Whatever Became of Guilt?” The sermon title in the church bulletin jumped out at Randy and Vicki as they sat in the pew. They looked at each other. Then, shrugging, they turned toward the pastor for the morning message.
The couple had been coming to this small, friendly Bible church in the Midwest since Randy’s new job had brought them here from the West Coast three months ago. The warmth of the members encouraged them, and Pastor Glenn communicated the Bible message in a straightforward, no-nonsense fashion. It seemed that they had found a church home after their cross-country trek.
This Sunday morning Pastor Glenn came right to the point. “Beware of the humanistic approach to guilt,” he preached. “A sense of guilt occurs because we’re truly guilty. Listen to it. God provides guilt so that well know when we’ve missed the mark. If you feel guilty, you are guilty.”
Randy and Vicki shifted uneasily. They weren’t used to this approach to the gospel. Yet perhaps God was speaking to them.
“Guilt solves the problem of loving ourselves too much,” continued Pastor Glenn. “Rather than concentrating on how wonderful we are, guilt refocuses us to the darker side. It puts who we are in perspective. Focusing on guilt doesn’t make us guilt-ridden. Instead, it makes us more responsible.
“The Holy Spirit speaks to us through guilt. Jesus taught about the conviction of the Holy Spirit in John 16:8: ‘When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.’ Don’t quench him.”
Driving home after church, Randy and Vicki were thoughtful. “Honey,” he said, “I feel worse after the sermon than before.”
Vicki nodded. “Same here. But maybe it means we need to get our act together.”
“I didn’t know our act wasn’t together until fifteen minutes ago.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” you may ask. “We need a sense of contriteness before the Lord. Don’t at least the psalms teach as much, as in Psalm 51:17?”
We cannot deny that a sense of our sinfulness is biblical. Furthermore, it is common to feel worse after we encounter God—the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Peter both knew the feeling (Isa. 6:1–7; Luke 5:8). Awareness of our sin informs us of our need for God’s forgiveness.
Pastor Glenn’s message sounds Christian, but much of it is unbiblical. It burdens Christians with shame and guilt that God never intended.
This crazymaker states that guilt and shame are good for us, are helpful to our spiritual growth. Guilt and shame assist us by revealing our past sin to us—and they also prevent us from sinning again.
This false assumption is especially potent in those who respect the Bible, because the Scriptures can be subtly twisted to teach guilt and shame messages. Families, for example, often use these messages to keep kids under control.
“Law is the easiest subject in the world to preach,” my seminary professor used to say. “Grace is the hardest.”1 It’s really not difficult to teach that—
1. The Bible says to obey God.
2. We don’t.
3. We should.
Hundreds of Scriptures are preached that way. The only problem is, it doesn’t help Christians grow spiritually. Most Christians already know they don’t do what the Bible says to do, and that fact hasn’t exactly set them free.
Pastor Glenn’s sermon is an example of a theology of guilt and shame, which plays out in our lives like this:
• “You’ve ruined the party for all of us with your behavior. I can’t show my face to my friends.”
• “How can you be so selfish as to not lend me the money?”
• “After all I’ve done for you, you can’t even come home for Christmas.”
• “Shame on you for saying that to her!”
• “You really should visit them. They are your parents, you know.”
• “There’s plenty of people out there who need your help, and you’re going on vacation?”
• “What am I supposed to do with myself if you can’t go?”
• “You should have licked that eating disorder by now.”
You get the idea. The speaker usually wants something from you and is angry that you aren’t providing it. The guilt message is simply a way to get you to change your mind.
Many Christians don’t see the guilt trip laid on them in these messages. Trying to solve their guilt problem, they talk to themselves this way:
1. I feel guilty (due to my own conscience, to someone laying a guilt trip on me, or to both).
2. I assume I’ve sinned.
3. If I confess my sins, God will forgive me (1 John 1:9).
4. I confess, and feel less guilty.
5. I go on with my life until the next time someone makes me feel guilty.
The problem is that we can feel guilty without actually being guilty. And 1 John 1:9 isn’t a bath for guilty feelings. It’s a sin bath. We don’t confess to get rid of guilt, but to have sin forgiven by God and to be reconnected in fellowship to him. There is much confusion about what the Scriptures actually teach about guilt and shame.
Let’s explore the concepts of guilt and shame first, then clear up the confusion surrounding them.
Guilt has two common meanings: The state of having done a wrong (e.g., he is guilty of stealing the stereo) and a painful feeling of self-reproach resulting from a belief that we have done a wrong (e.g., he felt guilty for not coming home for Christmas).
On one hand, the Bible always refers to guilt as the state, not the feeling. You won’t find Scriptures describing a feeling of guilt. The Bible describes a legal condition of guilt: “You have become guilty because of the blood you have shed” (Ezek. 22:4). “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
As a judge pronounces a defendant guilty, God has declared us legally guilty. We have missed God’s mark of righteousness and need his solution, the Cross. By official pronouncement we are guilty for having broken the law.
On the other hand, feelings of guilt—as opposed to the state of guilt—are basically our consciences condemning us, telling us we’re bad. Guilt feelings are painful, often causing us to criticize and condemn ourselves even more. Guilt feelings usually result from a sense that our actions have hurt someone. We may feel guilty about needing attachment to someone and consuming their time. Or we may feel guilty for disappointing someone, or setting a limit with them.
Some people feel guilty about letting others down through their imperfections or flaws. Olivia, for example, came to see me about a deep sense of guilt she bore over disappointing her husband. He was a talented musician. She wasn’t. For years he had unrelentingly reminded her that her inabilities had limited his potential. He completely overlooked why he had married her in the first place; he never seemed to notice her many wonderful qualities. Olivia’s grandiose sense of responsibility led her to feel that she had actually injured her husband.
Others may experience guilt when they show more talent or ability than another person. Still others feel guilty about simply existing, and taking up space on the planet. There is no end to the things about which we can feel guilty.
Shame is a painful feeling of having lost the respect of others because of our own improper behavior.
Though similar to guilt, shame has a broader definition in the Bible: It is both a state and a feeling. Shame can be a state of being despised by others (Joseph wanted to divorce his pregnant fiancée, Mary, quietly to avoid her being publicly shamed) or shame can be a feeling (Adam and Eve, in their pre-sinful condition, felt no shame). Shame is a sense of being bad, a state of internal condemnation.
Some people distinguish between the two words by saying that guilt describes our self-condemnation for what we do, while shame shames us for who we are. You feel guilty for yelling at your child; you feel shame for being a bad parent.
Of particular concern to us is the fact that guilt and shame both describe a state of internal condemnation, a pervasive sense of badness about the self, delivered by the conscience. These feelings can be mild or excruciatingly painful.
Guilt and shame arise from different sources. For example, some guilt is an awareness of our judged state—the fact that we are born under the law and severed from grace (Rom. 1:20, 2:14–15). Some shame comes from experiencing our own badness, as when “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).
These types of guilt and shame are simply our emotional responses to the realities of our fallenness. They are good for us because they tell us that we desperately need grace, and they motivate us to look for help and forgiveness.
However, the guilt and shame that we are concerned with in this chapter come from a different source. They derive from early socialization processes. The conscience serves as an internal parent to monitor and evaluate the goodness or badness of our behavior. When the conscience approves, we feel relief. When it doesn’t, we feel guilt and shame. This conscience-driven, environment-derived dynamic is what becomes a problem in spiritual growth.
You probably remember the Where’s Waldo? book series—cartoon scenes filled with hundreds of minute characters on the page, among which one was the bespectacled, stocking-capped Waldo. The challenge was to find him among the hordes of sunbathers, farmers, trolls, firefighters, animals, and the like.
Welcome to “Where’s the Crazymaker?” In the Sunday message Randy and Vicki heard lie the major theological errors of the “guilt and shame are good for me” false assumption. Now that we understand the true natures of guilt and shame, let’s take a biblical look at Pastor Glenn’s message.
Pastor Glenn claimed that feeling guilty is a sign that you are guilty. Guilt feelings, he said, are an emotional red light that tells you that you have sinned. God speaks through guilt and shame. So listen to them.
Ken exemplified this thinking. A highly self-critical professional man, he came to the hospital program for severe depression. Ken loved people, but his excessive sense of responsibility contributed to an unrelenting guilt problem.
I observed the climax of Ken’s problem in group therapy one morning. For the first few minutes, everyone was quiet. Some members mulled over the work done in previous group sessions. Others were just timid about initiating conversation in a group setting.
Detained by a medical workup, Ken came in a few minutes late. He took his seat. Several people smiled at him, and the group stayed quiet a few moments more.
Ken gradually became more and more agitated. I watched him squirm restlessly in his chair, rubbing his hands together and perspiring. Finally he could stand it no longer. “I’m sorry! I’m really sorry!” he blurted out.
The group members asked him what he was apologizing for.
“I ruined the group,” he said shamefacedly. “I know why the group is so quiet. I disrupted you all by being late, and now no one wants to talk. I’m really sorry!”
Ken’s conscience was punishing him for being late. He assumed that his conscience’s judgment was accurate. He assumed that he had disrupted the group session. But he hadn’t.
Many Christians feel the same enslavement to a shameful conscience Ken did. But we don’t have to. Let’s look at a biblical view of the conscience.
The first thing we notice is that our conscience is a product of the Fall. Human beings didn’t always have a conscience. Adam and Eve didn’t have one, because they didn’t need one. They had a direct, uninterrupted connection with God.
In addition, Adam and Eve were never intended to deal with issues of morality. Questions of good and evil weren’t meant for humans, but only for God. God knew that if we had knowledge of good and evil, we would turn our focus from relationship to rules, from love to legalism. Being good would become more important than being connected.
That’s why the only tree whose fruit Adam and Eve were prohibited from eating was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:9, 17). And when they ate, God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). Adam and Eve now had knowledge of good and bad, but without the character strength of God to deal with it. They were banished from the Garden.
The banishment was actually an act of mercy. God ejected the first couple so that he could later work out the problem of sin through his Son. Otherwise, they would have remained eternally hidden from God in the Garden. So humankind was stuck—out of the Garden, out of perfect connection with God.
At this point conscience began. It occurred as a product of our loss of relationship with him, as we began responding to the internal law of sin and death (Rom. 8:2). It was an adaptation, of sorts, to learning how to sort out good and evil. The conscience became an “evaluator,” refereeing the goodness and badness of our thoughts, actions, and feelings.
Our conscience isn’t God. It’s part of living in a fallen world, and in a judged state. This internal referee combines the law written on our hearts by God (Rom. 2:15) with our early socialization processes. But it isn’t perfect.
For example, people with overstrict, guilt-laden values will feel excruciating guilt when they are innocent. In contrast, people raised with no sense of right and wrong will feel no remorse when they should.
The Bible describes three types of conscience: the weak conscience, the seared conscience, and the mature conscience.
The weak (or immature) conscience. The weak conscience is an overstrict, punitive internal judge that finds guilt everywhere. It takes responsibility for much more than God intended, as Ken did.
Paul describes the weak conscience like this: “Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled” (1 Cor. 8:7). In other words, the weak or immature conscience prohibits, criticizes, and accuses unjustly.
The seared conscience. A seared conscience is the opposite of a weak conscience. The person with a seared conscience has little sense of remorse. The sociopathic personality has a seared conscience; he can’t feel empathy for the suffering of others. He lives by the law of the jungle: Eat or be eaten.
Those with seared consciences generally come from families in which they suffered such terrible abuse that they live in a state of perpetual rage. Or they come from families with little structure or love. With no attachments and no limits, people become small gods to themselves.
Those with seared consciences become controllers or manipulators of others. Paul warns Timothy against “hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods” (1 Tim. 4:2–3).
The mature conscience. Over time, the mature conscience is able to more and more closely approximate biblical values as it makes judgments. When the Bible speaks of a “clear conscience” (Acts 24:16; Heb. 13:18; 1 Peter 3:16), it indicates a person using a scripturally trained internal monitor. To have a clear conscience doesn’t mean you’re perfect, but only that your conscience is accurately helping you make biblical judgments about your actions.
As a product of the image of God as well as a part of the Fall, our consciences change and grow with us. As we help the conscience mature, we can trust it more. But it is certainly fallible. Equating the conscience with God makes as much sense as equating a cult leader with Jesus Christ.
The second crazymaking point Vicki and Randy’s pastor made is that we need to focus on guilt. Certainly, a sense of our sinfulness is necessary for repentance; but Pastor Glenn described something very different from that.
Guilt feelings focus on our badness. They focus on our feelings of worthlessness and our deserved punishment. They are essentially self-absorbed, not other-centered. Guilt moves us not toward relationship, but into hiding.
Godly sorrow is a better response to our sinfulness:
Yet now I am happy not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. (2 Cor. 7:9–11, italics mine)
Here Paul teaches the difference between godly sorrow (remorse) and worldly sorrow (guilt). Godly sorrow is empathic, centering on the hurt we cause to someone we love. We feel bad because we feel the pain of the person we’ve injured.
We are destructive. We hurt God: “I have been hurt by their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me” (Ezek. 6:9 NASB). We hurt each other: “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways” (Rom. 3:14–16). We constantly cause pain to those we love.
Godly remorse seeks to heal, to make restitution to those we’ve hurt. Reconciliation and relationship are its goals. To the contrary, guilt seeks self-justification. It attempts to get rid of the bad feelings.
Judas displayed worldly sorrow, or guilt. When he felt remorse, he tried to return the thirty silver coins to the priests and elders. He was more concerned with his misdeeds than with restoring his relationship with Jesus. The fruit of his worldly sorrow was suicide (Matt. 27:3–5).
The next time you miss the mark, search your emotional response. If it centers on how bad you are, your emotions are the sorrow of the world. But if your response centers on loving your neighbor as yourself, it is likely to be the sorrow of God.
Unlike godly sorrow, guilt holds us back from two highly desirable objects.
First, guilt prevents love. Those who are preoccupied with their guilt may look loving; but when you try to talk to them, they are absorbed with their own pain. They work harder trying to get rid of their own guilt feelings more than they work at feeling the pain of others.
When a husband tells his wife (as one I know did), “I’m staying married to you because I couldn’t stand the guilt if I left,” there should be no mystery why she cannot warm up to him. Such a husband is more concerned with not feeling bad than with nurturing his wife.
Guilt-motivated people are afraid to love. They give of themselves under compulsion rather than cheerfully (2 Cor. 9:7). They do loving things to avoid feeling guilty, not because they want to.
Consider the following scenario: You make plans for a weekend trip with a good friend. Two weeks before the trip, you call your friend to confirm your mutual plans. She tells you, “Oh, don’t worry—I would never forget this trip. If I did, I’d just hate myself. Being responsible to my friends is very important to me. I don’t like letting them down.”
Her comments probably wouldn’t affirm you as a desirable friend. She is obviously more concerned about avoiding guilt than she is with spending time with you. Yet this is the attitude that runs unspoken in the head of many guilt-ridden individuals. Love just doesn’t have room. Love’s want-to is smothered under guilt’s ought-to.
Second, guilt prevents spiritual and emotional growth. People don’t make genuine progress emotionally until they conquer their guilt feelings. There are several reasons for this.
Guilt-ridden people are afraid of being themselves because they fear further condemnation. So they generally adopt false selves that appear to be getting better, while they bury their wounded selves deep inside. This is common among Christian circles where a guilt message is taught: The compulsive or depressed person starts acting happier to keep the helpers happy. After a while, however, she breaks down—a process the helpers interpret as “backsliding.” In reality, her wounded soul had all along stayed hidden, and the problem had multiplied inside like a cancer.
Guilt-ridden people are emotionally under the law. They are not truthful about their weaknesses because they fear they will lose love. Admitting failure, they fear, will bring condemnation and isolation from God and others. People who are constantly frustrated in their attempts to be perfect begin seething inside—they can’t fulfill the law, can’t please their guilty consciences. It’s futile. The fruit of those attempts is only rage (Rom. 4:15).
Guilty people are more concerned about being good and sin-free (an impossibility in itself) than about getting well. They focus on the questions, Am I being good? Am I sinning? Am I bad? instead of on the questions, Am I connected deeply to others? Am I being truthful? Am I learning from my mistakes? When we focus on being good, we move into self-absorption and a compulsion to keep the rules—and we move away from closeness, intimacy, and relationship with God and others. You don’t open up to someone you think is holding a baseball bat over your head.
Leaving church one morning, I overheard a comment between two friends. “I really felt the conviction of the Spirit during the sermon,” one said. “I feel so guilty now that it’s just got to be God.”
This comment typifies the third problem in the message Randy and Vicki heard that Sunday morning. Although their pastor referred to John 16:8 as evoking guilt feelings, he did not understand the difference between God’s job and ours.
When Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would convict the world of guilt, he was describing the Spirit’s role in salvation. The Holy Spirit exposes our sinfulness and need for a savior. But he doesn’t dictate our response. Guilt, godly sorrow, rebellion, or indifference aren’t from him; they come from us.
The churchgoer whose comment I overheard should have said, “I’ll have to think about whether my guilt is a response to God or to my critical mother.”
One good thing about guilt feelings: They can be a sign of spiritual growth. Many who are recovering from emotional problems have severe guilt attacks. Leaving the old ways and cleaving to new ideas and people activates their controlling consciences—which then rain down “You’re being bad” messages to stop the mutiny of biblical freedom. Such consciences are saying no to your freedom. A critical conscience wants to keep you a slave to its mandates. It wants you to obey its idea of goodness, not the Bible’s.
If you’re in recovery and beginning to address your true spiritual needs for attachment, responsibility, and forgiveness—and you’re getting beat up by your conscience—rejoice! You’re probably doing something right. Then find friends who will help you work through the feelings.
If you’re motivated by guilt or shame, you cannot also be motivated by love. A strict, guilt-inducing conscience is not from God. Ask him for help in finding people who can move you from guilt and shame to love, and follow these steps:
1. Own the guilt. It may have been built into you by too-strict relationships, but it’s now your problem, and you can do something about it.
2. Get into a support system that is more concerned with relationships than “sin-busting,” a group that understands that “God’s kindness leads you toward repentance” (Rom. 2:14).
3. Investigate where you learned the guilt messages.
4. Become aware of your anger.
5. Forgive whoever controlled you.
6. Learn new information to reeducate your conscience, from the Scriptures and from books like this.
7. Internalize new voices from your support group. Guilt isn’t resolved by simply retraining your mind. You need to replace critical voices with accepting ones.
8. Don’t resist grief. Let others comfort and love you through the process.
“This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:19–20).