Pip: Mark L. Lastimoso Ministries has been asking the kind of questions most people quietly avoid — like whether you can even want to change before something outside yourself starts the wanting.
Mara: That's exactly the territory marklastimoso covers this week: where repentance actually comes from, what sin quietly costs, and what draws a person toward Christ in the first place. Let's start with conviction and repentance.
Where Repentance Really Begins
Pip: The common assumption is that repentance is the entry ticket — you feel sorry first, then you approach Christ. These posts are here to dismantle that sequence entirely.
Mara: The post "Christ is the Source of Every Right Impulse" sets up the problem directly: "They think that they cannot come to Christ unless they first repent, and that repentance prepares for the forgiveness of their sins."
Pip: So the obstacle people place between themselves and the Saviour is the very thing Christ came to supply. You cannot generate genuine repentance on your own any more than you can pardon yourself.
Mara: Right — and the post makes the mechanism explicit. Peter's statement in Acts 5:31 is cited: Christ was exalted to give repentance, not to receive it as a prerequisite. The impulse toward truth, the sting of conscience — those are already His work.
Pip: "The Law of God and the Character of Christ" shows what that sting actually feels like. One glimpse of Christ's purity and every spot of defilement becomes, as the post puts it, painfully distinct.
Mara: Paul's experience in Romans 7 is the case study there. Outwardly blameless, yet when the spiritual depth of the law came into view, his self-esteem collapsed. Seeing clearly is itself a gift, not a personal achievement.
Pip: Which makes the warning in "Yield to the Pleading Voice of God's Holy Spirit" land harder. Every act of delay doesn't just postpone repentance — it actively hardens the capacity for it.
Mara: The post is direct: "Every act of transgression, every neglect or rejection of the grace of Christ, is reacting upon yourself; it is hardening the heart, depraving the will, benumbing the understanding." Procrastination isn't neutral ground.
Pip: And "God Does Not Regard All Sins as of Equal Magnitude" adds a counterintuitive point — pride is actually more dangerous than the grosser sins, because the person mired in obvious failure at least feels need.
Mara: "They Know What is Right, and Yet Refuse to Do It" closes that thought: knowing the standard and declining to meet it is its own category of accountability. The excuse that others fail too doesn't transfer the obligation.
Pip: From the weight of what sin costs internally, the next question is what it promises on the outside.
What Sin Actually Delivers
Pip: "Unsatisfying Pleasures of Sin" names the mechanism behind restlessness — the craving that the world keeps failing to fill.
Mara: The post frames it as a divine signal: "The same divine mind that is working upon the things of nature is speaking to the hearts of men and creating an inexpressible craving for something they have not."
Pip: The longing itself is the clue. If the world's cisterns kept delivering, nobody would keep searching.
Mara: And what draws a person out of that search points directly to the cross — which is where the next post takes us.
The Cross as the Drawing Force
Mara: "The Sufferings of God's Dear Son" anchors everything in a single mechanism: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me."
Pip: The post traces how that drawing works even before a person knows it's happening — reforming habits, quickening conscience — and only later resolves into a clear view of the cross.
Mara: The question the post puts in the penitent's mouth is worth sitting with: "What is sin, that it should require such a sacrifice for the redemption of its victim?" That question is itself the beginning of comprehension.
Pip: The weight of the cross answers the question sin kept dodging.
Mara: Repentance as gift, longing as signal, the cross as the draw — it all runs in one direction.
Pip: Come as you are, apparently, because coming any other way isn't actually an option. More next time.