Because a man has altered his life does not necessarily mean that he has repented. A man may have lived an evil life and suddenly stopped being bad, not because he has repented, but because he is like an exhausted volcano. The fact that he has become good is no sign of his having become a Christian. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Baffled to Fight Better, 83 L
A man has the power to harden himself against one of God’s greatest gift’s. If in order to dissolve a piece of ice, you take a hammer and smash it up, you simply break it into so many smaller pieces of ice; but put the ice out in the sunshine and it quickly disappears. That is just the difference between man’s handling of wrong and God’s. Man’s handling may cause it to crumble , but it is still only so much crumbled-up wrong, whereas when God handles it, it becomes repentance, and the man turns to God and his life becomes a sacrament of experimental repentance. Baffled to Fight Better, 85 L
Never mistake remorse for repentance; remorse simply puts a man in hell while he is on earth; it carries no remedial quality with it at all, nothing that betters a man. Conformed to His Image 348 R
Remorse is never repentance; remorse is the rebellion of man’s own pride which will not agree with God’s judgement on sin, but rather, accuses God because he has made His laws too stern and holy. Our Portrait in Genesis 962 L
The prevailing attitude to-day is the healthy-minded attitude that treats remorse as a disease of the nerves and sin as mere intellectual nuisance – “Do things; don’t give way to absurd self-examination.” Jesus Christ stands for the unhindered facing of God, and such a facing will always bring a man to the evangelical attitude – “Just as I am.” Beware of bracing yourself up to be cheerful when you should be broken up into repentance. Notes on Jeremiah, 1393 R