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The sermon presents repentance unto life as more than fear, emotional distress, verbal confession, or temporary moral reform. True repentance is a grace-produced hatred of sin, sorrow over sin, and determined forsaking of it, evidenced by lasting practical change. Spurgeon emphasizes that God grants this repentance through sovereign mercy and that sinners should seek it by believing and contemplating Christ crucified. The sermon strongly calls hearers to examine themselves, embrace Christ, and repent without delay.
Theological center: Saving repentance is a sovereign gift of God, produced by grace through the Spirit, joined to faith in Christ, and evidenced by hatred of sin and changed conduct.
Applications: Repent and turn to God · Examine your repentance · Forsake and repair wrongdoing · Look to Christ’s cross
Primary texts: Acts 11:18 · Acts 26:28 · 2 Corinthians 13:5
“Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.” Acts 11:18 ONE of the greatest obstacles which the Christian religion ever overcame was the inveterate prejudice which possessed the minds of its earliest followers. The Jewish believers, the twelve apostles, and those whom Jesus Christ had called from the dispersed of Israel, were so attached to the idea that salvation was of the Jews, that none but the disciples of Abraham, or at any rate, the circumcised ones, could be saved, that they could not bring themselves to the thought that Jesus had come to be the Savior of all nations, and that in Him should all the people of the earth be blessed. It was with difficulty they could allow the supposition. It was so opposite to all their Jewish education, that we find them summoning Peter before a council of Christians and saying to him, “Thou wentest in to men uncircumcised and didst eat with them.” Nor could Peter exonerate himself until he had rehearsed the matter fully, and said that God had appeared unto him in a vision, declaring, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common,” and that the Lord had bidden him preach the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, inasmuch as they were believers. After this, the power of grace was so mighty that these Jews could no longer withstand it, and in the teeth of all their previous education, they at once assumed the broad principle of Christianity, “and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.” Let us bless God that we are now free from the trammels of Judaism, and that we are not under those of a Gentilism which has in its turn excluded the Jew. But that we live so near the blessed time that is coming, when Jew and Gentile, bond and free, shall feel themselves one in Jesus Christ our Head. I am not now, however, about to enlarge upon this, but my subject this morning is “Repentance unto life.” May God give me grace so to speak to you that His Word may be as a sharp sword, “piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.” By “repentance unto life,” I think we are to understand that repentance which is accompanied by spiritual life in the soul and ensures eternal life to everyone who possesses it. “Repentance unto life,” I say, brings with it spiritual life, or rather, is the first consequent thereof. There are repentances which are not signs of life, except of natural life, because they are only effected by the power of the conscience and the voice of nature speaking in men. But the repentance here spoken of i…