The Nature of Repentance

We may consider what repentance is in its general nature. It is a saving grace: “In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:25). It is a grace given us of God freely, enabling and disposing a soul to all the acts of turning from sin unto God; and it is saving, as in its own nature distinguishing a man from a hypocrite, and having a sure connection with eternal salvation.

To unfold this more particularly, consider:

(1) It is not a transient action, as papists and some ignorant creatures imagine, as if a sigh for sin, an act of sorrow for it, a confession of it with a “God be merciful to me a sinner” were repentance. No, no; these may be acts of repentance while they proceed from a truly penitent heart. But repentance itself is not a passing act, but an abiding grace (Zechariah 12:10); a continuing frame and disposition of the soul; a principle lying deep in the heart, disposing a man to mourn for and turn from sin on all occasions.

(2) It is not a passing work of the first days of one's religion, as some professors take it to be, but a grace in the heart, setting one to an answerable working all the days of his life. It is a spring of waters of sorrow in the heart for sin, which will spring up there while sin is there, though sometimes through hardness of heart it may be stopped for a while. They that look on repentance as the first stage in the way to heaven, and looking back to the sorrowful hours which they had when the Lord first began to deal with them, reckon that they have passed the first stage, are in a dangerous condition. And whoso endeavors not to carry on their repentance, I doubt if they ever at all repented yet. As when Moses had smote the rock in the wilderness, and the waters began to gush out, those waters ran (it is thought, 1 Corinthians 10:4) and followed them while in the wilderness; so the heart first smitten with repentance for sin at the soul's first conversion to God, the wound still bleeds and is never bound up to bleed no more until the band of glory be put above it in heaven (Revelation 21:4).

Hence initial and progressive repentance, though the former be the repentance of a sinner, the latter of a saint, are no more different kinds of repentance, than the soul's virgin love to Christ and their love to Him through the course of their spiritual marriage with Him; or than faith in its first and after actings. But as the midday and evening sun are the same with the morning sun, so are these; though the rising morning sun may be most noticed by the traveler, who, having traveled in the night, was thereby brought from darkness to light.

(3) It is not a common grace, but a special saving one. Men may have a repentance for their sin, gnawing their consciences and tormenting their hearts, which they will carry on in hell through eternity; being only the first movings of the worm in the soul that never dies, as Judas's repentance seems to have been, and as that of Simon Magus and Pharaoh. They may bitterly rue their sin, as Esau did (Genesis 27:34), who never truly repent of it (Hebrews 12:17); and the stony heart may be broken in a thousand pieces, while yet every piece remains a stone. They may have a superficial sorrow for sin and a light joy succeeding it, whose hearts were never pierced to the quick; and therefore the joy goes as the effects of a slight shower of rain on the parched ground (Matthew 13:20-21). But true repentance is a repentance never repented of, kindly working in the soul.

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