God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living (12 page)

Sin is only a problem if we refuse to admit it and confess it. It is spiritually healthy and emotionally freeing to simply agree with God, take responsibility for our wrong actions, receive the free gift of forgiveness and ask Him to help us change.

If we will face what God already knows, that we are flawed and imperfect sinners who need Him every moment that we live, then sin is not a problem. If one of my grandchildren spills something on the floor, I quickly say, “Don’t worry, it’s not a problem. Grandma can clean it up. I have something that will make the floor clean again.” I have noticed that sometimes when they spill something, they immediately look frightened, as if they are going to be in trouble. So I tell them not to worry as quickly as I can because I don’t want them to feel bad because they made a mistake.

When we make mistakes, Jesus feels the same way. It is as if He is saying, “Don’t worry, I have just the thing to clean up your mess, and it won’t even leave a stain.” When sin is removed and cleansed with the blood of Jesus, it should leave no guilty stain!

God doesn’t expect us not to make mistakes. He already knows about every mistake we will ever make, and He has already decided to forgive us. Sin does have to be paid for, but we don’t have to pay! What if you went to the electric company to pay your bill and they looked up your account and said, “Someone paid your bill in full yesterday.” How foolish would it be if you kept standing there trying to pay the bill that had already been paid? That is exactly what we do sometimes concerning our sin. We ask God to forgive us, He does, and yet we keep trying to pay with feelings of guilt. We must learn to ask and receive. Asking is one step, but receiving completes the process. We are to ask and receive that our joy might be full (John 16:24).

If we don’t know how to receive the free gift of God’s merciful grace, then we will punish ourselves with guilt. We sacrifice our peace and joy, but our sacrifices are not acceptable to God because they are not enough. Only Jesus could pay the price that had to be paid. Only He could become the perfect, sinless sacrifice for our sins. Stop trying to pay a debt that you cannot pay.

I have told this story before, but it needs to be repeated here because it is so good. It is an allegory about regrets that brings to life the importance of choosing your destinations carefully!

We all have an area of our thought life called “imagination.” That’s where we see mental images of how we believe things are. The images can be correct or incorrect. If you see yourself as a failure, when you’re actually a forgiven child of God—then you have an imagination that needs to be renewed. The Bible teaches us to pull down mental strongholds and put down imaginations that don’t agree with God’s Word. It is our job, with the Holy Spirit’s help, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4–5). In simple terms, we must learn to think and imagine as God does if we want to see His good plan for us come to pass. You can think or imagine things on purpose. You don’t have to merely passively wait to see what falls into your mind and then meditate on it over and over until it becomes part of you. God puts things in our mind, but Satan also
puts things into our mind, and it is vital that we know the source of our thoughts and imaginings.

Often when I am preparing to teach God’s Word, I imagine or see myself in front of the people, and I preach the sermon in my mind before I arrive at the church or conference center. I believe this helps me prepare.

I am on my way home right now and haven’t seen Dave for a few days, so I am looking forward to seeing him. We are going from the airport to lunch, and several times I have seen a picture in my mind of the restaurant we are going to and of ordering the meal we always get when we go there. I can see us enjoying the time and catching up on what has happened to both of us while we have been apart. My daughter’s birthday is today, and I have imagined how she will like her birthday gift when I give it to her.

Our imaginations and mind prepare us for action. They can prepare us for success or failure, joy or misery, and the choice is up to us. If you think about the past mistakes and all the things you have done wrong, it will only weaken you. It handicaps you as you try to enter the future God has for you. No matter what you have done in the past, learn to see yourself as a new creature in Christ. See what you want to happen, not just more of what you have always had.

Meditating on the past stirs up false guilt and will eventually become a stronghold in your mind. A stronghold is an area where the enemy has dug in and buried himself. It is much more difficult to tear down a stronghold than it is to form the habit of saying “no” to wrong thoughts each time they present themselves.

We need to stop thinking about our past failures if we want to defeat and overcome guilt and shame. We must stop focusing on the sin that has been forgiven and dealt with, and begin to praise God, thanking Him for the solution to the problem. Think about how wonderful it is to be completely forgiven. Here are a few
Scriptures to meditate on that will help you defeat Satan when he comes to you with false guilt.

Meditating on Scripture is the best way to defend yourself against mental attacks from the devil.

It is one thing to be ashamed of something you have done wrong, but it is another thing entirely to become ashamed of yourself. Shame is actually much deeper and more damaging than guilt. I was not able to heal from the abuse in my childhood until I realized that I had toxic shame filling my soul. I was ashamed of who I was and it poisoned everything in my life.

I am sure that at the beginning of my father’s sexual abuse toward me I was ashamed of what he was doing, and I clearly remember feeling guilty, even though I was too small to understand why I felt that way. At some point, as the abuse continued, I took the shame inside myself, and I became ashamed of me because he was abusing me. I thought that something was dreadfully wrong with me for my father to want to do the things that he was doing to me. He told me that what he was doing was good and that he did it because he loved me so much. Yet, he always warned me over and over not to tell anyone, so it made no sense to me. If what he was doing was good, as he told me it was, then why couldn’t I tell anyone? And if it was so good, then why wasn’t everyone doing it? I was pretty sure they weren’t. As I said, I felt confused about all of it and had no answers, but I was deeply ashamed of myself and felt certain that something was desperately wrong with me! The soundtrack “What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?” played over and over in my head until I was in my mid forties. Then I found out about the devastating effects of shame and with God’s help was set free from it.

Over the many years of abuse, I had developed a shame-based nature, and as long as that is the case, people can never fully get over feeling guilty. They will not only feel guilt over real offenses,
but they frequently feel guilty about imagined offenses. Anything that was even remotely enjoyable made me feel guilty and as if I had no right to enjoy myself. The shame distorted everything in my life. It was as if I was wearing glasses with mud on the lenses, and everything looked dirty to me because I felt dirty inside.

If this is a problem for you, I have wonderful news! Jesus has taken away the reproach of sin (the guilt and shame). He bore your shame and guilt. He has declared you
not guilty
and made you a brand-new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). When you feel condemned, it is not Jesus condemning you; it is the devil, and you must resist him. When you are having a guilt-and-shame attack, you must remember who you are in Christ. I recommend saying out loud, “God loves me unconditionally, and He has forgiven all of my sins.”

We are nothing in and of ourselves, but in Christ we are forgiven, made new, justified, sanctified, cleansed, and we stand before God right with Him. God is not angry with you; He is not disappointed or displeased. He loves you! I am sure you did a good job at receiving guilt and condemnation; now do a better job at receiving righteousness from God through Christ.

Religion gives us rules to follow, and it promises that if we follow those rules, God will be pleased with us. The problem is that we cannot follow them all, and if we are guilty of breaking one, God views us as guilty of breaking all (James 2:10). If we choose to live by religious legalism and a rule-keeping system, then weakness is simply not an option, so we struggle to be strong in every area, yet we always fail. If we fail to keep all the rules, then we feel we have sinned, and we experience all the misery and guilt of sin. We also have a feeling of being separated from God. God never leaves us, but our guilt places a wedge between us and Him. When we have a false view of what God expects from us, it opens the door for a lifetime of seeking something we can never attain and it produces tremendous frustration and disappointment.

On the other hand, Jesus offers us the exact opposite of religion. He offers us a new heart, a new nature and an intimate relationship with God through Him. This is all ours through placing our faith in Him. If we believe what God’s Word teaches us about what Jesus did for us, we receive these promises and they set us
free from the tyranny of trying to earn God’s love and acceptance through our own performance.

Jesus shows us how to live by example, gives us a desire to do it, and through the power of the Holy Spirit He enables, strengthens and helps us. When we realize what God has done for us through Jesus and we learn to receive His amazing unconditional love, we love Him in return and we want to please Him by being like Him and doing what we believe He would do in every situation. Wanting to do something and making an effort because of desire is entirely different from feeling the pressure of having to do something out of obligation and being afraid if we don’t.