You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Wednesday, February 20th, 2019. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are preparing for Lent by talking about repentance. First, we talked about why we

sin, and of course we sin because God gave us free will. Next we talked about how sin drives a wedge

between us and God. And each time we sin, we are placed further away from God and therefore

are less able to receive his wonderful graces. Today we are finally going to dig into the topic of repentance.

So first of all, I want you to know that when Jesus started his public ministry here on

earth, he called for repentance. He called for this first and foremost. He said, repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repentance is really the first step in following Jesus. Yes, we need to accept suffering like he did. Yes, we need to love others and love God. We need to do all of those things. But we are only able to actually do those things if we first clear away the sin and put ourselves into a closer relationship with God. Because remember, each time we sin,

there is something more between us and God. So let's get rid of all those sins so that we can

get closer to God and grow to be more like Jesus Christ. So there are four steps to repentance, and really only three that we

have to have to do, but four is better. The first step is to acknowledge what our sins are. The

second step is to go before God and ask for his merciful forgiveness.

Step number three is the trickiest step, and that is to accept God's forgiveness and move forward.

And step number four that we do just to really help to transform our hearts is we do

penance. We're going to talk about these first two steps today, acknowledging our sins and going

before God and asking for his merciful forgiveness. Now the past couple of days on this podcast,

I have been asking you to do an examination of conscience.

Very often, we do sins and then we either forget about them or we don't really realize how bad it was what we did.

We make excuses for ourselves or we just simply aren't paying attention to how we

have forgotten about God or overlooked the needs of the people in our life. So it's important that we do

an examination of conscience, especially during Lent. And if you're old enough to receive the sacrament of confession and reconciliation,

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