When we experience the pain of grief it is usually associated with some sort of loss or perceived loss in our lives. Personal grief that affects the whole human race can be divided into two categories: godly grief and worldly grief. With godly grief, our pain manifests as anger or hurt that compels us to turn toward God for help and relief. After we choose to go to the Lord and work out our emotions of grief, slowly but surely we will encounter relief in place of heaviness. We will move toward being able to live without regret and will understand that God uses all our experiences, both positive and negative, for good. This type of godly grief will produce recovery and acceptance in our hearts and lives.

On the contrary, worldly grief produces physical, emotional, and spiritual death. Worldly grief manifests as self-pity, codependency, failure to take responsibility for our feelings, blame, manipulation, false guilt, condemnation, sickness, hopelessness, and bitterness. Within this dark, deadly grief we easily get stuck, never processing through and finding release into the light. It is God’s will for us to turn to Him as we encounter and endure grief. Only He has the power to use grief as a tool to move us toward physical, emotional, and spiritual health and wholeness.

“For godly grief and the pain God is permitted to direct, produce a repentance that leads and contributes to salvation and deliverance from evil, and it never brings regret; but worldly grief [the hopeless sorrow that is characteristic of the pagan world] is deadly [breeding and ending in death]” (2Corinthians 7:10).