Have you ever had some random scene from a TV show stick
in your mind? Maybe it has a great line you
can’t forget. Something like, No soup for you! From Seinfeld. Or a little further back. “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” Does anyone remember that
one?
But I remember this random scene that doesn’t have any
great lines. It doesn’t even come from
that great a sitcom, one called Just Shoot Me.
Do you remember that one with David Spade? I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a full
episode. But as flipping the channels years
ago, one scene on that show grabbed my attention.
David Spade was trying to find out who had stolen something
of his from the lunch room. But he did
it in a peculiar way. He asked about it,
and then just stayed silent. The
silence got so uncomfortable that the guilty person always fessed up. “I’m sorry.
It was me. I was hungry, and the
pastry looked so good!” And the whole
silent technique begins to spread. Folks
are fessing up to all sorts of crazy mistakes and failings. Why
did that scene stay with me? Well,
first it was kind of funny. But beyond
that, it reminded me. Folks move through
life carrying around that baggage. They
hold on to regrets, guilt, shame, even. They may even think they’re supposed to. But they’re not. That
stuff never helps you. It never even
helps you to get better.
So, if it doesn’t work, why do people do it? Why does guilt carry such power? More crucially,
how do you free yourself from it? In
these words from the Apostle Paul, God shows you the way. Let’s listen and hear what God has to
say.
Too often, even more than you realize, you are trapped
in a guilt-based life. Now how can this
be? In these words, God shows you. More crucially, God shows you the way to get
free. God shows you that Jesus’
resurrection doesn’t just free you from death when you die. Jesus frees you from the thousands of deaths
that hit you right now.
What do I mean?
In everyone’s life, you have regrets, failures, disappointments, little
deaths so to speak. But the most painful
are those where you feel your own responsibility, where your flaws, your
failings created the situation. In those
moments, your image of you dies just a bit.
Heck, sometimes, you can dread that little death even
before it happens. I try to be the best parent I can be, but I
got my stuff. In some way or another, I
will mess this parenting thing up, but get this. It’s likely in ways I may not even see yet,
ways that one day my son will tell me, like I told my dad. I don’t look forward to that day.
But here’s the deal.
You can feel the weight of guilt, of responsibility even when whatever
happened had little or maybe nothing to do with you. It’s the double bind. When something bad happens, even when you don’t
bear any responsibility for it, you still feel bad about it. You not
only get the bad thing. You get the guilt,
whether it belongs to you or not. And it drives your life more than you even
realize it.
Every morning in our house, we have the challenge of
getting our five-year-old son off to school on time. And some days, we don’t meet the challenge,
and we run late. Every time that
happens, one question rises up in my son’s mind immediately. He asks. “Was it my fault?” He
worries about that, even when I tell him, no, it was a bunch of things that that
put us behind. Why does he stress about
that?
It’s because this guilt thing comes naturally to us. If your career isn’t where you want it to be,
often you think. What did I do
wrong? Is there something wrong with
me? If you have a health crisis, you wonder?
What’s wrong with me that this is
happening? How did I mess up? As a parent, it happens. That kid seems to be reading faster than
mine. What am I doing wrong? If your
kid has an issue at school, that crushes you.
Why is my child having problems? How
did I mess up? Guilt is
everywhere.
At the bottom of your anxieties, you’ll find guilt, at
the bottom of your anger too. That’s why
Paul talks about the sting of death being sin.
It’s that sense of failure that captures you, and it is deadly. It stings you, killing you a bit more every
time you feel it.
It does that, because it has power. And human beings do everything to avoid that
power. They try to shift the blame on
others. Or they numb themselves with things
or alcohol or TV or the internet to avoid it.
But no matter what, it still gets in.
Why is that? It’s because the
power of sin is the law.
Do you know what that word sin literally means? It comes from archery. A sin in archery happens when you miss the
mark. And that’s the problem. We all sense deep within there is a mark, a
target we’re supposed to hit. We don’t always know what it is, but we know that
it exists. The Bible calls that the law. And at its heart, the law isn’t just arbitrary
rules that you’re supposed to abide by. No,
the law is a way to help you understand reality at its deepest level, how
things are really supposed to be. The filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille put it well. You don’t break the law so much as break
yourself against the law.
That’s why guilt has power. It is pointing you to a deeper reality. It’s not simply in your head. It’s pointing to something deeply real. And in your heart, you know it’s something
real you’re not in alignment with. In
some deep way, your guilt is telling you the truth. Something is wrong. But guilt will never get you back to where
you need to be. What will?
Love will.
The Bible at the very beginning, in the story of Adam
and Eve shows you the root of the problem.
Why did Adam and Eve not trust God when he told them not to eat from that
one tree in the garden? They didn’t trust
the love. They didn’t believe that God
loved them, that all they ultimately needed was in that love. And so,
they ate, and ever since then human beings have made the same mistake. We don’t trust the love. We trust power or being right or looking good
or any number of false measures of value. And because we don’t trust the love, we make a
mess of our lives, our relationships, our world.
But in Jesus, God shows you the love like never before. In Jesus, God gives up God’s life to show you
that love, to give you that love. And in
his resurrection, God shows you that nothing, not even death will defeat that
love. You can’t save yourself from the
guilt. You can’t do it through success
or some self-improvement plan or even religion.
But trusting the love, that will free you. For in the love, you will have the courage
to face your broken places, your guilt and regret because you know God’s love
for you swallows them all up. And in
that love, you will find the grace not only to accept your failing, but by that
same grace to rise above to, to become the very people you yearn to be, the
very person that God created you to be.
That’s the victory Jesus brings, a victory that defeats guilt, regret,
even death, everything that separates you from God.
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