How to Deal with Guilt by Accepting God's Solution

Summary

All humanity is objectively guilty before God, whether we feel guilty or not. Jesus bore our guilt on the cross, offering forgiveness to those who repent, believe, and forgive others. We must accept God’s verdict, not our feelings, and trust that Christ’s sacrifice fully cleanses us. Good works can’t remove guilt—only Jesus can. When we believe His pardon, we’re freed from self-condemnation to live boldly for God by the Spirit’s power.

Two Types of Guilt

Guilt comes in two flavors, objective and subjective. Objective guilt is legal guilt. If we break traffic laws, we are objectively guilty, whether we feel guilty (subjective guilt) or not. Guilt is more than a feeling we get of remorse or self-condemnation.

Humanity’s Universal Guilt Before God

The Bible describes objective guilt as universal for humanity, with the whole world being guilty before God (Romans 3:19). We have all broken God’s laws.  Whether we feel like lawbreakers is irrelevant. We are guilty before God.

Jesus Paid the Penalty for Our Guilt

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus took our guilt upon Himself and died on the cross of Calvary to pay the death penalty it deserves (Romans 6:23). Forgiveness is available for all who meet two conditions.

Jesus said that we must repent and believe the gospel that He died in our place (Mark 1:15). That is the first condition. The second is that we must forgive others (Matthew 6:15). That is God’s only remedy to deal with the objective guilt that threatens to sink our ship forever if we ignore it. Jesus is God’s only provision for it.

Our Ungodliness and God’s Perspective

Jesus died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6), not for the mostly godly or the good people. Ungodly is a very low bar to clear. We all qualify. We easily make it with room to spare.

To think we are anything other than ungodly from God’s perspective is self-deception. The truest thing about us is what God says about us, not what our minds, feelings, or others say.  

Confession and Faith in God’s Forgiveness

We must confess our sins to God and to others whom we have hurt, and then accept God’s forgiveness as a fact. If we don’t believe God keeps His promise to forgive us when we confess and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9), guilty feelings will continue to storm inside us.

How to Deal with Guilt

A man in a congregation I pastored confessed his previous marital infidelity to me shortly before he died. He asked me whether God could forgive him for what he had done.

Guilty feelings had tortured him for decades. He was a leader in the church. The health of the church suffers when guilt hamstrings its members and greatly reduces their effectiveness. How can we assure others that Jesus’ death on the cross removes the guilt of their sins when we don’t feel forgiven ourselves? How can we live all out for God?

Christ’s Blood Cleanses Completely

Initially referring to Old Testament sacrifices, the writer of Hebrews wrote, “If that animal blood and the other rituals of purification were effective in cleaning up certain matters of our religion and behavior, think how much more the blood of Christ cleans up our whole lives, inside and out. Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God” (Hebrews 9:13-15 The Message).

Why Good Works Cannot Remove Guilt

Forgiveness based on Christ’s blood is God’s solution to our dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable. We feel guilty because we don’t feel respectable. Our inadequate solution is to perform good works to compensate for our sinful lapses.

God’s solution is the cross of Christ because good works can’t absolve the objective guilt of our sins and the death penalty they deserve. The gospel is the good news that God doesn’t make us pay for our sins.

Freed to Live Fully for God

Jesus did that for us.  We deal with guilt effectively by accepting that God’s solution for it is Jesus taking our place on the cross. That frees us to live all out for Him by the Holy Spirit's power, the intended purpose for our cleansing from sin’s defilement.

May we never conclude that we can live as we like because Jesus has footed the bill for our sins. Sin always has painful consequences. Jesus died to save us from their penalty and power.

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