""Only acknowledge thine iniquity" (Jer. 3:13).

[JM]

Preached At Galeed Chapel, Brighton, on Lord's day morning Sept.23rd, 1923

Repentance has in it also a free spirit of confession. The Lord speaks of this to His backsliding people by Jeremiah. "Only acknowledge thine iniquity" (Jer. 3:13). It is a great thing to have a free spirit in this. I know the spirit that would make us say; I am clean in some things where I have not been clean. There is a spirit in man that would hide his transgressions. "He that covereth his sins shall not prosper, but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy" (Prov. 28:13). This is one of the beautiful things that you find in true repentance; a free confession of your sins before the Lord. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:8,9). I have felt a very warm love to repentance, and a wish that I could repent every day of my life and repent deeply of the sins which I daily commit. It is a mercy to be kept from outward transgression, but with all this mercy there is inward falling and failing; and it is a mercy when the testimony of God's word so comes to us in the convincing light of the Spirit of God as that we do feel, and say before God that we have sinned.​

Faith and Repentance by J. K. POPHAM

 

[a mere housewife]

A friend of Ruben's quoted, I think Bavinck, recently to the effect of characterising sanctification as a process of continual repentance.