Well, dear congregation, we come now to the ministry of God's Word, and I just want to say up front that we are going to be stepping out of the book of Matthew this morning and addressing a matter of real and present ecclesiastical concern, at least as far as Grace Covenant Church goes. So what I want to ask you to do this morning is I want to ask you to turn to Jeremiah 31, verses 18 and 19, and we're going to get there in a moment, but I just want you there once we get there. Jeremiah chapter 31 verses 18 and 19. And while you're turning there, I want to draw to your attention, number one, the outline that was sent out on the listserv, but also that has been included in the bulletin for adults. And then boys and girls, I want you to notice this picture. This is for you. And a little bit later, Pastor Josh is gonna talk about this, but this is a picture of a person with a mask on, and that's the very thing we're gonna be talking about today. Jeremiah chapter 31, verses 18 and 19, and as we come before the ministry of God's Word, let's ask help from the Spirit of God that God would send His Spirit and illumine our hearts to hear, receive, and understand, and by God's grace, apply God's Word, let's pray. God eternal humbled to the grave. We sang that this morning, Father, and I hope that I speak on behalf of many if not all of us when we say that we don't understand what that means. It is a paradox that God eternal would be humbled to the grave, to death, and yet in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, God was crucified for our sins. And Father, I pray this morning that that reality, that truth would cause every single one of us to be humbled ourselves that our God would die for our sins. And that Father, we would compare that image, if you will, that idea that God would be humbled to the grave, and then compare it with our sin that we find ourselves so often running back to again and again, and that, Father, You would show the wicked disparity between these two things, and that You would give us a heaven-sent, Christ-glorifying, Spirit-saturated, God-glorifying motivation to hate sin with all of our heart and not be like so many hypocrites in the church today that give lip service, but not their heart and their hands and their minds. Would you help your servant this morning to proclaim the Word of God without fear, without trepidation, and without reserve? We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen. Next Sunday at 5 p.m. the members of Grace Covenant Church will gather in this place and what will be put before them is a vote for the excommunication of one of our members. And this Lord's Day and the next, my goal is to prepare our members for that vote And before I go any further, I just want to say there's some of you this morning that are visitors that are not members of this church. There's some of you this morning that think you're Christians and you're not. And there's some of you this morning that are maybe even visiting from another congregation, and you would wonder why in the world I would bring family business into the morning worship service. And here's the answer. We're not a seeker-sensitive church. We don't put the needs and the desires and the wants and the preferences of unbelievers or visiting Christians at the top of our priority list when we craft the liturgy for the Lord's day. Worship is about the Lord's people worshiping the triune God on his terms, and in some cases, doing the work of Christian discipleship. And what I want you to know is that as a body of believers, from the elders all the way down to the members, we are unashamed to say that this church practices church discipline. If you don't know what that is, here's what it means very simply. If there is somebody in our number who professes to be a Christian but walks as if they're not a Christian, The Bible very simply in Matthew 18 verses 15 through 20 says, go confront that person. And if that person listens, then you have won your brother over. If that person does not listen, you take two or three and confront them again. If they do not repent, if they do not listen, you take them to the church. And if they do not listen, then you let them be to you as a tax collector or a Gentile, which is another way of saying, You put them outside of the kingdom of God, and you say that they are not a Christian. It doesn't mean you are mean to them. It doesn't mean they can't come to church. All it means is that you do not regard their profession as a Christian, as a legitimate profession of faith. Now, that is not popular, and I don't care. There's a lot of things in this Bible that are not popular, and yet we are called as the church, and certainly I as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to proclaim whether people like it or not. But let me hasten to add this, if you are a visitor this morning, if you are a new Christian, and mainly if you are considering membership at a church, and you should be if you don't have a home church, I'm glad that this came up in the life of our church for you. because I want you to see that we take this seriously. We take sin seriously, and more importantly, we take a sin-atoning Savior seriously, and that is Jesus Christ. And though we are all sinners, I think we could stand shoulder to shoulder, lockstep, and say, though we are all sinners, we love Jesus so much that all of us should be fighting against sin, and if you're not, there's something wrong. And if you are ultimately unwilling to part with your sin, then dear friend, we cannot regard your profession of faith as legitimate. So, if you're visiting this morning, I want you to consider yourself as a fly on the wall. You are a fly on the wall and you are hearing the leader of a church address the church regarding a family matter, and I hope that you will learn about this. And I hope that in the course of laying out this week and next week from the Word of God what repentance is and is not, More importantly, or I should say just as importantly as applying that to the vote that all members in this place will be responsible to cast on Sunday night at 5 p.m., we will individually be asking ourselves, do I have false marks of repentance, or do I have genuine marks of repentance? What is the prevailing disposition of my life? Do I walk in repentance and faith, or am I a hypocrite? So that's the task that is before us this morning. And one of the first things I want to say is this. Oftentimes when people think about church discipline, that final step of putting somebody outside of the church. They have the false notion that the vote and the decision about church discipline, about excommunication, is about whether or not the sin with which this person is being charged, or the sins, is bad enough to merit or justify excommunication. And I wanna say very clearly and very straightforwardly, that's not what we're doing. When you come here, members, on Sunday night, next Sunday at 5 p.m., very simply, we're asking this question and trying to adjudicate the answer. Do we see repentance in the life of the person who has been charged with walking in these sins? That's what we're trying to figure out. Church discipline is about gauging repentance. Please write that down if you are unfamiliar with it. Jot it down in your head. It's about gauging repentance. And what you need to know is the Bible talks about genuine repentance and false repentance. And so if you're going to be able to gauge and discern whether a person is genuinely repentant, you've got to know the difference between a counterfeit or fake repentance and a biblical and genuine repentance. So what I want to do this Lord's Day is I want to talk about three things. Number one, I want to give you a definition of repentance. Secondly, I want to ground and align our motivations for repentance in the right place. And thirdly, I want to give you some marks of false repentance. And then next week we will consider marks of genuine repentance. So let's start at the beginning this morning. What is a genuine repentance? What is repentance unto life? Our catechism frames it well Baptist Catechism question and answer 92. It's right there in your notes. What is repentance unto life? Repentance unto life is a saving grace whereby a sinner out of a true sense of his sin and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ does with grief and hatred of sin turn from it unto God with full purpose and endeavor after new obedience. Now, that is a very compact theologically accurate view of repentance. And I just want to draw out under this head this morning, four features of this repentance that are very important. Number one, this is the most important. Repentance is at bottom a change of mind. Repentance is at bottom a change of mind. We change our mind by God's grace about what we think about sin, but it's not just what we think about sin itself. It's about what we think about everything having to do with sin. This is why Jude has that phrase in his book where he says, you know, hating even the garment stained by sin. That's metaphorical language. It doesn't mean you literally, if you sinned in a shirt, you go burn it. I mean, you could, but it's not necessary. What it's saying is it's not just sin. It's everything that sin affects. I was talking to somebody this morning about a conversation that we need to have because he's dealing with a member in his family whose environment in his family, extended family, has so affected him, the sin, that it's contaminated all kinds of things. Sin messes things up, and the child of God should hate sin primarily in his or her own life. So, repentance is a change of mind about your sin. Instead of loving it, listen, instead of protecting it, instead of nurturing it, instead of defending it, you hate it. And now we come to Jeremiah 31, 18 and 19. I want to give you a biblical example of that. Jeremiah the prophet speaking of Ephraim. Listen, Jeremiah 31, 18 and 19. I have heard Ephraim grieving. You disciplined me, and I was disciplined like an untrained calf. Bring me back that I may be restored, for You are the Lord my God. For after I had turned away, I relented, and after I was instructed, I struck my thigh. I was ashamed and I was confounded because I bore the disgrace of my youth." Beloved, here we have a biblical example of grief and mourning over sin. I want you to contrast that with what is oftentimes a very flippant attitude towards sin. I messed up. Okay, fine. Let's stop having this conversation. Why are we still talking about it? I messed up. Jesus forgave me. It's over. That is not contrition of sin. That is you being irritated and bothered by having to talk about it, and much more importantly, being confronted about it. But repentance, you see, is a change of mind about yourself and the things you tell yourself about your sin. What are some things that we tell ourself about our sin? It's really not that bad. I mean, when you compare it to other people, or everybody does it, I mean, come on. Like, doesn't God grade on a curve? No, God is not your algebra teacher, okay? God's standard is perfection. That's what God's standard is. Another thing that we tell ourselves is, well, what people don't know can't hurt them, right? I mean, if my wife doesn't know, my kids don't know, my elders don't know, fellow church members don't know, it doesn't matter, right? These are things that we tell ourselves. But repentance is also a change of mind about God. Well God will forgive me even though I just keep going back to sin over and over and over again, right? You know what that's called? That's called presumptuousness. Repentance is a change of mind about the people who are trying to warn you about your sin. Instead of seeing them as the problem, okay, you need to see that your sin is the problem. How many times have some of you been told, well, you're approaching me about my sin is the problem because I don't like your personality. You rub me the wrong way. Friend, did my personality make you cheat on your wife? Is that what happened? Did my personality make you go spend four hours looking at porn? Did my personality make you go get drunk? Did my personality make you have a problem of drug addiction? Is that what I did? Can we be honest with ourselves? Say the problem is sin. It changes our attitude about the people that come and try to talk to us about our sin. Repentance is a change of mind about Satan, the world, the flesh, and the devil that stand behind the lies of your sin. But now secondly, a second feature of repentance I want you to see is this change of mind that is repentance, manifests itself in a change of thought, word, and deed. Now, why do we have to say that? Because I've often come across in my ministry and just in my life as a Christian people who say, well, yeah, I have a change of mind about my sin. I feel bad about it, but I just, I'm not changing it. Friend, that's not a change of mind. If you have a change of mind about your sin and you believe that your sin leads to death, you don't go running headlong into it. You run in the opposite direction. And one of the things that the Scripture tells us about this, you could find this in Matthew 3.8, you don't need to turn there, John the Baptist says it, Paul says it in a different way, but it's basically this, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. You say you're repentant, keep bearing fruit that shows the product of repentance. Don't tell me you're repentant if you're not actually changing. Now, there's always an objection to this kind of language, and there's often an objection to this industry or this idea that the church would adjudicate a matter of church discipline. Because the objection is this, now wait a minute, we can't tell a person's heart, right? We don't know a person's heart. Well, I want to respond to that by saying three things, okay? And they're all under this umbrella. According to Jesus, yes, we can. Yes, we can. Here's three reasons. The church discipline process itself in Matthew 18, 15 through 20 assumes that we can get to the heart of the matter. It tells you to go confront somebody. If they don't listen, take two or three. If they don't listen, take it to the church. If they don't listen, do you see the pattern of not listening, okay? Jesus says, put them out. Now, is Jesus a hard-hearted Pharisee, or is Jesus the kindest man that ever walked the face of the earth? Absolutely, he's the kindest man that ever walked the face of the earth, but he gave us some hard truths, didn't he? And what he's assuming in the practice of church discipline is that there are fakes, there are wolves among the sheep, and they need to be rooted out. Just as you have a big, wide, open front door into the church, you need to have a big, wide back door of the church where you're putting people out. And as some have said, maybe the back door needs to be bigger than the front door. Secondly, can we know a person's heart? Well, here's the second thing Jesus said. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth, what? Speaks. You show me a person who all they ever talk about is how much they hate somebody, they're angry at somebody, they're bitter at somebody, everybody's an idiot, but they're the wisest person in the world, and I'll show you a person that has anger rooted in their heart. Please don't tell, well, just because they're saying those things doesn't mean they mean those things. Then what are they doing? Are they communicating? What are they communicating? They're communicating what's in their heart, friends. And I guarantee you, those of you who have children, this is how you shepherd your children. If they say something that is wicked, you say, oh, there's a problem there, little Johnny, little Susie. Like what's coming out of your mouth is indicative of what's in your heart. And we can talk about the external behavior and moderate that, but what we're more concerned about is why that's in your heart. A good parent will address the heart issue predominantly and primarily and trust that the external actions are going to follow. But a third reason why, yes, we can get a sense of what is in the heart of a person, as Jesus said in Matthew 7, 16, you will know them by their fruits. You will know them by their fruits. Somebody who claims to be a Christian is, as the prevailing disposition of their life, going to produce fruits that are commensurate with Christian conduct. But now a third feature of this repentance that I want you to see, and this is incredibly important. Repentance is granted by God. It is not conjured up independently by the natural man. In other words, beloved, repentance is an evangelical grace. It's given to you. God grants repentance to His elect. You know what He does to His non-elect? He hardens their hearts. You say, well, don't they harden their hearts? They do that too. God is behind it, and they are doing it themselves as well. If you don't believe me, read Romans 9. It's what it says. Pharaoh's heart was hardened. God hardened Pharaoh's heart. All of them are true. You don't have to pick. This isn't a buffet, okay? It's all happening simultaneously. So if you sit there as an unbeliever and you say, I don't like what you're saying, I hate you and I hate your God, well, you're hardening your heart, and that's judgment from God. God grants repentance, so if you don't have it, the first thing you should do is not make a list of the things you need to do. The first thing you should do is drop to your knees and get on your face before God and say, God, soften this heart of stone. That's what you should do. Too often in my counseling, and especially in these church discipline cases, people say, give me a list, give me a list, give me a list, just tell me what to do. Look, friend, I can tell you what to do, that's fine, we can go through the Bible, but again, I'm concerned about your heart. Because when I give you this list and you say, I don't wanna do any of these things, but I'm doing them because you're telling me to do them, you're already off on the wrong foot. Imagine your wife telling you that. I don't want to be intimate with you, but I guess I have to. Oh, that's great. That'll make for a romantic weekend. Okay, it's the same principle, you see. Christianity is a religion of the heart that manifests itself with our hands. But if you get the order wrong, you think, well, if I just modify behavior, that will trickle itself down to the heart. How's that working out for us as a country? We make laws. Does that change people? No, it just curbs sin. It just curbs crime. People are still gonna go off and do what they do. No. Government will not save us. Laws will not save us. The gospel of Jesus Christ will save us. And that's why repentance is a gift. You want a text for that? You can look at Acts 11, 18. You don't need to turn there, but this is the report when some apostles were coming back from preaching. When they heard these things, they fell silent, and they glorified God, saying, then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads unto life. A fourth feature of this repentance is that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance. Listen, I also come across people who tell me, you know what, I don't have cancer, so God must be happy with my life, as if cancer is the barometer for whether God is pleased with you. Or things are going well, I just got a promotion. Yeah, I know I have a porn problem, and I know I'm cheating on my wife, and I know I'm addicted to drugs and alcohol, and I know that I neglect my children, but I got a promotion. Friends, do you understand that the kindnesses of God in this life, what is the purpose of those things? That's right, to lead you to repentance. If you're looking at God's good gifts and you're saying, oh, this justifies my wicked behavior, you don't understand what's going on. What you should do is say, how gracious and merciful that God would give me these things. How much more reason that I give my all to him. God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance. So that's what repentance is. Now here's what I wanna do. I want to move on secondly to what I'm calling the need to ground and align our motivations for repentance. And to do that, I want you to go to 2 Corinthians 7, verse 10. 2 Corinthians 7, verse 10. And while you're turning there, I just want to let you know, next week when we talk positively about the genuine marks of repentance, we're actually going to come back to this text. the larger section of 2 Corinthians 7, and mine this out for all that it's worth. But this morning, I just want to draw your attention to 2 Corinthians 7, verse 10, and I want to contrast for you two different kinds of sorrow, two different kinds of sorrow or grief. 2 Corinthians 7, verse 10, listen to Paul. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. Here's what I want you to see. I want to get beyond the external actions of repenting. So if we're talking about an alcoholic, we can talk about getting into a program. We could talk about don't drink. We could talk about don't go around people. We could talk about all those things. But again, because I'm not trying to be a Pharisee and just talk about behavior modification, that's not what Christianity is about. I wanna get to the heart of the matter, and Paul gets at the heart of the matter here when he talks about two different kinds of motivations for repenting. So I wanna contrast these. A godly sorrow that leads to repentance and salvation versus a worldly sorrow or worldly grief that leads to death. What are these two different things? Well, let me lay them out for you. A worldly grief, a worldly grief, listen to me very carefully, is primarily and sometimes exclusively concerned with appearances, with what I may lose in this life, and with how it affects my relationships. In other words, this temporal life, how is repenting of this sin going to affect that? That's the extent of worldly sorrow. That's the extent of worldly grief. It's only concerned with the now. And this is why worldly sorrow can sometimes be very calculating, because it's going to be calculating it as it does the math in its head and it plays chess and it says, well, if I repent of this, then I'll get X, Y, and Z. Yes, I did a cost-benefit analysis and it's worth it, I'm gonna do it, okay? That's worldly sorrow, worldly grief. What's godly grief? Godly grief is primarily, though not exclusively, but primarily concerned with how heinous and offensive this sin is to God. And my example for that is David when he committed adultery against Bathsheba and followed that up with a chaser of murder by having Uriah murdered. He offended Uriah. He offended Uriah's family. He offended Bathsheba. He offended the whole nation of Israel because he's the king and he ought not to walk in this manner. And in Psalm 51, when he's crying out to God in his prayer of confession, he says in verse four, against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Now, David was not saying that he had not sinned against Uriah or Bathsheba. What he was saying is the most important offense that he has committed is that he has sinned against God. That, my friends, is godly sorrow. The problem is this, listen to me. Is it an either or? In other words, is it okay to also be concerned about my marriage as a motivation for not sinning? Yeah, that's okay. Is it okay to have a fear that says, you know, I don't want to bring reproach upon my church. I don't want to bring reproach upon my family. I don't want to go through the hell of dragging my family through me having an alcoholism problem. I don't want to do that. That's okay. That's not the question. The question is, is that the most important motivation for you? Or is the fear of offending God and the desire to please God the most important motivation for you? And what I want to submit to you this morning is, in all of our fighting against sin and motivations for not sinning and motivations for repenting, there is a hierarchy, okay? And what I want to submit to you this morning is, the vertical relationship with God that should guide and govern the horizontal motivations for repentance. If what you're more concerned about is how it'll affect your family and your wife and your spouse and your job, if that's the most important thing to you, then two things. Number one, you have a worldly sorrow and not a godly sorrow. And number two, in time it will show. Because here's what people do that have worldly sorrow in the church, they know how to play the game. They know how to talk the talk. They'll say, oh yeah, against God and God only have I sinned. Now can we talk about like how much I really have to confess to my wife? See, you're not really concerned about God, because I'm going to tell you something, listen to me. If you are primarily and predominantly concerned about offending God. and you're willing to confess to God, then after having confessed to God, you will be willing to confess to anybody else that you need to. And if you don't, if you say, well, I'm willing to confess to God, but not to my wife, you have a fear of man and not a fear of God. Do you hear what I'm saying? This is incredibly important. Repentance that is biblical says, whatever it takes. You want to take away my phone? Whatever it takes. You want to put me on covenant eyes so I'm not looking at pornography? Whatever it takes. You want to keep me accountable with how I deal with my money? Whatever it takes. Worldly sorrow says, I'm not really willing to give up that liberty. No, I'm not, sorry, I'm not interested in that accountability. You're not interested in repentance then. It's that simple. Godly sorrow says, whatever it takes. So this is the hierarchy of repentance that we should have. And the problem is that too often in the evangelical church, and I grieve over this, we hear from ministers, we hear from counselors, we hear from people that supposedly are teaching God's Word that, you know, God wants to make your life better. And it's hard because it's like there's a sense in which that's true, but what ends up happening is ministers are telling people, God is a God of your felt needs. It's moral therapeutic deism. That's all it is. God's here to make you feel better. Well, let me tell you something, friend. Confessing my sin doesn't make me feel very good until I receive the balm of Gilead and the gospel of Jesus Christ. But until then, it's hard. It's hard to be held accountable. It's hard to have my feet held close to the fire that I might do the right thing. But you know what? As a Christian, I want it more than anything else. Because I'm gonna tell you right now, and if you're honest with yourself, you will say the same thing. I'm afraid of what I can accomplish. I'm afraid of what I can do. And I saw it before Christ, before I, God say, before God came down and took out my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh, I saw what I was capable of. I saw how heartless I was. I saw how selfish I was. I don't want to go back. That was a hell on earth. But you are capable of going back if you do not have the accountability in the church of Christ that He intended for you to have. So vertical motivations must ground and govern horizontal motivations for repentance. Now let me give you two examples of this. You remember Joseph, boys and girls? You know the story, good. You know the story. He raises up to power in Potiphar's house after being sold into slavery, et cetera, et cetera. So he's in Potiphar's house, second in command in Egypt. He's put over all the affairs of Potiphar, and one day Potiphar's wife came in and wanted to seduce Joseph to break the seventh commandment, you shall not commit adultery. Okay? And Joseph did not say to himself, well, you know, if I do that, man, I've climbed this corporate ladder for so long, and if I do that, I'm going to lose all my privileges and all my benefits. He didn't say that. You know what he said? How could you expect me to sin against God in this way? That's godly sorrow. You know what he did? He ran away and she grabbed his cloak and he was naked, he didn't care. He just kept running. He would rather run away and look like a fool, and he did, look like a fool in the eyes of everybody, but get away from that temptress who was speaking the lies of Satan than to be in her clutches and sin against God. That's godly sorrow. And that's the godly sorrow that you should seek to cultivate. But what's a worldly sorrow? Well, it's Esau. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, and afterwards he realized how stupid that was. Birthright in the time of the patriarchs was a very big deal. And Hebrews 12, 15 through 17, the author says this, Hebrews 12, 15 through 17, see to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled, that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau who sold his birthright for a single meal, for you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, He was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears." You know what it doesn't say here? It doesn't say that he desired to repent. It says that he desired the blessing. He wanted to get that birthright back. He was not interested in repenting. And you know what's fascinating about this verse? It's scary. This is language that says, he found no chance to repent. That's just basically saying, listen, he couldn't repent. Friend, if you're not a true Christian, you can get to the point to where you can't repent because your repentance was never real in the first place. And I'm telling you right now that that is the scariest place on God's green earth that you could be, is in a place where you cannot repent. What leads me to a place where I cannot repent? A life of worldly sorrow and not godly sorrow. You men who struggle with pornography, I know you're here. I just want you to ask yourself this question, what do you fear when you look at pornography? Do you fear that your wife will find out and she will nag you? Do you fear that your children will see it and may not think as highly of you as you want them to think? Or do you fear that you are breaking the seventh commandment and God is displeased with your behavior and He hates that sin? And as we sang this morning, God eternal humbled to the grave. I want to ask you men, is the bloody and bruised face of Jesus Christ, Not worth enough to turn you away from your wicked perversion of pornography. Is it not enough? What more can he say? What more can he do? I would ask the same question for you who fall into drunkenness, for you that fall into addiction, for you that fall into neglecting your wife and verbally abusing her. Yes, you're here, I know. What are some examples of worldly sorrow? I repent so that people in the Christian community think highly of me. I repent in order to keep my family together. I repent for purposes of expediency. The Puritan Thomas Watson said this, a sin may be left not so much from strength of grace That's from reasons of prudence. A man sees that though such a sin be for his pleasure, yet it is not for his interest. It will eclipse his credit, prejudice his health, impair his estate. Therefore, for prudential reasons, he dismisses it. That's not godly sorrow, that's worldly sorrow. I repent because leaders in the church are telling me to. I repent because I don't want future evil to happen to me. But the problem with this false repentance is that it starts with a dead root. It starts with a dead root and a dead root produces no lasting fruit and so it's just a matter of time before that dead root shows the absence of real fruit and we see that you are a hypocrite and not a true child of God. Thomas Watson again says this of false repentance, what will a sinner not do? What vows will he not make when he knows he must die and stand before the judgment seat? Self-love raises a sickbed vow and love of sin will prevail against it. Trust not to a passionate resolution. It is raised in a storm and it will die in a calm. You hear that? When God brings a storm into your life, oh, God, if you start making deals, right? Oh, God, if you'll just do this, that, and the other thing, then I'll, and then things go calm, and you're like, well, I didn't, I had my fingers crossed. Things are good now, and we come back to the situation where God is showing mercy on us, and we interpret it badly. We interpret it as, oh, I guess things are okay now. No, no, no, no. No. When God sends a storm, he means for you to have godly sorrow. So then finally this morning, what kind of fruit does false repentance produce? We've talked about what repentance is, we've talked about the hierarchy of motivations for repentance and what needs to be at the top, and the predominant thrust of your repentance is your relationship with God, not everything right here. But now I want to give you about four or five fruits of false repentance, okay? Here's the first one, listen to me very carefully. False repentance rearranges the furniture instead of burning it. What do I mean by that? Well, let me put it this way. Counseling a man who is walking in alcoholism, okay? And he finally gets a hold of his external behavior and he's able to not drink for about a month and a half. But then what he does is he goes and gets prescription medication and starts abusing it. That's what we call rearranging the furniture. All you've done is you've traded in one for another. What's another example? Man's cheating on his wife. He's able to go for a period without doing that, but in its place, what does he do? He substitutes pornography from it. You're just rearranging the furniture, friend. What God calls you to do is take the furniture out back and douse it with gasoline and set it on fire. False repentance will not do so. False repentance will simply rearrange the furniture. False repentance will simply trade one idol for another. And you think on the surface, well, I'm not doing the same thing. Well, it's the same thing but a variation on a theme. That's all it is. Secondly, false repentance produces irritation and anger over the consequences of sin, but not mourning over the offense of sin. One of the things that we see in people that manifest false repentance is that it'll take months and months before we can even actually start working on the hard issues. You want to know why? Because for months and months, you know, all we're doing is we're trying to defend why we have a right to call them to repentance and defend why we have a right as elders to hold them accountable because they don't want to be held accountable. They don't want to be held accountable. And maybe that's a consequence of years and years and years, listen to me those of you who don't have church homes, years and years and years of not being committed to a local church where you have accountability. And you get used to the idea of, I'm just a lone ranger Christian. I just go off into the sunset without any accountability. That's not the way the church is made up, my friend. You're meant to have accountability. So, if your elders find themselves fighting with you and defending our right, our biblical right to hold your feet to the fire, you just might be exhibiting false repentance. Number three, false repentance will take advantage of a culture of grace. One of the common things I hear from people who exhibit false repentance is, don't we all sin? Okay, yes, yes, we all sin. The question is not do we sin, the question is how we respond to our sin. If you commit adultery and you're like, I messed up, okay, let's go, and then you do it again three months later. Okay, fine, I messed up, fine, fine. You're not repentant, my friend. Let me put it this way. Rosario Butterfield put it this way. I thought it was really helpful. I'm gonna switch the analogy just to make my point. An adulterer who doesn't commit adultery for three months is just an adulterer who's on vacation. That's it. It's not somebody who has repented of their adultery. Somebody, an alcoholic who hasn't drank for three months and then goes back to it was just an alcoholic on vacation. They haven't done the hard work of repenting of their sin. So be very careful about how we, don't we all sin? Yes, that's not the point, my friend. The point, my friend, is that your sin is destroying your life, it's destroying your family, and you wanna talk about other people's sin? They want to take advantage of a culture of grace. They say things like, well, doesn't Jesus say forgive 70 times seven? Yes, and this is why it's so important to have a biblical view of forgiveness. Yes, Jesus does say that. But if the person isn't genuinely sorry for their sin, as demonstrated by the fact that they go back to it over and over and over again as soon as the dust settles and everybody's attention is off them, then they really aren't sorry. A culture of grace, if it is not careful, can perpetuate a cheap view of grace. And this is where you as a congregation need to look, we need to look at ourselves and say, in this vote coming up next week, what is our vote going to communicate about the definition of grace? Is it going to communicate the message that grace doesn't transform? Or is it going to communicate the message that says grace transforms, and that's what we expect to see in people who name the name of Christ? Fourthly, I've never put it in these terms, but I finally just put it in this phraseology, and I stand by this. False repentance is cowardly. It's cowardly. False repentance would rather flee from accountability than fight sin with the Christ-exalting fuel of gratitude. And over my years of being a Christian and now as an office bearer, what I often see, listen to me, what I often see when people get brought up on charges that they know they're guilty of is they say, I'm going to a different church. That's what they do. You know what they're doing? They're cowards. If you commit yourself to the communion of God's people, you commit yourself for good or ill. Okay? And when somebody brings a charge against you that in your heart of heart you know is true, continuing down that path with them will bring healing. Nobody wants to ostracize anybody. Nobody's trying to shun anybody. You know what we're trying to do? We're trying to help you, friends. That's what we're trying to do. Grace builds up. Grace edifies. Grace fills in the gaps and gives you the grace that you need to repent of your sin. But if you run away, how can grace help you? It can't. False repentance is cowardly. False repentance produces a redefinition of repentance and a redefinition of grace. I see this all too often. I've lost count of the number of times that drunken members sometimes of this congregation have told me either on a phone call or face-to-face as they're cracking their 16th Bud Light, not only is that a bad idea, but it's a bad choice in beer. is they tell me, I feel bad for my sin, Josh. Okay, I'm waiting. Well, I'm not going to change, but I feel bad. I'm really grieved. Friend, that's not what repentance is. You're only going halfway. Those are half measures. What are you going to do about that sorrow? Because a worldly sorrow says, if I repent, I have to give this bud light to Josh and he's going to pour it down the drain where it belongs in the first place, okay? But I don't want to do that. So I'm gonna pop another one, and I'm just gonna tell him, you can't excommunicate me because I believe in salvation by grace alone through faith alone. It's not about works, yeah. And on the final day, Jesus is gonna look into the eyes of people that think they're Christian, that performed miracles, that did many great deeds in the name of Jesus Christ, and he's gonna say, depart from me, for I never knew you, you who practice lawlessness. Don't talk to me about grace. Grace transforms. So don't redefine repentance as I'm sorry. Don't redefine repentance as well I stopped doing these things even though I still want to do them and when nobody's looking I do do them. Can I tell you something? I follow a guy named David Goggins, okay? Don't judge me, but he's an ex-Marine, and I follow him for his fitness advice, okay? He is incredibly self-disciplined. He's got incredible self-control. He doesn't love Jesus, he's not a believer, but I'm gonna tell you this. David Goggins has enough self-control to stop drinking and to eat right. He's got enough self-control to do all those things. That doesn't make him a Christian. You understand what I'm saying? Unbelievers can repent from things externally but not internally. They can do it for worldly reasons and not godly reasons. The church is not here to see if you're a David Goggins. The church is here to see if you have godly, internal, heaven-sent repentance. That's what we're here to do. Grace saves and grace transforms, and that's the kind of repentance that we're looking for. And I just wanna close out this morning by reading that very thing in Titus 2, 11 through 13. Titus 2, 11 through 13. Paul speaking to his protege Titus says this. Listen, Titus 2, 11 through 13. for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people." What does that grace do? training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Beloved, That is what grace does. Grace saves us, and over the course of this already time, this now age, it transforms us. And this morning, this morning I want to put out to you this. All you need to come to Jesus Christ is to feel your need of Him. Do you feel your need of Jesus Christ this morning? Do you realize that your sins damn you? They will damn you to hell, eternally separated from the God of the universe. But because of that reason, because God so loved the world, He sent His Son into the world to receive that alienation from God, separated from His Father on the cross. All the unmitigated wrath of God fell on the Son of God while He was crucified. alienated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's what you deserve, that's what I deserve, and Christ took it for his people, and in its place, he lived a life of perfection, and if you turn from your sins, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you give him your judgment, and he bears it, and he gives you his righteousness, so that on the day of judgment, you will be able to stand. Do you feel your need for Christ this morning? I don't care about your works, but I will say this. If you feel your need for Jesus Christ, it's not just religiosity. It's not just something you do on Sunday morning for an hour and a half, but this is the very air that you breathe. It's life. You want God. You want the new heavens, the new earth. You want forgiveness of sin. You hate your sin. You detest it. You hate the consequences of sin, and you want God to free you from it. Then you feel your need for Jesus Christ, and he comes to you this morning, And he says, come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you what? Rest. Come to Jesus. Let's pray. Necessity is laid upon me, dear Father. to herald the oracles of God. I cannot help what people think. I can only be concerned, Father, with what you have commissioned elders in this place to do. And I beg of you, dear Father, by the mercies of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you would grant to every person in this place, whether they name the name of Christ or have not yet done so, that you would give them a feeling of their need for your Son. and that you would grant them real genuine repentance, the kind of repentance and faith that revolutionizes their life, that turns the world upside down, that gives them new lenses through which to see the world, such that they could say, I once was blind, but now I see. I once was dead, but now I'm alive. The air once blew upon my skin and I felt it not because I was callous and cold, but now I feel the gentle cool breeze from heaven blowing upon me. I'm alive. You've made me new. Father, would you do that for your people this morning? And those in this place who have hidden sins, Father, would you expose them? Would you expose them and grant them the repentance that says, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. And we thank You that we have a gospel that saves miserable sinners. Save sinners such as we this morning, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. Let us stand and respond in song.