In chapter 5 of The Gospel According to Jesus, John MacArthur makes a claim that deserves careful examination. He says that to be born again, a person must feel the weight of sin. That person must also long to turn from it and adopt a new way of life. This claim fits MacArthur’s broader framework. Throughout the book, submission, obedience, and lifetime commitment all act as conditions of saving faith. But what happens when we test this claim against Scripture’s own use of the word “repentance”? A different picture emerges. Repentance is real, important, and biblical. But it is not the means by which a person is born again.
What MacArthur Claims
In that chapter, MacArthur teaches that new birth requires more than simply believing in Jesus. It also requires an inner reckoning with sin. A person must feel the weight of guilt and truly desire to leave the old way of life. Without that inward turning, MacArthur suggests, the new birth itself is in question. This is not an isolated claim. It works alongside other conditions he lays out elsewhere in the book. Together they press saving faith toward full life transformation. That transformation becomes a prerequisite rather than a result.
What Repentance Actually Does in Scripture
The trouble appears when we trace repentance through the Old and New Testaments. Its consistent function is not to impart everlasting life. Instead, repentance recovers or extends temporal, physical life and restores fellowship with God.
Consider Nineveh. Jonah preached judgment, and the Ninevites repented in sackcloth and ashes. God relented, and the destruction He had threatened within forty days did not come (Jonah 3:5–10). Repentance secured Nineveh’s continued existence as a city. It did not secure a saving status. Nothing in the text says the Ninevites received everlasting life through this act.
Consider also Israel in the first century. For decades before the Jewish war of AD 66–70, the nation failed to repent. Catastrophic loss of life followed in that conflict. Again, repentance relates to keeping or losing physical life. It does not relate to granting or withholding the new birth.
This pattern holds throughout Scripture. Through repentance, God recovers or extends physical life. Through repentance, a wandering believer returns to fellowship with God. Repentance can also move an unbeliever toward that point of fellowship. The unrepentant person risks a life cut short by God’s discipline. That is a serious and sobering reality. But it belongs to a different category from the question of new birth.
A Closer Look at MacArthur’s Illustration
MacArthur illustrates his point with the story of a liquor store owner. This man left his wife and began living with another woman. MacArthur uses him as an example of someone whose behavior calls his new birth into question. This illustration deserves pushback on more than one front.
First, owning a liquor store is not itself a sinful occupation. Here MacArthur treats his own convictions about abstaining as if they were a biblical rule for all believers. Personal conviction is not the same as biblical mandate. Treating it that way misrepresents what Scripture actually demands.
Second, the illustration contains an internal inconsistency. Elsewhere MacArthur admits that genuine believers can fall away from faithful living and later return. By his own framework, then, a man who left his wife could still be born again. He would simply be out of fellowship with God. Yet the illustration does not extend him that same grace. Instead, it treats his ongoing sin as evidence against the new birth itself. The critique here is precise. MacArthur confuses a loss of fellowship with an absence of new birth. The first is a real and serious spiritual condition. The second is a far more consequential claim.
Justification of the Ungodly
Romans 4:5 may offer the clearest correction to this whole line of reasoning. There Paul describes God as the One who “justifies the ungodly” (NKJV). Not the reformed. Not the already-repentant. The ungodly. In effect, MacArthur’s framework wants Jesus to justify the godly. These are people who have already turned from sin in some clear, visible way. Paul says the opposite. God’s justifying work reaches the ungodly through faith.
This is the heart of the gospel Paul describes. Christ died for sinners, not for the already-reformed (Romans 5:8). Believing in Christ results in everlasting life because of what Christ accomplished at Calvary. It does not depend on the believer’s present moral condition. Nor does it depend on felt sorrow over sin or a resolve to change. Salvation is a free promise: whoever believes in Christ has everlasting life. As Scripture presents it, that is the whole transaction.
Two Categories, Not One
This comparison reveals a needed distinction. Scripture treats two things separately. The first is the status that faith receives: new birth and everlasting life, secured entirely by Christ’s finished work. The second is the ongoing role of repentance. Repentance brings temporal restoration and fellowship. It also preserves physical life, for believer and unbeliever alike.
MacArthur’s chapter collapses these two categories into one. As a result, it raises the bar for saving faith far beyond what Scripture requires. It also risks hiding the very thing the gospel makes clear: Christ justifies the ungodly, freely, through faith alone.
Part of the series: Responding to Lordship Salvation (all six articles in reading order). Watch the teaching: explore more in the Free Grace Videos playlist on YouTube. Related reading: Belief, Not Repentance: The Bronze Serpent in John, Lordship Salvation Discussion, and Interpreting the Woman at the Well (John 4).