“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.” – Matthew 3:7-8
Before the start of Jesus’s earthly ministry, John the Baptist prepared people for His coming by calling them to clean up their spiritual lives and repent of their sins. His fiery preaching even drew the hypocritical and self-serving religious leaders and teachers. However, he didn’t celebrate his growing influence and social media platform. Rather, John challenged the Pharisees and Sadducees for bothering to show up. Why had they come?
Though our covenant with God is very different from theirs (ours is based on God’s grace toward us through faith in Jesus Christ while theirs was based on obeying Old Testament Law), John’s message to these who were seemingly religious but thoroughly rotten remains relevant to us. “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.”
In other words, if you say you’re sorry for things you’ve done and say you want God’s forgiveness, then live the rest of your life like you truly hate those sins. Many people today quickly say they’re sorry for any number of things, but they aren’t really. After “apologizing”, their lives aren’t changed, their behaviors aren’t different, and there’s nothing about them that indicates they were sorry. They aren’t bearing any fruit consistent with real repentance.
Followers of Jesus must repent when we sin. Repentance goes far deeper than glibly saying, “I’m sorry” – there must be life change. Repentance looks like a desire to work with the Holy Spirit to kill that sin in your heart, to battle that temptation whenever it arises. If we immediately repeat the sin we said we were sorry for, that isn’t repentance and there’s no reason to believe God has forgiven it. We too must bear fruit in keeping with repentance, even once we’re saved by God’s grace, so we can live a life truly pleasing to our Lord.
Reflect on the last few times you told God or others you were sorry. Were you? Do your life change because of that sorry or are you lacking the fruit of repentance?