Salvation & Grace
I know I should feel sorry for what I did and I feel absolutely nothing. Can repentance be real if the feeling is not there?
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
David is describing what God actually accepts, in a psalm written in the wreckage of adultery and an arranged death. The word broken does heavy work here: it names something crushed, not something merely upset. He is not setting an emotional bar for you to clear. He is saying that God is not shopping for impressive offerings, and that includes impressive displays of remorse.
“For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.”
Paul is reflecting on a painful letter he had sent to the Corinthians and on how they took it. He separates two kinds of sorrow: one that leads somewhere and one that simply corrodes. The mark he uses to tell them apart is not intensity of feeling but what the sorrow produces. By that measure, numbness that still turns and changes direction counts, and floods of feeling that change nothing do not.
A path forward
Repent with your will rather than your feelings. Tell God plainly that you were wrong, that you do not feel it, and that you are turning anyway. That prayer is honest and it is enough to begin with.
Do one concrete thing this week that a genuinely sorry person would do: an apology, a repayment, an admission to the person affected. Action often arrives before feeling and sometimes brings it along.
Ask a pastor or counselor whether the numbness is wider than this one thing. Flatness across everything, not just guilt, is worth looking at with help rather than treating as a spiritual failure.
Closing verse
“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”
- Philippians 2:13
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