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How often do you feel guilty about something? Now, if you had a piece of paper in front of you and a pen and you wrote the words, 4 words, I feel guilty when, and then fill in the rest. I feel guilty when I eat that second helping of dessert or I, when I’ve hurt someone, or I feel guilty when I had a bad thought. I don’t do something that I should or I stay home from church or I do something I shouldn’t or I, if I cheat on my income tax.

Speaking of income tax, you might have heard the story of the man who wrote to the tax department. Dear sir, he said, enclosed, you’ll find a check for $500. I cheated on my income tax return last year and have not been able to sleep well ever since. If I still have trouble sleeping, I’ll send you the rest.

Wrestling with guilt in our lives

Well, we’ve all felt guilty at some time. Guilt is universal. It’s timeless when we lie or cheat. There’s that sense of something inside that makes us uncomfortable. Even the most hardened criminal feels a pinch of guilt when something is done that’s unethical. And as kids we’re told that we’re bad because we stole or told a lie, and that conditioning kind of stays in the mind. It was Noel Coward, the famous playwright, he pulled an interesting prank one day. He Sent an identical note to 20 men, of the most famous men in London. He sent it anonymously, and this is what it said, Everybody has found out what you’re doing. If I were you, I would get out of town. And the story supposedly goes on that all 20 men actually left town.

Now does that mean that we all have a guilty conscience? Many doctors say that unresolved guilt is the number one cause of mental illness and suicide. It was back in 1991 that Roy Baumeister, he was the psychologist of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, he studied guilt and discovered that the average person spends about 2 hours a day feeling guilty. And for 39 minutes of that time, people feel moderate to severe guilt. Now, before you start to feel guilty or depressed about that, guilt is like an electric fence that gives us a jolt when we begin to stray outside the boundaries or like an alarm to wake us up that something needs our attention to wake up.

So like pain, guilt tells us when something is wrong. When you feel it, you don’t just sit there, you feel you’ve got to do something about it, and that’s a constructive thing actually. In our lives, there’s something that harmful guilt comes from. Comments from people in the past, maybe our parents or people we’ve respected or loved or even those who’ve had a lot of control over us. And so there it is. You may have had a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, or even a minister who says you’re no good. You’ll never amount to anything. God will never love you. He’ll never forgive you because of what you’ve done or who you are. And those sort of negative, hurtful comments stay with us, and people who come under that sort of critical condemnation will feel guilty. Also anger and depression, and often this self-destructive behaviour will come through.

Other people have lived at home with an alcoholic and living with someone who has an addiction can lead your conscience to work over time to take on responsibilities that you shouldn’t have to, and I think it’s a liberating day when a spouse or a child of an alcoholic is able to say to himself or herself, I didn’t cause the problem. I can’t control it. It’s not my fault. I can’t cure it, and that is a good thing.

Then there’s another kind of harmful guilt, and we’ll talk about this further tomorrow. That’s called garbage guilt. It’s dumped on us by maybe our parents when we were young. A Christian mother or grandmother might have told us, for example, make sure you eat up everything on your plate, clean it up because there are starving children in China. And so you can end up going through life feeling guilty if you don’t eat all your food, and even though you may not need it. Do you know that the Bible actually is full of people who struggle with this thing called guilt?

And both the Old and New Testaments have plenty of stories about that, and we’ll have a look, particularly tomorrow at the person of David. I mean, centuries before Jesus came, the Hebrew people offered God guilt offerings. You can see that in Leviticus. So they felt they had failed God. So we’ll think about that tomorrow.

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Let’s Pray

Dear Lord, we do know that guilt can be very destructive, and so I pray that You will cleanse our mind and our heart so that we can be honest with you. Amen.

(Battling Guilt Pt. 2 — Morning Devotions)

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