If you look up the word “guilt” in the dictionary, you might first see what I call the legal definition. It could go something like this: “Guilt is the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense or crime.”
In this context, the idea of guilt is black and white – you either did it or you didn’t. Those are the only options in criminal court: Do you plead guilty or not guilty? In that setting, no one is asking about your feelings, just your facts. And maybe that’s one of the reasons we can get confused about guilt; that is, that we can think that just because we feel it, it must be factual. But the truth is that often the guilt we talk about in our daily lives, is just a feeling, and not necessarily factual at all.
When we look up the term “guilty feeling,” we can find this kind of more useful definition: “Remorse caused by feeling responsible for some offense” or bad action. The difference between guilt and a guilty feeling is this: That just because we feel it, doesn’t mean it’s true.
About this, one counselling organization’s website says,
Yesterday, my wife and I visited her sister in Toronto. Her birthday is coming up, so we went out to dinner with her and their brother and a few other family members. Then we took her to a concert at Harbourfront. It was a free concert, so this was a really easy birthday celebration. After we had dropped her sister off at her home in Toronto, I felt my usual desire for a hot chocolate to help keep me comfortable and alert for the longer late-night drive back to our home in Waterloo.
We popped into a Tim Horton’s and there was a bit of a line-up. Eventually I ordered my hot chocolate, and purely out of habit, without really thinking, I ordered a donut too.
First, that’s a bad choice for my health. Second, I had forgotten we already had a bag of snacks in the car with us. Third, Marhee had told me not to get anything extra; at least, that’s what she says she said, and apparently, I, perhaps conveniently, didn’t hear her. In any case, almost immediately after getting the donut, I felt a little bad.
There was a time when I would have also felt guilty; when I would have felt that choice as a weight on my conscience, not just my common sense.
Fortunately, I have hit a stage in my thinking, where I could acknowledge the fact that I made a bad choice, without drawing the conclusion that I was therefore a bad person.
Guilt is a feeling that should be reserved for situations
that affect our moral character.
Or, as Sister Merrilee Boyack once wrote,
“guilt for things other than sin… wastes time.”
It also wastes energy and, more importantly, runs the risk of wasting much of the good work God has done for the purpose of building us up and leading us home to Him, which is one of the reasons Satan loves it when we feel unnecessary guilt.
So that’s one of the things we need to know about guilt: When it is being applied to the right things. Sometimes, figuring that out requires us to drill down about what we are really feeling, and why.
I spoke with a woman recently who said she was feeling guilty about not giving money to her daughter to help her buy new glasses. She especially felt this way, she said, because when she was next in need of new glasses herself, she bought them without hesitation. She felt she was a hypocrite and was treating her daughter unfairly.
To give you some background, her daughter is a married adult with her own household. She is also a bit of financial mess; she doesn’t manage her money well. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say she doesn’t manage her priorities well and seems to waste her limited funds on less important and even frivoulous things whenever she feels the urge for them, only to end up short of cash when something more critical, like new glasses or car repairs, becomes essential.
When we drilled down on this situation a little bit, it became evident she wasn’t really feeling guilt; what she was feeling was the internal conflict of two competing priorities, both of which came from a single source: Her love for her daughter.
On the one hand, her love drove her to want to care for and protect her daughter, to save her from a difficult challenge. On the other hand, her love also drove her to want to help her daughter be accountable in order to become self-reliant and wise.
What she was calling guilt – a feeling we should only have about doing something bad – was really uncertainty about how best to do what was good.
Getting past the self-focussed and self-absorbing idea that she was guilty of something, helped her to move forward in sorting out the real dilemma of those competing, good priorities.
False guilt always just gets in the way, so it’s best to get rid of it as fast as we can. But there is true guilt, and as it turns out, just as guilt generally can be true or false, true guilt also has two faces, and can be either good or bad.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul wrote about this when he acknowledged that his first letter had caused them to feel bad about their behaviour. He wrote,
How can true guilt – guilt for things that are actually bad – be damaging to us? It can damage us, when it is not accompanied by other true principles and understanding that are necessary to make guilt be useful.
The purpose of guilt – the reason we have consciences – isn’t to beat ourselves up or weigh ourselves down. Just as physical pain tells us when it’s time to get a bandage or go to the doctor, the reason God gives us the gift of true guilt is to help us know when it is time to repent and to get closer to Him. For guilt to have this impact, it has to be one of a company of ideas and feelings.
Guilt should accompany the knowledge and testimony that God is our Heavenly Father who loves us, that He sent us into this life to experience weakness and error and even sin so that we could learn to rise above them, and that He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be our Saviour, Teacher, and Exemplar, both showing us the way and helping us to walk it.
Guilt should also accompany the knowledge that each of us, as a child of God, before coming to this earth, chose to come here because we already believed in the plan of happiness and had faith in Jesus Christ. Here, on earth, we may rediscover that faith and we can increase it, but it’s not new to us.
And what else do those truths teach us? For one thing, that you are already good. You were good enough in the pre-mortal existence to choose to follow Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father’s plan to come to earth.
And here’s the other thing you already are, that you need to believe in order for your guilt to be productive and good: You are already saved. You are already justified.
Jesus isn’t atoning for your sins tomorrow. He isn’t doing it again and again whenever you take the sacrament, confess, or say a prayer. He did it. It is continuous, continuing, eternal, and infinite; but it is also something He has already done. As the Anglican Bishop and author, N.T. Wright has said, Jesus has already won the battle; our job is just the post-war clean-up.
That’s what your guilt is: It’s God showing you what you have to clean up.
It’s not God telling you that you are condemned, worthless, or futile.
It’s not intended to plunge you into depression, or make you feel embarrassed, self-hating, or overwhelmed.
In fact, rather than those feelings that would make us hide our faces from God, Elder Bruce C. Hafen suggested that “if you’re seeing more of your weaknesses, that just might mean you’re moving nearer to God, not farther away.”
One of the signs of the gift of the Holy Ghost is that He reveals truth to us, including the truth about ourselves, which includes the fact that we all have weakness that is intended to bring us closer to God. As Moroni recorded when transcribing the Book of Ether,
I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them. Behold, I will show unto the Gentiles [that’s us, by the way\ their weakness, and I will show unto them that faith, hope and charity bringeth unto me—the fountain of all righteousness. |
When we feel godly sorrow, we acknowledge our sins, we accept that we have sinned, and we are accountable to God, ourselves, and one another, to repent and repair the damage of those sins. And we can do this joyfully.
When Enoch saw the heavens weep over the wickedness of humanity, his heart swelled wide as eternity, and he felt the enormity of God’s concern for us; and the scriptures say that Enoch “had bitterness of soul, and wept … and said unto the heavens: I will refuse to be comforted; but the Lord said unto Enoch: Lift up your heart, and be glad.” Then, we are told, “Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced.”
Brothers and Sisters, we have seen the day of the coming of the Son of Man. Like Enoch, despite the bitterness of heart that can be felt as we become more aware of sin and critical errors in our lives, we can rejoice in the grace that Jesus offers us, that comes because of the sacrifice He already willingly performed on our behalf.
If you find yourself burdened with guilt that will not go away, remember those facts of the gospel that I mentioned earlier. Remember, as Joseph Smith testified,
the glad tidings, which the voice out of the heavens bore record unto us – That he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness; That through him all might be saved whom the Father had put into his power and made by him; |
Repentance is not a one-time act, but a condition of being:
More particularly, it is the condition of being a disciple of Jesus Christ,
which is a condition we are granted by His grace.
Your discipleship is your most prized status on earth and will last throughout eternity.
Just as we are sealed to one another, husbands, wives, children, and in all our family relationships through temple ordinances, through our baptism and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost in confirmation, we are, in effect, sealed to Jesus Christ; we become His children, the offspring of His saving sacrifice.
Can we then justifiably believe ourselves to be far from Him, just because we have fallen short in some way? So long as we continue to strive to follow Him, we should not be burdened with self-doubt and recriminations, with self-pity or self-loathing. The Son of God, who was and is Jehovah of the Old Testament – the God of this world who covenanted with Abraham with an eternal covenant that is the foundation of our temple blessings – is also that God who Himself descended to the earth, to walk among us, to be an example to us, to die for us, to show how much He loves us. Who are we to deny that love?
I mentioned earlier the guilt that is damaging, that the Apostle describes as “working death”. This is the kind of excessive guilt that makes us think God cannot love us, that His Atonement cannot reach us, that our sins, our errors are so especially significant that we are beyond the scope of His grace. Brothers and Sisters, there is no greater lie that we can tell ourselves, no greater falsehood that we can believe, than that for any reason or for any instant we are outside the range of God’s loving grace.
“I am persuaded,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
It is my testimony that we should, daily and continuously, rejoice in God’s grace and goodness toward us; that our only attention to sin, ought to be to ensure we remain on path of repentance, continually seeking His help and relying on His power to sustain us as we make every effort to improve in the ways that He has taught us; and that we should we maintain our happy discipleship, grateful for His grace, welcoming His goodness, and embracing His everlasting love which will never leave us. I bear this testimony, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.