David Diga Hernandez - Breaking Free from Guilt and Shame

Guilt can play a positive role in your life. Second Corinthians chapter 7, verse 10 says this: «Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.» So, it’s a good thing if you sense shame over shameful acts; it’s a good thing if you sense shame over shameful thoughts; it’s a good thing if you sense shame over shameful attitudes. We should feel guilt when we’re guilty; we should feel the need to repent. Godly sorrow works repentance, so guilt does have a positive role; it can have a positive role. Your conscience is to your mind what pain is to your body. If you didn’t have any physical pain, you would never know if you had some disease that needed your attention; you wouldn’t know if you experienced some injury that could kill you. You need pain because you need something to indicate to you when something is wrong, and that’s what the conscience is. What pain is to the body, the conscience is to the mind. God has given us all a conscience so that when we violate His holy standards, when we violate His spiritual and moral laws, we sense it. We can be affected by it emotionally and mentally, and we start to sense this heaviness for our wrongdoing. Now, it’s dangerous if you allow yourself to get to a point where you’re no longer sensing anything in your conscience; that is what it means to sear your conscience. In other words, you’ve abused your conscience so badly, you’ve done things for so long that it no longer even bothers you, and you don’t care that you don’t care. Now, if you care that you don’t care, that means you still care. So don’t allow yourself to be paranoid about that either, because I know I might get some messages saying, «Brother David, a part of me allows compromise.» Well, yes, of course; all sin is a choice, but we have the power to also choose holiness. The Holy Spirit convicts us when we do wrong; He also convicts us unto righteousness. Watch this in John chapter 16, verse 8: «And when He comes, He will convict the world of its sin and of God’s righteousness and of the coming judgment.» Here we see that the Holy Spirit convicts not just of sin but also of God’s righteousness and the coming judgment. In other words, He doesn’t just tell us when we’re doing something wrong; He helps us aspire to all that God created us to be. So, it’s not like He’s just condemning you. The Holy Spirit will correct you, but please don’t mistake the Holy Spirit’s correction for His condemnation. The Holy Spirit only corrects what He wants to heal; He only corrects what He wants to help you overcome. So, if you’re being corrected by the Holy Spirit, if you’re sensing conviction, if you sense that strong weight of His hand coming down upon you because of the decisions that you’ve made, that’s a good thing. God corrects those whom He loves. Conviction is not a punishment; conviction is God’s grace. Conviction is not just God judging you; conviction is God’s power, conviction is God’s love, conviction is God’s mercy and compassion, because He loves you too much to leave you to your own compromise. The Holy Spirit convicts us of God’s righteousness; He calls us to higher places. Now, if you’re constantly focused on sin, on what not to do, you live in condemnation. But if you begin to lift your eyes and look to the Lord and see what you can become in Christ, well then, you begin to sense real freedom from sin because you actually have a standard against which you’re measuring your life. You’re actually aspiring to something greater. You’re aspiring to be more Christ-like; you’re aspiring to God’s standards of holiness as opposed to just fretting about sin. Now, I want to say this again because I need to make this clear: I am not saying you can compromise. I am not encouraging you to sin. I’m not saying sin doesn’t have consequences; I’m not saying that sin won’t destroy. Sin will destroy; sin has consequences. God will judge sin even in the life of the believer; that’s a different lesson for a different time, exactly how He does that. But I will say this: some believers live so weighed down by their own mistakes that they continue to condemn themselves even after God has forgiven them. So, I’m not talking to the Christian who is just allowing compromise in this season of their life and doesn’t care. I doubt that that person is even saved to begin with. But if there is a believer, if there is such a believer who is allowing compromise and doesn’t care, then I’m not talking about that person. I’m talking about the individual who is wrestling with that sin nature, who is doing all that they can to aspire to God’s standard of holiness because that’s what true Christians do. True Christians desire to be truly holy, and if there’s no desire for holiness in you, that means that the nature of your desires has yet to be changed, which could be a sign that you’ve not yet really received Christ. Now, that’s another lesson for another time; maybe we’ll address that at some point. Here’s something I wrote: condemnation is not of God; conviction is of God. Condemnation tells you that you are a mistake; conviction tells you that you made a mistake. Condemnation pushes you away from God in shame and fear; conviction draws you to God in repentance and humility. So again, let’s balance this. On one side, there are believers who allow compromise in their lives, and they’re not exactly attempting to overcome that. Whether or not they’re true Christians, that’s debatable; that’s a different discussion.