The Church today treats guilt as a bad thing. Many Christians think that they ought never feel guilty, and that feelings of guilt should be rejected and overcome through positive-thinking. But this is a serious error. Guilt is our soul's response to sin. It is good that we have that response if we are in fact guilty of something. But what do we do with guilt? What can we learn from it and where should it lead us? That's what I want to talk about today.
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Quick reminder at the top here, the Western Conservative Summit is June 8th and June 9th, so that's Friday and Saturday.
I'm going to be speaking on Friday morning.
I hope you can come out. It's in Denver.
I guess I should probably let you know that.
It's in Denver, and the theme this year, it's a good theme.
It's fortifying freedom, which is not only catchy with the alliteration, but it's also just a really very meaty kind of I have a few things to say about freedom that I hope will be useful to you.
Now, I want to talk about spiritual stuff today.
I tell you that by way of disclaimer at the top.
This particular show will be rated R for religious.
Just so you know, I know that that kind of content is disturbing and distasteful to some people, so just Fair warning.
Now, I received an email from somebody who brings up an interesting subject, and I thought it'd be worth discussing with you.
The subject is guilt.
I will summarize the email for you.
He says he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian, though recently he finds that he's experiencing a lot of guilt for past sins, for things in his past, and very intense guilt sometimes.
And he's not sure What he should do with these feelings, or if he should even be feeling them, isn't the Christian life supposed to be guilt-free?
That's what a lot of people seem to think.
He says that the church he attends is not much help because it's a church that tends to treat guilt as an objectively bad thing You know, that you should just let go of.
You should forget. Move on.
Not worry about it. His church seems to preach.
He didn't use this term, but he seems to preach kind of a self-acceptance gospel where guilt is nothing but an obstacle to be overcome.
He wants to know if I have a better answer to the question of guilt.
I don't know if I do. I hope that I do.
I'll give it a try. So, a few things on the subject of guilt.
First, it's a good sign if you have it.
If you have guilt, that's a good sign.
It doesn't mean that you're meant to stew in it or drown in it your whole life, but it is a good sign.
It's a sign of spiritual alertness.
It's a sign of love.
Guilt is a sign of love.
Now, many Christians, I think today, it would seem that many Christians today feel very little guilt.
And so that means that Christians who do feel guilt, they end up feeling even more alone and more lost and confused because their fellow Christians can't seem to relate to them.
Because there are some who can live in sin, can be dishonest, gossipy, materialistic, selfish, lustful, so on and so forth, and yet feel almost no guilt for it.
And the thing is, they'll say that they lack this guilt because they have faith in God.
And so what they claim is that their lack of guilt is a sign, a symptom of their faith and of their confidence in God's forgiveness.
But that's not really the case.
Simply not the case.
Their lack of guilt is due to their lack of love for God.
A Christian who has never experienced serious, deep guilt either has never sinned, so I'm not in that category, I don't know about you, or the other explanation is they don't love God and they don't really care about their faith.
Those are really the only two explanations for a Christian who really just never experiences guilt.
I've used this analogy before, but if you cheat on your wife and you feel no guilt for it, And maybe you apologize, but you're like, yeah, my bad about it.
Sorry about the whole cheating thing.
Anyway, what's for dinner?
If you have a callous disregard for your wife and for your vows...
You can't claim that this is somehow a sign of your confidence in those vows.
You can't claim that, oh yeah, well, I don't feel guilty because I know my wife loves me and she wouldn't want me to feel guilty, so that's why I don't feel guilty.
No. If you approach it that way, if you feel no guilt for betraying your wife in such a terrible, evil way, it's because you don't love your wife and you don't care about your vows.
And therefore, you're very far away from the place that you need to be in order for true reconciliation to happen.
In order for the marriage to be healed, you're very far away from it.
Even if your wife is a wonderful, loving person and is ready to forgive and has a forgiving heart, the marriage cannot be saved while you still have that attitude.
There are many Christians who have never struggled deeply with guilt, never feel the weight of it, don't understand what you mean when you talk about it, and so that means they can't repent because the repentance would not be sincere.
And without love for God and without repentance, then their souls are in a very dangerous state.
And to even call them Christian at all is, well, it's a bit of a stretch, let's just say.
But if you have guilt, then your guilt, this guilt that you feel, It means, at the very least, that you're aware of your sins, that you're alert spiritually, that you love God.
You love God enough to feel distraught by your betrayal of Him.
Remember when you were a kid and how it always felt so much worse?
If you got in trouble, it always felt, at least for me, I know, it always felt so much worse if your parents said, I'm disappointed.
They don't yell, they don't scream, they just tell you they're disappointed.
That always felt worse, especially if they really appear to be disappointed.
Like, I don't know if you're ever kidding, you did something, especially when you get a little bit older, and you did something really bad, and you hurt your pain.
It's clear that you hurt them, and they're almost too hurt to even be angry.
That's always the worst, right?
That's always so much worse.
Because you can tell that their disappointment in you and in what you did is rooted in their love for you.
And this gives rise to guilt on your part that's rooted in your love for them.
So that's the one thing we should remember, that guilt itself is a good sign.
Second, we should remember that guilt itself is not the problem.
You know, it's uncomfortable, it's painful.
Depending on the situation, depending on the guilt, it can even feel crushing sometimes.
But the guilt is your soul's response to sin.
So sin is the problem.
Guilt is not the problem.
We shouldn't talk about getting rid of guilt.
Sin is the problem.
Guilt, true guilt, you know, what I think we could call healthy guilt, is the Holy Spirit working within you, calling you to repentance and reconciliation.
I think the problem in our society today, and the church especially, is that we kind of go to war against guilt, but not against sin.
We treat guilt as the problem itself, as if a healthy Christian ought to feel no guilt whatsoever, no matter what he does.
But this is a sign of a dead Christian, of a non-Christian, of a soul that's on the precipice of hell.
That's not the sign of a healthy Christian.
The church should battle against sin and teach us how to respond to guilt, what to do with it.
So that we can be free from the burden of the sin that sparked the guilt.
Not free from guilt.
The objective is to be free from sin, not free from guilt.
Be free from guilt because you're free of sin.
I think guilt without a correct understanding of sin, guilt without an understanding of divine justice, can lead us to despair.
And I think that's one of the reasons why we see so much despair in our secular society.
So many people that are just, even if everything else around them, even if their whole life seems like it's a wonderful life in so many ways, still so many people are in despair.
And one of the reasons for it, I'm not saying the only reason, but one of the reasons I think in so many cases is this kind of guilt that they don't know what to do with it.
They just have it.
It brings to mind one of my favorite scenes in my favorite show of all time, Breaking Bad.
And in this scene, it's a brilliant scene, Jesse Pinkman, one of the primary characters on the show.
He's a drug dealer, also a drug addict.
And he's at this kind of drugs, it's kind of like a Narcotics Anonymous, I guess, meeting.
And they're all sitting around in a circle on folding chairs.
And the leader of the group is preaching self-acceptance.
And he's telling everyone, just let go of your guilt, let go of your past, let go of the shame, accept yourself for who you are, forget about your past actions, forget about past evils, and just move on.
Well, Jesse, it just so happens at this point in the show, has just murdered an innocent man.
And he killed him because he thought he had to.
He rationalized it that way.
But now the guilt of that action and of his life of crime in general, that guilt is just eating him alive.
And he hears all this stuff about self-acceptance, but it's just garbage to him.
It rings so hollow. There's something deeper that he needs.
And self-acceptance and moving on, that's not going to do it for him.
So he launches into this brilliant monologue, I think one of the most morally insightful monologues in the history of television, where he's crying out, and he's saying that he should be punished for what he's done.
He should be judged.
He doesn't want to accept himself.
He doesn't want to accept his sins.
He wants there to be some kind of consequence.
Because what's the point of life if you can just do whatever you want and face no judgment at all?
It was kind of a moment, kind of a theme right out of Dostoevsky, which is probably why I liked it so much.
But the point is that letting go of guilt, which is what he was being told in this support group, just let go, let go.
That's not good enough. It's not a good enough answer.
For those who are morally aware enough to actually experience true guilt, it's not good enough.
There has to be repentance.
There has to be accountability.
There has to be justice.
Even those who are not Christian, yet who have well-formed consciences, still kind of innately recognize this.
Whereas Christians who do not have well-formed consciences do not recognize this.
So I think what the church should be saying is, here's what I think the church should be saying about guilt.
The church should be saying, you feel guilt because you've sinned, and your sins are detestable, and you are right to feel the way you do about them.
You've betrayed your father who loves you, and if you love him, you should hate that fact, and you should hate your sin, and you should feel pain because of it.
Now, take all of that before him, And repent and resolve to never do it again.
And you've got to have that resolution also.
If you don't have the resolution, even if you fail to perfectly carry it out, if you don't make that resolution and mean it, then it's not repentance.
Third thing, then the question is, maybe the most difficult question is, well, what do we do about repented sins that still bring guilt?
What if you've really reformed your life, you've repented, you resolved to live differently, and you're really carrying that out, though imperfectly, you really have changed through God's grace, and yet still you have guilt for a past that you can't do anything about anymore.
Maybe you've done terrible things.
You can't do anything about it.
You wish it never happened, but it did.
And you still feel guilt for it, even though you've repented and you've thrown yourself on the mercy of God.
What do you do about that? And where does that come from?
Now, I think, I hope I'm not speaking above my pay grade here because this is a very deep question, but as I've thought about it, I think there could be a couple of different explanations for that kind of guilt, and they're very different explanations, so each person has to discern prayerfully which explanation applies to their case personally, but I think that persistent guilt for repented sins could be the result of Satan tormenting you.
Scripture tells us that Satan is our accuser, and he's quite relentless in his accusations.
And of course, he doesn't care if you've repented.
He'd prefer if you didn't. But that's not going to make him stop.
So he might accuse you of repented sins to discourage you from repenting in the future, because he wants you to feel like repentance is kind of fruitless.
But mostly I think he just likes to see you suffer.
He enjoys it. And he wants you to find faith and religion burdensome and tiring and painful.
And he wants you to see it as a source of self-loathing so that you abandon it.
And also I think Satan is interested in punishing you for repenting.
He takes that personally.
He doesn't like it. And so he's going to try to speak to you in the back of your mind and say, oh yeah, remember what you did?
Remember this? Remember this thing you did?
You disgusting person?
But here again, even this guilt, which is really more of a false guilt because it comes not from the Holy Spirit, but from the evil spirit.
But even this guilt is a sign that you're kind of onto something, that you're a threat to Satan, that he knows that you're almost lost to him, that you're on the right path, and he doesn't like that.
So he throws this against you.
This is when Satan gets really desperate.
This is his most desperate move is when he starts doing this.
He's trying to just scare you.
Keep in mind, he doesn't bother tormenting the shallowest kinds of people with guilt, because their consciences are too dead anyway, and they have no love for God, so he's got nothing to work with, and he doesn't need to anyway.
He's perfectly fine with those kinds of people to just let them be comfortable.
And if they never feel any guilt, then that's great as far as he's concerned.
But if you're struggling deeply with guilt, Then that means that he has raw material to work with.
So, like, look at it this way.
If you're kind of a prodigal son figure, you live deeply in sin, now you've come to God, and you've come sincerely, and you've repented.
And that's a wonderful thing.
And God rejoices over every lost sheep that he finds.
And that's wonderful. However, unfortunately, now Satan has a lot of raw material to work with.
He's got the perfect raw material because he has your past sins on one hand, which he knows about and he's seen and he delighted in when they were happening.
And he takes it very personally that you stop doing those things.
So he has that on one hand.
On the other hand, he has your love of God on the other.
He also has your love of God.
That's also raw material that he can work with.
He can exploit both of them.
He can kind of play them off of each other.
But you love God You've got your past sins.
So that's the material that he's working with.
Now, how do you know if your guilt has this origin?
Does this guilt have diabolical origin or does it have heavenly origin?
Well, if it's a repented sin and the guilt that you feel from it leads to self-hatred and despair, well, then that's from Satan because God would never give you those kinds of feelings.
He doesn't want you to feel that way.
God will stir in your heart a guilt that will drive you to repent, into restoration, into reformation.
He's going to give you a guilt, in other words, that brings you closer to Him.
But if your guilt is drawing you away into the abyss, into despair, into faithlessness, into self-hatred, into resentment, then you should know that it's not God leading you there.
So rebuke Satan in that case and give yourself over to God and his protection because that's Satan.
But, you know, I guess we have to ask ourselves, is all guilt for past sin, for repentant sin, is that always necessarily the work of Satan?
I don't think so. And this is where it gets confusing.
It's very difficult. It sometimes can be hard to discern.
It's a scary thing to think about.
But as fallen people in our conscience, sometimes it can be hard to discern.
Is this a voice of light speaking to you or a voice of darkness?
It can be hard to discern sometimes.
And Satan comes disguised as an angel of light.
But I don't think that all guilt that you might feel, even for past sins, even for repentances, I don't think it's necessarily the work of Satan.
And it would be a mistake to assume that it is.
Because it could be a sign, number one, that your repentance was not true, it was not sincere, it was not complete.
You know, when you've lived deeply in sin and you've done terrible things, To truly repent can sometimes be a process to really get yourself to a point or to allow God to get you through His grace to a point of really confronting that and feeling true sorrow for it.
It's not something that will just happen overnight.
I think we're mistaken if we assume that repentance and forgiveness are simple and painless acts.
And we're mistaken if we assume that our journey out of the darkness is going to be quick and comfortable.
It's not going to be.
It's going to be a process.
It takes some time. And so you may think that you've sufficiently repented, but you may not have.
Especially, again, if it's a life of sin and you in a fleeting moment say, oh my gosh, I'm sorry, that may not be true repentance.
That may just be an emotional experience that you had, a fleeting emotional experience.
Now I'd ask you, let's just take a really horrible thing.
So think about a rapist.
Or a murderer. Can someone like that expect to repent sincerely and from then on feel no guilt, no pain, no sadness, no grief, no sorrow over what they've done?
Of course not. Because our sins still have consequences.
They still leave marks. They still cause scars in ourselves and on other people.
They still have a weight to them, even when we repent.
And this idea of cheap repentance, kind of like the cheap grace that Bonhoeffer talks about, it's very damaging.
It's very misleading. After all, the worst sins that we can commit are the sins that cause scandal and hurt to other people.
And so even if we've repented of the damage that we've done to other people, the other people may still have to live with what we've done.
Depending on what it is, they may still have pain for the rest of their lives.
They may still have even worse than that.
You know, if we have been Christians and we've given a very bad example, we've scandalized other people with our example and led them into sin, it's a terrible thing.
It's the worst thing.
And those people may still be struggling because of us.
And if we've really repented and we really love God and we really love our fellow man, of course we're going to still feel some pain about that.
A truly repented rapist is going to realize that, well, the person that he raped is still out there and they still are going to suffer from this for the rest of their lives.
And I think this, you know, this becomes a stumbling block for a lot of people who maybe are considering becoming Christian.
And they hear about this really cheap idea of repentance and forgiveness.
And it causes a lot, I've heard this from people, it causes them to think twice about becoming Christian because it just doesn't, there's something about it, it seems almost sociopathic.
And they'll say, like, are you telling me that someone can do all these horrible things to other people, victimize them, and then just in a second say, oh, I'm sorry, and they're good to go and they can just live the rest of their life just whistling on by, whistling through the rose bushes and just, you know, like smelling the roses, not even thinking about what they've done to anybody else?
That's not right. Well, no, that's not the way it is.
Of course, if we have done terrible things and we've hurt other people especially, we're going to feel pain.
It shouldn't be debilitating.
It shouldn't be a self-loathing pain.
It shouldn't lead us away from God and into despair, but it may still be there.
And depending on what it is, it may always be there.
And so maybe we have to live with it.
We have to carry it.
It's our cross that we have made for ourselves, and it's our burden, and we have to accept it in humility and carry on.
At the very least, I think if we still have a certain pain over the thought of things we've done to other people, that's a pain that God may give to us.
And one of the things that He wants us to do with it, for sure, is to pray for those other people.
If we have ever scandalized somebody or victimized them in any way, we should be praying for them.
Like every day, we should be praying for them for the rest of our lives.
That's what true repentance is.
It's just not good enough to say, well, sorry.
I guess they'll have to deal with that.
Anyway, I'm going to go over here. Good luck with all that that I did to you.
See you later. No, we shouldn't hate ourselves for it, but I mean, it's not as simple as that, as just riding off into the sunset like it never happened.
One other thought. I've found that I will experience...
And one other thing about that. Again, this is...
And I think it's just so important to draw this distinction.
That even remembering past things that we've done, you know, the pain that comes with that.
I know I already said this, but I just think it needs to be emphasized that it is not a self-loathing pain.
And if it gets into self-loathing territory, then that is not from God.
It's more of just throwing ourselves at the mercy of God, going to God, and saying, you know, I know I've done this terrible thing.
I've repented of it. What else can I do, though?
Maybe I don't need to do anything, but what else can I? I want to do more to try to make it right, to try to correct what I've done.
And so one of those things God might say is, well, you've hurt somebody.
Pray for them. That's one thing you can do.
All right, one other thought. I've often found that I will experience myself pangs of serious guilt in moments when I find myself condemning other people in my heart.
And so then I'll feel guilt, not just for the condemnation, but also for a past sin of my own.
You know, a similar sin to the one that I'm noticing in another person will often come to the forefront of my mind when I am busy noticing someone else's sin.
Now, who causes that to happen?
That's not from Satan. The last thing Satan would do is that he prefers it if we stew in our condemnation and resent of our fellow man.
He doesn't want to interrupt that process at all.
No, that again is guilt and pain from God.
He's trying to give you humility.
He's not holding it against you.
He's not trying to torment you, but he's just saying, I know this when this happens to me, he's saying to me what he said to the crowd that were going to stone the adulterous woman.
He's just saying, he who is without sin.
And he's also saying, you know, remember your past.
Remember your sin. Remember, because I want you to remember what I've delivered you from.
Because I'm merciful. You're no better than the person that you condemn.
So have humility. Don't use my mercy and my forgiveness and my generosity as a means or as a reason for you to become prideful and arrogant.
I don't think it's true that God wants us to forget our past and our sins.
He does not want us to forget our Because if we forget our sin and our past, then we forget about His mercy and His love.
We cannot appreciate it and be grateful for it.
So I think He may bring that to the forefront of our minds sometimes to humble us and also to give us gratitude and joy so that we can remember, like, oh my gosh, think about that thing that I did, but yet He's forgiven me.
I do this with my own kids sometimes.
Recently, my son got in trouble for yelling at his sister and then yelling at me after I tried to correct him.
And his sister was kind of triumphant about it, you know, as kids can tend to be in these situations.
And so his sister came up to me and she said, Oh, Daddy, Luke was really wrong for yelling like that.
I'm so glad that I didn't yell.
And of course, I had to say to her, you know, yeah, he made a mistake.
He shouldn't have acted that way. You have also acted that way in the past.
So let's remember that.
Everybody makes mistakes, including you.
And that was just my way of trying to teach her a little bit of humility and also compassion for her brother so that she's not taking delight in the fact that he got punished.
And so I think that God, who is our Heavenly Father, Can kind of do the same thing with us, because we're his children, and I think a lot of times we need that reminder.
And there might be a little bit of pain, a little bit of guilt attached to it when we feel it, but that's good.
So I hope some of that was useful.
Those are my thoughts about guilt.
But if you're really struggling with it, remember that you can never pray too much.
And probably almost all of us are praying too little.
I know I am. So always just bring it back to God and ask Him, what do you want me to do with this?
What are you trying to teach me?
What are you trying to show me? Thanks for watching, everybody.
