What is the relationship between faith and repentance?

Question 07056

Faith and repentance are two words for one turn. That is the heart of the answer, and getting it right saves a great deal of unnecessary anxiety, because a good deal of pastoral damage has been done by treating them as two separate transactions that must be completed in the correct order.

The apostles never separate them, and neither should we. But they are not identical either, and the difference between them is worth seeing clearly.

How faith and repentance belong together

Picture a man walking north who is told that everything he wants lies south. The turn he makes is one action, and yet it has two describable aspects: he stops facing north and he starts facing south. Faith and repentance are those two aspects of a single movement of the soul.

Repentance is the turning from: from self rule, from the world’s account of things, from sin as a settled direction. Faith is the turning to: to God, through Jesus, resting on what He has done. You cannot do one without the other, because a turn towards is automatically a turn away from.

That is why I never ask people to complete their repenting before they are permitted to believe. There is no queue. There is a turn, and the two words describe what it looks like from either side.

Both are dealt with more fully in their own right, in the article on repentance and the article on faith, and reading them alongside this one will fill in the detail.

The image also explains why the two cannot be measured separately. Nobody turning round asks whether they have turned away sufficiently before turning towards. The one motion accomplishes both, and any attempt to grade them individually is an attempt to inspect something that only exists as a whole.

The apostolic pairing

Paul summarised his entire ministry in Acts 20:21 as “testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” One sentence, both words, no gap between them.

Jesus began His public preaching in Mark 1:15 with “repent and believe in the gospel.” Peter at Pentecost called for repentance in Acts 2:38 without using the word faith, and Paul told the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:31 to believe without using the word repentance. Each word can stand for the whole.

That interchangeability is the strongest evidence that faith and repentance are not two separate conditions. If they were, the apostolic preaching would be dangerously incomplete half the time, and nobody thinks that.

So when a preacher calls for faith alone, he is not omitting repentance. He is using the word that carries the whole turn, exactly as the New Testament does.

It is worth noticing how the Old Testament prepares for this. The Hebrew shuv means to turn back, and the prophets use it for Israel returning to the Lord. That single word carries both the leaving and the arriving. Hebrew never needed two words for it, and the New Testament pairing is filling out one idea rather than adding a second requirement.

Which one comes first?

Logically the question is a bit like asking which side of a coin comes first. There is a certain sense in which some awareness of God and His claim must precede any turning away from sin, which would put a rudimentary faith first. There is another sense in which you must let go of what you are holding before your hands are free, which would put repentance first.

I would not build anything on either ordering. Temporally they are simultaneous, and Scripture never sets out a sequence. What matters is that both are present, because a turn that leaves out either aspect is not the turn Scripture describes.

What I do insist on is that neither of them is a work performed to earn a place. Both are the response of a person to the kindness of God, and Romans 2:4 says plainly that it is that kindness which leads us to repentance in the first place.

There is one place where an order genuinely matters, and it is not between these two. It is the question of whether regeneration precedes faith or follows it. I hold that faith comes first and life follows, which is the plain sense of John 1:12 and John 20:31, and I have set out the reasoning in the article comparing Calvinism and Arminianism.

That ordering keeps the gospel invitation honest. When Paul tells a man to believe, he is not addressing someone incapable of responding until God performs a hidden work first. The Spirit convicts, the truth is presented, and a real person responds with faith and repentance.

Is repentance a work?

This is the anxiety underneath the question, and it deserves a direct answer. No. Repentance is not a payment, a penance or a level of remorse to be reached. Acts 11:18 describes God as having “granted repentance that leads to life,” which is not the language of achievement.

If repentance were a work, we would be back in a religion of contribution, and every believer would spend their life wondering whether they had turned hard enough. That is not the gospel and it is not how the New Testament speaks about faith and repentance at all.

Where the misunderstanding usually creeps in is through the phrase “fruits worthy of repentance.” John the Baptist said it in Matthew 3:8, and it is about evidence rather than prerequisite. Fruit follows the turn. It does not produce it.

The practical outworking is that you can turn today, without having first fixed anything. The power to change comes with the new nature received at that turning, not before it.

Some also worry about the phrase “repentance from sin” versus “repentance toward God.” Both appear, and they are not rivals. Turning from and turning to are the same turn, and picking a favourite preposition has caused more heat than light in the last century of debate.

Where the confusion comes from

Two errors pull in opposite directions. One removes repentance from the gospel invitation altogether and produces a message in which nothing is asked and nothing changes, which I have looked at in the article on easy believism. The other loads repentance with conditions until it becomes a work, which is the road to legalism.

Both errors share a mistake: they have separated faith and repentance into two things and then over corrected in one direction or the other. Hold them together as one turn and both errors lose their grip.

The Greek helps here. Metanoia is a change of mind that changes direction, and pistis is trust that rests its weight somewhere. A change of mind about God that does not result in trusting Him has not happened, and trust in God that leaves the mind unchanged is not trust.

A third distortion is worth naming. Some presentations make repentance mean a commitment to lifelong obedience offered up front, as though salvation were a contract in which we guarantee performance. Nobody could sign that honestly, and the New Testament never asks anyone to. What is asked for is a turn, and the obedience follows as fruit rather than being pledged as terms.

Faith and repentance in the ongoing Christian life

Both continue after conversion. The believer goes on trusting daily, and the believer goes on turning whenever the Spirit puts a finger on something. 1 John 1:9 assumes a rhythm of confession within the family, and the letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3 repeatedly call believing congregations to repent.

This ongoing repentance concerns fellowship rather than standing. Nothing about your justified status fluctuates, and I have explained why in the article on eternal security. What fluctuates is the warmth of the relationship, and confession restores it quickly.

In practice, a healthy Christian keeps short accounts. Not a morbid daily audit for reasons to feel wretched, but a readiness to agree with God the moment He points at something. That readiness is faith and repentance still doing exactly what they did on the first day.

So, now what?

If you have never turned, then turn. Tell God honestly what you have been and that you want Him instead, and put your weight on what Jesus has done. That single movement is faith and repentance, and you do not have to grade your own performance of it.

If you turned long ago, then keep turning in the small things. What has the Spirit been quietly pointing at that you have been explaining away?

Testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Acts 20:21, ESV

Both words are gifts before they are duties. God grants repentance and God gives faith, and the person who turns is genuinely turning while owing every part of it to grace. I am content to leave that where Scripture leaves it rather than resolving it into something tidier than the Bible allows.