Repentance or faith; which comes first?

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Is recognition of a need to repent to be counted as something? It is a precursor by many standards. I fear Society and the Church has removed that. When the recognition of the need to repent is numbed out, it obviously is not regeneration but peer pressure most likely. But when it comes from within it is from God putting his Law in our hearts and doing something. I believe both are good. We should be thankful both survive when they do.
 
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Thinking about my earlier post above, for me to turn from my antagonism and accept the Gospel was repentance.

in my opinion, your repentance was doctrinally based and grounded in the faith you now had. I myself am more comfortable with faith, preceding repentance.
 
in my opinion, your repentance was doctrinally based and grounded in the faith you now had. I myself am more comfortable with faith, preceding repentance.
I don't know. The second sermon by MLJ, which I'm listening to now, is even more direct in placing repentance first. This only a few minutes into it. This sermon appears to be directly defining repentance. I'm only a few minutes into it. Of course his viewpoint does not settle the question, but I have great respect for his knowledge, and interpretation of Scripture.
https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/repentance-2/
 
I love Swinnock. He writes, "according to a man's sense of misery, such is his estimation of mercy. The sharp sauce of repentance doth commend Christ exceedingly unto the spiritual palate. The more bitter and irksome sin, the more sweet and welcome Jesus Christ will be to the soul. When the sinner seeth that he is lost in himself, then and not till then, will he truly request to be found in Christ; the prodigal did not prize the bread in his father's house till he was ready to perish for hunger. If sinners were sensible of the sting of the serpents, they would look up to the brazen serpent with an eye of greater respect." It is when we are pricked to the heart, then we cry, "men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?"

Amen. Thankfully this is what I experienced. Praise be to God!
 
The long version is too complicated, so I will give the short one. In 1986 I was three years clean and sober through a 12 step program familiar to everyone. I had been raised by atheists and was not only an unbeliever, but extremely antagonistic toward Christians who wanted to dictate their morality to others.

Listening to a cassette tape of Dr. Bob Smith, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in a talk he gave in 1949, he said that the program of AA came from the 'good book.' Specifically the Book of James, The Sermon on the Mount, and the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians.
This infuriated me. I was between a rock and a hard place as it were. I wanted nothing to do with a program based on the Bible and Christian precepts, yet AA had saved my life and I knew that if I was to turn my back on it I'd soon be drowning my sorrows and committing slow suicide.
Some people might think what I am about to say is off topic, but there is a point at the end.

Jimmy, congratulations on your sobriety. My best friend for the last 25 years, who introduced me to the Gospel back then, became an alcoholic and addict about 10 years ago. He is in AA and has been sober for several years now. In many ways he understands Scripture much better than I do, especially from an experiential standpoint -- the standpoint of dealing with sin in his own life. He has explained to me how the 12 steps are clearly steps from the Bible describing the process of repentance. But the founders realized that the people who need this life and death help are almost universally dead set against Christianity. That is why they had to remove all religious wording from the 12 steps. That and the church has nothing to offer people whose lives are this much in slavery to sin. It takes a very special church which does have a program like this; that has something to offer to people who if they commit one more act of sin it can lead to actual death.

My friend struggled for a long time not understanding how God was clearly working in people's lives freeing them from the power and dominion of sin but it was not saving them in the Gospel context of salvation in Jesus Christ. In fact God was honoring the Scriptural steps He gave in the Bible even where His Name was not named! Those 2 separate categories just did not exist in his mind, though he finally did come to understand it.

We Christians can sit back and contemplate on which comes first -- faith, repentance, or even regeneration. And everyone can have their own differing views. We have the luxury to ponder such things. But these ponderings should always lead us to a higher view of God which is in line with Scripture. And we must make sure our ponderings do not cause us to leave out necessary pieces of the Gospel, and possibly lead us to offering to lost men doctrine (meat) instead of the Gospel (milk).
 
I feel like we are having two different conversations here. As I re-read the L-J piece in the OP, regeneration was not mentioned. He was talking about the relative order of repentance and faith. He argued that because repentance is often mentioned first, that therefore it comes before faith, or maybe it is concurrent with faith. The Auchterarder Creed says the opposite of L-J, at least if "forsaking sin" be the same as "repentance," which I believe it is, at least partially. We do not forsake sin in order to come to Christ. We forsake sin because we have come to Christ through grace. That is a hill upon which I will die, along with all the Marrow Men. The call of the gospel, which is often phrased in terms of repentance, does not indicate for us the order in which the events occur. So I have not mentioned regeneration, but it keeps cropping up as if its relation to repentance and faith is the issue here.

There is a definitional problem which I think is gumming up the works here as well. It is the definition of "repentance." Sometimes, "repentance" can mean something like "conversion," as in a turning away from sin and a turning to Christ. This is a more loose definition. It can be, in this case, almost synonymous with conversion, and encompass a great many things. It seems to me that possibly L-J is using the term in this sense, as are many (again, possibly) in the conversation. This is not the way I have been using the term, nor in the context in which I have been using it. I mean a very specific definition of forsaking sin, which, in the context of the Marrow controversy, was said by the neonomian General Assembly, to be essential before coming to Christ. This is what Boston, the Erskines, and others, following The Marrow of Modern Divinity, rejected with abhorrence, but the Marrow position is what the General Assembly rejected as anti-nomian. The simple fact of the matter is that no one can forsake sin unless they are united to Christ by faith. This union produces the duplex gratia of justification and sanctification.

The biblical pattern is that God regenerates a person by His Holy Spirit, thus producing faith, which unites a person to Christ, thereby laying hold of Christ both in justification-type benefits (justification and adoption), and sanctification type benefits (which start with regeneration and definitive sanctification a la John Murray, and include progressive sanctification to conclude in glorification). The former benefits are benefits of status the occur outside the person, whereas the latter benefits happen inside a person. Justification happens at the same time as definitive sanctification (distinct, yet inseparable). It happens as the result of faith. I hold that union with Christ is the umbrella benefit that houses all the others. Repentance is a necessary part of sanctification, but it cannot precede union with Christ.
 
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Mar_1:15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Act_3:19 Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord;

Act_26:20 But shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.

It seems Lane may be correct here. There are various ways in which the term repentance is being used. It seems that some passages are saying to repent and have faith or believe the gospel. Acts is a narrative book and we should be cautious about making any dogmatic doctrinal statements and the formulation of any doctrine from such a book. At the same time some things can't be ignored especially when it has historical context from the past.
 
Ed, you reaction is quite understandable. It is vitally important, however, not to let a reaction against the contemporary grace movement (as Harry Reeder dubs it) lead us into something equally as problematic, though not equally visibly so.

The CGM jettisons any idea of a distinct sanctification from the ordo salutis. They are typically correct on justification, incorrect on sanctification. They think that sanctification works the same way as justification. As the Westminster Standards make so clear, however, there is every difference in the world in terms of how they work. Also, the watchwords that help us avoid error in this regard are: distinct yet inseparable.

It is vital to gospel integrity, however, that repentance NOT be considered a prerequisite to coming to Christ (so we avoid neo-nomianism), while at the same time considering it an essential, yet subsequent benefit of union with Christ (thus avoiding the CGM).

Therefore, your hesitancy is needless, as long as one realizes that the best answer to the CGM is not to input repentance into the "coming-to-Christ" bit, but rather to emphasize the inseparability of faith and repentance.

Agreed. Justification and sanctification operate in very distinct ways. The Standards make this clear, and the confusion of the two terms (or the conflation of said terms) is the cause of much error in the church today.
 
It seems that the thistles in this thread are the result of two things. First, we're dealing with the Ordo Salutis and, while we can only deal with that within the confines of space and time, God exists outside these realms, and he is in complete control of the Ordo. We all agree that we're limited in our understanding of these concepts, but they're so majestic that our contemplation of them almost forces us to strain against our limitations--and not necessarily in a sinful way. We're honestly groping for understanding. It's important to remember that when we're using our minds best that activity will drop us to our knees--or at least it should. We cannot think outside the constraints of chronology; God created chronology.

Second, the Lloyd-Jones quotes at the outset are problematic to the discussion. Not that the quotes reveal any aberrant theology, so much as they indicate incomplete thought. It's simply impossible to deal with everything simultaneously; and anyone who has ever preached will know the frustration of leaving the pew thinking, "I left something out. What was I thinking?" Lloyd-Jones doesn't deal with regeneration in the quotes. And we must realize that regeneration must come first, chronologically, for any discussion of the chronology of repentance/faith or faith/repentance to make any sense.

It's always helped me to think of the act of initial-justifying faith as, in a manner of speaking, an act of initial repentance. The first time you believe you have actually repented of your previous unbelief.
 
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