To repent is to rethink, or change your mind. In religious terms, repentance toward God means to reconsider the way you have been living, ask God to forgive you and resolve to live differently with the help of the Holy Spirit.

This is a complete change in a person’s way of thinking and is not something that one can decide to do upon a whim. The first step in repentance is to feel the need to repent and that must come from God Himself. People live the way they do because they believe this is the best way to get what they want out of life. It isn’t until the Holy Spirit opens their eyes to see that all the trouble they have encountered in life is the result of bad decisions they have made that it is even possible to consider living differently.

Feeling sorry for what you have done is not repentance. That is, it does not automatically lead to changing course and doing things differently. Yet feeling sorry for what you have done is the first step toward repentance. It is important to distinguish between feeling sorry for yourself and feeling sorry for what you have done.

There are a few places in the Bible which speak of repentance in the simpler sense of a change of mind. Esau sold his birthright to his younger brother for one meal, and doesn’t seem to have grasped the consequences until Jacob received from his father the blessing due to the firstborn son. The Bible says “For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears” (Hebrews 12:17). I believe the “place of repentance” spoken of here does not refer to repentance toward God. Esau just wanted his father to change his mind and give him the blessing he thought he deserved, but it was too late.

There are verses in the Old Testament that say that God repented. This does not mean that God was sorry for something He had done, or intended to do, but that God changed His mind because of changing circumstances, either the rebellion of mankind or the entreaties of one of His servants.

The apostle Paul speaks of “repentance not to be repented of.” When we have repented of a life of sin and turned around to follow God, it would be folly to once again change our mind and go back to our former life.