“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

1 John 1:8-9

 

Do you and I have any real enemies?  Who do you think is the most dangerous enemy you have?  Is it your sharpest business rival or your closest professional competitor?  Or, do you fear as your most dangerous enemy some unknown terrorist, or a random gunman or mugger who might attack you, or some political radical whose screwy ideas could destroy all your security by upsetting the national economy?  Who do you think of as your most dangerous enemy?

A psychologist and counselor, out of his experience in working with scores and scores of troubled people, said: “The average person has no more serious enemy than his own guilt. A feeling of personal guilt is the crucial dynamic in so much that is self-damaging and self-sabotaging.” (C.F.Allison – Guilt, Anger and God)

When Shakespeare had his Hamlet say, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” he was thinking of this personality destroying, destiny damning, and energy sapping power of guilt.

Have you ever thought of your own guilt feelings as the most serious enemy you have to your personal happiness, your mental health, your efficiency at your job, your effectiveness as a Christian?  Well, it is worth our thinking about.

First, let’s take a good look at guilt.  Let’s be sure we understand the nature of this serious enemy within ourselves with such dire capabilities to harm us.  What does guilt look like?  Where does guilt come form and how does it get such a strangle hold on us?

“Guilt, like light, is hard to define.” (Allison – Ibid.) Most people say that their guilt can be described in terms of the shame they feel, their sense of failure, and their feelings of remorse over responsibilities not met, over persons wronged or neglected, over love outraged or unexpressed.

Our feelings of guilt are always associated with our sense of what is right and wrong.  Guilt, then, is conceived by conscience.  It is the offspring of that union of our ill-starred affair between our conscience and our behavior.  Whenever we’ve done what conscience can’t approve guilt is born.

Little wonder that St. Paul would utter that guilt-ridden cry: “O wretched man that I am! What I would not do, that I do.  What I would do, that I fail to do.  Who can deliver me from the bondage of this error and sin and guilt?”

Most of us fall into the habit of trying to handle our dangerous enemy, guilt, in one or the other of two very common, but very unsatisfactory ways.

Sometimes we try to deal with guilt by self-punishment.  “Unresolved guilt creates a need to make amends, to make restitution, to suffer enough to pay back what is amiss, to set things right by damage to self and thus balance the crime. . . A college chaplain insists that he has known no student to fail for merely academic reasons.  ‘They all had an emotional need to fail,’ he says.  ‘They flunk out because of some deep, and usually unconscious need to fail.’  This phenomenon is quite often related to the sense of guilt the student has about his relationship to his parents.  He is punishing himself!

“Sometimes the inability to complete our grief-work over the death of someone close to us results in prolonged depression caused by unrecognized and unresolved guilt.  We withdraw from friendships, from joyous participation in marriage, and from life itself.  We do this in part because our guilt has injured our sense of deserving and leads us to make restitution by self damage and the compensation of living less.” (Allison – Ibid)

Self-punishment is one very common, unsatisfying and damaging way to deal with our enemy, guilt.

Another way folks have found to grapple with guilt is to treat this enemy as a hobgoblin of an unhealthy mind, and to slay him as a figment of the imagination.

This, or course, involves a complete remodeling of one’s value structure, a tearing down of the moral and ethical standards by which one has made judgments and arrived at decisions on right and wrong.

“But the solution for guilt by removing it as an erroneous hallucination of the mind is scarcely any solution at all. . .  It is to remove a vital organ of a person’s humanity.  Years ago there was an operation called ‘lobotomy’ popular in some mental hospitals in the 30’s and 40’s, by which chronically disturbed patients who were a danger to themselves and others would have the pre-frontal lobe of their brain severed from the rest.  It seems that the conscience and moral censor of the brain was there, and once that was severed the patient felt no more intense guilt and self-recriminating unrest within himself, and he became quieter and easier to deal with in custodial care.”  (Allison – Ibid. Page 60)

I knew some people both before and after lobotomy surgery and they appeared to have been turned into zombies.  They weren’t worried or depressed any longer, but they were no longer fully human.

“To remove our guilt, even though it is killing us, is like removing a vital organ.  When the liver is diseased doctors do not remove it.  (They may replace it with a transplant, but they cannot totally remove a liver or the patient will die.)  Guilt is no kidney or arm, one of which we can do without.  Guilt is no appendix that is expendable.  As distorted, twisted, or diseased as it might be, it is an essential part of what it means to be human.” (Allison – Ibid)

Guilt is to the spiritual life what pain is to physical health.  Suppose a child is born with a congenital defect that renders him insensitive to all pain.  How lucky, one might think, to be exempt from stomachache, earache, and toothache!  But how tragic to feel no warning pain from an inflamed appendix so surgery might deliver him from death.

The guilt we suffer when we have transgressed our value system, failed our responsibilities, and outraged our self-image, is a saving monitor not only for our personal character, but for our culture and our civilization.  We can never afford the costly operation of guilt lobotomy, for really, that would be to kill conscience, or to so violently wound conscience by destroying our value system as to lobotomize our emotional and intellectual self.

If self-punishment and moral lobotomy are not the way to handle our guilt, what is?  The great glory of the Christian gospel is that it deals with the problem of human guilt decisively, realistically and redemptively.

The gospel does not tell us that our guilt feelings are imaginary, nor that the things we feel uneasy about are not real sins.  The gospel affirms the sharp distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, cruelty and mercy, justice and injustice.  The gospel confronts us with the solemn responsibility that is ours to choose the good and renounce the evil.

But this does not mean that the gospel saddles us with the responsibility of self-condemnation and self punishment to expiate our guilt.  Rather, the good news, which is the very essence  of the gospel, is that God Himself has dealt with our grievous problem of sin and shame and guilt in the Christ Event.  It is not up to us to become sinless and thus warrant His forgiveness.

The gospel’s good news is “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)  “For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” (John 3:17) “There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

How well John Baillie put it in his Invitation to Pilgrimage: “Salvation begins by tackling the guilt of my sin – rather than its power over my will, and offers me forgiveness before it offers me holiness. . .  I am accepted just as I am, and without being fit; and it is my acceptance while still unfit that alone has power … to make me fit.  I am not saved because I have become sinless; I am saved while still a sinner, because Christ is sinless … and bore my sins in His own body on the Tree.  But being saved while still a sinner is the beginning of my ceasing to be a sinner.”

The physiological reality of this guilt removal is graphically portrayed in John Bunyan’s allegory.  The Christian Pilgrim makes his way slowly and painfully along the roadway of his life, staggering under the heavy burden of a great pack on his back made up of the guilt from his sins.  But when Christian comes in sight of the Cross and lifts his eyes in faith to behold the atoning love of the crucified One, immediately his burden is loosed and rolls off his back and down the hill and into the sepulcher at the foot of the cross.  “Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, ‘He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His death.’” (Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan)

But a recurring dream of John Bunyan, even more poignantly and pointedly, speaks to our human condition of guilt and the gospel redemption.  In his dream Bunyan saw before him the Judgment Throne of God.  He, John Bunyan, stood at the judgment bar while the recording angel read the life record of his sins and failures.  On and on with the shameful account until finally in his dream it seemed to Bunyan he could stand the pain and anguish of it no longer, so he turned and ran through the darkness.  But he could hear behind him pursuing footsteps. He ran faster, but closer they came.  His lungs were bursting.  In terror he turned and looked back over his shoulder, and there was God the Father running after him with a pardon in his hand.

Let us pray. O God of Love, among whose angels there is joy over one sinner that repenteth, hear our confessions, and accept our offerings of contrition.  We have extolled the works of our hands, above thy handiwork within our soul.  We have disowned thy providence.  We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done.  We have failed those you have given us to love who have trusted us and depended upon us.  But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us.  Deliver us from the deceit and power of evil, and the burden of guilt and shame; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.