I've come across an online preacher several times in the past few weeks — someone who's built a large following (over a million on Facebook alone) teaching what he calls "the gospel of grace," and he's a sharper thinker than most people arguing his side of these questions. I won't name him here — that's not the point of this. A recent message of his on repentance is worth engaging seriously — it runs straight into the same ground my book, A Child of God Does Not Sin, is built on — because half of what he says is right, and the half that isn't matters a great deal for how the rest of the gospel gets understood.
His argument, as best I can lay it out
His case starts with language. He points out that our English word "repent" flattens together several distinct words from the original text: the Hebrew shuv (to turn, return), the Greek metamelomai (to regret or feel remorse — the word used of Judas after he betrayed Jesus), and the Greek metanoia (literally "after-mind" — a change of mind). His claim is that centuries of translation smashed these into one English word, and that's exactly why so many people wrongly associate repentance with guilt and manufactured sorrow, when the New Testament's actual word for it, metanoia, is really just a change of mind.
From there he goes further. He notes — correctly — that the Gospel of John never uses the word "repent" a single time, in a book whose entire stated purpose is "that you may believe... and that believing you may have life in His name" (John 20:31). His conclusion: repentance isn't a separate step alongside believing. It's already contained inside it. When you believe the gospel — that Christ died, was buried, and rose again — you have, by definition, already changed your mind. Repentance and belief are the same act wearing two different names.
Where he's right, and it's worth saying plainly
I don't think he's wrong about the words. Metanoia's meaning in actual usage really is a change of mind, not sorrow or guilt — its parts point the same direction, but usage is what settles it. Paul makes the distinction explicit in 2 Corinthians 7:10: "godly sorrow produces repentance." Sorrow produces repentance — it isn't repentance itself. If those were the same thing, that sentence wouldn't make sense. A lot of pulpit repentance-talk collapses into emotional performance, manufactured tears, a feeling you're supposed to work yourself into — and none of that is actually what the word requires. He's doing real service by clearing that away.
And he's right that John never uses the word. That's a plain fact about the text, not an interpretation, and I'd rather people know it than pretend otherwise.
Where I think he overreaches
Here's where the argument goes further than the evidence supports: John's silence on the word doesn't mean the concept is absent from his Gospel, and folding repentance entirely into belief isn't the only, or the best, way to explain that silence.
Start with the very first words of Jesus's own ministry. Mark 1:15 records His opening summary of the entire gospel message: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel." The word behind "repent" there is metanoeite — the exact same metanoia word group at the center of this whole discussion, no ambiguity about which of the three terms is in play. And Jesus joins it to "believe" with the word "and." Not "repent, that is, believe." Not "repent, in other words, believe." Two imperatives, joined by a conjunction that connects two distinct things, not one thing renamed. If repentance were simply contained inside believing, the same act wearing two labels, Jesus's own summary of His own message wouldn't need the word "and" at all. He could have just said "believe in the gospel." He didn't.
Paul preaches the same structure a generation later. Acts 20:21 summarizes his own ministry: "testifying to Jews, and also to Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." Notice the two objects. Repentance is aimed toward God, away from sin. Faith is aimed toward our Lord Jesus Christ, trusting His person and work. It's the same Greek preposition both times, but two distinct nouns joined by "and." If these were simply one act with two labels, Paul's own summary of his own preaching wouldn't need to name both, aimed at two different objects, in the same sentence.
That gets at the deeper problem with the "repentance is contained inside belief" argument: a change of mind still needs an object. Change your mind about what? In the Synoptics and Acts, repentance is consistently a change of mind about sin — turning away from it (Acts 3:19, Acts 26:20's "repent, turn to God, and do works befitting repentance"). Believing, especially the way John uses it, is trust directed at a person and a claim about Him. You can genuinely change your mind to accept that Jesus died and rose — an intellectual shift — without that same shift necessarily reorienting your relationship to your own sin. James makes exactly this point about a different kind of belief: even demons "believe — and tremble" (James 2:19). They've changed their mind about a fact. Nothing about them has turned.
To be clear, this was never a claim that repentance requires sorrow or guilt — he's right that it doesn't. The point is narrower: a change of mind about a fact and a change of mind about your own sin are not automatically the same change of mind, even when both deserve the name metanoia.
As for John's silence — I think there's a simpler explanation than "the concept doesn't exist in this Gospel." John is saturated with the substance of repentance under different vocabulary: "loving darkness" versus "coming to the light" (3:19-21), the new birth as a total reorientation of a person, not an intellectual update (3:3-7), and — twice, not once — the specific instruction "sin no more." He says it to the woman caught in adultery (8:11), and he says it again to the man healed at Bethesda: "See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you" (5:14). Two separate scenes, two separate audiences, the same turning-from-sin content each time. That's a pattern, not a proof-text of convenience. John's word for believing is thick and relational, never bare assent, which suggests he folded the turning-from-sin reality into his preferred word rather than deciding it was optional. An author choosing not to use a specific word is not the same thing as an author denying the reality that word usually names elsewhere.
The test with a missing question
There's a reason this isn't just an academic dispute about Greek grammar, and it's the real reason I wanted to write about it. To be precise about what this section is and isn't arguing: this isn't by itself a full case against "once saved, always saved" — that's a larger question this book takes on elsewhere, verse by verse. What follows here is narrower: whatever you believe about whether salvation can be lost, everyone agrees Scripture calls believers to examine themselves. The repentance-as-belief move doesn't settle that larger debate. It quietly changes what's on the exam.
Paul's instruction in 2 Corinthians 13:5 is direct: "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves." That's not a suggestion for the unusually anxious. It's a command to everyone.
Fold repentance entirely into believing, and you've quietly removed a whole diagnostic question from that test. If repentance is just a synonym baked inside "I believe the facts about Jesus," then freedom from willful sin — the specific distinction I lay out in Chapter One — never makes it onto the actual exam. You can affirm the right facts, call that "repenting and believing" in one motion, feel settled, and never once ask whether you've actually turned from what you know is wrong — because on this framework, that was never a separate question to begin with. You can fail the real test and never know it, because nobody handed you the right test to fail.
And to be clear about what's on that exam and what isn't: none of this is a claim that a believer will never make a mistake. Mistakes, ignorance, temptation, and ordinary human infirmity aren't what's in view. This is about willful, deliberate sin specifically — the kind a person can see clearly and simply decide not to turn from.
This is exactly the gap "once saved, always saved" theology tends to fall into from a different door. If the only checkable box is a past decision — I believed the gospel, therefore I'm secure, forever, regardless of what follows — then ongoing willful sin has nowhere to register as evidence, because the test was never designed to ask about it in the first place. But Scripture keeps insisting that freedom from willful sin belongs on that list of legitimate evidence — 1 John 3:9, again, along with the fifty-five other verses this book walks through one at a time. Leave that question off your own self-examination, and you're not failing the test. You're not even taking it.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
This might look like an argument over vocabulary, but it isn't. If repentance really is nothing more than a redundant synonym fully absorbed into belief, then "believing the gospel" quietly narrows down to accepting a set of facts — that Christ died, was buried, rose again — with nothing necessarily said about your own relationship to sin. That's a thinner gospel than the one the New Testament actually preaches, and it's the same half-measure this whole book keeps running into from different directions: a true fact, held at arm's length from an actual life.
None of this is an argument that repentance requires feeling terrible about yourself. He's cleared that away correctly, and I'm grateful for it. It's an argument that repentance and belief, even understood his own careful way — a change of mind, nothing more — are still two related but distinct turns: one toward God and away from sin, one toward Christ and into trust. Both, together, are what the New Testament actually asks for. I go into this same distinction at length in my book — the difference between believing that something is true and believing into someone with your whole trust — because it turns out to be the hinge the entire question of genuine conversion swings on. A Child of God Does Not Sin is now available on Amazon.
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