Handling Guilt or Shame

The Most Tortured Conscience Can Find Peace

• She had been a stripper, prostitute, drug addict and demon-possessed witch. It was hard to imagine a perversion or Satanic form of depravity she hadn’t wallowed in. Two thousand years ago, Christ agonized on a Roman cross, shedding his life-blood for those very sins. She continued in her extreme degradation. Finally, she joined herself to Jesus, by faith trading her wickedness for Christ’s holiness. One day Jesus appeared to her and said, ‘You are a chaste virgin in my sight.’

  
  

  None of us have an infallible conscience. In fact, most of us have consciences are at times wildly inaccurate. If you want Scriptural proof of this, you’ll find plenty.

  So when facing guilt feelings, the most important thing is to establish whether your guilt is real or imaginary. Tragically, most people stand guilty before God and are hardly aware of it. They wrongly imagine that if there is a heaven, they have a good chance of going there. On the other hand, there are countless thousands whom God regards as spotlessly pure and innocent, and yet are riddled with guilt feelings.

  We must clearly differentiate between deceptive feelings and spiritual reality.

  
  

  You have every right to feel guilty and fearful before God if:

  • 1. You have not asked God’s forgiveness for your sin, trusting Jesus to have paid the full penalty for your sin by dying on the cross for you. Christ alone is capable of the divine miracle needed to wipe out all guilt.

    2. You are unwilling to ask God to take your sins from you. To refuse to be delivered from your pet sin is like a drowning man stubbornly refusing to let his rescuer drag him from the water. If you have no intention of giving up a particular sin, you’ll die in that sin. The sins you love are as deadly as the sins you despise.

  Everyone who is not trusting Jesus for forgiveness, or does not want a sin-free life, remains guilty before the Judge of the universe, until he or she has a change of heart.

  If, however, you have met these two conditions, God’s smile is upon you. Any pangs of guilt or fear you suffer are simply an illusion – like fearing there’s an intruder in the house when it was only the sound of the wind. The feelings might exist, and they might be most unpleasant, but they are groundless. They have no correspondence to reality.

  Just to be sure, let’s briefly expound these conditions for spiritual cleansing. Then we’ll move to some exciting facts.

  1. You must believe the Scriptures that teach that Jesus, and only he, can remove your sin. (He alone can pay sin’s penalty because he alone has no sins of his own for which he must suffer.)

  2. Once you put your faith in God, trusting that he is infinitely wise and good and always has your best interest at heart, [more] the only logical thing is to resolve to follow his leading on every matter, regardless of how scary and costly it may sometimes seem. This is simply a decision. A state of mind. It means that despite some sins still seeming attractive, you decide that God’s way is best and sign over to him control of your life. It means refusing to enjoy the ‘benefits’ of past sin. You will repay money you have stolen, not let people to continue believing a lie you have told, and so on. And it means shunning the hypocrisy of wanting God’s forgiveness while refusing to forgive someone else. (The issue for forgiving others is so crucial that it is dealt with in detail in a special webpage.)

  Sin’s full penalty is death, and the sinless Son of God died for you. Why punish yourself? He’s already taken your punishment! Are you morally bankrupt? No way! Paid in full is stamped over your every account. By joining yourself to Jesus, a divine exchange takes place in which Jesus takes your sins upon himself (that’s what killed him) and his perfection becomes yours. The holiness of Jesus floods your entire being, flushing out every trace of sin. That makes you spotlessly pure and perfect in God’s eyes. Almighty God can embrace you and delight in you as intimately as he does his own eternal, sinless Son. Every whiff of sin is obliterated because Jesus died for your every sin. This central spiritual truth is expounded over and over in Bible. Scripture repeatedly promises this to you, but no where does it say you will feel that it has happened. The whole of Christianity is about choosing to believe spiritual reality instead of your inner feelings.

  It is worth prayerfully studying, and even memorizing, the Scriptures listed in the above link, because this is a crucial area of spiritual attack. Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and he overcame by believing and quoting the Scriptures, so you will be tempted over this matter and you can overcome by clinging to the dependable Word of God. Satan will disguise the true nature of the temptation, but it is actually a temptation to believe God is a liar. The Deceiver is trying to fool you into believing that God lied when he said that all your sins are forgiven, when Jesus said that all that come to him he will not cast out, etc. Don’t blacken God’s name by entertaining such a thought.

  
  

  No one can be any more guilty than the nicest person

  No matter how horrendously evil you might have been, by God’s standards, you are no more guilty than anyone else. We were all dead in our sins, says Scripture. You can’t get any deader, than dead! Without exception we were all a total write-off.

  Relative to each other, some of us seem fairly innocent and some seem very guilty. But this is by our sinful standards. It’s like someone who has murdered twenty people feeling superior to someone who killed two hundred people. Perfection is God’s only standard. We get just one shot at living a perfect life and we have all blown it. We have all missed the mark. Whether we missed the mark by a millimeter or a kilometer, means nothing. We all missed, and that’s all that counts.

  On the other hand, when you receive divine forgiveness through Jesus, no one can be more forgiven than you. Although outside of Christ, we all stand condemned, in Christ, we each stand spotlessly pure before the Holy One.

  Simple logic suggests that our spiritual enemy, whom Scripture calls the Deceiver and the Accuser, would muster all his evil cunning to distort this simple truth. If the Evil One wanted to keep people from the wonderful forgiveness that Jesus offers, he would try to convince them that they are not bad enough to need forgiveness. Or failing that, he would try persuading them that they are so bad that they cannot be forgiven. Either way, the result is the same. If he utterly lost that battle, and people became Christians, he would then try to get them to feel less sinful than others – producing bigots, arrogant fools and hypocrites. For those resistant to this attack, he would try the opposite lie, hissing that they are too sinful to be fully blessed by God or be mightily used of God. Either way, it would render them powerless. So it’s obviously to the Deceiver’s advantage to make you feel that total cleansing is impossible for you. Don’t let him get away with such lies.

  If, after God has forgiven us, we won’t forgive ourselves, we are implying we have a higher sense of justice than the Holy One. Anyone having the impertinence to make such an accusation is on dangerous ground. We are also implying that Jesus is inadequate – that he didn’t suffer enough for our sins, or that his sinlessness cannot swallow up our sinfulness. There is no shame in a forgiven person feeling guilty. That is simply the Deceiver at work. For a forgiven person to believe he or she is guilty, however, is a concern.