 After praising Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and sending Salat upon his beloved Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam who was sent as a Prophet and a Messenger, a bearer of glad tidings and a warner before the last day, I remind myself and I remind you to have taqwa of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, to have fear of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and the definition of taqwa is staying away from the prohibitions outwardly and inwardly and to fulfill the commands outwardly and inwardly. And also I advise you and I advise myself to turn in repentance to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala before it is too late. Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in the Quran, O you who believe, tubu ilallahi tawba tan nasuha, turn in repentance to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala in tawba, make tawba. But not just any tawba. Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says, tawba tan nasuha. He says turn into Allah and do a tawba that is nasuha. What is nasuha mean? If we look at the explanation of this ayah according to the early generations, the Salaf, one of the explanations is nasuha is that it comes from nasaha thawb, meaning to mend your thawb, to mend your clothes. So we've all had the experience of our clothes being ripped and we sew it or we have somebody sew it for us and then we can use it again. It's still a usable thawb. We don't throw it away. And this is what Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is reminding us. Our spiritual state needs mending and we should never be in a state where we feel like we want to throw ourselves away because that's what the sheytan wants to get us to do. He wants to put us in a state of despair. We've all sinned. Every single one of us is a sinner unless he's a prophet and there's no prophet after the prophet. Only the prophets are free from sin. The rest of us Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala created us and knew that we would sin. So we should never go into a state of despair, of yes, from the mercy of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala because that's what the sheytan wants us to do. When we get, when we do something wrong, when we do something haram, we shouldn't go to the opposite extreme of feeling so depressed that we feel like Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala will not forgive us. Allah will forgive us. And according to a hadith, if there are people that are not committing sins, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala will replace them with a people that do commit sins so that they can turn in repentance to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. He's a tawab. He is the giver of repentance. He is the forgiver. He is the one who pardons things. If we don't go through the process of turning in repentance to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, then we'll never know those true aspects of Allah. We'll never see him as a tawab. We'll never see him as the one who gives us repentance. Now this is not to say that we should purposely commit a sin so that we could do tawba. But it's to say that once we do commit a sin, that we should go through the process of doing tawba. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said that he, I turn in repentance to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and I ask for tawba from him more than 70 times a day. So this is a process that we should be doing constantly, all throughout our day. And we read throughout the Quran so many ayahs that mention tawba, repentance, that speak about the tawabin, those that turn into repentance, that speak about inaba turning back to Allah. We see this. We see the hadith. But how many of us know the process of tawba as a system? And how many of us that know the process are doing it as a practice on a regular basis? The tawba, the complete repentance that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is telling us to have, one of the early Mufassirun from the Salaf, one of the early people who gave Tafseer of the Quran, said that the tawba is equivalent to when you milk an animal, the impossibility of having that milk go back into the animal, that's the way our tawba should be with sin. Once we commit a sin and we do tawba, we never go back to it. And another example, they said, just like if a piece of wood is burned, you can never return it to its original state, that's the tawba tannasuhah. If we sinned and we did a sincere tawba, we'll never go back to that state. This sounds difficult, but there is a process to attain it. And the early Fuqaha jurists, the scholars from amongst our Ummah, they clarified exactly what is the process of tawba. And it boils down to four conditions. And we should all know these four conditions and be thinking about it on a regular basis. And this comes out, these conditions come out from, taken from ayes of the Quran, also from hadith, and also from understanding of the Sahaba and the later generation. But before going into the conditions of tawba, or the shuruq, I wanted to first back up and remind us of how Allah SWT forgives. Allah SWT has two types of forgiveness. One out of the fadl, one out of his virtue. A person could have sinned their whole life and never thought about Allah SWT, but they had iman, they had faith. And on the Day of Resurrection, Allah SWT can say, you're forgiven for everything you did. And that person never did tawba. They never thought about Allah. They never cared about Allah, but they believed in Allah. And out of his fadl, out of his virtue, he can forgive everything, except for shirk, except for associating partners. As long as a person leaves this dunya with one ounce of iman, they can be forgiven for everything. So we should never write anybody off. We never write anybody off, because first of all, we don't know who left the dunya with iman. A person, as according to the hadith, might spend their whole life in disobedience of Allah, in disbelief of Allah, but that instant before death, they become a believer. And there's a people that spend their whole life in belief and in good actions, and that instant before death, they leave Islam. So we never have full 100% yakeen of a person's state afterwards. So we should never say, that person is in hell, or that person is in hell. The only person that it is allowed for us to say they are in hell is if Allah told us through the Quran or through the hadith. And these are very few people that we actually know. Firaoun is one of them. Abu Lahab is one of them. His wife is one of them. And a few other people that are mentioned in the Quran. That's it. We can't say, oh, that person is going to hell. And I'm not going to mention specific individuals throughout history, but just think of some of the worst people. See, think of some of the worst people that did every type of possible harm. We cannot even say that those people are in a state of, in the hellfire. And there's even rulers in our day and age, that once they pass away or get executed or whatever it is, people say, oh, he's going to hell. What do we know? We can never write anybody off that that person is going to hell unless Allah told us that that that's going to happen. So Allah can forgive everything out of his fubbin. The other type of forgiveness comes from us actually doing something, some doing and action. We are, many of us have heard the hadith that when you walk to the masjid, as you walk to the masjid today, every single step that you take to the masjid, removes one of your sins. Every droplet of water that comes off of your limbs from Muldul removes a sin. These are actions that we could be gaining forgiveness, even if we don't realize the sins that we committed. But this is only for sins that are the minor sins, not the big sins, like murder and alcohol and gambling and backbiting. And there's a list of the bigger sins, the keba'er. This is for the sarayah. Those actions remove the sarayah. Also, by staying away from the big haram, Allah removes the little haram. So these are things that are happening with us out even realizing it. The other type of action that removes sins is toba. And this requires a conscious effort on our parts. We have to actually think about the sins that we've done and go through the process of toba. And this is applicable to two types of sins. The keba'er, the big sins that cannot be removed by good actions and by habits. And this is the main thing that we should be thinking about after this khutba is habits. If we have taken a sin as a habit, it's become habitual. The only way to break it is through a conscious process of unbreaking that. And that's what toba is. We have to break these habits. We all have habits. We have habits in our deem. We have habits in our dunya to work on a particular route. You all know that you get into a habit of driving. You don't even have to think about it anymore. It just happens. You can take the right exit, stop at the proper places, do everything. It's all habitual because it's become a habit. You're not even thinking about it. In the dunya, it's not that bad of a problem, although sometimes it is. Where it really is a problem is in our deem. And this status of being in a state where we're doing things habitually and not thinking about what we're doing is called gafla, heedlessness. And it's one of the root causes of all diseases. We've all had the experience of when we prayed, or I won't say all, but many of us have had the experience of when we pray. And we go through the entire prayer and we do everything. The fard, the sunnah, the mandub, every aspect of the prayer, we're doing it right. Outwardly, if somebody looked at us, they would say, Masha Allah, they did a good prayer. Inwardly, we were thinking, we were on the other side of the world. We were thinking about something else, but we performed everything. How did that happen? Because we got into a habit of doing that prayer in that proper way. We're not thinking about it and then we're not getting the benefit out of that prayer. In the same way, we could be in a process of doing a haram action of doing a sin and we're not even realizing it. We're not even realizing the harms that can come to us out of that sin. So the way to break this habit, the way to break this state of ghafla, of heedlessness is through tawba. Tawba has four conditions. The first one is a nadaama, remorse. And the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said in a hadith, a tawba to nadaam. Tawba is nadaam. If we want to break tawba down, repentance down to one thing, it is nadaama, having remorse. And this is similar in a hadith that the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said, al-hadjoo arafa. Hajj is arafa. 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-hadjoo arafa. Hajj is arafa. This doesn't mean that if we just do arafa, 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, tawba and nadaam. Tawba, repentance is nadaam. That is the heart, the core of the process of tawba 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 tawba? No, because he has not done the first shahm, the first condition of tawba. 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 tawba? No, tawba is a conscious effort. We have to think about it. If we don't have remorse, we don't have tawba. So that person might have outwardly left that action years ago, but if they never had remorse over what happened, the tawba 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 shahm, the second condition is that we have an intention to never go back to that sin. Anniyatu Allah Ya'udah ila Zanba. That 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 ulamas said don't leave trying to do tawba 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, tawba has not occurred. We have to conscious.