To repent means to turn away from. It is not a one and done activity. When someone repents and accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour, their inner man or spirit is modified and oriented towards the LORD. Regeneration takes place. They receive what I refer to as the salvation package, which is:
o A measure of the Holy Spirit
o Saving Faith
o The cleansing Blood of Jesus Christ
o A measure of the Word of God
II Corinthians 5:17
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
Spiritually you have been set into a correct orientation towards the LORD. However, your soul (mind, will and emotions) and your body will need to be brought into subjection to your spirit man.
Therefore it is now necessary to strengthen your spirit. This is done by spending time in God’s presence through prayer and digesting the Milk of God’s Word. As you start growing you will then realize that certain activities, in times past you partook of, no longer seem to be right for you. The Holy Spirit convicts you that these activities are not right, and you start to feel uncomfortable. It then becomes necessary to repent from these activities, because they are ‘dead works’. Dead works are any type of activity that does not lead to spiritual life and growth.
As you continue to grow up spiritually, you get even more sensitive to the Holy Spirit, and He then reveals even more inappropriate activities that you need to repent of. These can be as mundane as watching certain TV shows, the type of clothes you wear, certain kinds of jewelry you wear, certain beverages that you consume and even the company of certain people. You begin to discern the true spirit behind certain activities and things, and therefore it becomes unclean to you and you need to turn away, or repent of it.
I Corinthians 9:26-27
26 I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: 27 But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.