Untied Laces: Giving Your Guilt to God

Guilt is one of Satan's engineered marvels to keep people from God. All of us wrestle with accepting God's grace because of some awful and often unnamable wrong that distances us from him. Yet imagine the satisfaction Satan gets when we really do sin and the offense is one with which we struggle to stop. Like a fly in a spider's web, we gradually tire from the strain to be free and, guilt-ridden, our Adversary watches with delight.

Repeated sin is a burden to the soul. All of us know the hardship of fighting temptation, falling, lamenting in guilt, praying that we'll never do it again, only to discover that the issue is a real scab in the heart that we simply cannot let heal. It is spiritually crushing to realize that sin controls a part of one's life; and how to remedy it is sometimes equally troublesome to determine. That despair is real and it often becomes malignant.

Hear these words carefully: True penitence before God is acceptable, but self-deprecation plays into the hands of Satan and entangles us further in his weave. How? Very often we make ourselves both enforcer and offender of God’s commands. It is the human tendency for self-flagellation, to criticize ourselves hatefully. Surprisingly, it arises from an insidiously proud heart that exploits the very holiness of God. Let me explain.

We berate and loathe ourselves, scale the heights of fury and plunge the depths of remorse. Ultimately, we shake our fists at God and ask, "How can you love me like this, in all my wretchedness?" I’ve done it. We prefer his judgment instead of his mercy, which interrupts our scorning. And in our pitiful despair we try with one last stab for personal control . But when our emotions finally settle we sense that the God who is ever drawn to us yet beckons.

What we cannot accept in our guilty minds is a standing spiritual reality regardless of our embargos. It is this: Sin can never push us outside of God’s grace . We are the ones who eliminate God's mercy as the sufficient remedy for our weaknesses; but the Father calls us to see that we cannot lose his love. What matters is not how dark our sin but how great the love that heals and restores—if we would only go for help.

God wants to teach us to tie the laces that keep us falling. This means that in times of repeated sin we trip and stumble our way to God rather than away from him. He is who we need. Our resolution must be that if a sin should become a hindrance we cannot shake, we must drag it along with us into the place where the mercy to help can make us free.