For if also I grieved you in the letter, I do not regret [it], if even I have regretted it; for I see that that letter, if even [it were] only for a time, grieved you.
Paul had already sent one severe letter to Corinth, and this verse lets us watch him second-guess it. He admits the letter caused pain. He admits he wished for a time that he had not sent it. Yet he stands by it. How could a man writing by the Spirit ever wish his own words unwritten?
The phrase points back to a specific document, not just any note. One commentator insists the article matters, and blames translators for blurring it:
It is not "a" but the letter, clearly referring to the first epistle to the Corinthians. Did our translators wish to conceal this?
The startling thing is not the pain he caused, but the doubt he carried afterward:
His fear went so far that even the inspired letter he had written became a trial to him. The apostle had a question raised in his mind about his own inspired letter! Yet what writing was more certainly of God?... This teaches us plainly that, whatever God is working in a man, the inspiration of the vessel stands far above his own will. It is the fruit of the Holy Spirit's action.
Commentators differ on how to explain the regret. Some treat it as a lapse produced by affection:
His heart was so filled with love that it clouded his spiritual discernment. For a moment he forgot the character of his letter. He was not the one responsible for what he had written; the Spirit of God was its author. The regret showed weakness at a time when no news reached him from Corinth and his loving heart was so burdened for the Corinthians.
Others read it as ordinary human dread of hurting people, not doubt about the message:
His wavering did not come from any lack of confidence in what his hand had written. He knew the words were only in a secondary sense his own (1 Corinthians 14:37). But he was a man with the same feelings as the people he wrote to. So he shrank from picturing the effect on them of the letter he had been led to write.
Between sending the letter and hearing the outcome, Paul suffered. His "I did regret it" points to real inner pain:
There was no recalling what was past. We love those we have ministered to in the church of God more deeply than others. A link is formed between their souls and ours that even the glory will not erase... He feared he had lost the beloved Corinthians. How will they receive his letter? Was it too hard, too severe? In deep exercise he regretted having written it. "I did regret it," he says, speaking of his tried heart's exercise... He could not rest at a great and prosperous work in Troas, but went in search of Titus, so that his soul might be relieved.
The verse shows a man pulled two ways at once — firm about what needed saying, tender about what it cost them to hear it:
Nothing is more touching than the conflict in his heart. Their earlier state had made it necessary for him to write with severity, and with a certain cold authority. Now that the letter had done its work, his affection dictated almost an apology for the grief he might have caused... What concern! What a heart for the good of the saints!
Paul no longer regrets the letter, because he can see what the pain produced:
This sorrow was only for a season; it was a sorrow according to God. Because it was godly sorrow, it produced repentance leading to salvation, which no one regrets, and it brought forth fruit worthy of repentance... How different is the sorrow of this world! We see it in the solemn case of Judas. His sorrow was not for a season but for eternity. It was not godly but merely human, and instead of producing repentance it led only to death.
- The letter. Paul means one definite letter — the first one he sent to Corinth, written with severity.
- The regret. For a time he wished he had not sent it, though God had inspired it. Commentators differ on the reason: human weakness, or a tender man dreading the pain he had to cause.
- The love. The regret came from love, not from doubt about what he wrote. He feared losing the people he had ministered to.
- The season. The grief the letter caused was brief; godly sorrow has a time limit, unlike the sorrow of the world seen in Judas.
- The harvest. Once the fruit appeared, the regret vanished. Brief grief had produced repentance that leads to salvation.
Now I rejoice, not that ye have been grieved, but that ye have been grieved to repentance; for ye have been grieved according to God, that in nothing ye might be injured by us.
Paul had sent a letter that hurt the people he loved, and for a while he wished he had not sent it. Now he says where his joy lies. It is not in their pain, but in what the pain produced. And in the end their pain cost them nothing.
Paul is careful to say what he is not glad about. One writer explains why the success of his letter alone would not have satisfied him:
His word had come with power, and their old pride had given way to submission. That confirmed the confidence he had in his commission, but it gave Paul no joy. Demons can obey the Name he spoke in while men's hearts stay unrestored to God. His deep delight lay in the quality of their sorrow. Their sorrow was a godly sorrow, so their changed attitude towards him was the fruit and proof of their repentance toward God.
One phrase decides everything here: their grief was "a godly grief." That is what turned a letter Paul feared into a gain:
The letter had grieved them in such a way as to cause, not resentment, but repentance. Their grief was grief according to God — that is, grief seen from God's viewpoint. So it brought blessing, instead of the damage Paul had feared. Such grief works repentance that leads to salvation, and no one ever regrets it. That is true of salvation first of all. But here it applies to believers: their true repentance saves them from the traps of self-indulgence.
Paul had once wished that earlier letter unsent. One writer notes how striking that is, since the letter is Scripture:
His fear had gone so far that the inspired letter he had written now troubled him. The apostle had a question raised in his mind about his own inspired letter! Yet what writing was more certainly of God?
Being sad and repenting are not the same thing. The verse says their grief led somewhere: they were "grieved into repenting." One writer traces the inward movement step by step:
The apostle's first letter came with the power of the Spirit to their souls... God stopped their will, and they grieved at the sense of having gone wrong: conscience, not will, began to work... It was still godly sorrow, a broken will, a broken heart; the feeling — I have been following my own will, I have forgotten God... This works a far more active, deliberate judgment of evil, which is called repentance here. Godly sorrow works repentance that we shall never regret.
The Corinthians were already Christians. Their repentance was not about becoming believers but about what they had tolerated:
When we are told that God uses sorrow to work repentance that is never regretted, remember that these people were already believers. Here the apostle's rebukes worked repentance in them about the shameful evil they had allowed. And what worked it was godly sorrow, not the joy of the gospel.
The grief came "through us," Paul says — through him. Yet they lost nothing by it, and two things came of it:
His first letter had been used to do two things. First, it brought a thorough repentance about the evils he had condemned. Second, it revived their affection for him. There was, of course, a very close connection between the two. As they realised how wrong they had been, they saw that love lay behind his plain and faithful protests; and their hearts kindled with love for him in return.
This is what correction among God's people is meant to achieve:
Believers who go wrong are not disciplined just to punish them. Discipline aims to bring them to repentance and so restore them, both in their souls and to their place of fellowship among God's people. That is what happened with the offender at Corinth.
- Sorrow measured. Paul's joy is not that they hurt. It is that their hurt was godly sorrow, proving their hearts had turned back to God, not just bowed to an apostle.
- Sorrow directed. A godly grief is grief seen from God's viewpoint. That direction is what makes it bring blessing instead of damage.
- Sorrow working. Sadness is not yet repentance. It stops the will, wakes the conscience, and brings the deliberate judgment of evil that no one ever regrets.
- Sorrow for believers. These people were already believers. When a Christian tolerates what dishonours the Lord, repentance is still the way back.
- Sorrow costing nothing. They suffered no loss through Paul's letter. The letter gave them a cleared conscience and fresh love for the man who wrote it. Restoration, not punishment, was always the aim.
For grief according to God works repentance to salvation, never to be regretted; but the grief of the world works death.
Paul had written a letter that hurt the Corinthians, and for a while he almost wished he had not sent it. Now he has heard how they took it. So he weighs what their grief did in them, and he lays down a test that tells apart two sorrows that can look the same from outside.
Darby describes what Paul's first letter started inside them: a broken will, not a frightened soul.
Still it was godly sorrow, a broken will, a broken heart. The feeling was this: I have been following my own will, I have forgotten God. The illusion of a perverse will is gone, and the working of God's nature in us begins. Where the soul feels this rightly, there is no fear. There is no thought that God will hold the sin against it or condemn it. There is sorrow and grief of heart that it followed self-will. This works a far more active, deliberate judgment of evil, called repentance here.
The verse does not say that sorrow is repentance. It says the one produces the other. Pridham marks the difference.
The distinction between sorrow and repentance is clearly marked. The first leads to the second. The one is passing; the other lasts and keeps working. Godly sorrow shows a state of feeling; repentance is an active purpose of the heart, which by its nature grows into a habit.
Kelly rules out two things people mistake for repentance, then says what it is.
Even sorrow, however deep, is not repentance, though sorrow according to God works it out. It is also not correct to confuse repentance with conversion to God... Repentance is the soul, as born of God, sitting in judgment on the old man and its acts, its words and its ways... So Scripture calls it repentance not about God, but "toward God". The conscience then takes His side in self-judgment before Him, and weighs everything as in His sight.
Older translations read "repentance... not to be repented of", which sounds circular. Darby notes that the second word is a different one.
But in 2 Corinthians 7:10 a second word is used, completely different; it should read: "Repentance to salvation, never to be regretted."
Why can no one regret it? Pridham points to what repentance does.
Repentance cannot be repented of, since it is a turning from evil to good, and from oneself to God. So by its very nature it leads to life and salvation. It is a working thing: in a sinner its effect is conversion, in a saint restoration. In either case its end is peace.
Grief over sin can be entirely about oneself. Mawson traces what happens when the pain is only about the fallout.
The second is the sorrow that goes with fear of the consequences, and not because the sin itself is hateful. This is an entirely selfish experience... In this sorrow the devil seems very near. He mocks the soul in its distress and increases its fears. Again and again the soul vows that if it can escape the consequences, it will avoid that trap in future. The devil can mock with confidence, for he knows that as long as the soul is self-centred, it will go back to the same sin.
Hamilton Smith names the man whose sorrow shows where that road ends.
How different is the sorrow of this world! We see it in the solemn case of Judas. His sorrow does not last a season; it lasts for eternity. It was not godly but merely human. And instead of working repentance, it led only to death.
Paul is writing to believers. So the "salvation" here is rescue from the sin itself.
The repentance and salvation Paul speaks of there are the repentance and salvation of Christians... Godly sorrow had taken the place of shameless glorying in evil. This sorrow for their sin worked repentance: it led the Corinthian believers to turn from their evil course and clear themselves from the wrong they had allowed. Repenting in this way, they were saved from going further down the hill of decline... It shows that when a believer sins, his repentance should be as real and as practical as we expect a sinner's first repentance to be.
If repentance goes this deep, how does anyone reach it? Stuart answers that no one produces it in himself.
He who was crucified is exalted to give repentance and forgiveness of sins... Effort, hard work and self-punishment are all useless. He gives it, as we learn. The word of God works it in the soul, acting on the conscience by the power of the Spirit.
- Two sorrows. Both are sincere and both hurt; one is about the sin, the other about the consequences.
- Sorrow works. Godly sorrow is not the finish line. It is the feeling that produces repentance — a settled purpose of heart that keeps working.
- Repentance judges. It is the renewed soul taking God's side against itself, weighing its own words and ways in His sight.
- Never regretted. You can regret a painful letter, a painful season, even a painful confession — you will never regret this.
- Given, not achieved. Effort and self-punishment achieve nothing. Christ, now exalted, gives repentance by His word working on the conscience.
For, behold, this same thing, your being grieved according to God, how much diligence it wrought in *you*, but [what] excusing [of yourselves], but [what] indignation, but [what] fear, but [what] ardent desire, but [what] zeal, but [what] vengeance in every way ye have proved yourselves to be pure in the matter.
Paul's first letter to Corinth had wounded the church. Here he lists what that wound produced: seven marks left by a grief that came from God. The verse raises a question every reader faces. How do you tell real repentance from mere regret?
Each word in Paul's list names a change in a church that had let a scandal sit unjudged. The writers below quote an older translation, which reads "carefulness" for "earnestness," "vehement desire" for "longing," and "revenge" for "punishment."
"Carefulness" or "earnestness" stands in happy contrast to their earlier slackness. "Clearing of themselves" describes how readily they took up the solemn duty of judging the offence, once his earlier letter had stirred them. "Indignation" is the right word for the just and natural feeling that woke in their minds. Their eyes were newly opened, and they saw how great the evil was that they had left unjudged for so long. It was a feeling directed no more against the wrongdoer than against themselves. The "fear" he speaks of pointed first to the Lord, and then to Paul.
The last three words carry the list from feeling into action.
"Vehement desire" may seem very strong here. But the First Epistle had clearly struck them deeply, and awakened warm affection toward the Lord. "Zeal" follows. Last is "revenge" or "vengeance." This would speak of the actual judgment of the evil among them, and the putting away of the wicked man of 1 Corinthians 5.
Grief on its own proves nothing.
Grief may arise, and even reach a passionate extreme, and yet have as little changing effect on the person as summer dew on a rock… So the difference between sorrow and repentance is clear. The first leads to the second. The one is passing. The other lasts and keeps working. Godly sorrow shows a state of feeling. Repentance is an active purpose of the heart, and by its nature it grows into a habit.
That is why the test of repentance is deliverance, not tears.
This scripture shows us very clearly what genuine repentance really is. It is not quite sorrow for sin, though godly sorrow of that sort is part of it… The right sort of repentance is repentance to salvation. That is, it means deliverance from the thing repented of. Mere sorrow for sin, when a person faces its consequences, is the kind the world can have. It works death, not salvation. Judas Iscariot is a sad example of this.
This was not a conversion. The Corinthians already belonged to Christ, and still had to repent.
In its fruit in 2 Corinthians 7:9-10, they sorrowed to repentance; godly sorrow worked repentance. Here they were converted long ago, and had believed long ago. But they had been in a bad state, and had repented. You can see how it showed itself in verse 11.
Paul's closing verdict is that at every point they proved themselves innocent in the matter. Removing the offender was never the whole point.
Simply putting the wicked person outside, important as that may be, is not what comforted the apostle's heart. What comforted him was the working of deep and shared moral feelings among them all… Merely to be done with the offender would show in others an unexercised conscience, or else judicial hardness.
The sin they had tolerated involved the whole church, not just the man who committed it.
His words in the second Epistle show his thought: they were involved in the evil by allowing it. "At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter." His complaint was that there was sin, leaven — not just a sinner, but sin among them.
Kelly asks for more than the offender's own sorrow.
If we want God's will, it is not enough that the offender be truly repentant. God's people too, when they have to deal with a grievous case, should humble themselves and in grace bear the shame as if it were their own.
- Sorrow starts it. Grief can be strong and still change nothing. Godly grief is the seed, repentance is the crop, and only repentance lasts.
- Fruit proves it. Paul does not take their word for it. He reads seven marks: earnestness, clearing, indignation, fear, longing, zeal, punishment.
- Believers need it. The Corinthians had believed long before. Repentance here is a Christian judging himself, not a first conversion.
- The body owns it. Sin they tolerated made the whole church a party to it. The whole church, not one man, had to clear itself.
- Grace ends it. Paul's aim was never just to expel a man. He wanted a shared humbling, so that he could say they had proved themselves innocent.
So then, if also I wrote to you, [it was] not for the sake of him that injured, nor for the sake of him that was injured, but for the sake of our diligent zeal for you being manifested to you before God.
Paul now explains why he sent that painful earlier letter to Corinth. His aim was not the wrongdoer or his victim, but the whole church and its state before God.
The offence in Corinth was real, but Paul was not writing to close a single case.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Paul had written to rescue the Corinthian saints from the completely false state they had fallen into. He wrote to build them up again in the truth of God. The goal of spiritual exhortation is not to stamp out one form of evil, or to set right some special wrong. Its goal is to bring God's children into practical communion with Himself, and with each other in His sight. Such communion cancels the workings of the flesh in all its forms.
Paul could have ended the scandal by his own authority. He did not. The sin pointed to something worse behind it.
But using apostolic authority to shut down this one trouble would have done nothing to recover the Church. That open sin was only a plague-spot. To his divinely guided eye it showed the unhealthy state of a body that could tolerate such evil and feel no shame. His eye was not so much on the one who did the wrong, or the one who suffered it. It was on Satan, who stirs up all evil and corrupts the way of truth by deceit. That such an outrage went unnoticed proved to Paul how far the adversary had prevailed. He wrote as he did to wake them from their deadly sleep. His aim was to set them once more against the one who was robbing them of their glory.
The state of the whole gathering was the issue, so the work belonged to them. Even honest grief would have counted for something.
The apostle's anxiety is about them, the gathering as a whole. He explains it further in this verse. Suppose they had felt morally unfit to deal with the case, or had held back for other reasons. Even then, if they had "mourned" (1 Cor. 5:2) over it in true self-judgment, God might have acted in His providence and removed the offender. Instead they were glorying in their gifts and making light of defilement, even when it was so gross.
The closing words are disputed. The ESV has Paul writing "that your earnestness for us might be revealed to you." An older English version puts it the other way round: that his care for them might be shown. The ancient copies differ here.
So the apostle adds that he wrote, not for the sake of the wrongdoer, nor of the one wronged. He wrote so that before God they might see either their earnest zeal for him, or his for them. It seems very strange that the earlier clauses should ever look obscure. In the last clause the copies differ in opposite directions, and some give no good sense. Whatever the adversary had achieved for a time, their true zeal for the apostle was at last made plain to themselves before God. This is the best supported sense.
Either reading points the same way. Love between Paul and the Corinthians came into the open, and that mattered more than settling the case.
It was no small thing to put matters right between the one who did the injury and the one who suffered it. It was greater still to bring into the open that love which is the fruit of the divine nature in the saints.
- Wide care. Paul wrote about a scandal, but for a people. The offender and the victim were not the point — the church's state before God was.
- Deep care. One open sin exposed a body willing to tolerate it. Removing that sin by authority would have left the real state untouched, and the real enemy unopposed.
- Shared care. If they had only mourned over the sin, God might have stepped in Himself. Paul left the work with them, so that their own consciences would wake.
- Visible care. "In the sight of God" is where the result showed. The earnestness between Paul and the church came to light at last, though the copies differ over whose earnestness is named.
- Greater care. Settling the case mattered. Bringing out love, the fruit of the divine nature, mattered more.