55. How does Go lead us to repentance?
God’s convincing grace awakens in us a desire to flee the wrath to come and enables us to begin to fear God and work righteousness.
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The “wrath to come” has become a very unpopular concept in many Christian circles. Shouldn’t we think of God simply as loving, merciful, and understanding? Isn’t “the wrath of God” just a tool that religious authorities have invented to keep people in line—indeed, to oppress them?
And yet when Paul begins to lay out for the Christians in Rome what he proclaims everywhere as the good news in Christ (Rom. 1:16–17), the starting point for him is the bad news: “the wrath of God” (v. 18). Human beings have affronted God’s generosity. They have requited God’s gifts—including life itself and all the means of sustaining life—not only with the insult of failing to acknowledge and thank God for these gifts, but with the insult of giving credit elsewhere and using that gift of life their whole lives long with no thought of, and seeking no relationship with, the Giver (vv. 18–23). Human beings have affronted God’s holiness and God’s justice with their behavior: those who ought to have used their bodies as “instruments of righteousness” used them rather as “tools for sinning” (6:13, 19), flouting God’s just decrees for how his own creatures are to live before him and with one another (1:29–32). For those who honor the whole of the New Testament witness, there is no way to avoid the fact that we all start out standing on the wrong side of God’s judgment—God’s wrath (see, for example, Matt. 3:7; John 3:36; Rom. 2:5–8; 5:9; Eph. 2:3; 5:6; Col. 3:6; 1 Thess. 1:10; Rev. 6:6; 11:18; 14:10, 19).
But none of this means anything to the person who has lived in alienation from God until God allows him or her enough of a sense of God’s reality and God’s character to understand his or her real condition, even as Isaiah’s experience of the presence of the holy God led him to a new and profoundly disturbing awareness of himself and of his people (Isa. 6:1–8). John Wesley’s own experience of preaching to crowds of nominal and lapsed Christians and seeing the fear of God fall upon them convinced him that God was working invisibly in their hearts, giving the salutary gift of the same awareness that befell Isaiah.
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I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. (2 Cor. 7:9–10 NIV)
See also Hos. 6:1; Mic. 4:1–2; Hab. 2:4; Zech. 8:20–23; Matt. 3:7; John 16:8; Acts 10:35; Eph. 2:4–5; Heb. 13:18; D&D ¶ 102 § 4
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This is an excerpt from Christian Faith and Doctrine: An Annotated Catechism for the Global Methodist Church. Seedbed is pleased to partner with The Global Methodist Church to offer this companion resource to A Catechism of Christian Faith and Doctrine for the Global Methodist Church.
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