Moving beyond guilt is a primary key to a healthy life. Guilt is not a bad thing when it leads you to examine mistakes and failures. It can be a bridge from sin and failure to a new way of living but if we refuse to cross and instead sit in our guilt we will find that our lives become stagnant.
Unfortunately we are not always ready for something new. We hear the good news of grace, we sing about the love of God, we ask God in our prayers to forgive our sin but somehow this good news fails to makes its way into our emotions, our lives, our homes, our conversations, even our most important relationships.
The inability to move from guilt to grace leaves us in a state of fear. Of course, fear can be a useful tool. Not trying to cross a busy highway on foot because you are too afraid that you might get hurt is probably a good thing. I’ve driven in Rocky Mountain National Park many times. Fear helps me pay very close attention when the road is narrow and the drop off is measured in thousands of feet!
Families may have to use fear in an emergency when dealing with destructive behavior. When the family tells the addict, “If you do not change this behavior, we are leaving,” he or she may be frightened into stopping. But that fear must eventually be replaced by grace and and the willingness to move beyond guilt.
John, in a brief letter to the early church writes, “Perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because God first loved us.”
We love because God first loved us. We are able to live within love and grace because God has already chosen you and me to be God’s children.
The great scholar Joseph Campbell says that “Jesus’ death on the cross was not as ransom paid, or as a penalty applied, but an act of atonement, at-one-ment, with the human race.” What the church saw in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was one who entered into our sufferings and our joys, our heavens and our hells.
The perfect love of God invites us to cross the bridge of guilt to the freedom of a life lived in hope and faith.
Grace and Peace to you,
-Glen
