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The sermon places repentance at the beginning and end of Christ’s earthly commission, presenting it as indispensable to receiving the gospel. Repentance is not legalism but a grace-born response in which God illumines the sinner, produces humility and hatred of sin, and brings transformation. It cannot be separated from faith in Christ, and the cross turns repentance from mere bitterness into peace and joy. The sermon strongly warns that persistent impenitence leads to judgment while assuring repentant sinners that mercy is freely open in Christ.
Theological center: Saving repentance is a gracious work of God, inseparable from faith, grounded in Christ’s cross, and evidenced by changed life.
Applications: Repent before God · Abandon cherished sins · Obey the divine bidding now · Examine true repentance
Primary texts: Matthew 4:17 · Luke 24:47 · 2 Corinthians 5:17
“From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Matthew 4:17 “And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” Luke 24:47 IT seems from these two texts that repentance was the first subject upon which the Redeemer dwelt and that it was the last which, with His departing breath, He commended to the earnestness of His disciples. He begins His mission crying, “Repent,” He ends it by saying to His successors the apostles, “Preach repentance and remission of sins among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” This seems to me to be a very interesting fact, and not simply interesting, but instructive. Jesus Christ opens His commission by preaching repentance. What then? Did He not by this act teach us how important repentance was—so important that the very first time He opens His mouth, He shall begin with, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”? Did He not feel that repentance was necessary to be preached before He preached faith in Himself because the soul must first repent of sin before it will seek a Savior, or even care to know whether there is a Savior at all? And did He not also indicate to us that as repentance was the opening lesson of the divine teaching, so, if we would be His disciples, we must begin by sitting on the stool of repentance before we can possibly go upward to the higher forms of faith and of full assurance? Jesus at the first begins with repentance—that repentance may be the Alpha, the first letter of the spiritual alphabet which all believers must learn, and when He concluded His divine commission with repentance, what did He say to us but this—that repentance was still of the very last importance? He preaches it with His first, He will utter it with His last breath, with this He begins, with this He will conclude. He knew that repentance was, to spiritual life, a sort of Alpha and Omega—it was the duty of the beginning, it was the duty of the end. He seemed to say to us, “Repentance, which I preached to you three years ago, when I first came into the world as a public teacher, is as binding, as necessary for you who heard Me then, and who then obeyed My voice, as it was at the very first instant, and it is equally needful that you who have been with Me from the beginning, should not imagine that the theme is exhausted and out of date, you too must begin your ministry and conclude it with the same exhortation, ‘Repent and be converted, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” It seems to me that nothing could set…