Feeling guilty
Guilt can be crippling in many different ways.
For a Christian, guilt often also leads to a lack of assurance of our salvation. At times this might not be entirely unwarranted because it’s true that our assurance is confirmed by consistent Christian living (2 Peter 1:10), and undermined by a lack of obedience. When we look at our lives and we see our sin we might start to wonder whether or not we really are a Christian after all.
How should we respond to these feelings of guilt, and this recognition of our sin? In Psalm 32 David shows us both the wrong response, and the right one.
He says that when he kept his sin hidden from God his bones wasted away (v3). Rather than feeling the joy and assurance of salvation he felt as if God’s hand was heavy upon him (v4). That too might be our experience, because like David we are tempted to minimise or hide from our sin. We don’t want to admit it. In fact, we feel like to do so would only lead to even less assurance of where we stand with God! But in Psalm 32 we see that the opposite is true. When David acknowledged his sin to God he discovered not condemnation but blessing (v1-2). God forgave the guilt of his sin (v5). Christopher Ash writes that David “discovered that he had a choice: either his sin was covered up by himself (a pointless and painful attempt) or, wonderfully, it could be covered over by God in forgiveness. No sin that is covered up by us can at the same time be covered over by God. This is why confession of sin to God is such a blessing.”
So it seems perhaps counter-intuitive, but David shows us that when guilt leads to a lack of assurance the way to greater assurance is not to try harder. It’s to admit how bad we really are and place our confidence in Christ and his death for our forgiveness. The solution to our guilt is not to turn down the volume on our guilt, but to turn it up and recognise we have no hope except in Christ. As Dane Ortlund says in his book Surprised by Jesus, “the strange key to participation in the joys of God’s kingdom is not qualifying ourselves for it, but frankly acknowledging our disqualification.”
Often we feel guilty because we focus on our own inability. But there can be no assurance, even for the most godly Christian, when it is based solely on our Christian obedience. No-one is or will ever be perfect. We will always be inadequate. So even if our assurance is confirmed by consistent godly living, as 2 Peter 1:10 says, it nevertheless must be grounded ultimately in the adequacy of Christ’s death for us. Paul tells us that God demonstrated his love for us in that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). His love for us is not conditioned on our obedience, it is despite our disobedience. That, then, ought to be the grounds for our assurance.
