What Does It Mean To Repent?

The roots of the word “repent” are very interesting and suggest something quite different—not intensification of guilt and contrition. When we look at the Greek roots of the word “repentance,” the verb is metanoata. The noun is metanoia. Meta means “beyond.” The noun from which the second part of the word “repent” is derived is nous in Greek, and it means “mind.” Putting that together, “to repent” means “to go beyond the mind that you have.”