How Do You Grieve Over You Sin?
It is a joy to be here and I thought today, unlike most Sundays, we would start our entry into God’s word with a bit of a pop quiz. I know many of you were in university or maybe a few still are, so there’s nothing like a good pop quiz in the morning. So let’s start off with a little test on repentance, on what is true repentance. True or false:
- Repentance is when you confess sin to God - it’s true, repentance involves confession of your sin to God, but also, Judas confessed to sin and wasn’t repentant.
- Repentance is evidenced by crying, sorrow, grief - it’s false. Pharaoh, who grieved and was sorrowful over his sin but wasn’t repentant. So crying, sorrow, grief aren’t necessarily marks of repentance. They can be, but it’s not for sure.
- Repentance is when you resolve not to sin again - false. Oftentimes, after experiencing great pain over a sinful choice, someone will resolve not to do that anymore. “I am never going to (gossip, lie, cheat, do drugs,lose my temper…do this again).” Desiring not to do a certain sin isn’t genuine repentance.
- Repentance is when you change your behavior - false. Changing your behavior is the result of repentance, right? How many people do you know who have given up drugs, given up alcohol, but aren’t really repentant right? AA programs are full of unrepentant non-christians who have given up a certain sinful behavior.
- Repentance is the act by which you are made acceptable to God - false. Repentance is required for acceptance by God but it is not what makes you acceptable to God. That is the finished work of Jesus upon the cross. Repentance comes from God.
It is easy to confuse the world’s definition of repentance with what the Word of God says about repentance. It is something we wrestle with all the time, discerning what is real repentance.
How do you tell if your child has repented? How do you tell, when someone says I’m sorry…is that it? Are you? How can you figure out when someone is repentant? Do you take them at their word? Do you wait some months to see if there’s real change. Do you just automatically not believe them when they say that?
We often teach our kids to say I’m sorry without meaning it. We say, “Hey Jacob, you go apologize to little Johnny for hitting him.” We teach kids not to mean their apology, and as adults, we’re usually suspicious when someone tells us “I’m sorry” and it’s because when we say I’m sorry, often times, we don’t really mean that we’re sorry. So how do you tell when someone is truly repentant? When your adult son comes to you and has been making horrible choices but wants a second chance? How can you tell? When the lies of your spouse have finally been revealed and they’re begging for forgiveness…are they truly repentant?
When the weight you feel from your own sins is just crushing your soul, and you’ve asked the Lord to forgive you, how do you tell if you’re repentant? That's the question for today: how do you tell what is genuine, biblical, godly repentance. God’s word is going to answer that today. Open up your Bible to 2 Corinthians 7, which is where we’re going to live for most of our time.
2 Corinthians 7 is a letter written to the Corinthian church. The Corinthian church is established in Paul’s second missionary journey. Acts 18 it’s right after his visit to Athens, Paul shows up and begins to see the church established there. It’s where he meets the amazing couple: Aquila and Priscilla. It is a place where he ministered for 18 months and just had significant encouraging ministry there. And then he leaves, and then Apollos shows up, a man of exhortation, and begins to minister there. As Paul has left, and Apollos is ministering, Paul writes a letter to Corinth that’s been lost, I like to call it 0 Corinthians, but he mentions it in 1 Corinthians, that he’d already written to them, a letter to check on them, written out of concern for them. God didn’t preserve that letter, but basically, that letter provoked a lot of questions by the Corinthians, who then wrote him those questions. We have 1 Corinthians which is Paul’s reply to those questions that they wrote. He had some concerns about those questions. Timothy then visits after 1 Corinthians to follow up with it. Paul didn’t like what he heard from Timothy so he goes to visit for what he calls this painful visit, because the situation in Corinth is deteriorating at this point. After that, he sends another letter, I like to call 1.5 Corinthians, fits in between 1 & 2 Corinthians, and he’s confronting sin there. He’s challenging false teachers who are denying Paul's authority. Titus carries a letter in, and then he brings news to Paul in Macedonia of the Corinthians’s response and that’s what leads us to 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians is actually a letter of joy, because the Corinthians had repented. And the first 7 chapters of Corinthians are about their response & repentance. It’s really fun. He’s overjoyed that the Corinthians he loved, had mainly repented and this is written now in 2 Corinthian 7, the very end of his encouragement to them, and he’s describing their repentance. And he’s contrasting it with worldly sorrow, because all of us at some point feel grief, we feel guilt, over things that we’ve done. But not everybody repents. Not everybody confesses their sin and turns towards righteousness. And my hunch is you know some people who have see their sin but not turned towards God as a result of their sin.
Paul’s affirming that their response is a godly response. Their response was godly repentance. In general, the bible presents two very different pictures of grief over sin. 1 that leads towards repentance and 1 that produces death. And Paul, in 2 Corinthians 7, is helping us understand when we are seeing the work of God in somebody’s life. How do you know? He’s giving us this grid to evaluate every pain in our own hearts and ask this one key question: am I experiencing worldly sorrow or godly sorrow over this sin? You see this contrast in 2 Corinthians 7:10. Just look at that one verse there in your Bible.
For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.
So, here’s the questions that 2 Corinthians 7 asks. When you’re experiencing grief and guilt over sin, what sort of sorrow do you have? Is it a godly sorrow or a worldly sorrow? Is it a godly grief or a worldly grief? We see here the sorrow of the world, worldly grief, it produces death. Sorrow from God produces repentance and life, which one do you tell? How can you tell if your grief over sin is deadly? And truthfully, here in 2 Corinthians 7, Paul does not give us the answer. It wasn't his focus, so he describes it, but he doesn’t give us any identifying marks.
So I’m just going to step briefly out of 2 Corinthians 7 to give you 3 key indicators of what worldly sorrow looks like, drawn from other key passages.
The first key indicator of worldly sorrow is that your concern is mainly about the consequences of your sin. If you're grieving over sin and your fixation is on the consequences of your sin, you’re probably in the worldly sorrow camp. Right? There are many who cry, and wail, and grieve over their sin, not because of how they’ve sinned against God, but because of the consequences that they are now dreading. This is the man who is crying and pleading with his wife, promising it’s never going to happen again, appearing broken because he fears that his sin will become known, and that it will cost him his family. He’s concerned about the consequences. That’s deadly grief. We see it in Genesis 4 with Cain when he kills Abel. He to God in Genesis 4: 13-14:
My punishment is too great to endure! Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground; and I will be hidden from Your face, and I will be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.
What is his concern about? Not God, “I sinned, not just a man made in your image, but against my own brother I killed him, I am hopeless before you at this point, I recognize I’m cast out of your presence…” It’s nothing about his relationship with God. His focus is exclusively on the consequences to him. It’s all on the cost and the consequences of his actions. And if your thoughts are fixated on the cost and the consequences of your actions, of your sins, you’re probably in the camp of worldly sorrow. Your grief probably isn’t from God, your not in true repentance.
Second key indicator that we see in the world of worldly sorrow is that your desires remain unchanged despite your grief. Your desires remain unchanged despite your grief. You may get drunk, you watch porn, you do something else and you just feel really guilty and you experience this pain, you regret, maybe you even stop eating and you go into depression.
But over time, you want it again. You return to it. You feed your desires. An example of this practically in the old testament is Ahab in the old testament. Ahab and Jezebel. What happens is he wants somebody’s land and he’s coveting what he cannot get. And so he literally lays down in his bed, turns away his face, eats no food, won’t talk to anyone. He’s just in depression. Jezebel, his wife, basically fixes the situation, by killing the vineyard owner. So she comforts him:
Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead.” When Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab got up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to take possession of it. (1 Kings 21: 15-16)
All that to say, narrative example, what you have is that you have this person who is grieved by the sin, goes into depression, but returns back to the sin again.
In our church this was vividly portrayed probably 3 months ago by a man in a marriage who had completely violated his marriage in multiple ways, sinning against his wife, and was begging, pleading, crying saying “I want to do better, I want to grow, I hate those things I did.”
We have Nigel Shailer who oversees a lot of our counseling. After a long conversation with the man, he wrote up a contract and said “Okay if you really wanna change, here’s what you have to agree to, some simple things like ‘I’m going to come to church, I’m going to read the Word, I’m going to pursue counseling, I’m going to then take these steps in my marriage and I’m not gonna do these other things.’”
And that contract was literally signed in the morning and violated in the afternoon.
It is easy to say you want to change and then quickly turn back to your sins. If your desire for sins is unaffected despite the pain that you feel, your grief is probably not from God, probably not true repentance.
Third indicator of worldly sorry is that you keep it secret from those that you most hurt. You keep your sins secret from those that you most hurt. A fear of what others will think often drives people to stay silent about their sin. Even when they’re grieved, even when they’re sorrowful, when they’re feeling broken, some people will not confess their sin to others. They don’t want the people they love to think less of them. They have pride. You see this with Judas of all people. After living with the disciples for 3+ years, living with Jesus all that time, after betraying him, when he felt guilty about it, what did he do? He did not go to Jesus or to the disciples. He went to the chief priests who already knew of his sin and it says in Matthew 27:
Then when Judas, who had betrayed Him, saw that He had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
There is remorse, but it was worldly sorrow and it literally produced death in [Judas’] life.
If you’re not willing to confess to the people whom you love, and the people who were hurt by your sins, then your grief is probably not from God. That’s worldly sorrow.
Now the world often communicates or describes repentance as feeling bad for what you did. Sometimes they portray repentance as saying a prayer out of desperation, a plea, or saying I’m sorry, or promising, vowing never to do it again. None of those things are how God’s word describes the truly repentant. It’s not how a Christian repents. We don’t repent like the world. When you see sin in your life and you’re grieving over it, this is the question you should ask in your heart. Am I experiencing worldly sorrow or godly sorrow? Is this godly grief or worldly grief? Which one do you have? How do you tell if the grief over sin in your heart is producing genuine godly repentance? 2 Corinthians 7 shows us how we identify genuine godly repentance. It’s an amazing passage, and it gives 3 main indicators for genuine godly repentance.
And the first one we see in v. 6 & 7 actually, is that you can identify how you specifically sinned. You can identify how you specifically sinned. How do you know if you are genuinely repentant? Or if somebody else is? Well can you specifically identify how you’ve sinned?
Maybe you’ve had someone walk up to you and say “I’m so sorry if I hurt you” and “I want to ask for your forgiveness if I offended you”. That is the weakest, most vile confession. Why? Because it doesn’t know what’s been done wrong. It just says if you’re hurt, I’m sorry. It doesn’t identify or show or reveal that they understood what was done wrong. They have no clue how they’ve sinned. They’re just reading your hurt and saying “I’m sorry, I hope you can have peace because clearly you’re mad at me for something…” They’re not repenting, they can’t identify what they’ve done wrong. Genuine repentance means you can specifically identify what you’ve done wrong. When your spouse repents, you’re not looking for a spreadsheet with timestamps, but you’re looking for some indication that they understand what they’ve done wrong, to articulate some specifics.
For the Corinthians here, in chapter 7, or prior to it, they had already broken their relationship with Paul. They had believed gossip and slander about him, they had assigned him impure motives, they had doubted his calling from God and they knew it! And they freely confessed it.
You look at verse 6 and what does it say:
But God, who comforts the discouraged, comforted us by the arrival of Titus; and not only by his arrival, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted among you, as he reported to us your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me; so that I rejoiced even more.
They were changed in their attitude about him and they were telling Titus about it.
The tendency of our nation and our own hearts is to blame others for wrongs that are done. When I ask one of my children, “Why did you hit your sister?”
The immediate response is “because SHE…”
“But what was it in your heart that made you angry?”
“My heart got angry because SHE…”
We immediately assign the fault to someone else rather than taking it on our own selves. The issue is your anger. It takes a long time to get past life as a victim. Many many people don't see their sin. They blame how they are, what they do, what they’ve done, or their sins, on their spouse, their mom, their customer, their coworker, somebody else. But the precursor to genuine repentance is identifying how you have sinned. How YOU have sinned. If you go to a doctor and you say “I just don’t feel well.” You’re not going to get a lot of help, but if you say, “My ankle really hurts and there’s this 3 inch stab wound above it…” Well now he can really help you. He can cure that easily. You need specifics. And in genuine repentance, you have to see your sin and then bring it to the Lord. Now that’s the first indicator, the specific sight of sin.
And the next 2 indicators in verses 10 & 11 are like shoes. I have a son that runs around with 1 shoe and it does him no good. Why? Because you need 2 shoes for shoes to work. There’s another foot that’s going to get dirty or hurt if you're just wearing 1 shoe.
But here in these next 2 indicators of genuine repentance, they really go together. They’re bound together even though I’m breaking them apart.
The second indicator, the first shoe is that you’re thinking about sin & God begins to change. The way you think about sin and God begins to change. You see your sin specifically, and then your thinking about your sins and about the Lord changes. Chapter 7, verse 11, here’s how Paul describes that genuine godly repentance:
For behold what earnestness this very thing, this godly sorrow, has produced in you: what vindication of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment of wrong! In everything you demonstrated yourselves to be innocent in the matter.
Paul describes genuine repentance by saying that your very thinking, your very ambitions, they begin to change. The very first thing that godly sorrow produces is earnestness, eagerness. It’s an eager pursuit of righteousness by the repentant. It’s like when you repent, what happens first is that the blinders fall off your eyes. That correction that glasses do to someone whose sight is fading, that is not what's described in the act of repentance. Repentance is not a correction to how you view life or what you’ve been doing. Repentance is this wholesale change, a radical transformation of your life. It is like cataract surgery. When you move from blindness in the eyes to sight again. That’s repentance. You used to love sin and now you hate sin. It’s a radically different thing. Your thinking about sin changes. It’s not just improved or altered. It’s transformed. You want to be right with God. He becomes your concern. Saint Augustin d'Hippone, long long ago, 380, he, in his book The Confessions, talks about how before he was a Christian, he used to confess his sin and pray to God to change him, and yet in his heart, there were these little words that would be whispered “but not yet Lord, not yet”. That’s what he felt inside as he would plead for the power against sin. When you see sin and you go to God in prayer and you’re specific about it, is your view for it changing or is your heart saying “ not yet Lord, I’m not sure I want to give it up yet.”
A true indicator of real repentance is that your hunger for it changes. Your thinking about sin changes. You become eager for righteousness. You become hungry for joy with God, rather than joy in a particular sin. A really good question to ask when you feel grief over sin is “Do I see this sin as God sees this sin? Do I hate this sin as God hates this sin?”
The fruit of a hunger for righteousness is found really in the whole rest of verse 11. And Paul goes on to say there’s this vindication. You don’t make excuses, you don’t justify what you did. You own your fault, you don’t blame others you recognize that you’re responsible. It was your problem, your actions that caused it to happen. You admit your guilt in what you did. You can’t repent to God, you can’t repent to others if you don’t own your own responsibility for it. That’s vindication. You no longer make excuses for your sin but instead, you take steps to act in such a way to restore trust you broke with others.
We often hear people who throw up walls and make defenses for their sins. They lie, they use semantics to escape, blame for what’s happened, or to just say that nothing too bad really has happened. That’s not genuine repentance. That is not any indicator that your thinking about your sin or your thinking about the Lord has changed.
When you see your sin, you willingly admit your guilt. Why? Because it has been forgiven.
When you see your sin as a Christian you know that sin is forgiven so that when I confess it, it’s already forgiven by Jesus on the cross. My thinking, my desires, my priorities are changing, not because of anything I have to do, but because I can own my failures, and my weakness, and I can work to regain trust with others because ultimately, the only thing that’s going to transform me is my hope and faith in Jesus Christ. Rather than me just working to do better. I am going to vindicate myself, I am going to own what I did, in fact I’m going to become indignant about it.
He describes this indignation which means you become angry about your sin, you begin to hate your sin. You don’t hate your sin because of the pain that it caused you or the consequences that it's bringing into your life. There’s plenty of people who get mad about the consequences of sin for the challenges it brought on them.
You hate sin because it brought shame to God’s holy name. You hate sin because it brought reproach to his people. In our household, there is one thing that is hated deeply by my wife. It is mustard. She cannot abide the taste of mustard. How do you view sin? We should hate it more than she hates mustard. We should see sin that way. To recognize that every sin, not just the big ones that we feel really bad about, every sin no matter how big or how small is an offense to God. That He cannot live with it. This is why He sends His son Jesus to die on the cross, not because of the great big sins that everyone is shocked by, but even the smallest taint of sin, He sent His son Jesus to live a perfect righteous life. One that was incredibly and 100% free of any taint of sin so that his righteousness could be imputed to you and all of your sins as you trust in Him could be placed on the cross. So that when He endured the wrath of God’s condemnation on the cross, he paid for all of those sins. That is an amazing thing, that he prayed not just for the big ones, but for every dot of sin in your life. And when you repent, what are you doing but agreeing about the terrible cost of your sin to God.
You see sin then the way that God sees sin. That’s what the repentant do. When you repent you’re agreeing with God how bad your sin is and you begin to hate it not because of the cost to you but because of the cost to God. That's what true repentance is. And your thinking about sin and about God begins to change. It even changes your fears, that’s what Paul describes here. When he says fear, you no longer fear missing out, you no longer fear unsatisfied desires, you no longer fear what others will think, you don’t fear what will happen if you’re discovered. Instead, the repentant are filled with a deep fear of God. Paul in fact uses fear 5 times in 2 Corinthians and it’s consistently used, just like here, not a Halloween fear, but a reverent fear. A fear and awe and reverence of God. A respect for him. Repentance leads to a holy awe for God, one that you are filled with a holy fear of him because He is the one most offended by your sins. He is the one who chastens and judges sin. He is the one who also paid for sin on our behalf. And though we deserve judgement and wrath, we find mercy and grace. He remains faithful to us, even when we’re faithless. It is amazing. And so before repenting, maybe you feared missing out on the pleasures of life more than you feared anything else. Maybe you feared what people thought of you, maybe you feared failing to meet people’s expectations, you feared rejections, you feared change, you feared losing control. All of those fears go out the window when you’re repentant and one supreme fear controls the rest and that is a fear of God. Repenting of sin means that the object of your fear becomes God alone. Your thinking about sin, your thinking about God changes. You’re able to see it specifically, you're able to think about sin and the Lord differently. And it’s all just asked in this one question: what sort of grief do you have in your life over sin? Is it worldly or is it godly? When it’s godly, your thinking about God, your thinking about sin changes and that’s one sock, one shoe. You need another side, another half.
The third simultaneous indicator of genuine repentance is that you begin to eagerly pursue righteousness. That's the actual meaning of the word earnestness here, this eager pursuit and he starts off with saying here’s how our hearts and our thinking changes and he ends verse 11 by going to all the outward manifestations, the outward fruits of repentance that become visible to others.
Maybe when you were single before you found your spouse, or girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, there was at some time, this spark of interest in your heart towards somebody. Nobody else knew about it, but you were feeling “I think I like them!” And then, you were working up courage and suddenly, slowly you begin to talk to them and over time it became visible to everyone that you really like them. You’re sitting with some of them today. Right? So everyone knows that you like them! That inward feeling resulted in outward change, that’s what’s described here now in the second half of verse 11, these outward manifestations. He uses the word longing, in repentance, you begin to have a longing, a hunger for restoration. In fact in the KJV it uses it more like a vehement desire or passionate desire when you hate sin and you fear God, you become passionate about making things right. You become hungry to make things right. When you’re sinning, you only care about yourself, when you repent, you really care about your relationships with other people a whole lot more. You really want to see those right. A clear sign of someone who is not repentant is that they don’t really want to restore relationships. They’re not interested in rebuilding trust with the people that they sinned against. Now for the Corinthians, when they sinned against Paul and repented, they started working with Titus to immediately rebuild that trust and restore that relationship that they had had. If you commit sin and see no effect on your walk with God, on your relationship with Him, you’re being blind. There is a longing we should have for restoration with one another and with the Lord. If you can remember the days when you were single, some of you this might not be long ago, then you remember the longing you had for marriage, for a relationship with someone else. That burning in your heart to not be single anymore, that time when you’d see a couple and you’d wish it was you. Or you’d go to a bridal shower, baby shower, wedding and you’d wish it was you. Maybe you’d be puking your guts out at home, and wish you had someone there to take care of you. All kinds of ways, we’re prompted with longing for a spouse. That’s often God-given. Here, what he’s saying is that the repentant, those who have godly sorrow, have a genuine longing for righteousness. A genuine longing, a hunger, for righteousness. It’s a strong zeal and another way he describes it, where you stop pursuing your own glory and you begin to pursue God’s glory. You become utterly consumed with God’s glory. You want to spend all of your thoughts, and all of your focus on this one thing, a zeal, a passionate desire for righteousness, for holiness, to live differently in a way that’s pleasing to Him. When you sin, you're focused on one thing, satisfying your desires. When you’re repentant, you’re similarly focused on one thing, pursuing and pleasing God. It’s a radical change. Pursuing and finding joy in Him. You turn from yourself and you begin to pursue God. Repentance isn’t just stopping what you’re doing. So often we think of repentance as, “I’m done with this, I’m not going to do it anymore.” Repentance is not just stopping. Repentance is also pursuit. Pursuit of living for God. It’s putting off and putting on. That’s what you’ve been learning in Ephesians. It’s that same thing, it’s not just stopping the sinful action, it is zealously turning towards God. Being willing to pay any price to go and to follow him, which is why Paul describes the Corinthians’ repentance as a venging of wrong. They’re going to do whatever it takes to pay the price, to fix what they’ve done. To repent and avenge their sins. To fix it. God had confronted them, they didn’t try to protect themselves, to defend themselves, they repented, they were now aggressive about obedience, and they just wanted to see things made right even if it cost them something. So when you repent over sin, you’re going to make things right, you’re going to do what you can to avenge the wrongs you’ve done. You're going to work to fix relationships. You're going to do whatever it takes to pay the price to make things right. So for a thief that means not that they just stop stealing, but they’re going to go and confess what they’ve done and they work to repay what they’ve stolen. The liar doesn’t just stop lying, they go and they set straight the people whom they’ve lied to and broken trust with. The angry person doesn’t just resolve to never do it again, but they go and they ask forgiveness for those whom they hurt, and to plead for new trust. The selfish girl doesn't just stop being selfish she resolves to put others first and her last instead of first, and she works to affirm and encourage those particularly whom she has hurt. When you avenge wrong, when you have the zeal, that longing for righteousness, you don’t blame shift, you don’t minimize what you’ve done. You don’t rationalize and say “well, it’s fine”. You want to see justice done. You want to see wrongs righted, you want to see sin paid for, even at a cost to yourself. There becomes this aggressive pursuit of holiness in all of your life. Every part of it. Is your grief over sin producing repentance and real godly change in your life.
Genuine repentance results in this uncompromising, violent pursuit of holiness in every area of your life. And I know enough about LBC to know that there are people around who for whom this is true. When you’re caught in sin and you hear what genuine repentance looks like, you can think, “there’s no way that could ever happen”, but at 2pm today, you have 15 people being baptized as testimony that genuine repentance can really happen, and does all around you. There are people all around you who are evidence of God’s amazing, transforming work that He does in repentance, and it’s beautiful and sweet. This is not some early church super-Christian thing we read in the Bible. It’s something God desires to see and does see in His church, in LBC and in many people here. There are people who try to fake it because it’s easy to confess simple sins, more publicly appropriate sins, easy sins, not the hard ones. Some people who just hide the dangerous and the ugly sins away. That’s not repentance. That’s not healthy. That’s like complaining about an upset stomach while your liver is failing. You’re missing the sickest part of your being. What is your repenting like? What do you repent over?
We get a really bad message from the world about what repentance is. Apart from the Word, we're left to be told that if you specifically identify your sin, if you act like your sin is a big deal, if you think you can lastingly turn from these things, you’re just a fool. You’re going to regret it, you’re going to miss out, you’re going to be taken advantage of. You’re not being true to yourself and in fact, you're going to lose all pleasure in life. You’re also going to honestly act with malice toward others. That’s the message of the media entertainment & our own friends sometimes. In fact, more and more the message is that you need to be proud of your sin and it’s a part of your identity. God’s word says something entirely different. It says that if you get overwhelmed by the weight of your sin, if you feel like you just can't handle it, if you think that nobody is ever going to understand if you’re actually transparent and come clean about it, if you think that what you’ve done is too bad to be forgiven, if you think that there’s no way you’re actually going to see change in your life, God’s pleading with you to repent, to recognize that change is possible. That through his Son Jesus Christ, He can forgive anything. And he will transform you with a power not your own. And his promise is, you won’t regret it. That’s how Paul ends verse 10 of 2 Corinthians 7. He says that godly sorrow produces a repentance without regret. There’s no regret when you repent. We think of confessing our sins as horrifying, terrible, terrifying, “I don’t want people to think about me that way, I don’t want them to know what I’ve done, I would regret that for the rest of my life”. Paul says, godly sorrow, genuine repentance, produces repentance without regret. If you've ever struggled to repent, you need this. To know that you won't regret your decision. You won't regret your decision to confess and depend and trust and to pursue righteousness at all cost to yourself. You won’t miss that sin, you won't miss the feelings associated with that sin. You won't regret it at all, that’s the promise of God’s Word. And so if there are things you need today to repent over, I can say confidently that God wants you to do that. He wants you to repent. He’s pleading with you to repent, to know and be confident that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross paid for every sin that you have ever committed and will ever commit. He has paid it all. So plead with God to change you, depend on Christ’s righteousness and not your own, and depend on His Spirit to do it. God will be faithful to do every child of His who calls out.