Spurgeon, in All of Grace, on the quickening effects of the Holy Spirit on a man’s sorrow and response to sin:

The quickened spirit is more afraid of sin itself than of the penal results of it. The cry of your heart is not, "Who shall deliver me from punishment?" but, "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Who shall enable me to live above temptation, and to become holy, even as God is holy?"

What is more painful, the moral wrong or the pending consequence for that moral wrong? The way our hearts respond to sin, I think, goes a long way in revealing the true state of our souls.

I have had a great deal of trouble rectifying the reality of new birth and life, with the fact that no Christian will ever stop sinning. How can repentance be true if the sin is returned to? And, if the repentance isn’t true, then how can there be remission of sins? But this is the reality we live in. No one will stop sinning completely, even with the truest repentance—and certainly not all at once. There is a difficult tension to live with in this.

But, I think that Spurgeon has understood the balance. The regenerate heart will sin, it may “do the very thing it hates”. But, because of the cross, there is no fear of judicial punishment—only loathsome regret for the sin, which gradually teaches truer and truer repentance.

We move from the fear and hatred of punishment, into grace, which teaches us to fear and hate the sin.