What is the relationship between faith and repentance?
Question 07056
Few questions in evangelical Christianity have generated more pastoral confusion than this one. Some teachers present repentance and faith as sequential requirements, as if repentance must first reach a sufficient depth before faith becomes possible. Others minimise repentance to the point of near-irrelevance, presenting faith alone as the single condition with nothing else in view. Both approaches misread what the New Testament actually says, and both produce pastoral problems that are entirely avoidable.
Two Words for One Reality
The New Testament sometimes presents repentance and faith together as the content of the gospel summons. Mark records Jesus’ opening proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Paul summarises his ministry as “testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). In Hebrews 6:1, “repentance from dead works and of faith toward God” are described as foundational doctrines, listed side by side as the basic elements of Christian teaching.
This pairing is not accidental. Repentance and faith describe the same event from two different angles. Repentance is the turning away; faith is the turning toward. They are not two separate acts that must be performed in a particular order but two dimensions of a single act of turning. When a person turns from one direction to face another, they are moving away from where they were and toward where they are going. These happen in the same moment; they cannot be separated in time without the turning ceasing to be a turning at all.
What Repentance Actually Is
The Greek word metanoia means a change of mind, a fundamental reassessment. It is not primarily an emotional experience, though genuine emotion often accompanies it. It is a changed understanding of one’s situation before God, producing a changed orientation of the will. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 7:10 as a “godly grief” that “produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret.” The grief is not the repentance itself but what produces it; the repentance is the resulting change of direction.
Repentance is therefore not a works-based addition to faith. It is not the believer demonstrating sufficient moral seriousness before God will accept them. It is the genuine turning of the person away from the direction they were travelling, which is inseparable from any genuine turning toward Christ. Someone who claims to trust Jesus but has no intention of turning from their current direction of life has not understood what they are turning toward. Jesus does not offer to add Himself to an unchanged life as an additional spiritual benefit.
What Saving Faith Actually Is
Saving faith is not intellectual assent to a set of propositions. James makes this plain: demons believe that God is one, and they tremble (James 2:19). What they do not do is entrust themselves to God. Saving faith is personal trust, complete reliance upon Jesus as the only ground of standing before God. The Greek word pisteuō carries within it the sense of commitment, not merely intellectual agreement.
It is this personal, entrusting quality of saving faith that makes its inseparability from repentance plain. A person who genuinely entrusts themselves to Jesus has understood that they cannot be accepted on the basis of their own record, that Jesus is the only one who can make them right with God, and that receiving Him means receiving Him as He is. A person who has embraced that reality is already, in the act of embracing it, turning from self-reliance toward Christ-reliance. That is repentance. The two cannot be genuinely present without each other.
The Question of Order
If there is any logical order to be observed between the two, it would be that repentance and faith arise together in response to conviction and understanding of the gospel, with neither strictly preceding the other as a condition that must be met before the other can begin. Some theological traditions place repentance before faith in a strict sequential sense; others place faith before repentance. The New Testament seems less interested in that question than in the insistence that genuine saving faith always involves genuine turning, and genuine turning always involves genuine trust in the One being turned toward.
What can be said with confidence is that repentance is not a prior work of merit that earns the right to believe. Paul’s statement in Romans 10:9-10 points to confession and belief as the operative acts: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” The role of repentance is implicit in what it means to confess Jesus as Lord; it is not presented as a separate prior condition that must be cleared before faith can operate.
Pastoral Consequences
This understanding has real pastoral weight. A person who has been told they must achieve sufficient sorrow before their faith will be accepted can become trapped in an anxious cycle of self-examination, trying to manufacture enough grief to qualify. The New Testament offers no such standard. The turning itself, however imperfectly it was felt or expressed, is what God responds to.
At the same time, a version of the gospel that presents faith as purely intellectual acceptance and says nothing about turning serves the person badly. Someone who holds orthodox beliefs about Jesus while remaining entirely unchanged in the direction of their life has reason to examine whether they have actually exercised saving faith at all. The call to repent and believe is not two calls; it is one call with two inseparable dimensions.
So, now what?
The practical question for anyone examining their own response to the gospel is not “did I feel enough sorrow?” but “did I genuinely turn?” The turning involves both dimensions: away from self-reliance and self-direction, toward Jesus as the only ground of standing before God. Where that genuine turning has taken place, there is both repentance and faith, whatever emotional texture surrounded the moment.
“Testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Acts 20:21