How To Handle Your Guilt Series

SMILEY RELIGION: “God wants me to be happy.”

- 2 Corinthians 7:8.

- Today so many presume that God’s job is to make them happy. The only way they think about God is that He is there to answer our prayers and bring good things into our lives.

- Biblical ideas like carrying your cross, losing your life, or denying yourself would be greeted with (at best) confusion and (at worst) derision. The confusion would show on the perplexed face of the person completely lost concerning why God would want anyone to do any of those things. The derision would come from those adamantly denouncing that anything other than their personal happiness would be a worthy life goal.

- Whatever the reason, there are many today who are certain that their happiness is the ultimate goal of life and that God should help them achieve it.

- I should note that in opposing this I am not saying that God wants us to be miserable all the time. Rather, that there might be something other than our personal happiness that should be the highest goal of our lives.

- Although Paul didn’t believe the shallow idea that personal happiness should be our ultimate goal, even he struggled with the sorrow that we’re going to focus on this morning.

- In v. 8, Paul notes that he caused the Corinthians sorrow. He says he doesn’t regret it, but then acknowledges that he did regret it for a while. That speaks to the fact that sorrow and regret are difficult things to handle even in the best of circumstances. It evokes split decisions and divided minds.

WHAT ABOUT SORROW? Sorrow is necessarily because we’ve fallen short.

- 2 Corinthians 7:9.

- No doubt there are many here who are surprised by the first point because they presumed that God had nothing higher to shoot for than their personal happiness. Well, if that statement hurt you, then this second statement is going to hurt even worse.

- Here it is: sorrow is an important part of each of our lives. Now, I don’t just mean sorrow because we’re going to a funeral. No, I mean sorrow over things that we’ve done and ways that we’ve lived.

- I told you that you wouldn’t like it.

- We want to get into the two kinds of sorrow in a minute, but let’s just talk about sorrow in general for a minute.

- Why is sorrow necessary? Because we’ve fallen short.

- What do I mean by that? That we’ve sinned. That we’ve done things that are wrong. That we’ve said things that are wrong. That we’ve thought things that are wrong.

- I know that most wink at sin today. I know we come with endless excuses to justify our questionable actions. But sin is wrong. And having done what is wrong should cause us sorrow.

- We don’t want to face it, but the proper response to our sin is to feel sorrow. Thankfully it’s not the whole process and it’s not where we are supposed to end up, but it is where we are to start.

- So before we get to the two approaches to sorrow, let me stop and ask an introductory question: when was the last time you were sorry about something you did? Sorrowful for your sin? Does it happen regularly?

TWO APPROACHES:

1. “Worldly sorrow brings death.”

- 2 Corinthians 7:10b.

- Let’s start with the second half of v. 10 and then we’ll work our way back.

- We are told that “worldly sorrow brings death.” How does that happen?

- Let’s start with the way the world responds to sorrow. They try to minimize it. They try to justify it. They try to make themselves feel better, but when they think about it, it’s still there.

- Others are unable to minimize it. Their sin gnaws at them but they have no remedy available that would take away their sin. And so they either get overwhelmed by their sin (and end up drinking or doing something else to numb the pain) or they circle back around to trying to minimize it.

- So both of the options are poor.

- So when someone does feel sorrow and tries to handle it in a worldly way, the result is death. As just stated, they either end up trying to numb the pain or trying the talk themselves into believing it’s not a big deal.

- If they numb the pain, then they end up with a disaster of a life. That is, death.

- If they try to minimize it, then they ignore the moral cancer within them and pretend like everything is ok. The result there too is death.

2. “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret.”