A Negative Emotion Called Guilt

We are guilty people. We are guilty of bad thoughts, false statements, and hurtful deeds. Mostly, we are guilty before a pure and holy God. We have sinned. We have fallen short of God's perfect ideal. We stand in the need of forgiveness and grace.

David, the man after God's own heart, knew the magnitude of guilt and the need for amazing grace. This sermon will remind the hearer of David's sin with Bathsheba and the steps he took to remove the guilt of that sin. Our story is intertwined within David's story. God's love and forgiveness seeps out through the seams to refresh our hearts and eradicate our sin.

One day, Noel Coward, the famous playwright, pulled an interesting prank. He sent an identical note to twenty of the most famous men in London. The anonymous note read simply: "Everybody has found out what you are doing. If I were you I would get out of town."

Supposedly, all twenty men actually left town.

What if we opened your mail one day and found such a note? What would go through our mind?

Guilt is the dread of the past; a pain that wells up within our heart because we committed an offense or failed to do something right. It is a pain. Guilt is one of the most crippling diseases among people today.

Psychiatrists and doctors say that unresolved guilt is the number one cause of mental illness and suicide. The average person spends approximately two hours a day feeling guilty. And for 39 minutes of that time, people feel moderate to severe guilt.

Like pain, guilt tells us when something is wrong. When you feel it, you don't just sit there, you do something about it.

Sometimes we try to escape from guilt through activities, alcohol, or drugs. Or we run to psychiatrists-but secular psychiatry has tried to solve the problem of guilt by saying there is no such thing as sin.

Cont. on The Pain of Guilt