Category Archives: Repentance

Does Prayer Change God’s Mind?

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magnifying-glass5Article: R. C. Sproul (original source here)

Does prayer make any difference? Does it really change anything? Someone once asked me that question, only in a slightly different manner: “Does prayer change God’s mind?” My answer brought storms of protest. I said simply, “No.” Now, if the person had asked me, “Does prayer change things?” I would have answered, “Of course!”

The Bible says there are certain things God has decreed from all eternity. Those things will inevitably come to pass. If you were to pray individually or if you and I were to join forces in prayer or if all the Christians of the world were to pray collectively, it “would not change what God, in His hidden counsel, has determined to do. If we decided to pray for Jesus not to return, He still would return. You might ask, though, “Doesn’t the Bible say that if two or three agree on anything, they’ll get it?” Yes, it does, but that passage is talking about church discipline, not prayer requests. So we must take all the biblical teaching on prayer into account and not isolate one passage from the rest. We must approach the matter in light of the whole of Scripture, resisting an atomistic reading. Again, you might ask, “Doesn’t the Bible say from time to time that God repents?” Yes, the Old Testament certainly says so. The book of Jonah tells us that God “repented of ” the judgment He had planned for the people of Nineveh (Jonah 3:10, KJV). In using the concept of repentance here, the Bible is describing God, who is Spirit, in what theologians call “anthropomorphic” language. Obviously the Bible does not mean that God repented in the way we would repent; otherwise, we could rightly assume that God had sinned and therefore would need a savior Himself. What it clearly means is that God removed the threat of judgment from the people. The Hebrew word nacham, translated “repent” in the King James Version, means “comforted” or “eased” in this case. God was comforted and felt at ease that the people “had turned from their sin, and therefore He revoked the sentence of judgment He had imposed.

When God hangs His sword of judgment over people’s heads, and they repent and He then withholds His judgment, has He really changed His mind? The mind of God does not change for God does not change. Things change, and they change according to His sovereign will, which He exercises through secondary means and secondary activities. The prayer of His people is one of the means He uses to bring things to pass in this world. So if you ask me whether prayer changes things, I answer with an unhesitating “Yes!”

It is impossible to know how much of human history reflects God’s immediate intervention and how much reveals God working through human agents. Calvin’s favorite example of this was the book of Job. The Sabeans and the Chaldeans had taken Job’s donkeys and camels. Why? Because Satan had stirred their hearts to do so. But why? Because Satan had received permission from God to test Job’s faithfulness in any way he so desired, short of taking Job’s life. Why had God agreed to such a thing? For three reasons: (1) to silence the slander of Satan; (2) to vindicate Himself; and (3) to vindicate Job from the slander of Satan. All of these reasons are perfectly righteous justifications for God’s actions.

By contrast, Satan’s purpose in stirring up these two groups was to cause Job to blaspheme God—an altogether wicked motive. But we notice that Satan did not do something supernatural to accomplish his ends. He chose human agents—the Sabeans and Chaldeans, who were evil by nature—to steal Job’s animals. The Sabeans and Chaldeans were known for their thievery and murderous way of life. Their will was involved, but there was no coercion; God’s purpose was accomplished through their wicked actions.

The Sabeans and Chaldeans were free to choose, but for them, as for us, freedom always means freedom within limits. We must not, however, confuse human freedom and human autonomy. There will always be a conflict between divine sovereignty and human autonomy. There is never a conflict between divine sovereignty and human freedom. The Bible says that man is free, but he is not an autonomous law unto himself.

Suppose the Sabeans and Chaldeans had prayed, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” I’m absolutely certain that Job’s animals still would have been stolen, but not necessarily by the Sabeans and Chaldeans. God might have chosen to”answer their prayer, but He would have used some other agent to steal Job’s animals. There is freedom within limits, and within those limits, our prayers can change things. The Scriptures tell us that Elijah, through prayer, kept the rain from falling. He was not dissuaded from praying by his understanding of divine sovereignty.

No human being has ever had a more profound understanding of divine sovereignty than Jesus. No man ever prayed more fiercely or more effectively. Even in Gethsemane, He requested an option, a different way. When the request was denied, He bowed to the Father’s will. The very reason we pray is because of God’s sovereignty, because we believe that God has it within His power to order things according to His purpose. That is what sovereignty is all about—ordering things according to God’s purpose. So then, does prayer change God’s mind? No. Does prayer change things? Yes, of course. The promise of the Scriptures is that “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (James 5:16). The problem is that we are not all that righteous. What prayer most often changes is the wickedness and the hardness of our own hearts. That alone would be reason enough to pray, even if none of the other reasons were valid or true.

In a sermon titled “The Most High, a Prayer-Hearing God,” Jonathan Edwards gave two reasons why God requires prayer:

With respect to God, prayer is but a sensible acknowledgement of our dependence on him to his glory. As he hath made all things for his own glory, so he will be glorified and acknowledged by his creatures; and it is fit that he should require this of those who would be subjects of his mercy . . . [it] is a suitable acknowledgement of our dependence on the power and mercy of God for that which we need, and but a suitable honor paid to the great Author and Fountain of all good.

With respect to ourselves, God requires prayer of us . . . Fervent prayer many ways tends to prepare the heart. Hereby is excited a sense of our need . . . whereby the mind is more prepared to prize [his mercy] . . . Our prayer to God may excite in us a suitable sense and consideration of our dependence on God for the mercy we ask, and a suitable exercise of faith in God’s sufficiency, so that we may be prepared to glorify his name when the mercy is received.
(The Works of Jonathan Edwards [Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974], 2:116)

All that God does is for His glory first and for our benefit second. We pray because God commands us to pray, because it glorifies Him, and because it benefits us.

A Life of Repentance

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Jr. (original source here)

It takes me some time to kind of wind down and come off the excitement and adrenaline push of a Ligonier Conference. We just a few days ago had our annual Reformation Bible College conference, and I’m still thinking about it and thinking about the blessings that I had, about the things that I got to talk about, and that’s leading me to ask you to listen to this too. If you were there, I’m glad you were there and that you’re listening to the podcast, if you weren’t there, I’m hoping next time you will be.

Our theme, our approach for this year’s conference was a little bit odd. We’re looking at the dawn of the Reformation, and we’re doing so because we’re fast approaching the 500th anniversary of the occasion of Luther nailing his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg. But that doesn’t happen till next year, so it’s a little bit odd to be stopping to celebrate the 499th anniversary of the start of the Reformation. So our approach was to say “What was going on in the leadup?” My last talk, I looked specifically at what was going on in the life of Luther, and it was an opportunity to speak on a theme that was near and dear to my heart. I have, I confess, if you ever come to a Ligonier conference, if you want to know what’s going through my mind while I’m up there talking it’s not “All those people are looking at me!” I’m actually quite comfortable. I don’t like when one person looks at me, but I’m quite comfortable with a big crowd. What I’m thinking about is what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is to bless and help the audience with respect to their sanctification.

To put it another way, I’m trying to be prophetic into the lives of that particular audience. I get a little bit frustrated and annoyed at our propensity to sort of let loose our inner prophet when it’s safe. That we speak badly about our brothers and sisters that aren’t within our hearing. And what that does is it has a tendency to fill the ears of those who are hearing with pride. And so I want to speak to our propensity, and one of the things that I spoke to is this idea that we have, because we’re Reformed people, we’re theologically minded, we have this vision of Luther and the start of the Reformation, that this is how it happened: Luther was wrestling over some particular text or some particular Greek word, and he’s in his study or in a pub somewhere, and he has this “Eureka!” moment and then decides to go publish on it. And I suggested that that badly misunderstands what happened, and who Luther was. Luther was a genius, he was a brilliant mind, but more importantly, he was troubled in heart.

I argued that we can see what sparked the Reformation by looking at the first of the 95 theses. And the first of the 95 theses did not say “When Rome said this about this obscure text in Jeremiah, they mistranslated this Hebrew word” what he said was “When our Lord commanded that we should repent, he willed that all of our lives would be lives of repentance.” You see, what troubled Luther was not mere intellectual error, what troubled Luther was the sin in his own life. And that’s what needs to be our concern, and our reason for rejoicing in and celebrating the Reformation. The Reformation is the recovery of how we have peace with God. But our problem is we don’t even know that we don’t have peace with God. We don’t feel the weight of our sin. But Luther did. When he saw his sin and when he knew the holiness of God, he knew he had to hope that there would be some way that he could escape the wrath of God.

My talk took a turn to what may be my favorite text in all of Scripture, that text where Jesus gives the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where the Pharisee stands and says “I thank you Lord that I am not like other men”, and the tax collector says, unable to look up, beating his breast, “Lord be merciful to me a sinner.” You see, our problem is, we’re smart enough to know that we’re not supposed to be the Pharisee. But we’re pharisaical enough to think that because we’re smart enough to know that, that we’re not like other men. And we thank you Lord, that we’re not like other men, we know that the Pharisee is the bad guy of the story. Instead of actually recognizing that what we’re called to is the beating of the breast, and that crying out for mercy from God in Christ.

Friends, I want us to be students of theology, I want us to wrestle over difficult things, I don’t have a quarrel with enjoying these things while we’re smoking our pipes and stroking our beards. But we never, never can lose sight of the fact that all these things should be done while we’re beating our breasts, while we’re crying out for the mercy of God in Christ, that is what was recovered. The truth of the matter is that we have peace with God because of what Jesus did for us, in fact the whole issue of the Reformation was the affirmation of our dependence upon His grace alone. Not our dependence upon recognizing our dependence upon His grace alone, not our dependence on the perfect formulation. I suggested in my talk that if you were to query the tax collector upon the difference between imputation and infusion, he would have no idea, he would think you were speaking in tongues. But if you asked him “Do you cooperate with God? Do you contribute? Do you walk alongside God in your justification? Do you bring anything to the table?” he would say “Oh yes I do bring something to the table. I bring the need. I bring the problem. I bring death and destruction and rebellion. I’ve got nothing to offer. And that, at the end of the day, is the heart and soul of the Reformed faith, not just the mind, but the heart and the soul of the Reformed faith. Repentance is the foundation and the substance of Reformation.

Hyper Grace and Repentance

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uturn-signIn an article entitled “Hyper Grace and Repentance”, Dr. Sam Storms” so they say, and should instead turn our attention to the finality and sufficiency of God’s saving grace to us in Jesus Christ.

There is a sense in which this is a good and important reminder. Some Christians are excessively sin-conscious and have failed to recognize the glory and peace that come from trusting wholly in what God did through Jesus to remove the guilt and condemnation or our sin. But what they fail to recognize is that it is precisely because of the wonder and majesty of God’s saving mercy in Jesus that we should be sensitive to our sin and quick to repent of it. We do not repent in order to curry God’s favor or to make it possible for us to be reconciled to him. But repentance is absolutely necessary if we hope to live in the daily delight that comes with being reconciled to God.

Our experiential communion with Christ is always dependent on our sincere and heartfelt repentance from sin. We are altogether safe and secure in our eternal union with Christ, due wholly and solely to God’s glorious grace. But our capacity to enjoy the fruit of that union, our ability to feel, sense, and rest satisfied in all that is entailed by that saving union is greatly affected, either for good or ill, by our repentant response when the Holy Spirit awakens us to the ways that we have failed to honor and obey God’s revealed will in Scripture.

Part of the problem in the Hyper-grace message is their failure to properly define repentance. Several Hyper-grace authors contend that the only sense in which a Christian is required to repent is to change his/her mind or to rethink regarding sin and our relationship with God. Here is how one man thinks we think about repentance. In other words, this is how he believes we believe:

“Ongoing repentance is necessary to keep an angry God happy enough with you to be willing to bless you and use you. Your standing with God must be maintained by ongoing good behavior, and the only way to accomplish this behavior standard is through frequent sessions with God where you confess all known sins, ask for forgiveness, and repent or turn away from those sins.”

Again, he writes:

“Repentance is viewed as a necessary but onerous requirement in dealing with sin and staying in God’s good graces. It is a tool to be used to keep us in line and to prevent us from acting like the heathens we once were. If behavior modification is the goal, and it is with all legalists, then repentance is viewed as the primary method of accomplishing it.”

He argues that repentance simply means “to change your mind” about something. Rethink it. See the truth and believe it. Here is how he sums it up:

“The Holy Spirit convicts . . . or convinces me that I have believed a lie. I confess . . . or agree with the Spirit of Truth (no sense of condemnation). I then repent . . . or change my mind in light of truth.”

Michael Brown, who has written the most comprehensive response to hyper-grace, provides us with an illustration of how bad a definition of repentance this is. I’ve taken the liberty of expanding upon it a bit.

If you live in Oklahoma City, as I do, and you wish to join me in a leisurely drive to Dallas, Texas, you would typically depart from my house, drive east on Memorial Drive, and then turn right onto I-35. It’s about a 3½ hour drive. Everything seems to be going well until you notice a sign that says, “Wichita, 124 miles.” You turn to me (since I’m driving) and say, “Hey, guess what: we’re driving north instead of south. Dallas is in the other direction.” My response is: “Huh, you are correct. I’ve changed my mind about whether or not we are driving in the right direction.” And then I proceed to continue driving north, heading straight for Wichita, Kansas, instead of south for Dallas, Texas.

Changing of one’s mind is useless if it isn’t accompanied by a change of direction, a change of life and action. The only reasonable thing for me to do, having first changed my mind/belief about what direction I’m heading, is to exit off the interstate and do a 180 degree about face and head south in the direction of Dallas. It’s one thing to change my belief about where I’m heading. It’s another thing to change my behavior. And both elements are involved in genuine, biblical repentance. Continue reading →