Repentance

The third assertion about God in the Here We Stand series: that He is the God of infinite goodness. After surveying Old and New Testament assertions of God's goodness and offering a working definition (God's disposition to deal well and bountifully with all His creation), Pastor Martin traces the manifestations of divine goodness in creation, providence (preservation, provision, and pity toward creatures), and grace. He applies the doctrine to worship, daily attitude, and Paul's warning in Romans 2:4 that the goodness of God is meant to lead sinners to repentance.

Concluding eleven weeks on justification by faith alone, Pastor Martin turns to the second front of the devil's attack: the error that justifying faith can stand alone, devoid of works. He expounds James 2:14-26 as a carefully developed argument that saving faith is never a dead or merely notional faith but a living principle that produces self-denying obedience, using Robert Johnstone's illustration of Paul and James as two armies firing from opposite flanks at a common enemy. He closes by pressing searching questions on both the antinomian and the legalist, urging hearers to embrace Paul with one arm and James with the other.

Pastor Martin opens a second appendix to his series on justification, confronting how a believer honors both the once-for-all justifying act of God and the reality of indwelling and actual sin. After surveying the false solutions of antinomianism and sinless perfectionism, he expounds two of four principles: sin in a justified person must always be acknowledged as sin, and sin in a justified person must never be allowed to bring him into legal bondage. He draws heavily on Romans 7-8, 1 John 1-2, Psalm 51, and Psalm 130 to show how believers are to be both honest with their sin and anchored in the finished work of Christ.

Pastor Martin introduces Psalm 1 as a foundational didactic psalm describing the way of blessedness, contrasting it with the way of ungodliness. He outlines the psalm's structure, explains why the negative precedes the positive in Scripture, and begins examining the first phrase: 'walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,' showing that the counsel of the wicked is rooted in a man-centered perspective that excludes God, actively opposes Him, and assumes human self-sufficiency.

In the concluding sermon on Psalm 1, Pastor Martin expounds verse 6: 'For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.' He defines the two 'ways' as trodden paths or habitual patterns of life, explains the righteous as those with both imputed and imparted practical righteousness, and demonstrates that 'knoweth' means God regards with special favor, purpose, and delight. By contrast, the way of the ungodly is described without any reference to God -- it simply shall perish. He concludes that a man's destiny and his way are inseparably joined, and the only escape is repentance and faith in Christ.