“Repent and believe in the gospel.” This is how the King of the universe began his ministry. Given Jesus’ credentials, we should probably take notice.

In his inaugural address, Jesus tells us how to become a follower: repent and believe the gospel. There may be no greater barrier to believing the gospel than idolatry, which I say is the sin beneath all other sins. In a nutshell, idolatry is removing God as the object of worship, replacing him with a God-substitute. And we do it all the time. We worship idols when we elevate good things to the status of best things.

So if idolatry is the primary barrier to believing the gospel (initially and continually), then it follows that repenting of idolatry is the key to deepening our gospel belief.

In repentance, we must do three things in relation to sin:

• See it.
• Own it.
• Turn from it.

To see our sin in specific is to understand that it is grievous to God and hostile to his law (see Romans 8:7). This means that we see our sin as not just wrong in general, but in a specific and definite sense. A repentant person takes responsibility not just for the lawbreaking, but acknowledges that he or she is the lawbreaker. Finally, repenting means we turn from our sin. If idolatry is turning our backs on God while turning our whole selves to sin, then repentance is turning our backs on our idols while turning our whole selves to God.

How do you know if you are repenting deeply? One sign of true repentance is that we begin to see and know that we are bigger sinners than we thought. In other words, the bad news is actually worse than we thought.

But true repentance, the turning from sin, means seeing and knowing that the good news is better than we thought. Though in repentance we see that we are bigger sinners than we thought, through faith in the gospel, we see that he is a bigger savior than we thought.

The way to deal with sin and idolatry is to repent of them and believe the gospel. In his first letter to the church at Thessalonica, Paul praises the church for how they “turned from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). May this be said of us and of our churches as we repent and believe the gospel.

**Darrin Patrick is the founding and lead pastor of The Journey, a multi-site church in the metropolitan St. Louis area. He is also vice-president of the Acts 29 church planting network, and the author of Church Planter: The Man, The Message, and the Mission.