Guilt and Encouragement

If you look to the right, a post by Kevin DeYoung, titled Are Christians Meant to Feel Guilty All The Time? is going viral among Reformed Blogs. I wanted to reference it as well, encourage you to look at it, and dig slightly deeper into one comment I think appropriate for youth.

In short, DeYoung states that guilt is a natural consequence of sin. But yet, he writes, "I don’t believe God redeemed us through the blood of his Son that we might feel like constant failures." He goes on to list four reasons constant guilt might plague Christians:

1. We don't fully embrace the good news of the gospel.

2. Christians tend to motivate each other by guilt rather than grace.

3. Most of our low-level guilt falls under the ambiguous category of “not doing enough.

4. When we are truly guilty of sin it is imperative we repent and receive God’s mercy.

As someone who works with students - who live in a culture defined by acceptance and exclusion - the 2nd point is one which rings loudly. We spend so much of our time picking apart the failures of fellow Christ-followers, while very rarely encouraging them to live in light of the redemption we profess.

It's a sad fact of modern Christianity that God often seems to have a higher view of His redeemed children than do their fellow Christians. That God, the Most Holy and Just, would look on sinners with more acceptance and grace than those caught in the same sin is a testimony to the redemptive grace of Christ's sacrificial death.

The need for encouragement in the modern church is reaching an all-time high. We feel like islands, alone in a turbulent sea of culture, each trying to testify to God's GRACE, but each failing; and then having our failures exposed by other sinners trying, and failing, to testify to grace; and we feel miserable all the while.

It's time we encourage, support, and come along-side one another as we testify to grace which saves struggling sinners - yes, even struggling Christians.