Repentance: The Fruit of a Godly Grief

Introduction

In the last few weeks we’ve looked at the conclusion of Joseph’s story in the book of Genesis and how it concluded with a glorious reunion with his brothers through a godly reconciliation. Today we are going to look at a NT example that is, in a lot of ways, very similar. Instead of Joseph and his brothers, the characters are Paul and the Corinthian church. Although they hadn’t sold him into slavery they had let his ministry, the ministry of the Gospel, be challenged endangering not only their relationship with their beloved Apostle, but with Christ as well. For to reject Paul was to reject the message he spoke to them. As we look at how this church came to embrace repentance through a godly grief, we can study it and understand for ourselves what repentance is and how we can put it into practice in our own lives.

The Distress of the Corinthians

The Corinthian’s Sin

As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, he writes as one who was burdened and is now comforted to a church who was grieved and now has reason to rejoice with him. This is because reconciliation has been achieved through repentance. But what exactly was this sin the Corinthians were repenting of? (Explain)

Paul’s Hurtful Letter

2 Corinthians 2:4 (ESV)

4 For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.

When Paul heard that his letter had been recieved well and that the one causing trouble had been disciplined and had himself repented, he rejoiced and extended forgiveness and fellowship to the one who had wronged both him and the church. It was clear that the grief caused by that painful letter had been a godly grief which did not mean the loss of their relationship with Paul and with God, but rather restored them.

This is the real cause of the joy and comfort that Paul is experiencing. He tells them in verse 5 that when he came into Macedonia he was afflicted himself, both outwardly and inwardly. But God gave him comfort when Titus came with their latest letter, the reply to Paul’s painful letter. This letter communicated their longing, mourning, and zeal for Paul and his ministry to them. Paul admits in verse 8 that, although he did regret sending that letter at first because it hurt them, in the end he did not regret it because of how God had used it to bring reconciliation between Paul and the Corinthians. It had made them long for the affection of their dear friend and apostle. It had made them mourn the way they had sinned against him and against God. And it made them zealous for have that relationship mended and Paul’s ministry among them renewed.

The Corinthians Grief

These were to Paul fruits of the repentance of the Corinthians, and you can sense his heart and its deep longing for them throughout the entire letter. In this letter Paul means to bring them comfort while still instructing them and giving them a firm, Biblical foundation for why they should trust him and follow his ministry. He assures them that his love for them was not vacillating, but was present both in his reproof as well as comfort in their godly grief.

In our text, their grief is defined as being godly or, literally, according to God. That is, a grief in line with and in submission to God’s will. It’s the kind of grief someone living “according to God” would have. This is a pain that ends up filling positive and godly purpose, like the pain of taking a splinter out of your hand. Necessary, good, and relieving when it’s all done with, but very painful in the moment.

What is the good end to this godly grief? Repentance. We get the idea that the fact thier grief is a godly grief is proved by the repentance that it bears. Thus, a godly grief is defined for us as one that leads to repentance.

This is important for us to understand because in this life we have all kinds of griefs and sorrows, and more are promised in the Christian life. IF we are going to go through these griefs, don’t we want to know that they will end in gain and not in loss? Would you be willing to go through a painful opperation if you didn’t know the outcome? So it is important for us to understand our griefs in the CHristian life and how we can make sure they are godly ones that will bear fruit, not worldy ones that produce death (vs 10).

Repentance causes this grief to be worth it (I rejoice). Because the end of their emotional pain was repentance, Paul actually says he can rejoice as a result. For Paul, there are things that are absolutely worth suffering for. He is not being unfeeling. In fact, we saw how he has also been greatly grieved by writing that letter and by them. In chapter 6 he pleads that they would open their hearts to him just as he has opened up to them.

Rather, Paul knows that their grief will lead to their gain and to his as well, and so it is worth rejoicing. Don’t you want the outcome of the pain in your life to be something worth rejoicing about?

Paul says this grief causes no loss if it brings about repentance. If the Corinthians had embraced pride and refused to truly repent, there would have been great loss for them and for Paul. As it is, reconciliation could happen because of their repentance and so the temporary grief could turn to comfort and joy.

What Repentance is

It’s not hard to see the parallels between this situation and what we have been seeing in the life of Joseph and his family. In that situation, temporary grief was necessary for the joy and comfort of reconciliation to happen. Also, repentance was necessary for reconciliation then just as it is in Paul’s context. But what is repentance exactly? If it is the golden key that unlocks this comfort, joy, and unity in Christ, it is important we know what it is.

Even beyond that, we are told elsewhere in the NT that repentance is necessary to know God. When Jesus came, he came preaching that people repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand. In Acts 2:38, Peter tells the people he was preaching to that their response should be to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. So we see that it must be a top priority for us to understand what repentance is and how we go about practicing it. First we will look at what it is in order to get a clear picture of it, and then we will look at what it is not in order to erase any false ideas we might have about it.

To change one’s mind.

The most common way that the Greek word we translate as “repentance” is defined is that it is a change of mind. That is to say, someone who has repented has come to a way of thinking about things that is noticeably different from how they thought before. A repentant person does not stubbornly hold to what they have always thought or believed, nor do they pretend like they always thought in the new way. Repentance is to come to the realization that you were wrong to think a certain way about something and to begin thinking another way.

You may notice that by itself this word has little to do with sin. Someone could theoretically repent from almost anything, even from something good to something bad. However, in Scripture repentance is always seen in a positive light. Ethically, to repent is not only to change your thinking, but to change it positively. It is used to describe someone who once through a wrong way and now thinks a right way.

To change one’s life.

Although the word specifically refers to our thinking, it is not limited to it. Nor does it refer to any change of mind. The fact that I used to have a premilleniel eschatology and now am amilleniel is not repentance just because I changed my mind about something. We also know that there are those who have accepted Christianity in their minds, but have not come to Christ in their hearts. So we must understand that repentance is not simply having a change of mind. We may better define by saying that it is means to change our lives.

Changing our mind is not truly complete until we have consistently changed our lives to conform to this new truth we understand. If I agree that Jesus is the Christ who saves all who believe on him but I do not submit my life to him or trust his saving work I have not truly repented. So repentance means to change my mind in such a way that I am not only intellectually convinced of something, but I am convinced enough to change the way I live in order to be consistant with how I now think.

To follow a person.

Finally, repentance in Scripture speaks to a specific kind of change of mind and life. It’s not just a positive change, and not just a life-changing change, it is a change of mind and life in a very specific area. What area is that? To repent, when it comes down to it, simply means to follow Jesus Christ completely and totally in the ways he has called us to follow him. When Jesus called some Galilean fishermen to follow him, he was calling them to repent. His calling would drastically change how they think and how they live, but ultimately the real focus of repentance is following a person, the person of Jesus Christ.

What Repentance is not

This is so important and it is why I now want to go over what repentance is not. Because unfortunately when many Christians think of repentance, this is not at all what they have in mind. Notice that in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 he tells his listeners to repent and be baptized. Faith in Christ and conformity to his calling is what Peter means when he says “repent”. The Baptism is given to those who repent because those who repent are those who follow Christ. Let’s contrast that with what repentance is not.

It is not merely being sorry

First, repentance is not just being sorry. It is not merely an emotional experience of guilt and shame. How fearful it is for those who see an emotional response in themselves to a call for repentance and think that is repentance. Repentance will affect your emotions yes, but it is not limited to them. Nor is someone who at a certain time lacking those emotions not repenting.

While you may feel a sense of guilt over your sin, this is not the same as repentance. Now guilt is a proper response to sin, especially in the heart of someone who does follow Christ, and God may indeed use a sense of guilt to bring us to true repentance, but it is not itself repentance. If we feel guilt for our sin, we should thank God for it as the Holy Spirit can use it to humble us into repentance, but we should not rest in guilt as a sign of our repentance. Guilt can be unspiritual, unfruitful, and even false. The grief the Corinthians felt was only celebrated by Paul when it brought forth the fruit of repentance.

It is not merely changing your opinion

Secondly, it is not merely changing your opinion. If you were once an atheist or Muslim or Mormon and became convinced of the truth of Scripture that is not repentance. We’ve already looked at why that is; repentance is not just an intellectual event, it is a holistic event. It’s a change in our whole lives that is the result of believing the Gospel and following Christ as his disciple.

It is not merely cessation of problematic behaiviour

Third, repentance doesn’t mean a stop to problematic or sinful behaiviour. I want to make it clear, however, that if you have truly repented it will bear the fruit of turning away from sin and towards good works prepared for us in Christ. But repentance means more than simply stopping a sinful practice. The world has the power to stop sinful practices if they put their mind to it.

There are wordly people who have a whole lot more control over themselves and their habits than I do. There are followers of false religions who have gone to unimaginable lengths to stop certain sinful practices and have succeeded. Repentance is not the ability to stop practicing an individual sin, its not even the ability to make your life as a whole less sinful, repentance is the obedient answer to the call to come to Christ in faith. The call to repentance is the radical call to leave the way we used to live, the thoughts we used to think, and the goals we used to pursue, and come to Christ in faith, submitting all we are to him because we are now his disciples. If we think of repentance as tied directly to our works rather than to faith in Christ, we are inevitably going to create a doctrine of works-based righteousness.

It is not merely doing the right things.

Forth, repentance is not merely doing the right things. This is sort of the other side of the coin for the previous point that repentance is not merely to stop sinning. Repentance does lead us to walk in good works.

Ephesians 2:10 ESV

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Notice that it does not say, “Our good works have made us his workmanship.” It becomes clear that repentance is the direct result of something God does in us by his grace. Scholars say that repentance in the NT is largely synonymous with conversion. When we came to faith we converted, and through sanctification we continue to convert from old worldliness to the likeness of Christ. Our good works are then a result of that conversion, they are not the conversion itself.

Repentance, as the New Testament and in the Christian life, can be summerized like this:

It is the conversion of ourselves from being a slave to sin to being a slave to Righteousness.

It is to stop worshipping ourselves and to worship Christ.

It is to reject lies and pursue the truth of God’s Word.

It is to reject self reliance and embrace humble faith in Christ and his Work.

It is to reject our corrupted fleshly desires and embrace the Holy Spirit and the new person he makes God’s people into.

Repentance is to reject who you were without Christ and embrace who you are in him by faith in his grace.

Grieved without Loss

Repentance for the Corinthians.

With this understanding of what repentance is, what did it mean for the Corinthians to repent? And how did their grief lead them to repentance?

We saw that grief itself is not repentance, and in fact Paul speaks of of a grief that does not lead to repentance. But grief is often the tool God uses to bring us to repentance. Look at the way James describes repentance for the church he is writing to.

James 4:7–10 ESV

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Although the word “repent” is not there, the idea certainly is. James calls his readers to turn away from the desires of the flesh (James 4:1) and the worldliness and spiritual adultery they have committed by encouraging worldliness in their hearts. In his instruction as to how they can practice repentance is to embrace sorrow and brokenness. Sorrow and brokenness, when felt in a genuine way, humbles us and makes our hearts fertile for the work of God.

For the Corinthians, God did this in them through Paul’s painful letter. It humbled them, made them see that they were not submitted to Christ, and their response was to embrace discipleship and thus embrace their preacher and apostle, Paul.

How do we repent?

So how do we repent? What exactly are we expecting people to do when we say, “you must repent?” This is a difficult question to answer because, although the idea of repentance is rather simple when we boil it down to conversion. But conversion is impossible. While it is possible for us to change our mind or change our habits in our flesh, it is impossible for us to change ourselves so thoroughly, so supernaturally, in a way that is so against our nature that in a sense we die in the process. Conversion is as impossible as a dead man crawling out of his grave. So when we are called to repent, what exactly are we being called to?

The call to repentance is a call to those with the Spirit at work in their heart.

This makes repentance completely a work of God and the call for repentance like the spreading of the seed of the Gospel, knowing that only the ground fertilized by the Spirit is able to bear its fruit.

This does not give an excuse to those who do not heed the call to repentance. All people are guilty of sin, and the fact that God gives grace to some to repent does not mean you are not responsible for your sin and your sinful refusal to repent.

The fact the repentance is a gift of God does not negate the fact that it is something to be pursued actively. If someone truly desires repentance it is likely that they are already under the saving grace of God. Repentance truly sought is repentance accomplished. Just like the desire to love my wife more proves the love that already exists, so the desire for repentance proves a Spiritual work in the heart.

If this is true, why is the call of repentance necessary?

It is necessary because it is God’s appointed means by which repentance is accomplished. When God’s elect hear the Gospel preached, it is then that the Spirit works salvation in their hearts.

Likewise, Christians also must be called to repentance at times by each other because God uses his church to sanctify us. In the case of the Corinthians, God used his Apostle and his painful letter to bring the Spirit’s work in them to fruition. While God is a sovereign God and repentance is a work of pure grace, God uses means to bring his work about. God uses us in calling the world to a justifying repentance and calling believers in a sanctifying repentance, and this should be our motivation

To repent, we need to take up our cross and follow Christ.

Embracing Godly Grief as a tool for our humility.

We already looked at how God used grief to bring the Corinthians to repentance. We also saw how in James 4 the Apostle’s answer to worldliness and sin in our hearts is to be wretched and mourn in order to humble ourselves that God may exalt us in due time.

This wretchedness and grief is necessary because:

It denies the flesh its desires.

It puts us in a place where we are miserable as we are and will therefore long for a state that is much better. To mourn in our present, sinful, worldly condition is to simply be emotionally and spiritually honest with the tragedy of it. It goes beyond a confession of our weakness and sin and brings an experience of it into our entire being. This will show us the futility of the wrong way, the glory of the right way, and cause us to turn to that.

2. It denies pride its object.

As long as we have something to be proud of in ourselves we will not be able to repent.

Philippians 3:7 ESV

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

That is, whatever he had to be proud of in his life as a Pharisee he disavows to gain Christ. God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble, so if we desire the grace of God we will must reject pride. James unmistakably links humility with a godly grief and misery,

James 4:9–10 ESV

Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Pride is inherent in all of our hearts. It is something that is part of our sinful nature and something that must be repented from. Repentance relinquishes our control and recognizes God’s sovereignty, and nowhere in that is there room for pride. While we can certainly be proud in suffering and misery, it is much more difficult. We are put in a place where we are vulnerable, where we lack self-sufficiency, and where things are out of our control. While misery is something we naturally avoid, Scripture makes it clear that a season of misery is a blessing if it leads to repentance. With that being the case, it is good for Christians to orientate their own view of misery and happiness around this. In our everyday repentance, God graciously humbles us by various means. We must be willing to be humbled by them in order that repentance might be the fruit.

Why should I pursue repentance in my life if it is a work of God?

Because you need it.

Repentance is the only means by which someone can know God and experience salvation. Is this salvation not precious enough to pursue? Is God not a gracious Father who gives his Spirit to those who ask him in faith? If these are true, than you have every reason in the world to pursue repentance.

Conclusion

When it comes to the topic of repentance, there is a different calling to the unbeliever and the believer.

To the unbeliever, your repentance is necessary for your salvation. Up until now, you have been a slave to sin serving yourself and the passions of your flesh in one way or another, whether openly or under the guise of religious worship. The call to repentance for you is to come to Christ in faith. He alone can change your mind and your heart from what it is now to what it should be in him. Only he can bear the fruit of repentance in you, but you need only come for him to work it in you. The call for you is to humble yourself and embrace a godly grief that will lead you to him in faith.

To the believer, you are no stranger to repentance. It is a work that God has done in your before, and it is one he continues to work in you today. Everything God does in your life he does to make you more like Christ and submit to Christ’s lordship, which means he does it to bring you to greater lengths of repentance. Repentance begins at our salvation, but it does not finish until we make it to our eternal home in glory. When you were saved, you are 100% justified by the blood of Christ and are a new man or woman in him. But you remain in the flesh, and the sinful desires of the flesh need to still be repented of. Sanctification is the continued process of repentance in our lives, and its presence is a sign that the Spirit who works that repentance out dwells in you.

Whoever you are, repentance is both the most necessary and the most rewarding thing you can do. Turning to Christ, pursing Christ, walking with him, becoming like him, submitting to him, and denying anything that takes you away from him, these are the fruits of true repentance. I’m not telling you you need to stop sinning, or that you need to give this much or pray this much or read this much of your bible or serve this much or cry this much or fast this much, I’m telling you that you need to follow Jesus. Following Jesus will mean times of misery and grief, and I hope you can see in this text our need to embrace those times as special moments of grace to be more like him.