"One has repented genuinely if one is truly sorry..."
What does it mean to be "truly sorry"? Did Jesus ever speak of being "truly sorry"?
Repentance is, at its core, the changing of your mind about something. Repentance may
lead to feeling sorry for sin, it may
produce a confession and forsaking of sin, but repentance itself is just to change what one believes, what one thinks, about something. Why is this important to clarify? Because when we expand the meaning of "repentance" to include other things - feeling sorry, confession of sin, changing one's behaviour - we layer on
our own additions to what Christ meant by repentance and may end up subtly moving into works-salvation as a result.
Over and over, Scripture tells us we are saved by faith, by believing (
John 3:16; John 3:36; John 20:31; Galatians 3:22; Ephesians 2:8-9, etc.), by putting trust in Christ as Saviour and Lord (
Romans 10:9-10). And when we do, God moves into our lives, convicting us of sin (
John 16:8), provoking us to forsake sin (
Ephesians 5:9), altering our desires to conform to His own (
Philippians 2:13). God changes us; we don't change ourselves for Him. But this is what we do when we start saying that repentance includes all this stuff we must do, this
work, in order to be saved.
I was thinking can a person repent just in the last second I suppose one can but it may not be genuine in last second
As I pointed out earlier in your thread, one who lives persistently in sin grows blind, deaf, corrupted and hardened to the things of God. The prophet Jeremiah made this point in his warnings to Israel:
Jeremiah 13:22-23
22 And if you say in your heart, ‘Why have these things come upon me?’ it is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and you suffer violence.
23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.
In this quotation, Jeremiah asserts that those who are accustomed to doing evil are as able to change their evil ways, to do good, as the Ethiopian man is able to change the blackness of his skin or a leopard its spots. This is what we find all throughout the Bible: we harden into ways of thinking and living over time, becoming increasingly unable to think and live differently.
Think of Pharoah, already well-hardened against the Israelites whom he had made slaves in Egypt, who resisted Moses and the plagues of God, further hardened by God to the destruction of all the firstborn in Egypt, and so hardened in his hatred of the Israelites that it killed him. Think of the people of Noah's time, warned of the coming wrath of God, watching year after year the ark being built, but so hardened in their wickedness that all they could do was scoff at Noah's warning and mock the ark he was building. Even when the ark was finished and animals began to stream into it from all around, the wicked of Noah's time still refused to take what was happening seriously. Well hardened in sin, the wicked could not repent of their evil and be saved. Think of Jezebel, warned by a prophet of God that in her wickedness she would die and her flesh be eaten of dogs. Did Jezebel repent? No. Hardened in sin, she continued to rebel against God and one day, mocking God's prophet, she was thrown from a high window to her death. Her corpse was cut up and thrown out for the dogs to eat in fulfillment of God's warning. Think of the Israelite nation that, though warned often by God's prophets, time and again drifted into terrible sin as a nation, hardening in it, until God had to bring the Israelites under judgment and cast them into bondage to their enemies, many of them dying in the process.
Romans 2:5
5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.
Ephesians 4:17-19
17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.
18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.
19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
Hebrews 3:13
13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
The door to reconciliation to God always remains open - even to those hardened in sin - for the entire time we live on this earth. However, our capacity to respond positively to that open door dissolves over time as we live in willful sin and rebellion toward the God who holds open that door.
I thought can it be too late for a person if one does seek repentance while one can to make sure one is able to fully do the will of God before one dies
And what is the will of God? What is the foundation of God's will for us? What is the First and Great Commandment? Is it to do something? Go to church, help the poor, forsake sin? No. It is to love God with all of one's being! (
Matthew 22:36-38) As I told you in an earlier post, the Pharisees had made a career of being obedient to God's commands. They had even made up a whole bunch of their own religious rules, too! Doing stuff for God was a big deal for the Pharisees. But Jesus condemned them because, though they honored God with their lips, their
hearts were far from Him.
Matthew 15:7-9
7 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:
8 “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;
9 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
God isn't looking chiefly at the external things you do but at your heart.
1 Samuel 16:7
7 But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
If your heart is right with Him, if you love God, then your works will properly reflect that you do and please God. It is very easy, though, to skip the heart stuff, to neglect to truly love God, and go straight to the works, to obeying His commands. Paul pointed out, though, that no amount of knowing, or saying, or doing for God is of any use to the Christian apart from love, first for God, and then for others.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Here, then, is the Big Problem with the idea of being saved on one's deathbed. Love is at the heart of truly knowing and walking with God. It is the core of the Gospel, revealed in the Person and saving work of Christ. How does one at the very end of a life lived in hatred and rebellion toward God, hardened in sin, come to loving faith in Jesus? All things are possible, of course, with God; such a thing could, by God's divine power, be accomplished, but it would take a forcible reversal of all the person has chosen to become, an undoing of all their free choices to sin, to bring to pass. God didn't do this for Jezebel; He didn't do this for Judas Isacriot; He didn't do this for the wicked of Noah's time; He didn't do this for Pharaoh; He doesn't do this for all those on the Broad Way going to their eternal destruction.
Modern Christians have grown very light in their attitude toward sin. They have forgotten or ignored the testimony of Scripture to the terrible danger and death that sin always produces. Modern Christians believe they can dabble in moral compromise unaffected; they can swim in the river of sin and not be swept away by it; they can roll about in the mud and crap of evil and remain unstained. This isn't the testimony of God's word.
2 Peter 2:20-22
20 For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.
21 For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
22 What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”