For anyone who has faithfully read or listened to the late R.C. Sproul, you would know it is no exaggeration on my part to say that the man was a storyteller. Indeed, R.C. seemed able to pull from his deep proverbial pocket a story well-suited for almost any and every theological concept.
Several years ago, I heard a story by R.C. on the issue of guilt and forgiveness. At the time, I thought it to be an encouraging and insightful illustration; however, I was unable to remember exactly where I had first heard the story when I went to look for it some time after. It must have been from one of his many sermons I had listened to, or perhaps from his radio broadcast, Renewing Your Mind - though, I could not recall. This past summer I read his book Pleasing God and behold, there it was (with a plethora of other classic R.C. stories, might I add). Speaking on the issue of guilt in a chapter titled “Real Forgiveness”, R.C. unfolds this encounter:
A woman once asked me: “How can I receive forgiveness for my sins? I have prayed and prayed to God for forgiveness for my sins, but I still feel guilty.” The woman was seeking theological advice. She looked at me as if she expected me to come up with some secret, esoteric device to grant her full assurance of her forgiveness.
I replied, “I think you need to pray for forgiveness one more time.” My answer not only disappointed her, but also clearly annoyed her. She said: “Didn’t you hear what I said? I have prayed repeatedly. What good will praying one more time do?”
I answered, “This time I want you to ask God to forgive you for your arrogance.” Now she was really angry. “Arrogance! What do you mean by arrogance? I have humbled myself time and again in prayer. Why is that arrogance?”
In response, I quoted 1 John 1:9 to her: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Then I told her she needed to repent of her failure to believe God’s promise.
For a moment, and a moment only, let us empathize with this poor woman. There is in the Christian life such a thing as guilt. Even after we have been redeemed and washed in the blood of Christ, there can be - and often is, though wrongly so - a sense of guilt that yet lingers in the dimly-lit halls of our soul. This guilt assumes power when we give a foothold to unbelief and doubt; when we refuse to fully and finally believe that God has separated our sins from us as far as the east is from the west, casting them into the sea of forgetfulness (Psalm 103:10-12; Micah 7:19).
“He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love towards those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:10-12).
And yet, we still wrestle with guilt. Often, this guilt is bound to some particular sin from our past; “old haunts”, as it were. We know that God has forgiven us, yet we struggle to believe that God has forgiven us of that. Other times, we experience a more general sense of guilt, one that is tied less to some old way of life in particular but rather guilt over some vague realization of our own unworthiness. We are saved and forgiven, but we struggle at times to fully embrace the depth of the Father’s love for us. And lastly, sometimes we feel guilty, quite simply, because we have sinned.
When guilt of any sort stirs within us, we must distinguish between guilt and guilt feelings. If we have objectively sinned against God, then as Christians we should expect an objective feeling of guilt to flood our soul. If His Holy Spirit has taken up residence within us, then what a joy it is that He will not allow us to remain in sin’s slum without some profound sense of spiritual unease or even agony. If that is at any point where we find ourselves, then we must confess and repent, trusting in the faithfulness of Him who is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (1 John 1:9; Romans 3:26).
However, we must also reckon with the reality of so-called ‘subjective’ guilt. This shade of guilt is less factual and more emotional; it is a black veil that threatens to cast itself over the mind with a deep sense of unworthiness that shakes our faith to it’s very foundations. It is not unlike the sin the woman speaking with R.C. found herself in; the chief issue not being the initial transgression that we find ourselves in agony over, but rather an arrogant distrust of God Himself that lies at the heart of our guilt. In this way, the guilt is not subjective at all; it is still sin, albeit not the sin we supposed it to be.
Many of us, perhaps all of us, have tasted the bitter, dark drink of doubt. A doubt that arises from guilt-ridden thoughts, thoughts that cast a shadow on God’s love for us. Whether these doubts spring from the rotting vestiges of our fallen flesh lying to us or from the lips of the enemy accusing us, there remains one bulwark of hope: cast yourself upon the faithfulness of God alone, trusting in Him to forgive of the very distrust that so easily entered into your heart against Him.
Indeed, I suspect the Father allows our doubts to come now and again in order that we may despair of ourselves anew and cling to Jesus, and Jesus only. For it is in these dark seasons of doubt that a particular form of self-examination begins to take hold; a peeling back of the coats of the soul, as it were. We peel back layer by layer all that we are, like an onion, hoping to find some quality within ourselves that will in the end endear us to the Father and rid us of our woeful doubting. Only, upon reaching the last and final petal of our souls - should we dare to go down so deep - we find nothing at all that will save us. The final petal falls, and with it falls also the notion that anything but God’s free gift of grace through Jesus Christ can save us, endearing the Gospel afresh to our souls once more. When His hand is heavy upon us, stripping back by degrees the veil that separates us from Him, we are left with no other refuge but to trust all the more in the promise He made to all who believe in His Son.
It is one thing to realize the depths and depravity of your own sin, but it is another to doubt the promises of God. To cast a shadow on the character of the Lord and on His willingness to forgive even the most heinous sin is to presume that He is just like us. As humans, we struggle to forgive others; we withhold grace and love from one another; but God is not like us. When we fail to trust in the promise of 1 John 1:9 by fixating on our sin, we are not being pious - we are being proud. And in our proud refusal to take Him at His word, we are ascribing to God the same faithlessness that so characterizes our own hearts.
We may say that our doubts arise out of a despair over our own sin and not over His faithfulness, but that excuse simply will not do. To acknowledge and hate your sin is one matter, but to obsessive over it is another. Indeed, it is nothing but a form of unchecked self-pity, a shade of pride that ‘humbly’ swaths itself not as “holier than thou” but as “more wretched than thou.” In both instances the sin is the same: a preoccupation with self over Christ. Make no mistake, to claim that our own personal sin is somehow beyond the pale of God’s grace and Christ’s redeeming work is to doubt His character and promises. Self-pity is not piety: it is pride.
God is good and kind to shield from us the full depths of our depravity. It is the mercy of the Lord in Christ that spares you and I from all the dark we cannot see in ourselves; indeed, from all the sin we cannot see in ourselves. And yet, for all the indwelling sin that you and I do see and wage war against, know this: it is but the tip of an iceberg. God sees all of our sin, and yet He loves us - “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). To draw from the words of R.C. once more,
“There are many things in my life that I do not want to put under the gaze of Christ. Yet I know there is nothing hidden from Him. He knows me better than my wife knows me. And yet He loves me. This is the most amazing thing of all about God’s grace. It would be one thing for Him to love us if we could fool Him into thinking that we were better than we actually are. But He knows better. He knows all there is to know about us, including those things that could destroy our reputation. He is minutely and acutely aware of every skeleton in every closet. And He loves us.”
When I first became a Christian, I likely could have named for you on one hand the sins that I most regularly committed. I was, of course, insufferably naive - or something worse - in this absurd evaluation of myself. Now, over a decade later, I feel as though I could fill many volumes with the areas in my life still tainted by sin and selfishness. It is not that I sin more now than I did then, but rather that I see more of the darkness that lurks in my fallen flesh than ever before.
The more like Him that Christ makes me, the more sin I see in myself and the more I rush to Him for refuge from none other than me, myself, and I. The more holy we become through Christ’s life in us, the more sin we will see in ourselves. There is less sin than before, but we hate it more. We begin to see evil through the eyes of Jesus Himself; that is, we begin to despise it for the filth it truly is.
The Lord does not reveal our sin to us that we should be ashamed and despair, hiding from Him as our first parents did in the Garden. No - He does so that we may grow in our sanctification and in the realization of our great need for forgiveness and His great desire to satisfy it. It is in our comprehension of our weakness that well-worn paths begin to be made to and from His throne of grace. If we were to taste upon our conversion all the sin we now do battle against, our souls would surely have wasted away in despair and become undone long ago. Thanks be to God that He graciously keeps from us all the dark we cannot see; flesh that we shall draw swords against and kill to our fleeting breath, and then, as the hymn goes, “Be saved to sin no more.”
“There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains:
Lose all their guilty stains,
Lose all their guilty stains;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.”
Photo by William Isted, Unsplash
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