When We Feel Guilty - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, January 20th. Do you have a hard time letting go of the past and forgiving yourself? For believers, Christ offers to be the source of our strength when we feel guilty. When you have done something wrong and you know it's wrong, how do you feel? Well, you feel guilty. But have you ever had those same guilty feelings when you hadn't done anything wrong?

Well, sometimes we do. And when a person does not know how to deal with guilt, they struggle with guilt, it can be devastating throughout their entire lifetime. And what I want to talk about in this message, I want to talk about Jesus Christ being the source of our strength when we are struggling with those guilty feelings. 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. So let me begin with my own personal life. I was saved at about the age of 12 years, and so I didn't know too much about God. And so God was sort of distant to me, not having a father.

My father died and is about nine months of age. And so I didn't have that male image and usually get your idea about God from your father. And then a stepfather came along and I certainly hoped God wouldn't like him.

And so I had a very bad beginning. And so I remember thinking, I know that God is up there and I'm down here. And if I pray to him, he'll hear and answer my prayer. And so what I got to figure out is how do I get him in heaven into what I am thinking about as a kid?

And so he was always remote and distant to me. And I remember the first thing that ever happened in my life that made me realize that God wasn't all that distant, that he really and truly cared for me personally, and that he was involved in my life. I was taking a bath one day. We lived in a basement apartment.

And it was a very small bathroom. And so I'm getting ready to get out and get myself dried off and dressed. And so I reach up.

Now, this is a long black cord with one of those brass lights where you screw the light bulb in with a little black knob on it. So I reach up to grab the light socket. I'm standing in water over my ankles. I reach up to get it and the telephone rings. And normally you would just cut it off and get out of the tub. But I still remember at this split second, I remember dropping my hands, getting out, going to the phone, picking it up.

It had rung three times or four times. Nobody was there. No click, no nothing.

Just nobody there. Well, I didn't think anything about it. I put it down, walked back. When I walked back into the kitchen where the door was to the bathroom, framing that tub and that light socket, the door frame, all of a sudden I thought, that looks like an electric chair. If I'd have reached up and grabbed that socket and cut the light off, you'd have never known me. And I'd have never known you because I'd already be in heaven. For the first time in my life, God wasn't way up yonder. He was down here and He cared something about me. Now I wish I could say that from that moment on, God was this warm, intimate, personal Father to me, but He wasn't.

And the reason He wasn't was because that's not what I was given in life. I read the Bible. I prayed. I did the things that I thought I was supposed to do and tried to eliminate the things I wasn't supposed to do. I didn't always do that. I sinned against God like any teenager would.

He kept me out of a whole lot of things because I was scared to death. And I suppose maybe that was good for me. What I'm saying is my view of God isn't something I developed. My view of God is something that was given to me. The first Bible I own was the Big Thompson Chain Reference Bible that, or second Bible I own.

Big Thompson Chain Reference Bible, all those notes in it. And my mother gave it to me for my birthday. And I remember what I wrote in the fly leaf. I wrote, given to me by my godly mother who taught me both the love and the wrath of God.

I should have underlined and circled wrath because that's the part I heard. Because I didn't hear much about the love of God. I remember coming along in those years, hearing a sermon about the fact that God loved me. Never heard anything about the grace of God.

I think if I'd have heard something somewhere along the way, it would have registered. But it was always what God was like, sitting in His throne, on His temple, thundering and lightning and clouds and all of these things that made me realize that God was distant, that He was this kind of an overlord, an overseer and taskmaster who was keeping records, who was keeping points, and if I by some chance lived up to certain measurements, then I'd die and go to heaven. And to make it even worse than that is that they believed you could be saved and fall from grace. I didn't have a ghost of a chance because I couldn't be as holy as I wanted to be. I didn't know how much to read the Bible and how much to pray.

I didn't know what to do to please Him. I didn't know how holy I had to be and I didn't know how to be holy. And besides that, I couldn't keep up with the thou shalt nots. So the Ten Commandments was a burden to me. God was a burden.

Everything was a burden. And so I realized that I grew up beginning to feel guilty and this guilt had nothing to do with S-I-N. It had to do with my image of God. And you see, most people think that the New Testament is a book about sin and about guilt.

Let me just tell you something. Did you know in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you're only going to find the word guilt or guilty ten times. Six of those times, Pilate is saying that Jesus is guilty of nothing. Two of those times, Jesus is saying to the Pharisees what they're guilty of. The Pharisees said, you see, they call them hypocrites, what they were guilty of.

The other two times, he's talking to the same crowd about the blaspheming against the Holy Ghost. So the New Testament is not a word about guilt. The New Testament is a book about the grace and the loving kindness and forgiveness of God. Now, if I should have said to you, how many times do you think guilt is in the New Testament?

You'd have probably riled off a large number, but it's not true. And you see, it is about God's forgiveness and his love and kindness toward us, not about guilt. 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. A person doesn't get saved by repenting of their sins. Repentance is what I do because of what has happened in my heart.

Here's what Paul said. Paul said, If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. 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 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. And so there are many people who believe they've got to do the following things to get saved. They've got to repent of this, repent of that, repent of the other. And so when you start thinking about all the things in your life that you need to get rid of, here's what happens. Oftentimes, people who desperately feel the need of God in their life and they hear a sermon, if you're going to get saved, you've got to give up your this and give up that and give up the other.

And the person, listen, now think about this. You think about how hard it is sometimes as a believer who's already trusted Jesus Christ to deal with habits and things in your life and you've got God and you know that you have the Spirit of God to enable you. What about the people out there who are lost as they can be, absolutely helpless, feel condemned under this load of guilt and then somebody says to you, now if you want to get right with God, you've got to give up. If they had the power to give up all these things, they wouldn't need God.

They don't have the power to give it up. Listen, the message of grace is this. I don't have to measure up.

I don't have to perform. I don't have to jump the high jump any higher because at the cross, Jesus paid my sin debt in full. Now, the cleaning up business is a 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 as 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, who are 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 walking 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. It is my sense of estrangement that I am released from. It is my feeling of guilt I am released from.

It is my feeling that fellowship is broken that I am released from. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Even after you and I sin against Him, God does not condemn or judge us. Listen, He says, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. You say, no, wait a minute.

You're making it awfully easy for people to sit and get away with it. No, I didn't say that because He says, whatever we sow, we're going to reap. You say, isn't that God judging us? No, they're just certain principles that God's put in this universe to do what?

To protect you and me from wrecking and ruining our life. And so what He's saying is don't sin, don't sin, don't sin. Not because if you do, I'm going to judge you, condemn you, and wipe you out. Don't sin because here are the consequences of your sin. And the best example is in the first book of the Bible. God said to Adam and Eve, look, He said, look, look at this garden.

Absolutely fantastic and beautiful and all the divine words He could have used to describe it. Look at this. Every bit of this is yours. Just help yourself, just enjoy yourself, Adam and Eve, and all of your perfection and all of your innocence, just really have yourselves a wonderful time.

Now, there's one tree over there. Don't mess with that one. Because if you do, here are the consequences. If you do that, here's what's going to happen to you if you do.

So what happens? They disobeyed Him. It isn't that God says, you've had it, Adam.

You, Eve, you, no. He drove them out of the garden because He said before they ever did it, if you do it, you're going to die. That's just a consequence of doing it. They're just certain consequences to sin. It isn't suddenly that God, who is my loving Father, all of a sudden becomes this tyrant in heaven who's now judging and condemning us. We don't know what to do with sin, we confess it.

Now listen, we don't have pity parties over it. We don't grubble and just try to feel real bad. We sin against God and we get on our face and we say, Lord, I want you to forgive me. God, please forgive me. Oh, Father, forgive me. God, I know I've sinned against the Lord. And we just go on and on and on asking God to forgive us. Or you may say it today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day and some of you are still confessing sins that you committed years ago. Let me ask you a question. If God is the heavenly Father He says He is, how many times do you have to beg, plead your heavenly Father to forgive you of something?

One time. In most nations of the world, their God is a God of judgment. And people live all of their lives trying to appease this God and trying to please Him because when they die, they want something good to happen.

And they never know where they are. They know nothing about the grace of God because there's no such thing as the grace of God in any other religion in the world. And so people who've heard it though, and I'm talking to many of you who know what the meaning of grace is, you know what it is. It is the goodness and kindness and graciousness of God that has nothing to do with our worth or our merit and it's in spite of what we deserve. It is God loving us and forgiving us and making us the persons we ought to be.

And so you don't have to go 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. But 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 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? Confession, 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. And the best example of that is the prodigal son. When the prodigal son said, give me what's coming to me, the father said, all right.

He knew what was going to happen. He didn't say, you've had it. Be my, just go on. Just go on.

Just forget it. No. He gave his son what he asked for and then he waited for him week after week, month after month, year after year, who knows how long. The story doesn't tell us that. And when he saw him coming down the road, he didn't say, I knew he was coming back. You just wait till you get back here. I mean, you have really had it.

No. He went running down that road. Here's this boy trying to confess and repent of his sin.

His father's kissing him, hugging on him, waving his hand and saying, listen, kill the fatted calf. Bring out the robe. Get the diamond. Get the ring.

Get the sandals. My son was lost. He's come home again. Did you know that every time you and I come to him to confess our sins, that's the Spirit of God. 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. Thank you for listening to part one 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.