Sorrow That Leads to Change
2 Corinthians 7:9,10 Now I am happy, not because you were made sad, but because your sorrow made you decide to change. That is what God wanted, so you were not hurt by us in any way. 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.
Sorrow isn’t something that we’d ever wish upon ourselves. Why would we? And yet, what if I told you that there’s one type of sorrow that God wants for us; that’s actually … good for us?
Life has its ups and its downs and one of the real downers is when someone sharply criticises us; when they point out something we’d rather they hadn’t and worse still, we realise that they’re one hundred percent right. All of a sudden we see how stupid we’ve been, how much damage we’ve done … the ramifications of our attitudes and actions. That’s a terrible feeling.
It’s precisely that feeling that the Apostle Paul’s friends in Corinth experienced on more than one occasion when he wrote to them – particularly the first of his letters to the Corinthians that we still have on record which was … man, as sharp as you can get. It really brought grief and sorrow to the people in that church. But in his second letter he writes …
2 Corinthians 7:9,10 Now I am happy, not because you were made sad, but because your sorrow made you decide to change. That is what God wanted, so you were not hurt by us in any way. 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.
The sort of sorrow that God wants for us, the sort that’s incredibly good for us, is the sort that leads us to the decision to change; the sort that leads us on the path to eternal life. That’s what God wants.
And that’s His Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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