"Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21).

Repentance involves the moral judgment of ourselves under the action of the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the discovery of our utter sinfulness, guilt, and ruin, our hopeless bankruptcy, our undone condition. It expresses itself in these glowing words of Isaiah, "Woe is me! for I am undone" (6:5); and in that touching utterance of Peter, "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8). Repentance is an abiding necessity for the sinner, and the deeper it is the better. It is the plowshare entering the soul and turning up the fallow ground. But, the deeper the furrow of the plowshare, the stronger the root of the planted seed will be.

Salvation is as free as the grace of God can make it. Moreover, it is all of God from first to last. God is its source, Christ its channel, the Holy Spirit its power of application and enjoyment. All this is blessedly true; but we must never forget that man is a responsible being—a guilty sinner—imperatively called upon to repent and turn to God. We delight in a deep work of repentance in the soul. We fear there is far too little of it in the preaching of the gospel. Men are so anxious to simplify the way of salvation and make it "easy," that they fail to press upon the sinner's conscience his lost condition before God and His claims of truth and righteousness.

—C.H. Mackintosh