Repentance and Faith.
I. Consider the insufficiency of repentance by itself to procure the forgiveness of sin. Turn to analogy; turn to experience; turn to reason, and you may equally prove the fallacy of the opinion, which would establish a necessary connection between repentance and forgiveness. So long as there is any notion of the virtue of repentance its virtue as a necessary procuring of pardon and acceptance there must be a suspicion that the atonement is not called for, and therefore a question as to whether, indeed, it have ever been made.
II. Consider the suitableness of faith to being associated, as it is in the text, with repentance. If the sacrifice of Christ removes all the obstacles which appear to us to lie in the way of forgiveness, there can be no difficulty in admitting the suitableness of faith to be combined with repentance as a condition; for faith is simply that through which, as an instrument or hand, we lay hold on, and appropriate, the results of Christ's obedience and death. Believing in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, we pass into a position, not indeed of actual innocence, for nothing can destroy the fact that we have sinned, but we pass into a position in which no claim can be substantiated against us, which we cannot show to have been fully met and fully discharged.
III. Note the thorough harmony of the conditions laid down in our text with the blessed fact that eternal life is God's free gift through Christ. The conditions do not take off the least from the freeness of salvation. There may be nothing meritorious in the conditions, but, nevertheless, God may be pleased to impose those conditions, and to determine that He will not bestow the gift unless they are performed. I am not pardoned for the sake of my repentance; I am not pardoned for the sake of my faith, and yet it hath pleased God to appoint that without repentance and faith I shall not be pardoned, but that with them I shall. Through repentance and faith the merit of Christ is appropriated to you, but when appropriated it is as independent, as alone, in gaining entrance for you into heaven, as though there had been no conditions for its appropriation.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2,514.
References: Mark 1:14; Mark 1:15. Expositor,1st series, vol. iv., p. 430; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. v., p. 154; vol. x., p. 235.Mark 1:14-20. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 20. Mark 1:15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. viii., No. 460; Homilist,3rd series, vol. i., p. 15.