The Sorrow that Leads to Joy

If you want to be a happy person, then you first need to be unhappy. In other words, you must see your true state before God as a sinner with no hope of saving yourself. But God graciously offers you His forgiveness through Christ and His death on the cross.

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4 NLT). The last thing people want to do is mourn. They want to laugh, party, and whoop it up. But they don’t want to look at their real condition and be sorry for it. This reminds me of Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes: “I said to myself, ‘Come on, let’s try pleasure. Let’s look for the “good things” in life.’ But I found that this, too, was meaningless. So I said, ‘Laughter is silly. What good does it do to seek pleasure?’” (2:1–2 NLT).

Some people just want to laugh all the time. They want the party to go on. They suppress tears and seek laughter. They don’t want to cry. So they ignore their sins and don’t deal with them.

But if we want true and lasting happiness, we must mourn our spiritual state. And then what happens? Jesus said that we’d be comforted. When we go to God and say that we’re sorry for our sin, He extends His forgiveness to us. Thus, our sorrow leads to joy.

The Bible says, “For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death” (2 Corinthians 7:10 NLT).

If you want to really be a happy person, then you must see yourself as you really are—a sinner—and be sorry for being so and resolve to change. Without that sorrow, there will be no joy.