Read: Acts 26

Of all the human emotions, guilt is among the least welcome and the most crushing. That is not the way it has to be. Our guilt can introduce us to God's grace, and grace can introduce us to a great calling.

Prayer - Merciful GOD, turn our ears away from the voices of condemnation and shame, that we may see Jesus Christ, and hear the Holy Spirit who whispers in our ear the good news of salvation. In His Name, Amen.

Today’s text gives us the third account of Paul’s (aka Saul) conversion in the book of Acts. It is the second time Paul gives his testimony since he was arrested, twice in four chapters. This time, Paul stands before King Agrippa and his wife who are in town on a royal visit. King Agrippa is intrigued by Paul’s story, and he wishes to meet Paul for himself. In a ceremony of pomp and circumstance, Paul is brought before Agrippa to tell his story.

It is not a new story. We’ve heard much of it before, but each time Paul tells an authentic story that is sensitive both to his hearers and is truthful to his experience. Every time, Paul begins by describing his persecution of the church. “I did many things against The Name of Jesus of Nazareth. I locked up many saints in prison. I cast my vote against them that were being condemned to death” (Acts 26:9-10). Luke already has told us that Paul held the coats of those who stoned Stephen to death (Acts 7:57). Paul makes it clear that he was so “furiously enraged” against the church that he traveled to foreign countries even to try and extinguish it (Acts 26:11).

The most striking thing about all of these testimonies is that Paul never demonstrates any sense of shame. Honesty, yes. Shame, no. The church that he now leads, he formerly tried to destroy. Both men and women lost their lives because of Paul. Yet, we do not hear dark remorse in Paul’s speeches. He admits he was wrong, and even calls himself the “chief of sinners.” But I do not get the sense that Paul is plagued by guilt over his past sins. Yet we sometimes are. We commit a sin and live with it the rest of our lives. But this is not what God wants (Romans 6:1-7). God wants to call you to a new purpose.

Most of us live with so much guilt that it runs out of our ears. We feel guilty constantly for what we have done, and what we have left undone. We feel guilty for our failures, and sometimes feel guilty for our success. We feel guilty that we have so much when others have so little. We feel guilty about the sins we committed, the opportunities we missed, the mistakes we made, and the people we hurt. We wish we could have been better parents, better children, or better lovers. We’re all carrying around a lot of baggage.

Yet for all the horrible things Paul did to the church, he seems to not be weighed down with the baggage. After all that he had done! What happened to the guilt?

Theologians distinguish two types of guilt: false guilt and true guilt. False guilt, or inappropriate guilt, is a sense of shame because of the judgments of someone else. We are particularly susceptible to this when we have been judged by someone we love who tells us that we aren’t good enough, pretty enough, or smart enough. You feel shame because you did not make the team, or because you didn’t get into the college you wanted to attend, or because someone made you feel ugly. When you hear those words as a child or a teenager, you carry them with you the rest of your life. Those evaluations stay with us as long as we live. Someone around you is always ready to judge you to be inadequate, and that can leave you with a crippling sense of guilt. But that is not how the Bible understands guilt, or shame (Hebrews 12:1-3).

True guilt, or appropriate guilt, comes not from the judgment of others but of God. The Bible is most concerned about disappointing the God we serve. The ultimate sin and the cause of true guilt in Scripture is our refusal to live our lives in dependency on Jesus Christ.Having determined that we will save ourselves, we hurt all sorts of people and tell lots of lies, not the least of which are the lies we tell ourselves. We will tell ourselves that we are on our own, that it is up to us to fix our sins. But as King David discovered, the only way to manage your sins is with more sin! In Psalm 51, David cries out to God, “Have mercy on me, O God . . . I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against You, You alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight.”

So we may hurt others, but our true guilt, the core of all sin, is that we have hurt our relationship with God.

When we think about guilt, we tend to make two opposite mistakes:

1.  The first mistake (legalists). We set up standards of what religious people are supposed to look like. These become standards of morality, or spirituality, or commitment that no one will ever meet. Instead of acknowledging that we can’t meet them, we prefer to just keeping hearing how we should have. If I were a fundamentalist preacher, I would have one basic sermon every Sunday, “Bad dog!” “Bad dog!” “Bad dog!”

Instead of becoming transformed people through honest confession and transformation, we just become secret people. We learn to look religious and pretend that we are not as bad as we are. We learn all the right language, but it really is just a pietistic wrapping paper to cover over who we really are. Deep in our hearts we have internalized a lot of false guilt, which then leaves us depressed, angry and terrified that we will be discovered for who we really are.

The chief mistake of this approach to guilt is that, it not only causes people to live as a false self before others, but it also lures them into thinking that they can live with a false self before God.

When we hold up this religious standard of behavior without confession and authenticity, the false guilt often can lead us to a crushing shame because then we live in shame before others and also before God. All of life is swept up in the energy of keeping the secret. The result is a life lived in the darkness of depression, anger, and anxiety. That kind of false piety and secret shame is far from biblical guilt, but it is a kind especially rampant in church' today.

2.  The opposite mistake (liberals): is to designate ourselves as guilt-free zones. These Christians approach guilt as if there really is no such thing as sin. “It really doesn’t matter how you live as long as you are sincere and don’t hurt anyone else.” You can set your own ethical standards, or not have any standards at all, as long you are honest. “Trust your instincts” is the liberal mantra. But do we really want to trust our instincts? That can get you into all kinds of trouble. Just ask your dog!

How we feel can cause us to hurt when we have been hurt. How we feel can cause us to drift out late at night to find someone to take away the loneliness. How we feel can cause us to hoard money because we are afraid of the future.

One way in which we are more than an animal, the way in which we are a human in the image of God, is to be able to rise above our feelings and instincts to choose something higher. The refusal to deal with your wrong choices and the guilt that follows them will never draw you closer to God.

So how do we deal with guilt? I believe that we should not add to our guilt, as fundamentalists do, or to pretend there is no guilt, as the liberals do. Because of those approaches begin and end with one person in mind: me. And I can never find the place of freedom from shame as long as I’m focusing on me.

The only solution is to turn away from ourselves and toward Jesus Christ, The Only One Who can absolve you of your true guilt and put you on a new road of mission and purpose.

Listen again to Paul’s story. After listing all of his persecutions against the church, he then goes on to say that as he was traveling on the road to Damascus to drag more followers of Christ to jail, he was interrupted by a blinding light from heaven and The Voice of Jesus Christ saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Paul’s sin wasn’t against the church. It was against Jesus Christ. And that is true sin and true guilt.

Notice with me here for a few minutes how different this testimony is from the typical evangelical testimony. First, Paul never describes how miserable life was before he met Jesus Christ. “I was depressed and miserable. Then I met Jesus. Now my life is happy and fulfilled.”

That kind of testimony may be heard on Christian talk radio, but you will never hear it from the mouth of Paul. He doesn’t portray his life before Christ as lacking anything. He was not miserable. He was doing his best to live life the way he understood it should be lived for God. He was not searching for anything. But God was searching for him, and one day on the Damascus road The Savior found Paul. (Acts 26:12-20)

But Paul’s testimony did not follow the testimonial plot of misery then self-actualization. Willimon in his commentary on Acts sets up Paul’s Christian radio interview like this:

The Christian talk show host smiled and said, “We are so thrilled to have a famous Christian with us today to share his testimony with us – Saint Paul. (Applause).
“Tell us, Paul – or should I call you ‘Saint’ or ‘Apostle’?
“Paul the Pharisee would be fine,” Paul answers.
“Great! Paul, tell us about all the wonderful things that happened to you when The Lord Jesus came into your life.”
“Well, let’s see. First, I went blind. I got over that but then somebody tried to kill me and I had to escape in a basket. Then they stoned me. I have been mobbed, accused, and broke. That is what happened since Jesus came into my life.”

Now that characterization is a bit of a stretch of course. Paul does say in other texts that peace, joy, kindness, patience and other virtues began to flood his life because of Jesus Christ. But these were not the reasons he turned from persecuting the disciples to be a disciple being persecuted. It was not because Christianity is “the truth” or because he was looking for something to change his miserable existence. It was because he had a personal experience of the resurrected Christ, and that experience was the bedrock upon which he understood his faith.

By grace, Jesus brought Paul out of a darkness he did not know into The Light. That is how you and I will meet The Savior too. God will come to us, even when we least expect it, and it will be your experience of Him that will serve as the grounding of your faith.

But before grace (forgiveness) comes to us, first, prosecution: 'why are you persecuting Me?' then judgment: 'It was Jesus Christ that you persecuted.' That type of guilt is honest and also redemptive. It blinds (Acts 9:9; Acts 9:17-18) us with the discovery that we have been running away from God, and frees us to walk away from the lies and shame into a great healing of our sin and a great calling on our lives.

Jesus deals with our guilt – not like the fundamentalists who wish to add to it, and not like the liberals who want to wish it away – but by telling us the truth about our sin and the greater truth of His forgiveness (Acts 2:38).

It is at this point that Paul’s testimony differs again from the typical testimony, and even from his prior testimonies in Acts. The focus of this testimony is not so much on the sin that he left but on the calling he found – not so much on the sin as on The Savior. Jesus tells Paul what he had done, then I love the next phrase, “Get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen Me and to those in which I will appear to you.” It is not the ministry of Jesus to beat us down with a crushing guilt but to get us back on our feet for a life of service and mission.

What grace removes from us is not guilt, which can continue to guide us to God, but shame. Shame is the humiliating condemnation that beats down our souls. But as Paul tells us in Romans 8, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ.” Jesus does not use guilt to shame us but to grace us – to show us The Light and then the freedom to return to the place where we know we are the beloved ones of God. You get to that place, not by trying harder, not by covering over your sin, or not by trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. You get to that place when God forgives you and then adopts you by the act of Jesus Christ for you (Romans 5:6-11). You have to turn from focusing on your guilt to focusing on your Redeemer.

So it doesn’t matter to The LORD what you have done if you repent (Acts 2:38; Acts 3:19). What matters is what God has done in finding you. Your responsibility is not to get free of or hide your guilt, or to spend your life atoning for it. The way to deal with guilt is to turn to The Savior, where there is no more shame and leave it at His feet in repentance. In Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. That is the true Gospel.

Amy Grant wrote a song that she recorded on her latest CD. The song is called “Out in the Open,” and the last verse goes:

        For the sake of never making waves, I kept secrets to myself
        And no one ever really knew the darker shadows of my heart.
        But I will be a witness that there’s nothing in me dark enough
        The power of forgiveness cannot rescue from the deep.
        So I’m standing here and spinning ‘round in the fields of freedom
        And I’m still alive and reach out and I can feel the healing.
        Cause you say Come on out, come on out, into The Light.

Once you have seen the risen Jesus Christ, you know that it was darkness where you dwelled without Him. The only way to move from the shame of that darkness to a saving grace is to come on out into The Light. Bring everything you are and all that you have done. There is no darkness in you that forgiveness can’t heal. It is in The Light that you can get back on your feet, and finally, stand.

But the point of your salvation was never to just redeem you from something; it was to reconcile you to God and to a life of purpose and service for which He created you in Christ Jesus before you were born (Since before the beginning of time! Ephesians 2:10). Now that is a testimony.

Jesus Christ has come looking for you. So come on out, come on out into The Light (John 1).

» Back to top