Guilt

Guilt

How often we feel guilt as Christians and wonder how to handle it.  Guilt really results in one of two emotions, often both.  We either feel convicted or condemned.  How do we handle each of those?

Condemnation tells us that we are unworthy to do what God has for us.  “How could God love you after what you’ve done?”  We feel lowly, discouraged, separated from God, and we feel like crawling in that dark place under the house and just hiding from God in shame.

Conviction is the feeling that we have sinned, and we need to make things right with our God.  It’s a feeling much like condemnation bringing disappointment and discouragement in having failed Him.

Condemnation comes from the devil.  It is meant to draw us away from God, to keep us from our intimacy with Him, to stop our service for God and to dwell in self-pity.  It makes us ineffective in our witness.  Walter Martin used to rightly say, “To the devil, the next best thing to a lost soul is a sterile Christian.”  Condemnation makes us sterile by driving us away from God.

Conviction, though, is God telling us we need to repent.  He is reaching out to us to restore us to our intimate relationship with Him.  It is a healthy thing, and because He has paid the price for our sin through the death of His Son, He is faithful and just to forgive us of those sins (1 John 1:9)

Sometimes we tend to hang onto sins we’ve confessed.  Satan reminds us of past things we’ve done, people we’ve hurt.  Again, this is his attempt to keep us from our God.  I sometimes find myself asking for forgiveness of sins I committed years ago, sins I’ve confessed dozens of times before.  In the light of Scripture, God wonders what in the world I’m talking about:

Hebrews 8:12 (ESV)
¹²  For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”

God can willingly forget things.  Our confessed sins are among those things He chooses to forget.  It isn’t He who keeps bringing those past sins up.  It’s Satan reminding us and our flesh dwelling on them.

If we feel unworthy and discouraged, unfit to address God with our problems and sin, that is from Satan, and we need not pay attention.  And, we shouldn’t dwell on the sins of the past, God doesn’t even remember them.

When we feel separated from God because of the sin we’ve committed, we should seek Him out.  The conviction we feel is from Him as He desires to draw us back to His side.