… holding faith and a good conscience (I Tim 1:19)
… the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared … (I Tim 4:2)
May I, by your grace, O Lord, have a clean conscience in Christ, for you have taken my guilt and thrown it into the depths of the sea.
I bet you have someone in your family like Aunt Georgina. She feels guilty when she dries her hands on the wrong towel in the bathroom at Uncle Bob’s house. She apologizes when she gives Christmas gifts because she wasn’t sure what you wanted. Her conscience troubles her when her dog innocently scares a neighbor by licking him in the face. Normally, she is pleasant enough, but every now and then her feelings get the best of her and she feels so depressed about something she did that she can’t relate properly to anyone in the family. Her guilt incapacitates her.
Likely, you’ve also seen Charles Jackson. He cheats on his wife, and when discovered says, “Come on! This is the 21st century!” He constantly berates his children and justifies himself by saying, “I had to teach them what was right.” He defames a coworker to get her job and concludes, “That’s the way the world works.”
Aunt Georgina seems to feel guilty when a gnat lands on her plate, while Charles Jackson doesn’t seem to feel anything when he unjustly divorces his wife. He has a convenient explanation for everything, and remorse never touches his soul.
Aunt Georgina and Charles Jackson are both dealing with guilt, but they are doing it in different ways. Guilt is a human thing. No matter where you go you find it, and you and I all wrestle with it.
Now the first key to dealing with guilt is to understand that we use the word in different ways. The first way we use the word is to refer to real guilt, which I will label “Guilt.” Guilt refers to real moral wrong. Charles Jackson had Guilt when he cheated on his wife. The second way we use the word refers to feelings of guilt, which I will label “guilt.” Aunt Georgina had guilt when she dried her hands on the wrong towels.
Problems occur when Guilt and guilt do not correspond. In other words, if we have no real Guilt but we feel guilty, that is a problem. Or if we have real Guilt but feel nothing, that, too, is a problem. Feelings of guilt are not necessarily unhealthy. What is unhealthy is when the feelings and the reality don’t match. We should feel guilt appropriate to our real Guilt.
Now, feelings of guilt often come with other feelings like shame, embarrassment, depression, and inferiority. Consequently, most people don’t enjoy feeling guilty — even the Aunt Georginas of the world. The human race has, thus, concocted some clever ways to shirk these feelings. Generally, this involves denying Guilt, a skill which most of us have become adept at. We do this in different ways. Sometimes we simply redefine right and wrong. If we redefine what real Guilt is, then we are free to engage in our behavior without any of those inconvenient feelings. Sometimes we do not redefine Guilt but justify it with excuses a mile long. We agree that one should tell the truth, but that time we called in sick when we weren’t sick was a special situation. And besides, everyone else does it. Our excuses can be quite clever, and we generally believe them, so that we rescue our souls from those monstrous feelings of remorse.
The problem with these efforts is that they are self-centered, arrogant, and dishonest. We do not have the authority to redefine Guilt. That is God’s job, not ours. He sets the standards. We don’t. We can certainly label things right and wrong, and our labels can come close to or be far from reality, but we cannot change the reality. Imagine for a moment a man who cheated on his taxes and tried to get out of it by redefining tax law. He can’t to do that. He doesn’t get to write the law. And neither do we get to decide what real right and wrong are. Second, when we justify our Guilt with excuses, we paint ourselves to be prettier than we are. It is false advertising, and usually the ones we most deceive with our advertising are ourselves.
These sorts of practices will not do. We fool ourselves into feeling good. We hold up Aunt Georgina and say, “We don’t want to be like her,” but in our efforts to flee Aunt Georgina, we turn ourselves into Charles Jackson. Many people have no feelings of guilt because they don’t believe they have any Guilt. They proclaim “Peace, peace” when there is no peace. These sorts of efforts to hide Guilt are dysfunctional, deceptive, and sinful in their own right. They are nothing more than a cover up.
Now the Christian way of dealing with Guilt is quite different from these natural ways. The Christian way begins by acknowledging our Guilt. In one sense, this is just a matter of being truthful about who we are. The moment, however, we acknowledge our Guilt, we can begin to deal with it. People who hide it behind fancy definitions and excuses are never able to deal with it. They don’t even know it is there. And the thing about Guilt is that it doesn’t just go away, and it always involves real life. Guilt is not an idea floating in the sky like a runaway balloon. It is mixed with Earth. It deals with a rebellious attitude we had, some harsh words we spoke, a person we hurt, a defilement of our own body. Guilt insists on being as real as dirt. If we clean it up and pretend there is no dirt, if we treat Guilt as a vague feeling not tethered to reality, we never heal. The Christian way wants to deal with the real issues and not sweep them under the carpet.
Dealing with Guilt in a healthy way involves making things right, and the first place we must do this is with God. After all, when we sin, it is His law we have violated. When we harm another, we have harmed a soul He made. When we defile our own bodies, we defile His creation. Every wrong we do, we do against God. Therefore when we sin, we need to make things right with God just as a child who disobeys his father must deal with his father. Thus, all sin, no matter who it involves on earth, involves our heavenly Father whom we have disobeyed. Consequently, we must make things right with God.
The Christian way, however, is honest enough to see that you and I cannot truly make amends to God. It is too expensive. God is not Mrs. Johnson next door. He is an eternal and infinite King. He is a consuming fire. Justice surrounds His throne, and Guilt and justice can be an expensive mix. Real Guilt does not just deal with life issues. It is itself a justice issue. Therefore, the Christian way acknowledges not just our own Guilt, but the just judgment of God against it. People who say that hell is a cruel doctrine do not understand their own sin.
