Grief

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I woke up thinking about what Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 7 (verses 10 and 11) concerning the crucial distinction between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow. Then it turned out that the scheduled morning devotion dealt with that exact passage! One sorrow hurts as much a the other but in a significantly different way. Godly sorrow, Paul tells us, leads to repentance, and through that repentance to a new yearning and zeal for God. (Repentance has been referred to as the most creative word in the Bible.) Godly sorrow changes us and leaves us with a hopeful sense that there will be other chances or opportunities, and we are even eager to see how they will unfold. Worldly sorrow, on the other hand, leads not to repentance but to its counterfeit, regret. Associated with that regret is the sense that this was the last chance and we blew it, and that there will never be another opportunity like it. Worldly sorrow leads to death, Paul wrote, and, in the case of Judas Iscariot, it did that literally, because as we know, he took his own life out of the grief of that regret over betraying Jesus, hanging himself.
A good example of godly sorrow, by way of contrast, was Peter’s sorrow over denying his Lord Jesus, when he insisted the third time that he didn’t know Jesus, even cursing for emphasis, and then heard the rooster crowing as Jesus had predicted would happen. (Matthew 26, v.74-75) This was made more painful by the fact that shortly before Peter had proudly claimed that he would NEVER deny or forsake Jesus no matter what others did. We are told the Peter “went out and wept bitterly” over his failure. There is no question that he grieved his denials, but he didn’t commit suicide over them, thank God! He repented instead, and went on to see another day, and to seize other opportunities and to perform mighty miracles in the name of Jesus, and to help anchor the early church as one of its key leaders. Today as an original apostle he remains part of the foundation of the Church. (Revelation 21, v.14) All this because he discerned with Paul the difference between the two sorrows! We will need to do the same today and in days to come, I suspect, in order to fulfill our destinies in this generation.

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