Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is Your Repentance Real? | The Gospels | Matthew 3:1–12

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

What does real repentance look like? How do you know if your sorrow is genuine? And what happens when you stop looking at yourself and start looking to Jesus? In today’s episode, Keith explores John the Baptist’s call to “produce fruit in keeping with repentance” and shares how God’s kindness leads us out of shame and toward real change. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: Matthew 3:1–12

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Within about 12 hours of each other, two men in Jesus' inner circle betrayed him. Judas sold them for money. Peter denied that he'd ever met Jesus. Both Judas and Peter felt horrible about what they had done. Neither one shrugged off their sin. Matthew tells us Judas was seized with remorse.

He went back to the temple, threw 30 pieces of silver on the floor, in front of the men who had paid him and told them he had betrayed innocent blood. And Peter, Luke says, went out and wept bitterly. That happened on the same weekend to the same Lord. It was the same betrayal, the same crushing grief. But those stories and those people had very different endings. Judas took his own life. Peter stood up in Jerusalem 50 days later and preached the sermon that started the church.

So whatever separated those two men, it was not how sorry they were. Judas was sorry enough to die. Most of us know exactly what it is to feel terrible about something and change nothing. We've all had the 11 o'clock at night conversation with God, where we met every single word, and then we were the same person we'd always been. If we cannot name what separated Peter from Judas, then we don't know what to do with our own worst moments. John the Baptist names the difference in eight words. In Matthew chapter 3, John the Baptist is standing waist deep in the Jordan River. The crowds are pouring out of Jerusalem to hear him preach, to confess their sins, and to receive his baptism. When the religious leaders arrive to

observe what's happening, John isn't impressed with their religiosity or their position or their power. He tells them, produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Fruit that corresponds to the repentance that you claim to have. Notice what John is not asking for. He's not asking that they would feel something more deeply. There was plenty of feeling at the Jordan River that day. He's looking for the thing that feeling was supposed to produce, because it is entirely possible to stand in the river and get thoroughly wet to feel the whole thing deeply and walk back up out of the baptism

exactly the same person when you walk down into the river. So how do we tell the difference between genuine repentance and cheap imitation? Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 7. He says, Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See, Paul says there are two sorrows. And again, I want you to notice what Paul does not use to tell them apart. He does not distinguish them by how intense they are, nor by how long they last, or how many tears are involved, or how sincere they feel in the moment. Both sorrows are

painful. Judas settled that question forever. Grief alone proves nothing. Paul distinguishes the godly sorrow from the worldly sorrow by what they produce and by where they end. Godly sorrow produces repentance. It leads to salvation. It leaves no regret. Godly sorrow goes somewhere. It arrives. It is forgiven.

Worldly sorrow, it just produces death. It has no exit. It just loops over and over and over. It circles the same ground at two in the morning, year after year, and never lands anywhere. And look at what Paul says in the very next verse about what godly sorrow actually did in Corinth. He says, see what this godly sorrow has produced in you? What earnestness? What eagerness to clear yourselves?

What indignation? What alarm? What longing? What concern? What readiness to see justice done? Not one item in that list is a feeling. Every single one is an action toward the truth. An action toward the people they had wronged toward setting things right.

That's the difference between Peter and Judas. Judas's sorrow ran away from Jesus, away from the temple, away from the disciples, away from the possibility of being forgiven, and finally, it ran away from life itself. Peter's sorrow ran toward, toward other people, toward the empty tomb on Sunday morning, and ultimately back to Jesus. Sorrow isn't the test. No, the test is about the direction you're headed. So to go back to what John the Baptist said, how do you know if your repentance is genuine?

Well, let me give you a few questions. Here's the first one. It's the consequences question. If no one ever found out and nothing was lost, not my job, not my reputation, not my marriage, would I still hate this sin? See, if the sorrow for my sin evaporates the moment the danger passes, that it was never really about the sin, it was about the exposure. I wasn't sad or grieved that I had sinned. I just was sad and grieved that I got caught in my sin. Here's the second question.

It's the responsibility question. Do I take responsibility for my sin, or do I blame other people or circumstances? Do I say I sinned, or do I say my allergies were bad? It was a long day at work. Someone cut me off in traffic. I haven't been feeling well.

The kids were up at night. I was exhausted. Real repentance begins with taking responsibility for your own actions, your own attitude, your own words. The third question is the disclosure question. Am I managing information or am I being honest and forthright? Am I calculating how much to say and to who I should say it and in what order and how should I frame it? Godly sorrow welcomes the light because it wants the sin dead. Worldly sorrow negotiates the perimeter. the reputation. Then there's the cost question. Am I willing for this to be expensive?

Remember Zacchaeus? He's the guy that hid in the tree and then entertained Jesus at his house. Zacchaeus, when he repented of his sin, he wrote checks. The story in Luke 19 says he paid four times as much to anyone he had cheated. Zacchaeus made a restitution. Sometimes when you repent, you have to have really hard conversations. Sometimes you lose standing. Real repentance is willing to pay the consequences. Worldly sorrow wants absolution, but they don't want it to come at a cost.

They want absolution without charge. Then there's the specificity question. Can I name my sin? Worldly sorrow tends to be vague. I'm such a mess. I'm such a terrible person. Godly sorrow is specific. I lied to her about this.

this because I wanted to protect my reputation. Vagerness is not humility. Vagness is camouflage. It's just the sweeping self-condemnation. I know I'm a horrible person. I'm always growing up. But repentance is about naming your sin specifically and how it hurt the other person. Six is the self-punishment question. Am I trying to pay for this sin myself? See, this is the subtlest question, and it's the one that I think you might need to hear most. Worldly sorrow broods. It punishes itself. It refuses the comfort of the gospel. It says, I don't deserve to be forgiven for this. It's got a lot of self-pity in it. It sounds serious. It sounds reverent, but it's not. It's an attempt at self-atonement. It's an attempt for me to try

to make my own sacrifice for my sin. I can't do that. I need to run to Jesus. Because I can't pay for my own sin. Only he can. See, the person who cannot stop punishing himself is not taking sin more seriously than the gospel does. No, the person who won't stop punishing himself is taking Christ less seriously. Underneath all six of those questions is one big question. Is my sorrow running toward God or away from him? That brings this back to Peter and Judas. Now, I have to be careful, because I have just handed you six ways to audit yourself, and there is a way to use them that will do yourself real harm. If you begin to examine whether your repentance is repentant enough, if you're grading your own tears, inspecting your own motives for purity, well, you're looking too much at yourself

and not enough at your Savior. Your sin is great, but your Savior is greater. So those questions are for diagnosis. They're trying to help you see inside your own heart. They're not meant as qualifications as a test you have to pass. See, you've got to hold on to a few things. The first is this. A person genuinely lost in worldly sorrow is not lying awake at night wondering whether his sorrow is godly enough. Judas never asked this question. If you're laying in bed at night asking, is my sorrow real? Is my repentance real? That's probably the Holy Spirit working in your life leading you into true repentance. Second, know that in this life, everyone's motives are always mixed. Always. In everyone, including people whose repentance is entirely real. Nobody has ever

really repented with a perfectly pure heart. The test is the trajectory of our life over months and years, and not the purity of your motives at 11 o'clock at night. Demanding certainty about your own sincerity is not holiness. It's perfectionism. And then finally, assurance is never found by examining your repentance. If you inspect your repentance, looking for evidence that it's genuine, then you've quietly made your repentance the ground for your standing before God. Imagine driving your car on an old country road and you come up to a bridge and you're wondering if it will hold your car. You don't get out and inspect your car. No, if you're wondering whether the bridge will hold you, you get out and you inspect the bridge to see how well it's built. In the same way, if we're wondering about whether we can be

saved, we don't get out and look at the sincerity of our faith, at the genuineness of our repentance. We don't get out and look at ourselves at all. Instead, we look at Jesus, and we see that he is able to save all those who put their faith in Him. Real repentance comes from God. It's a gift, which means that if your repentance feels manufactured, you don't try to feel it more. No, instead just ask God, God, would you give me a repentant heart? Romans 2.4 tells us that God's kindness leads us to repentance. Isn't that interesting? It's not the fear of consequences. It's not some threat from God. Instead, it's God's kindness, how good God has been to us that leads us to want to turn from our sin and put our hope and faith in God.

And that explains why Peter made it and Judas didn't. Peter had somewhere to run. He was running to Jesus. It was never about the quality of his tears. Jesus didn't come to grade your sorrow. He came to be the end of it. Stop staring at yourself and go look at Jesus. He is able to save. Amen.

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