Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
2 Corinthians 7:10 NIVUK
I have a confession to make.
I am British.
I was brought up in a society that believes in ‘stiff upper lip’ – that, no matter what you are enduring, you should not show any emotion because emotional people are weak. I was raised in churches and schools where everything and everyone is always ‘fine’. You could have a house on fire, a family in hospital dying of some untreatable lurgy and pets that had run away from home, you could be friendless and living in a ditch and wearing the only clothes you possessed, but no matter what, you would be ‘fine’.
What a pile of nonsense!
Is it any wonder we have one of the highest suicide rates in the world?
These verses, and the surrounding context, are replete with emotion. And praise God for that!
But the specific emotion they discuss is not popular nowadays. There are many even now who tell us that we should not feel it at all – not because it is an emotion, but because of what emotion it is.
That is because the emotion is sorrow. More specifically (in this context), it is sorrow at my own sin.
This emotion is much misunderstood nowadays. Sin is celebrated, paraded, lauded.
Whole books are written about doing whoever seems natural and feels right. The very idea that we could so something and then feel sorrow seems to be anathema.
Yet here it is: in black and white.
But why should we feel it? And can it ever be a good thing?
Firstly, let’s look at the reason for sorrow.
Paul gives us a window into why the Corinthians felt this sorrow in one the toughest chapters he ever wrote: 1 Corinthians 5.
Corinth was a Greek port city and a centre of idol worship, as were many Greek cities. That idol worship included rampant sexual immorality – both Greek and Roman. In fact, the ancients believed that they could commune with the gods through intercourse with temple prostitutes.
And nothing much was off the agenda. The Greeks and Romans allowed what we nowadays would call bisexuality and paedophilia. It just wasn’t a problem for them.
This immorality, somewhat inevitably, leeched into the church. And in the case of Corinth, it reached its zenith in an act that very few of us would consider to be remotely okay:
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: a man is sleeping with his father’s wife.
1 Corinthians 5:1 NIVUK
This deed, which to many of us would sound like something we would only see on a chat show hosted by the late Jerry Springer, or on the tackiest form of reality TV, was expressly forbidden in Jewish law (Leviticus 18:8; Deuteronomy 27:20). It was also one of only two interdictions for Gentile believers (Acts 15:29).
Paul is fully justified to be furious about this, particularly as it exceeded the levels of immorality found in their surrounding culture.
The parallels between 1 Corinthians 5:5 and 2 Corinthians 2:5-11 lead me to believe that this is the event that caused the Corinthians sorrow: that they had tolerated a gross immorality in their church, Paul had challenged it and they had reacted – firstly out of pain and indignation, but had eventually obeyed and expelled this man from their church.
That would not have been easy. I don’t doubt that for a second. Challenging immorality, even doing it Biblically, ought never to be easy as there are emotions involved. Bringing this man to heal brought the church deep pain and sorrow.
Dealing with sin in our own lives is the same.
It’s hard. It ought to be. It is like visiting the doctor and hearing that awful verdict that you have cancer. No-one who ever received that verdict went out and threw a party. Why would you? You’re facing a battle against a deadly mortal enemy, regardless of whether or not it is treatable.
Sin is like that. It is deadly. Uncovering it in your life – either through a prayer time before God or the loving prompting of another believer – is painful. It hurts.
It causes sorrow.
That is why we see these verses:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
John 3:19-20 NIVUK
If we hurt ourselves and think we have broken a bone, we go to the hospital and get a certain wavelength of light (an x-ray) shone on the area of our body where there is tenderness and pain.
But when we sin, and we know we have sinned, are we as prepared to bring that sin to God, expose it to Him and repent, knowing that it will cause us sorrow?
If we are to get better, we must.
That brings us on to the first of two types of sorrow: Godly sorrow.
Interestingly, the Greek phrase here has a second meaning. As well as being Godly sorrow, this is a ‘sorrow towards God’. In other words, it is a sorrow that pushes the sorrowful person towards God, rather than away from Him.
Now this is quite something. You would imagine that someone who is aware of their sin would run from God, but that is not the case.
Sin often drives people towards God, to seek His forgiveness and His favour.
John tells us why:
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
1 John 1:5-7 NIVUK
In other words, living in darkness and sin is a hopelessly lonely existence. It breaks our fellowship and relationship with God and each other. Bur coming into the light by confessing our sins and seeking forgiveness, although this is difficult and upsetting, brings us back into fellowship with God and strengthens our fellowship with others.
Godly sorrow, sorrow that drives us towards God and not away from Him, is the emotion that we feel during this process.
But it also acts in another way. It brings repentance that leads to salvation.
How does it do that?
An old joke is told about a man who turned up in an Emergency Room with two badly burned ears. The nurse asked him, ‘What happened here?’
He replied, ‘I was ironing my clothes and my phone rang. Instead of picking up my phone, I picked up the iron.’
‘That explains one ear.’ the nurse replied. ‘But what about the second one.’
The man told her, ‘My phone rang again.’
In real life, if we touch something hot then we learn from it and take precautions so it won’t happen again. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.
The same should happen with sin. If we feel a genuine Godly sorrow for our sin, it should create an aversion in us towards that sin and we should have no desire to do the same thing again.
But what if we feel sad for a short time, the temptation comes again and we fall into the same trap?
Then the sorrow wasn’t Godly. It wasn’t towards God. We were only sad because our conscience bothered us. As soon as it stopped bothering us, we were fine again.
Godly sorrow creates in us an aversion to sin that drives repentance unto salvation. No other sorrow does that.
It also leaves no regret. But how?
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 NIVUK
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 NIVUK
The sting of our sin is borne by Jesus. Yes, we might not be happy that we did those things we now know were wrong – and we never should be – but they are now forgiven. So even when satan reminds us of our past, we remind him of his future.
As well as the reason for sorrow and Godly sorrow, we lastly see worldly sorrow.
And this is very striking.
Worldly sorrow leads to death. But how?
Sin is human insufficiency: either in the face of temptation or in the face of circumstances. Sin leads us to believe that God is not enough. We lose faith in Him and the people He made us.
Sin is simply not measuring up (Romans 3:23).
Worldly sorrow is like Godly sorrow in that it is caused entirely by sin. However, whereas Godly sorrow drives us to God, as we saw, worldly sorrow drives us away from Him. And since God is the only solution to our sin problem, worldly sorrow has no answers – only questions.
So what happens?
World sorrow quickly becomes overwhelmed and overcome. Worldly sorrow scrabbles around for any old answer: drink, drugs, sex, parties, music, gaming, money... anything. But none of these – literally none – can resolve the sin problem.
Worldly sorrow gives way to despair.
Existential despair. Dissonance. Dysphoria.
And with no solutions, it leads to either an angry, destructive nihilistic fatalism or, in many cases, it leads to death – either inwardly in a chronic lack of hope, or physically in suicide.
Anyway, spiritually, it leads to eternal death.
There is a clear picture of this in the Gospels.
We see two men who, in the face of a very difficult situation, reacted in similar, but still quite different ways.
Peter denied Jesus three times (Matthew 26:69-75; Mark 14:66-72; Luke 22:54-62; John 18:15-18, 25-27). Three of these four accounts show Peter as weeping bitterly – he feels sorrow. However, Peter was restored, both by a personal visitation from the Risen Jesus (Luke 24:34) and by Jesus at the Sea of Galilee (John 21).
Peter’s sorrow was clearly a Godly sorrow: it drove him back to Jesus.
However, Judas’ was different. He betrayed Jesus, selling him to the Jewish authorities for a paltry price – equivalent to the price of a slave (Matthew 26:14-15, see Exodus 21:32). His remorse overcame him, so much that he took his own life (Matthew 27:3-5).
His sorrow was worldly: it cost Him everything.
During Lockdown, a mental health crisis emerged, particularly among our young people. In the darker sides of the Internet, groups exist for those who are overcome with sorrow over who they are and what they are achieving. These are not support groups. They do not lift people up. They do not offer them a way out. Instead they convince people they are helpless and worthless and that this earth would be better off without them. These horrible, horrible people encourage those who are struggling to commit suicide.
In my mind, they should face at least a manslaughter charge, if not murder. This is just plain evil.
There is way out if we are overcome by our sins, our failings and our inadequacies. And it is not suicide.
We must firstly understand the reason for our sorrow – what it has that has made us feel so bad.
Then we must understand the difference between sorrow that drives us to God and sorrow that drives us away from Him, and then choose to run to God.
Coming into the light surrounding God to confess our sin and deal with our sorrow might be difficult, but it is always way better than skulking in the shadows, alone, exposed and dying ever more by the second.
So yes, sorrow is never joyful. Of course not: it would not be sorrow otherwise. And of course it is not comfortable.
But the pathway to eternal joy is through th e darkness of sorrow, if we are willing to embrace it and come to God for forgiveness.
My prayer is that you will.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, it is never easy to admit that I'm wrong and not good enough. It doesn’t make me feel good at all. And yet it’s true. Help me to embrace the sorrow that comes from bring wrong and use it to drive me to the right- to You. Amen.
Questions
1. What can we learn from the reasons for the sorrow in these verses that help us understand why we feel sorrow?
2. Do you feel sorrow when you sin?
3. What is it about this sorrow that is good for us? What good effects does it have? Are you willing to embrace it?
Comments