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.

Hiding Behind Religion

Many of us are deceived into thinking that we are saved by either a) our religious knowledge, b) our religious acts, or c) our religious tradition.

RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

“You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” - John 5:39-40

Jesus drops a bomb on the seminary students of his day. These young shooting stars, who had memorized large chunks of the Hebrew bible, had no idea that the bible was all about the Father's plan of saving the world through Jesus, not a self-help morality book that gives us strategic plan for saving ourselves.

RELIGIOUS ACTS

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'” - Matthew 7:21-23

This one will make your head hurt a little. So, ummm... some people doing religious things will enter the Kingdom of God (vs. 21) but other people doing religious things (vs. 23) are called evildoers? How do we clear up that fog?

Jesus is always about the heart. He makes the case that two people can do the same act but for different reasons because they have different heart motivations. So, how can you change your heart and its motivations? Well, you can't.

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” Ezekiel 36:26-27

There are two kinds of people:

• those who trust in their own heart and try to impress God with the religious acts that flow out of it
  
• those who ask Jesus for a heart transplant
  

Because of Jesus and the work on the cross, we can have a new heart with new desires. In the end, it is Jesus' religious act that justifies us.

RELIGIOUS TRADITION

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them... do not think you can say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.” - Matthew 3:7-9

These religious nut jobs bragged about finding their identity in father Abraham. It would be the equivalent of a Catholic today bragging about Jesus giving the keys to Peter (him being the first Pope of the Catholic church). Catholics, even non-practicing ones, find a strong sense of worth by belonging to “The Church”. But Protestants do the same thing in different ways. They will hide behind the banner of “evangelical” or “bible-believing”. Or, I've heard some college students say that they were raised in a Christian home. They hide behind their parents' faith.

No matter who we are, we can't take refuge in religious labels. Putting on a name tag (I'm Catholic, I'm a Seminary student, I was raised in a Christian Family, I go to a Bible-believing Church, etc.) may fool the people around you but it won't fool God.

One day everyones' heart will be scanned and the bar code will not lie. The litmus test: Were we finding our identity, security, and hope in Jesus or in our religious knowledge, acts, or tradition?

Works-boasting Is Wrong But Faith-boasting Isn't?

Just last week a student's grandma came with her to a bible study I was leading. When one of the other students started to go in the direction of earning our salvation through good works, the grandma immediately turned to Ephesians 2:8-9 to correct the heretical student. Every good protestant knows these verses: “For it is by grace you have been saved, not by works; it is a gift of God so that no one can boast.” Salvation comes from Jesus' merit alone, not ours.

So far so good.

But the problem I have noticed is that this group of anti-boasters has become well – boastful. Not boastful in the sense that they slip into a works-righteous mentality too, but that they become boastful of the fact that they “believed in faith” and everyone else hasn't. They start thinking that this “work of the heart” in turning around and trusting in Christ was their doing, not God's.

When we talk about when we decided to “trust in Christ” isn't there always a hint of “I looked at the options and the facts from the bible and made a good logical decision?” Don't we tend to think that we came to God and not that God came to us?

Why does this matter?

If we start to think that we came to faith in Christ through our own intelligent decision-making process, then we will start to judge others and make war against non-Christians. We will begin to feel self-righteous since we made a “duh” decision to follow God and that everyone else needs to follow in our footsteps.

The problem is that yelling at a blind person won't make them see. However, if we walk up to the blind, take a hold of their hand, and pray to God with all our might that He would open their eyes, then I think we'll start to reach the world as God intended. Realizing that God is the only one who can make the blind see (us included) is the only way to true humility.

Hopefully, as faith-boasting Christians begin to boast in Jesus and not in their “decision for Christ” we'll start to have more compassion on those around us and in the culture at large. I'm pretty tired of seeing “faith-boasters” wage war against the culture. They need a dose of their own depravity.