Is repentance necessary to come to Christ?

John Snyder explains in this video that repentance is absolutely necessary to come to Christ. Repentance is not just cleaning up one's outward appearance. There must be a mourning for our sin, a turning from it, and an embracing of godliness. 

There is no room for both Christ and our sin. We must repent and turn away from sin. There must be a humility in the life of a believer that understands how spiritually weak they are. Believers must hunger and thirst after righteousness. 

Matthew 5:4-6 (NKJV) - "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."  

Well, if we think of repentance as a work that we're doing, kind of a moral clean-up job, turning over a new leaf, scrubbing up the inside of our life or altering the outside of our life in ways that fit with other Christians, then we've got a wrong idea of what God requires. But repentance is absolutely necessary in order to come to Christ. One way we can think of it is to think of making room. There's no room to add Jesus Christ on top of all the other things that we've already filled our lives with. We're self-centered.

We've cluttered our lives with things that put us at the center of all matter. So we have to remove those. One helpful passage is found in Matthew chapter 5 at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. Christ says, Blessed are the poor in spirit. That is, that In light of who God is, looking at themselves honestly in the mirror of the scripture, they feel that their poverty is stricken.

They don't have two spiritual pennies to rub together. The next thing Christ says is, blessed are those who mourn. It's not talking about being sorrowful because someone near to us dies. It's talking in light of that poverty of spirit. I see myself for who I really am.

I'm honest with God and then I'm honest with myself and there's a broken heartedness that comes in. Next Christ says, blessed are the meek or the humble. Having seen myself in front of God, having broken my heart over my spiritual poverty, it's hard to be proud with people around me. It's these three things that Jesus describes as an emptying process and they lead a person to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Without repentance there isn't any room for the fullness of Christ.