The loving gift of Guilt Brendan Mc Crossan
The Amazing Loving gift of guilt The loving gift of guilt seems to be a contradictory thing to say! guilt makes us feel terrible, it burdens us down, causes depression and heaviness, it causes us to feel like we are carrying a weight around with us everywhere, every moment of every day. Guilt does not feel very loving to those who suffer from it. When a dear friend phoned one day asking for prayer, the lord informed me he was living in guilt, it was weighing him down, and he could not sleep, nor have peace of mind. I arranged to meet him a few days later when he came back from holiday, and in the meantime I talked to God about it, and was just amazed by what he said about guilt. We look on guilt as something negative, something that is weighing us down, a burden on our back, that keeps us from approaching God because we feel so guilty about sins we committed and theses sins were bad, oh my God how they were so bad, or so we believed. We hid those sins, even from ourselves if that were at all possible, we didn t wish to think of those sins again, and so we shoved them down inside of us, into a dark recess in our minds and tried to forget about them, we tried to bury them, or even thought we succeeded in burying them, and we left them there deep in our subconscious mind for years and years until we actually consciously forgot them, or had a little flicker of those sins when we seen someone sin in the same way, maybe a TV show brought them back up again by something you seen, and the memory re-surfaced again briefly. Then you proceeded to again bury that sin or sins. The beginning of guilt! In the very beginning we see Adam and Eve sinned and tried to hide that sin from God. Genesis-3-8- that evening they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden; and they hid themselves among the trees. The lord God called to Adam, Why are you hiding? It s amazing to think that after committing the first sin ever committed, they chose to try and hide from God, and they tried to hide their sin, from the all seeing eyes of God; because they felt guilty they choose to hide from God. After Adam and Eve sinned the next to sin was one of their sons. Adam and Eve did not realise that God had programmed into them, the feeling of guilt. Genesis-4-8- one day Cain suggested to his brother, Let s go out into the fields. And while they were together there, Cain attacked and killed his brother. But afterwards the lord asked Cain, Where is your brother? where is Able? How should I know? Cain retorted. Am I supposed to keep track of him everywhere he goes? But the lord said, Your brothers blood calls to me from the ground. What have you done? Cain tried to hide his wicked sin from God, but God knew what he had done. We too, do like Cain, we sin and then we try and hide our sins from God. So you see from the very beginning of mankind man and women sinned, and tried to hide their sins from God. The writer of one of the Psalms was another who tried to hide his sins from God, and suffered the consequences. Read what he says in the following Psalm.
Psalm-32-1- what happiness for those whose guilt has been forgiven! What joys when sins are covered over! What relief for those who have confessed their sins and God has cleared their record? There was a time when I wouldn t admit what a sinner I was. But my dishonesty made me miserable, and filled my days with frustration. All day and all night your hand was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day, until I finally admitted all my sins to you, and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, I will confess them to the lord and you forgave me! All my guilt is gone. Now I say that each believer should confess his sins to God when he aware of them, while there is time to be forgiven. Judgment will not touch him if he does. Have you felt those same feelings that the Psalm writer felt, that heaviness and depression and listlessness? And it was because he was trying to hide his sins from God. God created guilt in us as a means of making us aware of sin, and guilt in God s plan is supposed to bring us to remorse and remorse to seek forgiveness. Guilt was designed by God to be something good; Satan corrupts that gift and makes it work for his evil plans to ensnare us. Guilt was supposed to draw you closer to God, that is what it was designed to do to bring you to repentance because you could not bear to be away from God, but Satan distorted that loving gift and twisted it to make us keep away from God, to try and hide our wrongs from God, just like he done with Adam and Eve, and with their son Cain. Confessing your guilt brought God s forgiveness and mercy, and moved you another step closer to him, but Satan uses it to draw us away from God for fear of what God may do to us, and all God wanted to do was forgive us and give us right standing with him again. Guilt from God s perspective If you look at guilt from God s perspective you see that guilt is good, it is meant to draw us to repentance, to seek God s face, and be forgiven, to be brought closer to God. The more aware you are of sin that means the more closer you are being drawn to God, it is just the opposite from what you feel; the closer you are to God the more sin is brought into the light, and the more you are aware of it. Sin cannot stand in the presence of God, and in his presence is where he wishes you to be; always close to him and getting closer and closer every day. Guilt is great, it is something to be joyful about, it should bring the Christian believer into a time of great rejoicing, as his or her sin is exposed and removed. Note; the words I used here, exposed and removed, when sins are acknowledged, and then admitted to one s self, and then brought to the lord and forgiveness is asked for, sin is then forgiven and removed. Guilt has done its job successfully. As a Christian if you are trying to get closer to God you will find that it seems to be the worse you are getting, the more you try the worse you seem to be. You are aware of sins that didn t bother you before, or didn t bother you as much as they should have. You may have been aware of the big sins you committed, but the closer you come into his beautiful presence, the more aware you become you are doing wrong things, like holding unforgiveness against God s children, and disliking people whom Jesus died for. Let s look at the words of the Psalm writer again and see what feelings he is expressing. Psalm-32-1- what happiness for those whose guilt has been forgiven! What joys when sins are covered over! What relief for those who have confessed their sins and God has cleared their record?
He is saying what happiness he is feeling now that his guilt has been forgiven, what joy when sins are covered over, {his sins are not covered as in hidden they are covered over by God s forgiveness, we today have them covered by the blood of Jesus.} What relief, for those who have confessed their sins, and had their record cleared? What relief; have you ever experienced that feeling of relief when something you thought was going to happen and then discovered it didn t, you feel a great relief. He experienced = happiness = joy =relief, he experienced the feelings that we all wish for, simply because guilt brought him to admit his sins to God and stopped trying to hide them. It s worth it searching our hearts and bringing any sin that we find hidden there before the lord and confesses them to him, and then we too will experience the happiness, the joy the relief, that the psalmist experienced. Guilt is great, fantastic, because it won t allow us to keep hiding our sins forever, unless we die before confessing them to God. I personally use Psalm 139-23- search me O God, and know my heart; test my thoughts. Point out anything you find in me that makes you sad and lead me along the path of everlasting life. Here I am asking God personally to search my heart, because I have the capabilities to try and hide things from him, and even from myself, but when he searches me then nothing will remain hidden, everything gets exposed, wonderful, search my guilty secretes lord expose them for what they are and then I can confess them and stop trying to hide them, let the guilt in me bring everything to the surface that is hidden in my darkest recess of my soul. Guilt has many sides to it! When God created guilt in us when he formed us, it was meant to be a guide for our souls, it was such a loving gift, because God did not want us to be separated from him because of sin, and we know when we confess sins to God he forgives them, and we are back in right standing with God. He didn t move away from us, guilt and sin caused us to move away from him, and Satan keeps telling us that we sinned so badly we can t be forgiven. God created guilt with only one side to it, to bring us to repentance, but Satan took that gift and distorted it for his evil purposes. Like everything good created, T V, or computers, or other things created for good; Satan takes these good things and distorts them and corrupts them for evil purposes, I don t need to describe everything he distorts, you know what I mean. Remember something about Satan, it is not in his nature to tell the truth, all he does is lie and lie to us, getting us to believe him, a liar, instead of us trusting God and running towards our loving Father, like the prodigal son and saying, Father I have sinned against you, forgive me. Everything God made was and is excellent in every way. Genesis-1-31-then God looked over everything he had made, and it was excellent in every way. God declared everything excellent, good in every way, brilliant! Then Satan full of corruption told the woman Eve the greatest lie ever told, and this lie caused the downfall of man from God s grace for everyone ever since, until Jesus restored us back into grace again by his death on Calvary. Satan took the word of God and twisted it around; he told the woman, that s a lie God told you. He called God a liar, he reversed things for the woman, he was and is the world s greatest liar, and he had the audacity to call God a liar. He twisted what God said and got the woman to believe him and not God. And he has been doing the same thing ever since. Genesis -3-13 then God asked the woman, How could you do such a thing? The serpent tricked me, she replied.
The serpent, the Devil, Satan, tricked her, and he is still tricking mankind twisting the word of God and distorting the truth in everything, everything God made or done; Satan comes to destroy and steal and kill. He destroys your trust in God, by convincing you, you can t be forgiven, your sins are so many, and they are dirty sins, like sexual sins, they are always dirty, disgusting, he tells you and are so dirty you couldn t confess those vile terrible sins to God, hide them from him. You re the only one who committed such terrible sexual sins even with your own siblings, remember something here at this point, Satan is a liar and can t tell the truth, millions have fallen into sin, and all the same sins, you are not the only one who did that kind of filthy sin, he tells you and makes the sin so disgusting that you are so ashamed that you can t look God in the eye again or even the person with whom you sinned, or sinned against. Come on, catch yourself on; Satan is the one who pressurised you into committing those sins and now he stands and condemns you and tells you they were so vile you couldn t be forgiven, hide those sins away! Burry them in the back of your mind and forget about them. But God s loving gift of guilt won t let those sins remain buried, because God sees them anyway, and wants you to come to him and confess them to him and get forgiveness and come back into God s fold again, close to God. Everything God done is good, excellent in every way; everything Satan does is filled with lies and deceit, truth is just not in him, neither is peace, he cannot have peace because he is separated from God forever and will spend eternity in a lake of fire burning forever, and he wants you there for company, not because he loves you, but because he hates God and all God made. The loving side of guilt is from God and brings us to repentance and closer to God. The confusion of unreal guilt! Satan keeps us in guilt separating us from God convincing us were too bad to come to God again. So you see, here are two conflicting sides of guilt, and there is another side of guilt which again Satan uses against us. And that is unreal guilt; unreal guilt is guilt from something that happened to you, and you feel guilty because of something that happened to you, not something you personally done. For example; if someone raped you and through that rape the person touched you intimately arousing you, and even though you are being raped, you enjoy the sexual part of it, a person feels terrible guilt about this. Believe it or not but this is a natural thing that happens to people, all over the world. A rapist knows he can touch a woman in a certain place and he knows it will arouse them, and of course he gets more pleasure out of controlling her, she is left with the feelings of guilt; she feels if she had done this or that, it wouldn t have happened, if she had done something different, if, if, if. What happened was not the woman s fault; there was no way she asked to be raped, even by a father or brother. She didn t wish for this terrible thing to happen to her, and she didn t want to feel aroused when the person touched her intimately, she never asked for this to happen to her, or him as the case may be, in today s world, men are also being raped. Unreal guilt is just as crippling as real guilt, it depresses you, and it lies heavy within you, like a great weight you re carrying around with you. A few nights ago I was watching the 6-clock-news and a soldier was being interviewed, and he told of the horror of seeing his soldier friends being blown to pieces in front of him and he was the only survivor, he described his feelings of guilt at being the only one to survive. It may seem incredible to believe that a soldier who survived a massive bomb blast, would feel guilty about surviving, you would think he would be so happy to be alive, and he probably feels glad
to be alive but he is also weighed down by a burden of guilt. This guilt is called unreal guilt; he didn t do anything to be guilty about; but the feelings of guilt remain within so many people; especially people who survived a terrible accident or like the soldier, a bomb, or a plane crash. These people all feel guilty they survived, unbelievable to you and me but to them the guilt is real, the truth is it is unreal guilt they are feeling. They survived because of one reason or another, maybe God protected them because a granny or mother prayed every day for them and believed God would protect them in a terrible situation, who knows. I worked in a derelict house renovating it for someone, and British SAS soldiers were hidden in the attic, and I went into that house with a clerk of works to evaluate the work I had done, and as I went to walk up the stairs I felt a hand on my chest stopping me from going any further, I got scared and asked the clerk of works could we leave it as I wasn t feeling so well, and he agreed and we left the house. Later that same day a man entered the house and went up the stairs and those SAS soldiers killed him, he was going to collect IRA weapons that they had hidden in this house I worked at unknown to me. Why was he killed and I was spared, I only know that I was being constantly prayed for by my wife and mother, and I had no knowledge of the IRA weapons in this empty house, on the other hand the man knew these weapons were there and he had gone into the house to get guns so that the IRA could attack the British soldiers or police, maybe kill someone. Did I feel guilty that I did not get killed? No I thanked God for protecting me because it was that night at a Marriage Encounter weekend that I gave my life to the Lord, I did not even know that a man had been killed in this house until after the Marriage Encounter weekend. Those who have experienced a near to death experience like I did should be thankful to God, and not allow Satan to destroy their feelings and emotions by unreal guilt. They have a choice to make here and now if they read this, they can choose to live a life full of unreal guilt and remorse for ever or they can stop Satan in his tracks right now, by first of all thanking God for sparing their lives, for giving them a chance to repent of their sins, to give them a chance to come to Jesus and let Jesus save their souls, and to let God use them for his glory, because God turns everything to good for those who love him. God will turn your unreal guilt into something good later on, and as a means of helping others. Unreal guilt is not a good thing, it cripples a person, destroying their happiness, and unlike real guilt it can t be forgiven because you didn t do anything wrong. God can t forgive a guilt that is not real, it s impossible for him to do so, because you done no wrong. True guilt is a good thing, it brings you to repentance because you can t live with the guilt any longer, but unreal guilt brings no repentance because there was no wrong done against God. God can t forgive something that is not a sin, but you can forgive yourself, by choice, and change your unreal guilt into a freedom for you. You are the one who needs to say to yourself; I done no wrong in this situation, and therefore I make a decision before God and with his help I now chose to forgive myself, and I let go of this unreal guilt and I bind you Satan from using this unreal guilt against me in Jesus name. Then ask God to fill you with his light in this area so that unreal guilt cannot get back into you. God will be delighted to fill you with his glorious light as he does not want you living in unreal guilt, real guilt feels bad enough without having unreal guilt, crippling you as well. You can see now that there are different sides to guilt, there is the true guilt from a wrong done, a sin committed, and brought to the lord, forgiveness is given, and you and God are ok again; and then there is the guilt that Satan uses, your real guilt of the sin committed but he uses them
to crucify you and keep you away from God, he twist that loving gift of guilt which brings us to repentance and he uses it to keep us away from God saying were too bad a sinner to be forgiven, our sins were so disgusting we couldn t approach God. And the unreal guilt that Satan uses against you also. Guilt must be dealt with in the same way it must be confessed and then forgive yourself. God does not hold sin against us, not when he forgave us through Jesus Christ our Lord and saviour. Unreal guilt needs to be dealt with in the same way also, the only difference between real guilt and unreal guilt is, real guilt is sin committed, and unreal is imaginary wrong doing. You were not responsible for surviving a plane crash or a bomb or car accident, it was the grace of God that protected you for whatever reason, and this reason will be revealed someday in God s timing, you were nor responsible for being raped or even enjoying the act of sex in itself, it is a natural feeling, and now you must forgive yourself in the same way that God forgives you your real guilt. Satan enjoys tormenting you, he delights in making you feel guilty; don t allow him anymore to torment you with guilt, real or unreal. You have the power in you to take control of your life again and take that control back from Satan by forgiving yourself, then thanking God for his mercy and compassion. Guilt is a loving gift from God our father, let us realise and keep that thought in mind every time Satan tries to get us wrapped up in guilty feelings, real or imaginary. Romans-8-1 therefore there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. Satan uses guilt as a condemnation weapon; but the truth is guilt is wonderful; it s a truly loving gift from God our Father. If guilt was a means of condemning you then it would contradict God s word that there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. God s word never contradicts itself, if it says there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus then it does not use guilt as a means of condemning someone for whom Jesus died. Satan on the other hand uses guilt to condemn you and criticise you and put you down, and keep you away from God s love, guilt draws you to God eventually to confess your hidden sins, and be forgiven. Let the guilt you have been holding onto for all those years now be confessed to God and be forgiven, remember that you are only one out of millions and millions that have sinned those same sins, you sin was no bigger than anyone else s sin, Christians make a tremendous mistake believing that one sin is bigger than another and that one sin is more disgusting than anyone else s sin. James -2-10- and the person who keeps every law of God, but makes one little slip, is just as guilty as the person who has broken every law there is. This scripture tells you distinctive and clear that sin is sin and there is no difference in the size of sin. Sin is breaking the law of God, or the Ten Commandments to make it easier for you to understand. If you are a Catholic like me you will have grown up with the belief in venial sins and mortal sins, telling us that certain sins will send us to hell if committed, and other sins like venial sins will have us spend a long time in Purgatory, this is not true, this was taught to Catholic children to help them understand sin, but we still carried it into adulthood with us, that condemnation, of the big sin. THERE IS NO BIG SIN there is only sin and sin is breaking the law of God, and thank God Jesus came and fulfilled the law for us by dying on a cross on Calvary taking on himself all our sins, and forgiving us and making the way clear for us to come to him boldly as scripture
says. Sin is sin, there is no difference in the size of sin; it is breaking the law of God. Satan uses sin and guilt against us because we do not understand the awesome love that God has for us by sending Jesus to die for OUR SIN! There is nothing you have done that cannot be forgiven, everything you have done and ever will do, has already been forgiven, you just need to forgive yourself, and forgiveness is a decision not a feeling. You decide to forgive yourself after confessing your sin to God and if it s unreal guilt your feeling, you tell Satan to get lost, and then you tell yourself I forgive me! and then you refuse to allow him to put guilt unreal of real back upon you. You will have to fight to break Satan s hold over you and if you just keep refusing guilt and confess, {say} Jesus has forgiven me. Then Satan will eventually leave you alone in this area knowing he is defeated here. I could go on and on telling you scripture after scripture of the mercy and love of God for you, but you as a Christian need to read your bible and see the truth in his word for yourself, and the truth will set you free. You can also read my books on Google; just type in Google search; brendansbooks.com or miracle teaching ebooks and you can download them or read them on line Amen