sermonette: Godly Sorrow

Martin G. Collins
Given 25-Jan-97; Sermon #274s; 18 minutes

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Back in the early 1970s, the Worldwide Church of God began a nationwide public evangelizing campaign. If you will remember (those of you who were around), Garner Ted Armstrong was leading those campaigns, and speaking in different major cities. And in many cases, these campaigns brought into the church some very worldly people. And there was one family who came into the church (where I was attending at the time) with their four children and one of their sons, we will call him Jim, was my age, and we became friends.

Although very jovial from an outward appearance, Jim actually lived a life of worldly sorrow. Jim had a total disrespect for authority. To give you an example of what I mean, by the time he was in his early 20s, he had 75 speeding tickets. And the judges still let him keep his license continually because Jim showed such an attitude of remorse and sorrow, that he was able to keep it.

That is “the sorrow of the world” in its finest sense, so to speak.

He had an uncontrollable temper. At age 18, a fight on the street corner landed him in jail. When the police showed up at the street corner that he was fighting on, he began to run and immediately they suspected drugs and arrested him and threw him in jail. Jim was extremely sorry that his parents had to come in and bail him out of jail that night. Again, the sorrow of the world.

Jim had a drinking problem which added to all of the rest of the problems that we are looking at here. When he drank, he thought he owned the world, and became very aggressive, violent, and obnoxious. So after he was sober, and back with his friends, his friends were all angry at him again. Jim was very sorry for what he did; very remorseful and very down about it all. Again, worldly sorrow.

He was a bad driver on the top of all of this, adding to the problem. It is a wonder any of us lived that were around him: One time he was driving his Triumph Spitfire (if you are familiar with those really small cars; they are almost like a shoe that you put on), it is a sports car, a convertible, and he had two friends sitting on the back with their feet in the seat as he drove around. I had been asked if I wanted to go that night, and I just had a bad feeling about it, and said no.

Well, that night as he was going around a corner or curve at a high speed, the wheel broke off, and the two flew out of the top of the car; it flipped the car three or four times, and it ended up landing against the tree, otherwise I guess it would have continued to flip more times. My best friend flew out of the top of the car, and landed on his head in the road, and broke two vertebrae, so he ended up in the hospital in traction.

Well, we went in to visit this friend in traction, and Jim was in tears, very remorseful, very sorry for what he did; but it did not change his driving. He went right back to doing it again—an example of sorrow of the world.

He had sexual urges as you can imagine what that caused in pain to people, and he was sorry for that.

The last I heard of Jim was about 10 years ago. He was in prison, and another friend of mine had seen him, and he had been lifting weights and was all bulked up, just looked like a bloated toad, so to speak, while in prison. Jim was very sorry for being in prison, as you would imagine. His freedom had been taken away. He was embarrassed, to put it frankly, that he was in prison. But of all the sorrow that Jim had in his life, it did not change him. It did not change him one iota. He just got worse and worse and worse.

Proverbs 22:8 He who sows iniquity will reap sorrow.

Certainly Jim sowed that iniquity, and he reaped all the sorrow from it. He was a prime example of the fulfillment of that scripture. It never led Jim to repentance at all.

The sorrow of the world is the sorrow that is felt by the worldly. The sorrow is not at sin itself but at its consequences, which we see very clearly in Jim's example.

Turn with me to Exodus 9. We will look at a biblical example of someone that was very sorry for what was happening. You are very familiar with this. This is the seventh plague on Egypt, and Pharaoh is the person who was sorrowful.

Exodus 9:27-29 And Pharaoh sent and called for Moses and Aaron, and said to them, "I have sinned this time. The LORD is righteous, and my people and I are wicked. Entreat the LORD, that there may be no more mighty thundering and hail, for it is enough. I will let you go, and you shall stay no longer." So Moses said to him, "As soon as I have gone out of the city, I will spread out my hands to the LORD; the thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, that you may know that the earth is the LORD's.”

Now skipping down to verse 34.

Exodus 9:34-35 And when Pharaoh saw that rain, the hail, and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet more; and he hardened his heart, he and his servants. So the heart of Pharaoh was hard; neither would he let the children of Israel go, as the Lord had spoken by Moses.

So there was a very strong example of sorrow of the world. Pharaoh was sorry while he was having the event come upon him, but as soon as they were relinquished or pulled away, he went right back to sinning in the same way without any change, or remorse, or repentance. The sorrow of the world may include these things.

Sorrow may arise from the loss of friends or property; from disappointment; from shame or disgrace. Take, for example, a man who is guilty of forgery, or guilty of perjury, or any disgraceful crime. He is very sorry when his family is affected, and he ends up in jail similar to Jim's example.

It is sorrow for sin that overwhelms the mind with guilt, but without repentance to God.

People do things wrong and feel guilty about it. But it is not sorrow that leads to repentance, so it is the sorrow of the world—worldly sorrow. They go right back to doing what they had done all along.

Turn with me to II Corinthians 7 where Paul refers to the sorrow of the world, which arises from sin, which does not lead to God for forgiveness.

II Corinthians 7:9 Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing.

Paul is writing here about the sorrow that he caused to the people in Corinth, having to do with the previous letter that he wrote to them. After he wrote it, apparently, as he talks about in this chapter, he felt some regret about writing it because he felt that it would make the people too depressed and sorrowful from it. But when he saw the result of what happened from that letter, he was very pleased that he wrote it, and the sorrow that the letter brought upon the people. It may possibly be from the sin that we know about in the Corinthian church, the sensual sin that was there that they had not rid themselves of.

Continue on in verse 10 to see the key verse here in this sermonette.

II Corinthians 7:10 For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.

So we see there the contrasts shown between the sorrow of the world and godly sorrow.

There are at least three things that the phrase, “godly sorrow” implies here.

1. Godly sorrow comes from viewing sin as God views it. A man has a certain view of sin—how he looks at a sin that has been committed. But God has a totally different view of sin. When man looks at sin, man looks at it on how it has affected him, and how it has affected someone maybe in close proximity to him. But God sees it in a much wider view. He sees it as not only affecting the person, but society, and the future generations. It is appalling to God. It is an evil that God cannot allow to continue in His people. And so, He reacts to that sin.

Now, if a person has a mind that is willing to react to the sin, then God will help them to overcome it.

2. This phrase implies that godly sorrow arises from seeing that sin is committed against the holy and just God. So, many people in this world see “sins,” or “their sins that are committed,” or they think they see them, but their remorse is within themselves. They do not see their sin as being committed against God.

Let us take a look at a biblical example. I am just going to refer to it, we will not turn to it. Matthew 26 records the example of Peter's godly sorrow after he denied Christ three times.

Matthew 26:75 And Peter remembered the word of Jesus who had said to him, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” Then he went out and wept bitterly.

Now, that could have been just the sorrow of the world, but as we see later in his life, his submission and his service to God, that was godly sorrow that he was showing there. It was the beginning of godly sorrow that would continue in everything he did from that point on.

David's sin with Bathsheba was a great sin committed against all of Israel. But it seems lost and moved into insignificance against the sin that it was against God Himself. David was experiencing this godly sorrow when he wrote:

Psalm 51:4 Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.

So, David's great remorse and godly sorrow for the sin that he had committed with Bathsheba he realized was against God Himself, the eternal God of all things, and not only against the nation of Israel, and Bathsheba, and the child that they bore.

3. Godly sorrow leads us to God through repentance to obtain forgiveness. A truly repentant person seeks God for forgiveness. Sorrow without genuine repentance is not godly sorrow, but it is the sorrow of the world because it will only lead to going to the world for consolation.

For example, if an individual is sorry for a sin they have committed, or is just sorrowful in general, where do they go for comfort and consolation? Well, they go to the store, and they buy themselves something to make themselves feel better. Or in an extreme case they may go out and get drunk to forget their cares. This is a sorrow of the world rather than godly sorrow. Godly sorrow brings a person to repentance to salvation. Godly sorrow is not repentance, but it produces repentance. Look again at II Corinthians 7, verse 10.

II Corinthians 7:10 For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.

“For godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, not to be regretted.” That phrase is from the New King James Version. In the Old King James version, the phrase says, “Worketh repentance to salvation, not to be repented of.” That is a little bit confusing on the surface. So I looked at several translations, and tried to pull out what I thought would be a good translation of this phrase. I took Goodspeed’s New Testament: An American Translation. I thought he translated this phrase fairly well. He said:

For the pain that God approves results in a repentance that leads to salvation, and leaves no regrets.

I thought that was a good way of putting that.

Matthew 27:3 says that Judas was remorseful. Again, his sorrow and his remorse obviously was not godly sorrow; it was sorrow of the world, because he went out and he committed suicide, which in an extreme case is another way that the world deals with the sorrow that they have, and cannot deal with.

Reading on in II Corinthians 7, verse 11 shows the impact that godly sorrow can have on us.

II Corinthians 7:11 For observe this very thing, that you sorrowed in a godly manner: What diligence it produced in you, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what vindication! In all things you proved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

Paul is speaking here of whatever the sin was that they were allowing in their congregation there, possibly in that sexual sin, and he is saying, “This is what it produced in you as a congregation.”

Now again, I paraphrase this taking the Goodspeed, Phillips, and also the Conybeare translations. And putting those together, this is what this verse in a sense means. And I quote,

You can look back now and see how the hand of God was in that sorrow. Look how seriously it made you think, how eager it made you to prove your innocence, how you righted the wrong done.

So we see that godly sorrow does stir us to action. It causes us to do something about the sin that we have committed. That is where the repentance comes in. It causes, it stirs us to repent in godly sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 7:3 Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better.

This is true because it stirs us to action, as we have just seen. When we mourn over sin as committed against God, we seek God for forgiveness. This gives us a commitment to seek God.

If we sin, and we realize it is against God, and it affects more than just ourselves, we turn around and we begin to repent of that sin. But God has to help us with that in order for us to overcome our sins, because humanly, we are just not capable of doing it on our own. So we have to make the effort to overcome our sins.

The opposite of sorrow is joy. The sorrow of the world brings more sorrow, but godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, which brings long-lasting joy.

Turn with me to John 16 which records Christ's conversation with His disciples just before His arrest and crucifixion. Here, Christ realized that the disciples were puzzled at why He was saying that they would sorrow for a while, and then have joy, and then sorrow again for a while. And so He told them these things about sorrow in order to comfort them, and to set down a principle that holds true for us today.

John 16:20 “Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy.”

John 16:22-24 “Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you. And in that day you will ask Me nothing. Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you. Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”

It is a biblical principle that if we ask in accordance with God's will, and in the right attitude, that God will give us what we need. And the principle holds true here with godly sorrow. Godly sorrow is something that we have to ask for. It just does not come naturally. And when God provides that godly sorrow for the sins that we have committed, it leads us to repentance and then on to salvation.

In closing,

Psalm 32:10 Many sorrows shall be to the wicked; but he who trusts in the Lord, mercy shall surround him.