Luke 15:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Luke 15:7

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This is a very misunderstood verse. The question is, who are these just persons? Are they Christians, who have been accepted by God? They have been forgiven their sins, they have been given new life, they walk with Christ, they pray to him, they receive his blessings. They are heaven-bound, they are loved by God with an immeasurable love. Is that who is meant? No, they are not literally ‘just people who need no repentance’. Christians have all repented, and they are only just because they have been justified by God. The passage actually tells us who is in mind. This parable is spoken to his detractors, and whenever he speaks a parable to the scribes and the Pharisees, they always feature in it. This is not about those who genuinely need no repentance, but who, in their own estimation, are already just. Of course they were not truly just. This is divine irony. They desperately needed to repent, but not in their eyes. They didn't seem to bother about personal righteousness. Their imagined righteousness lay in the exactness with which they followed the rites and ceremonies of the law. There's no joy in heaven over the self-righteous, no joy over people whose sin is only surpassed by their conceit, and who reject the Saviour of the world. But true conversion is a remarkable and a wonderful thing. Every conversion is a triumph for Christ; it’s a vindication of the cross and what he did. What a wonderful thing to be in the position where you can save someone's life. But all heaven rejoices when something much more than that happens. Who would dare to be out of step with heaven? A life is saved forever, eternal life. There is no power that exists that can undo it. The person is beyond harm from the moment they first repent and trust in Christ. We are lost sheep. We are away from God, doomed and cut off. But Christ is the Saviour who has come into this world. Yes, but how are you saved? How do you come under the benefit of that atonement? How can you be sure that you are covered, that he died for you? How can you be changed by the gospel? By repenting; that is the key to it all. What is repentance? The Greek word literally means to think differently. Sometimes people have misunderstood that. They say, all you have got to do is to think differently about God: to believe that he is there, to believe that he exists. But the word repentance in the New Testament is used strictly in conjunction with another word: repentance and remission. It is said in the Gospels that Christ went everywhere preaching repentance for the remission of sins. That tells us it is about forgiveness, the removal of guilt, the removal of sin. Repentance means changing your mind about sin, not just about God; changing your mind about what you are doing, acknowledging that we fall far short of God's standards, acknowledging our pride, our dishonesty, our meanness, our hatred, our greed, and all the other things. Not only things we do, but things we are. We are proud, we are deceitful, we are filled with self-love. We are capable of nice thoughts as well, but these other thoughts contaminate and ruin us for God. It's God's word that tells us and convicts us. We see our desperate state: poor and pitiable and blind and naked spiritually in the presence of God, and we feel the desperate need to repent. Repentance is saying, I am that lost sheep. It is first of all acknowledgement. It says, ‘I am a sinner in my deeds, but I am also a sinner in my state and my condition.’ Repentance is sorry for the sin; it is ashamed of the sin. It says, ‘I deserve that eternal punishment. Lord, deliver me from the sin. Give me pardon. Give me a new life. I submit to thee. I trust entirely in the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary for me. I put my trust in that and in that alone.’ Without repentance, for the rest of your life you will be out of touch with God, unaware of him, stubborn, vulnerable to sin, vulnerable to your pride, heading for death. And one day you must be judged by God, and you will be lost forever in the wastes of everlasting punishment and perdition. See yourself as a lost sheep. See that you can go up on the shoulders of Jesus Christ. What a wonderful picture of human need and the Saviour of the world and the way to be saved.

Application

How many people need no repentance? Are you one who says you have no need of repentance? You see no need of repentance, that is. This is nonsense talk to you. You have no interest in it. ‘Repentance? What good will that do me?’ You don't even believe in God. To whom are you going to repent? But you don't understand that the Creator of all things, the infinite divine being, is holy and faultless and pure. You don't understand that Biblically, that we are a fallen race, disobedient to God and separated from him. In order to be reconciled with God, we need new life, and obtaining new life involves repentance. You need to come back to where all people were years and years ago with some rudimentary understanding of the Scriptures and what God has revealed about himself.

It may be that the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, has put it into your heart to hear the gospel. Maybe you know yourself to be outside the kingdom of God, and Christ in his great mercy has begun to stir your heart and to reach out to you as someone who really, as you stand, is without value to him. He brings you to a sense of your need. He suddenly opens your eyes so that you are no longer like a lost sheep out on the mountain, oblivious of all the terrors that are around you, and he puts into your heart a great sense of spiritual need. And you realise you are only half a person, because your spirit is dead within you, and you don't know where you're going. Then alongside that he puts into your heart a great awareness of your selfishness and your rottenness, and no longer are you like a proud Pharisee who thinks that sin is just outward things like adultery and murder. You realise sin dwells in you, and you are given a great concern. As the Lord appeals to you and stretches out his hands and shows his love in saving sinners, there will be one thing that you have to do. You have to repent. You have to turn to him. With that sense of need and the awareness that he has given you, which you would never have got on your own, you have to turn to him, you have to accept what your past life has been like. You have to acknowledge how wayward and foolish you have been. You have to realise that your soul is withered up and you have no spiritual life in you. You have to desire salvation and come to God and simply, humbly, absolutely unconditionally turn to him and say, ‘Oh God, I see it all. I see how worthless I am. I see that there are absolutely no grounds why I should be pardoned or forgiven, except that the Saviour has such love for people like me. Forgive me. Oh God, I know that there is nothing I can do to wash away my sin, but I believe the Saviour has died and suffered on the cross to take away the sin of all those who cry out to him for help. I yield my life.’

There are some people who say, ‘I have tried to repent.’ There is surely some sincerity in what they say, but do they really understand this? That when you repent, it means going to God unconditionally and letting him pick you up and carry you home. For some people, there's still a lot of pride. They think they need some forgiveness, some new life, and they think that if they can just get an arm around the Saviour, they can do some of the walking themselves. They can't. The only way you ever get converted is this. You come to the Lord and you yield your life. You give it to him. You give up your ambitions, your desires, all the old habits. You ask him to change you and to give you this experience of conversion and to make you his.

Questions

Joy in heaven? What is heaven? Heaven is a place far beyond the power of the human tongue to describe, far beyond the power of the human mind to conceive. It is the very throne room of God. It's a spiritual realm. It's a place of indescribable bliss and beauty. Its borders and its walls fill all space, time, eternity. Heaven is filled with the glory of God. Heaven is filled with all the people of God who have already died and gone before. Heaven is filled with grandeur and glory, all the apostles and prophets, all the great converted men of history. And it's filled with the sound of praise and gladness and rejoicing. And yet, such is the love of God, such is the concern of the Saviour, such is the tender concern of the powers of heaven, that the Bible almost says that all heaven will stop when one worthless creature repents. Isn't that amazing? And it doesn't matter how worthless I am. It doesn't matter how undeserving. It doesn't matter how wretched. When I cry out to God, all heaven is stood by and the powers of God to change me and to make me a true Christian.

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Introduction

Luke 15:7 Commentary and Bible Study