Evangel Church PCA

If you think about it, penance is really just a godless counterfeit of repentance. It's an act of contrition where a person seeks to make atonement for one sin apart from Christ. Typically, penance occurs when an individual seeks to appease the the disapproval of others or maybe their own conscience by expressing sorrow and remorse through self inflicted punishment or reform. Whereas repentance recognizes that forgiveness is only found in the finished work of Christ. Penance tries to earn it. It tries to earn it by thinking that through human effort, we can we can somehow pay off sin's debt.