"True repentance strips sin of all that is accidental"

"The beginning of hungering and thirsting after righteousness lies in the birth of conviction of sin. In fact the presence of this element in it is what distin­guishes true, deep repentance from every kind of superficial regret for the secondary consequences of sin. True repentance strips sin of all that is accidental. It resembles an inner chamber where no one and nothing else is admitted except God and the sinner and his sin. Into that chamber all the great penitents like David and Paul and Augustine and Luther have entered, and each one in the bitter anguish of his soul has borrowed the words of the psalmist: ‘Against thee, thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight, that thou aughtest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.’

"A repentant sinner acquits God and condemns himself. And for the very reason that his consciousness of sin is God—centered, he is also alive to his inward seriousness. He learns to trace it in the recesses and abysses of his inmost life, where even the eye of self-scrutiny would otherwise scarcely penetrate, but in which the eyes of God are at home, where all our iniquities stand naked before him and our secret sins in the light of his countenance. If it is characteristic of sin to excuse itself, it is no less characteristic of repentance to scorn all subterfuge and to judge of itself, as it were, with the very veracity of God.

"Herein indeed is shown the first grace of God to an awakened sinner that he lets in upon the soul this cleansing flood of moral truth. It is a painful experience, but even through the pain the penitent feels that his relation towards God has been in principle rectified, that the sorrow of repentance is a sorrow after God himself Without that much of faith there is no repent­ance, by that much of faith gracious repentance differs from the remorse of the hopelessly lost." -- Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Truth, p. 37,38