“Only acknowledge your guilt, that you rebelled against the Lord your God and scattered your favors among foreigners under every green tree, and that you have not obeyed my voice, declares the Lord. Return, O faithless children, declares the Lord; for I am your master; I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.”
(Jeremiah 3:13–14, ESV)
There have been some difficult times in the pastorate where it was necessary to execute church discipline. It happens when a parishioner is in sin and refuses to repent despite numerous attempts to counsel the person. At the end of all the unsuccessful attempts, we sadly had to remove the person from our fellowship.
As part of this process, we would write a letter to the person being removed. It would include a statement of the reason for removal. We would conclude the letter with a heartfelt plea to let the person to know that there was an door open to the removed person, a way to return to the fellowship. Why did we offer a way back? It was because we have a heart for people and wanted them to know that there is a way to be restored. It is the way of confession and repentance.
This is what we see the Lord offering to “faithless Israel.” It was an open door. There is much misunderstanding over the doctrines of confession and repentance in the church today. Some incorrectly see them as the same. Some falsely conclude that repentance is unnecessary in Christianity. So, let us delve into this for a moment.
In the Greek language the verb translated as confession is homologeo, which means to say the same thing as another (Strong G3670). In the context of sin, it is the sinner saying the same thing as God in response to his or her sin.
Repentance is different. The Greek verb for repentance is metanoeo, which means to change one’s mind (Strong G3340). In the Christian context it means to change one’s mind from their former ways of the flesh to the ways of God. In this sense, repentance is an integral part of a person’s conversion to Christianity and his or her ongoing Christian experience.
Let me explain this. Prior to faith in Jesus a person either has refused to see the Lord Jesus as the God who saves or has refused to believe in Jesus’ work on the cross. When this person comes to faith, he or she will experience a change in mind towards God’s salvation. Otherwise, there would be no salvation. While we know that man is saved by grace alone through faith (Eph 2:8-9), faith and repentance must be vitally linked and inseparable.
After salvation repentance takes an integral role in the life of the believer, seen in two ways. One being the shift in the persons mindset towards God and His righteousness as brought about by the Holy Spirit’s work of regeneration, by which the believer received a new divine nature.
The other is that which is seen in response to moral failure. The issue here is that while every believer has a new nature, the old fleshly nature has not departed. Occasionally the believer will stumble in sin. Upon realization of this sin, the believer will confess the sin (1 John 1:9) and combined with this confession, purpose in their heart to stay on God’s path of righteousness.
Here in God’s plea to “faithless Israel,” we see a call to both confess and repent. He told them to confess stating, “Only acknowledge your guilt, that you rebelled against the Lord your God.” Then He called them to repent, “Return, O faithless children, declares the Lord; for I am your master.” The Hebrew verb “return,” shoob, in many cases in the Old Testament been translated as repent. It is a command to turn back from the ways of wickedness and return to the ways of the Lord. The Lord was letting “faithless Israel” know that the door was open for their return to Him.
For true believers, confession and repentance are vitally linked. When we sin, we confess, that is to agree with God that our action has missed the mark. Yet confession apart from the mindset of repentance is mere vanity of empty words, which mean nothing. Both confession and repentance are born in the heart of the believer by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. This is the key to unlocking the door to a beautiful fellowship with other believers and with our Heavenly Father, which has not been lost on the Heavenly side but has be fractured on the earthly side.
Renewing the Heart 