GUILT AND GRACE

INTRODUCTION:

ILLUSTRTION:

Article in the San Diego Union. The scene was the San Diego superior court. Two men were on trial for armed robbery. An eye witness took the stand and the prosecutor got up to begin his questioning. First he asked the eyewitness, "You were at the scene of the robbery?" Yes, answered the witness. "You saw a vehicle leave at a high rate of speed?" Yes. "Did you observe the occupants?" asked the prosecutor. Yes. The prosecutor in a booming prosecutor's voice said, "And are those two men in this courtroom today?" At this point the defendants sealed their fate. They both raised their hand.

· Let's admit it. All of us at some point in our lives have to honestly say "I did it."

· There are things we've all struggled with. We're all in the same boat.

· James 2:10 “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”

· Obviously, when it comes to the way we evaluate guilt, there are different degrees of guilt.

· Recognizing the fact that whether it's one sin or many in our lives we've all slipped, we've all sinned and we're all in the same boat.

· What's the difference between real guilt and another kind of guilt, a false kind of guilt?

1. WHAT IS GUILT?

· We all know what it feels like.

· The Psalmist reminds us what it feels like, “For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me.”

· Everyone of us knows that overwhelmed, burdened feeling.

· That feeling of, "I hope nobody finds out."

· But does God mean for us to live with it for the rest of our lives? No.

· The purpose of guilt is not just to make you feel bad.

· He has a greater purpose than that.

· Guilt is actually a warning light.

· Picture it that way.

· It's a warning light that goes off that says, "Something's wrong.

· Something needs to be fixed."

· It's like the warning light that goes off on the dashboard of your car which says something's wrong.

· Does it help to break the warning light when it's going off?

· No, it's saying something needs to be fixed.

· Julie and I have this conversation that goes on in the car sometimes. We're driving down the road and she says, "What was that? I heard a sound in the engine. Sounds like something's wrong." I say, "I didn't hear anything." She's got a pretty good ear. She's usually hearing that something actually is wrong. But I know if something's wrong, I'm going to have to fix it, so I "don't hear anything"! For me, the engine has to actually fall out before I admit that something is actually wrong.

· That's the way we deal with guilt many times.

· We try to ignore it or pretend it's not there.

· We've got lots of different ways of dealing with this warning light that God sends into our life.

· But the truth is, if something really is wrong, the best thing to do is to get it fixed.

· I could try to fix the car myself but I'm not very good at that.

· So I need to take it back to the manufacturer.

· That's what we need to do with our lives.

· That's what the warning light is saying.

· It's saying, "You need some time with God.

· You need God to heal this."

· That's the warning light that God's bringing in.

· Before we look at the difference of how we try to deal with that warning light and how God's able to deal with it…

· Before we look at how we try to fix ourselves and how He's able to fix us, we've got to make a very important distinction.

· There's an important distinction to discover about guilt.

· There's two different kinds.

o There is genuine guilt. The real deal.

o We've all dealt with that, the genuine guilt that comes from the fact that we've all done wrong things that have hurt ourselves, hurt others, and hurt the heart of God.

o That's the honest truth.

o Unless we're perfect (and none of us are) we've all had to deal with this real thing of guilt.

o This feeling of genuine guilt.

o There's another brand of guilt that is very important to understand if you're going to get past this and find God's grace in the midst of it.

o That is false guilt.

o That's thinking that maybe there might be a light on the dashboard that comes on and you're so worried about it that you worry yourself into a guilt.

o That's feeling like, "If a light on the dashboard ever came on, what would people think of me?"

o There's many people who deal with this false guilt.

o I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say something like this, "I just have this overwhelming feeling of guilt.

o I don't know where it comes from.

o I can't really put my thumb on it.

o I don't know the source of it.

o But I just feel bad."

o If you're dealing with false guilt you're probably sending yourself a lot of mental e-mail.

o And they read something like this, "You think that's enough... You call that acceptable .... Look at all the things you haven't gotten finished. ... You have disappointed the people that are around you."

o If that's the kinds of things you're hearing a lot if you're dealing with false guilt.

· We need to understand that often false guilt in our lives is the result of incidences that may not have been your fault.

· Some of the people who struggle the most with false guilt, struggle because they were caught up in the circle of someone else's sin at some point in their lives.

· It may be a parent, a friend, a physical, mental or emotional abuse.

· But somehow, maybe even at an early age, you were caught up in the cycle of someone else's sin and you feel that you just can't get that out of your life.

· Maybe it was even one of your own children.

· You feel like because of what they have done, that's come upon your life.

· There are also times that false guilt is there because you just can't get past your past.

· This is what I hear people say when they're feeling this way.

· "I've asked God a thousand times to forgive me and I just can't feel forgiven."

· That's when you can't get past your past.

· Probably all of us have dealt in some ways with false guilt.

· What we need to understand today is that false guilt is very popular among church goers.

· It's a great thing in church.

· It produces a faith that is more walls than doors.

· There's no way out.

· It closes in on you.

· It's been a problem for those who've been trying to find the truth of God for a long time.

· Paul talks to some people who are struggling with false guilt trying to make themselves feel better by doing a lot of good things.

· He wrote to them in Galatians and said, “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?”

· But that's the sign of what happens when we struggle with false guilt.

· We can't feel forgiven by God so we try more and more to make it better by our own power.

· How do you know the difference between true guilt and false guilt?

· How do you know if it's God who's speaking to you or your Jewish grandmother or Sister Margaret from parochial school or Brother Bob from some fundamentalist church?

· How do you know who it is who's really speaking to you?

· Three tests.

· Three tests that will help you and I determine, and discern whether this is true guilt or false guilt.

1. Is the focus on people or is it on God?

· "False guilt is that which comes as the results of judgments and the suggestions of men."

· True guilt is that which comes as a result of divine judgment, what God thinks about the situation.

· If you're struggling with false guilt, you're going to find yourself striving a lot for approval.

· You'll be an approval junkie.

· You need other people's approval to make you feel better about yourself.

· It's a daily fix that you need.

· And you need more and more to help you feel better about yourself.

· The real problem with this is you live a lot of life worn out.

· I have a hard enough time just living up to my own expectations.

· If you have to live up to everybody else's expectations, to get their approval, that will wear you out.

· Is it people or is it God?

2. Is it vague or is it specific?

· Sometimes people will say something like this, "It's this cloud of doubt... a fog of guiltiness..." and they don't know how to get rid of it.

· I'll ask them what it leads back to, what's the struggle they're facing.

· And they really can't say.

· Almost all the time when it's the vague, foggy feeling of guilt, it's Satan talking to you and not God.

· God does it like a pinpoint of light.

· When God wants to speak to me about something, He's able to do it like a pinpoint of light.

3. Rules or relationships?

· When you're struggling with false guilt the big feeling is, "I broke the rules."

· When you're struggling with genuine guilt the feeling is, "I hurt someone.

· I hurt my wife…

· I hurt my husband…

· I hurt my children…

· I hurt the heart of God because of what I did."

· That's the difference between the two.

· The rules become more important than the relationship.

· So it becomes a religion rather than a relationship.

· In church it becomes duty rather than desire.

· False guilt blinds us to the miraculous work of God and it binds us to the meticulous rules of men.

· Which would you rather have?

· Whatever kind of guilt we're dealing with -- true guilt/false guilt -- we've got ways of dealing with it and God's got ways of dealing with it.

OUR WAYS OF HANDING GUILT

· Back to the light on the dashboard: What are you going to do when that light goes off?

· How do you handle it?

· It's amazing how we have common ways of handling these feelings.

· They go all the way back to the first man, the first woman, the first sin.

· The ways they dealt with that first sin are pretty common today.

Genesis 3 the Bible tells us that they first sewed fig leaves together and made something to cover themselves. Then they hid from the Lord God. Then when challenged, Adam said, "I was afraid because I was naked. She gave me some fruit from the tree, so I ate it." Three ways that are indicated in the way they responded and the way we respond today too.

1. We often respond with shame.

· We feel bad about it.

· If you think you can feel bad enough about the wrong things you've done to make them ok, probably most of you have already discovered that doesn't work.

· Shame doesn't work.

· They sewed fig leaves and tried to hide out.

2. Hiding.

· They hid in the bushes from God, as if God couldn't see them there.

· That's like trying to put your hand over the light on the dashboard that's going off, pretending that nothing is really wrong.

· It doesn't work.

· But they tried that one.

· They hid out.

3. Blame.

· This is a popular one.

· It's sort of a tragic, humorous story what happens in Genesis.

· You've got Adam and Eve and the serpent standing there and God comes.

· God asks Adam, "Did you eat of that fruit of that tree?"

· Adam took it like a man and he blamed his wife.

· He points right at Eve, "She did it. It's her fault. She gave me the fruit."

· So Eve's standing here, blamed too.

· She points at the serpent, "The serpent did it."

· Of course the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on...

· Isn't it easy to try to blame your way out of the wrong things that have happened? We all do this.

· God has a way of dealing with guilt, too. Very different from our ways.

GOD'S WAY OF HANDLING GUILT: GRACE

· 1 John 1:9 "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."

· "if we confess our sins" -- that's part of dealing with guilt.

· That's part of God's grace.

· "He is faithful and just" – this is also a part of grace and how it works.

· "will forgive us".

· That's how we deal with the guilt that makes us sick and splits us up and tears us apart.

1. Confess your sins.

· You say, "God, I did it. I confess my sin."

· Not just our need -- our sin.

· Not just our frustration -- our sin.

· Not just our problems -- our sin.

· What does that word mean -- sin?

· There's a lot of fancy definitions out there.

· The easiest way to understand it for me is to look at the middle letter in the word.

· Sin is all about "I".

· It's all about my way.

· It's all about me saying to God, "Excuse me, but I'm going to live my life my own way. I've got my own plans."

· It's about me looking at the car and saying, "It looks ok to me so I'm leaving you out."

· Whether you look very moral in this world's eyes, or very immoral, you can still have that "I" right in the middle of your life.

· You can still leave God out.

· That's what sin is all about.

· Tell God, "God, I left You out. Because of it, I messed up and it messed my life up."

· When it comes to sin we do one of two things -- cover up or face up.

· We try to cover it up and pretend it's not there or we face up to it.

· You might as well tell Him, He already knows.

· Why not be honest about it?

· Psalm 69:5 “O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.”

· There's nothing more difficult than trying to hide something that cannot be hidden.

· There is nothing more wearying, nothing more costly.

· Why try to hide it from God? Tell Him. Be honest with Him.

· Telling God -- confessing to God -- means more than just admitting.

· The literal meaning of this word is "saying the same thing about".

· You say to God, "I agree with You about this. It's wrong and it hurt. I agree with what You think about this sin. I agree with what You think about this wrong that I've done."

· How do you do that?

· How do you tell God?

· You do it through prayer.

· Even right now where you're seated just start to talk to Him about it.

· He'll listen.

· Talk to Him about the things you've done.

· The Bible also encourages us to also tell a trusted friend.

· There's something healing about that.

· Look at what James 5:16 says, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.”

· You may have told God a hundred times but never told anyone else.

· Because of that you're still struggling with guilt that keeps coming up about that sin.

· There's something healing about telling a trusted friend.

· It's got to be the right person, but when you tell the right person it takes that sin that looks so big when you keep it in the dark when you keep it hidden, when you don't tell anyone, and it shrinks it down to size.

· You tell somebody else and they say, "Oh, yeah, I've struggled with that too."

· All of a sudden you realize, "I'm not alone!

· I'm not so impressed with this sin anymore. Or depressed by it.

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