Guilt

In the United States and many parts of the world, it is considered prudish to have less than seven sexual partners.  No longer is promiscuity considered morally wrong, at least as it pertains to a standard derived from something less than the Bible.  There are other areas of behavior that are morally repugnant to a large portion of the population that would be odd concerns to any era but our own.  Feelings of guilt have not left us; they simply have become attached to new morality tenets that have surfaced in our time.    Would a couple ever before have felt guilty about having another child yet now many do!  Has there ever been an age where so much angst has been suffered over the military strength of one's own nation?  When did we start feeling guilty about expressing faith in Christ?  It is moral to send naked pictures of oneself by text but immoral to pass those naked pictures along to others.  There is a moral code to our world and it shifts about like seismic fissures.  The natural course is to make morality match one's behavior rather than the other way around.  In a social order that decides it is moral, what need is there for a God who dies for one's sins?  A god who powers success might be interesting or a deity that settles emotional instability could garner a following but a true Savior who wrecks ones inner world by becoming Lord is anathema to  moral self-determinists.  Satan does not want a guilty sinner and does his best to keep the fretting over right and wrong from the soul.  But once a man or woman faces the mirror of God's own justice and gains a fresh insight into what really is right and wrong, the sham is uncovered and the healthy guilt of the Holy Spirit descends.    We try so hard to be done with guilt but guilt is a window through which the light of God shines into the heart and reveals the true need of every soul, the need for Christ to bring salvation to the totality of life.

When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: 

John 16:8 NIV

Unperturbed

What seems to frustrate us most, at least for those who live actually, acknowledging  tragedy and wreckage are  the normal parts of life, is that we can't ever swing free of our troubles.  We may hide from them for a while or even make light of them as if we are indifferent to their bite but in the end troubles square us up and make full contact.  The soldier on the battlefield as well as the mother nursing her sickly child is matched up with troubles and they make a mockery of the misty dream-state concocted by teachers of Biblical positivism.  You would think, if you believed some, that the disciples never died, Mary Magdalene never got sick and John found Patmos a paradise.  It is there before us though.  We do get tired of our husband's mood swings, limp with arthritis and wake up to unemployment.  The bank does foreclose on our house and our daughter slams the door on us.  This stuff of life is here and we must recognize the root of it as it is.  We are a fool if we think Jesus never stubbed His toe, woke up with a migraine or failed to sway the crowd.  He, whose own brothers and sisters thought Him a fool and whose mother convinced herself He had lost His mind, lived out fully the farthest reach of sin and taking it within Himself buried that sin in the Cross.  Our sin has been crucified with Christ but its stench remains at every crack and mound.  Its damage remains like scars that seem to get worse with age.  What Jesus Christ has done for us though in taking our sin from us is make it possible for His life to live within ours, for Him to actually transform us that He and us become one new being.  This means that the same strength Christ had as He worked His way to Jerusalem is ours and the faith He had that made Him fearless as the storm threatened to swamp the boat where He slept is the faith we hold too.  We have no monstrosity to fear, no rejection to dread.  With Christ working His way through each part of us, we can be happy as sorrow strikes but not with the happiness of a lunatic but with the joy of the redeemed,  the joy flowing out of the One who has been baptized by death and come up again alive to the brim.  You can, in Christ, face your day not in some drunken stupor brought on by the old wine  you drank before but in the life you have now with the Lord Himself welling up as a fountain of Living water within you.  Drink deeply from that spring and face what comes to you with the strength God provides.  Nothing is too terrible to bear if Christ's very own blood flows through your veins.  It is not God who incites you to worry, not Christ who pushes dread upon you.  The word of God is always "fear not" just as surely as you breathe.  Don't dread the coming storm...be glad God has given you the opportunity to find out just how strong you now are and how unperturbed you can be.

"Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."   John 7:38 NIV