June 26, 2001
We were at a funeral when we heard someone say that they seldom go to funerals or church because “the preacher always makes me feel guilty.”
No one likes guilt. It steals both peace and sleep. Yet guilt is as vital to our well-being as pain. Pain tells us our body is injured or sick. Guilt tells us to stop and consider our actions.
Both are built in signals that protect us from physical and moral danger yet they can malfunction. My oldest son lost two fingers in a sawmill accident. Sometimes he feels pain in those fingers yet they are gone. This “phantom pain” is not legitimate.
Sometimes guilt is not legitimate either. When my nephew died on a trip away from home, my brother said, “I should have driven him there myself.” As we talked about it, he realized that he had no reason to feel guilty. He knew his son was dying, regardless of the trip. Taking that trip or having his dad with him on it would not have changed the inevitable.
Also, we can be trained to think our actions are wrong but they are neither illegal or immoral. A friend has huge pangs of guilt over spilled food. He admits that when he was little, his mother scolded him at the slightest accident, making him feel that spilling food was deliberate bad behavior. While his head says this guilt is silly, his emotions poke his conscience.
Illegitimate or false guilt makes us beat ourselves with regret over things that are simple mistakes, or unavoidable and out of our control. True guilt is different. It relates to moral choices we make and things we can change.
True guilt convicts us when we do things that are against an outside standard such as civil law and God’s moral laws. Whether we rob a bank or say unkind, careless words, or neglect to do something we knew we should have done, we can feel pangs of conscience. These feelings are supposed to direct us toward change and help us to think, talk, and live upright, moral lives.
Real guilt comes in two varieties. The Bible talks about the remorse we feel when we do wrong and get caught. We may be sad, mad, or otherwise upset but that is as far as this kind of guilt goes. It creates an uproar but we do not change.
The other kind of guilt is a “sorrow that leads to repentance” or a turn away from whatever we did toward changed behavior. This guilt is different from simply being sorry we got caught because with it we realize we have displeased God — and we did not want to do that. We are sorry because we are hurting ourselves and our relationship with Him, so we take steps to live differently.
This makes sense. If we get a painful sliver under our skin, we don’t take painkillers but look for ways to remove the sliver. Yet some people who feel true guilt avoid tackling the real issues. They try to get rid of the law or God (and say He is dead). They try to eradicate those guilty feelings with excuses, rationalizing and denial. This may numb their conscience but it does not set them free.
God’s solution for guilt is confession, forgiveness and cleansing. The Bible says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
Running away from guilt makes as much sense as trying to cure a broken leg with pills. While we might be able to cover some kinds of pain for a while, covering guilt never works. It builds life-limiting scar tissue and blocks our relationship with God and others.
Lord, repentance is never a one-time activity. Even the godliest of Your people must constantly listen to their conscience. Help me then, to always hear what guilt is saying to me. If it is true guilt, may I never try to cover or excuse it but bring it to You for forgiveness so You can change my life. Amen.
Showing posts with label value of guilt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label value of guilt. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
The value of guilt .......... Parables 697
December 19, 2000
A sign on a church reads “No God — No Peace. Know God — Know Peace.”
After a restless night, do you ever struggle out of bed in the morning complaining and muttering, “There’s just no rest for the wicked”? It may be a clique but that line actually comes from Scripture. In context, God is describing the rebellion of His people when they refused to follow His directions. He finishes His description with “There is no peace,” says the Lord, “for the wicked.”
Some versions use the word “rest” but either way, lack of peace or lack of rest describes the agitation of heart felt by anyone with a guilty conscience.
In spite of popular psychology, feeling guilty is not always a bad thing. It is like pain. If we did not feel pain when touching a hot stove, the burn would cause physical harm. Pain makes us stop touching the stove. Guilt is similar. When we do something contrary to our convictions, guilt helps us stop doing it. Without that agitation, we would cause harm to ourselves and others. Guilt also encourages us to fix the mess that our wrong actions have produced.
Guilt does have its drawbacks. One of them is that we tend to measure it by how bad we feel. That is, if someone feels badly for taking pencils from the boss but the fellow in the next desk feels nothing, then that person is apt to say, “It may be wrong for you but it’s okay for me.”
Such relativistic thinking dismisses all objective standards regarding morality. It says God’s opinion is not important or at best, is open to personal interpretation. That’s just another way of saying, “I don’t care what anyone thinks, even God. I will do what I want to do.”
Christians hold God and His Word as our standard, yet guilt is still tricky. Sometimes we do the right thing but feel guilty if someone doesn’t like what we did. That happens if our goals slip into a desire to please people. If someone is not pleased, then we have failed our goal and will say we feel guilty. As long as we did nothing wrong, this is a “false guilt.”
It gets trickier. True guilt, under the objective standards of God, does not always produce that inner agitation or lack of inner peace. We can break God’s law in ignorance, something like we can drive over the speed limit with a broken speedometer. If that happens, we may not realize we have broken the law because we can’t see (or feel) anything, but we are still guilty of doing it.
Obviously, if we rely on our feelings only to tell us about guilt, we can be mistaken. Not only that, if someone tells us we are guilty but we didn’t feel any guilt, we might refuse to see or admit it. We could say, “But everyone else does it” or “It’s really not that bad.”
Most people could not dismiss speed limits without considering how that would affect lives—our highways are already littered with victims—but our society tosses out objective standards and replaces them with personal opinions, personal preferences, and subjective feelings, then dares to say we are free from “Victorian” restraints. Some call this “progress.”
Lack of civil, criminal, and even traffic laws produces confusion, anarchy, and death but lack of moral law produces progress? Take another look. The price of dropping God’s standards is far more than lack of sleep, a vague sense of unrest, or an argument over who is right and who is wrong. It is out-of-control moral chaos.
Lord, the Bible says You “laugh at the wicked for you know their day is coming” and promises justice for those who do right. It is not easy to live an upright life in a world where right and wrong are measured mostly by what people want. God, help me to know what You want and then give me the courage to do it.
A sign on a church reads “No God — No Peace. Know God — Know Peace.”
After a restless night, do you ever struggle out of bed in the morning complaining and muttering, “There’s just no rest for the wicked”? It may be a clique but that line actually comes from Scripture. In context, God is describing the rebellion of His people when they refused to follow His directions. He finishes His description with “There is no peace,” says the Lord, “for the wicked.”
Some versions use the word “rest” but either way, lack of peace or lack of rest describes the agitation of heart felt by anyone with a guilty conscience.
In spite of popular psychology, feeling guilty is not always a bad thing. It is like pain. If we did not feel pain when touching a hot stove, the burn would cause physical harm. Pain makes us stop touching the stove. Guilt is similar. When we do something contrary to our convictions, guilt helps us stop doing it. Without that agitation, we would cause harm to ourselves and others. Guilt also encourages us to fix the mess that our wrong actions have produced.
Guilt does have its drawbacks. One of them is that we tend to measure it by how bad we feel. That is, if someone feels badly for taking pencils from the boss but the fellow in the next desk feels nothing, then that person is apt to say, “It may be wrong for you but it’s okay for me.”
Such relativistic thinking dismisses all objective standards regarding morality. It says God’s opinion is not important or at best, is open to personal interpretation. That’s just another way of saying, “I don’t care what anyone thinks, even God. I will do what I want to do.”
Christians hold God and His Word as our standard, yet guilt is still tricky. Sometimes we do the right thing but feel guilty if someone doesn’t like what we did. That happens if our goals slip into a desire to please people. If someone is not pleased, then we have failed our goal and will say we feel guilty. As long as we did nothing wrong, this is a “false guilt.”
It gets trickier. True guilt, under the objective standards of God, does not always produce that inner agitation or lack of inner peace. We can break God’s law in ignorance, something like we can drive over the speed limit with a broken speedometer. If that happens, we may not realize we have broken the law because we can’t see (or feel) anything, but we are still guilty of doing it.
Obviously, if we rely on our feelings only to tell us about guilt, we can be mistaken. Not only that, if someone tells us we are guilty but we didn’t feel any guilt, we might refuse to see or admit it. We could say, “But everyone else does it” or “It’s really not that bad.”
Most people could not dismiss speed limits without considering how that would affect lives—our highways are already littered with victims—but our society tosses out objective standards and replaces them with personal opinions, personal preferences, and subjective feelings, then dares to say we are free from “Victorian” restraints. Some call this “progress.”
Lack of civil, criminal, and even traffic laws produces confusion, anarchy, and death but lack of moral law produces progress? Take another look. The price of dropping God’s standards is far more than lack of sleep, a vague sense of unrest, or an argument over who is right and who is wrong. It is out-of-control moral chaos.
Lord, the Bible says You “laugh at the wicked for you know their day is coming” and promises justice for those who do right. It is not easy to live an upright life in a world where right and wrong are measured mostly by what people want. God, help me to know what You want and then give me the courage to do it.
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