The sin of guilt.

If you feel guilty, I have some really terrible news for you: guilt is a terrible, horrible sin.

I don’t mean that guilt is what you feel after you’ve committed some terrible, horrible sin, although that’s certainly the case. I mean that feeling guilt is itself a sin. This doesn’t feel like help, does it? But hang on, the good news (really) is coming.

Ask yourself, “Why does God tell us which things are contrary to our nature and His purpose for our lives?” Well, naturally, so that we will recognize them, right?

Okay. But what are we supposed to do once we recognize that we have done wrong? The guilty man answers this question by justifying his burdenedness. “I have sinned, and therefore I feel guilty.” This seems simple enough, but is in fact a truly hellish heresy.

To put matters bluntly, the problem is that guilt is not mere sin-awareness. Guilt is sin-cherishing.

Think about it. When you feel guilty, do you go on feeling guilty? Of course. But when you are in right relationship with God, do you go on feeling this way or does God relieve you of the burden of condemnation through faith in the sacrifice of His Son? So doesn’t it make sense that an ongoing sense of worthlessness would be specifically contrary to God’s Will? That’s because guilt perverts the gift of sin-awareness by turning it into a poisonous trap of remaining alienated from God based on the blasphemous notion that God wants you to be guilty rather than repentant and faithful, that He is a God of wrath and not mercy who has revealed a moral code in order to crush you rather than to drive you back into His loving arms.

Guilt presumes God is the elder brother in the Prodigal Sons story, bitterly looking for any reason to heap shame upon you, when in fact God is obviously the father in the parable, eagerly running out to grasp us in His love.

So why does God give us the gift of sin-awareness? First, so that we will realize we are already in a fractured relationship with him. But the next step is the vital one. If God more than anything wants us restored to Him, then the proper response is to take this sin-awareness right back to Him, seeking for and trusting in His mercy and grace in joy.

But if God is a punitive and vindictive overlord, then we quite naturally internalize sin-awareness as the embedded worthlessness which reminds us we are wretched beings. That’s guilt, and that is why it is a sin; because of what it says about God’s Nature and what it says about His purpose in revealing our sins to us.

And if you’re grasping this, then you may be on the verge of another tremendously important conceptual realization. There is another, opposite reaction to sin-awareness which is nevertheless just as insidious as guilt: false repentance…which most people simply call repentance.

If there is one most common idea people have about repentance it is to turn yourself around and stop sinning. Then you will know you are back on the right path with God. But can’t you see that this only leads to pride and (of course) future failures which then lead either to guilt (when you fail) or self-reliant pride when you think you’ve succeeded?

This “change-your-behavior-ist” misunderstanding of repentance has perhaps done even more damage to Christian thinking than even guilt itself because it lays the responsibility for fixing our lives in our laps rather than at the foot of the Cross. True repentance is recognizing sin and then turning toward God in faith that Christ’s righteousness already is your identity and both seeking to grow in the knowledge of this salvation and praising God for how much of it He has already accomplished in you.

Thus, guilt and Change-your-behaviorism both start from the same basic paradigm error that our relationship with God is defined primarily by our works. If we do wrong, we are separated from him through guilt. If we do right, we are united with him through the false repentance of self-justifying works.

Repentance and faith, in contrast are beginning, middle, and end a matter of turning to God and trusting in Him to work His righteousness out in you. And when you respond to sin this way, you neither feel guilty nor proud. You simply rejoice in the ongoing fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that the Father would see us just as He saw Him for all of eternity.

And if you’re really getting this, then you will suddenly see that having me tell you that your guilt is actually even more sinful than the sin which inspired it is not even worse news. It’s incredibly good news…because it is of the essence of what the Good News really says.