530. The question then is asked: how is one to repent? The answer is, in deed; that is, by examining oneself, recognising and acknowledging one's sins, praying to the Lord, and starting a new life. The previous section [525-527] showed that repentance is impossible without self-examination. But what purpose does self-examination serve, but to enable us to recognise our sins? Or what purpose does their recognition serve, unless we acknowledge their presence in us? Or what purpose would these three actions serve, if not to enable us to confess them before the Lord, to appeal for His help, and from this point on to start a new life, which is the end in view? This is real repentance.

This is the way we need to develop and act, as every person may know, once he has left childhood behind, and more and more as he becomes his own master and knows his own mind, if he considers baptism, which is a kind of washing standing for regeneration. For at baptism his godparents promised on his behalf that he would renounce the devil and all his works. The same is true on considering the Holy Supper: all are warned that before they are fit to approach they must repent of their sins, turn towards God, and embark on a new life. The same may be seen on considering the Ten Commandments or the Catechism which all Christians have before them; here six of the Ten Commandments are simply instructions not to do evil deeds, and unless one puts them away by repentance, one cannot love the neighbour, much less love God. Yet on these two commandments the Law and the Prophets, that is, the Word, depend, and consequently so too does one's salvation. If real repentance is practised from time to time, in fact as often as one prepares oneself to partake of the Holy Supper, and if one thereafter refrains from one or two sins one caught oneself committing, this is enough to start the process of making it real. Anyone at that point is on his way to heaven, for that is when a person begins to become spiritual instead of natural, and to be born anew under the Lord's guidance.

525. V. Recognition of sin and a person's self-examination are the beginnings of repentance.

No one in the Christian world can fail to recognise sin. For everyone there from childhood is taught what is evil and from boyhood what is sinful. All youths learn this from their parents and schoolmasters, as well as from the Ten Commandments, the first text put into the hands of everyone in Christian countries. As he grows up, he learns this later on from sermons in church and instruction at home. It is fully taught by the Word, and moreover by civil law and justice, which say the same as the Ten Commandments, and other parts of the Word. Sinful evil is nothing else but evil directed against the neighbour; and is also directed against God, and this is sin.

But the recognition of sin is useless, unless a person examines what he does in his life, and observes whether he did such a thing in secret or openly. For up to this point all that is mere knowledge; and then the arguments of the preacher are merely a noise in the left ear, which goes through to the right ear and so out. Finally it becomes no more than a thought, a piety on the part of the lungs, in many cases mere imagination and a chimera. But it is quite the reverse, if a person, recognising what is a sin, examines himself, finds one in himself and says to himself, 'This evil is a sin,' and fearing everlasting punishment abstains from it. Then for the first time the preacher's teaching and oratory in church is taken in with both ears and reaches the heart, so that he turns from being a pagan into a Christian.