If you have in your mind a condemning God, you don’t have the right view of God. When you have received his love you won’t be afraid; you will hear “I love you.”
1 Jn. 4:17-18 says: “Love is made complete so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement…There is no fear in love. Love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” When we have received God’s love, we don’t need to fear losing our forgiven state with Him.
Rom. 8:1-2 “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
John 3:17 says “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
Rom. 8: 33-39 says that “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
When we “believed”, we were declared “not guilty.” There is no more separation. There is no more anger, or wrath. We do not have to fear condemnation or guilt. (Jn. 3:18; Heb. 10:14; 17-18) We are legally “not guilty” by believing. A guilty Christian is an oxymoron. We don’t become guilty again each time we sin. We don’t lose God’s love or acceptance when we sin. Jesus died for all of our sins, past, present, and future. The whole point of Jesus death was so that He could have a relationship with us even though we are, and continue to be, sinners. He knew that we would wrestle with a desire to be independent from Him until the day we die. God sees our inability as a part of our reality and he is not mad at our weakness. In Matt. 5:3 Jesus calls being “poor in spirit” or being in a state of incompleteness before God, “a blessed state”. In 2 Cor. 12:7-10, Paul says that our weakness keeps us humble and dependent upon God’s strength.
If we are still feeling guilty when we sin, the problem is inside of us. God does not give us feelings of guilt. The Holy Spirit sends us messages of conviction, not feelings. We decide how to feel about the message. God does not motivate us by guilt, he motivates us by love. The more we receive God’s love, the more that we will be motivated by his love to live the way that we were created to live. We don’t need guilt motivation. God does want us to know how terrible sin is and that it needs judgment, but only so that we understand how great our salvation is, not so that we think we are bad forever. He has rescued us. He wants us to see ourselves as rescued forever, not judged forever.
God does not want us feeling guilty. Jesus died on the cross to cure us of our guilt. Guilt does not motivate us to change for the right reason. Guilt is focuses on how we feel about ourselves, not on the offended party or the destructiveness of our actions. When we feel guilty, we want it to go away so that we can feel better about ourselves. But when we are motivated by God’s love for us and therefore our love for his perfect design, and for all of his valuable creations, then we change because we have empathy for the people that we hurt and we have a desire to do things that are right because they bring life and not death.
God’s acceptance of you, and therefore your acceptance of yourself as a continually sinful person, does not cause you to sin more. The lack of fear allows you to face the truth instead of deny it or try to escape the guilt feelings. Once you don’t have to worry about guilt anymore, you are free to be motivated by love. When you realize that God is “for you”, and he loves you, and has always had your best interest in mind, you understand that all of his instructions and commands are good, and benefit you, and bring life. This leads to freedom from sin motivated by love rather than guilt.
