"The human race is inquisitive about other people's lives, but negligent to correct their own." - Saint Augustine of Hippo in Confessions

"I take no pride in what I did…but pray that in some small way I have righted the wrong I committed so many years ago." - from a letter in an envelope containing $150 in cash as restitution for a stolen canoe. The Bradgate, Iowa, postmaster found the letter the day after Easter from an anonymous correspondent who said he was a railroad brakeman passing through town when he stole the 17-foot fiberglass canoe from behind a house in 1973.

"Repentance is always difficult, and the difficulty grows still greater by delay." - Samuel Johnson in The Quotable Johnson (Christianity Today: October 6, 1997)

"There's a lot of spiritual smog in the churches. Nothing will blow that out except the same wind that blew at Pentecost." - author unknown

"One thief on the cross was saved, that none should despair; and only one, that none shold presume." - J. C. Ryle

"If there are a thousand steps between us and God, he will take all but one. He will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours." - Max Lucado

"The man who knows his sins is greater than one who raises a dead man by his prayer." - Isaac the Syrian

"Don't ever be afraid to admit you were wrong. It's like saying you're wiser today than you were yesterday." - author unknown

"May be old fashion, but as long as there is sin, it will never be outdated." - author unknown

"People who admit they're wrong get a lot farther than people who prove they're right." - Beryl Pfizer

"Within the next few hours if we really opened our hearts to repentance and faith for an unscheduled invasion of God, we could meet the demonism of this age with the demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power." - Vance Havner

"Repentance may be old-fashioned, but it is not outdated so long as there is sin." - J. C. McCauley

"One day an unidentified man placed an envelope with $400 on an employee's desk in the office of the Public Service Co. in a Colorado city. In the envelope along with the money was a note which said, "once a thief, now a Christian. This is to pay for the electricity I stole from your company several years ago." Too many modern Christians have lost sight of what the Bible means when it talks of repentance. Many think that repentance is little more than shaking their heads over their sins and saying, "My; but I'm sorry I did that!" and then continue to live just as they have lived before. True repentance means "to change, to turn away from, to go in a new direction," "Godly sorrow worketh repentance" (2 Cor. 7:10)." - Lee Roy Davis

"By repentance we understand (1) the recovery of the right mind in a sinful person awakened by the Word of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit, and received by true faith, by which the sinner immediately acknowledges his innate corruption and all his sins accused by the Word of God; and (2) grieves for them from the heart, and not only bewails and frankly confesses them before with a feeling of shame; but also (3) with indignation abominates them; and (4) now zealously considers the amendment of his ways and constantly strives for innocence and virtue in which conscientiously to exercise himself all the rest of his life." - Christianity Today, 1/8/01

Repentance