“It is a great duty,” Puritan Thomas Watson once penned, “incumbent upon Christians solemnly to repent and turn unto God.”* Sometimes repentance—turning from sin and turning to God—is the proper response to unanswered prayer. God tells us no in order to show us our sin. When he does, hopefully respond accordingly and repent. When our repentance is genuine, it is the most beautiful thing because it shows the Holy Spirit is working in us.
How can we tell if our repentance is sincere? Let’s get some more help from Watson. The puritan explains in his treatise on repentance that true repentance—wrought by the Holy Spirit—is a “spiritual medicine made up of six special ingredients.”
Watson goes on:
- Sight of sin,
- Sorrow for sin,
- Confession of sin
- Shame for sin,
- Hatred for sin, and
- Turning from sin.
The progression of true repentance is simple. We must see our sin in order to truly repent. If we neglect to notice it, then repentance is impossible. We will never see the need for repentance if we never see the insidious nature of our sin. But even if we see our sin, we must have genuine sorrow over said sin. “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “but worldly sorrow brings death.” True, Holy Spirit-produced repentance reveals itself in authentic sorrow. If there is no sorrow for sin, there is no repentance of sin. And Paul makes his point even scarier: worldly sorrow leads to death. This worldly sorrow can reveal itself in saying, “I’m sorry, Lord, I repent,” and then proceeding to do the same thing, over and over again. It’s mere lip service. Put bluntly, it can reveal you’re faking it. And we can’t fake out God. We may say we repent as our response to unanswered prayer, but if we don’t truly mean it, God sees that.
*Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance 7th Edition (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2016), 13.
Blake Long 
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