Has anyone ever told you they are sorry, but you can tell by the tone of their voice or body language that they don’t mean it? Almost everyone has been on both sides of this scenario. What this demonstrates is that we all know true repentance is felt. It isn’t just about saying the right words or merely acknowledging wrongdoing. Repentance flows out of real shame and sorrow. For the Christian, repentance will flow out of an understanding of the seriousness and severity of our sins. The more we grasp the holiness, perfection, and righteousness of God in addition to his love, goodness, and kindness, the better we understand how ungrateful, wicked, and prideful we are when we sin. The better we understand how heinous our sins are we will feel guilt and shame.
We cannot repent of our sin without first experiencing the humility of grasping, even just a little, how awful it is to disobey and disrespect God. True repentance can only happen when we humbly come before God with genuine sadness for our sin to ask for forgiveness. There is a great example of this in the Bible. The Bible contains two letters by Paul to the church in Corinth. In the first letter, one of the main things that Paul does is to call out the sins of the Corinthian church. The list is not short but it is quite colorful. Suffice it to say the Corinthian church had some clear and severe issues.
In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, we learn how his readers responded to his rebuke. Paul writes, “yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance.For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death” (2 Cor. 7:9-10). The Christians in Corinth felt sorry. They mourned over their sin, and as a result they went to their knees in repentance. Paul is happy that they mourned not because he gets to say “I told you so” to the groveling Corinthians, but because their emotions led them to Christ. What Paul calls “godly sorrow” leads to salvation because it finds forgiveness in Christ alone.
This is opposed to a worldly sorrow. Worldly sorrow happens when someone is sad they got caught, not that they sinned. Worldly sorrow is what Cain exhibited after God told him his punishment for killing Abel would be to wander the earth. Cain was very sad to hear God’s judgment against his sin, but he wasn’t sad he murdered Abel. When Cain heard God’s judgment, he immediately said, “My punishment is greater than I can bear” (Genesis 4:13). He is sad about the sentence, not the crime he committed. This is radically opposed to true, godly repentance which is sorrowful for the sin itself because it is an affront against God. This is a healthy sorrow which drives a sinner to repent and find forgiveness in Christ Jesus through his atoning death. In sum, Christian repentance isn’t a formula; when a Christian tells God they are sorry, they mean it.
