Guilty Your Honour

Would you like to live in a world with no rules where you could do what you like? I do what I like, you do what you like...as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else : ) Well there you have it, your first rule! It doesn't take too much intelligence to figure out that the World needs rules. And we sure got a lot of them at this stage in our history. Don't forget all the unwritten rules - especially if you're a man haha.

Well unfortunately the more rules we know, the more likely it is we will break them, which causes an unusual effect on us - Guilt! There's no denying it, the older we get, the more rules we have learned, the more prone we are to feeling guilty. And guilt is seriously bad for us. I don't just mean emotionally, but physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually. It is highly destructive and has to be dealt with.

Some things we do we can seek restoration for. For example, if I have hurt a friend's feelings I can go and apologise to them. If I am sincere, the friend will usually forgive me. If I have stolen something from someone, the Bible says we should repay 4 times what we have taken. If I stole a $100 mobile phone from some unsuspecting person, I should go and buy them an IPhone instead. That sounded a good idea to one of the girls in our Youth Group. She asked if I could steal her phone!

But some things we do wrong cannot be put right by our actions. I'm sure you can think of a few, maybe some in your own life. You can't reverse the thing you have done and you can't bring a life back. You can either cover it up and live with the guilt or you can confess and suffer the consequences. Quite often the consequences are severe so we choose to cover it up, but live with the guilt.

You may have heard the story of King David and Bathsheba. The moment David saw Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, he had the thought "Wow, she's a beautiful woman". That was not the sin. We may often have a thought that we immediately recognise is wrong. That is not the sin. If we turn away, walk away, we haven't sinned even though the thought was bad. David's sin started the moment he chose to keep looking! Everything went from there. First adultery. Then deception. Then evil plans, then murder, then more deception. Each sin lead to something worse. A common approach people take when they have done wrong is to try and cover it up. Finally what David had done could not be put right. He could not make restoration to the man he had murdered! David had to live with his guilt and he did so for a year.

Now God won't let us get away with it. Like hunger telling us we need to eat, guilt is God's way of telling us to seek forgiveness and restoration. With David, God sent the prophet Nathan to jolt David from his position of false comfort that came from fooling himself that he had successfully covered it all up.

Finally David admitted his guilt and began the process of his forgiveness and restoration which you can read in Psalm 51. I do want to add that after confessing his sin, David accepted a punishment. This is not clear in the Psalm but if you read the previous passage above, you will see that the Lord did punish David. It is not easy to accept punishment but this is also part of the overall process of healing in some cases. The process is;

• Admitting our guilt  
• Admitting our weakness
• Asking to be made clean and new
• Asking for restoration
• Accepting our punishment
• Praising God from a true heart
• Asking for a future blessing

I put that last one in because sometimes in our guilt, we feel undeserving of anything anymore. But don't forget God loves us and being restored means everything in our relationship also is !!! Only God can give us that kind of forgiveness. Only God can remember our sins no more.

So there you have the remedy for persistent guilt. It's not in convincing ourselves that we have done nothing wrong, but in finally acknowledging that there is something wrong we have done and going to the one Person who can forgive and restore us again 1 John 1:5-8.