A friend called me Saturday about
a woman in his Sunday school class dealing with guilt. A few weeks ago another
friend talked to me about a man he met on his job dealing with guilt. Both of
these people struggling with guilt are advanced in age, both of them are wrestling
with things that happened long ago, both of them are weighed down with the
crushing burden of guilt and remorse.
My question in the Saturday
conversation was, “Does she know Jesus?” My question to my other friend, when I
see him again, will be, “Does he know Jesus?”
In a therapeutic society, and
in a therapeutic church, our tendency is to seek emotional or psychological
healing – we think that the alleviation of pain, in this case the pain of
guilt, is what our first response should be; and so our first question is, “How
can I give this person immediate relief from pain?” This may be a fair question
in terms of medical triage (but even there further pain may be necessary to
save the patient), but it is a dangerous question in matters of the soul, and
it is an especially dangerous question when guilt is concerned.
While there can be false guilt
in different forms, I am not addressing false guilt right now; I am addressing
God-given merciful guilt; for just as physical pain alerts us to a medical
condition, the pain of guilt alerts us to a sin condition – and alertness to a
sin condition is meant to drive us to Jesus Christ in repentance and seeking
forgiveness.
The default response to guilt
in our society is to deny it and by denying it we deprive ourselves of God’s
forgiveness. We use pleasure, we use alcohol and drugs (legal and illegal), we
use materialism, we use false religion, we use self-help, we use sex – we use
whatever we can to deaden guilt, to deny guilt, to justify ourselves. In much
of the professing church Jesus has become one therapist among many – He’ll make
it better without repentance, without confession, without remorse – of all the
medications available, Christian feel-good-about-myself medication is the most
insidious for it hides the Christ of the Cross and the Cross of Christ. In
church we can be so close and yet so far away.
As passages such as Romans
Chapters 1 – 5:11 make clear, God wants us to know guilt so that we’ll be
driven to Jesus in repentance and confession – and keep in mind that repentance
means turning around and following Jesus, it means (in the Biblical context)
following Jesus Christ as Lord. True repentance manifests itself in a
relationship with Jesus Christ and it is only in a relationship with Jesus that
we can know forgiveness and a conscience at peace with God, with others, and
with ourselves.
In this sense, guilt is good news! Our response to those
struggling with guilt need not be, “I’m so sorry,” but rather can be, “That’s
great news that you have a sense of guilt, let me introduce you to Jesus
Christ! He knows about your guilt because He knows about your sin, He knows
about all of our sin – let me tell you about why Jesus came and died and was
buried and about His resurrection.”
The world has made guilt a bad
thing, but guilt, operating the way God designed it, is a good thing because it
is meant to lead us in confession and repentance to the God who so loved us
that He gave His only begotten Son.
As followers of Jesus Christ
our calling is to share Jesus with others, to make disciples by teaching others
to obey all that Jesus Christ has commanded us (Matthew 28:19-20). God has
broken into this world in His Son Jesus and He is our Lord and we are His
disciples, His followers; He is our Master and we are His slaves; He is our
elder brother and we are His family; He is the Head and we are His body.
Knowing Jesus Christ is everything – therefore our threshold question must
always be, “Have you come to know Jesus through repentance, confession, and are
you following Him?”
The Crucifixion was not a
therapy session, it was the Son of God bearing the sin of the world; because of
the Christ of the Cross our sin can be forgiven and our consciences cleansed from
guilt (Hebrews 10:19-22) and we can know intimacy with God and with each other.
“Therefore having been
justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand,
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” [Romans 5:1-2.]
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