Repentance-In the Eyes of the Apostle Paul

One thing that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Paul’s conversion from being a persecutor of those that followed Christ to following Christ himself was nothing short of a miracle. When the Lord revealed to him what he was doing and lifted the scales from his eyes, it set the Apostle Paul on fire and he never looked back. He was personally chosen to be used mightily by Jesus, Acts 9:16.

One of the things that he preached on was the importance of repentance and turning away from your old, wicked ways. Acts 20:18-21 details, “And when they had come to him, he said to them: “You know, from the first day that I came to Asia, in what manner I always lived among you, serving the Lord with all humility, with many tears and trials which happened to me by the plotting of the Jews; how I kept back nothing that was helpful, but proclaimed it to you, and taught you publicly and from house to house, testifying to Jews, and also to Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”

There is so much to unpack from these passages of Scripture but one of the main takeaways is that Paul preached repentance to both the Jews and the Greeks. He knew that living a life in willful sin would allow the enemy to have a legal right in the lives of God’s people. That is why it was significant that not only the Jews but also the Gentile nations grabbed a hold of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul was used by the Lord to reach Jews and Gentiles in a massive way.

We can also see the mission that the Lord set before Paul to proclaim the Gospel to Gentiles in Galatians 1:15-16 as it reveals, “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles…” We can also find his assignment detailed in Acts 13:47 as it states, “For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.’”

This was not going to be any easy task as the Gentile nations did not believe that Jesus Christ was the only true God but believed in many gods. He was going to have to bypass their carnal thinking and preach to them the Gospel of Christ as the final authority. However, the Apostle Paul was the perfect person for the challenge: he was Jewish and trained as a Pharisee, so he had a clear understanding of the Law, he was from Tarsus and spoke Greek allowing him to comfortably speak to the Gentile nations as well as the Romans as Greek was the common language spoken.

Needless to say, the Apostle Paul was fully equipped for the task at hand and so after his intense conversion he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was the Lord of all. The next thing that needed to be done was to preach repentance to both the Jews and the Gentiles nations around the world. That is exactly what Paul did!