Guilt, Grace & Gratitude

In a society that consistently teaches “love of self” as a solution to almost every problem, is focusing on guilt before a Holy God counterproductive?  Does acknowledging our guilt before God have any place in the Christian experience, when so often we are given the message that we must live victoriously, naming and claiming God’s promises so that we can lead abundant and fulfilled lives?  Will admitting our guilt before God undermine our self esteem or our pursuit of an optimal Christian experience?  Conversely, if grace is preached too freely, will this remove the motivation for Christians to live a holy life?  Will grace without strings attached open up the door to lawlessness?  When does gratitude for the finished work of Christ come into play?  These questions have received widely different answers in the Christian world and are particularly divided along denominational lines.  Dr. Michael Horton, professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, tackles these important issues in a prologue to a broadcast of the White Horse Inn.  His insights are profound and help us to understand our position of guilt before God, the grace He freely gives in Christ, and the life of gratitude Christians live in response.

Dr. Michael S. Horton
Westminister Seminary California

”Grace is the essence of theology and gratitude is the essence of ethics.” So declared one of the greatest Reformed theologians of this century, G.C. Berkouwer.  It sounds so simple, and yet it is such a difficult business to arrange all of our thoughts, affections, convictions and actions around these two poles.

You see, we fear that making God’s grace alone in Christ the essence of our theology, it will lead to imbalance and apathy in the Christian life.  And by making gratitude the essence of ethics, where does the fear of punishment and hope of rewards have any place?  Therefore we hear the cry again and again, “Balance!  We need balance!” as if the good news were just too good and the bad news were just too unbearable.

Most of our contemporaries would like to believe that either God is too nice or that we are too nice to merit divine wrath.  As it has been in many self-satisfied periods in history, our day is given over to feel-good religion and there is little place in feel-good religion for recognizing our guilt before a Holy God.

Guilt, in fact, is a dirty word in our feel-good culture.  This may be because many of us were raised in strict churches where guilt was a tool for keeping us in line.  But for the wider culture, guilt is one of the casualties in this “triumph of the therapeutic”.  The idea of guilt just isn’t warm and affirming.  As the great Saturday Night Live theologian Stuart Smalley would tell us, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me!”

But denying it doesn’t make it go away.  We feel it, but we can’t explain it, because we aren’t allowed to believe anymore that we feel guilty, since maybe we are guilty.  While the world pokes fun at feel-good religion, the church seems to be thriving on it these days.

While we may not relish a toothache, it’s the pain that pushes us into the dentist’s office and maybe saves the tooth.  We can deny the tooth’s pain or pretend that it doesn’t exist, as the Christian Science or Pentecostal faith healers might expect us to do, but the Bible paints the picture of the human condition with warts and all.  Like the toothache, our feelings of guilt are meant to lead us to recognize that there is in fact an objective problem of guilt before a Holy God.

Let’s put it in the following terms.  Do you believe in God?  Let’s start with the very basic.  If so, do you believe that this God thinks that the actions of Hilter and the Nazis were wrong and deserve severe punishment?  If there is a God, and He didn’t consider those actions worthy of the severest punishment–whatever that happened to be–would there be any sense of justice in the world?  Could you believe in a God like that?

Even the most committed secularist secretly harbors the hope that a serial rapist who beat his rap on earth will nevertheless get his due sometime, somewhere, somehow in the next life.

So what do you think?  Can you accept the idea that there is a final judgment, at least for some people at the end of it all?  Is evil ever finally judged and vanquished, or will the slaughter of millions in Nazi Germany never be avenged?  Can we live with the existence of a God who is that callous to our existence?

If you can accept the idea that there is a final judgment of at least some people, the next question is this: If there is a final judgment of some people, why not you? If you grant that there is a final judgment at all, and that evil is finally judged, and the wicked are sentanced, there must be some reason why you think that you don’t belong there.

Maybe you’re not Hitler or Stalin.  Maybe you think of yourself as a pretty good person who gets along with people well enough.  But do you have any objective, solid reason to believe right now, right where you’re sitting, that you are good enough to avoid God’s judgment?

Do you know how good you must be to receive His approval instead of His sentance?  These are tough questions, and since eternity is one heck of a long time, you ought to have some reasons to believe whatever it is you believe about this whole subject.

The problem is, we–and by “we” I mean the Christian church at the end of the twentieth century–haven’t been terribly clear ourselves.

The Scriptures are quite plain about the whole business.  We are born sinners and we die sinners.  At no point in between are we righteous enough to stand before God.  And God’s holiness and justice requires the punishment of all sinners.

So no one escapes God’s wrath, because God doesn’t “grade on a curve”.  The biblical view levels the playing field.  There is, says Scripture, no one who is righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10-11).

No other religion has such a pessimistic, or as we would say, realistic view of human nature and the possibilities of salvation by human effort or goodness.  But the good news is that no other religion has such an optimistic view of God in His grace!  While the world’s religions may all point you in the direction of heaven, telling you that you aren’t helpless and that you can save yourself by pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, Christianity tells you that Christ has come not just as a moral leader to show us the path to God, but to be our way, our truth and our life (John 14:6).

That’s what I mean when I say that everybody else tones down both the bad news and the good news.  The bad news isn’t as bad as Christianity’s portrait, but the good news, therefore, can’t be as good either.

The problem is, we know, deep down, when we put our head on the pillow, we don’t have the foggiest chance of getting close to God by our own resolutions or good intentions.  We know that our heart is deceitful and our thoughts are far from loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourself.  Deep down we know, as Adam and Eve knew when they fled from God’s presence and tried to cover up their nakedness with fig leaves of their own making that things aren’t that simple and God isn’t pleased with our lives.

We know–in every culture, in every religious tradition, that there must be an atonement–a peace offering, and either we will have to stand judgment for our sins, or we must throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, trusting in Christ alone to provide us with the justice and righteousness that we need before the heavenly Judge of all the earth.

If grace is the essence of theology, then as Berkouwer said, gratitude must be the essence of ethics.

John Wesley once declared that if we took grace too seriously, especially the doctrine of election, it would undermine our only basis for pursuing a holy life–fear of punishment and hope of rewards.  But isn’t that a selfish motivation for the Christian life?  That’s always been the fear–“Too much grace!  It’ll throw a wrench in the whole process of Christian growth.”

But the Scriptures insist that a legalistic view of the Christian life is what leads us right back to fear and bondage.  Since the Law, though good, in and of itself can never give us the power to perform what it commands, the gospel not only reconciles us to God in the first place, it’s the only fuel we have to keep us going in the process of sanctification.  Therefore, gratitude–not fear of punishment or hope of rewards–is the only proper basis for pursuing a holy and God-glorifying existence.

If our salvation depended upon us for one moment, even in the slightest degree, we would eventually either become self-righteous, pretending that we were actually pulling it off, or we would despair of ever knowing whether God really accepted us.  How could we possibly love God and serve our neighbor freely if we were still caught up in the saving of our own skin?

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Used with permission from Dr. Horton and the White Horse Inn.