21 I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.
Beginning a relationship with God requires two things: a turning and a trusting. The first, the turning, is something that we don’t often do in our natural selves. We get trained by life to avoid the consequences of our selfish choices. We become experts in making excuses. We seem to be able to wiggle out of almost any uncomfortable mess we have gotten ourselves into. If it is really bad, we hire a lawyer and let him do the lying for us. But Paul’s message, and the message of the Bible as a whole, is that we must be willing to face the consequences of our actions. We are responsible. Period. But recognizing that we are responsible is only part of the equation. We are responsible before God and before God we must stand. That is what Paul says. It is not enough to turn away from sin, we must turn to God. Turning away from sin is our human attempt to clean up our own lives. Some people do a pretty good job of cleaning up their lives by themselves. But this is not enough. We must turn toward God, recognize His standard, and then turn from our sinful selves. No one can clean up their lives to meet God’s standard. We must come face to face with our own need for God’s help before God will help us. As long as we stay stubbornly self-reliant, God will not help us meet His standard. But as soon as we do the second act, trusting in Jesus, we get full credit for His righteousness. When we have faith in what Jesus did on our behalf, God considers Jesus’ perfect life enough to make up for all our imperfection. We turn to God and fully see our need and then He provides fully for that need. We do trust someone, either ourselves or someone else to get us to heaven. The only One who can be trusted with this task is Jesus, the One who entered the world from heaven, lived a perfect life, died the death of a vile criminal even though he was innocent, and triumphed over death’s penalty which kept us living in fear. He did this all because He knew we couldn’t do it ourselves. We had the need and He fulfilled the need. Repentance is not enough to secure our place with God. We must trust Him to provide what we can never accomplish. Repentance and faith are necessary.
The Arnold Journey 