Founding director of International Awakening Ministries, Richard Owen Roberts is a world-renowned student of revival. His 9,000 volume collection on the subject forms the nucleus of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center Library. In this passage from Repentance, he explains and insists that true repentance is more than inward pain.
One can experience the deepest possible remorse over sin and yet not repent. Both Esau and Judas demonstrate this. Indeed, we must all learn to distinguish between the sorrow that comes from being caught and the sorrow that comes from a deep, inward hatred of sin and longing for the glory of God that is the distinguishing feature of the regenerate person.1
Footnotes:
1 Richard Owen Roberts, Repentance: The First Word of the Gospel (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002), 86.
