2 Corinthians 7 2 thru 13

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“Sorrow That Leads to Repentance,” 2 Corinthians 7:2-13 (January 22, 2017) 2

Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one. 3 I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together. 4 I am acting with great boldness toward you; I have great pride in you; I am filled with comfort. In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy. 5

For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn—fighting without and fear within. 6 But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, 7 and not only by his coming but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you, as he told us of your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more. 8 For even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it—though I did regret it, for I see that that letter grieved you, though only for a while. 9 As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. 10

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. 11 For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter. 12 So although I wrote to you, it was not for the sake of the one who did the wrong, nor for the sake of the one who suffered the wrong, but in order that your earnestness for us might be revealed to you in the sight of God. 13 Therefore we are comforted. PRAY We are in the second week of a three-week emphasis on Celebrate Recovery (CR). Celebrate Recovery is a twelve-step recovery program, like Alcoholics Anonymous, and in a few weeks our church will launch our own chapter. We are taking these three weeks to still do Bible expositions each Sunday but on Bible passages that illustrate some of the principles behind Celebrate Recovery in order to promote and explain the ministry. Probably like a lot of you, before about a year ago I’d heard about CR and AA, I’d seen meetings portrayed in television and movies, but I didn’t really know anything about it. One of the big realizations I’ve had over that time is that the twelve-steps in these programs are, properly understood, just an outline of the Christian life. Therefore, we are all in recovery. We are all recovering from something, since we are all sinners. You don’t have to use that language, but the twelve steps are one way of outlining what it looks like to follow the Lord Jesus. Last week we looked at Romans 7 through the lens of the first step in any recovery program: admitting the problem. You must admit that you are a sinner, that your life is

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unmanageable, that you are powerless. We looked at the third step as well, that we all need to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of the Lord Jesus Christ. Today, we are moving forward and will look some of the next steps, beginning with step four, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”; step five, “We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs;” step six, “We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character;” and step seven, “We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” And I think word the Bible uses that best sums up what is taught in these four steps is the word repentance. Both in recovery programs and in the Christian life itself, repentance is absolutely necessary. You can’t become a Christian without repentance, but neither can you live the Christian life without constant and continual repentance. Three points: first, the nature of repentance. Second, the fruit of repentance. Third, the power in repentance. First, the nature of repentance. In Matthew 4:17 Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In the book of Acts, when Peter preaches his sermon at Pentecost and tells the crowd that they were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, their Messiah, they had a hand in his crucifixion, we read those men were “cut to the heart” and they said to Peter, “What shall we do?” And Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins …” Acts 2:38. Jesus and Peter say that repentance is necessary to be saved and be reconciled to God. But what is it? The Greek word in 2 Corinthians 7:9 and 10 translated as “repenting” and “repentance” is the word metanoia, which is a compound word that literally means “a change of mind.” This year marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther, professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. And it’s fitting that we mention that this morning, because the match that lit the fuse of the Reformation was a debate over the church’s understanding of repentance. In the Middle Ages, from the year 1000-1500 A.D., what we would call now the Catholic Church (though then it was just “the Church,” because there were no other churches) taught that repentance meant that when you sinned, what you had to do if you wanted to be reconciled to God was to feel contrition, sorrow, for your sin, then go to a priest, confess your sins to him, and then the priest would assign you an activity, called a penance, in an attempt to make restitution for your sins. Now, none of that is a bad idea. I think confession and restitution are wonderful ideas, biblical ideas. But they are different from repentance. Over time, slowly over hundreds of years, when Christians thought about repentance they began to think only in terms of

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“doing penance,” the external act, and not the internal sorrow you felt for your sins. I don’t think the church intended that at all, but that’s what happened. By the 1500’s I think it’s fair to say that most Christians began to believe that what reconciled them to God was not God’s gracious forgiveness of their sins but instead their penitential acts, their act of restitution. It was the good works the priest told them to do that made peace with God, and not God’s unilateral act of forgiveness. This led to all kinds of problems that many people inside the church saw, but it was Martin Luther who struck the match. In the first of his 95 theses Luther quoted Matthew 4:17, and he wrote: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Luther’s study led him to a recovery of the biblical teaching that repentance is an internal act, not external. Repentance should lead to external actions, but it is itself internal. Luther’s study led to a recovery of understanding that repentance was metanoia, a change of mind. It led to a recovery of understanding that we are forgiven of our sins not because of any good work we might do to try and make restitution for our sins, but we are forgiven because of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ and his perfect life and his sacrificial death on the cross God unconditionally forgives us of our sins. Because Jesus Christ paid the debt we owe for our sins on the cross, we can be forgiven by sheer grace without regard to any good work we might do. In fact, the only work we have to do is believe – is to change our minds, is to repent – and trust that in Jesus Christ God is perfectly, finally, completely pleased with us. That’s the gospel. The Protestant Reformation led to a necessary and glorious recovery of what the Bible taught on repentance and, therefore, the gospel. However, if the church of the Middle Ages made too much of the external activities, many in the church today make too little of what a demanding and total internal “change of mind” repentance really is. From time to time you’ll hear some Christians say, “Repentance means only ‘a change of mind,’ so that means that all we have to do is give mental assent to the proposition that we are sinners and that we need Jesus Christ to save us from our sins. Just agree in principle that you are a sinner – that’s repentance.” Now, I have no doubt that people who teach this want desperately to hold onto the emphasis on God’s grace as much as possible, make salvation as completely and totally God’s work as they possibly can, but in so doing they minimize what the Bible says repentance actually is. If repentance is merely “mental assent” to the proposition that you are a sinner and you need God to save you, that’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Why does he call it that? Because it doesn’t cost you anything. You just say, “I’m a sinner, in theory, and that’s wrong,” but you don’t feel remorse, you don’t feel sorrow for your sins, you don’t resolve to change and live differently and take up your cross and follow Jesus wherever he leads out of gratitude as a result. It’s cheap grace.

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That’s not what the apostle Paul called repentance. Here we need to talk for a few minutes about the context of 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians was a letter the apostle Paul sent to a church he helped to found in the ancient city of Corinth. A lot of scholars think it’s the last of four letters Paul sent to that church. The first letter is referred to in 1 Corinthians, and it’s been lost. What we call 1 Corinthians is the second letter Paul sent. Then Paul visited Corinth after writing 1 Corinthians, and while there something happened. We don’t know what it was, but one person or a small group of people in the church there did something awful, something hateful. And whatever it was it was bad enough that when Paul left Corinth and got to Macedonia, he wrote a third letter to the church – that’s the letter referred to in verse 8, and scholars call it “Paul’s severe letter.” This letter has also been lost to history, but in it Paul tells the majority of the church in Corinth that they must deal with this small group of people. They must put a stop to whatever it was they were doing, because it was wrong and hurt the church and it was an offense to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Titus takes the severe letter to Corinth for Paul, and returns after a few months to Paul with the good news that the majority in Corinth had repented. Now, did that repentance simply mean “mental assent”? Did the majority say, “Yes, Titus, we agree to the proposition that we were in the wrong,” but then not do anything about it? Of course not! Titus came back to Paul and reported that the Corinthians felt deep contrition at the news they’d wronged Paul, that they disciplined the parties in the wrong, that they longed to be reconciled to Paul, and when Paul hears that he writes, “As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved [by my letter], but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us.” 2 Corinthians 7:9. “Cheap grace,” repentance that is all theoretical and propositional but doesn’t cost you anything and doesn’t bring about change, is not a Christian notion, and it certainly won’t work in recovery either, will it? Just giving mental assent to the proposition that you’re an alcoholic isn’t going to help, will it? Just admitting in theory that you struggle with drugs or pornography isn’t going to change anything, will it? No, it takes a “fearless and searching moral inventory” of all your life. It takes being “entirely ready for God to remove all the defects of character.” So, what is repentance? Repentance is an internal change of mind and not an external act, but it is a change of mind complete and total and radical in nature. Where you once loved your sins, now you hate them and never want to go back to them, and whereas you once were indifferent at best about the things of God, you now love him and want to give your whole life over to him and never offend him again. Not that you will accomplish that, not that you’ll be perfect, but you’ll wish you were. And you’ll make excuses no longer – you’ll call the sin in your life sin, a defect of character, and you’ll resolve to rid yourself of it completely. Second, the fruit of repentance. It’s important to distinguish between repentance, which is internal, and the fruit of repentance, which is external and which repentance always

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produces. Just like an apple tree will produce apples, repentance will produce it’s fruit. We are saved as Christians by grace alone through faith alone, just by believing the gospel, but we are not saved by a faith that is alone – saving faith is always accompanied by good works, by actions, by behavioral and life change. In the same way, true recovery is always accompanied by actions. You can’t be in recovery and continue to live in the same behavioral patterns you followed in addiction, can you? Now what does this changed life look like? In verses ten and eleven, Paul very clearly and very helpfully shows us what this life looks like. “10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment [readiness to see justice done – NIV 1984]! At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter. 2 Corinthians 7:10-11. I’m going to break the fruit of repentance down into four parts. If you claim to be a Christian, I challenge you to apply these four markers of true repentance to yourself, and see if this fruit has been produced in you. Further, if you have a relationship in your life that has been broken by the sin of another, and you want to find out if that person really is sorry, if they have really changed (not because you want to lord it over them but because you just can’t get back in certain relationships if the sin continues, can you?), then apply these markers to them, too. Apply to yourself, and apply to them. First of all, one mark of a life changed by repentance is godly grief: he hurts for how he has hurt others. Every time a repentant person thinks about his sins and the pain it’s caused others, he is grieved. He’s grieved, and he does not want to bring that pain on another ever again. It doesn’t mean that he won’t, but he hates it when he does. An unrepentant person, by contrast, is not sorry for his sins, but sorry only for the consequences. That’s the last part of verse 10: “worldly grief produces death.” He’s sorry for what his sins cost him, but not sorry for the sins themselves. Second, a second fruit of repentance is indignation. A repentant heart can’t stand his own sins; he hates his own sins far more than anything else, he is indignant about them, certainly far more than anyone else’s sins. An unrepentant person will often gladly admit they are a sinner in theory – “yes, I’ve messed up, I’ve made mistakes.” They’ll give mental assent to the proposition. But they are indignant about the sins of others. All they can talk about is what he did, and what she did, and what they did, and how wrong they all are. A repentant person, on the other hand, admits in theory that other people are sinners, and that they’ve done wrong. “Of course, they aren’t perfect,” he’ll say. But he is indignant about his own sin, and that’s what he’s worried about, and that’s his focus.

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Third fruit: fear. Fear of what? Fear of God. There are seven of what the scholars call penitential Psalms in the Old Testament, Psalms about repentance. And the most famous is probably Psalm 51, the Psalm David wrote after his adultery with Bathsheba. And do you remember what David writes there? He’s writing to God and says, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight …” Psalm 51:4. And you read that and you say, “How can David’s sin be only against God? What about Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband?” Yes, David did sin against Uriah, but in David’s repentant heart that’s a small thing compared to sinning against God. The repentant person is so focused on the God who loves him and has saved him through Jesus Christ that he fears offending God above all else. An unrepentant heart may have fear, but it’s not fear of God. It’s fear of getting caught, it’s fear of getting beat up, it’s fear of losing his reputation or being fired because of sin, but it’s not fear of displeasing the Lord. The fourth fruit of repentance is a readiness to see justice done. Do you want to know if you’re truly repentant? You’ll know when you go to the people you’ve hurt with your actions and you say, “I want to make this right between you and me – how can I?” Then you listen, and you do what you can to make amends. Readiness to see justice done. That’s also step eight of recovery: “We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” Step nine is going out and actually making the amends. You make restitution, you try to fix what you’ve broken. But the justice that needs to be done doesn’t have to be something big; often it will be a small thing. Tim Keller, in one of his sermons, talks about how when he was first married he would come home, sit on his bed, take off his shoes, and throw them into the closet he and his wife shared. But when he did that his wife would notice that his shoes would hit the closet door and scuff it up and the wall inside the closet as well. So she said, “Don’t do that. You’re just scuffing up everything.” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore,” but he hardly thought about it. He’d forget. It had become a habit. So the next night he threw them in again. She said, “You said you weren’t going to that.” “Oh, yes, I’m sorry.” The third night he did it again. What did she start to think? She thought, “I’m not going to keep humiliating myself. He’s not going to turn me into a nag.” But what happened is every night she would hear a clump, and every night she’d get more and more angry. Forty clumps later, he comes home, sits on the bed, takes off his shoes, and throws them in the closet, and she explodes. And Tim Keller says, “At this point, she’s 40 clumps angry, but I’m not even thinking about the 40 clumps. I’m just thinking about this one.” He’s thinking, “This is inappropriate anger. I just threw my shoes in. I shouldn’t have

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done it, but come on.” The point, though, is that he wasn’t repentant. He knows in theory he’s sinned, but he’s indignant about her sins. But he said that one day after that, he began to realize how he’d hurt her. He asked her, “What can I do?” He wanted to make amends. She said, “I don’t know. Do something to remind yourself not to throw your shoes.” So he got down on the floor that night and made himself a sign and put it right where he had been throwing his shoes. The sign said, “Stupid, stop throwing your shoes and hurting your wife. Signed, God.” He made amends. It wasn’t big, sometimes it will be. But that’s the fruit of a repentant heart. Third, the power in repentance (what will it do?). Repentance brings peace. Before I became a pastor, I was an attorney. And my first job was in what was then a fairly big firm down in Jackson. And I was a nervous wreck, because I didn’t know what I was doing. No one ever does when they first start a new job, but it really stressed me out because I was billing out my time at this hourly rate and there’s no way my clients were getting their money’s worth out of me. And when I actually had to go and take a deposition or attend a hearing that first year it was terrifying, because your client and the firm is counting on you but you don’t know what you’re doing. What was wrong? I was under-qualified for the job. Law school does not prepare you to be a lawyer. It’s great training, I’m thankful for it, but it does not prepare you for the day-to-day practice of law, so I was nervous, scared, and intimidated by all these older lawyers around me. Now what everyone needs to realize is that you also are under-qualified for a certain job: the job of running your life. And that's why so many of you are nervous, scared, intimidated, fearful, or, on other hand, posturing and pretending to be someone special when deep down, in your heart of hearts, you know you’re not. You know you’re underqualified to be the lord of your life. But the power in repentance is this: when you take a fearless and searching moral inventory of yourself and admit to God and everyone else that you are under-qualified to run your life, all of the sudden peace starts flooding into your heart where once chaos reigned. When you give control of your life over to Jesus, when you make that change of mind, the pressure’s off. Now, he’s running your life, he’s guiding you and directing you in the way you should go, and he’ll do a far better job with your life than you ever could. Your only task now is to obey – you leave the results up to Jesus. If something seems to go “wrong” in your life, that’s on him. And friends that brings peace. But repentance also brings transformation. Through repentance you can become far more loving, far more compassionate, patient, thoughtful, and wise that you ever thought you could be. One of my favorite examples of repentance from literature is Edmund Pevensie, from The Chronicles of Narnia. In the second book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Edmund is a rotten, spoiled-brat. He’s awful – he lies, he complains, he annoys everyone. And he is incredibly mean to his younger sister, Lucy. He hates her. And when Edmund gets to Narnia he meets the White Witch, and she’s so kind to him – she

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gives Edmund his favorite treat, Turkish Delight, and promises that if he will just bring his brother and his sisters to meet her, she will make him King of Narnia. Of course, the only reason she wants to meet them is so she can kill them and keep her throne. So, Edmund goes back and brings his siblings to Narnia, but he can’t immediately deliver them to the Witch, so he goes to meet her by himself. And when he meets the White Witch the second time without his siblings, there’s no mention of him being made king. Instead, she ties his hands behind his back, and orders a dwarf to whip him and force him to walk where she wants Edmund to go. Now, if that isn’t a picture of what sin is, what addiction is – promising to make you a king but soon thereafter turning you into a slave – I don’t know what is. But something begins to happen to Edmund – he begins to repent. We read that on that walk, hands tied, whipped from behind, he saw how awful he’d been and that for the first time felt sorry for someone other than himself. Soon after that, Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure in the story, saves him – Aslan sacrifices himself on the Stone Table so that Edmund can live. And from that point in the story on through the rest of the books Edmund is a changed person. No one is wiser than Edmund in the rest of the series, no one is braver than Edmund, no one is more compassionate and forgiving than Edmund. And whereas he once hated Lucy, now he is her protector. He loves her, he cares for her. Edmund is transformed. Why? He changed his mind. All he’d done to that point was dwell on himself and how he’s been done wrong and people weren’t looking out for him, and it made him miserable. But now he thought of others, how to serve them and please them, and it made him wonderful. Repentance leaves no regret. 2 Corinthians 7:10: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” All the Greek scholars say that “without regret” doesn’t refer to salvation, but the repentance. Repentance brings about such a wonderful change in our lives and gets us so much closer to what we want to be that we regret nothing, nothing, about it. So of course it means you would never go back go back to the way you were. Of course, once you meet Christ, you don’t want to go back to trying to run your life own your own. Of course, you don’t want to go back to addiction. The last thing a repentant person ever wants is to go back to the way he used to be. Matthew Henry: “True penitents will never repent that they have repented …” But it also means that the transformation in your life is so sweet that you actually get to the point where you don’t even regret the pain that led you to repentance in the first place – after all, without it, you never would have repented. Wasn’t that Susan’s testimony? She said her disease is now one of her greatest assets because it led her to Christ and to help others. That’s the power repentance can bring in your life – it will mean that even the evil in your life is used for good.

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Do you want peace in your life, do you want change? Do you want “no regrets”? Then repent – change your mind. Give your life to God, and see what he’ll do with it. PRAY

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