Thanks for your comment. I’m not sure what part of what I’ve written that you’re having problems with. It seems to me that we’re in pretty close agreement. The work of salvation is completely the work of God. It’s initiated by God and then completed by God. There are many who seem to feel that there’s a negotiating process. But God’s sovereign. He can command us all day long to repent. Change our minds. Stop sinning. But we’re just incapable. It’s not an issue over free will or anything like that. And we’re not merely mindless automatons. We’re fallen and depraved and incapable of living and thinking righteously on our own.

So, as in your case, we’re not saved by our knowledge either. The day I was born again, I didn’t know much of anything. But all of a sudden, in an instance or moment, I believed differently. I all of a sudden believed something I never believed before. And there was a certain knowledge that accompanied my sudden belief. This wasn’t head knowledge. It came via grace. Faith, belief and that little bit of knowledge were imparted to me.

Of course, as time moves on, what I know and believe continues to grow. Or at least it should. It sounds like that has been the case for you as well.

I will say that one of things we tend to struggle with is the order of events. As human, we tend to think chronologically. Faith, repentance, belief, etc. And the reality is that they sort of occur concurrently. I was trying to express that. But faith and salvation are never causal in the sense that we received them because of our repentance. That would be works.

One small paragraph did not seem right to me.
“So, what’s the implication of all of this? In order for a person to exercise biblical repentance, he must be born-again. Therefore, he doesn’t repent to be saved. He repents because he is saved. This is justification by faith.”

I agree that this is the way it works for the born again Christian. We repent because of the Spirit’s work and our ever increasing knowledge of God’s marvelous love for us in Christ.

Hy first thoughts though were about the mystery of being born again. That is to say our first repentance and conversion. I can say that I hated the evil that I saw around me before I became a Christian. I became a Christian when the Holy Spirit showed me that the same evil was within me. I was reading Psalm 51 with a hostile,mad at the world and at God, attitude. My intent was to mock the God of the Bible. Somehow at that same moment, as I read verse 4, I accepted my responsibility for sin and I surrendered to a God of whom I new little, except that David knew him as a God of mercy, compassion and forgiveness.

I could have gone on hating sin around me and even in me, except that I surrendered to the mercy of a God that I scarcely knew. It was God’s work of creation in me that changed me. I was born again.

Knowledge did not save me. I knew so little. Jesus was not in the picture (yet). I became a believer in the Father of Jesus. Later I was to learn that I had heard the gospel but had been totally blind and deaf to it.

I will say that I really appreciated your observations about the other 2 kinds of soil. Here I will add that Faith is proven by faithfulness: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” This is how we can know whether we are real believers of simply deceiving ourselves.