If You Keep Committing the Same Sin, Was Your Repentance Fake?

Last week Pastor Whinsky started unpacking repentance on Ask Me About Jesus, and the questions you sent in were piling up, so this Thursday he picked it straight back up. Two questions got the airtime. If someone keeps committing the same sin, was their repentance fake, and does God keep forgiving? And is it really possible to repent on your deathbed? The second one took about two minutes. The first one took most of the hour, and honestly it should have.

Apologetics is not saying sorry

He opens every Thursday the same way and he says he'll keep doing it, because people keep getting this wrong. Apologetics comes from apologia in 1 Peter 3:15, a reasoned defence of the hope you carry. It has nothing to do with apologising. And it isn't reserved for clever people who debate other religions. His test is almost annoyingly simple: do you know what you believe, why you believe it, and can you say it with some enthusiasm? Which, he points out, literally means being filled with the Spirit. If you can't say what you believe, he'd argue you don't yet believe it.

Repentance and confession are not the same thing

This is where the episode turns. Pastor Whinsky says the Old Testament idea of repentance is turning around and walking the other way, and the New Testament takes it further. Metanoia, as he breaks it down, has two halves. Meta is change that comes from being in relationship, the way heat changes meat. Noia is the mind: your thinking, your will, your emotions. You can leave an affair and still think about her every day. You can stop drinking and still be hanging around the thing in your head. That isn't repentance, he says, it's relocation.

Confession in 1 John 1:9, on his reading, is something different again. It's covenant language, an acknowledgement that you broke it and have no claim left to make. And the line he wants people to sit with is that God is faithful and just. Not “sorry, try again” forgiveness. Fair, and still faithful.

So does repeated sin mean the repentance was fake?

His answer is blunt, and he doesn't pad it. If a person keeps doing the same thing and the thinking underneath hasn't changed, they haven't repented yet. They may have believed in God. They may have confessed, which he calls a decent start. They may even have cried. But he's seen enough in rehabilitation ministry to say that tears at the kitchen table followed by the same behaviour the next day is usually manipulation, and the uncomfortable follow-up question is whether we try the same thing on God.

He doesn't leave it at the warning. He walks through Hebrews 10:26–30, which he calls one of the scary passages (his Bible is yellow there), and 2 Peter 2:20, where going back is described as worse than never having left. His rehab work backs that up. Someone who gets free of one substance and falls back often lands in a worse place than they started, because the shame says you may as well go all the way. And he notes how the enemy works, like a lion cutting one animal off from the herd. The first sign he watches for in someone recovering is that they stop coming to fellowship. When that happens he knows something has gone dark.

Then the turn he cares most about, 1 John 3:4–10. The key word is practice. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning. Not never stumbles, practices. And the same verses say you can practise righteousness, get better at it, be counted as right standing because you're making the effort and he covers the rest. A tomato seed doesn't look like a tomato plant, he says, but it pulls everything around it into itself and turns dead material into living, and that's his picture of the seed of God growing roots into your soul.

He also lays out both sides of the old argument about whether a saved person can fall away, and he's fair about it. One tradition says those who walk away were never truly saved. The other says they tasted it and chose to leave. He says both end up in the same place, one way to eternal life, and that he personally stands with the second view because that's where he thinks Scripture leans. Endure to the end, contend for the faith, and don't treat grace as a licence.

You can’t repent without the relationship. Time, closeness and intensity are what change a person.

Gifts are not fruit, and this one matters

If there is one thing he'd like you to take out of this episode and argue with someone about, it's this. Gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12) are irrevocable. Once given, they aren't taken back. That means someone can have a powerful healing ministry and still be out of line with God, and he says that plainly, scary as it sounds. Jesus never said you'd know people by their gifts. He said you'd know them by their fruit (Matthew 7), and fruit, the Greek karpos as he explains it, is what grows when your life and the Holy Spirit's life cross over and align. Nobody prays for patience and gets it by morning. It develops. It's also the thing that holds up under pressure, when someone cusses you out and you don't react because the Spirit has been producing something in you.

That's also why he reminds listeners of John 16:8. The Holy Spirit convicts of three things: sin, righteousness and judgment. Everyone remembers the first. He says the second, being shown what's good and how to stay in right standing with God, is the one most of us ignore.

Can you repent on your deathbed?

Yes. He doesn't hedge. Romans 10:13, and the man on the cross next to Jesus, who had no chance to live differently or be baptised and still said he deserved what he was getting and asked to be remembered. Jesus answered him. Pastor Whinsky leans on Ezekiel for the other side: God forgets the wickedness of someone who truly turns, and the same passage warns that a righteous man who walks away loses the credit for his past. God really does want everyone saved. He's also just.

Scriptures mentioned in this episode

1 Peter 3:15, Hebrews 11:1, Matthew 10:32–33, 1 John 1:7 and 1:9, 1 John 3:4–10, Hebrews 10:26–30, 2 Peter 2:20, Matthew 12:43–45, Galatians 5:22–23, 1 Corinthians 2:1–5 and chapter 12, Matthew 7:16, John 15, John 16:8, Jude 3, Romans 10:9 and 10:13, Joel 2:32, Ezekiel 18, and Luke 23. Read them in your own Bible rather than taking anyone’s word for it, which is rather the point of apologetics.

There are more questions in the pile than one hour can hold, so expect this thread to keep going. If you have one you want answered on air, send it in. Pastor Whinsky's own closing words were that people should ask, and he meant it.