In my last post, I wrote about the importance of focusing on our hearts instead of our behavior. I talked about Andy Stanley’s podcast series, It Came from Within, which is the same subject matter as his book Enemies of the Heart. Most of the ideas in this post come directly from Stanley’s podcast.
The first “enemy of the heart” that Stanley covers is guilt. Guilt creeps into my heart when I wrong someone else. Guilt is anger and disappointment with myself. I messed up; I let myself down; I let you down; I let God down; I failed. That anger and disappointment become a weight that I carry around, and if I don’t resolve my guilt, that weight will follow me into every future relationship.
One way that guilt manifests itself is that it’s difficult to please a guilty person. A guilty person subconsciously says, “I let myself down. And since I didn’t meet my own expectations, I can’t allow you to meet my expectations, either.”
Another way that guilt manifests itself is that it often keeps us trapped in destructive behaviors. Stanley gives the example of a student who cheats on a test. If the child keeps his action a secret, how likely is it that he will cheat again? It’s definitely a good possibility, even if the child feels a lot of remorse over his previous action. But if the child chooses to confess that mistake to his teacher, what are the chances he will cheat again? Not very high, right? Facing the consequences of his poor choice will change his heart and his future choices.
I believe that unconfessed guilt plays a huge role in porn addictions and other addictive behaviors. The small amount of research I’ve read so far is consistent in saying that you simply cannot break an addiction on your own. You must confess. You must involve other people in your journey. Keeping secrets will condemn you to failure again and again.
If you haven’t guessed it yet, confession is the spiritual discipline that resolves our guilt. As Stanley says, “Guilt grows in the darkness and is dissipated by the light.” James 5:16 says, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”
The modern church has stressed the importance of confessing to God and forgotten the importance of confessing to other people. Of course we need to confess to God and make sure that our relationship with him is clear of secrets. (Yes, I am aware of how silly that sounds. But we all like to pretend we can hide things from God at times, don’t we?) The confession that brings about life change, however, is made to another person. Bringing secrets into the light breaks their power; keeping secrets hidden requires dishonesty, deception, and duplicity, and the secrets just grow heavier as time goes on.
Confession to other people is essential to breaking the power of guilt. But there are a couple of issues that make confession very challenging.
First, we don’t want to confess because we want to avoid the consequences of our actions. If we confess something “big,” there will most likely be a lot of relational pain and trauma. There may be financial repercussions. In the example of the student who cheated, there might be suspension from school and receiving a poor grade. We can usually predict the consequences of our actions, and we dread them. We work hard to avoid them. The thought of voluntarily facing those consequences is foreign and seemingly insane.
However, if we truly want to change our behavior and – more importantly – heal our hearts, facing consequences is necessary. Every parent understands the importance of consequences. They teach us and shape us. We learn our lessons in life by “reaping what we sow.” If we truly want to be the best people we can be, we must volunteer to face the consequences of our poor choices head on.
Consider, too, that the consequences of our actions are usually tangible, immediate, and impact a handful of people. Compare that to the consequences of concealment, which are intangible and therefore often difficult to predict or observe. It’s easy to pretend that concealment is not having any effect on us at all. But guilt that lurks under the radar, undetected and/or ignored, impacts most of our relationships throughout our whole lifetime. It lingers, and it decays, slowly and steadily. Our secrets eat away at us, day by day, year by year. Which set of consequences is better?
But even when we realize that facing the consequences of our actions is truly better for us than concealment, even if we find the courage to face those consequences, most of us don’t have a safe place to confess.
And that is a topic I will discuss further in my next post. J
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