When We Feel Guilty - Part 2

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, January 21st. Sin can produce paralyzing guilt. Though you can't go back, you can learn how to obediently move forward. Learn more about how Jesus is the source of our strength when we feel guilty. Guilt can be devastating to a person's life, to their productivity, to their fruitfulness in life unless they know how to deal with it, because some guilt is false. Now, some things that happen in our life or things that we do will cause guilt. But all guilt is not the result of sin. So somebody should say, would say then, well, anybody knows how to deal with guilt. All you'd have to do is just confess your sin. That's the end of it. But suppose the guilt is not the result of sin.

Then what do you do with it? And sometimes if you and I understand what the source of something is or why we experience it, then we can deal with it probably much easier. So I want to talk about why we have these feelings of guilt.

One of them is this. One of the primary reasons for feeling guilty is a wrong view of God. When you have a wrong view of God, you can be harassed for years in your life with feelings of guiltiness. That is, you feel guilty.

Something's wrong, but you can't quite figure out what the problem is. And so I simply want to ask you, if somebody said to you today, what is your image of God? Is He a loving, wonderful, gracious Father who is concerned and intimately related to you and interested in what you're doing and wants to lead you like a father leads his small children? Or is He this judge up there taking records and taking points and keeping account of your life so in the judgment He will be absolutely accurate when He confines you to something less than you want? That is no view of God at all, according to the Scriptures. But that is exactly the way many people see Him, maybe not to the same degree, but to some degree. A general view of their image of God is that He is a judge and that He condemns sin and that He's really and truly not on our side. Now, the more sin there is in your life, of course, the more you're going to feel that way. What I'm concerned about is those people who are struggling with guilt when the reason for their guilt is their poor view of God, not because of their sin. Well, there's a second reason, I think, that people struggle with guilt, and that is the missing message of grace.

They grow up in churches, for example, and they do not teach the grace of God. There are many men who are preaching the gospel who will tell you that they believe you're saved by the grace of God. But when they present the method by which a person is saved, here's what they will say. In order to be saved, you must repent of your sins. Well, what is repentance? Repentance is the turning away from something and turning to something. How does a person get saved?

A person doesn't get saved by cleaning up their life. It is faith in the person of Jesus Christ as God's Son and faith in what He did at Calvary that makes it possible for a person to be forgiven of their sins and become a child of God. Repentance is what I do as a result of what has happened in my heart, as a result of receiving Jesus as my personal saving, forgiving me of my sins.

I want to get rid of this junk in my life, these things in my life that don't belong there. So repentance in the life of the believer is what we do once we have received by faith Jesus Christ. It is in cleaning up my life, getting rid of this and getting rid of that that gets me saved. It's receiving Christ, and once He comes into my life, gives me a brand new heart and a brand new perspective on life, and I'm born again, then all the things out there that do not match who I am now must go, that's where repentance is in the life of the believer. The cleaning up business is the result of what God has done in my heart.

He's made me a child of God. Those things that I once enjoyed, I don't even enjoy them anymore. I don't want them in my life anymore. I choose to get rid of those things now. I'm not cleaning up to get acceptable.

I'm cleaning up motivated by a love for Almighty God. That's grace and not works. And I'm here to tell you, if somebody tells you that you've got to do anything else but place your trust, and what the Bible says about Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and trust His work at Calvary, then they have added something to God's redemptive plan, forget it. If thou shall confess, believe, agree with Him about the death of His Son for your sin, and you accept the fact that He died in your place and that God accepts you on the basis that you accept His Son, then your sins are forgiven and you become a child of God. But if you grew up in churches like most of us did, and we're told that in order to be pleasing to God, you've got to do the following things.

If you want to be saved, you've got to do the following things. Then what do we do? We live with this false sense of guilt, and we struggle with this guilt of trying to be sure we haven't missed anything that we're supposed to do. And I think about people who live under this, year after year after year, struggling with these feelings of guilt, but if they had to identify something specifically, except maybe something that happened today or yesterday, but this is this cloud of guilt that hangs over them all the time. I tell you, my friend, God never intended for us to live with that because how can I abide in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and He says when I abide in Him, I'll have His joy, and my joy will be full. How can I be full of joy and at the same time walk in under a cloud of this generalized guilt that I can't put my finger on, I can't catch hold to it, I don't know what to do with it?

And it causes an incessant struggle in the lives of many people. Well, there's a third thing that I think causes us to feel it, and that is we don't know what to do with sin. Well, you say, sure, everybody knows what to do with sin.

No, they don't. You see, when you and I sin against God, the Bible says we are to confess it to Him. Now, that confession is not what gets me my forgiveness. What gets me my forgiveness is what Jesus did at Calvary.

Don't ever, listen, don't ever forget that. The only means of forgiveness is what Jesus Christ did at Calvary when He shed His blood for the forgiveness of our sins. Now, my responsibility is to accept that. My responsibility is to confess my sin. My responsibility is to turn away from it.

But listen to me. My forgiveness before Almighty God does not rest on my performance or whether I come to Him and plead and beg and do all the things that people do. Forgiveness is mine. And so you don't have to get down and beg and plead. And I remember I used to cry out to God and tell Him why He ought to forgive me and try to convince Him to do it.

Listen, you don't have to convince a loving Father to do something that He's just waiting to do. But you see, if you don't know what to do with your sin, you'll beat yourself over the head with it. And you just, you won't forgive yourself. And you see, God forgives us. We come to Him sincerely the first time.

But what's the problem? We don't forgive ourselves. And so here's what Satan does. Satan says, aha, I couldn't be happier. He takes that as a hammer. And you know what he does?

He just hits you in the head with it every day. Look at you. Look at your past. Look what you've done. Look at you. Look at you. Look at you.

Look at you. And what happens? You live under this gloomy cloud of guilt, which has absolutely nothing to do with truth. And there are people who live under that, live under it and live under it. And somehow they've never understood the grace of God has taken care of it, past, present, future. The guilt is gone.

That's what the cross is about. And if you sin today, what provides your forgiveness? Your repentance?

No. The blood of Jesus. My confession is my coming to Him so He can release me from these feelings of guilt, estrangement, separation, broken fellowship, so that once again He and I can fellowship together. It isn't because He walked away.

We walk away. He is a loving Father, not a condemning judge. He is a condemning judge to those who are wicked who have absolutely refused His Son. But listen, they're not His children.

They're His enemies. We who are His children, we come to a loving Father. Listen, that doesn't motivate us to give us license to sin. That motivates me to want to be obedient to this Father who is so gracious and loving and kind and generous, willing to forgive, willing to cleanse, willing to make us righteous. That's what the grace of God's all about. And so to have the feeling that somehow you have to deal with this sin, you have to deal with this sin. You, listen, as a child of God, you deal with it once and listen, you thank God for His forgiveness and move on. That's not being ungrateful and it is not being, it is not being indifferent.

It is just being what God said we're to be. Another reason that we struggle with guilt is because we can't let go of the past. Just can't do it. How many times have I talked to people who say, well, I'll tell you what my problem is. Back yonder about six months ago, a year ago, five years, ten years, twenty years, sometimes thirty and forty years ago, let me tell you what happened in my life.

Can you imagine living for years and years and years and years with this big, dark cloud hanging back there, something in the past? Well, did He ask God to forgive you? I have. Did He forgive you?

Yes. How many times have you asked Him? Oh, I ask Him every day. Why do you ask Him every day? Because I just want Him to forgive me. Hasn't He already forgiven you? Yes, but my friend Satan is so clever.

He is so clever. Now I want you to turn to the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, verse twenty-five. He says, forty-third chapter of Isaiah, verse twenty-five, I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake. You know what He means by that? Listen, He's a loving, heavenly Father. You know what? He doesn't want us feeling guilty.

He wipes them out. He says, and I will not remember your sins. You know what it means?

That when you come to Him, He says yes. When you come to Him, you come to Him righteous. Now listen, I know you don't believe that. Most of you do not believe that you're righteous in God's eyes. You say, look at my conduct.

I understand that. How could I be righteous because God's made you righteous? Now your conduct isn't righteous. Conduct may not be righteous, but your spirit, the real you, is righteous because the blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you from all sin, made you a child of God, sanctified you, the Bible says, placed you in Christ, and He says that you and I are seated in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. My earthly conduct may not be what it ought to be, but listen, my spirit in the presence of God is right. Has nothing to do with how good I am. It has to do with the grace and mercy and love of God. Now, here's the tragedy of not releasing the past.

Many people are talented, gifted people whom God would use in wonderful ways. He can't. Friend, just let it go. Just let it go. You say, how do I let it go?

Here's what you do. You say, Father, I'm just going to take you to your word. You said, I will remember your sins against you no more. Thank you. And so by faith, I just release all of my past, washed under the blood.

You said it's separate as far as the east is from the west. I want to thank you that I'm clean, pure, and holy in your sight, not because of what I am, but because of who you are. Because of who's living on the inside of me, I just release that.

Friend, you can walk away from the past, because that's what God wants you to do. Another reason that we struggle with guilt is because we can't distinguish between mistakes and sin. A sin is a deliberate, willful act that you and I know is an act of disobedience to God. It's something wrong. We know it. Premeditated. We calculate it. We decide, it's what I'm going to do, knowing that it's wrong. A mistake is something that happens on the spur of the moment.

It isn't something you decided, calculated, figured out, manipulated, here's what I'm going to do. It's just something that you do. All of us have made mistakes, things that we have said, things that we have done without thinking through properly, decisions that we made off the cuff without thinking about the consequences and so forth.

There's a difference. So when we sin, we know what to do. We bring it to God. We confess it to Him and thank Him for His forgiveness and move on in the love of God. When we make a mistake, what do we do? We own it. God, I made a mistake. I blew it at this point.

So what do we do? We just say, Lord, I want to thank you for bringing this to my attention. I wish I could change it.

I can't. But Lord, would you just use this somehow in my life to build me up and edify me and make me the godly person you want me to be? And Lord, I'm just going to claim Romans 8 28. You said you'll take everything in my life and turn it from my good if I really want you to do it, if my heart's in it. And Lord, I want you to take all my mistakes, all my failures and turn them into something good.

He'll do exactly that. All of us make mistakes. We're children and He understands that we're children and He understands we're going to make mistakes. And so what do we do?

We just bring them to Him, leave them with Him and trust that He knows and is willing to do something about it. Well, one of the primary reasons that you and I struggle with, Gil, is that somehow we feel like we've missed God. And a lot of people who have the feeling, I believe that God called me back yonder somewhat years ago to do something for Him. Well, what did He call you to do?

Well, I'm not sure. Now, listen carefully. God never calls you to do something for Him in general. I want you to serve me. God's going to call you to do something specific.

Here's what happens. Let's say that we give an invitation, especially in missionary conferences and so forth, and you're standing there and the Spirit of God's really convicting you about your willingness to surrender to Him. So you live with this guilt. God called me to missions.

I didn't go. He called you to walk the aisle, to make a commitment of yourself to Him, a public commitment that you'll do whatever He calls you to do. And He may have called you to go back to your business and be a godly witness. But if you feel that God, because God called you to make a commitment of surrendering, you notice to Him that He called you to something specific that He didn't tell you to do it.

And so you live with this guilt. God called me. I miss God's call. Now, you didn't miss God's call.

You may have disobeyed Him when He said to you, I want you to walk that aisle. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to commit yourself to me to whatever I called you to do. Well, then just tell Him, God, you challenged me to commit myself and I didn't do it. I know that was an absolute sin against you not to do it.

That was rebellion on my part. And I just want to ask you to forgive me and thank you for your forgiveness. Now, Lord, here I am.

What do you want to do in my life? Let's say that He did call you to some specific task and you didn't do it. But, you know, I can't ever be what God wants me to be. Well, if God had called you to preach the gospel or to be a missionary or something like that when you were 20 and you are now 45 years of age or somewhere thereabouts, you say, well, how can I ever go back and do what God called me to do?

You can't. You can't go back and do what He called you to do. But you know what you can do? You can confess the fact that you've sinned against Him by being rebellious and wanting your own way and asking Him to forgive you of your sin and thanking Him for it and say, Lord, I've fully surrendered my entire life to you. I know that you can pick up the pieces.

You can pick up what's broken. You can take me at this point in my life and you can set me in the center of your will for this point in my life in this time. And, God, I'm committed to doing whatever you say, wherever you say. Do you think God's going to say, too late, too bad? God delights in fixing things, fixing people, putting them back together, giving them a new beginning that start all over again. I don't care who you are, what you've done, where you've been, you can't name anything that outsends the grace of God.

You can't do it. And so people say, well, I committed this sin back then and God could never use me for this. Says who?

What about the Apostle Paul, murderer? You know what we do? We feel comfortable trying to get this infinitely loving, forgiving, gracious, kind God down here to fit our mold of what forgiveness is like. And, friend, that's not the way life is. You see, everybody's messed up somewhere.

You know what? There's no such thing as a person who wished they hadn't done something and who wouldn't like to go back and change something. Thank God we don't have to go back. We just have to go up and watch Him change our life. Amen? That is the grace of God. Father, we love You and praise You. Thank You for Your loving kindness toward us. And I pray that You'll just set somebody free this morning. In fact, maybe a lot of people, Lord, it's just coming to You, laying down what doesn't belong to us, what doesn't fit us, and knowing that we've been made righteous by Your grace through the blood of Jesus. For we ask it in Your precious name. Amen. Thank you for listening to part two of When We Feel Guilty. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.