One of the most read books in my library is When I Relax I Feel Guilty, by Tim Hansel. Having been taught that work is the highest virtue, and having been given a job to do every time my parents saw me sitting down, I used to find myself feeling guilty when I had nothing useful to do. It is still a problem for me. All of us experience guilt in different ways. Some of it is good guilt that motivates us to do the right thing, and to repent, and seek forgiveness, when we sin against God, and our neighbor. But much guilt can be false guilt that is learned from the authority figures in our lives we are trying to please. Distinguishing between the true and false guilt is critical to health. Psychological guilt is a feeling or emotion. Spiritual or theological guilt is a state of alienation from God or our neighbor. We can be spiritually guilty, yet not feel anything. We can feel guilty but not be in a state of alienation or separation. It is important to make the distinction between psychological and spiritual guilt. Archibald Hart writes that “Unless we learn to tell the one type from the other we will always be handicapped in our growth toward spiritual and psychological health. We will feel guilty when we shouldn’t, and not feel guilty when we should.” (Unlocking the Mystery of Your Emotions, p.110)

Confusion between these two kinds of guilt can be abused by pundits, columnists in the media, politicians, and preachers, who manipulate people by trying to make them feel guilty.

What is guilt, and where does it come from? Guilt is a warning signal that something has been violated. It is emotional pain that warns us that something is wrong. The common source for such pain is what we call the conscience, which is a form of moral consciousness – a sense of right and wrong. James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense (1993) makes the case that everyone has a moral sense, that we all make moral judgments innately, that society inculcates in us virtues of sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty. This is the classical teaching of Plato and Aristotle which informed the world of the New Testament.

St. Paul, writing about the Gentile world, maintains that “they show that the requirements of the law (of God) are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them. (Romans 2:15) Jesus said that he would send the Holy Spirit. “When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin.” (John 16:8)

Dr. Hart writes that, “The state of tension (a state of anxiety) we feel whenever we evaluate something as wrong is what we call ‘guilt’.” (p.114)

The problem occurs for us when we get confused over what we consider to be wrong. During childhood we learn what others, whose love we need, consider wrong, and we try to earn their love by adopting their values. Withholding love, or acceptance, then becomes a control mechanism which is internalized in the conscience. The conscience can be under-developed or over-developed. If it is over-developed then

“you will feel guilty almost all the time about everything you do. It becomes impossible to assert yourself and stand up for very basic rights without feeling guilty. You cannot say ‘no’ to a request and have great difficulty confronting someone who is hurting you. On the other hand it is possible to suffer from an inadequately developed conscience. Here you feel very little anxiety when you cause pain to others. Immoral behavior doesn’t phase you at all. People with a weak conscience make the same mistake over and over again and do not benefit from the experience. They seldom feel sorry for what they do and resent any effort to punish them. In its extreme form this lack of conscience is called a ‘conduct disorder’ as it frequently causes the person to be in trouble with authority figures or the law.”(Hart, p.115,116)

Somewhere between these two extremes there is a healthy, balanced conscience. “The person with a ‘normal’ conscience understands why something is right or wrong and does not condemn her or himself without an adequate basis in reality. Here is the essence of a healthy conscience: it has the capacity to receive forgiveness and to benefit from the experience.” (Hart, p.116)

When my parents told me not to do some things they usually told me why. They gave me an appreciation of the consequences for my actions. They explained how certain behavior would pose a danger to myself or others. We lived next to a railway yard. There was the temptation to play with the switching equipment. We even had a turntable on which locomotives were turned around by hand. We could always take shortcuts across the railroad tracks in order to go on errands, instead of going over the pedestrian bridge. It was drummed into me that I could lose a leg or my life if I got caught in the machinery, and I could cause accidents which would endanger others if I interfered with the equipment. My conscience was educated as to what was right and wrong behavior. Conscience needs to know why something is wrong in order to accurately reflect guilt.

“It should alert us to wrong just as pain alerts us to disease. Guilt is designed to correct behavior, not to punish it; to bring us to repentance, not send us to hell. Guilt should serve as a warning sign that something is wrong – not as self-punishment.” (Hart, p.117)

Guilt is neurotic when you feel guilty nearly all the time without adequate justification, or you cannot stop the guilt, and you cannot stop remembering all your past misdeeds, and you keep labeling yourself as ‘bad.’ Or you find yourself trying to avoid feeling guilty by saying, “I must do this”, “I should do that”; or “I’ve just got to go there.” That is being driven by the desire to please someone whose love and acceptance is important to you. When you don’t do something you feel you should do, you feel terrible and engage in self-condemnation.

Let us look at how St. Paul deals with such a problem in 1 Corinthians 8 & 10. The issue was buying and eating food that had been dedicated to the pagan gods. Much of the food sold in the marketplace had been offered to the gods. The Christians asked themselves whether the meat was spiritually contaminated? Did the pagan gods actually have an effect on the meat? Even if one did not think so, what would one’s participation do to a fellow Christian who might have scruples about this?

Paul answers these questions by pointing out that “for us there is but one God and Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.” (1 Cor.8:6,7) He urges that they be sensitive to the weak conscience of their friends and not do anything that would endanger their weak, fellow-believers. Don’t use your freedom to be a stumbling block to others. If it is sin to them it is sin, even if it isn’t to you.

Later on in chapter 10, Paul said that it was possible to “Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.’ If some unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if anyone says to you, ‘This has been offered in sacrifice,’ then do not eat it, both for the sake of the man who told you and for conscience sake – the other man’s conscience, I mean, not yours. For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience. If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for?” (1 Cor.10:25-30) He concludes that he does all to the glory of God, that he does not want to cause anyone to stumble, and he tries “to please everybody in every way”.

He is more concerned to live to the glory of God rather than pleasing himself. He is not going to be legalistic, he is free to do what is best for the situation in which he finds himself. He is not going to feel guilty for doing something he doesn’t think is wrong even if a fellow-believer disagrees with him, unless it is going to cause unnecessary problems for the church. He sees God to be bigger than the nit-picking that some people engage in.

J.B. Phillips in Your God is Too Small, warns us about constructing God in the image of a policeman. Life is like driving along the interstate when all of a sudden we see a patrol car in our rear vision mirror. Our guilty reaction is not to suddenly brake, that would be to draw attention to ourselves. Instead we click off the cruise control and let the car slowly ease down to a safe speed and we hope the patrol car will pass. All too often we see God as the enforcer. He comes to make us feel guilty. Sometimes we need to feel guilty. But often we don’t. I could feel guilty about being well-fed, being happily married, being healthy, having a lovely home, and a satisfying job, when I compare myself with much of the world that lacks all those things. But, if I am giving to help others, and doing my best to fulfill God’s purpose for my life, I shouldn’t be going around feeling guilty for things over which I have no control.

On the other hand, if I am speeding along life’s highway, exceeding the speed limit, ignoring the rules of the road, and am a danger to others, I deserve to be stopped and punished. True guilt occurs when I go against God’s commands, when I do not believe in Christ and follow him, when I take all that God so richly gives me, and like the prodigal son, go off on my own and spend it on myself. Then I am convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit. I realize what I have done, and I repent of it. I return home, determined to throw myself on my Father’s mercy. Before I can get the words out of my mouth my heavenly Father throws his arms around me and welcomes me home. That is the picture Jesus gives us of forgiveness. The only way we can deal with our guilty conscience is to receive the forgiveness God offers us in Jesus.

Leslie Weatherhead once said, “The forgiveness of God is the most powerful therapeutic idea in the world. If a person can really believe that God has forgiven him, he can be saved from neuroticism.” (Hart, p.122)

When we grasp this message of forgiving grace – undeserved, and conditional only on our repentance – we experience a sense of release and relief that no merely human psychotherapy can provide. This is what Jesus offers. This is what the Gospel proclaims.