Series: Healing For Damaged Emotions
#2 Guilt and Grace
Jan 18, 2009
Dr. S. I. McMillen in his classic book, None of These Diseases, informs us that some 75% to 80% of all physical illness is not rooted in the physical realm, but in the realm of the heart and spirit, in the emotional realm of life. These are the true psychosomatic illnesses which means that the sickness and pain are real enough, but the root cause of that disease is either in the person’s emotional and/or spiritual state of mind. In commenting on this claim as to the root cause of physical illness, Dr. David Belgum observes that physical symptoms and breakdowns may be the patient’s involuntary confessions of guilt.
The emotion of guilt does play an important role in our lives. What pain is to the body, guilt is to the spirit. When we smash our thumb with a hammer, we instantly know that something is wrong. The pain is excruciating. When we smash someone with our words, we instantly know that something is wrong, because we feel, and should feel, very guilty because in smashing someone else, we really smash ourselves. Unfortunately the spirit/emotional realm isn’t quite as clear cut and definitive as the physical realm when it comes to pain and guilt. One of the issues that we face as Christians is real guilt and false guilt. Real guilt is from God. False guilt is from Satan who is a liar; the father of lies, and is “the accuser of the brethren.” Real guilt is good because it leads us to confession, repentance and forgiveness.
If indeed it is true that much of our physical illness is a direct result of emotional and spiritual brokenness, then we need to deal with those issues of the spirit and the heart. “Above all else, guard your heart for it affects everything that you do.” (Proverbs 4:23)
In our Scripture Jesus tells this parable of the unforgiving servant. A certain king decided to settle his financial accounts and called in his loans. He discovered that one servant owed him the fantastic sum of $10 million. [Can we relate to this, or what?] Keep in mind that the taxes for the entire region of Judea, Samaria, Idumea, Galilee, and Perea all together totaled only about $800,000. Jesus used an unbelievably exaggerated large sum to prove a point. Sometimes Jesus does that to help us understand God’s truth and in this case that our debt to God and to others is so great that it is impossible to pay it back. A servant making a few bucks a day could never earn enough to pay off a debt of $10 million.
When confronted this servant fell to his knees and begged for mercy. The Greek word for mercy here means, “a delay, an extension of time.” Give this servant credit, either he was delusional or a very optimistic conniving con man buying more time to figure something out. However, an amazing thing happened. The king knew this man could never repay the debt so the king forgave him this debt, totally absolving the servant of any payment at all. Do you see the contrast here: the servant was thinking that the king’s forgiveness was ‘more time,’ whereas the king was thinking ‘total and complete release from that huge debt.’ Out of his grace the king forgave him his debt.
This story takes a dramatic twist in that this same servant who has just been forgiven a $10 million debt, finds a co-worker who owes him $20. He seizes this co-worker by the throat and demands immediate payment. Because he couldn’t pay up, the first servant had him thrown into debtor’s prison. This blatant miscarriage of justice came to the attention of the king who called in this forgiven servant. This grace-filled king suddenly became enraged. “I forgave you all your debts and you go and treat a fellow-servant like this! As you received mercy, you should have given mercy.” The king ordered this unforgiving servant to prison where he was tortured until he paid what he owed.
Now…. here is the clinching line: “So also my heavenly Father will do to everyone of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” What? Can this be? Is this an exaggeration like the $10 million in debt? Or is this all about some future judgment of the punishment of the wicked? The bottom line of this parable is that both the unforgiven and the unforgiving are plagued by guilt and resentment, tormented by all kinds of emotional conflicts even in this life. Maybe this is the reason Jesus included this line in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” [We use ‘trespasses’ for ‘debts’ but the meaning is the same].
Sin brings about guilt because sin is a wrong that we have committed against God or someone else. That sin creates a debt that needs to be repaid and leads to our feeling guilty. Our carnal, natural inclination is to repay that debt by making it up to that person. We are ‘in debt’ to them and attempt to assuage our guilt by doing penance, acts of contrition if you will, attempting to level the playing field. Divorced parents often do this to their kids (especially dads) by spending all kinds of money on their kids through toys, electronic gear, expensive trips and saying ‘yes’ to their every whim and wish—all of it trying to ease the pain of their own guilt over the breakup of their marriage. It is not about what is best for the kids; it is about dealing with our own guilt. The prison of our guilt wreaks havoc on our relationships and well being leading to the taskmasters of resentment, striving, and anxiety, which lead to stress, conflict, and emotional problems.
The doctors at the Minirth-Meier Clinic define forgiveness, as “the act of setting someone free from an obligation that is the result of a wrong done against you.” Forgiveness is not excusing the offense nor minimizing the wrong done, rather it is recognizing the offense and purposely choosing to pardon the perpetrator of the offense. What happens? Pardoning the past frees you to love the present. God made us for grace not for guilt. He made us for freedom not for the torment of an emotional prison. He made us to be whole, not to be broken.
Much of the cause of our damaged emotions flows out of our failure to receive God’s forgiveness and to our failure to forgive.
I. For those of us who claim the name of Jesus, our emotional problems would be greatly reduced if we fully understood, received, and lived out God’s grace and forgiveness through Jesus. So many of us are like the first servant in Jesus’ parable. The king gave this servant far more that he asked for and God gives us far more than we ask for but we don’t recognize it nor fully understand it. Consequently we continue to live under the guilt and condemnation that we and/or Satan put on us. Paul wrote, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Somehow we fail to realize that Jesus stamped PAID IN FULL on our spiritual mortgage papers and has put them through His divine shredder. When I was in college I was taking a class in art appreciation. As it was I had the highest grade in all 5 of the professor’s classes. The final exam time came and I blew it and felt I did poorly on that exam not only losing the claim of the highest grade, but maybe even losing that coveted ‘A’ for the class. As I handed her my exam, she held it up and asked me, “Do you want me to grade this?” Jokingly I replied, “Not really.” With that she tore up my exam paper. I was stunned and flabbergasted thinking that somehow she thought I had cheated on the exam. She looked at me and said, “As far as I am concerned, you already have your grade.” I was given a gift that day and walked out of that classroom walking on air. I had experienced the gift of undeserved grace and was free from the results of my blown final.
As Christians we sing of God’s Amazing Grace, we read about it, talk about it, have it all neatly packaged and have grace in our heads. We rattle off the profound definition—Grace is God’s undeserved favor--but we do not know or experience grace at the gut level of our lives nor in our relationships. It hasn’t infected nor affected our hearts and emotional life. It makes little or no difference in how we live day to day.
Even for the Christian guilt can be a taskmaster because we don’t or can’t believe that God would totally and completely forgive us. We believe Satan’s lies and his false guilt keeps us the prison of trying to atone and make up for our sins and mess-ups. This often drives us to greater spiritual performance, striving to be and do better, and achieving even greater things for God. In short we try to pay the debt we cannot pay. Dr. Seamands tells the story of a young pastor who was having all kinds of relationship issues, especially with his wife. He was critical, demanding and sarcastic to his wife. Everything she did was wrong and he began to withdraw, rejecting her love and affection. Through counseling the truth came out. As a young man stationed with the army in Japan he was feeling terribly lonely. Satan used that weakness to lure him into visiting prostitutes a few times. He had never been able to forgive himself even though he had accepted God’s forgiveness. The guilt plagued him and he hated himself. He never told anyone and the burden was becoming unbearable. The bottom line was that he continued to beat himself up, believing Satan’s lies that he had no right to forgive himself, that he was not worthy of his wife’s love, nor worthy to be happy because he had an huge debt to pay. His emotional brokenness about destroyed his marriage, his family and his life.
This young pastor had to forgive himself and fully accept God’s grace and forgiveness turning aside Satan’s accusations. The good news is that he did and was freed from his own self-made prison of regret, guilt, resentment, stress, conflict and pain. Failure to receive God’s forgiveness causes all kinds of damaged emotions that result in all kinds of garbage and brokenness.
II. The second cause of continued damaged emotions is failure to give forgiveness. This is really an outgrowth of not experiencing God’s forgiveness ourselves. The servant, not realizing that his debt had been completely cancelled, thought he had to go around and collect the debts owed to him because he still had to pay back his debt to the king. So instead of forgiving those in debt to him, he had them thrown into prison. Not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people. You see, the vicious circle becomes more vicious. The unaccepted are the unaccepting. The unforgiven are the unforgiving. The ungraced are the ungracious. Their behavior often becomes bitter, resentful, nasty and anti-social. Think of the people who have hurt you, disappointed you, let you down, or said nasty things about you. They all owe you a debt, don’t they? And you are all about collecting that debt. You must make those who have slighted you pay, to hurt as you have been hurt. It’s all about retribution and you become a grievance collector.
Marriages become a natural hothouse breeding this kind of tit for tat payback and debt-collecting scenario. Each spouse expecting the other to meet their emotional needs, to heal their damaged emotions, to fill the needs they have longed sought after. Oft times marriages become like two leeches sucking each other dry, and in the process destroying each other, themselves and their marriage as each continues to collect the debt of unfulfilled expectations. Husbands and wives can make great marriage partners, but they make lousy gods. Wives, your husbands cannot do for you what only God can do. Husbands, your wives cannot do for you what only God can do.
Unfortunately this same kind of thing happens among Christians and in churches, and it seems to me most often the participants don’t even know why they are doing it. The source is their own damaged emotions that influence and control their expectations, their behavior, their actions and reactions, and their relationships. The result is disagreement, conflict, animosity, bitterness, lack of trust, gossip, character assassination, broken relationships, hindrance of ministry, possible loss of people for eternity, and the potential to destroy a local church—all leaving a lot of damage in its evil wake.
The good news is that forgiveness for you is available, and the power to forgive others by God’s grace is possible. The great thing about God is that He takes this forgiveness one step further. He not only forgives, but also uses our hurts, scars, disappointments, resentments, anger and life’s garbage and transforms them into good. We see it in the cross of Jesus. God took the worst form of injustice and Satan’s evil making it into the best gift of all—our salvation. We see it in the Old Testament story of Joseph. Joseph experienced all kinds of scars and pain in his early life: sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused of attempted rape by his master’s wife, forgotten in prison by his friends. Joseph was full of damaged emotions. But God used it all for the good of His people. In forgiving his brothers, Joseph told them, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”
Because we have been forgiven, we can forgive. Because we have experienced God’s grace, we can be gracious one to another. Because we have been healed, we can be God’s wounded healers.
Paul said, “Owe no man anything, but to love one another.” (Romans 13:8) Hear Jesus’ words, “Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matthew 10:8)
Are you ready to deal with your own damaged emotions? Have you really been forgiven by God and by yourself? Have you forgiven those who have so terribly hurt you? This is the real change we can count on.