The Repentance Process

A few days ago, at least, I mentioned the repentance process in one of my blog posts, and I would just like to take a moment right now to emphasize that it truly is a repentance process. We sometimes, mistakenly, think of repenting as something a person does once. They commit a sin, and then they repent of it, and then it's over. But repentance is so much more than that. Repentance isn't just apologizing for doing wrong and promising not to do it again. Repentance means changing, and changing takes time. When we repent of a sin, that's not a one-time apology for one action we did, it's a process of changing our natures, or at least our habits, so we commit that sin less and less frequently until we manage to stop committing that sin at all. So when we talk about repenting, let's be sure that we mean more than just apologizing, and when we repent of our sins, let's be sure that we are actually following the full process of repentance.