"repentance" Tagged Sermons (Page 2)
The blind man Christ heals in two stages, in Mark 8, has drawn plenty of liberal interpretation eager to explain away the strangeness of a healing that doesn’t work the first time. Read redemptive-historically instead, Christ’s second touch gives real, permanent life, not a partial fix. That permanence is bound up with an ongoing, penitent state, not a single moment of healing.
There is no pardon from God apart from real repentance, and the water Israel pours out before the Lord in verse 6 pictures exactly that kind of total surrender. Repentance forces us to reckon honestly with our own deadness, not manage it around the edges. Christ’s own perfect repentance is what makes ours effective at all.
1 Samuel 4-7 works as a compact summary of the Old Testament’s entire prophetic office, not just Samuel’s own career. Read together, these chapters present Christ himself as prophet, priest, and king all at once. Our own repentance, in the end, comes only through Christ’s repentance, enacted at his baptism.
Samuel’s return to active ministry in verse 3 sets a pattern his whole later itinerary follows, prefiguring Christ’s own continual, moving ministry. True repentance, unlike its false counterfeits, actually transforms rather than merely regrets. Christ’s kingdom, like Samuel’s ministry, is defined by that same ongoing transformation.
Israel’s double repentance directly answers its earlier double defeat, restoring what sin had cost. The victory and peace that follow are already real and not yet complete, the same tension Paul describes in Philippians 3. Samuel’s stone, Ebenezer, ‘hitherto hath the LORD helped us,’ names both what has happened and what is still to come.