Godly Grief Produces Repentance (2 Corinthians 7)

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today we are going to be looking at 2 Corinthians chapter seven. But before we get to our lesson, I wanted to make a mention of something that I think is important to remind everyone of.

As we are going through these daily Bible studies that I'm giving, and sometimes I give them from my studio at home, sometimes I give them from my car, like I'm doing right now. Sometimes I give them from the studio at church.

These are only small Bible studies taken from one or two verses, sometimes even a half a verse from the passage that we're looking at. But my encouragement to you is to please remember that the goal of this is to encourage you to read the whole chapter every day.

The goal that we have set for our church this year is that everybody is going to be reading through the New Testament together, one chapter at a time. And if you don't know, you can go onto our website, sgfcjacks .org, and you can download a copy of our daily Bible reading program.

And the way that we have it set up is you're reading through the New Testament in the order that we believe that the books were written. And so I wanna encourage you, because there's so much more in these chapters that I'm able to give.

I'm trying to keep these daily Bible studies to seven to eight minutes at the most. Sometimes they go up to 10 minutes. And of course, I've been doing interviews on the weekends. Those can go 20 minutes or so.

But I've been trying to keep these relatively short because I know that this is just one more thing that is being added to your day. And I don't want it to be a whole sermon, but basically a series of miniature sermons all put together for you to use over coffee in the morning as you're getting ready to go about your day, just to basically spend the morning with you and encouraging you in the word.

Godly Grief Versus Worldly Grief

And so today we're going to be looking at 2 Corinthians chapter seven. And the apostle Paul says something very interesting in this passage. He's talking about the subject of godly grief. And he says, godly grief leads us to repentance, produces repentance, but that worldly grief leads to death.

So godly grief leads to repentance and worldly grief leads to death. And this one statement is based on something that he's saying. He's saying that he had sent a letter to the Corinthians and it had caused them grief.

And that that wasn't necessarily his intention. He wasn't intending to grieve them. But at the same time, there is a good part of grief. There's a good application of grief. If you hear a message from a man of God and that message cuts you to the heart and that creates grief in your heart and that grief leads you to repentance, then that's godly grief because that's God using something that is a difficult and grievous thing to lead you out of something, out of some kind of a sin or out of some kind of a lifestyle into a repentant lifestyle.

And so that's Paul's point. Godly grief leads to repentance. But then he goes on to say, but worldly grief leads to death. And so what exactly he's referring to here, what it seems to be, he's saying is that there's two different types of ways that we can be grieved.

We can be grieved in a godly way that leads us toward a godly end, which is repentance. Or we can be grieved simply in a worldly way. And probably the example of this from the Bible would be the difference in the responses of Judas and Peter.

Both Judas and Peter denied Christ in a sense. Judas, of course, denied Christ by selling him into the hands of the Jewish leaders. He sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and he was grieved. The Bible says that he grieved so much that he went out and committed suicide.

That is true grief. And I think that's an example of grief, worldly grief leading to death. But it didn't lead to repentance. But on the other hand, you have Peter. Peter has the opportunity to see the Lord after his resurrection.

Peter's Restoration After Denial

And Jesus brings him to the place where he asks him three times, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And of course, Peter says, Lord, you know, I love you. Lord, you know, I love you. And it says that these questions were difficult for Peter because Jesus kept asking him.

And I think the reason why he asked him three times, do you love me? Is because he denied Jesus three times. And therefore, Jesus is giving this threefold opportunity to be restored because Peter had denied Jesus three times and here's the threefold opportunity for restoration.

Do you love me? Yes, you know, I love you. And of course, he repeats that statement in a different way in three times. So here again, there's two figures, two examples to us. When we face something where we are challenged with our sin, are we challenged to draw closer to God in repentance or are we challenged to sink further away from God and to sink into despair and to depression and further into depravity?

And so that's a big question that we have to ask ourselves. What happens when we hear a man of God preach a message of repentance? Does that encourage us to repent or does that encourage us to withdraw?

And the apostle Paul says that if it's a grief that leads to repentance, then it is a godly grief. And so my encouragement to you today is that if you're hearing the word of God from a man of God and it's encouraging you to repent and it grieves your heart, then to be thankful for that grief, to be thankful that there's a man of God who's willing to speak difficult things into your life because it's not easy.

As a preacher, I can tell you, it is hard to preach hard things. It would be much easier to get up and simply preach easy, soft messages that make everyone feel good. But when you have to get up and call people to repentance, to call people to change, to call people to look at their lives differently, and people leave, some people leave very angry having heard a message like that.

I've had several, I've had people get up in the middle of my messages and leave with smoke falling out of their ears as if it were, they were so angry. And as a man who's preaching, of course, I don't take pride in that, oh, look, I was able to make this person angry.

It's easy to make people angry. But my prayer is that that grief would lead them to repentance rather than to withdrawal. Because again, as Paul says, godly grief leads to repentance. And if the man of God in your life is preaching to you a message that causes grief, be thankful because it's a hard message to preach.

And even more so, it's one that the Lord is using in your life to bring you to repentance. So I hope that this has been helpful for you today. I hope these are every day are helpful. And I encourage you, if they are, to please let me know because I'm very thankful when I hear from folks, especially if you have questions about anything, I'm more than willing to entertain and answer those questions as best I can.

So thank you again for watching. May God bless your day. Thank you for tuning in to Coffee with a Calvinist. I wanna remind you that if you like what you have seen, please take a moment and thumbs up this video if you're watching it on YouTube.

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My name is Keith and I've been your Calvinist.