How Do You Deal With Your Guilt?

People deal with their bad consciences in many ingenious ways (from Charles Drew's book “The Ancient Love Song”):

• Practicing denial by keeping themselves busy working or entertaining themselves (cable TV and video movies can easily fill every leisure hour with nonreflective stimulation).
• Balancing off the bad stuff with religious or philanthropic activity.
• Purging (subconsciously) their guilt by vigorously condemning similar failures in other people.
• Developing a philosophy or a psychology that denies the existence of true guilt.
  

How do you deal with your guilt?

No matter how you deal with your guilt, the good news is that Jesus (not having any guilt of his own) died to clear you of a guilty conscience. So now, if you are trusting in Him and His work on the cross for you, you no longer have to work ingeniously to suppress your guilt. You are free and can live without the weight of condemnation on your shoulders.

If you are a Christian and still doing any of the following (above), perhaps you need to reflect on how well you understand the gospel.

If you are walking around trying to rid yourself of guilt, chances are you struggle with pride - since you are not letting Jesus take the guilt from you.

Perhaps you have been holding onto your guilt out of a desire to fix, clean, and redeem yourself.

Redeeming Souls vs. Redeeming Culture

There seems to be a dichotomy in the church between proclamation and mercy ministries.

Some churches train their people to share the gospel and hold many evangelistic events and outreaches. Other churches or ministries follow Saint Francis’s advice, “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary use words.” Redeeming souls vs. Redeeming culture. That seems to be the split.

The Christian communities I’m involved in seem to drift more toward redeeming souls than redeeming culture. We talk a lot about internal redemption (of the soul) but not so much about external redemption (of the culture). So, I think we should ask ourselves why this is and make some necessary changes.

Are we teaching out students how to redeem culture once they have come to Christ?

If they step out into one of these cultural institutions (Business, Government, Media, Church, Arts & Entertainment, Education, Social Sector) after graduation, will they know what to do?

How do we go about equipping our students to do the works God has prepared for them in advance... in their area of influence?