Fulfilling Our Repentance

Matthew 3:4-10
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
December 7, 2025

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told His followers to “be perfect…as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Yet, Jesus knew full well they’d never be perfect this side of heaven. Why, they couldn’t take even the first foundational steps of discipleship perfectly!

In telling the story of Jesus, Mark in his Gospel covered less incidents than the other three; but, when he covered one, he almost always provided the most detail. So when Mark wrote about John the Baptist and Jesus getting folks ready, Mark gave the most extensive citation of their message. He quoted Jesus saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Repenting and believing were not, for Jesus and John, separate activities, but two sides of the same coin. Repenting and believing work together to reorient a life around God and His grace.

John seems to emphasize repentance more than faith, but he knew they were inextricably linked. That’s why he told people to repent only after telling them the good news about what’s coming. That’s why he invited people into, as Mark and Luke put it, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. The baptism was not just an action of moral seriousness, but an embrace of the hope that faith gives for unmerited pardon and empowerment to a better life.

We can’t receive God’s grace apart from repenting and believing, but part of the grace is that we don’t have to do either one perfectly. We just have to sincerely hang our hope on God’s having done every necessary thing perfectly. We just put our weak and wavering faith in Jesus and decide for a new trajectory in life, trusting Him to find our ambivalent and hesitant commitment good enough to work with – and build upon.

But He does that in collaboration with us, so that we develop the new life together as we over time get better and better at repenting and believing. Remember, those who were baptized were those who already had some faith and who already had somewhat reoriented themselves to God. Their only aspiration was to repent and believe less imperfectly and thus more impactfully.

It makes sense then that Martin Luther would exclaim, “The whole life of a believer should be repentance.” It’s an ongoing process that keeps sending us deeper into the grace from which we began.

John the Baptist came on the scene “wearing clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist” – that is, dressed like Elijah whose return Jews saw as a sign of the imminent arrival of the Messiah. John also came on the scene “in the wilderness” eating nothing but “locusts and wild honey” – that is, so single-mindedly focused on the One who was soon to appear and to take over, that his life, sustained by only the most basic necessities, was a sign of the right priorities.

Many people went out to John to be “baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins”. To do that, you’d have to be so dismayed by your failure to fulfill your repentance and faith, that you’d be willing to humiliate yourself publicly by admitting your shortcomings as one of God’s chosen people and your needing to start over again – as if you were a pagan convert to the Jewish faith who had to undergo a symbolic bath to wash off your idolatrous sin.

Your only consolation would be that you were at least being honest about your need of grace – something the self-satisfied, self-congratulatory leaders of the Pharisees and Sadducees resolutely resisted. As a result, they were of all people in the gravest danger of being “cut down and thrown into the fire” like a fruitless tree. So, out of tough love for them, John warned them of the wrath to come should they not repent. Their ancestry could not spare them from the danger; only their bearing “fruit worthy of repentance” could.

And what is that? It is so decisively refusing to accept our status quo that over time we gradually change in conduct and character. It is, while doing so imperfectly, demonstrably altering the trajectory of our life in ways that are eventually tangible and visible to an objective observer. Luke in his Gospel recorded how John gave some detailed examples of such change: people with two coats sharing one of them with someone who’s cold, folks with spare food sharing it with someone who’s hungry, tax collectors extracting from citizens only what’s fair, and soldiers using their power not to get for themselves but to benefit others. All that is to say, the genuinely repentant do justice and enact compassion as they walk humbly with their God – never perfectly, but over time ever more fully – albeit with many an up and down, with almost as many setbacks as steps forward, but with an overall trend in the right direction – so that, if their spiritual life were charted, it’d look like a graph of the New York Stock Exchange in a bear market – never a straight line, but on the whole angling higher.

While good works are never the root of salvation, they are ever its fruit. So, if someone shows no movement toward greater generosity, integrity and zeal for equity, there is in reality no salvation at work in them. As Jesus said, you know them by their fruit.

To fulfill our saved life, we have to fulfill our repentance. And to fulfill our repentance, we have to change much. But who among us has the capacity for that even if we know our life is at risk if we don’t change?

Dr. Edward Miller, former dean of the John Hopkins medical school, tracked patients who’d undergone heart bypass surgery. Though they’d been taught doable, healthy lifestyle changes proven to prevent reoccurring cardiac problems and to extend longevity, two years after surgery only 10% lived any differently than before. In other words, 90% preferred to stick with their familiar risks rather than to make changes in their best interest.

The vast majority of us need help to follow through and consistently do what will save our lives. But we even need help to avail of help!

For the life of discipleship, we need to be baptized with the Spirit to be freed from our fear of change and to be rescued from that fear’s resultant rigidity and resistance to change.
Let us then get ready for Christmas – or, more accurately, the reality it commemorates: God with us – not by getting the perfect gift for everyone on our list, or decorating our home to a T, or getting through a tough season without getting drunk – but by fulfilling our repentance as we keep on turning ourselves around and over to the One who alone can save us.
Jesus is our hope. Let us prepare the way for Him to take His proper place in our life by fulfilling our repentance and giving Him opportunity to be our Way, Truth and Life!