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John the Baptist
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Faith and Repentance Inseparable
by Charles H. Spurgeon
(Contined)

"Repent and believe in the Gospel."   Mark 1:15

III. But we must pass on to a third remark. These commands of Christ are of the most reasonable character. Is it an unreasonable thing to demand of a man that he should repent? You have a person who has offended you. You are ready to forgive him—do you think it is at all exacting or overbearing if you ask him to apologize? If you merely ask him, as the very least thing he can do, to acknowledge that he has done wrong? “No,” you say, “I should think I showed my kindness in accepting, rather than any harshness in demanding, an apology from him.” So God, against whom we have rebelled, who is our liege sovereign and monarch, sees it to be inconsistent with the dignity of His kingship to absolve an offender who expresses no contrition.

And I say again, is this a harsh, exacting, unreasonable command? Does God in this mode act like Solomon, who made the taxes of his people heavy? Rather does He not ask of you that which your heart, if it were in a right state, would be but too willing to give, only too thankful that the Lord in His Grace has said, “He that confesses his sin shall find mercy”? Why, dear Friends, do you expect to be saved while you are in your sins? Are you to be allowed to love your iniquities and yet go to Heaven? What? Do you think to have poison in your veins and yet be healthy?

What, Man? Keep the thief in doors and yet be acquitted of dishonesty? Be stained and yet be thought spotless? Harbor the disease, and yet be in health? Ridiculous! Absurd! Repentance is founded on the necessity of things. The demand for a change of heart is absolutely necessary. It is but a reasonable service. O that men were reasonable and they would repent! It is because they are not reasonable that it needs the Holy Spirit to teach their reason right reason before they will repent and believe the Gospel.

And then, again, believing—is that an unreasonable thing to ask of you? For a creature to believe its Creator is but a duty. Altogether apart from the promise of salvation, I say, God has a right to demand of the creature that He has made, that He should believe what He tells him. And what is it He asks you to believe? Anything hideous, contradictory, irrational? It may be above reason but it is not contrary to reason. He asks you to believe that through the blood of Jesus Christ, He can still be just and yet the Justifier of the ungodly.

He asks you to trust in Christ to save you. Can you expect that He will save you if you will not trust Him? Have you really the hardihood to think that He will carry you to Heaven while all the while you declare He cannot do it? Do you think it consistent with the dignity of a Savior to save you while you say, “I do not believe You are a Savior and I will not trust You?” Is it consistent with His dignity for Him to save you, and suffer you to remain an unbelieving sinner, doubting His Grace, mistrusting His love, slandering His Character, doubting the efficacy of His blood and of His plea?

Why, Man, it is the most reasonable thing in the world that He should demand of you that you should believe in Christ! And this He demands of you this morning. “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” O Friends, O Friends, how sad, how sad is the state of man’s soul when he will not do this! We may preach to you, but you will never repent and believe the Gospel. We may lay God’s commands, like an axe, to the root of the tree, but, reasonable as these commands are, you will still refuse to give God His due.

You will go on in your sins. You will not come unto Him that you may have life. And it is here the Spirit of God must come in to work in the souls of the elect to make them willing in the day of His power. But oh, in God’s name, I warn you, if, after hearing this command, you do, as I know you will do, without His Spirit, continue to refuse obedience to so reasonable a Gospel, you shall find at the last it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah, than for you. For had the things which are preached in London been proclaimed in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and in ashes. Woe unto you, inhabitants of London! Woe unto you, subjects of the British Empire! For if the Truths of God which have been declared in your streets had been preached to Tyre and Sidon, they would have continued even unto this day!

IV. But still, to pass on, I have yet a fourth remark to make and that is, this is a command which demands immediate obedience. I do not know how it is, let us preach as we may, we cannot lead others to think that there is any great alarm, that there is any reason why they should think about their souls now. Last night there was a review on Wimbledon Common, and living not very far away from it, I could hear in one perpetual roll the cracks of the rifles and the thunder of the cannon.

One remarked to me, “Supposing there really were war there, we should not sit quite so comfortably in our room with our window open listening to all this noise.” No. And so when people come to Chapel, they hear a sermon about repentance and faith. They listen to it. “What do you think of it?” “Oh—very well.” But suppose it were real? Suppose they believed it to be real, would they sit quite so comfortably? Would they be quite so easy? Ah, no! But you do not think it is real. You do not think that the God who made you actually asks of you this day that you should repent and believe.

But, Sirs, it is real and it is your procrastination, it is your self-confidence that is the sham, the bubble that is soon to burst. God’s demand is the solemn reality, and if you could but hear it as it should be heard you would escape for your lives and flee for refuge to the hope that is set before you in the Gospel—and you would do this today. This is the command of Christ, I say, today. Today is God’s time. “Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your heart, as in the provocation.” “Today,” the Gospel always cries, for if it tolerated sin a single day, it were an unholy Gospel!

If the Gospel told men to repent of sin tomorrow, it would give them an allowance to continue in it today, and that would, indeed, be to pander to men’s lusts. But the Gospel makes a clean sweep of sin and demands of man that he should throw down the weapons of his rebellion now. Down with them, Man! Every one of them. Down, Sirs, down with them and down with them NOW! You must not keep one of them! Throw them down at once! So long as you continue in unbelief, you continue in sin and are increasing your sin. And to give you leave to be an unbeliever for an hour were to pander to your lusts.

Therefore the Gospel demands of you faith and faith now, for this is God’s time and the time which holiness must demand of a sinner. Besides, Sinner, it is your time. This is the only time you can call your own. Tomorrow? Is there such a thing? In what calendar is it written except in the almanac of the fool? Tomorrow! Oh, how you have ruined multitudes! “Tomorrow,” say men, but, like the back-wheel of a chariot, they are always near to the front-wheel, always near to their duty. They still go on and on but never get one whit the nearer, for, travel as they may, tomorrow is still a little beyond them—but a little and so they never come to Christ at all. This is how they speak, as an ancient poet said —

“I will tomorrow, that I will, I will be sure to do it.
Tomorrow comes, tomorrow goes and still you are to do it.
Thus, then, repentance is deferred from one day to another,
Until the day of death is one, and judgment is the other.”

O sons of Men, always to be blessed, to be obedient—but never obedient. When will you learn to be wise? This is your only time. It is God’s time and this is the best time. You will never find it easier to repent than now. You will never find it easier to believe than now. It is impossible now except the Spirit of God is with you. It will be as impossible tomorrow. But if now you would believe and repent, the Spirit of God is in the Gospel which I preach.

And while I cry to you in God’s name, “Repent and believe,” He that bade me command you thus to do gives power with the command. Even as Christ spoke to the waves and said, “Be still,” and they were still, and to the winds, “Be calm,” and they were quiet—so when we speak to your proud heart it will yield because of the Divine Grace that accompanies the word. And you will repent and believe the Gospel. So may it be and may the message of this morning gather out the elect and make them willing in the day of God’s power.

But now, lastly, this command, while it has an immediate power, has also a continual force. “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” is advice to the young beginner and it is advice to the old gray-headed Christian, for this is our life all the way through—“Repent and believe in the Gospel.” St. Anselm, who was a saint—and that is more than many of them were who were called so—St. Anselm once cried out “Oh, sinner that I have been, I will spend all the rest of my life in repenting of my whole life!”

And Rowland Hill, whom I think I might call St. Rowland, when he was near death, said he had one regret and that was that a dear friend who had lived with him for sixty years would have to leave him at the gate of Heaven. “That dear friend,” said he, “is repentance. Repentance has been with me all my life and I think I shall drop a tear,” said the good man, “as I go through the gates, to think that I can repent no more.”

Repentance is the daily and hourly duty of a man who believes in Christ. And as we walk by faith from the wicket gate to the Celestial City, so our right-hand companion all the journey through must be repentance. Why, dear Friends, the Christian man, after he is saved, repents more than ever he did before, for now he repents not merely of overt deeds but even of imaginations. He will take himself to task at night and chide himself because he had tolerated one foul thought.

He repents because he has looked on vanity, though perhaps the heart had gone no further than the look of lust. Because the thought of evil has flitted through his mind—for all this he will vex himself before God. And were it not that he still continues to believe the Gospel, one foul imagination would be such a plague and sting to him, that he would have no peace and no rest. When temptation comes to him, the good man finds the use of repentance, for having hated sin and fled from it of old, he has ceased to be what he once was.

One of the ancient fathers, we are told, had, before his conversion, lived with an ill woman and some little time after, she accosted him as usual. Knowing how likely he was to fall into sin he ran away with all his might. She ran after him, crying, “Why do you run away? It is I.” He answered, “I run away because I am not I. I am a new man.”

Now, it is just that, “I am not I,” which keeps the Christian out of sin. That hating of the former “I,” that repenting of the old sin that makes him run from evil, abhor it, and look not upon it, lest by his eyes he should be led into sin. Dear Friends, the more the Christian man knows of Christ’s love, the more will he hate himself to think that he has sinned against such love. Every doctrine of the Gospel will make a Christian man repent.

Election, for instance. “How could I sin,” says he. “I that was God’s favorite, chosen of Him from before the foundation of the world.” Final perseverance will make him repent. “How can I sin,” says he, “that am loved so much and kept so surely? How can I be so villainous as to sin against everlasting mercy?” Take any doctrine you please, the Christian will make it a fountain for sacred woe. And there are times when his faith in Christ will be so strong that his repentance will burst its bonds and will cry with George Herbert—

“Oh, who will give me tears?
Come, all you springs,
You clouds and rain dwell in my eyes,
My grief has need of all the watery things
That nature has produced. Let every vein
Suck up a river to supply my eyes
My weary weeping eyes. Too dry for me,
Unless they set new conduits, new supplies
To bear them out and with my state agree.”

And all this is because he murdered Christ. Because his sin nailed the Savior to the tree. And therefore he weeps and mourns even to his life’s end. Sinning, repenting and believing—these are three things that will stay with us till we die. Sinning will stop at the river Jordan. Repentance will die triumphing over the dead body of sin. And faith itself, though perhaps it may cross the stream, will cease to be so necessary as it has been here, for there we shall see even as we are seen and shall know even as we are known.

I send you away when I have once again solemnly declared my Master’s will to you this morning, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Here are some of you come from foreign countries and many of you are from our provincial towns in England. You came here, perhaps, to hear the preacher of whom many a strange thing has been said. Well and good, and may stranger things still be said if they will but bring men under the sound of the Word that they may be blessed.

Now, this I have to say to you this morning—In that Great Day when a congregation ten thousand times thousands larger than this shall be assembled. And on the Great White Throne the Judge shall sit—there will be not a man, or woman, or child, who is here this morning, able to make excuse and say, “I did not hear the Gospel. I did not know what I must do to be saved!”

You have heard it—“Repent and believe in the Gospel.” That is, trust Christ. Believe that He is able and willing to save you. But there is something better. In that Great Day, I say, there will be some of you present—oh, let us hope all of us—who will be able to say, “Thank God that by His Grace I yielded up the weapons of my proud rebellion by repentance! Thank God that by His Grace I looked to Christ and took Him to be my Savior from first to last. For here am I, a monument of Divine Grace, a sinner saved by blood, to praise Him while time and eternity shall last!”

God grant that we may meet each other at the last with joy and not with grief! I will be a swift witness against you to condemn you if you believe not this Gospel. But if you repent and believe, then we shall praise that Divine Grace which turned our hearts and so gave us the repentance which led us to trust Christ and the faith which is the effectual gift of the Holy Spirit. What shall I say more unto you?

Why? Why will you reject this? If I have spoken to you of fables, of fictions, of dreams, then turn on your heel and reject my discourse. If I have spoken in my own name, who am I that you should care one whit for me? But if I have preached that which Christ preached, “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” I charge you by the living God, I charge you by the world’s Redeemer, I charge you by the Cross of Calvary, and by the blood which stained the dust at Golgotha— obey this Divine message and you shall have eternal life. But refuse it, and on your own heads be your blood forever and ever!

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