What should have been said to most who walked the isle was, "Go sorrow awhile, then, we will see if you get saved. If you get sorrowful over that you will get saved." The problem is, you will not sorrow over your life. You say you are lost but you are not really sorrowful over your lost condition. I know that is true because I lived that way even with the knowledge of my lostness for 16 months. I had never really got sick of my lostness until I got to the end. Near the end I saw it was my fault that I was still lost. I sorrowed heavily over my unbelief. I remember that morning! Things were heavy that morning. I was tired of being lost. I was ready for this thing to be over with. Then I can remember Brother Greg Moffitt preaching, "Don't say good-bye to God," and just weeping. I was thinking, "Oh, God, Oh God, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna walk away from here, if you don't help me." Knowing it was in me. But I was saying, "God, I don't want to walk away. I want it to be over." I remember at the invitation, a woman went down to talk to Brother Greg. I did not think she would ever get through. I was going to get Brother Greg to pray with me, because I was sick. I was sick of myself and my life. I wanted out. I did not want to talk about it anymore. I did not want to think about it anymore. I did not want to study about it anymore. I did not want to hear any more testimonies about salvation. I wanted to have one. I wanted out. I was at the end of myself in great heaviness. Pain had not got a hold of me yet. But heaviness had. The idea of me getting saved had gotten to be a big problem. That is such a good picture of birth. A person will not repent until it becomes a big problem. What God is saying is that this is a big problem. This is not so good! You need to get out of here. You know you can die in lostness. Somewhere you have got to get saved. I remember when I got on my knees. As soon as I hit my knees, God got a hold of me. Everything in me began to come up. I was thinking, 'Where is this coming from!' I was sure not working this up. Oh, the sorrow, and all the regret. I was apologizing for everything. I was saying I was sorry for every unbelieving thought. I was not blaming God for anything. I was crying out saying, "God it is all my fault." When God began to squeeze me, I could say anything. God was helping me admit all my flaws, which was producing in me a need for Him like I had never known before.

There is good news in these same verses in Isaiah. Verse nine says, "shall I bring to the birth and not cause to bring forth?" To bring to the birth refers to the beginning of the travail and pain. What this means is that God would not show you that you are lost, causing remorse and regret, and not finish the work. Would God begin to work in you and then not bring youforth? No. He does not believe in causing man to be troubled and reproved and not bring him through. He would never just tell you that you are lost and not want to save you. If he did not want you to be his child, he would just leave you in darkness and let you go. You would be like one of those that will say at the end, "Lord, did I not do many works?" He will say, "I never knew you." If He ever gets a hold of you He will not let you go.

One must not compare the amount of travail they have with somebody else. Some women can have babies almost walking to the hospital and walk right out the other side. However, all women have an amount of pressure and they can identify those ingredients. For some reason, some women handle pressure, even in the natural realm, better than others. They are emotionally
different. But it is still pressure, it is still anguish, and it causes birth.

So how does one tell if he had enough sorrow to be saved? Is it by the amount of emotion involved? No! Is it the amount of repentance involved? No! It is the birth that makes the difference. What did the sorrow and repentance produce in you? I know people who have cried bucket loads down at the altar and they never where changed. People say that I believe weeping saves.
I do not! I believe we are saved through repentance and faith. However, I do know this. You are not going to repent unless you remorse. Am I saying that a man has to cry to be saved? NO! But, if he does not cry in his eyes, somewhere in his soul, he is crying. The reason I say this is because of what the Bible says. It says, "cry unto the Lord." What is calling on God, if it is not crying unto God? However, people express that cry differently. So you do not compare the actual amount of tears you can get in a bottle. It is the heart that is broken.

Not only do you see godly sorrow illustrated in the woman having a baby, but also in the idea of the broken heart. That takes us to some of the other verses. Lets go to Proverbs 15:13. "A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance. But by the sorrow of the heart, the spirit is broken." What repentance produces is a broken heart. Well, a broken heart would be a changed heart, would it not? If I had a vessel that is not broken and I threw it on the ground hard enough and broke it, what it once was used for it could not be used for again. It is broken. This is what God does to you when you get saved. What you were once used for, you cannot be used for again. Could attempts be made? Oh, yes. But it would not last, because you have been broken. You see, all that once was in the vessel will not fit in you anymore. Can you go back and try it? Yes, but it will not last.
This is why you do not have to worry about a saved person sinning all he wants because they do not want to. Their ' wanter' has been broken. Will they want to on occasion? Yes, one may try to pick up those broken pieces and pour some water in them but they are so shattered, it just will not hold water anymore. So a broken heart is the result of repentance. It is not just a change of mind. It affects the heart. If the repentance you had did not affect the heart, it was not genuine repentance. Genuine repentance produces a life that is different. You are a new creation. What you were once used for is no longer any good.

But what brings on a broken heart? Sorrow of heart! Is not that what Proverbs says? "But by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken." The brokeness starts with sorrow; regret; wishing it had never happened. And when it is godly, it becomes so great that you do not want it anymore. The only hope that any of us have of ever getting saved is that God would make us not want
what we want. Believe me. God can save. If he can create the whole system of birth, surely he knows how to save people.

Look with me in Psalms 51. I want to prove to you again that no salvation can occur without Godly sorrow. Psalms 51:16-19. For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar. (AV)

I want to start with verse 19. Verse 19 is a picture of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, which is the sacrifice of righteousness. You cannot claim as your own, the sacrifice of righteousness until you have a broken heart. Let me explain that. In the old testament, in order to deal with sin, they had the picture of the sacrificial system. In the sacrificial system, because of sin, they needed a
lamb to take away their sin. They would bring that lamb to the altar, lay their hands on its head and identify themselves with it and confess their sin, then cut its throat. And the Lamb would take their place. This was their offering for their sins. All of that was a picture of the Lord Jesus, our offering for sin. Because of our sins, He was nailed to the tree. When we get saved, we identify ourselves with his offering to take away our sins. But, you cannot have that offering of righteousness without a broken heart. You cannot go up to the altar. All that Jesus did will not be effectual for you without a broken heart first.

Go back with me again to Psalm 51:16. "For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." (AV) A person might say, "Why can I not just say I believe in Jesus?" One might believe in Jesus all his life and believe he died on the cross for his sins and still not get saved. Then what would be missing? Sorrow, and brokeness. An experience that is
light-hearted, and trivial, and has no weightiness to it, no heaviness to it, and just wanting to escape hell and go to heaven, is not enough to be saved. You cannot have what the Lord Jesus has done unless you come through brokeness. Your believing will not work because it has no heart to it. Saving faith is done with the heart not the mind. God knows the heart and you cannot
fool him.

God will not turn away from a broken heart that really needs God. When godly sorrow is worked verse nineteen says, "Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness." The people had to come this way. They could not just go through the motions. Sometimes in the history of Israel, they did go through the motions. It became a religious ritual with them, which is what is happening in our Baptist churches. For instance in some Baptist churches we have traditions concerning the time to be saved. When you are about six or seven, you go down and tell the preacher you want to be saved and say the prayer, or when you are twelve. Every church has different traditions. You will hear things like, 'Well you are of age now, it is time to get this thing done;' 'It's time to say the prayer;' 'It's time to go get baptized now;' 'It's time to join the church.'  Israel would perhaps say, "It's time now for you to offer your ransom money. You are of age." I can see the Jews. It would be time to go to sacrifice and they would go out into the herd and find their best one, bring it into the house of God and sacrifice it, doing the same thing once a year. It became a time to just go through the motions. God hated it. The one that He looked on and was pleased with, was some sinner with his lamb coming in the temple weeping. Weeping over his life, he had for the past year, crying, thanking God for that Lamb. Weeping over his sins, but thanking God that he had a way out. His attitude was broken and the heart was right. God would, in effect, say that He would accept that sacrifice for his sins.

It is time we stopped playing around. People say that I am making salvation hard. No, all I am doing is preaching salvation like it should be, that it is a matter of the heart and not a matter of the head. If we would make it a matter of the heart, our churches would be a lot more pure and lot more loving. I had a preacher say to me once that salvation could not be the answer to the
problems in our churches today. My response was that the salvation that most preachers preach will not help the churches, but real salvation will. A little decision that man makes, a little prayer that you pray will not change your life. But you let God get a hold of people and get them sick of their life, they will come out of the world and will never be able to go back again. When I
look at my life, there is no way I can go back to way I used to be. I cannot play the games at church anymore. God got me so sick of playing church that there is no way I want to go back to empty ritual.

You cannot have the salvation of God without godly sorrow. Then you might ask, "How does one get godly sorrow?" This is done by taking reproof. That is how it comes. If you do not want to listen to correction, you will never get saved. This is also why I believe that a person cannot get saved until he admits he is lost. When a person will not admit that he is lost he is rejecting the reproof which brings on godly sorrow. Many people believe today, that a person can get saved and not be for sure he is lost. So he is alone in the dark saying, "Lord if I'm lost, save me." What he is basically doing is not wanting to face reality. He does not want it to be as heavy as it is supposed to be. We are so afraid for people to be lost because we are afraid of how they will react to it. But they cannot get saved without seeing their lost condition. This is where the heaviness and the sorrow are.

God will not despise or turn away a broken heart. If you try to go through the motions of acknowledging your sins without a broken heart, God will ignore you. That is why I despise the methods of today, which take the Roman's road and say, "The Bible says here 'for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,' Do you believe that?" And the lost person says, "Yes." Then they are told, "Now that you know you are a sinner, you can trust Christ." The reason people do this is because, they have never heard the doctrine of godly sorrow. When you preach the doctrine of godly sorrow you take salvation out of the hands of man, and out of a memorized plan, and put it back where it belongs, in the hands of God. Some people's response to this is that they tell folks they must be sincere. The Bible does not talk about sincerity. It talks about sorrow.

I can remember trying to work up sorrow. I literally would go to the altar and make a grunting noise, trying to get conviction on me. I was going to try to produce it. I remember getting down at the altar and hearing myself echo through the church, "Oh, God." Then a preacher friend came up and got down beside me. He listened to me. I would grunt awhile. Then he finally said,
"What are you doing?" I said, "I'm trying to get saved." He said, "Listen, you can't save yourself. Do you think all that grunting is going to do any good? God is not through working yet." I needed some time for God to show me how really wicked I was. You cannot work that up. It is not something you decide you are going to have.

John 3:8, says, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." (AV) Being born again is not a decision of man will. It is a decision of God's will. It is compared to the wind. You do not know where it comes from and you do not know where it is going to go when it gets through. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit. The Spirit of God comes from where it wants to and it goes where it wants to and you are not in control. I remember the day I got saved. I did not know it was coming when it came. I also remember when my wife was saved. We were at a service at Camp Zion, which, at the time, I was lost and knew it. She was still playing with the idea. She was thinking about it. There were about 2000 people there. They started singing a song; an invitational song that we had heard all our lives, "Coming home." God very quietly said to Connie, "You are not coming home." All of a sudden, Connie realized that she was not going home. She began to cry. Sorrow and weeping got hold on her and it was not stopping. I asked her if she was all right and she said she would be ok. But the Lord never let up on her. All this time, God was showing her some things. God said, "You are not the good little girl you have always thought you were." God showed her the cross, how Christ had died for her sins and how she had rejected him. She was weeping uncontrollably. She did not bring that on herself. God brought that on her. All of a sudden, God took a hymn, when she leastexpected it, worked it in her and made her sorrowful by it. He brought her to the altar where she got saved. No man has ever been saved without godly sorrow producing it.

I have a word of caution for those who might say, "Ok, I am lost. I am just going to sit here until God produces salvation." There is a danger in that attitude. Because it did say, they sorrowed after a Godly sort. A person can take that so far and sit there and never do anything with the reproofs that are coming to them. Godly sorrow is produced by something. It does not come out of the air while you are sitting there. This is a problem with some that hear our doctrines and take them without balancing them. One must understand how God produces salvation. It is done by you listening to him correcting you. If a person sits there and hears preaching that is correcting him, and yet he is not believing the corrections, he will never have godly sorrow. One does not just sit there and all of a sudden get sorry. I have seen some people that are lost just sitting there waiting on the wrong thing. Something will bring it on. It may be the preaching. It may be, like Connie, the words of a song. With the people at Corinth it was a letter they read. With Brother Jim Grapp, it was a booklet he read that brought it on. He was paying attention. He was listening. He was saying, "Yes God show me what my problem is." But I know many who are sitting there waiting on something to happen to them as if it is a magic formula that comes out of thin air and they are not listening. And they will perish, sitting in their chair.

Some will take the preaching of godly sorrow wrong and say that we believe that man has no human responsibility, which is wrong. Man's responsibility is to listen to the reproof of God and weep over his sin, to respond when God is talking. There was a tendency in me to just sit there, but the Bible says that men must strive to enter in. Striving to listen to God and believe Him is
extremely important. It was something that God said in my heart that broke me and brought on godly sorrow. That is why we preach. We preach that men would hear and repent.

A person will not just be sitting there and some big emotional feeling hit him and start crying. No! He will cry over something. Weeping is over sin!

Salvation has emotions in it. Sorrow is an emotion! What is joy? Emotion. Preachers who say there are no emotions involved in salvation obviously do not know the Bible. However, salvation is not purely an emotional experience. Your emotions are worked and produced by God's word and by the Holy Spirit. There are those who now have experiences with absolutely no
emotions because they are afraid of that crowd who has nothing but emotions: the crowd who gets all emotional and say, "One day I started crying thinking about the heavens and I saw a star in the sky and I got so excited. Now I know I'm saved because I got so excited." That is an experience based solely on emotions and not on the truth. Salvation is a saving experience more than it is an emotional experience, but because it is a saving experience it has to be emotional. If you are drowning, and you get saved, that is emotional! And after you got delivered, you were thanking God. And when you were going down, tell me you did not have some emotions?

Let me summarize briefly. Godly sorrow is a required ingredient in salvation. The only way you can tell if all the crying is real, is to ask yourself what it did to your life? Are you broken? Has God taken your heart that lived for itself and totally shattered it
where it cannot live for itself anymore? Who has ever heard of a child being born without travail? It has never happened and it never will.

- Pastor Terry Owen

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