Why Believing in Jesus Is NOT Enough (The Missing Step)
Brothers and sisters, we are living in a generation where faith has become a fashion statement. Something you wear on Sunday, but take off the moment conviction comes knocking. We preach grace without truth, forgiveness without surrender, and salvation without sanctification. But let me tell you something that may sound harsh to modern ears. Faith without repentance is dead.
That’s right. Dead. Not weak, not confused, not immature, dead. We’ve mastered the art of crowd-pleasing Christianity. We’ve replaced altar calls with emotional music and swapped godly sorrow for feelgood slogans. People are being told, “Just believe and you’re saved.” But they’re never told to repent, never told to turn, never told to die to themselves and follow Christ.
And that, my friends, is spiritual malpractice. Let’s walk through this like grown men and women of God and not as babes content with milk when we should be chewing meat. Let’s open the word and look this in the eye. Here are six truths, six piercing truths about the deadly lie of faith without repentance. A man says he has faith.
That’s good. But that isn’t enough because talk is cheap and claiming to have faith doesn’t make it so. In fact, scripture makes it plain. If your faith does not produce evidence, it is dead. Real faith produces real change. It transforms your desires, your direction, and your decisions. And that change isn’t cosmetic. It’s foundational.
It goes deep to the root of who you are. The gospel doesn’t come just to inspire. It comes to interrupt. It doesn’t decorate your old life. It buries it and raises something new. Jesus didn’t come to offer behavioral improvement. He didn’t die just to boost your self-worth or help you reach your potential. He came to redeem sinners.
He came to set captives free. He came to rescue people from death. And when you truly encounter him, when you have faith that is born of the spirit, you change. You turn away from what you once loved. You start to hate what God hates and love what God loved. That’s not self-effort. That’s the power of God.
We live in a time when many profess Christ, but continue to live like the world. No conviction, no transformation, no brokenness over sin, and we applaud that. We treat spiritual stagnation as normal. Well, everyone sins. We say nobody’s perfect. But that’s not the attitude of someone who has encountered the living Christ.
The one who has truly been saved. Doesn’t shrug at sin. He grieavves over it. He runs from it. He fights against it with all his might because the spirit within him won’t let him make peace with it. Faith that produces no repentance is counterfeit. It’s not the kind of faith that saves. It’s the kind that deceives. James wrote, “Faith without works is dead.
” He wasn’t saying that works save us. He was saying that saving faith will always bear the fruit of obedience. Not perfect obedience, not sinless perfection, but a clear, undeniable transformation of the heart. You go from rebellion to submission, from selfishness to to sacrifice, from loving darkness to walking in the light.
And let’s be clear, this isn’t about legalism. It’s not about trying to earn your way to God through behavior. It’s about recognizing that the grace that saves is the same grace that sanctifies. The gospel doesn’t just forgive you. It reclaims you. It takes ownership. And if you can claim to have faith while still being the Lord of your own life, then what you have isn’t faith at all. It’s delusion.
When the gospel penetrates your heart, it doesn’t leave you the same. It crushes pride. It exposes idolatry. It brings you to your knees. You come to the end of yourself and cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And he does. He saves. But the evidence of that salvation isn’t that you said a prayer. It’s that your life begins to reflect the one who saved you.
