“Repent of your wickedness and pray to the Lord. Perhaps he will forgive your evil thoughts,” (Acts 8:22)
There is much said on guilt by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, ministers, hairdressers, and even bartenders. They have all heard their share of guilt stories and most of the time guilt is looked upon as a bad thing. A quick google search will reveal a lot more information about the destructiveness of guilt than its value. Guilt is almost always looked at as a negative, but if we look at guilt as a negative, it is easy to miss positives that true guilt can play in our lives.
The dictionary calls guilt “the act or state of having done a wrong or committed an offense.” This is pretty straight forward. Guilt is an indicator something going wrong. It is the negative feeling that accompanies a negative behavior. Guilt in itself is not wrong. It is the warning light on the dash board of our car. In society today, we are basically told to cover up that light. We are told it is wrong to feel guilty and so we are told, in essence, to deal with the symptoms of guilt rather than the causes the guilt.
Guilt originated in the garden. Adam and Eve ate of the one thing that was forbidden and they hid. They were not experiencing some sort of false guilt planted by Satan. They were facing the real feelings of guilt after the real trespass of God’s commands. After they presented themselves to God, God did not tell them to wipe out those evil guilt feelings from their mind. He was not angry for their guilty feelings,
but for their rebellious actions. Guilt was not the wrong. It was an indicator of wrong. Because of the trespasses in the garden we know that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) So sin is with us always, regardless of the message the world tries to give.
Later in the New Testament, Jesus used the hypocrisy of men to save an adulterous woman from stoning. After all the would-be “stoners” walked away, Jesus did not tell the woman to go and not feel guilty any longer because she had a reason to feel guilty. He asked her who was there to condemn her. “She replied, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you either. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.'” (John 8:31) He told her to go and sin no more. He did not deal with the symptom of sin, but the act of sin. He told her to stop the action that led to guilt. To often today we stir real guilt and false guilt both in the same pot and make the feelings the same. The consequence of this is a lot of people not dealing with root causes of their sinfulness. John tells us in 1 John 2:1 “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” We need to deal with the sin, not just the feelings of sin.
I have told the story many times about the man who would just walk up and hit people for no reason. He felt terribly guilty about it and went to therapy. After months of therapy, he finally felt cured and shared his relief with a friend. “I still hit people for no reason, but I don’t I don’t feel guilty any more.” A humorous story, but all too true today. We are told not to feel guilty about acts that we should feel guilty about. 
If we remove the guilt, we will not deal with the acts. Guilt is often the vehicle that transports us to a place of healing so we should not ignore it.
Down deep we know when we are guilty, and we don’t want to face reality, so dealing with the surface feelings becomes much easier than dealing with the deeper truths. Two men were on trial for armed robbery. An eyewitness took the stand, and the prosecutor slowly moved to what would be his climatic conclusion of questioning. “So, you say you were at the scene when the robbery took place?”
“Yes,” the witness answered.
“And you saw a vehicle leave at a high rate of speed?”
“Yes,” the witness answered again.
“And did you observe the occupants?”
“Yes, two men.”
“And,” the prosecutor boomed, “are those two men present in court today?” He turned and faced the defendants. At this point the two defendants sealed their fate. They raised their hands. We know when we are guilty, we often just need to come clean.
If we would just test our guilt feelings, we would realize that many of them have a legitimate basis. There was an NFL player back in the day who had terrible pain in his knees. He would just have them shot up with pain killers and play the games anyway. After years of doing this, he retired and his knees were beyond repair. He was virtually a cripple. The pain in his knees was an indicator that there was something wrong that needed to be dealt with. Covering up the pain was like us covering up our guilt; it keeps us from dealing with the root problem and it will just continue to get worse. Soon it will cripple us. Guilt is often a warning sign, flashing away, letting us know there is a malfunction and we must take the time to look at problem and deal with it.
As is the way of the world, everything is topsy-turvy. Legitimate guilt 
is made to seem false, and false guilt is made to seem legitimate. We are told we shouldn’t feel guilty about acts of sin, but we should feel guilty about acts of righteousness. We are told that any guilt we might carry inside our hearts by being separated by our savior is illegitimate. But we are also told that if we shake the forbidden fruit from the tree and eat, we should shake off the guilty feelings that will follow. There is only one way to shake off the guilt and Dr. Luke tells us how in Acts, “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.” (Acts 3:19) You notice he doesn’t say, “just don’t feel bad anymore.” That just doesn’t work.
There is a lot more authentic and necessary guilt out there that are signposts pointing to disaster than there are bouts of false guilt. We must not fear guilt any more than we fear the burglar alarm going off on the back porch. We should not fear the alarm, but the burglar. We should not fear the guilty feelings but the actions that set them off. Of course, there is such a thing as false guilt and the key is how do we distinguish between good guilt and bad guilt. Next week I will get into how we tell the difference. Until then have a great week…
