Ephesians 2:1-3 “You He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”
Pastor Sproul asks: How can we make up for a crime against God? How much time do we have to spend to make it right, to atone for offenses against an infinitely holy being? In the categories of biblical justice, our sins against God are infinitely heinous. That means we are unable to do the time. There is nothing we possibly could do to make up for our shortfall. Most people do not understand that the debt, the moral debt, we owe to God is so vast we never can repay it. So they say to themselves, “God is a God of love; He’s a God of mercy; He will never require payment.” They’re hoping against hope that God will adjust His standards to meet them where they are, that He will give the human race a plenary indulgence and not going to hold them personally accountable for their guilt. Many millions of people are counting on that. Jesus taught over and over again that there will be a final accounting, and that every idle word that you and I speak will be brought into the judgment.
As we have seen, we have real guilt before God. Maybe the reason you feel guilty is because you are guilty and compromised your integrity. You have violated the law of God. It’s important for us to understand that nothing we can do can make our guilt before God go away. The law is based ultimately on God’s own personal character. We can try, by many acts of penance, to make restitution for our violations of God’s law. However, the guilt always remains. In the final analysis, I said, the reason to obey the law against sex outside of marriage for example is not merely to escape painful consequences but to avoid offending the just holiness of God. So to ask the question, “What do you do with your guilt?” is simply to ask the question, “How do you live with yourself?” How do we live with our innate knowledge of what we have done and of who we are? We are objectively guilty in God’s sight—and we must deal with that guilt.
The good news is that God has given us a way to deal with our guilt. In fact, we might say that the whole message of the Christian faith is the proclamation of God’s solution to a problem we cannot solve ourselves. He has made a provision to deal with the reality of guilt, and He does it on the basis of real forgiveness, which is one of the most liberating, freeing, healing experiences of the human soul. That’s the good news of the Christian message. That’s the power of forgiveness, for what happens in forgiveness, according to the Scriptures, is renewal. God’s answer is not to paint a big red ‘S’ for Sinner on your chest and make you walk through the community in shame and embarrassment. The answer to guilt is always forgiveness. The only thing I know of that can cure real guilt is real forgiveness. What you need to do is get by yourself, get down on your knees, and tell God what you have done. Tell Him that you’re sorry and ask Him to forgive you and to make you clean , experiencing the forgiveness of Christ, not just in a symbolic sense but in a real way.
Whenever we break the law of God, we incur objective guilt. We may deny that the guilt is there. We may seek to excuse it or deal with it in other ways, but still the reality is that we have the guilt. I believe it is one of the mercies of God that He protects us from having to feel the full weight of the guilt that we actually have incurred in His sight. The only cure for real guilt is real forgiveness based on real repentance and real faith. Try to live the Christian life on the basis of Scripture, because Scripture is objective truth that transcends the immediacy of a person’s experience. Ultimately, the only source of real forgiveness is God. If we deny our guilt, we are simply fooling ourselves with self-deception. We all sin. Therefore, we all contract guilt. 1 John 1:8-9 “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” What, then, are you trusting—your feelings or the truth of God? You’re a debtor who can’t pay your debts. All you can do is cry unto God
Pastor Sproul asks: “Do you believe in Satan?” I know that we live in a time and in a culture that has an almost totally secular worldview. It has no room for supernatural beings, but the Scriptures take Satan very seriously. We need to understand that while Satan does indeed tempt Christians, his primary work in the lives of believers is accusation. That’s his favorite pastime. His very name means “slanderer.” Why would Satan invest so much time and energy in accusing people who have been forgiven of their sins? As the archenemy of God and His church, Satan wants to paralyze us, to rob us of our freedom, to take away from us our joy and our delight in the free grace of God. The difficulty lies in the fact that God the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, whereas Satan accuses us of sin. The same sin may produce both conviction and accusation.
When the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, He does so to bring us to repentance and, ultimately, to bring us to reconciliation with God, to forgiveness, to healing, and to cleansing. In other words, when the Spirit of God convicts us of sin, His entire purpose and entire motive is redemptive. When Satan accuses us, perhaps of the same sin, his purpose is to destroy us. It takes wisdom, persistence, and saturation in the truth of God to discern the difference. The way to silence the Accuser is to confess our sins before God and believe the Word of God, even as Jesus did in His temptation experience. The only support system we have for standing in the presence of God as sinners who have violated the law of God is the forgiveness that God gives us in Jesus Christ. We need real forgiveness. But that real forgiveness requires real repentance and real faith, and without real repentance and real faith there is no real forgiveness to real guilt before God. Our guilt should drive us to search for the way of forgiveness and reconciliation that God provides for His people; it should drive us to the cross, where Christ paid the price for our transgressions.
In Christ, Brian
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