Whenever God changes a person's heart, causing them to come to Christ for salvation, two things happen. The change in heart causes the person to want to live morally so as to please God and glorify him. But at the same time, the person realizes that they are unable to satisfy this desire completely. So while a person may improve morally over time, their own sinfulness actually bothers them more than it did before their conversion.
This has been an on-going problem for me for several years now. Sometimes, I feel like I've moved backward instead of forward, and it has made me question whether I'm really regenerated at all.
It raises a question I've wondered about. Why does God only change us in such a way as to come to Christ for salvation? Why doesn't he change us completely so that we are free of sin altogether? Ezekiel 36 says that God will "give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances" (Ezekiel 36:26-27). However, after a person converts to Christianity, they remain sinful their entire lives. They may improve, but they never reach perfection. Nobody is able to obey Jesus' command to "be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).
It looks like moral perfection doesn't take place until either after death or after the resurrection and judgment. That's when God completely cures us of our sinfulness. Until then, we're stuck with a desire to please God and an inability to do so. Why, if God cures us of our rebellion to enable us to come to Christ, does he not go the rest of the way and cure us of our sinfulness?
There may be a lot of reasons, but here's one I was thinking about today (I wrote this a few months ago actually). The reason, I suspect, is to keep us humble while we await redemption. It's a constant reminder in the meantime that we are relying solely on his grace for our salvation, and not on our own ability to be morally perfect. When God changes our hearts, he gives us a desire to obey his commands, but when we find that we are unable to accomplish that desire, we realize how helpless we are. This drives home the point that salvation is by the grace of God alone, and it leaves no room for boasting on our parts. All the glory for our salvation goes to God alone.
So if you, like me, sometimes experience guilt and remorse for your behavior, or you feel like a failure because of your inability to be the kind of Christian you aspire to be, the solution is not to dispair, but to throw yourself at the mercy of God and praise him for his grace. And be thankful that you have it.
I confided my troubles to a friend a couple of years ago. Every time I expressed guilt or remorse over something I had done, she would go beyond trying to comfort me with the fact that I was forgiven. She seemed to think the fact that I felt guilty at all was an indication that I didn't understand the gospel. I think the mistake was on her part, though.
The gospel includes the fact that if you are in Christ, you are clothed in his righteousness, and it's that righteousness that allows you to have peace with God. As far as God's judgment is concerned, it's as if our sins never happened. We are completely absolved. That is reason for a person weighed down with guilt to feel relieved and thankful. But does this mean we should never feel guilty for our actions? I don't think so.
Granted, a person can go overboard and berate themselves excessively in an unhealthy way, but feeling guilty is a perfectly natural and appropriate response to being guilty, and since even those who are declared righteous in Christ commit sins, they are guilty of something from time to time. A person who never felt guilt or shame for their sins merely because of their faith in Christ has misunderstood the gospel. You would have to be a sociopath to never feel bad about hurting other people. Not only are guilt and shame perfectly natural and appropriate but they even have the added benefit of driving people to repentance and preventing them from repeating their mistakes. God gave us a conscience in addition to a moral awareness to motivate moral behavior.1 It isn't enough that a person knows right from wrong; they have to care about right and wrong, and caring entails feeling bad about doing wrong.
To say that a person should never feel guilty just because Jesus died for their sins boarders on antinomianism because if there's no real moral guilt for a Christian simply because Jesus atoned for sins, then for all practical purposes, there's no moral law that Christians are obligated to keep. That is not what my friend believes, but it is the logical consequence of her view. If there is a moral law that Christians are obligated to keep, and if they don't keep it, then they are actually guilty of something. Atonement removes our guilty standing before God, but it doesn't reverse the past. If you sinned in the past, then it will forever be the case that you sinned in the past. If you're a healthy human being with a conscience, you'll feel bad about it when it happens.
And you may also feel remorse because of the practical consequences of your sin. Regardless of the righteousness we have in Christ, everybody must reap what they sow in this lifetime. If I committed a murder, I could be completely forgiven and declared righteous before God on the basis of Christ's atonement, but I might still have to spend the rest of my life in prison because I am not righteous under the law. There are consequences to your actions, whether good or bad, and you do reap what you sow, whether you're saved or not. 1 Peter makes a contrast between suffering for doing what's right and suffering for doing what's wrong. In one case, you are blessed, and in the other case you are simply reaping what you sow. If you are reaping the unpleasant consequences of your sin, then you are warranted in feeling remorse and regret for having committed the sin.
Another friend of mine thought that forgiving somebody means treating them like they never did anything wrong. So, for example, if you wronged your girlfriend, and she dumped you, then as long as she doesn't take you back, that means she hasn't forgiven you. To forgive you, according to my friend, means that she takes you back. I think that's absurd. Forgiving somebody doesn't mean you trust them again. Imagine if you hired a baby sitter whose recklessness resulted in your kid losing a finger. You may forgive the baby sitter, but that doesn't mean you're going to trust them with your kid again. We are commanded to forgive anybody who asks us for forgiveness (Matthew 18:21-22), but that doesn't mean we have to be foolish. It would be foolish to trust somebody who has proven themselves untrustworthy. So if you've done wrong, there are consequences you'll have to live with even if you are forgiven.
Jesus didn't die so that you wouldn't feel guilty when you sin. He died to pay the penalty for your sin so that God won't punish you for it. Jesus saved us from the wrath of God. He didn't save us from our conscience. Our conscience isn't something we need to be saved from. Our conscience is what motivates us to do right, and it does so at least partly by making us feel guilty when we've done wrong. It serves a good purpose. Conviction comes from the Holy Spirit. So don't think that you've missed the gospel just because you feel guilty about something bad you did. You haven't missed anything! Instead of trying not to feel guilty, repent of the sin and give God glory for his grace. The feeling of guilt will subside on its own with time. Or it should anyway. But you aren't somehow out of step with the gospel just because you feel guilty.
NOTES
1. See Conscience and moral intuition for more on this distinction.
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