The Wednesday Word ~ 29 July, 2026 A.D.

Guilty as Charged, Part I

by D G Miles McKee

Many believers are suffering needlessly from guilt. It's true that we all have much to feel guilty about, but the Gospel has radically dealt with this problem. Hear the word of the Lord. It says,

"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water." -Hebrews 10:22.

The Lord Jesus is our ever-living, ever-glorious High Priest and, as His followers, we have the privilege, through Him, of enjoying full guilt free access to heaven. This access to heaven, however, has been given, not because of anything we have done or are doing, but rather because Jesus Himself is the living way. Our works as His followers cannot improve upon His finished and completed work nor can they add to His perfection.

Christ is 'All in All';

He is the way to heaven and the destination.

He is the door to Heaven and all that is inside the door.

Furthermore, because of our perfect Savior and His finished work we can now have a guilt free life; ... a life of abundance (John 10:10) which comes to us through the Gospel. As believers we continually absorb ourselves in the powerful and energizing knowledge that God Himself came to this earth as our personal representative, undertook our cause, suffered and died for our sins and rose from the grave.  As we steep ourselves in this Good News we are enabled to abandon hope in our own righteousness, and see that because of grace alone we are now reckoned as being perfectly righteous with neither perverseness nor iniquity found in us (Numbers 23:21).

However, many church goers are self-absorbed and focused on their condition. They are certainly not thrilled with Jesus. This is a direct result of the Gospel not being preached, expounded and applied. Even for a genuinely saved person, a focus on self is not the way to peace! On the contrary, a self-focused life sets us up for serious attacks from the Prince of Darkness. Unless we are grounded and established in the Gospel, we have no protection against the ongoing onslaught of guilt and condemnation sent our way by Satan. When these attacks happen, unless the Gospel has been grasped and embraced by us, the only options left open are those of despair and depression.

The reality is that there are many believers dying with guilt instead of enjoying the abundant guilt free life of this 'so great salvation'. When there is a steady diet of subjective preaching it causes believers to continually look inward to their hearts. When our heart and our spiritual condition become our focus, we have set ourselves up to be ambushed by his satanic majesty. This is not to say that it is never right for the believer to be challenged about their heart condition, but a steady diet of that kind of preaching divorced from a Gospel centre destroys the very thing it is intended to establish. The Gospel truth is this; in Christ, every believer is already absolutely and totally perfect and, therefore, free from guilt. One of our problems, however, is that, as believers, we often discover it very hard to embrace such a message. Do you ever find that? Let's be honest, sometimes it's hard to put all our confidence and trust in an invisible Christ who somehow took our guilt way back at some point in history. Every now and then, when our faith seems to fail, we want something a little more tangible. Sometimes we think that there should be something extra that we can do or contribute to this business of salvation ----at least that way we could have something more 'solid' to rest upon. We want to make some kind of atonement for our sins, we want to show how sorry we are for our wretched failures and in that way demonstrate to God how deserving we are of His forgiveness. The great difficulty with this type of thinking is that, apart from it being an insult to Christ, it makes God into someone with whom we must continually barter, a God we try to impress and appease.

And that´s the Gospel Truth!

(To be continued)

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