Beyond Guilt—To Forgiveness

By: Robert Heerspink

Scripture Reading: Psalm 32

November 23rd, 2008

"NOW I HAVE GUILT"
It’s not likely I know you personally. But I think I can still tell you something about yourself. It’s quite likely that right now you are feeling guilty about something in your life.

One of my favorite animated films is "Toy Story." Likely you’ve seen it. Woody and Buzz Lightyear start out as rivals and end up as friends. But neither Woody nor Buzz is my favorite character from the movie. No, my favorite character in the movie is Rex, the green dinosaur. I like Rex because he reminds me of me. Rex is a bit neurotic. Prone to mishaps. And when he messes up, he declares in his squeaky voice: "Now I have guilt!" I always laugh. I love Rex’s transparency. He’s so honest. And he puts into words what many of us feel but what we often aren’t quite ready to admit to others!

"Now we have guilt." People have been saying—or at least thinking—that for thousands of years. Go back to Scripture and you’ll find that same frank admission on the lips of some pretty well known people. David can declare in the Psalms, "My guilt overwhelms me, like a burden too heavy to bear." The Apostle Paul can say of his own existence: "Who can deliver me from this body of death?"

GUILT WE DESERVE?
But are all these guilt feelings really necessary? Is our guilt real? Do we need to own it? You know, psychologists often talk about neurotic guilt. Guilt that’s only imagined… are they right? Is there such a thing as neurotic guilt?

There is. As a pastor, I’ve seen plenty of it. Neurotic guilt is guilt born of the fact that we don’t live up to the unrealistic expectations of others. A student brings home solid B’s on her report card. It’s a fair assessment of her ability. Her parents demand A’s. The result? Guilt.

An athlete is a solid utility player on the basketball team. His parents think he should be a starter, perhaps the star. He never comes home from a game feeling successful. The result? Guilt.

But this kind of neurotic guilt doesn’t end in childhood. Many of us as adults have carried this kind of guilt for decades. We don’t measure up to the expectations of others. A wife feels guilty because she can’t keep house according to the perfectionistic standards of her husband. A husband feels guilty no matter how hard he works, because he doesn’t bring in enough money to satisfy his wife’s over—the—top lifestyle.

Hey, and who needs outside forces to experience this kind of guilt? We lay guilt trips on ourselves! A business executive feels guilty because he never achieved that corner office and V.P. status. Pastors feel guilty because they haven’t miraculously brought wandering sheep back into the fold. A church member feels guilty because he declined an invitation to serve in a position that he has neither the time nor the gifts to fulfill. Parents beat themselves up because they think there is something they could have done to prevent the mistakes their kids make. "There must have been something I should have said. There must have been something I could have done. Then everything would have turned out right." That’s the tape that keeps playing in our heads.

WHO’S YOUR JUDGE?
Now, the Bible has something to say about this kind of false, neurotic guilt. You discover it in I Corinthians 4:3—there Paul says, "I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court . . ." Paul is talking here about expectations—the unrealistic expectations others would lay on us. The unrealistic expectations we would lay on ourselves. And he says—I’m not going to allow those expectations to dominate my life. Those expectations aren’t going to guilt trip me. Paul invites us to say to others—even to say to ourselves—"I’m not going to allow unreal expectations to determine how I feel about myself."

In the novel, Zorba the Greek, Zorba and a friend are discussing the friend’s character. Zorba remarks: ". . . the same thing is happening to you as happened to the crow."
"What happened to the crow, Zorba?"

"Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly—well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn’t for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don’t you see? He just hobbled about."

How often don’t we feel guilty because we try to strut about like a pigeon when what God really made us to do is walk like a crow? A rabbi by the name of Zusya said on his deathbed: "In the world to come, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’"

That’s the real issue, isn’t it? God made each of us unique, with our own set of abilities and talents. Your concern in life is not to be someone else, but to be you. Your concern in life is not to live according to the unrealistic expectations of others—not even the unrealistic expectations of yourself—but to live according to the expectations of your God—who knows you inside out.

Some of us have to begin by dealing with our guilt feelings by getting a monkey off our back that isn’t suppose to be there in the first place.

THE REAL DEAL
But now, here’s the rest of the story. While some of our guilt may be neurotic, not all of it is. And that means that we are going against the flow when it comes to opinions that operate in our culture today. Best—selling author, Wayne Dyer, tells about a man who came to him bothered by extra—marital affairs. Here was Dyer’s advice. First, the problem isn’t with your affairs. The problem is your lousy marriage. Second, your guilt over your affairs demonstrates that you have an out—of—date ethical system. You need an upgrade. Free up your sexual ethics and you wouldn’t have a problem any more.

Guilt? Dyer says—forget it. But can you forget it? The Christian poet, T.S. Eliot, wrote a poem entitled "The Cocktail Party." In that poem we meet Celia, who is talking to a psychiatrist, Dr. Reilly. They are discussing the word, ‘sin.’ Reilly asks, "What’s the point of view [about sin] in your family?" Celia says she has been taught to disbelieve in sin—that misbehavior was only ‘bad form.’ That if you were concerned about having ‘sinned,’ well then, you were a bit odd. And yet, she admits to Dr. Reilly, her ‘mistakes’ nevertheless lead her to feeling ‘sinful.’ She says: "[There is]. . . the feeling . . . of emptiness, of failure toward someone or something outside myself. And I feel I must . . . atone—is that the word? Can you treat a patient for such a state of mind?"

There are those of us who can relate to Celia. We don’t quite want to believe guilt is real—yet we can’t get out of our heads and out of our hearts the sense that we have caused offense by what we have done. We can’t get of our heads the nagging conviction that we have done things that need to be ‘atoned’ for.

David, in Psalm 32, talks about what happened in his own life when he tried to suppress legitimate guilt:

"When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long
for day and night your hand was heavy on me
my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer."

Suppressed guilt, says David, not only ruined my spiritual condition. It tore up my emotional life. It impacted my physical health! For you see, real guilt cannot be ignored. It rips at our sense of peace and well—being. We have within us this undeniable conviction that we have violated a moral code that we did not invent—but that was given to us. A moral code that is stamped on our souls. We have this conviction that we have violated our own identity, we have done wrong to our neighbor, and we have offended a holy God. We have this sense that our words and deeds have shattered the shalom, the peace, which God intends for the world. We know that what we are talking about is not merely a problem of measuring up to unreasonable standards. No, we have done the very things we should not have done. And what we should have done, we have ignored doing. We are GUILTY!

DEALING WITH THE GUILT PROBLEM
Now, what are you going to do about it? Celia says, "I feel I must ‘atone’ for what I’ve done." A lot of people have that same feeling about the ways they have messed up. In New Mexico, there was once a place called Ghost Ranch where the members of that commune practiced self—inflicted punishments for their sin. The most courageous of the members had themselves beaten and tied to crosses in an effort to expiate their guilt.

I have never met people who have gone to such extremes. But I have met people who are inwardly whipping themselves over the ways they have messed up. In fact, often the people who are hardest on us are ourselves. Many of us have made a lot of deals with God—"Lord, let me tell you what I’m going to do for you in the future to make up for the past." The problem is—that’s a solution to guilt that really doesn’t work. Some of us have been playing that game with God for decades and it hasn’t made our guilt disappear. On the contrary, our failed deals with God have only made our guilt worse.

So how do you handle guilt, real guilt? Let me suggest three steps:

SOONER NOT LATER
First, deal with guilt as soon as it arises. Guilt is to the soul like physical pain is to the body. Physical pain says something is wrong with my body—and the sooner I deal with it the better. Guilt is spiritual pain that tells the soul there is something serious that needs to be addressed right now. Stuffing guilt into a corner of your life where you hope it will go unnoticed is the worse thing you can do.

"Don’t let the sun go down on your anger," says Paul. That’s good advice, and that’s good advice for guilt too. The Psalmist says, "When I kept silence my bones wasted away . . . day and night your hand was heavy on me." Not dealing with guilt allows gangrene to settle into your heart. So don’t bottle up sin’s bile. Deal with guilt as soon as you sense its presence.

THE PAIN OF CONFESSION
Second, confess your guilt. "Then I acknowledged my sin to you," says David, "and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord . . ."

When a reservoir has risen too high, the floodgates are opened to relieve the pressure. Otherwise the dam would burst apart. Confession opens up the floodgates of the heart. Confession relieves the pressure that guilt places on our hearts. It releases the pressure by allowing the guilt to flow out to God.

Now making general confession to God isn’t that hard. It’s easy to say we are all sinners—myself included. But to get down to specifics—to confess not just sin in general, but SINS—that’s tough! Because at that point, we need to take off those masks we wear. At that point we no longer can hide from ourselves anymore. Oh, we never were able to hide from God. We may think we can, but what we are really doing is hiding from ourselves. And when we confess our sins we not only tell God—we tell ourselves—what we are really like. That’s when our own selfishness and pettiness can rise to the surface. No, confession—real confession to God, real confession in which we are transparent to ourselves—is not easy.

And it’s hard not only because it demands of us uncommon honesty—but because it creates a terrible risk! What if we are honest with God about what we are like? And what if God says what unforgiving people sometimes say—"You can take your confession and stuff it. I’m not forgiving the likes of you . . ." You know, frankly, down deep we feel so bad about ourselves that we think anyone and everyone would say exactly that to us. Especially God.

THE JOY OF FORGIVENESS
That is why it’s so important to claim the promise—the promise of forgiveness. Listen to what the psalmist says: "I will confess my transgressions to the Lord . . . and you forgave the guilt of my sin . . ." You forgave. "Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered . . . Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does to count against him. . ."

Can you believe this? Can you believe this of yourself, can you believe your own forgiveness? You know a lot of people don’t believe it. A lot of us have taken those steps and confessed their sin and yet their guilt still haunts us. In the words of Paul Tillich, we have heard the gospel all our lives and yet are "unable to accept our acceptance."

The warden of San Quentin prison once told about a man who served a long sentence. The man was now in his seventies. It was time for his release. Through all his life, he had yearned for freedom, but when the time came to be set free, he couldn’t handle the thought of being on his own, outside those prison walls. He had been institutionalized, you see. He begged to stay. He had no family; he had no place to go.

They let him stay. He had an unlocked cell and could come and go as he wanted within the prison. One day the warden offered to take him for a ride to show him how much things had changed in the outside world. He refused, fearing the warden was going to drop him off somewhere and not allow him to come back inside.

You know, many of us experience what that man experiences. We have confessed our sin. We are forgiven of God. But we still live in the prison cell of our guilt. We are so determined to be in control of our lives that we cannot accept the gift of divine grace. Well, it’s time to press up against the prison door and discover, to our amazement—that the door is unlocked.

What will give us the courage to step forth into our freedom? Into the joy of our forgiveness? The courage flows from Christ. Your forgiveness is believable—because God has not merely blinked at your sin—God has chosen to nail your guilt to Calvary’s cross. Your forgiveness is real—because Jesus has shouldered your guilt. Your condemnation before the judgment seat of God is gone—it’s really gone. It has been thrown into the depth of the sea of God’s forgetfulness.

It’s time to end our pity parties. It’s time to end the guilt parades. It’s time to focus on the one in whom our forgiveness lies. It’s time to believe that the gospel is good news—not just for my neighbor—but for me!

About the Author

Robert Heerspink

Rev. Robert Heerspink is a native of west Michigan. He completed his undergraduate studies at Calvin College and holds the degrees of Master of Divinity and Master of Theology from Calvin Theological Seminary. He has also received a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Bob was ordained a minister of the Word in the Christian Reformed Church of North America in 1979, and has 26 years of parish experience, having served four churches throughout west Michigan. He was appointed the Director of The Back to God Hour in 2006. Bob has written several resources related to congregational stewardship, including the book, Becoming a Firstfruits Congregation. He is a regular contributor to TODAY, the monthly devotional of The Back to God Hour. Bob is married to Edith (Miedema) and they have three children. His hobbies include reading fictional and historical works, watersports, and occassional golfing.

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