You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘guilt’ tag.
For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. 2 Timothy 1:6
I could sit for hours by a campfire. I love to watch the flames dance as they change color. I enjoy the warmth and comfort they give me on those chilly or downright cold nights in the woods.
One night, while camping, my family and I decided to leave the warmth of our campfire to walk down by the lake we were camping at to look at the stars. There is no comparison to a starry night when you are 50 miles from the nearest small town and hundreds of miles from any large town. I always stand in awe of my God and Father when I look into his heavens.
Eventually, the coolness of the night had its effect on us and we decided to return to the fire. The flames had died down and there was nothing left but some glowing embers. I took a few small pieces of wood, laid them on the coals and began to fan the embers. Within minutes the flames had returned and the warmth of the fire was doing its work on our cold bodies.
The Apostle Paul was writing to his young protégé, Timothy. Apparently, for some reason Paul remembered the tears Timothy shed. Were they tears of loneliness in ministry? Were they the tears of a young man missing his teacher? Had Timothy gone through the loss of a friend or family member? We don’t know. But what we do know is the Paul encouraged Timothy to remember. He reminded him of his faith, the faith of his family, the strength of his God.
There are many times in our lives when the flames of God’s spirit can grow dim as a result of the struggles of family, work, or relationships. The quiet of the wilderness can fail to squelch the call of worry, doubt, guilt and frustration.
That night by the lake my spirit was restored by gazing into the heavens and remembering whose child I was. My heart was warmed by the reminder that this great God that hung the millions of stars in place stoops down to wipe my tears; offers a shoulder to cry on; offers forgiveness of my guilt.
Don’t allow the flame of God’s Holy Spirit to grow dim during the struggles of life. Focus on the facts of God’s love for you. Enjoy the warmth of his strength in your life. There is nothing you are going through that he has not sanctioned. There is nothing you have done, or can do that will keep him from offering you the warmth of his love.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, there are so many times that the trials of life keep the flames of your love and grace from reaching me. Let me sense your Spirit flowing through me so that I can be a light and shed the warmth of your love to others in need. Amen.
So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.”Romans 8:15
Psychology Today says of guilt, “Guilt and its handmaiden, shame, can paralyze––or catalyze one into action. Appropriate guilt can function as social glue, spurring one to make reparations for wrongs. Excessive rumination about one’s failures, however, is a surefire recipe for resentment and depression.”
Guilt almost always focuses on the negative, even though it can have positive outcomes. We’ve all been there. Dealing with feelings of regret, failure and fear over decisions we’ve made and choices from our past that haunt us daily. Those times when we’ve been awakened in the night by worry or come to a point during the day when we look around ourselves and ask the questions. How did I get here? How will I get out?
Guilt has been used for centuries to control behavior and to protect the status quo. “Wait until your father gets home!” too many of us remember hearing.
“If you don’t behave the police will come and take you away!” (I actually heard a young, frustrated mom say to her very two-year-old acting two-year-old. I shudder to think how that child grew up looking at law-enforcement.)
“If you don’t go to church and read your Bible you will go straight to hell!” (Okay, maybe it was never verbalized like that, but the message was clear.)
God hates divorced people and gay people and anyone that does wrong things. (One of my personal ‘UN’-favorites.)
The most unfortunate thing about guilt is that it has been used for centuries as a motivator by organized religion. I use the term ‘organized religion’ to clearly differentiate those systems from what we commonly refer to Christianity. Christianity can be a religion; in fact most people refer to it as a religion. In reality however, True Christianity is more about relationship than it is about rules and religion and…guilt. Every religion known to man speaks of personal responsibility and punishment. Only Christianity speaks of unmerited love and forgiveness.
The Apostle Paul, the Apostle of grace, writes in his letter to the believers in Rome, ‘We have not received a spirit of fear!’ (My paraphrase) That means fear motivated by guilt and remorse has no place in the heart of a repentant believer in Jesus Christ. The church may wield the sword of guilt to chastise us and keep us in line, but grace trumps that sword.
What a blessed truth. Guilt has no more hold on me, just as a child enjoys all the rights of being an heir. We no longer need to live under the oppressive hold of guilt in our lives. We are free. We are children of God and as such can address the creator of the universe as Daddy. What a blessed promise!
PRAYER: Father God, Daddy. I claim the forgiveness you have given me through your son, Jesus Christ. I will no longer allow guilt or shame to have control over me. I’m your child and eternally thankful for that. Amen.
They said to one another, “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen; that’s why this distress has come on us.” Genesis 42:21 (NIV)
It’s a story I have heard from my youth. Joseph, just a boy of perhaps 18 was a dreamer. He was the favored son of his father and a source of contention among his brothers. So much so that when the opportunity came, these brothers sold their brother into slavery and told his father that he’d been killed by some unknown, but savage beast.
The disadvantage to seeing the end of the story is that you forget to contemplate what was going on emotionally for those involved. Judah, the ringleader of the brothers wanted Joseph out of the way once and for all. Rueben fought for the integrity of family and his father.
Imagine for a moment, if you will, the anguish of Joseph that day. We remember him more as the good looking and wiser ruler that led Egypt through famine and won the safety of his family. But that day near the old well, it was a different story.
Don’t forget for a moment that the story of Joseph, like any story in the Bible or any other book is a story about real people with real feelings and real emotions. These were the guys Joseph played football with on Sunday afternoons. These were the guys that Joseph learned tending livestock from. These were the guys who helped him put the first worm on his hook and cheered as he pulled in his really big fish.
As Joseph was led away behind the caravan of camels it wasn’t just his brothers he saw disappear over the horizon, it was everything he remembered. He left the arms of his father to deliver food and to the best of his knowledge would never see dad again. Some of us have an adventurers’ heart. Launching out into the great unknown has a certain romance to it. The adventurer chooses to leave the well-known for the unknown. That can’t be said for Joseph. As he was led away he saw his very future being ripped from his hands.
Fast forward now twenty years into the life of Joseph. Somewhere in his life Joseph made a decision to trust God. Read his story in Genesis and you’ll see the presence of God in his life mentioned repeatedly. Whether it was before he was sold into slavery or after, somewhere along the line Joseph made a decision to make the best of every situation and to realize that regardless of what happened God was in control. Because God was in control his ‘duty’, so to speak was to serve this God to the best of his ability.
Like Joseph, there are those times when life deals us a horrible hand of cards. There are those people and those events that seem destined to ruin us and destroy us. But we don’t see the end of the story. We must focus on a God we can trust to know better than we do how life should go. We must rely on the one who sees the end of the story to get us through the middle chapters.
PRAYER: Father, during those times when life seems hopeless and I’m not sure I can continue on, help me remember how you used the abuse Joseph suffered to save the lives of his family. Help me serve you faithfully during my distress. Amen.
Real love isn’t our love for God, but his love for us. God sent his Son to be the sacrifice by which our sins are forgiven. 1 John 4:10
When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the Lord God among the trees. Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.” Genesis 3:8-10 (NLT)
Our finite minds won’t allow us to come to a full understanding of what it was like in the Garden of Eden when the first man and the first woman walked with God. Scripture tells us that Adam and Eve walked with God as three friends, not as creator and creation. The only relationship they knew with Jehovah God was a face to face, arm in arm, friendship.
After the first couple ate from that dreaded tree, the relationship was severed, but the love was not. That’s important! It wasn’t the lack of God’s love that drove Adam and Eve into the trees; it was a misunderstanding of their relationship with the father.
In the years that followed, if we read the stories of the Old and New Testament carefully, we realize that from that point forward, the Heavenly Father’s purpose was not to punish mankind for their rebellion, but to gain back the relationship he so badly wanted. The very purpose of him creating mankind and the universe that surrounds us was so he could love us. God’s love was the motivation for all he did. Since then, everything he does is an effort to regain the love relationship he had with us in the beginning.
It wasn’t just physical nakedness that drove Adam and Eve (and us) away from a loving, merciful and graceful creator; it was the exposure of their own ability to live up to their part of the love relationship. Guilt and shame built a wall between the lovers. In the garden, God sought to cover that shame with the temporary clothing of an imperfect sacrifice; on the cross he destroyed the barrier once and for all through the Messiah, Jesus Christ!
The problem for us becomes the fact that we still are deceived into thinking that because we fail; because we are unable to fulfill our end of the love relationship we can have no part in the pure forgiveness of the perfect sacrifice. Nothing is further from the truth.
Our ability to love God has never been a prerequisite for living in a love relationship with the Father. Our only response is to accept his love freely based on our own repentance and confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, the enemy of my soul continually bombards me with the lie that I can never love you enough and therefore I can not love you. Based on your promise I realize that my love for you has never been a prerequisite for your loving me. Today, I claim your love for me based on the perfect sacrifice you gave on the cross. Amen.
You will never succeed in life if you try to hide your sins. Confess them and give them up; then God will show mercy to you. Proverbs 28:13 (GNT)
One time while camping in the north woods of Minnesota we saw an interesting phenomenon. When we retired for the night we’d unknowingly left a jar of peanuts open and on a table. In the early morning hours a chipmunk happened to come along and seeing an opportunity, climbed into the jar and filled his cheeks with delicious peanuts. Unfortunately, the mouth of the jar was just large enough for him to get in, too small for him to get out with his peanut-filled cheeks.
We watched from our camper as he tried repeatedly to escape, but to no avail finally, he took the only recourse he had. He emptied his cheeks and (I imagine) begrudgingly left his treasure behind.
There are times in life when we hold so tightly to things that they keep us from enjoying the freedom God intended for us to have. Guilt is one of those things. Guilt can be ‘real’ guilt, based on things we’ve done against God, against ourselves or against others. Guilt can be false as well, based on the words and activities of others who use their power to keep us subdued and imprisoned by their own anger.
Like the chipmunk, we struggle to move on with victory in sight, but never seem to be able to make that final leap, never seem to be able to rid ourselves of those feelings of guilt and failure that bog us down.
- Guilt forces you to focus on the past and clouds your vision for the future;
- Guilt focuses on your failures not your strengths;
- Guilt sends inaccurate messages about who you are. It tells you that YOU are a bad person when in reality it was your actions that were bad, not you;
- Guilt masquerades as anger (leading to bitterness);
- Guilt is a breeding ground for fear & worry;
- Guilt can shorten your life expectancy by raising your blood pressure, risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and anxiety disorders.
Millions of dollars are spent each year to find cures for a variety of illnesses. The good news is that medical science has made great strides in controlling or even curing many diseases that were once life ending.
The better news is that when we talk about guilt, the cure is already available to us…and it’s free! Guilt will never be resolved by a simple pill. Guilt will never be relieved by counselors or religion. Guilt can only be taken from us through confession to the one person who promises to grant us forgiveness and mercy.
Jesus Christ came to free you of the burden of guilt. He came to cleanse your guilty conscience. Other people may refuse to forgive you; other people may continue to remind you of your faults; there may be physical reminders of your poor choices that you will carry the rest of your life. But through confession of your sin, your guilt is taken away through Jesus Christ, who grants mercy to all of us.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, I’ve been lugging this baggage of guilt with me for far too long. I confess my wrongs to you and ask you to forgive me and grant me mercy so that I can live free of the guilt that kept me captive. Amen.
Mike Fisk & Built with Grace 