A Biblical Approach to an Overly Guilty Conscience
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Have you ever had one of those cringe-worthy flashbacks? Perhaps you were simply making yourself a sandwich, opened up the fridge to grab the mayo, and the sight of the water jug prompted a memory of an awful conversation you had with your mother last week. The sense of guilt is so potent you cringe, and the heat of embarrassment and shame flushes over you from head to toe, despite the abundance of apologies you have given.
Maybe this one memory plunges you into a list of all the horrible things you’ve said in the past as you spread the mayo on your sandwich. Because of this, you spend the rest of the day sulking over your guilt, wondering if you should ever risk speaking again.
Each of us knows the sickening feeling of guilt over our sins. It isn’t pleasant, and sometimes it comes unannounced. Yet, we also know it was by recognizing our smothering guilt that we confessed our sins and trusted in Christ for salvation. Is this guilty feeling good, even though it feels so bad? What do we do with our guilty consciences? What do we do when guilt feels stuck in our stomach and refuses to go away?
There is a helpful kind of feeling of guilt.
Feelings of guilt are necessary and good at times. Without feeling the weight of our sins and rebellion against the one Holy God, we wouldn’t come to him in repentance and seeking his rescue. If we didn’t recognize the gravity of our sinful condition, God’s call to salvation would be laughable to us. Upon salvation, we are freed from that guilt. When we trust in Christ, we trust that he lived perfectly for us and bore all the wrath from God we deserved for such sin.
“Without feeling the weight of our sins and rebellion against the one Holy God, we wouldn’t come to him in repentance and seeking his rescue.”
But we still continue to sin because of our fallen nature. Each time we sin we should feel that conviction of guilt once again, reminding us that we still need Christ. We still need his righteousness, because we are still unable to obey perfectly like he did. And we still need God’s grace—we need him to bestow forgiveness on us yet again.
Sorrow over our sin reminds us that we need the Holy Spirit working through God’s word to continue molding and crafting our hearts into the likeness of Christ, because they are still far from perfectly imaging him. This recognition of our guilt keeps us in constant dependence on God.
Our guilty conscience is a sign that God is at work in us. He is showing us our need for him and how we are still disobeying him. He uses our feelings of guilt to bring us back to our knees in submission and back to Scripture, so we can learn how to obey.
Paul describes this godly sorrow over our sin in 2 Corinthians:
For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death. For behold what earnestness this very thing, this godly sorrow, has produced in you: what vindication of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what avenging of wrong! In everything you demonstrated yourselves to be innocent in the matter. (2 Cor. 7:10-11)
There also is an unhelpful kind of feeling of guilt.
Do feelings of guilt ever go wrong? Absolutely. A good thing can become a bad thing—too much frosting on a cake is sickeningly-sweet (in my humble opinion). A guilty conscience has a good place in the Christian life, but when our sense of guilt becomes excessive we have created unhelpful sorrow.
“We don’t believe we are forgivable, so we try to pay for our sins by our own grief. ”
The problem isn’t simply feeling guilty for your sins; instead it is living in your guilt and remaining in that place of misery. You don’t believe you are forgivable, so you try to pay for your sins by your own grief. Maybe if I make myself miserable enough, then the sin will be more forgivable. That’s where I was; I relived my past sins in agony and refused to rejoice in the grace I had received from God.
Beating ourselves up over our guilt as a type of penitence or punishment for our sins doesn’t glorify God—rather, it tarnishes the truth of Christ’s sacrifice. The gospel says your condemnation is gone:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Rom. 8:1-2)
We have this hope and freedom because of Christ’s fulfillment of the law (by his perfect life) and his death on the cross where he bore the wrath of God for us. There is no extra punishment needed from us—Christ took it all.
There is recovery for our overly guilty consciences.
I thought the key to recovering from my addiction to regret was forgiving myself. We have all heard the saying, “You can’t forgive others if you can’t forgive yourself.”
“You can search the Bible through and through, but you won’t find a single verse that tells you to forgive yourself. ”
But is this idea truly biblical? Does God really require us to practice self-forgiveness? You can search the Bible through and through, but you won’t find a single verse that tells you to forgive yourself. We are called to forgive others and rest in the forgiveness from God. God doesn’t command us to forgive ourselves but to trust in his grace and forgiveness of sins (Acts 3:19).
Who are you to say if your sin is unforgivable?
God is the Perfect Judge—he is the one who deems you forgivable, and he says that all who trust in Christ and repent of their sins will be forgiven (Isa. 1:18; 43:25; Matt. 6:14-15; 26:28; Eph. 1:7; Col. 1:13-14; Heb. 10:17; 1 John 1:9).
When we hold onto those sins and try to punish ourselves by feeling miserable, we act as our own judge and refuse to accept God’s forgiveness. We declare that Christ’s sacrifice isn’t enough for our sins, but we are capable of paying for them ourselves.
The healing balm to our blistering consciences isn’t constantly cringing in the memory of sin but rather resting in Christ’s atonement for our sins. We can stop digging deep within ourselves trying to haul up some willpower of self-forgiveness. Instead, when we sin we can trust in God’s saving grace and seek out his forgiveness—not our own—and that makes all the difference.
This article was originally published on February 6, 2020.
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2 Important Things to Remember about Fighting Sin—Romans 7:13-25
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5 Important Things We Can Learn about Repentance from Psalm 51
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