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Yesterday I was talking about guilt. What is it about guilt that seems to trap people? The Bible is full of people who struggle with this thing called guilt, and David is probably the best-known personality. Here was David, King David, known as a man after God’s own heart, and wow, that’s some compliment. He was a great person, a shepherd, a poet, a musician, a warrior who defeated Goliath and the armies of many enemies. He was a king, husband, and a father. So as popular and powerful and prominent as this man was, he committed sin. He couldn’t control his lust, and actually he violated not one but two of God’s 10 commandments. He committed adultery and he murdered a man.

Battling Guilt Pt. 1 — Morning Devotions

And we know that one day when the time of the year when kings went to war, David was at home and The Bible tells the story from his palace he saw this beautiful young woman bathing, and he learned that she was Bathsheba, the wife of one of David’s top military commanders. So they slept together. She became pregnant as a result of the affair, and the story goes on that David arranged for Bathsheba’s husband to be killed in battle. And then the king marries his pregnant friend and the baby is born. Everything seems to be going well until, and of course God had His way of confronting David. Nathan uses a parable to convict the king of the two wrong things that he had done, and we read in 2 Samuel 12 – King David’s confession, I have sinned against the Lord.

Hope beyond guilt

So we have Psalm 32, which is a great passage to read some time, and I’m going to read it just from a more modern translation. This is David. Remember, he was writing from this sense of guilt, and yet there was something positive to come out of it. How happy, he said, is the one whose wrongs are forgiven, whose sin is hidden from sight. How happy is the person whose sin the eternal God will not take into account. How happy are those who no longer lie to themselves or others. When I refused to admit my wrongs, I was miserable, moaning, complaining all day long, so that even my bones felt brittle day and night. God, your hand kept pressing on me. My strength dried up like water in the summer heat. You wore me down. And when I finally saw my own lies, I owned up to my sins before you, and I didn’t try to hide my evil deeds from you. I said to myself, I’ll admit all my sins to the eternal, and you, Lord, lifted and carried away the guilt of my sin.

A remarkable statement there from David. The older translation here talks about transgression. A transgression is like stepping out of bounds, doing something you shouldn’t do. David uses this word ‘sin’ or ‘to sin’ actually means to miss the mark of God’s perfection, to fall short of the goal. It was like the scripture in Romans 3:23, says all or everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Iniquity. He talks about iniquity, thinks he’d done wrong. He was deceitful. He had lusted after this woman and arranged for a man’s murder. My body wasted away. He was in the midst of guilt. And how true it is that today guilt can still damage relationships. It separates us from people that we’ve hurt. We could even blame others, condemn them for the wrong, instead of facing up to it ourselves. We can become very vindictive. And do you know that guilt, as it was for David, can also damage our souls because we’re children of God, made in the image of God, and if you don’t do something about guilt, it paralyses your relationship with God. It’s like a barrier put between you and God.

So there it was. David said, well, I did acknowledge my sin to you, Lord. I didn’t hide my sin. I will confess what I have done. And there’s that old saying, Confession is good for the soul, and that’s true, isn’t it? So it brought him back to God, and David felt guilty because he was guilty. He’d done wrong. The Bible says, as I said, that all have sinned. We’ve all sinned. God has a solution for our sin, and that is our relationship with Jesus Christ. If we confess our sins, the Bible says God is faithful and just and will forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Let’s Pray

Lord, help us to deal with the guilt problem. Help us to see that Jesus takes our sin and our guilt on His shoulders on the cross. Amen.

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