“… and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” (Rm 3:24-5)
Praise, You, O Lord! My guilt is gone through the blood of the Cross!
This week’s blog continues the last one. If you haven’t read the last one, scroll down.
In the last blog, I mentioned that real Guilt involves relational brokenness and justice. When we sin, we justly deserve punishment and we harm our relationship with God. Therefore, any attempt to deal with Guilt properly, must deal with both those issues. God will not simply wave His hand and forgive our Guilt to restore the relationship, for such hand waving ignores justice, and God is just. But neither will God execute a just punishment in a cold manner devoid of any relational meaning, for such a punishment ignores love, and God is love. When God deals with our Guilt, He does so in a just way and a loving way.
God has released justice through the blood of the Cross (Rm 3:24-6), and He has brought reconciliation through the blood of the Cross (Col 1:20). In Jesus, God has removed your Guilt. He has done so with complete justice, and any payments or debts you may owe because of your Guilt are gone. The Cross took care of those. Justice has been served. Therefore, the barrier that your Guilt brought between you and God is destroyed. In doing this, God offers you reconciliation. He says, “Come. I will forgive your sin. Abide in my presence.”
This action of God is precisely the thing that we could never do ourselves, and it deals directly with the real issue — our sin. The follower of Jesus experiences this reconciliation, this forgiveness, by faith. Therefore, the Christian way of dealing with Guilt is to acknowledge it and bring it by faith to the Cross, which destroys it. The Christian may sin at times, but before God, all the sin is gone.
We are free from Guilt through Christ, and it is this freedom that allows us to rejoice in a real way. Our joy is not the deceptive comfort of hiding our Guilt. It is the full realization that we are more Guilty than we know but that we have been released from it because Christ has died. Praise Him!
This freedom from Guilt then affects our feelings of guilt. The Cross is the antidote to Aunt Georgina (see previous blog). Christians have no business bashing themselves on the head for a Guilt that is gone. I do not mean Christians should never feel remorse. I mean simply that they should never wallow in it. Their sin is gone. It is not just hidden from their eyes through some rhetorical trick. It is completely obliterated by the love of God. When Aunt Georgina grasps that fact, she is a different woman. She may still wrestle and struggle with her orientation to guilt. We do live, after all, in a fallen world. But she is not the same Georgina. When her heart and mind fully grasp the fact that all her real Guilt is gone, the inappropriate feelings of guilt begin to disappear. “If God has forgiven me for the time I cheated in chemistry and for the sexual relationship I had with Aaron, then why am I worrying about towels?” Aunt Georgina is clean in Jesus Christ, and she ought to think accordingly.
The Christian way of handling feelings of guilt is not to deny real Guilt but to deal with it through the Cross. Because the Christian way actually deals with the real problem, it produces real peace from the inside out and not just a contrived peace built on blindness.
Christians are righteous in God’s eyes because God has made them righteous through the Cross. The theological term for this act is “justification,” and we have been justified not by our good works or by our religious rituals but only by faith in Jesus and the work He did on the Cross. Justification comes in Christ. We “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Rm 3:24) We are made right for the simple fact that we are in Christ. Justification is part of our union with Christ, and when we enter into that union, our relationship with God changes. Sin and Guilt are destroyed. We are clean and right in his sight because we are in Christ, and Christ is clean and right. We are made right by faith because we are united with Christ by faith. Justification and the removal of our Guilt are part of the package of being in Christ. Praise Him! By faith, your Guilt is gone.
