All language subtitles for Dealing with Difficult Problems - How to Deal with Guilt.en

Today, we're going to consider one of the most serious difficulties that any of us has

to face in our Christian lives

The difficulty is one that is universal, and it’s one that has the power to be debilitating

and paralyzing to our personal growth

I'm speaking, of course, of the problem of guilt

When Paul gives his exposition of the Gospel in his epistle to the Romans, he talks about

the universality of human sinfulness

In chapter 3 of Romans, in verse 19 he makes this comment, "Now we know that whatever the

law says, it says to those who are under th law that every mouth may be stopped and all

the world may become guilty before God

Therefore, by the deeds of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight, for by the

law is the knowledge of sin

Paul says. "Whatever the law says, it says to all who are under the law" and in a certain

sense all of us are under the law of God, so everything that the law says it says to

all of us

What it says to us is that when we stand before the judgment seat of God every mouth will

be quiet

Every mouth will be stopped because under the udgment of the law of God, the whole

world is guilty

Many times. I'm engaged in intellectual discussions with people doing the task of apologetics

and trying to answer their objections to the truth claims of Chnstianity

I've noticed on such occasions that if you answer one objection to the Christian faith

to their satisfaction, before they take a breath they’ll raise another objection

If you answer that objection to their satisfaction, again here comes the third one and a fourth

one and it gets to be almost an endless chasing of somebody around a circle

Frequently, what I will do in circumstances like that, after I've tried to answer these

questions, I'll stop this game and look the person in the eye and say, "Here's my question

for you

What do you do with your guilt?

What do you do with your guilt?"

I don t ask them. "Do you have guilt?”

I assume that they have guilt and that they know that they have guilt

It's an amazing thing to see how people stop in their tracks when you ask them a direct

question like that and begin to stutter and stumble as they grope for an answer to the

question, because if there's any place where the unbeliever is vulnerable and exposed

it is at that point because even though they may seek to deny the reality of their guilt.

they know that they are walking through this world with unresolved guilt

Several years ago, I had a friend who was a psychiatrist, and very seriously he came

to me on one occasion and asked me to come to work for him

I said "You must be joking

I don t know the first thing about psychiatry; and I'm certainly not qualified or capable

to work in your office dealing with people who are in therapy"

He says "Oh, but you are
M

I said, "Why is that?"

He said. "Because the vast majority of the problems that I have to deal with as a psychiatrist

are all bound up with guilt, guilt and its consequences, guilt that is paralyzing guilt

that is unresolved," and he said, "Most of the people I see don t need a psychiatnst

They need a priest

They need to understand how to unlock this problem of guilt"

Well, the first thing I want us to understand about guilt is that guilt is objective

What I mean by that is that guilt has nothing to do in the final analysis with our feelings

or our subjective responses to situation

Guilt ultimately is defined strictly in objective categories

What I mean by that is this

Guift is incurred when the law of God is broken

We define sin historically as any want of conformity to or transgression of the law

of God

When we break the law of God either by failing to do what the law requires or actually doing

what the law prohibits, at that moment we incur guilt

Guilt is the breaking of the law of God, and God as our judge determines that when we have

transgressed his commandments, we have thereupon come to a status of guilt

Now I mention this business of guilt being objective because there's so much confusion

in our culture about the nature of guilt

We tend to associate guilt with guilt feelings

We need to distinguish between guilt as objective and guilt feelings which are subjective

That is, feelings about guilt have to do with our personal subjective attitudes and responses

to actual violations of the law of God

Now when we talk about guilt being objective, we're talking about it being defined stnctly

in terms of breaking the law

The first thing we have to understand about that is that the law that defines guilt in

the final analysis is not the civil law. not the customs and mores of a given social order,

but moral guilt in the final analysis is defined by the breaking of God's law

Now why is that so important to understand'?

Well, because human laws the laws of our society, the laws that we call the civic order

of our culture don t always agree or correspond to the law of God

That is there are many things that the civil law may allow or permit that God will not

EuEl

Now when we break the civil law. we expose ourselves to arrest and to prosecution and

we may have to go to court

We may have to go through trial

We have a prosecuting attorney, we hire a defense attorney

We listen to the presentation of the evidence, and the jury or the judge renders a verdict

and that verdict will either be guilty or
not guilty

Now, again, no one is going to use as a defense for their behavior the statement that they

don't feel guilty

Imagine if you're charged with a crime in the civic court and the judge reads the charge

against you and asks you how you plead and you say, "I plead not guilty"

You don't even have a defense attorney there, and he said "Well, where's your defense attorney?"

You say, "Well, I don’t need one because
I can prove that I'm not guilty"

"Well, how can you prove you're not guilty?'

"Well, your honor, I don't feel guilty, so if I don’t feel guilty, I must not be

Now what's wrong with this picture?

That will hardly work as a defense in a criminal trial or even in a civil case in our culture

because our courts understand that how you feel about what you have done has no bearing

in the final analysis on whether you actually have done it

The issue before the court is, has this person done the act or the crime with which that

person is charged?

The defense tries to argue that he's innocent of the charges

Now there may be an attempt on the part of the defense to argue, yes he's done it, but

he's not really responsible for it because he's insane or there are other extenuating

circumstances, he was coerced into it

Still, those are all attempts to either deny or ameliorate to some degree the reality of

the guilt

We know that there are people in our culture who are psychopaths or sociopaths

They can perform all kinds of heinous crimes without feeling guilty at all but again,

it is the task of the court to determine whether the law has been broken

Now it's also true that you may sometimes be obeying the law of God and in so doing.

disobeying the civil magistrate, and in the eyes of the civil magistrate you may be adjudged

to be guilty, whereas in the eyes of God you may be declared to be innocent

We remember in the New Testament, for example when the authorities of the Jewish nation

prohibited the apostles from preaching the Gospel and Peter asked the question, "Should

we obey God or men?"

They said. "We cannot obey this civil magistrate because if we do we will incur guilt before

God because he's commanded us to do these things"

We remember when Stephen provoked the outrage of his enemies, and in a kangaroo court he

was suddenly found guilty and was stoned to death

Even while he was being killed, he had the vision of heaven open before him and he saw

Christ standing there in heaven as his defense attorney pleading his case before God

The earthly court found Stephen guilty, while the heavenly court found Stephen innocent,

so we understand that there can be these conflicts but it's the other side of that coin that

we need to be very very careful of, and that is when the civil law allows us to do things

that God does not permit

I think people in America need to realize that we have gone through a powerful revolution

in our history

In the eighteenth century, we had the Revolutionary War, in which we achieved our independence

from the British crown

The historians talk about two major revolutions that took place in the eighteenth century,

one, the American Revolution and the other ne the French Revolution

Though they took place in much the same period of history what was happening in these events

was radically different one from the other

In the case of the French Revolution, what was going on was a revolt against the established

There was an attempt to overthrow a longstanding tradition of customs, morality, of values,

of institutions that were well established in the nation

The French Revolution with its bloodbath and with its reign of terror, again sought to

radically change the culture of France

Whereas in America, the American Revolution was not fought to establish a new order, a

new way of life; but rather, to preserve the Amencan way of life that had begun early

on in Colonial days and now was deemed to be threatened by changes that were enacted

by Kin George and by the Parliament of England

The American colonists were saying: "We will fight to preserve our traditions to preserve

our values, our customs our morality "

Even though it was a revolution in the sense of a civil uprising against another government.

it was not a cultural revolution, as such

Yet, the cultural historians have told us that the most radical revolution in American

history did not take place in 1776, but it took place in the twentieth century chiefly

in the decade of the sixties where the revolution of the sixties was a revolt against established

values, established customs, against the established

With it, came the sexual revolution the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the free

speech movement and so on

These were attempts of a new generation to create a new society, a great society a new

order and in many respects it was successful

Those who are old enough to remember the culture before 1960 sometimes still remain somewhat

dazed and confused about what has happened in our own country, and we experience life

now as people who are from the old order and are now forced to accustom ourselves to a

new order in which there's great miscommumcation between those two orders and we're engaged

in a cultural war

Now in many respects, that revolution was an ethical and moral revolution in the sixties

and it had some very strange dimensions to

In the youth culture, university campuses in the sixties, with the advent of the drug

culture and the advice of Timothy Leary for young people to turn on and to drop out and

so on and we had the hippie generation and all of that there were two famous slogans

that emerged in our culture

The first was everybody has the right to do his own thing

Now listen to that for a moment

Everyone has the nght to do their own thing

That salutes a philosophy of moral relativism and pure subjectivism, saying, "I have the

right morally to do what I want to do

If I want to be engaged in premarital sexual behavior or extramarital sexual behavior

that s certainly not the government's business

It's nobody's business

The government has no right to invade the bedroom

This is a matter of personal and private preference for me "

It's subjective, it's relevant, and we witnessed the impact of that kind of thinking in the

trauma of 1998, going into 1999, with the impeachment process of the president of the

United States, where the nation was very much divided over the question of distinguishing

between the president’s personal moral behavior and his political behavior as the chief executive

officer of the land, because the second slogan of the sixties was that cry and call of the

young people under thirty, and you remember they said we can't trust anybody over thirty,

the so called generation gap that was spoken of at that time: called the older generation

to tell it like it is

Tell it like it is

Now the phrase tell it like it is. is a call to objective truth, and you see the tension

here

On the one hand, the young people were saying, "We want to do our own thing

We want to live on a subjectivistic basis but we want you to tell it like it is to

conform to some kind of objective standard of truth

Now if we analyze that carefully, what we discover that what happened in that decade

of the sixties and into the seventies was a radical disjunction between what we call

personal ethics and social ethics

The same group of people who were marching in behalf of social justice with respect to

civil rights and had a deep passion to make sure that human rights were protected in the

land and were opposed to the violence and the bloodshed and the Vietnamese War and so

on and protested against war and the violation of human rights around the world, having a

high sense of social morality were the same ones that were living in communes, getting

high on drugs, and involved in promiscuous, unbndled sexual behavior so that there was

this disjunction between personal morality and social or public morality

In a sense, what happened was sin was now reduced to institutional behavior, not personal

behavior, and personal immorality was rationalized on the basis of people having the nght or

the freedom to express themselves however they wanted to

We're living on the other side of that revolution. oO today we encounter all kinds of confusion

about the matter of guilt

I remember meeting with a college coed, a senior in college, in the sixties when I was

teaching on a university campus, and this young lady asked to have an appointment for

counseling

She came to me and she was very distressed and she explained that she had recently been

engaged and that she and her fiance were involved in premarital sexual activity

She said to me, "And I feel so guilty"

I listened

She said, "And I went to see the chaplain of the school and I explained to him how guilty

I was feeling, and he told me that the reason I was feeling guilty was because I was a victim

of an outmoded Victorian or puritanical ethic that had a tendency to oppress us in our sexual

freedom and in our right to express ourselves as mature adults

He counseled me to that end," she said, "but Professor Sproul, I still feel guilty "

I said; "Well, you're very fortunate." and she said? "What do you mean fortunate?"

I said, "Well, it's a wonderful thing when you feel guilty rf you are guilty

The problem is when we are guilty and don't
feel it"

I said, "The reason you feel guilty is not because of something the Puritans did or because

of the legacy of Queen Victoria

The reason why you feel guilty is because you are guilty

You have violated the law of God by your own admission and by your own testimony

And all of the attempts to psychoanalyze and rationalize this guilt away, fortunately for

you have not been effective

The pain of guilt feeling is a marvelous curative thing

Imagine what would happen to us as human beings if our physical bodies suddenly lost the capacity

to feel pain

We would never be alerted to the presence of invasive disease that could be life-threatening

s uncomfortable as the pain is, it is a warning sign, an alert to us that something is wrong "

I said "So you're fortunate that you still at least have the capacity to feel guilty,

because the guilt feeling is one of the things that we have become masters of eliminating 1

Think back in your own life and how you have dealt with guilt, how if you commit a sin

once, you may be overwhelmed with sickness in the pit of your stomach, a sense of personal

revulsion because of what you have done

You’re sick about it, literally because the weight of your guilt feelings is so enormous

Then you do it again, and the second time it's not quite as uncomfortable

Then you do it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time a sixth time, and pretty soon

you can cruise along in this behavioral pattern without any feelings of guilt whatsoever

You have acquired the status that Jeremiah described when he spoke to the hardheartedness

of the people of Israel when he said to them because of their repeated transgressions of

the law of God, "You have acquired the forehead of the harlot, that is, you have lost you

ability to blush

You have become recalcitrant, you've become calloused so that now you can violate the

law of God and not think anything of it
H

There is where the absence of guilt feeling becomes a license to continue to sin and to

sin with the assumption that you can do so with impunity

We talk about the moral issues of our day

I've been interviewed many times on radio shows and television shows and particularly

with respect to the most serious ethical issue of our day namely the issue of abortion

I'm asked by these radio hosts as a theologian what I think about it and I say "I don't

have time to go into the full case against abortion-on-demand and so on but I can give

you a shorthand answer

As a person who's spent his whole life studying theology there are things that I still don't

know, a lot of things I don t know "

I said, "But if there's anything I know about God it's that God hates abortion, that in

God's sight, this is not a minor transgression, but this is a gross and dreadful violation

of the sanctity of human life "

I said: "There's no doubt in my mind about

What astonishes me is the cavalier way in which people in the modern culture can deal

with these issues without any apparent sense of guilt

I wonder how that woman feels who's been encouraged to have an abortion and everybody in the group

says it's okay, it's okay, and the law permits it and everything else and she has it

I can't believe that that woman is under normal circumstances completely free from the assault

of her conscience

I assume that she has to know better

Yet for every sinful action there is under heaven, somebody has brought forth a carefully

crafted rational defense for it, an attempt to justify

That’s why we have a problem with this conflict between guilt and guilt feeling

We can desensitize our consciences, and remember conscience is crucial here

Scripture speaks about conscience as that inner voice within us, that voice that either

accuses us or excuses us for the behavioral things that we do

However, it wasn’t God who said, "Let your conscience be your guide "

It was Jimmy Cricket, and we have to be careful about adhering to what I call Jiminy Cricket

theology

Now our conscience should be our guides in some things that is, if our consciences are

duly informed by the word of God, then we ought to be following our conscience but

the conscience, the scripture says, can be seared

It can be twisted, it can be distorted, and the conscience can actually excuse us for

the very thing that God accuses us of doing

We think of David

I can't for the life of me imagine that King David who elsewhere was defined and described

as a man after God's own heart, who wrote so many of the magnificent psalms Here

was a man whose soul was aflame with passion for the things of God and he got engaged

in adultery and because of his involvement in that adultery he then used the power of

his political office to have his lover’s husband sent to the front lines where conveniently

he would be killed and removed as an obstacle for David's desire so that he could take Bathsheba

to himself

I can't believe that David went through that process without the pangs of guilt haunting

him

Yet. even this one who was so familiar with he law of God, managed to silence those internal

voices so that when Nathan, the prophet, came to him to confront him with his behavior and

Nathan told the parable in order to get David’s attention, David didn t recognize himself

in the parable

David expressed his outrage, his moral outrage at the behavior of the villain in the parable,

and he said "Where is this man?

Not in my kingdom will I tolerate that" until Nathan looked at David and said "Thou art

the man

Then, the house of David collapsed on his head because suddenly, through the power

of the Holy Ghost David was brought face to face with the reality of his guilt and

he was devastated

Fortunately for David, there was still a sensitivity in his soul to the things of God so that when

God the Holy Spirit touched him with the conviction of his sin, now David restored a proper relationship

between his guilt feelings and the reality of his guilt

The objective and the subjective came together, but for most of us, that's rare

We have all kinds of subjective techniques to hide our guilt to conceal our guilt to

deny our guilt, but we have to remember, beloved that guilt is real, and it's defined not by

what we want

It's not defined by what we feel

It's not defined by what is legal in the state

It's defined by the law of God

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