Barnabas asked Jesus, "O Master, if your disciples be asked, what should they answer, and how should they show penitence?" Jesus answered, "When a man loses a purse does he turn back only his eye to see it, or his hand to take it and his tongue to ask? No, but he turns his whole body back and employs every power of his soul to find it. Is this true?" Barnabas answered, "It is most true."

Then Jesus said, "Penitence is a reversing of the evil life; for every sense must be turned around to the contrary of what it wrought while sinning. Instead of delight must be mourning; for laughter weeping; for revelling fasts; for sleeping vigils; for leisure activity; for lust chastity. Let storytelling be turned into prayer and avarice into almsgiving."

Then he continued, "Know then that penitence more than anything else must be done for pure love of God; otherwise, it will be vain to repent. I will speak to you by a similitude. Every building, if its foundation be removed, will fall into ruin. The foundation of our salvation is God, without whom there is no salvation. When man has sinned, he has lost the foundation of his salvation. Therefore, it is necessary to begin from the foundation. The sinner should cry and it should be like that of a father who weeps over his son who is near to death.

O madness of man, who weeps over the body and yet does not weep over the soul from which the mercy of God has departed because of sin, tell me if the mariner, when his ship has been wrecked by a storm, could recover all that he had lost by weeping, what would he do? It is certain that he would weep bitterly. I say to you truly that in everything for which a man weeps, he sins, except when he weeps for his sin; for every misery that comes to man comes to him from God for his salvation, so that he should rejoice when it befalls him. However, sin comes from the devil for the damnation of man, and yet man is not sad about that. Surely, here you can perceive that man seeks loss and not profit.

I tell you that for sin alone one ought to weep, because by sinning man forsakes his Creator. However, how does he weep who attends at revelling and feasts? Therefore, you must turn revelling into fasts.

The first thing that follows sorrow for sin is fasting. For he who sees that a certain food makes him sick, for that he fears death, after sorrowing that he has eaten it, forsaken it, so as not to make himself sick. Therefore, the sinner should do the same. Perceiving that pleasure has made him to sin against God his creator by following sense in these good things of the world; let him sorrow at having done so, because it deprives him of God, his life, and gives him the eternal death of hell."