In this video, Scott Brown discusses the topic of repentance. There should never be a halting of our quest to continue to increasingly conform our lives in accordance with Scripture. We shouldn't become complacent and think we've somehow reached a point where repentance and reformation is no longer necessary.

1 Timothy 4:8 (NKJV) - "For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."

It's great to be here. Thank you so much for coming to come and commemorate such a great season and in the history of the world that of the Reformation and then To consider our own Reformation and how critical it is that that this Reformation that began continues in every area of our lives. You know, in just five days, the world is going to either berate or they're going to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg. And why a conference on repentance on the 500 year anniversary of the Reformation. And the reason for a conference on repentance, on the 500th year anniversary of the Reformation, is that the very first of Martin Luther's 95 theses addressed the area of repentance directly and he said this in the first thesis when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent he willed that the entire life of believers be one of repentance.

That says it all. That's why we're having a conference on repentance here. We've been preparing for this conference for probably about 18 months, and it really has been a joy in one way to prepare for it. But the Reformation of the Church and the Reformation of your life and the reformation of your family should never be over. We're on a long journey.

It's that heavenly journey that God puts all of His people on, whom He loves. And that journey really has to do with the identification of remaining sin and also returning to biblical order in every area of life. And that really is our mission here at this conference, is to call one another to biblical order. First of all, in the order of your heart. Second of all, in the order of your family life.

And third, in the order of your church, because reformation is something that really is designed to touch absolutely everything. Our mission at the NCFIC is to speak to matters of church and family life, the complementary roles of church and family life, and so everything that we do has to do with the reformation of church and family life, and so it really is a delight to do that. Now, there are just some things in our lives that should not remain the same. And I pray that that would be your meditation as you're with us. There are just some things that should not remain the same.

Maybe it has to do with the way that you think. Maybe it has to do with the way that you relate with people, or the way that you conduct your life in your family, or the way that you work, or the way that you operate in your local church, or if you're a leader in a local church, the way you govern the operation of that local church, that we would all of us ask ourselves, Are there some things that just should not stay the same? And so, we've all found ourselves here at a conference that is dedicated to the resurgence of biblically ordered church and family life. And at the same time, we should always recognize that repentance is a wonderful gift, and it's a gift that really is a gateway to joy. And I hope you see that as we make our way through these instructions from the Word of God.

Okay, kids, do I have your attention? Kids, what is repentance? You're gonna hear the word repentance, oh, hundreds of times. I don't know how many times I'm going to use the word repentance in this one message, but many times I've already used it. What is repentance?

And I want you to understand that repentance is very, very simple, at least in one aspect. And that it is a word picture. The word repentance is actually a word that describes an action. It describes something that's happening. So all children and adults need to understand that repentance is a word picture.

And it means two things. It means the change of your mind, that's one thing that it means, and it also means the change of your direction. In other words, your mind is going down one path, but repentance calls it back off of that path to a right path. Picture repentance like this. It's a change of direction as well you're walking you're walking down a road and you're going one way and when you repent you turn around and you go the other way I vividly remember this as a person whom the Lord Jesus Christ was calling as a very young man.

And I recognized that I was going one way, and I didn't want to go that way anymore. And I turned around, and I began to walk toward Jesus Christ. And it's been many, many years on that walk, and on that walk, I haven't stopped repenting and I haven't stopped continuing to turn around. But repentance is a word picture. So when you hear the word repentance repeated 1, 000 times in the next three days, think of a person walking down a way and turning around because that is the word picture that this word repentance means.

You've experienced this in different ways. You children have experienced this if your parents have a GPS. You'll be going down the road, and you'll be going off course, and you'll hear this voice, this voice out of nowhere. It might be a British accent, it might be a woman, who knows what it might be. It might be a cowboy.

You can get these in any voice you can imagine and the word will will come out of the GPS Rerouting rerouting or you will say proceed to the root proceed to the root well That's really repentance You've got to proceed to the root, back to the right root that you were going, when you were going the right way. Now, this is why repentance is such a glorious blessing of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When a person turns to Jesus Christ, they are given a new capacity. Conversion launches a new capability in the soul of man, and it is the capability to repent and that capability unleashes a lifetime of increasing joy and relief from the pains and the troubles of sin. So repentance is a marvelous capability of salvation.

If you're saved, you know exactly what I'm talking about and what a kindness it is that God would give us this gift of repentance. I think that's why the Church Father Tertullian said, I was born for nothing but repentance. And I think he said that with the fondest sense of the terminology that he uses, that it is such a good thing to be called into that kind of life. And also, we need to recognize that repentance is a mark of true Christianity. You know, that's why during the Communist revolution in Romania, the Christians were slanderously called the Repenters.

That's what they were called, because that's what they were doing. And they were slandered because they were called, oh, they're just the Repenters. Well, these slanders had no idea how wonderful repentance really is. Now, I found it to be somewhat dangerous to plan for a conference on repentance. On a personal level, it's been a hard year.

At the same time, planning for a conference on repentance has been a very helpful and a very sweet thing. Most men who preach understand that what they're preaching on also tends to fall really hard on their souls. You're getting ready to preach something, and God, He drags you through it. If you're preaching on the sovereignty of God, he's going to give you something to help you understand that he's a little bit more sovereign than you thought he was. And so when you engage in any kind of preaching, you're sort of dragged through it.

And so it's been a year of walking through these matters. And I've found that spending the time preparing for this conference has really brought unexpected opportunities for me to search my heart and to examine remaining sin, and I've Recognized over and over again this year that I'm way worse than I thought I was One of the one of the one of the features of remaining sin is that it hides. And it can hide for a long time until God in His kindness decides to put His finger in the wound. And He brings a realization of that remaining sin. But sin does hide, and it's hiding in all of us, and it will hide in us until God comes and takes us to glory.

But in God's mercy, He's given us this gift to relieve the poison and to bring us back into a right place. And so I've seen the beauty of the gospel more this year than any other time. While I've seen more remaining sin, I've seen more of God's mercy and his kindness toward me, and I'm so grateful for that. But what we need to recognize here is that there are some things that just should not remain the same. And I pray that God really brings us a sense of that.

Now at this conference, you will encounter preaching. We've gathered preachers really from all over the world as you you've been with at our conferences before You recognize that we place a high value on the preaching of the Word of God We believe that it's preaching that changes the world We believe that preaching is the way that revivals take place, and so we really do want awakening and revival, and we believe that the only way that a true awakening and revival will take place is through the preaching of the word of God, the receiving of the word of God, the repentance and the turning unto God. And so we are very thankful to bring, at least in this case, I've assigned 25 biblical texts on repentance to the men who have come to preach. And as I've worked my way through the Bible on this matter of repentance, I tried to extract various passages of scripture that were representative of the whole doctrine of repentance. I pray that somehow you'll have a sense of the whole counsel of God on this matter of repentance through these passages of scripture.

And these men who are preaching are dear to me, and I'm very grateful that they have come. Almost all the speakers at this conference are preachers who preach in churches who are listed on the NCFIC church listing. The kind of preaching that you'll hear is the kind of preaching that you can hear all over the world in the churches that affiliate with us and I'm very very grateful for that and our greatest prayer and really the central driving force of our work here at this conference and our work every day at the NCFIC is to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life that there would be a revolution a biblical revolution of church and family life we believe that those two institutions are so pivotal for the blessing of mankind and for the spread of the gospel. The family, the first place where the gospel is heard in a child's life, the family, the place where the word of God is taught when you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. It's so critical that we reform the family according to scripture And we're not done with that yet My family's not done with yet that yet either by the way And that also that the Church of Jesus Christ is reformed according to scripture that we abandon the inventions of this world and we find ourselves humble before God and we establish biblical patterns of worship in the Church of Jesus Christ, that we find when the Lord Jesus Christ comes to retrieve us that we're found doing the things that he commanded us to do.

And with all of our hearts, we just want to proclaim boldly that the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life is a pivotal matter, and we really, with all of our hearts, want to call every person who will listen to us to return to biblical order in the church and the family. And so we pray that that's what happens here in this place. Now, during this weekend, there are four things that I am praying that will happen as we're together. First, that we will be able to accurately explain the doctrine of repentance from the Word of God. That these men will come and they will order themselves under the authority of God and they will preach the word of God.

They won't have their own message, but they will take from scripture and preach from these great texts of scripture, and that understanding will take place. The second prayer that I have is that we would call one another to repentance personally, that we would be lovingly bold in calling one another into this great blessing that is repentance. And then thirdly, that God would use our time together to lead the unconverted to repentance unto life. That they would find life. You know, every year, as far as I know, people have been converted at this conference, and I pray that it happens again to many people.

You know, when you realize that there is something wrong with your life, and that thing that is wrong is that you're not reconciled to God. You're running from God. You're on that road. You're running away from him and you need to turn around and God is calling you. Turn, turn around, turn around from that path of destruction and return to me and find times of refreshing.

So I pray that that third thing will happen. And then finally, that our time together would have a marvelous effect on the churches that are represented here. I believe I was told there are over 60 churches that are represented here in this place. And I pray that you go back into your churches and you become faithful local church members, that you pour your heart and your soul into the prosperity of a local church of Jesus Christ, that you would not ignore her, but you would give of your treasure, you would give of your time, you would pour out the gifts that God has given you in those local churches, that you would go back, and that this conference wouldn't just die here, but that it would live week after week in the worship and the fellowship of your local church. Now, the heart of the changes that took place in the Protestant Reformation were launched by the preaching of the word of God.

Now, I think we would all agree that repentance has fallen on hard times in the modern church today, and as we're celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I think it's probably clear to most people that modern churches rarely address the subject of repentance. You can go to mass evangelistic campaigns and there's not a call to repent. There's a call to receive Jesus, but there's rarely a call to repent and to return and to change. Today we have preaching that does not call for repentance. In order to read about repentance, you have to go back to really old books.

That's what I found in these 18 months of dealing with this subject. But The Protestant Reformation was fueled primarily, seminally, by a return to what we call today sola scriptura. And everything that happened in the Reformation really flowed from the return of scripture. We're familiar with the five solas, sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, sola Christus, and sola dea gloria. All of these really are fundamental outgrowths of the sufficiency and the authority of scripture.

The reformers, or the theologians following the reformers, called sola scriptura, the formal principle. It was the heart of the Reformation and you can you can read about this in the great confessions of faith In the Westminster confession in the Baptist confession of 1689 you can read very clear language that explains The place of Scripture, but then Sola fide was called has been called the material Principle and that there is no righteousness other than Jesus Christ's righteousness that is sufficient to save sinners. The reason I bring those two out, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide, is because I think you can see by looking around that we live in an evangelical world which has abandoned largely these two principles that evangelicalism the people who call themselves evangelical and gel evangelicals many of them have absolutely rejected sola scriptura, and they've rejected sola fide, and we're here to say that is the wrong direction, and we should not be following that direction for example if you read Ian Murray's book and I highly recommend it evangelicalism divided he traces really the demise of evangelicalism and and and and ask the question who are evangelicals anyway but but he he speaks of of the success of the ecumenical movement under the influence of Christianity today and the influence of Billy Graham, where the term evangelical has been broadened.

It's been broadened so broadly to actually include those who reject sola scriptura and those who reject sola fide. We live in a world where evangelicals are called evangelicals, but they have actually rejected these two fundamental doctrines of the Reformation. And this is why we find in evangelicalism a detente with the Roman Catholic Church, and we find a church that's full of inventions rather than faithfulness to Scripture and Scripture alone. And you know this this matter of returning to Scripture alone is so critical. What we found in the Reformation is that everything was reformed.

It wasn't just justification by faith, everything was reformed during the Reformation. Luther, by cleaving to Scripture alone, revived marriage, he revived family life, he revived the importance of music, He revived an understanding of work and vocation. He revived a sense of the regulation of the church and really a revival in preaching. All you have to do to understand how radical and how transforming Luther was in the Reformation was to look into his family life. Look at his wife.

Look at his children. Look at what he did in his home. God transformed that family, transformed that marriage, and it all came from this one formal principle, the sufficiency of scripture or sola scriptura. And the reason that we've got to continue to consider these things is that there are just some things that should not stay the same in my life, in your life, and in my church, and in your church. And so that's why we are really praying for a resurgence of biblically ordered churches and families.

Now, there was an unexpected event, an explosion that took place on October 31st, 1517, that spread these doctrines like wildfire. And there were four personalities that were at the center of this wildfire. First was Pope Leo X, second was Albrecht of Brandenburg, the third was Johannes Tetzel, and the fourth was Martin Luther. And let's take these one by one so you can have a sense of what this reformation, this earthquake was all about. First of all, you had Leo X.

He was a man who wanted money. In 1517, Europe was under the control of the Roman Catholic Pope Leo X, and he needed money. He needed lots of money to repair and to rebuild a mega church a massive building that you know by the by the name st Peter's Basilica and he needed mega funding for a gigantic building and That was a problem The second was Albrecht of Brandenburg. He was a man who needed money. Albrecht of Brandenburg wanted to purchase the Archbishopric of Mainz and the control of the funds flowing into the church from all of Germany.

Essentially, he was a religious person who wanted to buy the cash flow of the church in Germany, and he would have to pay to buy that cash flow. In the same way that men pay for businesses, they're actually buying a cash flow. And that's what Albert of Brandenburg was doing. But in order to control that cash flow, he had to buy it from the Pope. Imagine pastors today buying cash flows of churches for monies that they raise and borrowing money to do such a thing.

But to buy the bishopric, he paid the Pope with the money that he borrowed from a wealthy Austrian banker named Jacob Fugger. And the deal he made with the Pope was that he would be authorized by the Pope to sell indulgences for eight years and those indulgences that he would sell would be purported to release souls from purgatory for a certain number of years, depending on the amount of money that was paid. And the sweetness of the deal for the pope and for Albrecht of Brandenburg is that they were going to split the revenue 50-50. And so then you had, while you had this great deal for both the Pope and Albrecht of Brandenburg, you had to have a way to bring the money in. And so the third personality is Johannes Tetzel.

He was a man who knew how to raise money. And he was the salesman for indulgences. And he was a supreme hawker and a salesman. I would encourage you to go and read some of the sermons that he preached to these people. They're just tragically formed.

But he was a marketer and a master communicator. And of course, we've heard his famous jingle, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs and so Tetzl finally made his way to the outskirts of the parish of Wittenberg where Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He wasn't allowed to come to come into Wittenberg because the priest there did not want Tetzel to take a piece of the indulgences that they were selling in their church. And so then you have Martin Luther who comes to the scene and being so disturbed about Tetzel he wrote these 95 theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg explaining how corrupt and profane it was to buy indulgences and that's that's that's where we read in the first the first thesis when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, he meant that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance. But how did Luther arrive at this conclusion about repentance?

How did he end up with this conclusion? Well, he had been translating the Latin Vulgate into his language, and he was studying Matthew 4.17, which says, where Jesus says, "'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And he noticed that in the Latin Vulgate, that version of the Bible, The word do penance was in place of the word that should have been there, repent. He read do penance rather than the word repent, and he recognized that the Latin Vulgate had mistranslated Jesus' statement in Matthew chapter 4 verse 17. And so he crafts these theses, And here they are.

We've read the first one. The second, this word cannot be understood as referring to a sacrament of penance. That is, confession and satisfaction as administered by the clergy. And third, yet it does not mean, and this is very important, and this is where a lot of people are confused about repentance, Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance. Such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh.

That's very important if we're going to understand the doctrine of repentance. Penance is doing things to offset wrongs done. Penance arises out of feeling bad for sin and taking an action. Penance is self-justification. That's not what repentance is.

Now, if a person goes through life and they think that their penance is repentance, there will be a tragic result and they will go through life feeling very bad about their sin but never having been converted and that's the tragedy of misunderstanding the doctrine of repentance it's disastrous to the soul because true repentance results in change and sometimes it's seismic change That's why in Acts chapter 17 we read that there was a riot because when the apostles preached the people looked around and they said, the whole world is turned upside down. In other words, people's lives were changing. They were being transformed. Everything about their lives were being transformed. It was true repentance that was taking place there.

And it was so disturbing that the Apostle Paul was finally, after three weeks in Thessalonica, was thrown out. He went to Berea. He preached the same thing, and he was thrown out of Berea. And then he went to Athens, and the Athenian scholars just scoffed at him and rejected him. So this reformation that we're talking about is a reformation that changes people's lives.

It actually alters and refigures your life. And if the church will have the power of the Lord Jesus Christ It will have the transforming power of true repentance this is the tragedy of the modern church that has really taken penance for repentance and reduced the Christian life to feeling bad about your sin and saying you're sorry. And nothing could be further from the true doctrine of repentance. So I'd like to sort of give us a flyover of this conference and the things that we plan to deal with here. And these texts that have been assigned to these preachers here, I pray will be like a divine GPS system in your heart, where you're hearing the words, rerouting, rerouting, return to the root, return to the root.

So I'm gonna walk through these texts and just give you a sense of them. First of all, we're going to deal with the fact that repentance is a gift from God. That's a message I'm gonna give in just a few minutes from Acts chapter three. Secondly, the necessity and the results of repentance. This is Joel Beakey here this evening, and he's going to venture into Matthew 4.17 in Acts chapter two, and he's going to answer the question, is repentance necessary for salvation, And what does repentance have to do with feelings and everything else?

And then thirdly, the scandal of sin and our desperate need of repentance. Justin Huffman is going to take us to Judah and Tamar and bring us to the world of repentance and the forgiveness of scandalous sins. What do you do with scandalous sins? And fourth, the relationship between repentance and restitution. Jason Dome is gonna come and deal with Luke 19 and other places in the word of God and answer questions like what does restitution mean and what does it look like and what does it really have to do with repentance.

Fifthly, we'll be speaking of repentance in corporate worship from Psalm 130 Scott annual is going to come and help us understand the beauty and the power and the goodness of ongoing rhythmic Repentance in the life of a local church through the worship of God. I think this is gonna be a very helpful message, particularly for those of us who are involved in our local churches. And then six, the role of anguish in repentance. Jeff Pollard is gonna come and bring us Matthew 27, verses one through 10, and he'll explain from the scriptures what false repentance looks like and yes it can include a radical anguish of soul as it did with Judas and Joe and Jeff will will speak to us about other instances of false repentance in the Bible, which included this matter of anguish. It's not enough to feel anguish about what you did.

And then number seven, the repentance of David. In Psalm 51, John Snyder will bring us one of the best-known passages of Scripture on repentance where David turns to the Lord for a clean heart. And then we're going to give, eighthly, an illustration of a church that repented in 1 Thessalonians 1, 6-10. And Malamulo Chindongo is going to sort of transport us back in time into the Church of Thessalonica and show us what it looks like when a church has turned from idols. And then, ninth, the marks of true and false repentance from 2 Corinthians 7, 8-13.

Sam Waldron is going to bring us this, one of the clearest and most powerful didactic texts explaining true and false repentance. By the way, there are three messages on this passage of Scripture at this conference. It's very, very important that we understand it, and three men will come and preach it and you'll hear various various facets of this great passage of Scripture and then we in in this tenth message are will will see that repentance is deeper than an outward act from Joel 2 verses 12 through 30. Kevin Swanson will bring this scene and recognize that it's a lot easier to tear your garments than it is to tear your heart. And then 11th, the priority of repentance in ministry from Acts 20 verse 21.

Rob Ventura will explain from this passage how repentance fits into the whole message of the Christian life and the preaching of the Apostles. And number 12, the fruit of a repentant life. Pu'u An-Mer-Shahi is going to take us into this great passage in 2 Corinthians 7 and to speak of this multicolored fruit that comes from repentance. And then 13th, that promoting repentance in one another is such a critical thing and Anthony of Athenia will show us from James 5 in Proverbs 27 now Anthony Mathenia was just called home his wife is in labor and he you may see him back he said that if it's a false labor he might he might come back but he's on he's he's with his wife now Hannah pray for them looks like a new baby's gonna enter the Methenia household. What a blessing.

Anthony warned me about this six months ago, that this might happen. We were able to hear him preach this morning, and it was so wonderful. And who knows whether he'll come back? The Lord knows. The Lord reigns.

And then 14th, repentance in local congregations. Paul White is gonna bring us this message out of Revelation 2 and 3. And then 15th, how does the Lord repent? This is one of the most remarkable messages that will be given at this conference Marcus Cern my dear friend for many years is going to come and speak from many passages of scripture to answer the question, well, how does the Lord repent? And that should be very, very helpful.

And then 16th, how do you know when to repent? This is a message from Jeff Bakken, head of James 4. Jeff informed me today that he is in such a physical state today that he cannot speak and he's not able to come. But he, I believe he has sent a video explaining some of the things that he wants to declare here through his children. I spoke to his wife Victoria, but pray for Jeff.

He's in excruciating pain and can't even speak at this moment. And then 17th, the missing link in biblical counseling. Here, Kerry Green from Washington is going to come and speak to us about how we should recognize the importance of repentance as we're counseling one another. And then, number 18, Zechariah 1, 1 through 6, John Latham is going to bring what many theologians say is the central Old Testament text on repentance, because the language that is in this text is the language that you find everywhere in the Bible. It's a little bit of a Rosetta Stone for understanding the whole doctrine of repentance in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.

And then 19th, the role of obedience in repentance from Isaiah 1, 11 through 31. Chris law is going to show us the role of obedience in repentance and then we'll have a message on Herod's partial repentance from Mark 6. Jimmy Farabbe is going to come and explain the collateral damage that's caused by the kind of repentance that Herod experienced and partial repentance. Here's a reality. Everyone has partial repentance, But there's a classification of partial repentance that we see in Herod that should terrify us if it's ours.

And then 21, dealing with idols of the past and present. In this matter of penance, This is Judges 3, 12 through 30. Adam Madden from Utah is going to come and bring us a case study of idolatry of the past and present idolatry and how one must treat it with a spirit of repentance. And then in addition, we're gonna have some really, I think, wonderful messages from some other men. Gary Powers is gonna come and speak to us about the repentance of Manasseh.

So there it is. That's the flyover of this conference. We pray that God will bring a rich treasure trove of exposition of scripture, preaching that will bring us to places of repentance, that remaining sin that we are not seeing would be uncovered, we would return to the Lord, because the truth is there are just some things that just should not stay the same. And I pray that God would help us to understand those things here at this conference. Thank you so much.

And I pray that God would richly bless us.