What Repentance Is

by St. John Climacus

“Repentance is the renewal of Baptism. Repentance is a contract with God for a second life… Repentance is a constant distrust of bodily comfort… Repentance is the daughter of hope and the renunciation of despair. Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by practice of good deeds contrary to the sins. Repentance is purification of conscience. Repentance is the voluntary endurance of all afflictions… A sign of true repentance is the acknowledgment that we deserve all the troubles, visible and invisible that come to us — and even greater ones…[Another] true sign of repentance is the forgetting of wrongs…”