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I saw a post from a couple weeks ago somewhere that I just have to respond to. A response this long in that topic would be serious toastpaint, and a more upfront thread on the topic got locked. So I'll try phrase this in a way that every Christian-religious person affected will know exactly what I'm talking about without being offensive.

<rant length="infinity">
The spirit and the body are always striving for dominance against each other and most likely will be until the day you die. It is HIGHLY unlikely that you will become perfectly sinless before death. It's debatable whether anyone has (though I like to believe a few have). And yet people still go to heaven.

God knows what you're going through, he came to earth and fought against these things too. Even before that, though, he knew (because there's no before and after for him but that's beside the point).

But though we're all guilty, FEELING guilty is entirely unhelpful. Remorse? sure. Sorrow? in a sense, and only if it doesn't dominate you. But guilt usually causes people to see themselves as horrible people. Please, please, for the love of God, get over this feeling. It's not from God, it's from Satan. Because when you hate yourself like that, it won't be long until your love for others is eroded away.

Here's a story: St. Francis (I think all denominations would agree he was a great guy) lived a life of near-perfect love, charity, preaching, peace, renunciation, etc. But he also practiced extreme physical self-punishment. By the end of his life, he was a physical wreck that needed to be carried around on stretchers and pack animals. Now, that served as a great symbol in a sense, but it also hindered his ministry. Some doctors looked at him and they told him the whole thing could have been avoided if he wasn't so harsh with himself physically. And then he realized something very important: that "brother body" (he called everyone and everything brother or sister) is just as important as brother you or sister you. This "last lesson of St. Francis", as I call it, is very important: We are another person who needs to be treated with love and respect. If we treat ourselves harshly for our sins, what's stopping us from treating others harshly for theirs? And when everyone has sins, who wouldn't you treat harshly?

But that does NOT mean excusing our own sins, of course. I'm just saying, guilt is the mental equivalent of lashing yourself with a whip, throwing yourself out into the snow in your underwear, or even depressing things like slitting your wrists.

YOU can't, by yourself, stop your sins. When you believe that sin is something you can stop just by "trying harder", of course you'll hate yourself for it. We must always try, but realize that we WILL fail. For years even. Maybe we'll never get a particular sin under control. What God looks at, though, is if we tried, and if we realized that true strength comes from him. The sooner we realize that the only way to overcome sin is to ask him to give us his strength, the sooner it will happen. And that may still take years (instantaneous conversion to faith is common, but instantaneous conversion from sin is so rare that we shouldn't even consider the possibility). If you spend those years trying harder to fix the problem yourself, every time you fail you will think "I failed because I didn't try hard enough, because I suck, I'm a horrible horrible person." Do you know what an attitude like that will do to you? We have bad in us, and we have good in us. Only seeing the bad will destroy your brain!

I speak from experience, of course. The attitude of guilt eventually destroyed my faith. I still believe way back in my mind somewhere, but the practice of my faith is still so linked with my years of self-destruction that I find it incredibly hard to do anything with it. It's made even harder by the fact that I haven't felt more sane in my entire life than since I stopped beating myself up inside. Faith as I know how to practice it is inextricably linked with a certain insanity for me now. In other words, Satan played me like a piano. So I say this: before your faith is twisted into an instrument of self-destruction that will eventually either destroy you or cause you to let it go for your own sanity, GIVE UP THE GUILT.

Accept that the body wants something the spirit hates, and that this body is still you. (some people mention voices that sound like themselves: the voices are you--a part of you anyway) And this body is not to be hated for it. The Bible doesn't say that we will be beings of pure spirit in the end, but beings of purified spirit AND purified body. So accept your body and pray that God will give you his strength to work toward bringing it in line with the spirit. Obsessing about sin only brings more attention to it and opens yourself to more temptation.

So remain calm. And when you fall, calmly pick yourself back up again.

As imperfect as it is, just try the best you can and be patient. That's all you can do. The best you can is good enough.

</rant>

Whew

I just wish someone would have told me before it got to the point it did, but no one tried to explain anything or give me any context at all. When I see other people tormented like that, I gotta do something. I made this an open letter because I may have misunderstood what that person was saying and this doesn't really apply, but this issue is a universal problem that many people need to consider.

C-dogg, Naptime, don't make the same mistakes I did. You guys are young. You got your whole lives ahead of you.

EDIT: I made an untruthful comment about goths and emo people, so I replaced it

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Well said. There isn't a thing there that I disagree with.

I think the biggest problem with guilt as opposed to remorse is that when we feel guilty, we feel less than other people, and not worthy to get help. We don't want anyone to know about our mistakes, and so we bury them, rather than actually repenting or dealing with the mistake. We don't feel worthy to pray and get the strength to overcome.

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Guilt and shame are built-in responses we have. They are intended to let us know that we've stepped outside of God's provision so that we can get back on track. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to shatter our self-image, causing us, like our ancient parents, to try to hide from our problems rather than facing them. In that way, guilt and shame immobilize us and harm us instead of doing what God intended for them to do: to help us realize that we are helpless and in need of his mercy.

I like the first three steps of the Twelve Steps:
1. I am powerless, and my life has become unmanageable - recognizing our need.
2. There is One who can restore me - realizing that only God can meet that need.
3. I must therefore turn my life and will over to Him - allowing him to address that need.

These three steps are pretty much what repentance is.

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I know exactly what you're talking about, IT. I've been there.

...though I don't understand what you mean when you say your faith was destroyed. Do you mean you no longer thought Christianity was true? It doesn't sound like that's the case from what you say, though I could be mistaken. Are you referring to common practices of the faithful, such as praying and churchgoing? That would make more sense.

So long as you still believe Christianity is true, and act accordingly, I would say you still have faith.

I suppose I'm just nitpicking over wording here, though.

Either way, you shouldn't give up entirely on the practices associated with faith. We are taught how to pray for a reason; be careful not to cut off all communication with God simply because Satan corrupted your last prayer. In time I'm sure you can disentangle the link; you might even use similar guidelines as what you outlined here.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

You missed the point entirely, Eldiran. Tiger is talking about guilt and shame and the devastating effects they have on the human psyche, how they can drive us away from God. He seems to be specifically addressing the (false) idea that our bodies are evil, which they are not, for Christ himself became a man.

Tiger, if I understand him correctly, is facing the same struggle that Martin Luther did in the early days of his ministry, seeing the reality that he is a sinner, and yet helpless to escape the destructive cycle. Eventually that struggle would drive him to rely on Christ alone (Christ, not knowledge, not good deeds, not religious practice, but Christ ALONE).*

Know this, Tiger, your struggle is not different than one we've all faced. But just as I said earlier, you can relinquish your guilt through the Lord Jesus Christ, who became a man and struggled as you did, even to the point of his own faith being broken, when he cried out, "Eloi Eloi Lama sabachthani?" Christ has not abandoned you, but is with you even in your struggle. I know. I've been there myself.

Hey, if God can forgive murderers like David and St. Paul, imagine what he can do for you?

*Don't get me wrong, I still believe that Christians need the ministry of Word and Sacrament, so that they continue to receive the work of Christ in their lives. But we go to church not to please God, but because we need him to strengthen our faith.

As a called and ordained servant of God's Word, I'd be more than glad to help anyone who finds themselves struggling with their faith. Just drop me a PM sometime.

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I understood that. I was concerned and confused about Tiger's destroyed faith. Faith is the ability to retain belief in that which is true... so how can one have their faith be destroyed, and yet still believe truth? That's what I was trying to figure out.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Actually, you didn't miss the point entirely. I just missed part of the point. My mistake. Sorry.

But to answer your question, there are two types of faith, both of which are testified in Scripture, and both important to Christians:

Fides Quae - confessional or doctrinal faith, what one holds to be fact, which focuses on content and corporate confession and teaching. For the Christian, this content can be understood in terms of the Nicene Creed.

Fides Qua - individual or personal faith, what one believes in their heart. I've been where my personal faith is crushed. My entire last year of seminary was in that place. Sure, I believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but I no longer believed he cared about me as his child. It was not until he put me in a place where I could once again experience his unconditional love that my Fides Qua was back in line with my Fides Quae.

Don't get me wrong - as a Lutheran I firmly believe in the necessity of Fides Quae - sound doctrine and confessional faith. In fact, our confession of faith ought to inform all of our personal experience. But if we have only Fides Quae, then our faith is not complete. The difference is, on one hand, confessing that Jesus Christ has died and risen from the dead, and on the other hand, knowing that Jesus Christ died and rose again For Me.

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No problem.

Thanks for clarifying that. I think I comprehend now.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Well, I didn't mean this to be about me so much.



That's the reason I posted this. I felt it was something that gets missed sometimes and I was hoping to help bring attention to this so people could avoid this situation. The problem was that it came down to a choice between having faith and crushing guilt or faith-on-hold and no guilt and I felt the need to choose the latter just to feel sane. Hopefully someone (anyone) will be more alert to what guilt can do before it gets to that point.




That would make more sense the way I was saying it, using the word "practice" faith, but that implies that faith should be approached like a checklist, which is a bad idea. That gets to the heart of my personal issue with faith, that it's like a checklist for ME to do, rather than something that's developed with God mostly out of my own control. But anyway, it's hard to say really what I believe right now.




Yeah, access to heaven isn't for people who have some checklist filled out, it's for people who are friends with the management. I had fides quae out coming out my ears (I might as well have been a home-based monastic), but not nearly enough, if any, fides qua to sustain it. With a basis of qua, the quae makes sense. Without qua, a well developed quae is insanity. The main thing is to start talking to God again and work from there.


About that spirit-body connection, I heard somewhere that most of the brain doesn't register negatives. So when you're thinking "Don't do that", most of the brain only sees "do that". So instead of thinking "don't sin", you should think of a positive opposite like "DO this virtue".

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