Godly Grief, Worldly Grief

I. Introduction
A. In our passage this week, Paul is not talking about his own experience as he wrote the severe letter (which we don't have but which he refers to in 2Cor.7:8). He has been talking about the Corinthian experience in receiving his letter (V.9), in other words, the grief they experienced as a result of his letter.
B. Now he expands on that some more in v.10-11. 
C. 2Corinthians 7:10–11 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. 11 For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter.
D. In this verse Paul describes the godly response of the Corinthians to his letter of severe rebuke, and the good fruit it produced in them.
1. In v.7 Paul began the list of the good fruit which – as Titus had reported to him – had come as a result of his severe letter: “your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me.”
a. Longing to put it right
b. Mourning over their sin
c. Zeal to be reconciled to Paul, and for him to be encouraged about them again
2. He continues the list here in v.11.
a. earnestness (to make things right with Paul again)
b. eagerness to clear yourselves (not of doing anything wrong, but of their debt toward Paul)
c. indignation (either at the ones who had undermined Paul or at themselves for tolerating it)
d. fear – alarm (either fear of God or a healthy fear of Paul the apostle - note 1Cor.4:21)
e. longing (to be reconciled to Paul, their spiritual father who had first brought them the gospel)
f. zeal (for Paul and against his detractors, for righteousness and against evil, to do the right thing)
g. punishment (i.e. punishing the evil-doer in their midst through the exercise of church discipline)
h. you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter.
(1) vindication of yourselves (i.e. a zeal to rid themselves of the stain of their sin before Paul)
(2) He’d called to them for their support when he visited, but they didn’t come through for him.
3. Lists like these are hard to translate, hard to figure out exactly what the author had in mind.
II. But the thing here which is so beneficial isn’t so much the details of their repentance, though, but the rich glimpse of true repentance it gives us.
A. For instance, we see that true repentance involves profound sorrow.
1. Repentance is a lot more than saying you’re sorry. (Some of us have terrible trouble just saying, “I’m sorry.” But repentance is so much more than that.) True repentance involves a deep grief over our sin.
2. The reason we don’t experience this grief is because we don’t really grasp the weight of our sin. Repentance is a big deal because sin is a big deal.
3. Imagine a man who commits adultery apologizing to his wife. Would he express grief? But that’s exactly what we’re doing every time we sin. We’re committing adultery! Shouldn’t we grieve?
4. This is what James is talking about in James 4:4–10 “You adulterous people! ...9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”
a. For me, the thing that’s so striking about this passage is that this kind of thing is so foreign to our church life today — taking sin seriously, lovingly but firmly confronting each other, zealous to maintain their good testimony and to protect their relationships to one another.
b. How can we expect God to exalt us if we never humble ourselves in repentance?
B. But true repentance doesn’t end with grief. There is more to the process.
1. Think about a person who is very dirty and very stinky. Cleaning the septic sludge.
2. There are tools available to clean ourselves. But before you get to the shower or the soap or anything like that, you have to begin with grief. You have to begin with “Yuck! I am disgusting!”
3. But that grief isn’t enough, is it? The grief must yield a determination to get clean. “I am disgusting” must move to “I’ve got to get clean!”
4. You don’t want a person with muck running down his legs stopping to catch a little TV or grab a snack before they go to the shower. When this happens, you know that the dirty person hasn’t really been gripped by his filthiness.
5. The Corinthians had not only experienced grief over their sin, but they were zealous to do what they had to do to make things right.
6. V.11 says the Corinthians displayed earnestness, eagerness to clear themselves, indignation, longing, and zeal.
C. Now the specific actions which should be taken to address one’s sins appropriately depend on the nature of the sin. And we’re only given one detail about what the Corinthians needed to do.
1. Paul told the congregation in Corinth that they needed to exercise church discipline against the member who not only supported the Judaizers in their criticisms of Paul, but actually opposed Paul to his face when he came to confront the problem.
2. This seems to be what Paul is referring to in v.11 when he uses the word, punishment, or avenging of wrong (NASB), or readiness to see justice done (NIV).
3. So, they followed through and brought discipline against this fellow. And it proved effective. The discipline led to the man’s repentance.
4. We know this from 2Corinthians 2:6–8, where Paul seems to be referring to this man: “For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him.”
D. So, we see the Corinthians’ grief, their determination to act, and then their follow-through in doing what they needed to do. That’s why Paul is commending them. They heard God’s word and were cut to the heart, and were impacted and transformed by God’s word.
1. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. This is in contrast with folks who hear God’s word, and even enjoy it, but then don’t do anything about it.
2. James 1:22–25 talks about this: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer-who-forgets but a doer-who-acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”
a. Here James tells us that folks who hear the word but don’t do it are like a man who looks in a mirror, but when he walks away he forgets what he looks like. You see, the word of God tells us what we’re like. And when we look into it, we see ourselves the way we really are.
b. And the idea is that when we walk away, we’ll remember what we saw and live differently.
c. But it doesn’t always happen this way. Sometimes people look into the word of God – they might even enjoy the intellectual exercise of digging into God’s word – but it has no impact on them. It never grips them. The word may tickle them, but it doesn’t pierce them. The word of God for them is entertainment of the mind but never engages their hearts.
III. There is a pattern reflected here in this passage. Think about how we become Christians. We are living in sin, but then God speaks His word into our lives. And it calls us out of our darkness and into the light, not just in our understanding, but in our whole person.
A. But this doesn’t just happen once; it doesn’t stop at conversion. It keeps happening. We fall into sin, and we need to be called out of it again and again. The Corinthians were called out by Paul.
B. Sometimes God speaks His word through a brother or sister. Sometimes through the Scriptures. Sometimes He speaks His word to us in prayer. Sometimes through a book. Sometimes He speaks through His word being taught or preached.
C. Sometimes God’s word isn’t taken to heart right away. The Corinthians didn’t listen at first; it wasn’t till they received Paul’s severe letter that they were cut to the heart. David went for months before he finally listened to the prophet Nathan.
D. Part of being a Christian is being eager to see our faults and our failures. They are there; we just don’t see them.
1. Song from the musical Wicked: “The trouble with schools is They always try to teach the wrong lesson Believe me, I've been kicked out Of enough of them to know They want you to become less callow (i.e. juvenile) Less shallow But I say: Why invite stress in? Stop studying strife And learn to live "the unexamined life" ”
2. Christians must not live unexamined lives.
3. As Christians, we know there’s something wrong with us. We need God’s light exposing our sin, and we need God’s help conforming us to the image of Christ.
4. “Search me and try me, Lord, and see what wicked way there is in me.” (Ps.139:23-24)
5. Sin isn’t just bad. Sin doesn’t just hurt others. Sin hurts us – a lot. Any person who truly cares about himself/herself is going to be anxious to get rid of sin.
6. We look at a drug addict and say, “You’re killing yourself!” And that’s just the way it is with sin.
E. This means that as Christians we also need to be listening to the Scriptures, and listening to them explained and proclaimed. And we need to be listening to God’s word speaking through our friends and family, and movies we see, and books we read, and stories we hear. We need to put ourselves in places where it is likely that God will shine the light of His word upon us and show us our sin.
IV. There is one more thing here we haven’t discussed. Paul contrasts godly grief and worldly grief.
A. We’ve already talked about godly grief, but what is worldly grief?
B. Worldly grief is the sorrow the world experiences, sorrow not infused with the grace of God.
C. All human emotions have a godly form and a worldly form. In addition to godly laughter, for instance, there is ungodly laughter. There is godly jealousy and ungodly jealousy. There is godly fear and ungodly fear. And there is godly sorrow and ungodly sorrow.
D. So what is this worldly grief which leads to death?
1. Every human experiences grief. Believers know that their grief is designed to be life-giving.
2. But non-believers don’t have that confidence.
E. The world looks to this life as the only reality. Now is all they have.
F. Sorrow doesn’t make sense to them. They see it as life-ruining.
G. They want to live happy lives and they keep experiencing sorrow instead.
H. This is a world of suffering. Life is short. Death is scary at best, and every man knows deep down that doom is sure (Rom.1:32). He is on a sinking ship and he sees no hope of escape.
I. And folks are often offended with God because of it. They are always saying, “If God really existed, and if He was really good and all-powerful, He would make life happy instead of miserable.”
J. And the Christian is sometimes tempted to interpret sorrow this way. And so the Bible is constantly reminding us about the good purpose of sorrow, and calling us to accept it and even count it as joy.
K. But the non-believer doesn’t have any other way to interpret it. For him, you go through the pain and sorrow, and then you die. They sometimes grasp for some meaning in it all, saying things like, “Everything happens for a reason,” but they have no real basis for believing that, they are just fighting the gravitational pull to despair. Because they don’t yet know Christ.
L. This is why so many in the world are desperate to escape from reality.
1. They do this either by pretending, making up a new "reality" to replace the gloomy one.
2. Or they escape by focusing on pleasant things and refusing (as far as they’re able) to think about depressing things.
3. Or they escape by means of drugs or alcohol or sex or whatever.
M. But Christians don’t do these things, not just because they’re bad, but because we don’t need any escape. When our eyes are open to what we have been given in Jesus, grief doesn’t get us down or ruin our lives. In fact, we can count it all joy because we know grief is God’s tool for our good.
1. The fact is that God’s goodness is bigger and more potent than the sorrow of this world.
2. He even uses the sorrowful things of this life to do good in us.
3. And we have the confidence that this sorrowful world is someday going to be transformed into a world of joy: "The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." (Rom.8:18)
N. These are some of the things which are so wonderful about becoming a Christian.
1. God is so ready to forgive sinners when we humble ourselves before His mighty hand. Luke 15 tells us that there is a party in heaven when a sinner repents.
2. Becoming a Christian doesn’t take all your sorrows away, but the sorrows begin to sense.
3. Becoming a Christian doesn’t take all your hardships and heartbreaks away, but you have the Lord to walk with as you experience them, and you know that they’re short-lived.
4. And you know that it will all be worthwhile in the end.