The Weapons for Rebuilding Christendom (#2: Repentance)
This article is part of the series Weapons for Building Christendom, where we are exploring the God-given armaments that Christians must wield if we are to see households strengthened, churches fortified, and nations brought under the dominion of Jesus Christ.
A CRUCIBLE FOR REFORGING MEN
Every army keeps its medics well-trained and ready, for every man who enters battle will be wounded. Some will fall; others will bleed; still others will break beneath the strain. That is the point—no one escapes violent combat unscarred. And the same is true in the war for holiness. Every man who takes his stand against the world, the flesh, and the devil will bear the marks of battle. Sooner or later, a flaming arrow from the enemy’s crooked bow will find its mark, sinking deep into the chest. It is as certain as the sunrise, and you must learn to wage war through the pain if you want to see Christendom rebuilt.
But that raises the question every wounded man must face: what separates the one who dies in his sin—lying cold among the corpses that litter the battlefield—from the one who lives on to fight another day? It is surely not that one of them fell and the other did not, for all have fallen short of the glory of God. Instead, it is that the living man—raised by grace through faith in Christ and made alive by the Spirit of God—is the one who, by the Spirit’s power, can and must reach down and yank the Morgul dart from his own flesh, drop it bloodied at his feet, and stand to fight again. In that act, repentance becomes both the courage and the pain required to remove the alien poison so that life may again flourish in the soul where death had begun to settle. Repentance is the work by which a dying fighter becomes a living one. In this way, the man who flees repentance not only becomes a pincushion for the enemy’s arrows but will end up staggering beneath wounds that will one day immobilize him. Whereas the man who repents rises a little sore and a little bloodied, yet restored, rearmed, and ready to be the soldier Christ has called him to be.
Repentance, then, is not the sigh of the defeated—it is the song of the resurrected. It is not the weeping of the weak—it is the shout of the reborn. It is the clatter of armor being refitted by the Spirit’s own hands, the rasp of a blade drawn across the whetstone of mercy until it shines again. When the devil wounds you, repentance is how the Spirit seizes your trembling hands, turns the knife, and drives it back against him. When the world mocks you, repentance is how the Spirit brings you to your knees before the cross—and raises you to your feet unashamed.
And trust me, the devil does not fear your Bible knowledge or your moral outrage. He does not tremble when you argue theology, share opinions, or call out the world’s corruption. He fears only the holiness the Spirit forges in secret—the kind that bends the knee and crucifies pride. He will gladly let you debate every doctrine, decry every evil, and denounce every idol—so long as you never slay the one within your chest. He will even cheer for your zeal if it keeps you from repentance. For an unrepentant man, even clothed in orthodoxy, is still his ally. His hidden lust, his simmering bitterness, his festering envy—these are the cancers that rot the army from within.
And what an army we have become. A generation of men who mistake activity for victory, words for war, and comfort for courage. We talk like generals but live like deserters. We rage about politics while our prayer closets grow cobwebs. We boast of doctrine yet neglect devotion. We complain about weak pulpits while refusing to lead strong homes. We post, posture, and pontificate while our Bibles gather dust and our families go unfed. We mock the culture’s madness while secretly drinking its poison—addicted to screens, enslaved to lust, drunk on entertainment, and numb to holiness. We preach about headship but abdicate responsibility. We rail against effeminacy while living without discipline. We call it conviction, but it is pride. We call it discernment, but it is division. We call it courage, but it is cowardice dressed in zeal. And until we repent—until we fall on our faces before God in brokenness and blood-earnest prayer—we will keep mistaking noise for reformation and self-righteousness for strength. These are not reformers; they are rebels in uniform. They are not prophets; they are pretenders. They speak loudly of Christendom, but they will never build it, because they will not be ruled by Christ.Christendom will never be built by such men. Why? Because the kingdom of God advances through contrite hearts, not clever insults. It is forged on the anvil of repentance, not in the echo chambers of outrage. Before a man can build righteous altars, he must first burn tear down his own high places.
David knew this truth in his very bones: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away” (Psalm 32:3). The silence of sin is not peace—it is slow spiritual decay. But when he broke that silence, when confession split his pride like a stone, the rot gave way to renewal. “I acknowledged my sin to You, and You forgave the guilt of my sin” (Psalm 32:5). That is the pattern the Spirit still works in every age: repentance before restoration, exposure before empowerment. The man who hides his sin cannot build anything but a tomb, but the man who confesses becomes a living stone in the house God is raising.
Repentance is the surgeon of the soul. It cuts deep—but only to heal. Its blade is bright, its edge severe, yet it rests in nail-pierced hands. The same Christ who bled for you now bleeds you clean. The Spirit steadies the hand, wounds the pride, and saves the man. The Christian who will not repent is like a soldier who refuses amputation while boasting of his bravery as the gangrene climbs. Better to crawl into heaven maimed than to strut into hell in perfect health. For the wounds of Christ heal, but the wounds of sin only fester. Repentance may hurt for a night, but rebellion rots forever.
And this is why every true Reformation begins on its knees. The proud build towers; the penitent build kingdoms. Luther understood it. The man who made war on the powers of darkness began his Ninety-Five Theses not with defiance but with repentance: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He willed that the entire life of believers be one of repentance.” That was not just a flimsy marketing slogan—For Luther repentance was at the center of reality. He would rather be broken by God than crowned by Rome. And his protest has shaken for centuries and crumbled empires because it was born in the dust of confession. He did not gather an army of mockers, but a brotherhood of men who feared God more than popes, and their sobs for revival turned into the gunpowder for revolution. Their repentance fueled the Reformation, and with it they remade the world.
And we too must recover that same humble spirit. Before we raise a single glass for Christendom, we must raze the citadel of self. Before we reclaim the gates of culture, we must first open the gates of our own putrid hearts. Because, we cannot take dominion over nations while we are still slaves to our own lusts. We cannot wage holy war with unholy hands. We cannot conquer darkness if we still languish its shadows.
In that way, repentance is liberation from the slavery of sin. It is deliverance from the tyranny of self and it is the bursting forth of a fountain of real and lasting joy. Your flesh will attempt to chain you to your behaviors, strangle you with your past, and shackle you with the bonds of guilt and shame. But Jesus Christ died to breaks your chain! The world says, “You are the sum of what you’ve done.” Christ says, “You are the one I have redeemed.” The devil, if God would allow it, would leave you as worm food in the grave of guilt; but Christ calls you out like Lazarus, strips off the grave clothes that were binding you, and clothes you with His royal robes of righteousness. Repentance, then, is not another flagellation session—it is an ascent into glory, a rising of the soul from our propensity toward ruin into the glorious restoration Christ has purchased for us. Repentance is to reject the ashes of death to return to the embers of life.
So let the scoffers mock and the proud preen. Let the unrepentant parade their cleverness while the world burns to cinders beneath their brilliance. For they do not know that every empire built on pride is already ash in the wind. But as for you, man of God—beat your breast, bow your head, and take up the only weapon that can win the war for the world.
Repentance reforges men. It melts the iron of arrogance and recasts it in the likeness of Christ. It turns cowards into conquerors, hypocrites into heralds, and slaves of sin into stewards of dominion. For the kingdom of God is not built by unbroken men but by broken ones made whole. Grace does not pamper soldiers; it tempers them. It does not drape them in softness; it dresses them in steel. Only when the Church falls to her knees will she rise to rule the nations. Only when her altars are wet with tears will her banners gleam with triumph.
Therefore take up this weapon. Confess. Forsake. Be healed. Then rise—blood-washed, battle-ready, burning with holiness—to build again the ruins of the world. Let repentance be your hammer, humility your anvil, and holiness your battle-cry. For when the hearts of men are reforged in Christ, the very stones of culture will sing again. And from those flames of contrition, Christendom will rise—not as a memory of what was, but as the dawning glory of what shall be.
