All of Repentance

"Repentance is not just turning from sin. It's also turning towards Christ."

Ray Ortlund

What is my motive?

"As I seek to do this, I need to remind myself constantly that this is not a game I am playing. If I begin to enjoy it as a kind of intellectual exercise, then I am cruel and can expect no real spiritual results. As I push the man off his false balance, he must be able to feel that I care for him, and the cruelty and ugliness of it all will destroy me as well. Merely to be abstract and cold is to show that I don not really believe this person to be created in God's image and therefore one of my kind. Pushing him towards the logic of his presuppositions is gong to cause him pain: therefore, I must not push any further than I need to."

Francis Schaeffer
Found in Questioning Evangelism, p.120

Missing the Mark?

"...It doesn't help that some Christians have tried to illustrate sin as an archery term.

'Sin is simply missing the mark,' they say. 'The same Greek word for sin is used as anarchery term, so we're all just 'target-missers.''

Well the same Greek word might be used, but the two concepts couldn't be further apart. When the Bible describes the nature of our rebellion against God, it paints an uglier picture than our simply missing a bull's eye (see Rom 3:10-18). Rather than aiming carefully at God's target, we turn our backs and shoot arrows everywhere else. Wanting to please ourselves, we ignore the true bull's eye and set our affections on seductive targets that cannot satisfy, sanctify, or save. We are not primarily target-missers; we are self-centered false-target worshippers..."

Randy Newman
Questioning Evangelism, p. 81

Carson on the Outpouring of the Holy Spirit

In short, I see biblical support for the thesis that although all true believers have received the Holy Spirit and have been baptized in the Holy Spirit, nevertheless the Holy Spirit is not necessarily poured out on each individual Christian in precisely equivalent quantities (if I may use the language of quantity inherent in the metaphor of “filling”). How else can we explain the peculiar unction that characterizes the service of some relatively unprepossessing ministers?

Although I find no biblical support for a second-blessing theology, I do find support for a second-, third-, fourth-, or fifth-blessing theology.

Although I find no charisma biblically established as the criterion of a second enduement of the Spirit, I do find that there are degrees of unction, blessing, service, and holy joy, along with some more currently celebrated gifts, associated with those whose hearts have been specially touched by the sovereign God.

Although I think it extremely dangerous to pursue a second blessing attested by tongues, I think it no less dangerous not to pant after God at all, and to be satisfied with a merely creedal Christianity that is kosher but complacent, orthodox but ossified, sound but soundly asleep.

D.A. Carson

Showing the Spirit, 160.