Embracing Guilt and Shame

Recently, a pastor at church posted a video-question on Facebook that asked people to comment on the reasons that we give for not confessing our sins. As I read through some of the comments, there was a recurring theme: guilt and shame cause our failure to confess our sins.

I decided to comment as well, but ommitted these two things in my response. Here's why... When I think about guilt and shame, I am first confronted with their definitions and then with their implications. Guilt, by definition, is the just conviction of transgressing a law. Shame goes a step further: not only does it embrace the guilt of breaking the law, but it also concedes that a particular party was offended, in this case God Himself. Whenever someone admits to doing something especially grievous (which is essentially confession), they usually say, "I'm ashamed," rather than "I'm guilty." The implications of guilt and shame are important, but only to an extent. They both seem to be a sign pointing to something more important, in fact, they are the means by which God reveals to us the gravity of our sinfulness and the necessity for our repentance, which begins by confession. In the same way that a burn on the hand indicates that the thing touched is fiercely hot, shame and guilt are the very feelings that our souls manifest in order to cope with the exceeding sinfulness that we battle against in the midst of a war being waged between the sinful nature and the nature that is being redeemed. Yet some would say that shame and guilt are hindrances to confession!

One person actually said that guilt and shame are crippling to us, which may be true for people who don't fully understand the benefits that guilt and shame can effect in our souls. Are they not actually spiritual warnings acting in us as healthy evidence that our consciences are not friendly with sin? If we so easily default to the cop-out of guilt and shame as the reasons for our lack of confession, the blame lies outside of ourselves, residing with these two intangibles, thereby essentially releasing us of any real responsibility. The thing to which these signs point, that is, the root of a failure to confess our sins is more simple than we may think, which may in reality bring more conviction, more guilt, more shame, and more personal responsibility within us, which is were the blame must lie.

The true reason for our failure to confess our sins is sin itself! Because of our sinful nature, our carnal desires are wholly enslaved to that sin, resulting in a will that is chained to sinful actions, namely concealing the very sin that torments us. Guilt and shame expose the sin within us, that we may confess and be cleansed. Therefore, guilt and shame are not agents of sickness that cause us to be spiritual paraplegics, but rather, tools of God that bring us to a place of desperation that would bring ultimate healing. In reality, though, for those of us who refuse to confess, sin itself takes us to a place of willing disobedience that would rather conceal sin and be tormented rather than reveal sin by confession that would have eternal cleansing effect on our everlasting souls through repentance.

So the root of our unwillingness to confess our sins ultimately boils down to the nature we've inherited from Adam, a corrupt nature that would persuade us to abdicate our own responsibility for sin, instead blaming things outside ourselves so that we never actually have to deal with confession. And if we never actually deal with the root of the issue, we'll only be producing rotten fruit.

For me, the message is simple: "MAN UP! Take responsibility for your sin, and kill it!" This is a war we're fighting here, and not one for the timid or weak (2 Timothy 1:7). Like John Owen said over 350 years ago, "Be killing sin or sin will be killing you." For centuries, men have searched for ways to misplace their due blame. It is far past the time of blaming anything other than ourselves for our sin, embracing the guilt and shame that comes with it, that we may find ourselves being led by the grace of God to the freeing power of confession, the beginning of repentance. Then, by the same kindness of God that leads us to repentance, we may attain an eternal inheritance kept in heaven for us where there will be no condemnation ever again!