"For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." (2 Cor 7:10, KJV) "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 Cor 7:10, NLT) The Google dictionary defines sorrow as a feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment, or other misfortune suffered by oneself or others. And this is where many Christians shout God forbid! Yes, sorrow on its own and when it is suffered without purpose is bad. The Scripture above talks about two types of sorrows: The godly sorrow and the worldly sorrow. One of the reasons the church is losing its power and becoming a mere social gathering is because of the absence of the good godly sorrow. We have taught and learnt the gospel of grace to our own detriment and spiritual death. These days sin is no longer treated as the taboo it is. Sin is no longer seen as the leprosy, cancer and death that it is. Christians and even pastors and other ministers live publicly and defiantly in sin and immorality. Someone simply said "If I have a quarrel with you, I will drop my Bible, deal with you (by this he meant going to a witch doctor to get charms); then I will come back and pick my Bible". This ludicrous statement is a mirror of the pitiable situation that Christianity has found itself as a result of the absence of the good sorrow. .
Until we consider sin a grevious matter, we would never experience the godly sorrow if we fall into sin. Granted that we are human and by our own power we cannot defeat sin. So, we may occassionally sin even as Christians, but what we do after that will be proof of our relationship with God. We must desire to live above sin and all ungodliness. That, when we sin, we will feel the godly sorrow which the Bible says leads to repentance. The sorrow we speak of here is the feeling of regret and disappointment we feel at ourselves if we, as children of God, mistakenly fall into any sin. The day we stop feeling that godly sorrow is the day we start dying. The day sin we stop taking sin serious is the day we have begin our journey toward backsliding which is the ultimate loss of our salvation. Today, there are pastors, deacons, choristers, etc who have backslidden and are still in the church doing church things. May God grant us the grace to abhor sin because sin pulls down, destroys, limits and kills.
"Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice that will cover these sins." (Heb 10:26, NLT)
Don't deliberately live in sin expecting grace to cover you!