 Tawbah has four conditions. The first one is a nadama, remorse. And the Prophet ﷺ said in a hadith, a tawbah to nadam. Tawbah is nadam. If we want to break tawbah down, repentance, down to one thing, it is nadama, having remorse. And this is similar in a hadith that the Prophet ﷺ said, Al-Hajj is Arafah. We know that there's many aspects of Hajj. But if you want to boil it down to the core of what Hajj is, the hadith says, Al-Hajj is Arafah. Hajj is Arafah. This doesn't mean that if we just do Arafah, the rest of our Hajj is correct. There are other aspects of the Hajj. But what it means is that that's the core of the Hajj, that we should make sure that that's the core that we build everything else around. So in the same way, tawbah and nadam. Tawbah, repentance is nadam. That is the heart, the core of the process of tawbah is remorse. What is this remorse? This remorse is that we are leaving this action because we feel a sorrow in our heart for doing it. There are some things people leave because of health reasons. There are some things people leave, I'm talking about sins. Some sins that people leave because of health reasons. Somebody might stop drinking alcohol because the doctor said it's bad for you. So now he left alcohol. Did he do tawbah? No, because he has not done the first shahr, the first condition of tawbah. There has to be remorse. There are people that leave haram because they don't have access to it. They don't have the money anymore to fund their sin. So when they stop doing the sin, have they done tawbah? No, tawbah is a conscious effort. We have to think about it. If we don't have remorse, we don't have tawbah. So that person might have outwardly left that action years ago. But if they never had remorse over what happened, the tawbah has never happened. And so they are still in a state of sin. We ask Allah SWT to protect us from that state. The second shahr, the second condition is that we have an intention to never go back to that sin. He or she has an intention that we make an intention that we will never go back to it. We may have been in the situation where we know we're doing something wrong and we say astaghfirullah. But in our hearts we know that we're going to do it tomorrow. We know we're going to do it next week. It's a good beginning. The Unama said don't leave trying to do tawbah because you know you can't do it, fulfill the whole thing. But as long as we know in our hearts that we're going to go back to it, tawbah has not occurred. We have to consciously think about what we have done, make that intention to never return to it, and then the tawbah, the process now begins. It's not complete. There's still two more conditions. But if we have an intention to go back to it, especially if it's a habit, we might say astaghfirullah. But you know that's your habit. Unless you take an effort to break that habit, you're going to go back to it. Somebody might sit through a health class and hear about the benefits of exercise and say you know what? I want to do that. But there's no benefit on that unless they actually follow through with it and change their lifestyle. So just like people make lifestyle changes to benefit their health and to benefit their wealth, in the same way we have to do that to benefit our deen, we have to make a lifestyle change if we have taken something as a habit and worked on making that intention never to go back to that. And there are many ways to do this. And the ulama have given guidebooks to us on how to do it. There's many examples of ways to break it. One of the ways to make that intention is to think about the harms of that of that sin. And to think about yom ul qiyamah, the day of judgment, and to think about the grave. These are all powerful tools of reflection that we can use to make that solid intention that we will never go back to that thing. Also Imam Nowi mentions that the scholars have said that one of the things that you can do is go to the place where you did the haram and do a good action. So they said if somebody has done a sin in the masjid, go to the masjid and do salah there or do irtikaf there or read Quran there. If you did ghiba about somebody, go to other people and make praise of that person because we defiled our mouths when we ate the flesh of our brother or sister. Now we have to clean out our mouths just like we have to clean out our mouths after eating najasa. If we ate pork we have to wash out our mouth. And if we ate and we did ghiba we have to go and wash out our mouth a spiritual cleansing through dhikr and through mentioning good things about that person specifically. And there's many other tools of how to have this intention to not go back and to break that habit. But that's the second condition. The first is that we have remorse. The second is that we have an intention never to go back. The other condition, the third one is that we have to stop it. If we are in the process of a sin we have to stop it at that point. We have to stop right there. We can't say I'll do it. I'll do toba later. We've all heard this in our communities. Don't worry about the deen that right now. Wait till you're older. Take care of your deen when you're older. We have to stop that sin right at that instant. And because toba is wajib, so many times we see in the Quran an order Allah is telling us tobu ilallah, turning repentance to Allah. This order means it is wajib. It is farb. It is an obligation. So if we don't do toba, we are in a state of sin. We are in a state of fisk, of aisyan, of disobedience of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So we have to stop that sin as soon as we make that recognition. Sometimes we get in a state we're doing something and then it doesn't hit us until we're actually in it. And then we say, Oh, Stokeful Allah, that's haram. I can't be doing that. You're eating something and you realize it's haram. You're talking with somebody and then you realize it's ghiba. You're in a business transaction and then the realization hits you. I can't be doing this. Once that realization hits you, stop right there. If we don't stop, if we continue on, then what have we done? We have forgotten the order of Allah to do toba. So it now puts us in a double state of sin. The first is actually the sin that we committed. The second is that we have delayed toba. We have now delayed toba. So now the person has to make toba for the original sin, that sin that he first did. And then he may have to make toba repentance for delaying the toba. And then if he delays it again, he or she delays it again, then now it's another toba. And so it could compound upon the person and drive them deeper into a state of spiritual darkness. Those are the three conditions. There's a fourth condition, but these are the three conditions for all sins. And to have remorse, an intention never to do it again and to stop it if the person is actually doing it at that point. There's a fourth condition. If the sin happened to be with somebody else, if we took somebody's money wrongly, if we hurt somebody's feelings, if we slandered somebody, if we cheated somebody, now our sin involves another person. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will never accept the toba until we make amends with that person. If it was something between us and Allah, we forgot the prayer, we left the prayer, we have remorse over what we did. We have the intention never to do it again. And now if it's prayer time, we get up and pray. If we've done that, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can forgive us. But if we've taken the haqq of another person, Allah will put the toba on hold until we make amends with that person. So we have to go to those people, return the money. We have to return the things that we've done wrong. We have to make amends with the people that we've slandered. We have to make amends with the people whose businesses we might have ruined through slander and so forth. We have to make amends between husbands and wives that we may have caused problems between, or children with their parents, or students with their teachers, or friends amongst themselves. If we have caused problems between people, we have to fix it. That's the fourth and final condition of toba. If we do these four conditions for our toba, we fulfill it, then we have a good opinion that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will forgive us for what we did. We can never have 100% surety that we were forgiven. But we can have a good opinion that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will forgive us. The only toba that we have 100% surety that it is forgiven is the toba from shirk. If a person was not a Muslim and they became Muslim, their shahada, their testimony of faith, they're entering the deem that is their toba and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala forgives everything.