Onwards and Upward
2 Corinthians 7:10 The kind of sorrow God wants makes people decide to change their lives. This leads them to salvation, and we cannot be sorry for that. But the kind of sorrow the world has will bring death.
When we make a mistake (and seriously, who doesn’t?!) we have two choices. We can either wallow in it or learn from it. We can either use it as a stepping stone to more mistakes or we can take what I call the onward and upward approach. Which will it be?
We all know that feeling of waking up one day – it’s a new day … but then, all of a sudden we remember that stupid thing we did yesterday; that person we hurt; how we failed God. And the sorrow is like a knife to the heart.
The question is, what do you do with that sorrow? There are a couple of different ways to handle it. It turns out that one way is a good way, the other is a bad way. One sort of sorrow can have positive outcomes in your life, the other sort … well, not so much. Have a listen to how God puts it through the Apostle Paul:
2 Corinthians 7:10 The kind of sorrow God wants makes people decide to change their lives. This leads them to salvation, and we cannot be sorry for that. But the kind of sorrow the world has will bring death.
Let’s talk about the bad kind of sorrow first – the one that the world has, the one that leads to death. So often, when people experience that kind of sorrow, it heads into a downward spiral – into worse behaviour, into despondency, into simply giving up.
But the sort of sorrow that God wants us to have is the sort that leads us to change our lives. It’s remorse that leads to repentance – literally – to turning our lives around, away from the wrong that we’ve been doing and back to God.
The kind of sorrow God wants makes people decide to change their lives. This leads them to salvation, and we cannot be sorry for that.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
Blessed by this devotion?
Share it with a friend!
Respond
Lisa Sheridan
Thank you Berni, I find this helpful! Now by God’s grace, may I not be “a forgetful hearer, but an ...
more
Thank you Berni, I find this helpful! Now by God’s grace, may I not be “a forgetful hearer, but an effectual doer”! (James 1:25)
Michael Dundee
Very true and timely as I am battling an addiction. We must learn from our failures and try not to continue making the ...
more
Very true and timely as I am battling an addiction.
We must learn from our failures and try not to continue making the same errors. The best way to please God and grow spiritually, is to repent any and all actions, thoughts that damage our relationship with the true God!
We have such a prize possession in our privileged relationship with our Heavenly Father, and His only Son, Christ Jesus!