What is the relationship between repentance and salvation?

Michael Beasley explains in this video that it is important to understand that when a person talks about salvation and the Gospel, the big question that needs to be asked is, “What do you need to be saved from?” People often wrongly answer that they are merely "adding God to their lives." 

In reality, the Gospel preaches transformation and states that salvation and repentance involve a dying to self and that repentance is essential. We need to turn from our wickedness. We are not adding God to our lives, we are forsaking what we were. Paul says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins. There is nothing to go back to. You don’t go back to a grave that is sin. We were dead in our trespasses and sins and God made us alive. 

Repentance is crucial. There must be a sorrow that leads to repentance. The Gospel calls us to live a life that is in the imitation of Christ. It is a lifelong process of sanctification. Repentance is a critical part of that process.

Acts 2:38 (NKJV) – “Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

When we're talking about the necessity of repentance for salvation or why it's related, It's important to understand that when a person talks about salvation and the gospel, the big question that needs to be asked is, what do you need to be saved from? Sadly, in the modern preaching of the day and for many decades past, that message has been confounded. Instead of being saved from the wrath of God, men are essentially believing somehow that they are just being saved in the sense of just having God being added to their life, wherever they are, however they're living. But the gospel says, the gospel preaches transformation. The gospel preaches that we are to lose our life for Christ's sake.

The Gospel teaches that repentance is essential because we need to turn from our sin and turn from our wickedness and turn from our former ways and acknowledge that we're not just simply adding God to our lives, but we're forsaking what we were in our trespasses and sins. I think this is one of the reasons why Paul, when he describes our former state of life, he says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins. That's another way of reminding us of the fact that there's nothing to go back to. You don't go back to a grave and dig it up and enter into it. Who would ever do that?

We were dead in our trespasses and sins, and yet by the grace of God and out of His great love, He made us alive together with Christ Jesus and and that work speaks of transformation so repentance is crucial I talked to a lot of people and they'll talk about how they're saved and Believing that they're saved and yet there's no apparent repentance over sin. There's no sense of sorrow that leads to repentance in their lives and this is not the gospel. Again, the gospel calls us not just to have a ticket to heaven but it calls us to live a life that is in the imitation of God, in the imitation of Christ. And that is a process, a lifelong process of sanctification, which again, as Luther rightly states, repentance is a part of that process of sanctification.