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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
Chapter Twelve: Reclaiming Fear and Guilt
In that moment …fear and guilt were restored to my life as forces for good.
“Judgment Verses”
I have heard many people say that before becoming Christians they liked Jesus but found God the Father unapproachable. This never made much sense to me. It wasn’t that I always found God the Father approachable; it was instead that I found Jesus to be just as scary. He was sinless and had the whole “no one comes to the Father except through Me” message (John 14:6). This added such authority to His words that He seemed frightening.
Also, Jesus’ pronouncements of judgment went far beyond anything spoken by the Old Testament prophets. While they warned of wars, famines, and plagues, He warned of hell. Eternal torment made all other punishments seem small.
And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!
Think of all the terrible pain people can inflict on you: decades of torture, maiming, plucking your eyes out, wasting diseases, mental anguish …. Jesus said that none of those horrors is as terrible as being thrown into hell. This means that we should endure all of those other horrors for a lifetime, if necessary, to stay true to God, because doing so would be far better than ending up in unquenchable fire. To make matters worse, Jesus didn’t blame that fire on the devil. He made it clear that His Father is the One Who could cast us into it!
I read verses like this as a young man, and it seemed that Jesus was using a persuasive technique similar to the neighborhood bully: “Follow me, or my Father will beat you up!” If God the Father was scary, Jesus was, at the very least, a willing accomplice to His unapproachableness.
How could I reconcile fire and brimstone with the presence of the Holy Spirit I felt? God showered me with love and drew me near. Verses like Luke 12:4-5 seemed out of touch with the closeness and support He gave. It all made me wonder who He really was. Was He the Guy who lovingly held me or the One who frightened me with the threat of being turned into a crispy critter?
I didn’t like “judgment verses” (verses like Luke 12:4-5). They sounded too much like the demonic condemnation I spent so much energy resisting. They brought my harsh internal Parent to the surface with its anxiety-based perfectionism.
I played mental tricks to try to work around these sorts of verses. Perhaps the best trick was to accept them with my mind while my emotions refused to embrace what they were saying. My heart gave lip-service to wrath while it danced around what wrath really meant. For example, I reasoned that people were only sent to hell because they twisted God’s arm and forced Him into it. He wasn’t really angry at them. (i.e. Wrath wasn’t really an expression of His wrath. It was more that by rejecting Him they fell into a mechanical process of consequences that He couldn’t stop.)
“Judgment Verses” about Me
In 1979 I had a dramatic encounter with the Holy Spirit while reading Romans 1 and 2. He opened my eyes to understand sin from His perspective.[31] I realized what a horrible crime it was, and I understood why He was angry with those who didn’t repent from it. At last, I saw why He had to judge people for choosing their own way. It wasn’t because He was cranky; it was because disobedience did so much damage.
Within a few minutes, my entire view of “judgment verses” changed from “these make God look like the bad guy” to “these show that we are the bad guys and deserve to be punished.” Hell didn’t exist because the Creator of the universe was a schizophrenic who loved people at one moment and tortured them the next; it existed because people had to pay for the pain they had caused.
When I saw this I, for the first time, understood that I deserved to go to hell. I had believed in this truth as a doctrine for years, but it now pierced my heart, tearing down the wall I had erected to protect myself from my judgmental internal Parent. I wasn’t sure if removing that wall would unleash psychological and demonic forces that would drag me into self-destruction, but I knew that God was speaking to me. It seemed best to let Him show me that I and others were failing to repent and that this had consequences.
But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God
(Romans 2:5 NAS)
I realized that I was responsible to stop my sexual sins. I had said that I was for years, but I hadn’t believed it in my emotions. How could I feel responsible for not repenting if I didn’t know how to do it? Now I saw, with the Holy Spirit’s help, that I had no excuse. Somehow my failures were my fault, and if God practiced strict justice, each day I continued in them would store up greater wrath for me in the day of judgment. I could be lost forever.
I didn’t like thinking about that, but I had to admit that my life on earth was falling apart. It wasn’t a great stretch to conclude that my actions could be setting the stage for my eternal life to suffer the same fate.
At first, I didn’t see the part the death of Jesus played in all of this, so I thought I might really be headed for hell. I got on my face before God and said basically, “I have tried everything I know for the past eight years, and I have failed to obey You. I don’t have anything left. I can’t think of any way that I can stop my sexual sins. If every day that I don’t repent just adds to my penalty, then please open up the ground and take me now. I don’t know how to quit, and I don’t want my stay in hell to get any worse than it already will be.”
Then, I waited to see what God would do.
Mercy
After maybe a minute, the answer hit me. I realized that this was what the blood of Jesus was all about. I had no ability in myself to change, and because of that, God had to do something drastic to save me. He had to send His Son to satisfy His wrath toward me for the sin that had taken over my personality, which felt so much like “who I was” that I had no clue how to alter it even when threatened with hell. I was so blinded by my evil that I felt my best option might be to let the ground swallow me to limit my judgement.
I had believed in both my sinfulness and the blood of Jesus as doctrines for years. I had written songs about them – even putting all of Isaiah 53 to music,[32] but I had never before seen why His death was necessary. I thought God could forgive people simply because He was a nice guy. It was only when I saw the seriousness of what I and others were doing that I realized that someone had to pay. Sin was ugly and ingrained in us beyond anything I had previously conceived. Judgment didn’t come because God was intolerant; it came because we had earned it by choosing to become people who were bound by such selfish darkness.
That was why only Jesus could save us. Only He took what we deserved by dying on the cross so we could find forgiveness and freedom. Our sinfulness left us with no other good choice but to receive Him and what He had done.
Fear and Guilt as Friends
In that moment when I finally understood sin, death, judgment, and mercy, Fear and Guilt were restored to my life as forces for good. The reality of sin explained why these emotions existed; the death of Jesus allowed me to put them into perspective. They were no longer so horrible that I was unable to face them. I could now stare them squarely in the face and discover how they were intended to work for me rather than against me. God had created them with a purpose:
The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, to turn one away from the snares of death. (emphasis added)
When I kept it all inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became daylong groans. The pressure never let up; all the juices of my life dried up. Then I let it all out; I said, "I'll make a clean breast of my failures to GOD." Suddenly the pressure was gone — my guilt dissolved, my sin disappeared. (emphasis added)
(Psalm 32:3-5, The Message)
I began to embrace Fear and Guilt through the work of the Holy Spirit. I still had issues with them, but He helped me to consider the Scriptures to resolve a good deal of the confusion. I started to distinguish more clearly between fear based on faith and fear based on unbelief. I grew to better understand the difference between conviction and condemnation. I embraced wise caution while rejecting foolish cowardice.
I saw I needed to learn to work with these emotions rather than running from them as I had in the past. The devil had misused them in my life, and I had reacted to that, but now Jesus was reclaiming them.
Slowly, I found the Holy Spirit changing my Fear and Guilt – and this gave me the ability to give up the outward activities associated with the smoking fetish: smoking and privately acting out. Several months after the encounter I have described in this chapter, I realized that I now was able to stop these activities if I wanted to. I had to make the difficult choice to do so, but I put my faith into action and haven’t returned to them for more than thirty years.
Putting all of this into the terms I have been using in this book, my internal Parent was at last discovering how to fulfill a major part of its nurturing responsibility. Parents identify danger for children and teach them how a healthy Fear and Guilt can be their friends. They also comfort children and help them to avoid irrational terror and condemnation. The Holy Spirit was teaching me how to do that, and it opened up a significant piece of my personality to God’s transforming goodness. The result was that I was able to rise above my previous stumbling.
A Tightrope Over Hell
I hadn’t yet identified the Unprotected Heart Stronghold, but I had experienced a key to tearing it down. It often maintains its hold by gaining such influence on our Fear and Guilt that we run from issues we should face by God’s grace. We see them through the warped lens of abandonment, rejection, condemnation, or other painful experiences. They seem too frightening and overwhelming to confront, so we set up coping mechanisms to avoid or suppress them. In the resulting confusion, we find ourselves unable to resolve our issues and find health.
This changes as God leads us past our coping mechanisms into Holy Spirit empowered truth that makes us free. We discover that the answer isn’t found in avoiding Fear, Guilt, or other emotions; it is found in learning their place in God’s plan. They were created with a purpose, and as we discover that purpose and flesh it out in our lives, they change from states of dysfunction to expressions of godliness.
The following figure shows the change that had taken place:
| Prev Fig | Next Fig |
Notice that in contrast to Figure 14 on page 72, I was no longer falling to Sinful Behavior and Attitudes. I don’t mean to imply by this that I was totally free from sin in all areas of my life; I continued to falter in many ways.[33] (As I wrote earlier, if I were to try to describe every area of myself at the same time using the Emotion Commotion chart, there would be so many arrows and boxes it would lose its value as a teaching tool.) What the lack of arrows to Sinful Behavior and Attitudes represents is that I was no longer falling to outward expressions of sexual sins.
The highlighted portions of Figure 15 show that my internal Parent was learning to correctly Perceive Danger and use Fear and Guilt to guide me away from it. The result was a greater obedience (the arrow from the Fear and/or Guilt box to the Obedient Behavior and Attitudes box). I still had a good deal of unresolved Anger and Sorrow, but for the most part, my healthy expressions of Fun Emotions and Desires, Self-Control, Fear, and Guilt were enough to keep them from causing much damage.
Figure 15 is a picture of what I call the “Tightrope over Hell” stage of my life.[34] Through a combination of delight in Jesus, humility, good decisions, godly caution, and conviction, God gave me the power to escape from my most destructive habits. Though major parts of my hedge of thorns remained intact, enough of it was torn down that I was able to walk the tightrope and make steady progress.
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