Some may ask the question of whether
our repentance and sorrow must always be alike. Although repentance must be
always kept alive in the soul, there are two special times when we must renew
our repentance in an extraordinary way:
1. Before receiving the Lord’s Supper.
In the same way that the Passover meal is to be eaten with bitter herbs, our
spiritual meal should come with bitter sorrow. Our eyes should be freshly wet
with tears, and the stream of sorrow should overflow. A repenting posture is a sacramental
posture. A broken heart and a broken Christ together well. The more bitterness
we taste in sin, the more sweetness we will taste in Christ. When Jacob wept,
he found God: So Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, “I have seen God
face to face” (Genesis 32:30). The way to find Christ comfortably in the sacrament
is to approach the table weeping. Christ will say to a humble penitent what he said
to Thomas: “Take your hand and put it into My side” (John 20:27), and
let my bleeding wounds heal you.
2. At the hour of death. This should
be a weeping season. It is the time to do our last work for heaven, and our
best wine of tears should be saved for such a time. We should repent now that
we have sinned so much and wept to little, that God’s bag of sin has been so
full and his bottle of tears so empty (Job 14:17). We should repent now that we
repented no sooner, that the fortresses of our hearts held out so long against
God before they were leveled by repentance. We should repent now that we have
not loved Christ more, that we have not learned more virtue from him and
brought more glory to him. It should be our brief on our deathbed that our
lives have had not much blanks and blots in the, that our duties have been so stained
by sin, that our obedience has been so imperfect, that we have been so weak in
the ways of God. When the soul is going out of the body, it should swim to
heaven on a sea of tears. (Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance: A
Closer Look at This Essential Element of True Christianity [1668; repr.,
Abbotsford, Wis.: Aneko Press, 2023], 20-21)
