Just as every coin has two sides, every Christian’s conversion is comprised of two sides: repentance and faith. To understand repentance completely we must study not only what we turn from but who we turn to and how. When we repent of our sins, we must turn in faith to Christ alone for salvation. Faith consists first in the knowledge that we are sinners in need of redemption. Faith trusts that Jesus Christ is the only person who can offer forgiveness because he died for our sins so that God might reconcile himself to us. As Jesus himself taught, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Furthermore, true faith knows that our greatest need, the need for our sins to be forgiven, is met through the atoning death of Christ.
Finally, faith trusts in Christ. That is to say, faith is not only intellectual and emotional, but it is also a matter of the will. As one theologian put it, faith is a “surrender of the soul as guilty and defiled to Christ, and reception and appropriation of Christ as the source of pardon and spiritual life.” Faith is to give ourselves over entirely to Christ, to admit our helplessness to save ourselves and to lean solely on his righteousness for our salvation. This surrender in faith leads to a change in the way we live. True faith always results in growing holiness and fruitfulness (James 2:14-26).
When repentance and faith are joined in the Christian life, we have the fundamentals of sanctification. God’s work of sanctification, our growth in holiness and being conformed more and more into the image of Christ, is made evident in our life in two actions. First, putting sin to death, or in other words, repenting of our sin and working to stop sinful behaviors and thoughts. Second, putting on the new man or woman that we are in Christ, by faith. Paul gives a great description of these two fruits of sanctification in Colossians 3:1-17. He starts off this section with an exhortation, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God… For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1, 3).
In a spiritual yet very real sense, when we become Christians we die with Christ and are resurrected with him. Our sinful and earthly selves were nailed to the cross with Christ when we repented of our sin. Elsewhere Paul writes, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Romans 6:6). Just as we die with Christ because we are united to him, the Bible teaches we are raised with him to newness of life. That is why Paul exhorts us to “seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). It is because faith unites us to Christ in his resurrection that we not only repent of our sin, but increasingly grow in holiness and righteousness by the gracious work of God in our hearts, minds, and souls.
Footnotes
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 505.
