We left the last blog post with the suggestion to consider the role you played in your physical birth here on Earth. I’m willing to bet that you don’t remember it. Nonetheless, you obviously were born into this world and at least one other person worked to get you here through a birthing process. If you are spiritually born again as described in John chapter 3, my guess is that you weren’t (and that I wasn’t) fully aware of exactly when such birth took place either. I know many people say that they know when they “accepted Christ” and “prayed the sinner’s prayer,” but that is not what I am talking about.¹ If you are in fact born again, what I am talking about is when God called your spirit from death to life and made it so. That is what we have discussed so far. Now, we turn to your (and my) response.
According to scripture, once confronted with the special revelation of Jesus Christ (step 2) and the conviction of the Holy Spirit (step 3) after being drawn to Jesus by the Father (step 1), our role is to repent and believe. This blog post will focus on repentance—what I am referring to as “step 4.” I have grave concerns about how the term “repentance” is and has been taught in many churches over the years. So often I hear it summarized as doing a 180 (degrees)² and turning from your sins to Christ (i.e., turning and metaphorically walking in the opposite direction). And I know it’s just a metaphor and that words can have multiple meanings, but it’s being taught as the definition of repentance by many. I think this is a poor and often (unintentionally) misleading definition. First, we can focus on why I believe this is not a good definition, and then we can go over what I humbly submit is a much better and more accurate definition of the concept of biblical repentance.
Okay, so why is the ole “do a 180 and turn from sin” a bad definition of “repentance?” Let’s start by defining what is allegedly being turned from: sin. In the New Testament, the primary Greek word translated as “sin” is ἁμαρτία (hamartia), which is derived from the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartanō, meaning “to sin” or “to miss the mark”). In context, “sin” is like failing to hit the center mark when shooting an arrow from a bow at a bullseye target. You don’t have to be off by 180 degrees. You might be off by 0.5 degrees. It’s still sin, and it infinitely separates you from God’s perfect holiness. You might ask, “Why would barely missing the mark cause eternal separation?” Answer: Because when you, with your free will, sin—even once—you shift your trajectory from the perfect and holy trajectory of your Creator. Even if you are off by 0.001 precent over your lifetime, that shift in trajectory over eternity creates an infinite distance between you and your Creator’s perfect righteousness. And everybody misses the mark. See Romans 3:23 (“ . . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”). Everyone, that is, except for one person: Jesus Christ. He passed the test none of us could pass. He is the focus. He is the victor. He is the savior. Defining “repentance” with a focus on us working to change our bad habits, clean ourselves up, and walk back the “opposite” direction toward Jesus results in some very skewed version of the “gospel” that depends on our human efforts. Such an understanding stands in contrast to a person that has been transformed by the power of God into a new creature with new leanings, tendencies, and desires. We still live in a flesh body with fleshly desires, but, once reborn, the Holy Spirit is alive in us transforming who we are.
A literal definition from the Greek language of the word “repent” from the Greek verb μετανοέω (metanoeō) literally means “to change one’s mind” or “to think differently afterwards.” It does not mean “to turn around” (e.g., do a 180). Rather, it’s about changing thinking, not changing doing. The change in doing will flow naturally from the change in thinking when coupled with authentic belief. And repenting is not just some new trivial interest in God but seeing things very differently than you did before being exposed to the special revelation of Jesus Christ.
A logical next question is asking about what is “different” in the thinking and what does this new thinking come “after.” For a person in the middle of this process of repentance, the shift is accepting that what Jesus taught and still communicates through His word and the Holy Spirit is that we can’t work or earn our way to God by being “good” or “better”. To such a person, Jesus is effectively saying: “You’re hopelessly off course. Stop trying. Give up. Surrender.” There is one person who could do it (i.e., pass the test, hit the mark perfectly, and provide a way back to the perfect and holy Father). It was and is Jesus Christ. This can be confusing because Jesus taught about us having to meet an exceedingly high (i.e., perfect) standard/threshold. See Matthew 5:48 (Jesus concluding his teaching during the Sermon on the Mount in which he states: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”) Tragically, many have taken that to mean (and many churches teach) that we must constantly “repent” and work to be better and better until we hopefully reach this figurative threshold of perfection to be better at avoiding sin to be acceptable to the Father when we kick the bucket. This thinking is the foundation of so many religions—mankind’s effort to strive toward perfection to please some concept of a god. However, Jesus was not being figurative in Matthew 5:48. He was being literal. We must literally be perfect like the Father is perfect in the context of sin. If this is something you have not heard communicated in this way before, I encourage you to stop and let it sink in for a moment. Think about it. Think differently about the way you have been taught in years past and how you have defined “god” or what you thought Jesus taught. Jesus is telling us that WE CAN’T DO IT.
The good news is that He has already done it. It is finished.³ It is imperative that this is understood before step 5: believe. Because if we do not think in a new way about who Jesus is and what he actually taught, our “belief” (faith) will be based on us—our own efforts to better ourselves—as opposed to reliance on Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man who is the only perfect and acceptable sacrifice for our missing the bullseye with our respective lives.
Summarized and simplified points regarding Jesus and His purpose are these: (A) all people have sinned and have shifted their trajectory from the perfect trajectory required by the Creator who is perfect; (B) there is no way for us to correct course on our own because there is not a sufficient payment/restitution (sacrifice) we could make that can or would satisfy the “clean up” for our respective epic messes; (C) God in the person of the Father sent his only son, Jesus, to reveal the truth of the universe to humanity and also operate as a perfect atoning sacrifice to clean our sins and messes; (D) Jesus also lived a perfect life and hit the bullseye perfectly, paving a way for Him to clothe us with His perfection so that we are made fully righteous and perfectly presentable to the Father; (E) Jesus fulfilled numerous prophecies (many of which were made many centuries before His “birth” on Earth), performed numerous miracles, claimed to be the prophesized Messiah for the Jews, claimed to be God, was rejected by the Jewish spiritual leaders, predicted his death and resurrection, was put to death by Roman soldiers under command of Pontius Pilate via crucifixion, was buried in a guarded tomb, was raised back to life three days later, and appeared to over 500 people over the course of the following weeks before ascending to heaven. If we repent and believe in Him, we will not perish but have everlasting life.⁴ That’s the gospel, in a nutshell.⁵
If we receive His words and are made to think differently (repent) about who Jesus was and what His true teachings were, we are then put in a position to decide whether to actually believe Him. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, manifesting intellectual assent to something (i.e., agreeing that something is probably true or actually happened) is not the same as placing faith in something or someone. The “belief” Jesus requires is more than intellectual assent. That will be discussed in the next blog post. For now, here are some questions to consider:
At some point in your life, have you been made to think differently about who Jesus is and what he actually taught?
Are you still viewing “repentance” as earning your way to God (or a god) through your efforts of improving yourself, cleaning yourself up, and distancing yourself from your sin?
How good is “good enough” in order to stand in the presence of a perfect and holy God?
Botton line: Your good works do not clean up your mess. Good works will (and must naturally) flow from a reborn person, but the good works themselves are the results/effects of someone who has been reborn, not a cause for (or of) being born again. It’s as if we’re toddlers with permanent Sharpie® bright color markers marking all over dad’s ivory white linen couch, and we have no way to erase the crazy mess and damage we’ve done (no matter how many sweet crayon drawings we later create on paper to make up for the Sharpie debacle). The damage to the fine furniture is done and it is permanent. That is, unless there is someone that has the means to completely wash the mess away and make all things new. Good news: there is.
Robert Lowry sums it up well in his hymn lyrics from 1877 as follows:
What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
O Precious is the flow that makes me white as snow.
No other fount I know; Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
©2026 Roby Robinson. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission by EARNEST EXPEDITION, LLC under license.
¹I challenge you to find “the sinner’s prayer” in scripture, but you might start by looking in the book of 2 Hezekiah. Going on a snipe hunt is also a viable option . . . or chasing wild geese—your call.
²Sorry for triggering any PTSD related to trigonometry class form years ago, but we are just getting started with this metaphor.
³For clarification, the focus here is on the Doctrine of Justification which has been accomplished fully and completely through the work of Jesus Christ in atoning for believers’ sins and imputation of His perfect righteousness to us to make us perfectly acceptable to the Father. Nonetheless, what God starts, He finishes. He doesn’t make mistakes. There is another related doctrine, namely, the Doctrine of Sanctification, which involves a process of being refined after a person is truly born again as described in John chapter 3, but the process of sanctification is not what merits our standing (position) of being an adopted son or daughter of God. A person taking a strict Arminian viewpoint on this subject would disagree and argue that one can lose his or her salvation based on their work through the process of sanctification, but I personally do not agree, and I do not believe that scripture supports such a position. I encourage you to investigate it yourself and see what you conclude that scripture says about this topic. See, e.g., John 10:27-29; Romans 8:38-39; John 5:24; Philippians 1:6; Ephesians 1:13-14; Romans 8:30; and 1 Peter 1:3-5.
⁴John 3:16. The sentence above presupposes that the Father has already drawn someone to Christ, the person has been presented the special revelation of who Christ is, and the Holy Spirit has moved in such person to convict them and bring their spirit to life from the dead. The only steps we actively participate in are repenting and believing. And if we are truly born again by the Holy Spirit, such subsequent repentance and belief by us is assured. See Romans 8:30.
⁵Okay, it’s not as succinct as Ronny Graham’s “short, short” Spaceballs wedding ceremony, but it’s a concise list, nonetheless.