“…godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” 2 Corinthians 7.10 ESV
Last week we talked about the pattern and process of salvation. God brings revelation, and in His light we see both His glory and our total depravity. We are moved by this revelation to either run for or run against Him. Running against Him leads to death and darkness. Running for Him leads to everything good.
The process, though, is difficult because there is a very great deal to unlearn.
Basically, we have to unlearn everything we know. Especially if we were raised in the church.
Walking in the way with Jesus has nothing to do with ritual or tradition. It is not a religion. It is the way of life. It both leads to life and is life itself, and one of the more difficult things for us to understand about it is how much it features death. It does because, as we move from darkness into the light (which is a difficult process itself), the spiritual-surgical process we undergo means death to the darkness and life to the light. In this, the age of grace, we are indeed a new creation, and this is our identity—this is how God sees us now, but we are still in subjection to futility. This futility drags us away from the light sometimes. Christians can still fail. This is how we learn.
I believe one reason God has in ordering it this way is so that we learn humility; we learn the discipline of continual repentance. We need repentance to be a process for the same reason God told Moses, “Man shall not see Me and live,” and Jesus then told Philip, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” It’s not that God was telling a half-truth. It’s that He was laying out the process for us.
You don’t have to walk with Jesus very long to see the truth of this. We all have to do our work. Each of us has a lot of entanglements down here. Walking with Jesus is learning how to refuse the bad and choose the good.
The beauty of this walk is that when God blesses, He adds no sorrow with it. That He continuously provides us the opportunity for repentance in the age of grace is proof enough, isn’t it?
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