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26th June 2024
WednesdayReflection
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Interview with John Piper
'Is My Repentance Real If I Keep Committing the Same Sin?'
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The question is one of the most common questions that an honest and serious Christian has to ask, especially in light of the demands of the New Testament for holiness, along with its warnings.
Let me start with a clarification of how to even pose the question in language that I think is perhaps more consistent with the way the New Testament speaks.
I would suggest that we not use the word repent for the way we respond to daily sinning as Christians.
That may surprise people, but let me try to explain.
"Sin is a condition of the heart that is bent away from God in preference for other things."
Jesus said, alongside
"Give us this day our daily bread," "Forgive us our debts".
I take it for granted, then, that he wouldn't have said that if there weren't a need for daily forgiveness of our sins, our debt to God.
Here's my definition:
any thought, any attitude, any word, any facial expression, any gesture, any action that does not flow from a treasuring of Jesus, is sin.
Sin is not just big, bad deeds like murder or stealing or adultery, or even more regular sins like dishonesty or foul language or impatience.
Sin will be with us until that inner condition is wholly obliterated in the presence of Jesus.
The word repentance in the New Testament refers to a basic kind we experience at the beginning of our Christian life, and that we may have to experience if our life takes a terrible turn into a path of destruction from which we need to be called back. - as in the churches in the first chapters of Revelation.
New Testament doesn't use the word repentance for the daily habit of dealing with our indwelling, recurrent sin.
Rather, I would suggest that 1 John 1:8-9 proposes the word confession:
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
What about sins, then, that we commit more than once - indeed, so often that they are threatening to destroy our assurance of being a Christian?
Here's the way I would put it: there are two kinds of confession, and there are two kinds of sin.
First, there is confession that, at one level, is expressing guilt and sorrow for sinning, but underneath there is the quiet assumption that this sin is going to happen again, probably before the week is out.
It's a cloak for fatalism about your besetting sins.
You feel bad about them, but you have surrendered to their inevitability.
That's one kind of confession.
The other kind of confession is that you express guilt and sorrow for sinning, just like with the first kind, but your hatred of the sin is so real that you have every intention as you confess of making war on that sin tonight, this weekend.
You aim, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to defeat it.
The two kinds of sin that I'm referring to are, first, the kind that is not premeditated or planned, and there is scarcely any battle in the moment when it happens.
Before you realize what you're doing, it's done.
I'm not excusing these things; they're sin. They're sin.
I'm calling them sin, even though they are more or less spontaneous and not premeditated.
Here's the other kind of sin that I'm referring to; namely, it is premeditated.
You actually sit there or stand there weighing whether to do it or not.
You take ten seconds or ten minutes or ten hours wrestling, and then you do the sin.
Now, I think it's possible for a Christian to commit both kinds of sins and get into patterns of both kinds of confession.
But I would say that the confession that cloaks fatalism, hopelessness, peace with sin, and the sin that is premeditated are more dangerous to our souls.
Both are dangerous. Don't get me wrong; both are dangerous.
But the confession bordering on hypocrisy and the sin bordering on planned unrighteousness are more dangerous.
"Sin will be with us until that inner condition is wholly obliterated in the presence of Jesus."
As much as I would like it for my own soul, I don't think we can provide a list of sins or a number for the frequency with which you can sin and get away with it.
The book in the New Testament that is perhaps the hardest on Christians sinning is the same book that warns most explicitly about the dangers of perfectionism.
1 John 1:8-10. says
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins . . .
And that confession right there, I think, means real confession.
. . . he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
><(((°>
This is an extremely edited version.
The full article is avaiable on request
John Piper
is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
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