In my recent post entitled God Doesn’t Want You to Forgive Yourself, I argued that the concept of “forgiving yourself” is not only unbiblical but counterproductive to growing in your faith.  In this follow-up, I wanted to address the pain and guilt that leads people to feel like they must forgive themselves even though they know God has already forgiven them.

What I do appreciate about encouraging hurting people to forgive themselves is that there’s a recognition that something is not right.  If after you’ve confessed your sin to God and to others you still feel a paralyzing guilt, an ingredient is missing.  But if that ingredient isn’t forgiving yourself, then what is it?

A passage from Matthew’s gospel I think gives us a good answer.  Matthew 9:1-8 is the famous story of the paralytic who was brought by his friends to Jesus in the hopes that he would be healed:

…And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.’  And behold, some of the scribes said to themselves, ‘This man is blaspheming.’  But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?  For which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven, or to say, “Rise and walk?”  But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ -he then said to the paralytic- ‘Rise, pick up your bed and go home.’ And he rose and went home.  When the crowds saw it, they were afraid, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

What exactly is going on here?  While Matthew only writes that the Pharisees called Jesus a blasphemer, Luke (and Mark for that matter) fills out the picture a little more about why Jesus was accused of blasphemy: “And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, ‘Who is this who speaks blasphemies?  Who can forgive sins but God alone?’” (Luke 5:21)  As I wrote in the previous entry on this topic, since all sin is ultimately against God (Ps.51:4), only God can offer forgiveness of sins.  The Pharisees understood this well, which is why they accused Jesus of blasphemy when he claimed to forgive the paralytic’s sins.  He was claiming the ability to do something only God could do.

But there’s more to the story than this.  Any nut can claim to forgive a person’s sins.  So Jesus backs up his claim by healing the paralytic.  Why is this relevant to him claiming to be able to forgive sin?  Michael Green explains:

There was a deeply rooted conviction in Judaism that all suffering was a result of personal sin, and that nobody could be cured until he or she was forgiven.  For instance, Rabbi Chija ben Abba said, ‘No sick person is cured from sickness until all his sins have been forgiven him.’  Rabbi Alexander agreed: ‘The sick does not arise from his sickness until his sins are forgiven.’

The scribes and Pharisees felt that since Jesus had blasphemed God, he would not be able to heal the man.  So by healing the paralytic’s illness, Jesus was proving his authority to cleanse the man’s deepest and most difficult paralysis: sin.  It was his moment of vindication.

So what does this story have to say to those who struggle with lingering guilt?

First, it serves as a reminder that only the one sinned against can offer pardon for sin.  Jesus has authority to forgive sins, and he promises to permanently wipe clean the sins of anyone who comes to him (John 6:37).  He promises to cleanse us of our sins when we confess them (1 John 1:9), and as a child of God he separates our sins from us as far as the east is from the west (Psa. 103:12).

Secondly, in light of this it also reminds us of a huge truth: You are who God says you are and nothing less.  If you know that God forgives you but you struggle to forgive yourself, you need to start looking in a new mirror.  You’ve too long been looking in a mirror that reflects a failure, an addict, a pervert, a drunk, a whatever….  It’s a false mirror though.  It’s the mirror Satan wants you to look in.  But God holds up a different mirror.  Looking into it, you see Christ.  You see sinlessness, perfection, holiness, and a royal child of the Most High God.  Yes, I know you still sin.  And God knows and is grieved by those sins you still commit.  However, when it comes to your eternal salvation, God is judging you by the perfect life lived by Jesus.

Third and finally, I think this passage illustrates well the missing ingredient that people are looking for when they feel like they have to forgive themselves.  The greatest need of the paralytic was the same as ours: forgiveness for the sins which have made us enemies of a holy God.  Jesus provided this ultimate need for the paralytic, and if you’re a believer in Christ he did the same for you.  But he didn’t stop there.  He healed the man’s paralysis, and commanded him: “Rise, pick up your bed and go home.”  And the guy freaking did.  If you have truly confessed your sins to God, you’re forgiven.  And now Christ is commanding you to live in light of your new-found freedom.

God has forgiven you, and now you must rest in his forgiveness.  Instead of trying to forgive yourself, rise, pick up your bed, and start walking like a forgiven person.  Stop lying down on your bed dwelling on your former paralysis after Jesus has commanded you to rise, and accept the fact that you have new freedoms.  Every command that Christians are given in the New Testament stems first from who we now are because of our union with Christ.  For example the first three chapters of Ephesians are all devoted to reminding believers of what God has done for them and what is now true of them as a result of his work.  It isn’t until the last three chapters that all the commands start.  The point is that we can only ever do anything of worth for the Lord by first comprehending what he has done for us. (Eph.2:8-10)  As a child of God, the Bible says far greater things about you than you would ever dare believe about yourself.  And it’s belief in those things that’s the missing ingredient when you feel the need to forgive yourself.  Stated positively, when you accept who God says you are, you won’t feel the need to forgive yourself.

“‘I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.’”
-Isaiah 43:25

If you’ve ever listened to a John Piper sermon, you’ve probably heard him talk about fighting sin by replacing sinful desires with superior pleasure in the glory of God for his supremacy manifested through Christ to the nations for his global cause.  (If you’ve listened to him, you get the joke.  If you haven’t, that didn’t make sense.  Keep reading!)  Basically, we grow in Christlikeness and experience victory over the sins we’ve been enslaved to by learning to find more joy in God than in sin (a process called “sanctification”).

A huge ally in the sanctification process is hatred of sin.  And while many Christians struggling with habitual sin know that they should hate their sin enough to forever flee from it, the reality is that a part of them still loves it.  And that can be confusing.  How can you love God so much, read his Word all the time, go to weekly accountability meetings, and still be enslaved to this sin?  Ultimately, I think it’s because we still love that sin deep down.  And I think the reason we still love it deep down is that we don’t hate it deep down. (Did I just blow your mind??)  So why don’t we hate it?

A big reason hatred for sin is lacking could be that we don’t see it for the cosmic treason that it is.  We give it less-than-horrible names and thus treat it lightly.  Or to say it another way, we just don’t call our sins for what they are, because to do so would be to face the ugly truth about ourselves.  Here are some examples of ways I’ve typically heard myself or others describe sin.

1. “I screwed up last night.”
2. “I’m struggling with anxiety.”
3. “I’m having a hard time getting in the Word.”
4. “Prayer hasn’t really been consistent.”

The problem with these phrases is that none of them sound that bad.  They succeed in getting across a “This isn’t ideal” vibe, but also a “Oh well no one’s perfect” one, and that’s the problem.  They don’t capture the magnitude of the fact that your sin cost Jesus his life.  Here’s the same list again, in the same order, worded now in such a way to capture what’s really going on:

1. “I looked at porn and masturbated.”
2. “I don’t trust in God’s goodness and provision.”
3. “Other things are just more important to me than God.”
4. “Prayer has no value to me.  I feel like God’s either not there or doesn’t care.”

Things like these are a lot harder to say.  The more specific we get with our sin, the more uncomfortable it becomes to confess it, because we’re starting to see it for what it really is.  The lines in the first list aren’t untrue.  But I don’t feel as terrible saying them since they’re sugar-coated.  When I go deeper though and say the words in the other list, I’m far more ashamed and disgusted.  It’s a lot more jolting.

Sin says something about how we view God.  When you’re anxious, you’re not really “struggling with anxiety.”  You’re struggling to believe that God loves you and is guiding your life according to his purposes.  When you’re “struggling” with inconsistent time in prayer, you’re struggling with a consistent arrogance that makes you feel like you don’t need God.  The tricky thing though is that we’re not always aware of these deeper heart issues.  Rather, things like praying to the almighty God of the universe are talked about in terms of personal discipline rather than personal obedience.  So when we’re not praying, we think the problem is our schedule (external) and not our hearts (internal).  And when we fail to pray, we feel like we’ve been defeated by something external rather than taking ownership for our own sin.  Jerry Bridges says it this way:

When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility.  I am saying something outside of me has defeated me.  But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me.  We may, in fact, be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey.

If we’re not calling sin for what it is and owning up to it, we’ll never learn to hate it.  Sin is personal, not abstract.  For example, if a wife catches her husband looking at porn, she’s going to take it personally.  What he’s doing says something about how he views her, in this case her desirability.  Similarly, sin says something about how we view God.  Struggling to find time to get in God’s Word isn’t primarily a discipline issue.  It’s an issue of you not finding God desirable enough to spend good quality time with him.

The process of sanctification is a long and painful one.  But it has an end, and it’s joyful along the way.  For the purposes of hating your sins and enjoying God, get good at calling sins for what they are.  And remember that the presence of the God you’ve offended is a safe place for doing that.

“Oh you who love the LORD, hate evil!”
-Psalm 97:10

I’ve heard it.  And you’ve heard it.  ”Yeah I know God forgives me.  I just can’t seem to forgive myself.”  One time I even heard a pastor counsel a friend of mine to forgive himself as he was burdened with the guilt of some recent sin in his life.  Is there any merit to this?  No, there’s not.  Not only that, I believe that harboring this kind of mindset is very dangerous in that it completely undermines the gospel.

I don’t want to be insensitive to the feelings that make one believe that they need to forgive themselves.  I’ve been there a million times.  You confessed your sin to God, asked him to forgive you for those sins, and yet you still feel horrible.  You can’t shake the guilt you feel over that sin.  It grips you and won’t let go.  What are we supposed to do with this?  Forgiving yourself not only won’t help you alleviate that guilt.  It will actually push you further away from comfort, because saying “I know God’s forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself” is a form of pride.  Here are five reasons this statement is misguided:*

1. It makes you a bigger judge than God.

You say “I know God forgives me…”  If you acknowledge this much, then you’re acknowledging that the highest judge in the universe has looked at you and declared you innocent.  Paul writes, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?  It is God who justifies.” (Rom.8:33)  In other words, if the highest judge justifies, who is going to contradict him?  You?  Fact: the highest court always overrules the lower ones.  If what God says about you isn’t the final word, then he’s not the highest court in your heart.  You are.

2. It shows that you’re trusting in something other than God for justification.

Sometimes what feels like guilt over sin is in actuality guilt over failing to achieve a goal you’ve set for yourself.  Timothy Keller, in his excellent book Counterfeit Gods, writes:

When people say, ‘I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,’ they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God’s.  Idols function like gods in our lives, and so if we make career or parental approval our god and we fail it, then the idol curses us in our hearts for the rest of our lives.  We can’t shake the sense of failure.

So you’re a seminary student, heavily involved in your church, a model of personal piety, and everyone looks to you for guidance.  Then one night you go a little too far with the godly woman you’ve been seeing.  You’re devastated.  You’ve confessed it to the Lord, but that doesn’t seem to be enough.  It could be that the guilt you feel isn’t from sinning against the Lord.  It could be that you haven’t lived up to who you have built yourself up to be in your mind: a super-godly person who would never do what you did.  In the words of David Powlison: “So often when people feel remorse for what they’ve done wrong, it is a remorse against their idealized self-image, a remorse in their own eyes, and a remorse against what other people think about them…”  None of which is remorse against God.

3. It means that your sin is a bigger deal to you than it is to God.

All sin is ultimately against God. (Ps. 51:4)  He above all is the one offended by your sin.  Your sin cost him his Son, and as a result of his sacrifice on the cross God now forgives you.  If you’re still trying to forgive yourself after he gave everything to forgive you, then that just means that your sin didn’t offend God as much as it offends you.  Mike Wilkerson notes that “[i]t is the height of self-centeredness to think your sin somehow offends you (or anyone else, even) more than it offends God.”

4. It could be a refusal to honestly confess your sin.

It’s worth considering that you may still feel unforgiven because you haven’t actually turned to God to confess and repent of your sin.  Plagued by the guilt of what you did or said, you figure that God is too mad to listen to you.  It’s “safer” instead to console yourself by distracting yourself from the guilt.  So instead of going into God’s presence you turn on the TV.  Instead of reading his Word, you read gossip articles online.  God = conviction = discomfort = finding something that won’t make you feel horrible.

“Without confession I will remain unforgiven,” Miroslav Volf writes, “not because God doesn’t forgive, but because a refusal to confess is a rejection of forgiveness.  Refusing to confess, I refuse to make forgiveness my own through confession of wrongdoing and joyful gratitude over it not being counted against me.”  (my emphasis)

5. It could be a form of works-based salvation.

We as Christians have a strange tendency to want to punish ourselves more than God wants to punish us.  We know that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1), but there’s just a really good feeling we get when we condemn ourselves anyway.  It feels…noble.  Humble.  Righteous even.  The more we punish ourselves for our sins, the more righteous we must be since righteous people hate sin, right?

But God doesn’t want us to do penance for our sins.  It’s one thing to mourn our sinful condition while keeping our eyes on Jesus and the fact that we’re getting credit for his life and not ours.  It’s something else entirely to feel like God will accept you more as you punish yourself more for sin.

“Jesus frees me from trying to impress God or others because he has impressed God on my behalf.”
-Jonathan Dodson

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*I’ve adapted this list from Mike Wilkerson’s book Redemption: Freed by Jesus From the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry, pages 78-80.