How to Deal with Guilt

Today on Renewing Your Mind… It wasn't God who said, let your conscience be your guide, it was Jiminy Cricket. Now our conscience should be our guides in some things. That is, if our consciences are duly informed by the Word of God, then we ought to be following our conscience. But the conscience, as Scripture says, can be seared. So how do we know when to trust our consciences? Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C.

Sproul continues his series, Dealing with Difficult Problems. He'll help us discern when our conscience is telling us the truth and when it's leading us astray. And in the process, we'll learn the difference between true guilt and guilty feelings. Today we're going to consider one of the most serious difficulties that any of us has to face in our Christian lives.

The difficulty is one that is universal, and it's one that has the power to be debilitating and paralyzing to our personal growth. And I'm speaking, of course, of the problem of guilt. Now when Paul gives his exposition of the gospel in his epistle to the Romans, he talks about the universality of human sinfulness. And in chapter 3 of Romans, in verse 19, he makes this comment, "'Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore, by the deeds of the law, no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.'" So Paul says, whatever the law says, it says to all who are under the law, and in a certain sense, all of us are under the law of God. So everything that the law says, it says to all of us. And what it says to us is that when we stand before the judgment seat of God, every mouth will be quiet.

Every mouth will be stopped because under the judgment of the law of God, the whole world is guilty. Now many times I'm engaged in intellectual discussions with people doing the task of apologetics and trying to answer their objections to the truth claims of Christianity, and I've noticed on such occasions that if you answer one objection to the Christian faith to their satisfaction before they take a breath, they'll raise another objection. And if you answer that objection to their satisfaction, again here comes a third one and a fourth one, and it gets to be almost an endless chasing of somebody around a circle.

And frequently what I will do in circumstances like that after I've tried to answer these questions is I'll stop this game and look the person in the eye and say, here's my question for you. What do you do with your guilt? What do you do with your guilt? Now I don't ask them, do you have guilt? I assume that they have guilt and that they know that they have guilt. And it's an amazing thing to see how people stop in their tracks when you ask them a direct question like that and begin to stutter and stumble as they grope for an answer to the question. Because if there's any place where the unbeliever is vulnerable and exposed, it is at that point.

Because even though they may seek to deny the reality of their guilt, they know that they are walking through this world with unresolved guilt. Several years ago I had a friend who was a psychiatrist, and very seriously he came to me on one occasion and asked me to come to work for him. And I said, you must be joking. I don't know the first thing about psychiatry, and I'm certainly not qualified or capable to work in your office dealing with people who are in therapy. And he said, oh but you are.

And I said, why is that? He said, because the vast majority of the problems that I have to deal with as a psychiatrist are all bound up with guilt. Guilt and its consequences, guilt that is paralyzing, guilt that is unresolved.

And he said, most of the people I see don't need a psychiatrist, they need a priest. They need to understand how to unlock this problem of guilt. Well, the first thing I want us to understand about guilt is that guilt is objective. What I mean by that is that guilt has nothing to do in the final analysis with our feelings or our subjective responses to situation.

Guilt ultimately is defined strictly in objective categories. What I mean by that is this, guilt is incurred when the law of God is broken. We define sin historically as any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. And when we break the law of God, either by failing to do what the law requires or actually doing what the law prohibits, at that moment we incur guilt. And guilt is the breaking of the law of God, and God as our judge determines that when we have transgressed His commandments, we have thereupon come to a status of guilt. Now I mention this business of guilt being objective because there's so much confusion in our culture about the nature of guilt. We tend to associate guilt with guilt feelings. And so we need to distinguish between guilt as objective and guilt feelings, which are subjective. That is, feelings about guilt have to do with our personal subjective attitudes and responses to actual violations of the law of God. Now, when we talk about guilt being objective, we're talking about it's being defined strictly in terms of breaking the law. And the first thing we have to understand about that is that the law that defines guilt in the final analysis is not the civil law, not the customs and mores of a given social order, but moral guilt in the final analysis is defined by the breaking of God's law.

Now why is that so important to understand? Well, because human laws, the laws of our society, the laws that we call the civic order of our culture, don't always agree or correspond to the law of God. That is, there are many things that the civil law may allow or permit that God will not permit. It's also true that you may sometimes be obeying the law of God and in so doing disobeying the civil magistrate. And in the eyes of the civil magistrate, you may be a judge to be guilty, whereas in the eyes of God you may be declared to be innocent.

We remember in the New Testament, for example, when the authorities of the Jewish nation prohibited the apostles from preaching the gospel, and Peter asked the question, should we obey God or men? And they said, we cannot obey this civil magistrate because if we do, we will incur guilt before God because He's commanded us to do these things. And we remember when Stephen provoked the outrage of his enemies, and in a kangaroo court he was suddenly found guilty and was stoned to death. And even while he was being killed, he had the vision of heaven open before him, and he saw Christ standing there in heaven as his defense attorney, pleading his case before God.

And so the earthly court found Stephen guilty while the heavenly court found Stephen innocent. So we understand that there can be these conflicts, but it's the other side of that coin that we need to be very, very careful of, and that is when the civil law allows us to do things that God does not permit. Now I think people in America need to realize that we have gone through a powerful revolution in our history. The cultural historians have told us that the most radical revolution in American history did not take place in 1776, but it took place in the 20th century, chiefly in the decade of the 60s, where the revolution of the 60s was a revolt against established values, established customs, against the established order. And with it came the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the free speech movement, and so on. These were attempts of a new generation to create a new society, a great society, a new order, and in many respects it was successful. And those who are old enough to remember the culture before 1960 sometimes still remain somewhat dazed and confused about what has happened in our own country. And we experience life now as people who are from the old order and are now forced to accustom ourselves to a new order in which there's great miscommunication between those two orders, and we're engaged in a cultural war. Now in many respects that revolution was an ethical and moral revolution in the 60s, and it had some very strange dimensions to it. In the youth culture, in the university campuses in the 60s, with the advent of the drug culture and the advice of Timothy Leary for young people to turn on and to drop out and so on, and we had the hippie generation and all of that, there were two famous slogans that emerged in our culture. The first was, everybody has the right to do his own thing.

Now listen to that for a moment. Everyone has the right to do their own thing. That salutes a philosophy of moral relativism and pure subjectivism, saying I have the right morally to do what I want to do. If I want to be engaged in premarital sexual behavior or extramarital sexual behavior, that's certainly not the government's business. It's nobody's business.

The government has no right to invade the bedroom. This is a matter of personal and private preference for me. It's subjective.

It's relative. And we witnessed the impact of that kind of thinking in the trauma of 1998, going into 1999, with the impeachment process of the president of the United States, where the nation was very much divided over the question of distinguishing between the president's personal moral behavior and his political behavior as the chief executive officer of the land. The second slogan of the sixties was that cry and call of the young people under 30. And remember they said we can't trust anybody over 30. The so-called generation gap that was spoken of at that time called the older generation to tell it like it is. Tell it like it is. Now the phrase, tell it like it is, is a call to objective truth.

And you see the tension here. On the one hand, the young people were saying we want to do our own thing. We want to live on a subjectivistic basis, but we want you to tell it like it is to conform to some kind of objective standard of truth. Now if we analyze that carefully, we discover that what happened in that decade of the sixties and into the seventies was a radical disjunction between what we call personal ethics and social ethics, the same group of people who were marching in behalf of social justice with respect to civil rights and had a deep passion to make sure that human rights were protected in the land and were opposed to the violence and the bloodshed in the Vietnamese war and so on and protested against war and the violation of human rights around the world, having a high sense of social morality were the same ones that were living in communes, getting high on drugs, and involved in promiscuous, unbridled sexual behavior so that there was this disjunction between personal morality and social or public morality. In a sense what happened was sin was now reduced to institutional behavior, not personal behavior.

And personal immorality was rationalized on the basis of people having the right or the freedom to express themselves however they wanted to. Now we're living on the other side of that revolution, so today we encounter all kinds of confusion about the matter of guilt. The pain of guilt feeling is a marvelous, curative thing. Imagine what would happen to us as human beings if our physical bodies suddenly lost the capacity to feel pain.

We would never be alerted to the presence of an invasive disease that could be life-threatening. As uncomfortable as the pain is, it is a warning sign, an alert to us that something is wrong. Think back in your own life and how you have dealt with guilt, how if you commit a crime, how if you commit a sin once, you may be overwhelmed with sickness in the pit of your stomach, a sense of personal revulsion because of what you have done. You're sick about it, literally, because the weight of your guilt feelings is so enormous.

But then you do it again, and the second time it's not quite as uncomfortable. Then you do it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, a sixth time, and pretty soon you can cruise along in this behavioral pattern without any feelings of guilt whatsoever. You have acquired the status that Jeremiah described when he spoke to the hard-heartedness of the people of Israel when he said to them, because of their repeated transgressions of the law of God, you have acquired the forehead of the harlot.

That is, you have lost your ability to blush. You have become recalcitrant. You've become calloused so that now you can violate the law of God and not think anything of it. And there is where the absence of guilt feelings becomes a license to continue to sin and to sin with the assumption that you can do so with impunity. For every sinful action there is under heaven, somebody has brought forth a carefully crafted rational defense for it in attempt to justify it. That's why we have a problem with this conflict between guilt and guilt feelings. We can desensitize our consciences. And remember, conscience is crucial here. Scripture speaks about conscience as that inner voice within us, that voice that either accuses us or excuses us for the behavioral things that we do. However, it wasn't God who said, let your conscience be your guide.

It was Jiminy Cricket, and we have to be careful about adhering to what I call Jiminy Cricket theology. Now, our conscience should be our guides in some things. That is, if our consciences are duly informed by the Word of God, then we ought to be following our consciences. But the conscience, as Scripture says, can be seared. It can be twisted.

It can be distorted. And the conscience can actually excuse us for the very thing that God accuses us of doing. We think of David. I can't for the life of me imagine that King David, who elsewhere was defined and described as a man after God's own heart, who wrote so many of the magnificent psalms, here was a man whose soul was aflame with passion for the things of God. And he got engaged in adultery. And because of his involvement in that adultery, he then used the power of his political office to have his lover's husband sent to the front lines where conveniently he would be killed and removed as an obstacle for David's desire so that he could take Bathsheba to himself. I can't believe that David went through that process without the pangs of guilt haunting him. And yet even this one who was so familiar with the law of God managed to silence those internal voices so that when Nathan the prophet came to him to confront him with his behavior, and Nathan told the parable in order to get David's attention, David didn't recognize himself in the parable. And David expressed his outrage, his moral outrage at the behavior of the villain in the parable.

And he said, where is this man? Not in my kingdom will I tolerate that until Nathan looked at David and said, thou art the man. Then the house of David collapsed on his head because suddenly through the power of the Holy Ghost David was brought face to face with the reality of his guilt, and he was devastated. Fortunately for David, there was still a sensitivity in his soul to the things of God, so that when God the Holy Spirit touched him with the conviction of his sin, now David restored a proper relationship between his guilt feelings and the reality of his guilt. The objective and the subjective came together.

But for most of us, that's rare. We have all kinds of subjective techniques to hide our guilt, to conceal our guilt, to deny our guilt. But we have to remember, beloved, that guilt is real, and it's defined not by what we want, it's not defined by what we feel, it's not defined by what is legal, it's defined by what is legal in the state, it's defined by the law of God. If we're going to deal with a problem of guilt, we have to understand the difference between true guilt and guilty feelings, and that's exactly what Dr. R.C.

Sproul did for us today to help us understand that clear distinction. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind and another lesson from R.C. 's series, Dealing with Difficult Problems.

So far this week, Dr. Sproul has addressed topics like anxiety, anger, and suffering. It's a very practical series, and I commend it to you. We'd be happy to send you all six lessons on one DVD. Contact us today and request it with your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. Before we go today, let me tell you how much we appreciate you listening to Renewing Your Mind. We are a listener-supported program, and so when you donate to Ligonier Ministries, you're helping make this program possible. So thank you for your generosity. Well, tomorrow Dr. Sproul addresses something we struggle to do, especially when we have been wronged. He'll show us that every one of us has an obligation to forgive. We hope you'll join us Thursday for Renewing Your Mind.