Repentance (John Colquhoun)

Repentance

John Colquhoun, minister in the Church of Scotland at Leith, deals in turn with the sources, nature, necessity, fruits and evidences of evangelical repentance, how it differs from legal repentance, and how logically (although not in respect of time) it must be preceded by faith and justification. The author leaves his reader in no doubt that without such repentance there is no scriptural warrant to assume that a person is born again of the Spirit. He provides an excellent corrective to a superficial conception of conversion.

Table of Contents

Biographical Introduction

1. The Sources of True Repentance
2. The Nature and Import of True Repentance
3. Necessity of True Repentance
4. The Difference Between True and Counterfeit Repentance
5. Fruits and Evidences of True Repentance
6. The Priority of the Act of Saving Faith to the Exercise of True Repentance
7. The Priority of Justification to the First Exercise of True Repentance
8. Objections Answered

About Author John Colquhoun (1748-1827)

Shortly after his conversion, young John Colquhoun walked all the way from Luss to Glasgow, a distance of about fifty miles, to buy a copy of Thomas Boston’s Fourfold State. This book had an enormous influence on his early Christian life.  Some years later, he was called to be minister of the Church of Scotland at Leith.  The epitaph on his tombstone reads as follows:

Having studied deeply the Doctrines of Grace, and experienced their saving and sanctifying power in his own soul, he labored earnestly and affectionately to communicate the knowledge of them to his fellow sinners.  As an author his chief aim was to advance the glory of the Saviour.  In private the exhibited the effects of the holy doctrines he inculcated in public, by a close walk with God; and by a kind, affable and humble deportment towards all men. And in these several ways his labours were acknowledged of God, by whom they were blessed to many. He was faithful unto death and has now received the Crown of Life.