Does God Want Us to Feel Bad About Ourselves?
God came down to earth so that we might be free of our fear, guilt, and shame.
Edit 5/16/2025: I changed the title from “How Bad Does God Want Us to Feel About Ourselves?” to “Does God Want Us to Feel Bad About Ourselves?” I think the second title is a more accurate summary of the piece.
I think sometimes the church can lean too hard into trying to make us feel guilty for our sins. I've known Christians who are convinced that they are the worst of the worst. I have friends who still feel weighted down by guilt from decades ago, and for whom their occasional forays into Christianity have offered no succor.
I have friends who refer to themselves as "recovering Catholics." Why "recovering?" Because even after they left the church, the guilt that the church instilled in them still seems to live in their bones.
I think there are two sides to the Christian coin:
1) We are all sinners.
2) God loves us infinitely as His cherished children just the same. Christianity teaches that God came down to earth and died for our sins; and you don't die for people who you don't love or who you think suck.
Both sides of the coin are important. But I think some parts of the church can lean too hard into side #1. When we do that, I think we miss more than half the picture.
The truth is that God doesn't want us to live lives trapped in fear, guilt, and sin. The Bible teaches that God so loved the world that He came down to earth and died for our sins so that we might have eternal life with Him (John 3:16). But is being trapped in fear, guilt, and shame really life? No! Speaking from personal experience, that's not life; it's just Hell on earth.
Would any of us want that for our children? Of course not! And as much as any human father or mother has ever loved their children, the truth is that God loves us a thousand times more (Matthew 7:11). He doesn't want His treasured sons and daughters to be trapped in misery, either in the afterlife or here on earth. That sounds more like Satan's plan for us than anything.
The truth is that God came to free us from our guilt.
What does this look like?
In the church, we talk a lot about a cycle: confession, repentance, forgiveness. But sometimes I think we can miss the heart of what these concepts really mean. As theologians Jamie and Donna Winship explain, a lot of the church thinks that confession just means telling God that we're sorry for sinning. And repentance means telling God that we're REALLY sorry for sinning. And then maybe, if we're sorry enough and we feel awful enough and we feel guilty enough, then maybe He will grace us with forgiveness.
But that's not what confession means. As the Winships teach, "The word 'confession' actually means to tell the truth."
Here's an example of how that looks in my own life.
I practice listening prayer, which means that I practice listening to God even on seemingly small decisions. I practice this when I'm driving. God, do you want me to stay in this lane, or move over? God, do you want me to pass this car or just relax behind them?
About a year ago, I was mulling whether or not to change lanes; and I asked God which lane He wanted me to be in. Part of me felt like God was calling me to stay in my current lane, and part of me felt like God was calling me to switch lanes. And so I switched.
And immediately I was hit with a powerful feeling of guilt. And I felt God's voice in my head: "Confess."
My first thought was to pair my feeling of guilt with God's call to confess, and to assume that I had done something wrong. And so I prayed something like this: "God, I think I switched lanes when you didn't want me to; and I'm very sorry."
That happened a few times, and I always felt the same: a profound feeling of guilt over what was, objectively, a very small decision.
But that's not what confession is about. At all.
And then one day, when this happened and I felt God inviting me to confess, I remembered what the Winships said: confession is about telling the truth. And so I dove into my psyche and told the truth.
"Lord, I feel really guilty because I made a split-second decision and I don't think it was the decision that you wanted me to make."
Immediately I felt an answer, in the tone of infinite love and joy and peace and connection that I have come to associate with the divine.
"Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful truth-telling. THAT's what I wanted you to see; you absolutely beat yourself up and feel really guilty even over tiny things. Which is completely unnecessary. So now let's talk about how I can help you to let go of that guilt and that desire to beat yourself up."
And then, once God had showed me my pattern of beating myself up over tiny things, we started to work together on helping me to break free of that pattern. Me flagellating myself was completely contrary to God's will, and so He's been transforming my heart so as to help me to stop doing that.
As Jamie Winship writes to God in Living Fearless, "Thank you for your kindness that leads us to repentance. It’s never condemnation; it’s never guilt. It’s kindness that leads to freedom!"
Now of course, I'm not saying that we should just repeat the same sins over and over again without ever changing. But then again, I'm not sure I've ever met someone who wants to do that anyway. When I was addicted to pornography, I knew it was killing my love life and leaving me feeling dead inside. I didn't want to just watch porn day after day; I wanted to be free! I have a friend who still feels wracked by guilt for cheating on his wife thirty years ago. But of course he would never cheat on his partner now. His problem isn't that he wants to keep sinning and sinning and never changing; it's that he can't break the chains of guilt that keep him down even decades later.
The good news of the Gospel is that God wants to break those chains in us. Every moment of every day, He is inviting us to do two things:
1) to experience His loving forgiveness for any wrongs we may have committed (which is always, 100% of the time, absolutely available as soon as we ask for it).
2) to leave our fear and guilt and shame at His feet so that we are no longer encumbered by them.
If you've never experienced the healing power of divine connection, I invite you to pray something like the following:
"Dear Lord (or Father, God, Truth, etc),
"Thank you so much that you chose to come down to earth and die on the cross for me just so that I could be in loving relationship with You. Thank you for your deep and eternal love for me. I know that You love and cherish and delight in me as only a perfect parent can. I know that I am the apple of your eye and beautiful in Your sight.
"Lord, I feel trapped in fear and guilt and shame. I feel scared for tomorrow. I wake up and my first thought is that something terrible will happen, even if I don't know what.
"I feel guilty for everything I've done wrong, Lord. I look at all of my past mistakes and sometimes they pile up until they feel like that's all there is to me. I feel guilty and ashamed of so much of what I've done. I feel like I must be worthless, or defective, or made somehow less than everyone else.
"But, Lord, I know that you do not want me to feel this way. You died on the cross that I might have eternal life with you. You came down to earth so that I might be free of the 'false self' of my fear and guilt and shame. Lord, you are the chain breaker, and you came down to earth to break my chains—because no loving parent ever wants to see their beautiful and radiant child in chains.
"Lord, you came to free me of the fear, guilt, and shame that make up my 'false self,' so that I could step into the love and joy and peace and beauty and wonder and freedom that IS eternal life with you.
"Lord, what do you want me to know about letting go of my fear, guilt, and shame? What do you want me to do?"
And then write down whatever it is that you hear.
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