Don't punish people who repent; heal them. I don't believe that private sin requires public rebuke or removal from office if repentance is taking place. However, when no evidence of true repentance exists, then discipline is in order.
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Haggard, Ted (Expanded edition (May 2001)). The Life Giving Church. Regal Books. pp. p. 112. ISBN 0830726594.Ted Haggard
The Scriptural doctrine in regard to repentance is not, that a man must repent in order to his being qualified to go to Christ; it is rather, that he must go to Christ in order to his being able to repent. From Him comes the grace of contrition as well as the cleansing of expiation.
Henry Melvill
Holy practice is the most decisive evidence of the reality of our repentance. "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance."
Jonathan Edwards
Repentance is a pure gospel grace. The covenant of works admitted no repentance; there it was, sin and die. Repentance came in by the gospel. Christ has purchased in his blood that repenting sinners shall be saved.
Thomas Watson
There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human being who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is, but it does not exist, for when it exists it does so in the esthetic in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is, it is the abstraction from or a something prior to the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The esthetic sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway-which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all-just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical. No wonder, then, that one fear it, for if one gives it a finger it takes the whole hand. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of its investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed. This impulse signifies precisely the difference between the esthetic and the religious as the difference between the external and the internal.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Honesty is difficult. It is easier to hide in the crowed and to drown one’s own guilt in that of the human race, easier to hide from oneself than to become open in honesty before God. This honesty is certainly not a perpetual enumerating, but neither is it the signing of a name on a piece of white paper, a signed confession to an empty generality; and a confessor is not a co-signatory in the human race’s enormous account book. But without honesty there is no repentance. Repentance is nauseated by the empty generality, but it is not a pretty arithmetician in the service of the faintheartedness-rather an earnest observer before God. To repent of a generality without substance is a contradiction, akin to inviting the most profound passion to dine on superficiality, but to tie one’s repentance to a particular is to repent of one’s own responsibility and not before God, and to vitiate the intention is self-love in depression. If it so easy to repent: to love and to feel one’s wretchedness ever more deeply, to love while the punishment is being suffered, to love and not want to falsify the punishment as divine dispensation, to love and not want to hide secret resentment as if one suffered an injustice, to love and not want to stop seeking the sacred source of this pain!
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Haggard, Ted
Hague, Frank
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