It does not necessarily entail real sorrow for sin or a turning away from it. Perhaps, in this scheme, most people who are saved fall into the carnal Christian category, people who are Christians but live like the world. As a minister I have dealt often with both kinds of people. Some struggle to know that they are Christians in fact. And I have dealt with people who are quite sure they are going to heaven though they are not living a godly life, even, in some cases, a life that conforms even outwardly to Christian standards of conduct.
Assurance is a very practical issue.
Now, let me say at this point that I reject out of hand the carnal Christian view of Christian assurance, the view that living faith, saving faith may exist in the heart of one who is not transformed in life. That position seems to me to be such an outrage against so many texts and such emphatic teaching that I do not need to spend our time disproving it. There are scores of texts like these everywhere one looks in the Bible. To take all of these statements as somehow only distinguishing between two types of Christians is a gigantic travesty of interpretation, a hundred violations of the plain meaning of words. But if we reject carnal Christianity, then we are finally left with some form of the problem of determining how one can be sure that he or she is a real Christian.