The story is told about a visit that the 18th century king of Prussia, Frederick II of Prussia made to a prison in Berlin. Expectantly, the inmates all vainly attempted to prove to him their innocence and the injustice of their incarceration. Everyone, that is, with one exception.
Seeing that one lone, quiet prisoner, the king approached him and asked the reason for his imprisonment.
“Armed robbery, Your Honor.”
“Were you guilty?”
“Yes, Sir,” the inmate answered the king. “I entirely deserve my punishment.”
Hearing that response, the king immediately ordered the guard: “Release this guilty man. I don’t want him corrupting all these innocent people!”
What the prisoner demonstrated was an accurate perception of his heart, and a sense of contrition and repentance. This is the same kind of pattern believers in Christ are to exhibit when they sin. While the believer in Christ has been freed to act purely and do righteousness, yet because of his fleshliness, he will still continue to sin. So what becomes all-important then is how he responds to the reality of his sin.
Second Corinthians 7:9-11 provides good direction — sin should produce grief that in turn produces repentance (cf. also Js. 4:8-10). Commenting on this principle of spiritual grieving, Thomas Watson (The Godly Man’s Picture) asks the question, “why is a godly man a weeper?”
1. He weeps for indwelling sin, the law in his members (Romans 7:23), the outbursts and first risings of sin.…A regenerate person grieves that he carries with him, that which is enmity to God! His heart is like a wide sea in which there are innumerable creeping things (Psalm 104:25)—vain, sinful thoughts. A child of God laments hidden wickedness; he has more evil in him than he knows of. There are those windings in his heart which he cannot trace — an unknown world of sin. “Who can understand his errors?” (Psalm 19:12).
2. A godly man weeps for clinging corruption. If he could get rid of sin, there would be some comfort — but he cannot shake off this viper! Sin cleaves to him like leprosy! Though a child of God forsakes his sin — yet sin will not forsake him.…So though the dominion of sin is taken away — yet its life is prolonged for a season; and while sin lives, it molests! The Persians were daily enemies to the Romans and would always be invading their frontiers. So sin “wars against the soul” (1 Pet. 2:11). And there is no cessation of war — until death. Will not this cause tears?
3. A child of God weeps that he is sometimes overcome by the prevalence of corruption. “For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do.” (Romans 7:19). Paul was like a man carried downstream. How often a saint is overpowered by pride and passion! When David had sinned, he steeped his soul in the brinish tears of repentance. It cannot but grieve a regenerate person to think he should be so foolish as, after he has felt the smart of sin — still to put this fire in his bosom again!
4. A godly heart grieves that he can be no more holy. It troubles him that he shoots so short of the rule and standard which God has set. “I would”, says he, “love the Lord with all my heart. But how defective my love is! How far short I come of what I should be; no, of what I might have been!…
5. A godly man sometimes weeps out of the sense of God’s love. Gold is the finest and most solid of all the metals — yet it is soonest melted in the fire. Gracious hearts, which are golden hearts, are the soonest melted into tears by the fire of God’s love. I once knew a holy man, who was walking in his garden and shedding plenty of tears, when a friend came on him accidentally and asked him why he wept. He broke forth into this pathetic expression: “Oh, the love of Christ! Oh, the love of Christ!” Thus have we seen the cloud melted into water, by the sunbeams.
6. A godly person weeps because the sins he commits are in some sense worse than the sins of other men. The sin of a justified person is very odious…
Words of Grace 