Guilt (Frontlines - Week 4)

What if the guilt you've been carrying was never yours to keep? On this Father's Day, Shawn tackles one of life's most universal burdens—guilt—and reveals why wallowing in it actually diminishes the grace Jesus purchased for you. Drawing from Romans 5:1-2, Shawn unpacks the life-changing truth of justification: that through faith in Jesus, you are made *just as if you'd never sinned*—not someday, but right now. Don't miss this powerful message that will finally give you permission to lay down what Jesus already carried to the cross for you.

Transcript

Good morning, everybody. Happy Father's Day. To all the dads that are out there today. We are talking about something that I think every dad in the room and joining us online can resonate with. Today.

We are talking about guilt. Aren't you glad you came to church today? Like, some of the dads here are thinking, I could be out on the golf course today. I could be boating. I could be working on, you know, smoking some meat.

But we are talking about guilt today here in church. But it is, I think it's something that we all can understand because we've felt it. We know what it is like to kind of wrestle with guilt. And guilt shows up in a variety of ways in our lives. We have, like, no lack of ways to feel guilt in our lives.

And so we actually, here in Southern Indiana, we have a version of guilt that is named after us. The Southern Indiana guilt. It's known as rural guilt in other places. It's that guilt of maybe you grew up in a small community and you left and you went to college someplace and you haven't been back. And so now, like, you feel guilty that you're not in the community that your parents grew up in, that your grandparents grew up in.

You feel guilty that you've maybe stepped away from some traditions that you used to practice as you were growing up, and so now you feel a sense of guilt that you don't do those anymore, that you're not introducing your kids to those. There's this Southern Indiana guilt, and it takes shape in a lot of different ways in our part of the world, in our neck of the woods, as you might say, we feel survivor's guilt, parental guilt. Thinking back on maybe how we've raised our kids, things that we did said, things that we didn't do, didn't say. We can feel financial guilt, feel guilty for money that we spent on something, or feel guilty that we didn't put enough back. We feel guilty that maybe we saved and we should have.

Maybe in that moment spent instead, we can have all kinds of reasons why we feel guilt. We talk about guilty pleasures that we have. We use guilt as a weapon against somebody to maybe get them to do what we want them. Another word for that is manipulation.

We know what it's like to feel guilty for things that we have done, things that we haven't done. We feel guilty for things that we have said, things that we haven't said. We feel guilty because we are exhausted and we don't feel like we have anything to give at the end of the day. But then we also feel guilty for resting on a Saturday afternoon instead of doing some work around the house. We feel guilty because we think that we're not enough.

We show up in a room and we feel guilty thinking that we need to be more. Or we feel guilty because we show up in a room and we feel like we are too much. Our burdens, our cares, the things that we're going through in life, it's just a little bit too much. And the people that we're with, they don't want to know about that. They don't want to walk through it with us.

So we feel guilty. And for some of us, we may say, that is like our default setting is to feel guilt. And guilt might be one of the most universal experiences that we have. Maybe you're sitting here right now feeling guilty for all of the things that you feel guilty about. We feel that we know what it's like to feel guilty for something that we did or said or didn't do or did say.

And we usually think of guilt as a. As a negative emotion. And to be fair, guilt very quickly moves into being a negative thing in our life. But I just want to start the sermon this morning by telling us, I think that there's actually a place where guilt is good in our life. Guilt can actually be a gift.

Like, we would be concerned about somebody if they did something to hurt someone else and didn't feel a sense of guilt about it. Guilt is a good motivator in our life. It's a horrible motivator to use in somebody else's life. But it can be a good motivator in our life after we have maybe lied to somebody, broken their trust, we've hurt them in some way. That feeling of guilt that we have welling up inside of us could actually be a voice of conviction.

Our conscience that God has given us that's saying, hey, you need to go and do something about this. You need to take a step and make this right. You need to ask for that person's forgiveness. You need to try to reconcile this relationship. And so, in a way, guilt can be like a warning light on our dashboard that's flashing, saying, hey, something is off, Something's not working, and you need to do something about it.

And so guilt can be that gift that spurs us on to do the next right thing after maybe we've blown it. But guilt can also be a burden. And my guess is that this is the type of guilt that we're most familiar with. It's that type of guilt that lingers. It's that type of guilt that consumes us.

Unresolved guilt can settle into our soul. It can eat away at us.

Unresolved guilt can be a burden and not just the relationship. Maybe that was like broken by our sinful behavior. But guilt has a way, when we let it live inside of us, it leaks into other relationships. It has a way of influence in how we think about ourselves, how we think about others, how we relate to other people and to ourselves.

Guilt becomes a burden when it stems from trying to live up to the unrealistic expectations that others put on us or that we put on ourselves.

And so we feel guilty for not living up to what others want us to be or do. It's the mom who feels guilty for taking an hour to herself. It's the dad who feels guilty for resting on a beautiful Saturday afternoon when he can think about all of the things outside that needs to be done.

And maybe you look at your current situation in life, whatever age and stage you're in, and you feel guilty that you're not in a different place, that you don't have more, do more, that you don't feel like you are enough or more, you feel like you've squandered opportunities and you feel guilty about it. And so, yeah, guilt can be a gift, but man, it can really be a burden that wears us down. It can leave us feeling like we are drowning in regrets.

And so what do we do with our sense of guilt? Well, I'm glad that you asked. A couple of things. Here's what we try to do. One of the things that we try to do is we just deny it.

Like, ah, it's not really that big of a deal. What I did was not that bad. I'm fine. Nothing is wrong. We deny our actions that maybe led to our guilt, or we deny that, that we wrestle with guilt anyway.

We say, oh, I'm just being humble, or, you know, I'm letting God convict me when it's actually stewing inside of us. And it's a way of denying the guilt that we feel. Another thing that we can do is justify it. Boy, if you knew what that person did to me, then you would understand why I did what I did to them. I was under a lot of stress.

We become our own defense attorney and we justify our actions and we write them off as we were in the right and they were in the wrong. Another thing that we do is we numb it. We can numb that guilt that we feel. We don't want to feel it, but we don't know what to do with it. And so we just try to drown it out.

We stay busy. We keep scrolling. Shopping, drinking, binging, working, whatever it is. We just try to numb the guilt to make it go away.

We try to outperform our guilt. If we feel guilty for not being enough, then we overcompensate by trying to be more than enough, to be better, to do better, to do more, to work harder. We try to prove our worth to everybody. We outperform our guilt. And then finally we.

We maybe punish ourselves for it, for what we've done. We take the blame, and so we inflict the punishment. We beat ourselves up. We talk to ourselves in ways that we would never talk to anybody else.

We feel like if we're just bad enough or if we feel bad enough for long enough that maybe we'll be able to get rid of our guilt.

If you've ever, like, gone to one of these five things or really anything else that didn't make the list, you know that they're limited. Like, at best, at best, they can help you manage your guilt, but they're not going to take it away. I mean, eventually you're going to come back to yourself and you're going to find yourself continuing to deal with the things that you were dealing with. The guilt is going to come flooding right back. But the gospel gives us a better way of how to handle our guilt.

It's not any of these. The gospel's answer to our guilt is grace. It's grace. You see, the gospel is honest. One of the reasons why I love scripture so much is because it does not shy away to who we are, to who I am.

The Scripture is very honest about our sin, about how when we sin, not only do we sin against God, but we sin against others. We add to the brokenness and the pain of another person's Life. And Romans 3:23 says that all of us have sinned and all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. It is the universal condition. We have all gone our own way.

We have done our own thing. We have acted outside of the way that God created us to live. And our sin breaks our relationship with God and with others. And Scripture teaches that justice is demanded for our sin. Our actions added to the brokenness and pain of this world.

And something needs to be done about it. And we can try to manage our guilt. We can try to fix it on our own. But Scripture says that God took care of it, for Jesus, took our guilt to the cross so that we don't have to carry the weight of it anymore.

And we can be motivated by our guilt to do the right thing to. To. To make amends for what we have done. But we do not have to be burdened by carrying it around with us anymore. We don't have to feel like we have to deal with it or fix it ourselves.

We don't have to live up to the unrealistic, expect others or ourself, hoping that we can earn the approval of God or another person in our life. Jesus took our sin. Jesus took our shame. Jesus took our guilt to the cross so that we don't have to bear it anymore. That is grace.

And grace lets me lay down what Jesus took up for me.

One of the most beautiful messages of the Gospel, that I don't have to carry it anymore. I can lay it down because Jesus took it up for me. He took it up for you. One of my favorite passages that speaks to this is our text for today in Romans chapter 5.

This passage is one that's made a pretty profound impact in my life.

I just want to read it for us again as we get into it. So listen to these words. Follow along. If you have your Bible open, we'll have the words up on the screen as well. This is what Paul writes.

Therefore he's gone through these first four chapters just real quick, talking about our need for a Savior that we can't save ourself by. By the law, by doing good things. We need Jesus. Jesus came and, and. And so now we can find new righteousness in him and, and.

And salvation in him. And so then Paul says, therefore since we have been justified, say that word with me. Justified through faith. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

Verse 1 says that through our faith in Jesus we have been justified. Such a key word not just in this passage, but in Scripture. For those of us who are following Jesus. This is a word that meets us in the front lines of our faith. It says something to us today.

The new Living Translation translates verse one as we have been made right in God's sight. And that's a really good way to translate that word. The word justified means to be made just as if I'd never sinned. To be made in this way just as if I had never sinned. I know myself, I know my sin.

But my faith in Jesus has justified me, has made me through God's grace, just as if I'd never sinned. And if you have put your faith in Jesus, if you hold onto his death, burial and resurrection for your hope, the sin same is true for you. You have been made just as if you had never sinned. And what I love about this word and about how Paul writes this verse is that he's not talking about something that is going to happen one day. He's not talking about something that will happen when we all get to heaven.

He. He is talking about a reality in your life right now. You have been justified. You have been made through your faith in Jesus just as if you had never sinned, which means you are justified. Current state, present relationship with God.

You have been made just as if you'd never sinned. That when God sees you, he does not see all of those things on you. He sees Jesus in you, who has taken all of those away. And you now stand in freedom and forgiveness before him so we can lay down that guilt because Jesus took it up for us. He took our sin and our shame and our guilt to the cross.

He paid the punishment that we deserve so that we could have new life, resurrection, life. In the verse before ours, Paul writes, he Jesus was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification, to make us just as if we'd never sinned. The good news of the gospel is Jesus taking what he did not deserve and giving us what we do not deserve. And so grace lets me lay down what Jesus took up for me. I can ask for forgiveness when I've hurt others.

I can seek to make it right when I feel that tinge of guilt inside of me. But I don't have to live there. You don't have to live there. I don't have to carry my guilt around with me anymore. I have been forgiven and set free from it.

I've been justified through faith in Jesus. So I don't have to hide anymore, and neither do you. There's so much freedom in that. Father's day always makes me reflect. Obviously, my own dad, who we've got a story, as every I imagine father son relationship does.

But I'm grateful for him for the model that he was, for the ways that he has shaped and formed me into the man that I am today. I'm grateful for him. But I also think on days like today of not just my own dad, but I think of like the spiritual fathers in my life who have poured themselves into me, who have invested in me, who have Helped me be a better follower of Jesus, a better husband, father, pastor, a couple of guys that I've sent a text to even this morning, just saying, hey, thanks for being a spiritual father in my life, for teaching me how to pray, for showing up when life was hard. I hope you have some guys like that in your life as well. One of the guys is a man named Bo Baron, who got to know when I was in Owensboro.

These were in the early days of my ministry. I was a middle school minister, which means that I mostly spent Sunday mornings with middle schoolers, which was. Was awesome until it wasn't anymore. And I'm like, I need to find something else. But I'd spend Sunday mornings with them, and every now and then, every now and then, I would get called up to the big leagues and be asked to preach on a Sunday morning.

And it was usually on that Sunday in between Christmas and, like, the beginning of the new year. We jokingly refer to that as National Youth Minister Sunday, because, you know, youth minister typically preaches across all churches on that Sunday morning. Sometimes it was that July 4th weekend, Labor Day weekend, and I would just kind of be called up and I'd get to preach on one of those days. And it was one of those mornings I was preaching on something. I don't really remember what it was, but I said something that must have revealed my lack of understanding of God's grace, quite honestly.

What it was, it was just bad theology.

And after the sermon was over, I kind of painted this picture that God loves us, but he really just kind of tolerates us. I didn't mean to, but that was the message that I'd gotten across and some of the ways that I talked about it. And Beau came up to me after the service. And Beau was a young guy. He's a little bit older than me, but he's a Marine.

Just pretty intense. And Beau was like, hey, that's a really interesting thing that you preached about. Where did you find that in Scripture? Like, oh, no.

And he's like, why don't you look for it and let's get together for breakfast this week? And so we got together, and he's like, all right, so show me. Where is that? And I'm like, yeah, I was wrong. He's like, I know.

I'm glad you know now. Let me tell you about grace. And Beau didn't just talk to me about grace. He didn't just read a couple of passages. Beau poured the next several months into me, teaching me not just head knowledge about grace.

But how to actually allow that to shape my life and how I live and how I pastor and how I love my family and view myself. One of the first things that BO did was he made me memorize our passage for today. He made me memorize this passage. And he. And he talked about what justification means.

And he helped me understand that when we put our faith in Jesus and follow him, we are not who we used to be. God doesn't just tolerate us. He flings the doors wide open and says, welcome in. He makes us new. Not he will make us new.

He is making us new in this moment, right here, right now. And that is good news for us today.

And we see some outcomes from justification in our passage that I just want to highlight as we wrap up this morning. First, because of our justification being made just as if we had never sinned through Jesus, we are at peace with God in our sin. Scripture says that we are God's enemies. We have chosen our way over His. We are fighting for our kingdom instead of living in his kingdom.

But our faith in Jesus brings us peace between us and God. And this word peace, There's a few different words in Greek for peace, and this is not the one that's like translated kind of shalom in the Old Testament. That's like inner peace. This is a peace that is used when two countries are at war with one another and they call a truce and the war ceases. That's the kind of peace.

That's the word that Paul uses in this passage. There's no longer enmity between us and God through our faith in Jesus. We are no longer his enemies. We are his friends. The war is over.

The conflict is resolved, settled. We are justified. We are at peace with God. Current state of being not will be. We are.

We stand before him not on our own merit, not on the own good that we have done. We stand before him on grace, God's unmerited favor for us. One commentary put it like this, that we get to experience all the blessings of being in that relationship with Him. And grace gives us a foothold in the door that one day will swing wide to permit the enjoyment of the glorious presence of the Almighty and a privilege to be enjoyed forevermore. And so not only are we at peace with God, but we now have access to the Father.

That's another thing that Paul says in this verse. By this grace in which we now stand, we have access to the Father. We can approach him with confidence both now and. And on that day when we stand before Him. And so by faith in Jesus, man, this text tells us you are justified, made just as if you had never sinned.

You are at peace with God, no longer his enemy, but his friend. And you have access to the Father who pours out his blessing on you both now and for all eternity. That is who you are in Christ. And so if God is no longer holding your sin against you, then why are you, why are you still living in guilt? Why are you still living in shame?

Why do I continue to walk in this when I know what God's word says? I know what my faith in Jesus has made me?

Why do I continue to carry this guilt? Why do you and not the guilt that motivates us to make amends and do the right thing again, I think that there's a place for that. But why do I continue to linger? And why do we beat ourselves up over the things that we've done? The people that we were robbing us of, the blessing of a new life in Christ?

I think somewhere along the way we bought into this idea that feeling guilty and following Jesus go hand in hand. That you're not really following Jesus unless you feel just a little bit of guilt for the things that you've done. Unless you feel a little bit of guilt for the things that you've said that you're not doing it right. Unless you feel this low grade sense of guilt. The scripture says that it is for freedom that we have been set free.

Continuing to carry our guilt. Listen, is not a sign of humility or a godly life. If anything, continuing to carry our guilt diminishes the work that Jesus did for us on the cross. It diminishes the sufficiency of, of grace. It is saying, listen, the, the cross was not enough.

I need to also feel really bad about what I did to atone for my sin. And God's saying, no, I have freed you from that. Yes, let it motivate you and change who you are becoming. But don't wallow in who you used to be. You have been set free from that.

Live in my grace. Grace invites us to lay down what Jesus took up and carried for us to the cross. We can now walk in his freedom. We can boast not in our own good work, but in his good work for us. We can be honest about our mistakes.

We can go and we can reconcile and we can ask for forgiveness because we don't have to have it all together and be right all the time. We have been set free from those things. It's not where our identity is we have been justified. We are at peace with God. We have access to this grace through Jesus.

You have access to this grace through Jesus. So I just want to read our passage one more time as I wrap up this morning. Romans 5:1 2.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith and to this grace in which we now stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. The gospel does not tell guilty people to try harder. It tells guilty people where to find rest. Not rest that we can enjoy someday down the road after we die, but rest that meets us right here in the front lines of our life as we wrestle through guilt. And what do we do with this man?

The invitation of the gospel is to. To bring it to him, to seek him for forgiveness and grace and new life. The Gospel invites us to find rest for our souls today, right here, right now. And through faith in Jesus, it's what we can find. And we don't have to carry it anymore.

If you're here today and you're ready to find that rest, maybe you've been wandering, you've been doing all of the other things to try to manage your guilt, and it's just not working. I want to invite you to stop chasing after that, those fixes, start chasing after Jesus. The door is open. The invitation is yours to come and to follow him. And if you are ready to do that, to lay down your guilt and your shame and experience his forgiveness.

We'll have some people around the room with lanyards that would love to lead you in that next step. Maybe it's getting baptized, maybe it's just praying, God, help me to receive that grace afresh. We're gonna come to a time of communion. We've got some stations up front and in the back. And in a moment, just get up.

Whenever you're ready, grab a cup, take it back. And one side there's some bread that helps us remember his body that was given. The other side, some juice that helps us remember his blood that was shed for us. And just take a moment to thank God that through faith in Jesus and what he did for you, you stand today just as if you'd never sinned. And God is pleased with you.

He loves you. Let's thank him for that. God, thank you for doing what we could not do on our own. We could not right our wrongs.

We could not get rid of our guilt and our shame. And so, God, you sent your son, Jesus to do that for us. To take on himself what he did not deserve and give us what we do not deserve. New life, freedom and forgiveness. And we now stand in that today.

And Lord, I know our enemy, Satan, wants nothing more than for us to just continue to. To be just absorbed and consumed by our guilt. Because it keeps us from living in the freedom that you've given us. Oh, but Lord, today may just well up in us anew that you are making us new. You have set us free from that and that we don't have to walk in it anymore.

And so we celebrate that and we remember that now during this time, meet us in this place in Jesus name. Amen.