Reply To: Repentance Is the Foundation
8I am not sorry that I sent that severe letter to you, though I was sorry at first, for I know it was painful to you for a little while. 9Now I am glad I sent it, not because it hurt you, but because the pain caused you to repent and change your ways. It was the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have, so you were not harmed by us in any way. 10For 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 Cor 7:8-10
This is an excellent passage on the importance of confronting sin even when it’s not popular. In the past two months I’ve had two different PRMs who divorced their first spouse, then married a second or fornicated, then left the second person and remarried the first spouse. At the time, in my regular Bible reading, I came across a couple of passages in the OT that identified this as an abomination to the Lord with curses. When I confronted the PRM about it and had her repent and break the curse, she said she could hear a demon screaming in her mind. And later in the session, she received a dramatic deliverance. I always emphasize with people not to rush through the forgivenesses and repentance steps to get to the end fast, because it’s in these fundamental things that most of the ‘heavy lifting is done.