What to do with guilt

Morning after morning in my teen years I would wake up with the same feeling.  It was as if someone had wrapped a belt around my gut and was tightening it.  Nervousness like an electrical charge set to 'constant on' mode permeated my system.  This was a punishment, I was sure, because all together my bodily sensations told me I was feeling guilty.

Guilty for what?  I wasn't sure, but I sure knew it must be something.  Why else would I feel this way?  I worked to find things that I must have done wrong and asked God to forgive me.  The slightest wrong feeling or thought could have been the culprit.  Yet, surely there were things I couldn't remember that may have been the cause.  I begged forgiveness for those too.

When there is sin, it has to be paid for, so to make up for them I tried to prove my desire for forgiveness by denying some happiness.  Maybe it was not allowing myself to enjoy something or, at other times, just being 'down' to prove to my Judge that I was serious.

Have you fought this battle with guilt?  Maybe it was for actual wrong doing or maybe it was, like me, a general feeling of unworthiness.  Father knows about this and is a much better God than the sacrifice-demanding one I thought He was.

The letter in the New Testament written to the Hebrews speaks directly to this.  When I heard a series of talks about this in college it changed everything for me.

Let me simply summarize chapters 9 and 10.  The old covenant God made with people (as explained in the Old Testament) sets up a system whereby people can deal with their sense of guilt by making blood sacrifices of animals at a temple to God who focuses his presence in a quarantined room, sealed with a heavy curtain, called the Holy of Holies.  Within this system, "people under the law offer the same sacrifices every year."

In a way, that's what I was doing with my guilt: offering sacrifices of happiness, groveling, and self-hatred.  Over and over again, I would make my payment.  But, the letter to the Hebrews continues like this:

"but these sacrifices can never make perfect those who come near to worship God.  If the law could make them perfect, the sacrifices would have stopped.  The worshippers would have been made clean, and they would no longer have a sense of sin."

In other words, that old system didn't ultimately work, and nor will ours.  Instead, God sends his Son to deal with our sense of unworthiness, our sense of needing to pay for things over and over again.  Instead, "we are made holy through the sacrifice Christ made in his body, once and for all time." 

What does this all mean?  I'll let the text speak for itself:

"So, brothers and sisters, we are completely free to enter the Most Holy Place without fear because of

the blood of Jesus' death.  We can enter through a new and living way that Jesus opened for us.  It leads through the curtain--Christ's body.  And since we have a great priest over God's house let us come near to God with a sincere heart and sure faith, because we have been made free from a guilty conscience, and our bodies have been washed with pure water" (10:19-23).

Live in confidence with your God, like I have learned to do.  Trust that He has fought and beat your guilt.  You may need to continually remind your guilt that it already lost the fight. 

As I have learned to live in this reality, I've discovered that people who live freely in Father's love, will freely love others.  That, indeed, is a very new, new convenant.