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Repentance: Path to Christlike Love
If “God is love,” love is power. The final manifestation of the Holy Spirit will be simply a demonstration by the church of the love of God:
It is the darkness of misapprehension of God that is enshrouding the world. Men are losing their knowledge of His character. It has been misunderstood and misinterpreted. At this time a message from God is to be proclaimed, a message illuminating in its influence and saving in its power. His character is to be made known. Into the darkness of the world is to be shed the light of His glory, the light of His goodness, mercy, and truth.
This is a work outlined by the prophet Isaiah in the words, “Oh Jerusalem, that bringeth good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength.”
Those who wait for the bridegroom’s coming are to say to the people, “Behold you God.” The last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world, is a revelation of His character of love. The children of God are to manifest His glory. In their own life and character they are to reveal what the grace of God has done for them. (Christ’s Object Lessons, pp. 415, 416.)
Jesus included the finishing of His work when He said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35).
For over a hundred years we have sensed the need for that love.* Local churches all over the world long to be able to reveal it, but feel hampered by inadequacy and contradictory influences that work to negate it. Obviously Satan hates the idea of such love really succeeding. Due to his “making war” against the “remnant church” from within as well as from without, after all these years we still are forced to recognize that this ultimate manifestation of love is yet future. No one can successfully point to a time in our past history and say, “Here the latter rain was received, and here these final prophecies were fulfilled.”
Love, the Fire in the Coal
When that love does impregnate the church as fire permeates the coal, she will become super-efficient in soul winning. Each congregation, “Jerusalem” to its local community, will be what Christ would be to that community were He there in the flesh. He inspired with hope “the roughest and most unpromising,” encouraged those who were “discouraged, sick, tempted, fallen,” saved those “who were fighting a hand-to-hand battle with the adversary of souls.” So will the church become a duplicate of Christ’s power to redeem lost people.
This will not be done by bright advertising schemes or promotion methods. The Holy Spirit will do something for the heart because the church members will receive the “mind of Christ.” “Miracles will be wrought, the sick will be healed, and signs and wonders will follow the believers. … The rays of light penetrate everywhere, the truth is seen in its clearness, and the honest children of God sever the bands which have held them. … A large number take their stand upon the Lord’s side!’ (The Great Controversy, p. 612).
What could those “rays of light” be except a clear example of the love of God seen in His people? One’s mind staggers to try to imagine the joy that will flow like a river when the word of the Lord goes forth in glory and power and human hearts meet Christ and find in Him their soul’s longing!
When one prays for the Lord to use him to win a soul, he can never know who that person may turn out to be. We may have hoped He would use us to win some “good” person; we may discover that He wants us to win someone we think of as “bad.” We think of our congregation as a comfortable, exclusive religious club when the Lord declares that it is “an house of prayer for all people,” including “sinners” we haven’t thought much about.
It is pathetic to try to limit love to “good” people. Any love so restricted ceases to be love. It stands revealed for what it is—naked selfishness. Real love is not dependent on the beauty or the goodness of an object, as is our natural human affection. We “like” somebody who is nice. But it is impossible for us to love somebody who is not nice, unless an entirely different kind of love takes over the control of our hearts. That kind of love is what the New Testament calls “agape.”
Here is an example of what it is: “God commendeth His love (agape) toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. … When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son” (Romans 5:8, 10). “I say unto you, love [the same word] your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44). We are to make the “sun” of our love “to rise on the evil and on the good,” to show our mercy and compassion both on “the just and on the unjust” (verses 45-48).
Why does God waste His gifts on “bad” people? Why send sunlight and rain on “enemies”? The answer is that God has something that is not natural for us to have—agape. If we could manipulate the bounties of nature, we would make a difference. And we would probably feel that our method of discriminating between “good” and “bad” people would be more efficient in persuading the “bad” to become “good” than God’s way of showering blessings on both alike without any sign that He likes one type of person better than the other.
But our Father in heaven is “perfect” in His love for the unworthy. When we learn such love, He will call us “perfect,” too, His true “children.”
Such love filling the church will accomplish wonders we now hardly dream of. We have no idea how many people are counted by the Lord as His, scattered all around us far and near, whom now we consider hopeless. Yet they are just as much His as was Mary Magdalene, or the thief on the cross. The moment we try to be selective in our “love” and feel, “I want to invite this person to come to Christ because he is nice, but I don’t care to win that person,” we forfeit connection with the Holy Spirit.
As the “Pharisees and scribes murmured,” we are too easily scandalized because “this Man receiveth sinners” (Luke 15:1, 2). But the greater the evil of the sinner, the greater is God’s glory in changing him:
The divine Teacher bears with the erring through all their perversity. His love does not grow cold; His efforts to win them do not cease. With outstretched arms He waits to welcome again and again the erring, the rebellious, and even the apostate. . . Though all are precious in His sight, the rough, sullen, stubborn dispositions draw most heavily upon His sympathy and love; for He traces from cause to effect. The one who is most easily tempted, and is most inclined to err, is the special object of His solicitude. (Education, p. 294.)
Repentance Lights the Fire
in the Coal
Now, to be practical, how can we learn this kind of love?
There is no way except by seeing Christ as He is. He is very different from what many confused ideas have supposed He is. Perfectly sinless, nevertheless He experienced a corporate repentance “in behalf of the sins of the world.” He knew how weak He was apart from strength from His Father. He knew He could fall. Born in the river that sweeps us into sin through the force of its undertow, He stood firm on the rock of faith in His Father, even when it appeared that He was forsaken. The Father sent His Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” In very truth He is our “brother.” He bore the guilt of “every sinner.” No one’s heart was locked for which He did not therefore have the key.
Zechariah says that the greatest event ever to happen to the church in the last days will be this new vision of Christ: “They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him.” Here is a clear picture. When we realize that we are the ones who have crucified Him, and when we “look upon Him” with understanding, we shall realize a new sense of oneness with Him and sympathy for Him. We will feel toward Him as a parent feels toward an only son, a great warmth of affection that will cancel out the appeal of all worldly allurement. This experience will indeed be a miracle.
The point of Zechariah’s prophecy is that corporate repentance felt for corporate guilt will trigger this marvelous experience. Then will come the free-flowing love for sinners we long to achieve. The point is that this ability to feel for and to love every sinner was not a supernatural endowment imparted to Christ exclusively because He was the Son of God; it was the direct result of His experience of corporate repentance.
We may not in our human judgment be guilty of the sin of another, but once we get the idea that we too are born with a carnal mind which is “enmity against God,” we sense how in truth that sin is as natural to us as it has been to another, and how it would have been acted out in us if it had not been for the grace of Christ and for the lack of equal circumstances or opportunity. He who has the “mind of Christ” will have the repentance of Christ. The closer He comes to Christ, the more he will identify himself with every sinner on earth. Christ asks “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans” to repent no more than He Himself has repented. It is treason to Him to repent less!
Righteousness by Faith
and Repentance
Only a repentance such as this can make sense of the expression, “The Lord our Righteousness.” The one who knows that Christ is all his righteousness will know that he is himself all sin. The one who feels that by nature he has at least some righteousness of his own will feel he is that much better than the sinner. Feeling so, he will know nothing of Christ. Christ to him will be a stranger. And so will the sinner be a stranger to him. When Wesley saw a drunkard lying in the gutter, he said, “There, but for the grace of Christ, am I.” Evidently he must have felt it deep inside, for if the remark had been a mere cliche to him, he would never have been able to change as many lives as he did.
Self-righteous “saints” abhor the truth of Christ’s righteousness. They resent the contrition that is implicit in seeing in Christ all their righteousness. They shrink with abhorrence from putting themselves in the place of the sinner, the alcoholic, the dope addict, the criminal, the prostitute, the rebel, the mentally ill. They say in heart, “I could never sink to such a depth!”
So long as they feel thus, they are powerless to speak as Jesus did the effective word to help such. Their love for souls is frozen by their impenitence. Restrained and restricted, it ceases to be love. They decline to enter the kingdom of heaven themselves through letting the Holy Spirit melt down their deep-frozen hearts, and they actually “shut up the kingdom of heaven against men,” barring the way so that neither “Mary Magdalene” nor “the thief on the cross” can find a path to get in. Blessed would be the millstone to be hung around the necks of such people, and blessed would be their drowning in the sea, said Jesus, rather than that they should face in the Judgment the results of their hard lifelong lovelessness. “It were better not to live than to exist day by day devoid of that love which Christ has enjoined upon His children” (Counsels to Teachers, p. 266).
It is this impenitence that is directly hindering the coming of the “latter rain” for the effective finishing of the gospel work on earth. According to Christ’s call to “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” it is time now for us to understand that the guilt of the whole world’s sin is ours, “mine,” apart from the grace of Christ. 1 am the whole world’s sin, its frustrated enmity against God, its despair, its rebellion—all is mine; and if Christ were to withdraw from me His grace, I would embody the whole of its evil, for “in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.”
This is the reason why the repentance Christ begs us to accept takes us back to Calvary. It is impossible to repent truly of minor sin without repenting of the major sin which underlies all other sin. Without seeing that truth, repentance is an empty word. True repentance is nothing short of an “after-perception” of our guilt shown “in behalf of the human race” in crucifying Christ.
There is a close relation between righteousness by faith and corporate identity. As we have seen, the underlying idea behind the “message of Christ’s righteousness” is that I possess not a shred of righteousness of my own. If I have none of my own, what do I have which is rightfully my own?
The answer is sin.
But how much sin do I have? Only a little? No, I am all sin. It follows that the New Testament idea of “righteousness by faith” is built on the principle of corporate guilt and corporate repentance. By perfect corporate repentance, the sinner accepts the gift of contrition for all sin of which he is potentially capable, and not merely for the few sins which he thinks he has actually committed himself. Thus in turn he receives the gift from Christ of potential righteousness equal to His own perfection, at present far beyond the sinner’s capacity. But it is just as real as the sense of potential guilt he has realized in behalf of the sins of the whole world.