Sandra Leightner St. James United Methodist
2 Corinthians 7:8 All Saints Day Sermon November 9, 2014
Would you turn in your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 7:8 – I’m using a translation called The Message.
There is a story attributed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the English writer who created Sherlock Holmes. Doyle once got into an argument with some friends over dinner. Doyle insisted that every man over the age of 40 had a skeleton in the closet, a secret something they did not want others to know. Some at the table disagreed with Doyle, so he suggested they put his theory to the test. The dinner guests picked out a man they knew as upright in character, the kind of man everyone respected. Doyle then went to the telegraph office and sent him this anonymous message. The telegraph read – “All is discovered. Flee at once” Within 24 hours, the man had left London and never returned. That telegraph confronted that man’s hidden guilt and sins.
Paul one time sent such a letter to the people of Corinth. In this letter, Paul rebuked them for the sins. But after sending the letter, Paul had a few second thoughts and sat at home worrying that he has been too hard on the people of Corinth. But it all turned out good.
2 Corinthians 7:8 -13
8-9 I know I distressed you greatly with my letter. Although I felt awful at the time, I don’t feel at all bad now that I see how it turned out. The letter upset you, but only for a while. Now I’m glad—not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss.
10 Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets. They end up on a deathbed of regrets.
11-13 And now, isn’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart. And that is what I was hoping for in the first place when I wrote the letter.
Guilt feels rotten. It actually feels like carrying a burden that weighs you down. Guilt beats you up and lowers your self confidence. Guilt makes you replay your mistakes in your head. You start obsessing on what you could have done differently. It wastes enormous amounts of your energy. You can even mentally punish yourself.
Guilt feels so bad that it is hard to realize that guilt can be good for you. Yes, like in Paul’s letter, guilt turned those people around and changed their lives.
Let me tell you three ways that guilt is good for you. First, you may be feeling guilty because you made some bad choices, guilt over eating all the left over Halloween candy, guilt because you haven’t kept in touch with your family like you should have, guilt following a death, guilt because you spent all your time at work and neglected your family, guilt because you haven’t done anything good for anyone in a long time, guilt for something you said or something you didn’t say.
This type of guilt is telling you that you are making bad choices. It’s time to change your life and your lifestyle. It’s true that you can’t change the past. That is water under the bridge, but you can resolve to live different today and forever more. You can become a better person. As Paul says, by confronting your guilt, you can be jarred into turning things around.
There is a simple analogy. What pain is to the body, guilt is to the soul. You grab hold of a sharp object or a hot poker and you feel pain. That means stop grabbing hot, pointy objects. The pain tells you that you are damaging your body so stop it. Same thing – You do something wrong and you feel guilt. The guilt is telling you to stop. You are damaging your soul.
What is the first good thing about guilt? It tells you that it is time to change your life and your life style. Guilt can make you a better person. You feel guilt, because you are not living up to being your ideal person. Guilt can get you back on the path to being the best you and living your best life.
Neurologist and psychologist Victor Frank praised guilt. If handled properly, guilt can push a person toward finding meaning and purpose in life. Through guilt, he wrote, people have the potential to change for the better. Healthy guilt is a gatekeeper and boundary maker. It helps us discover where we shouldn’t go in life, what we shouldn’t do. Guilt helps us find our way back toward what’s right.
That is the first good thing about guilt. The second good thing about guilt is that it drives you to make restitution – to make an apology, to pay back a debt, to make it up to someone as best that you can.
Have you ever heard of the Conscience Fund? The Conscience Fund is for real. It was started in 1811 for people who have defrauded the government so that they can pay back what they stole. If you stole something from Uncle Sam and your conscience is bothering you, send the money back to the Conscience Fund. They do get some interesting letters there. The smallest gift was nine cents sent in by someone who reused a stamp. The largest was $40,000 paid over installments. Nearly $6 million has been sent in by people paying back for what they had stolen. Most are anonymous, but not all.
This is the second good thing about guilt. Guilt pushes us to make amends – to fix the relationship, to make the apology, to repair the damage, to make it as right as we are able to make it right. It will do a lot for your self esteem, and you will feel better. If you own up, fess up, and make it right.
The third good thing about guilt – it can indeed pull you towards God, and you will be a better person for it.
Vs 9 said, You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from God. The result was all gain, no loss.
10 Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, (they) end up on a deathbed of regrets.
Don’t end life with a deathbed of regrets. In God we have our salvation and the release from our guilt and shame.
1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Gordon MacDonald had a secret sin that he kept covered up. Publically he was a good man. Secretly, he was an adulterer. When it finally came out, he lost everything from his job to the love of his family. But repentance, a turning to God, a change in his life led to his restoration. MacDonald wrote about his fall – “Yes, I know what it’s like to live with a secret. But I also “know what it is like to live once again in the light.” He left behind his secrets and walked free in the light of God.
Paul sees that same kind of change in the Corinthians. This is how Paul describes the change he sees – Paul says to the Corinthians - You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart.
There is one final thing to remember about guilt, shame and sin. Nobody is perfect, only Jesus was perfect. The rest of us will fall short.
Martin Luther began life as a man obsessed with his guilt and shame. In 1505, 21 year old Martin Luther walking toward village of Stotternheim when the sky became overcast. A raging storm blew up and a bolt of lightning lit the sky with a flash, knocking Martin to the ground. “St Anne, help me!” he cried “I will become a monk, if you let me live.” At once it seemed the storm faded away.
Martin Luther thought the lightning had been launched at him by God as a message, a glimpse of the terror of Judgement Day. Martin knew he needed to preserve his soul, and the best way to do that was to become a monk.
At the end of his first year, Martin became a priest and was invited to celebrate his first mass. Martin’s family came for the occasion. The chapel was filled. The psalms were sung. Then Martin took his place behind the altar and began. But just moments in he was struck by sheer terror – here he was, in his own words, “a miserable, little pygmy…dust and ashes and full of sin” daring to speak to the living, eternal and fearsome God.
Martin got through the mass and kept going as a monk, but those experiences capture his terrible internal burdens. He got to the point where he was convinced that God was so pure and holy no-one could ever hope to be saved. “More than once (I) was driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him!”
So martin began to go to confession – he spend hours in the confessional – would walk away and come back 10 minutes later because he had a sinful thought. The confessional priest finally told him to go away. Come back when you have a real sin to confess.
Martin is a bit of an extreme picture – but he was a man tormented by his guilt. And then in 1513, eight years after that thunderstorm, seven years after that terrible mass, Luther had a third great religious experience. Luther discovered a life transforming insight – that God’s requirement for us is not perfection but faith.
You and I are not perfect, and God knows that, and loves us as we are. He sees us where we are at, and knows what we could be. What God asks us to do is to come to him and to trust him. To trust in his salvation and in his love.
Though he was a man who walked in darkness, like others before him, Martin Luther had seen a great light. And now he knew what it meant to walk in light.
Yes, guilt can be good for you. It can be the signal that tells you to change your life and go in a better direction. It can push you to make amends and restitution for what you have done wrong. It can take you to God who can lead you into becoming a new creation without all those heavy burdens of sin, shame, and guilt.
Maybe someone will look at you and say, you’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible, looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart.
And that is what guilt, properly handled, can do for you.