Sanctification

[Toasty]

After a person is converted to Christ, how soon will be there changes in his or her life? Are changes supposed to abrupt or slow and gradual? If a murderer or a fornicator were to become a Christian, would he stop committing those sins immediately or would it take a long period of time before he stops committing those things? I was just wondering because I have known people who became Christians and they said that it took them several months before they stopped committing a certain sin.

 

[Gforce9]

I think the only proper answer would be that it belongs to Providence. There are too many variables between individual situations to even have a standard. I look at David's situation; there seemed to be some time before he recognized the wickedness he had done. He deserved instant death, yet, for reasons known only to Him, God was extremely patient with David. Uriah was murdered, Bathsheeba was pregnant with someone else's child.
In this day, a session would have to make that call. A good session would take steps a particular situation warranted.......

 

[Jack K]

When there's been no repentance in a person's life (they're an unbeliever) and then suddenly there is the beginning of repentance (they become a believer), it often appears to be quite a startling change. However, the fact that this happens for many does not mean that God works it at the same speed for all, or with every sort of sin in one's life; and the real change he does work may be the sort that's not as obviously noticeable. So there certainly may be occasions where it takes new believers some time to repent of some sins that would seem obvious to many of us. I've been a believer for decades and there are sins I still seem to have made little progress against.

I think this is particularly common in our current culture when it comes to sexual sin. The difference between the moral foundation in the church and that of the wider culture is so vast that it often takes new believers several months just to realize they've been sinning and to understand why their behavior is sinful. Then comes the matter of getting out of entangling relationships or changing deeply engrained habits, so that repentance in this area simply doesn't happen overnight. I've known several new believers who've had to struggle with this, and all of them took a matter of months, at least, to deal with God's call for repentance in that area. This doesn't mean we should excuse sin, but we should have some patience with a new believer who's adjusting to a whole new moral framework, and should deal with that person compassionately.

 

[Toasty]

I think the only proper answer would be that it belongs to Providence. There are too many variables between individual situations to even have a standard. I look at David's situation; there seemed to be some time before he recognized the wickedness he had done. He deserved instant death, yet, for reasons known only to Him, God was extremely patient with David. Uriah was murdered, Bathsheeba was pregnant with someone else's child.
In this day, a session would have to make that call. A good session would take steps a particular situation warranted.......

I agree that the only proper answer would belong to Providence. Not everyone changes at the same rate.

 

[Toasty]

When there's been no repentance in a person's life (they're an unbeliever) and then suddenly there is the beginning of repentance (they become a believer), it often appears to be quite a startling change. However, the fact that this happens for many does not mean that God works it at the same speed for all, or with every sort of sin in one's life; and the real change he does work may be the sort that's not as obviously noticeable. So there certainly may be occasions where it takes new believers some time to repent of some sins that would seem obvious to many of us. I've been a believer for decades and there are sins I still seem to have made little progress against.

I think this is particularly common in our current culture when it comes to sexual sin. The difference between the moral foundation in the church and that of the wider culture is so vast that it often takes new believers several months just to realize they've been sinning and to understand why their behavior is sinful. Then comes the matter of getting out of entangling relationships or changing deeply engrained habits, so that repentance in this area simply doesn't happen overnight. I've known several new believers who've had to struggle with this, and all of them took a matter of months, at least, to deal with God's call for repentance in that area. This doesn't mean we should excuse sin, but we should have some patience with a new believer who's adjusting to a whole new moral framework, and should deal with that person compassionately.

I thought of a question as I was reading your post. How would you explain to non-Christians that faith is the sole instrument of justification even though both faith and repentance are involved in conversion? Also, how would you explain the necessity of repentance without giving the impression that repentance is some kind of work we do that gets us saved?

 

[Jack K]

When there's been no repentance in a person's life (they're an unbeliever) and then suddenly there is the beginning of repentance (they become a believer), it often appears to be quite a startling change. However, the fact that this happens for many does not mean that God works it at the same speed for all, or with every sort of sin in one's life; and the real change he does work may be the sort that's not as obviously noticeable. So there certainly may be occasions where it takes new believers some time to repent of some sins that would seem obvious to many of us. I've been a believer for decades and there are sins I still seem to have made little progress against.

I think this is particularly common in our current culture when it comes to sexual sin. The difference between the moral foundation in the church and that of the wider culture is so vast that it often takes new believers several months just to realize they've been sinning and to understand why their behavior is sinful. Then comes the matter of getting out of entangling relationships or changing deeply engrained habits, so that repentance in this area simply doesn't happen overnight. I've known several new believers who've had to struggle with this, and all of them took a matter of months, at least, to deal with God's call for repentance in that area. This doesn't mean we should excuse sin, but we should have some patience with a new believer who's adjusting to a whole new moral framework, and should deal with that person compassionately.

I thought of a question as I was reading your post. How would you explain to non-Christians that faith is the sole instrument of justification even though both faith and repentance are involved in conversion? Also, how would you explain the necessity of repentance without giving the impression that repentance is some kind of work we do that gets us saved?

First of all, that's a good and important question.

I point out that authentic faith and authentic repentance are not as easily separated as one might think. Although it's often helpful to consider each by itself, neither one truly exists without the other. This is because our faith is in a person, Jesus Christ, and Christ is our Prophet, Priest and King. It's impossible to only accept, for example, the "Priest" part of him (only have faith for cleansing from sin) because that wouldn't be faith in Christ. He's more than that; also the Prophet who teaches us and the King who, among other things, rules our lives. So any true faith in Christ necessarily will include repentance.

Yet it's still appropriate to speak of the whole thing as salvation by faith alone, because faith in Christ is what's happening at the heart level. And faith, we must remember, is a gift of God (Eph 2:8), so that the repentance aspect of it is not any kind of work that saves us. It's merely a God-worked change in us that surely happens when we really take hold of Christ, the whole person, rather than Christ as an atonement-for-sin concept.

That difference between faith in Christ, the whole person, and faith in Christ as an atonement-for-sin concept is what I usually end up talking about when this question comes us. I find that many evangelicals today don't have that big view of Christ and of faith, and this is why repentance seems to them to fall outside of the faith umbrella.