs to be said that faith is not a mere optimistic feeling, any more than repentance is a mere regretful or remorseful feeling. Faith and repentance are both acts, and acts of the whole man. Faith is more than just credence; faith is essentially the casting and resting oneself and one’s confidence on the promises of mercy which Christ has given to sinners, and on the Christ who gave those promises. Equally, repentance is more than just sorrow for the past: repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Saviour as King in self’s place. Mere credence without trusting, and mere remorse without turning do not save. ‘The devils also believe, and tremble.’ ‘The sorrow of the world worketh death’. (James 2:19; 2 Cor. 7:10).”
A. W. Pink
“The Christian who has stopped repenting has stopped growing.”
Leonard Ravenhill
“If John the Baptist came back today, he would not be a voice crying in the wilderness but crying in the church.”
“The last words of Jesus to the church (in Revelation) were ‘Repent!’”
Alan Redpath
“If you want revival, let me remind you that God only plants the seed of His life in soil which has been broken up by repentance.”
Paris Reidhead
“A person repents when he comes to the place where he discovers that the will of God is the government of his life and the glory of God is the reason for his life. He only has repented who has changed his mind about his reason for being.”
Richard Owen Roberts
“The first word of the gospel is not ‘love.’ It is not even ‘grace.’ The first word of the gospel is ‘repent.’ From Matthew through the Revelation, repentance is an urgent and indisputable theme that is kept at the very forefront of the gospel message.”
J. C. Ryle
“There are no impenitent people in heaven. All who enter have felt, mourned over, forsaken and sought pardon for sin in Christ.”
C. H. Spurgeon
“Repentance is as much a mark of a Christian, as faith is. A very little sin, as the world calls it, is a very great sin to a true Christian.”
“Repentance grows as faith grows. Do not make any mistake about it; repentance is not a thing of days and weeks, a temporary penance to be got over as fast as possible! No, it is the grace of a lifetime, like faith itself. God’s little children repent, and so do the young men and the fathers. Repentance is the inseparable companion of faith.”
“If the man does not live differently from what he did before, both at home and abroad, his repentance needs to be repented of, and his conversion is a fiction.”
“There is no repentance where a man can talk lightly of sin, much less where he can speak tenderly and lovingly of it.”
“A Christian must never leave off repenting, for I fear he never leaves off sinning.”
A. W. Tozer
“One thing wrong with us today is that we do not repent enough. The reason we do not have more repentance is that we repent for what we do instead of for what we are. The repentance for what you do may go deep, but the repentance for what you are goes deeper.”
“Repentance should be radical and thorough, and the best repentance for a wrong act, as Fenelon said, is not to do it again.”
“The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense.”
Paul Washer
“The evidence … the raw-bone, biblical evidence that there was one time in your life that you repented unto salvation, is that you continue repenting until today and continue growing in repentance.”
Thomas Watson
“The two great graces essential to a saint in this life, are faith and repentance. These are the two wings by which he flies to heaven. Faith and repentance preserve the spiritual life—as heat and water preserve the physical life.”
“Knowledge without repentance will be but a torch to light men to hell.”
“Christ is never loved till sin be loathed. Heaven is never longed for till sin be loathed.”
“By delay of repentance, sin strengthens, and the heart hardens. The longer ice freezeth, the harder it is to be broken.”
John Wesley
“God does undoubtedly command us both to repent, and to bring forth fruits meet for repentance; which if we willingly neglect, we cannot reasonably expect to be justified at all: therefore both repentance, and fruits meet for repentance, are, in some sense, necessary to justification.”
George Whitefield
“True repentance will entirely change you; the bias of your souls will be changed, then you will delight in God, in Christ, in His Law, and in His people.”
Recommended Reading
Boda, Mark, ‘Return to Me’: A Biblical Theology of Repentance. IVP, 2015.
Boda, Mark and Gordon Smith, eds., Repentance in Christian Theology. Michael Glazier, 2006
Boston, Thomas, Repentance: Turning from Sin to God. Christian Focus, 2012.
Colquhoun, John, Repentance. Banner of Truth, 1826, 2010.
Ferguson, Sinclair, The Grace of Repentance. Crossway, 2010.
Finney, Charles, True and False Repentance. Kregel, 1851, 1975.
Miller, C. John, Repentance: A Daring Call to Real Surrender. CLC, 2009.
Ovey, Michael, The Feasts of Repentance. Apollos, 2019.
Renner, Rick, Repentance: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Do It. Harrison House, 2017.
Roberts, Richard Owen, Repentance. Crossway Books, 2002.
Sproul, R. C., What is Repentance? Reformation Trust, 2014.
Watson, Thomas, The Doctrine of Repentance. Banner of Truth, 1668, 1999.
4 Replies to “Repentance: Quotes and Recommended Reading”
True. Repentance is essential to receive forgiveness and to have a new heart fashioned after YHWH’s own image. An ongoing process it is true. The above quotes are very good. Thank you Bill.
Thanks Suzanne.
From Jesus at Revelations 2: 20-23 (I get a feeling this is not one of Jesus’s most well-remembered statements since it’s really severe…)
“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.”
When was the last time anybody ever taught that Jesus actually threatened to make an unrepentant woman suffer and even kill her children? No soft mr nice guy here, I’m not even sure where that caricature of Jesus came from.
True. Repentance is essential to receive forgiveness and to have a new heart fashioned after YHWH’s own image. An ongoing process it is true. The above quotes are very good. Thank you Bill.
Thanks Suzanne.
From Jesus at Revelations 2: 20-23 (I get a feeling this is not one of Jesus’s most well-remembered statements since it’s really severe…)
“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.”
When was the last time anybody ever taught that Jesus actually threatened to make an unrepentant woman suffer and even kill her children? No soft mr nice guy here, I’m not even sure where that caricature of Jesus came from.
Yes they are strong words indeed Mark.