We have held this truth to be self-evident for some 250 years (as of the time of this writing) that all men are created equal. This means that no man has greater intrinsic value than another. We often struggle to apply this practically; it seems to assert itself in times of tragedy. A team rushes into a dangerous situation; not all of them come out. Patients sleep in rows on a ward, then one night a bed is empty. Two cars collide at an intersection; one driver staggers out of the vehicle; the other does not. The math is difficult. These lives were worth the same, at least at their origins. So why does one end and another continue? We look for answers in what was done with those lives. Sometimes we find solace: the men who emerged from the danger alive and well had families that needed them, while those left behind had no one waiting at home. The soul lost in the car accident had been a drunkard and a louse. Sometimes we are left more confused and frustrated. The patient who passed had been an outstanding campaigner for medical research, soon to be married with a long and prosperous future forecasted. The one who survives has accomplished nothing noteworthy. All of this math falls apart somewhere along the way when we start to speculate about what might have been.
The truth is each human life has value; each contains something of the divine image. Our modern philosophies and sciences deny this, but our souls cannot. When we walk away, and others do not, we rarely walk away unscathed. “Why me?” is the question that can haunt our loved ones and us for years or decades. We feel burdened to make it all make sense, to justify the outcome. It can push us to do great things, or cause us to sink into lethargy. It has the power to bind us to a moment in time and rob us of the life we were given to live.
I am a survivor. I survived childhood cancer. I knew people who didn’t. We were children. We hadn’t done anything yet. I came through scarred, but cancer-free for thirty years. I know another who came through better off, only for the cancer to return again and again, taking her down piece by piece. She rode across Tennessee on a bike to raise money for the hospital that treated us. She was engaged to be married. She’s gone; I am still here. I used to think about her a lot, and the others. I didn’t remember them well, but they formed a chorus of judgment in my thoughts for years. When I exorcised those ghosts, I thought I was healed, but my healing had only just commenced.
Survivor’s guilt drives its roots deep into our hearts, shifting our perceptions of ourselves and of everything around us. There is nothing easy about curing it, though the cure can be stated in three words. You likely already know it, but like me, you struggle to accept it completely. We have made-up conditions for our release. We like the character in Dickens’ most enduring novel: “I wear the chain I forged in life.”
Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge my own situation. I was a child who contracted a disease, a victim of random genetic mutation according to medical science. My cancer was not contagious; my fight with it was my own. There was nothing I could have done to help my fellow patients in their fights other than provide the support of a fellow child.
Your situation might be different; perhaps you had more agency in it. Maybe you failed to check something that led to an incident, or perhaps you acted irresponsibly and caused an accident. There are countless situations in the world far more difficult than my own; but by grace there is an answer to each one. While I have drawn on my own experience for this writing, my solution is rooted in God’s Word.
Survivor’s Guilt in the Bible
Following the Numbers
What follows a tragedy are questions. “Could I have saved those lives?” “Is there a reason I am alive?” “Why did this happen?” Together, all these questions, and all the others, combine to form an equation that can reshape the rest of our lives. Perhaps there are times when we can find a neat solution, but I suspect that in most, if not all, cases the equation remains unbalanced. After all the work we do to figure out these difficult numbers, we are left with a burden. We have come to call that survivor’s guilt.
Both the Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam-Webster define guilt as the fact of having done something wrong, particularly violating a law. Emotional guilt is the bad feeling of knowing we have done something wrong or hurt someone. So, in the case of survivor’s guilt, we feel that we have done something wrong by remaining alive. When you break a law, you pay a price.
One of the main problems with solving our equation is that no penalty is assigned. Unless you caused the deaths, the police will not be showing up. Even if you were the cause through accident or negligence (drunk driving, intentional at a hazardous worksite, etc.) a judge can rarely inflict a penalty severe enough to equal the damage done.
That feeling of guilt shows that we are still in touch with true morality and value human lives. We value other human lives, but our own value is in question. The numbers can lead in several directions. The worst possible outcome is that we decide we should not have survived at all, becoming suicidal. Suicide appeals to the guilty soul because it ends the whole problem; it stops the pain caused by the nagging question and the impossible burden.
It is a very selfish answer that, far from resolving a tragedy, adds to it. Suicide is never painless. Suicide spreads the guilt around rather than containing it. Suicide prolongs suffering rather than ending it. Suicide is not the answer; it is only the end. If you take your own life, you have not won by way of escaping; you admit defeat by resigning.
The pain is real, and it is often overwhelming. It is made more difficult to bear by the other effects of guilt in our lives. If you have contemplated this awful option, I am asking you as one who contemplated this evil myself, to stay with me to the end of this article. There is a better way; you can live again and have another good day. Please do not give up; your life is worth saving even if you do not believe it. God be with you, and help you to take the next breath and the next until the air is sweet to you once more, amen.
The most universal effect of survivor’s guilt is to isolate the sufferer. We feel that no one else understands our responsibility, and so we close off a part of ourselves to others. We feel we do not deserve good things until we have paid off the debt of our guilt, and so we push others away. Some of us, myself included, have done this so long we do not even realize we are doing it. We may not recall what genuine relationships feel like. We lose love not because we are unlovable or undeserving, but because we feel that we are.
Those who try to love find their love not so much rejected as ignored. It is like someone sending us letters that sit unopened on a library table. Part of our self-inflicted sentence is solitary confinement.
This is really devastating because it cuts us off from perspectives that could help us work through our guilt and make something good of our history. We limit ourselves to our own understanding when we refuse to really listen to anyone else. See Proverbs 15:22: “Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.”
Surviving cancer, or anything else, can deepen our appreciation of human mortality, but it does not make us universally wise. That is to say, we do not automatically know more than anyone else because we lived through whatever we lived through. Our family, friends, ministers, and others can speak truth to us. God can speak through our brothers and sisters in Christ and is supremely qualified to tell us the truth; He is Himself the way, the truth, and the life. Editor’s note: It says so in John 14:6.
This notion, once understood more profoundly, raises the strange issue of entitlement. Oddly, the guilty should feel themselves entitled to special treatment, but it happens. It seems that bearing our burden of guilt entitles us, as it is necessary and at the same time all-consuming for us. It is very much like the entitlement of disability, which might accompany survivor’s guilt, giving us a double claim on special treatment.
Now, let me be clear on this: in the days, weeks, and months following our emergence from a tragedy, we will need special care. We may need particular care from time to time for years following. We do not need the world to cater to us. We do not have entitlement to that at all. Surviving doesn’t make you king or queen; it makes you alive.
Being alive is an opportunity to do something. And often survivor’s guilt spurs us on to do something worthwhile. Many cancer survivors support ongoing research, or raise funds to supply treatment. Those who survive accidents often invent safety improvements, or lobby for stronger standards. Serving our communities and trying to make a positive impact with our remaining time is good and admirable.
However, when we are motivated by guilt, it is not as good as it might be. Guilt tends to make us restless, and even reckless in our pursuits. Guilt drives us to demand certain results because it isn’t really about helping people or glorifying God; it is about paying our debt. Something that debt seems so great that we could never hope to pay any meaningful portion of it. So, we stop living, stop trying, and we survive counting down the days till we leave this prison we locked ourselves in. This is not living.
Either the doers or the defeated can feel themselves perfectly justified and even morally superior. For many years I prided myself on trying to make something of my life. The truth was it wasn’t really my life; I owed it to a chorus of ghosts. I was no more alive than those who spent their days trying to drown their pains. Here then is the end of all the ways of survivor’s guilt; you end up as nothing more than a survivor, and life, dearly beloved, is much more than survival.
Now in all this we are thinking a lot about ourselves, but we are thinking of ourselves highly. What I mean is that we are not placing a high value on our own lives. At first glance, that may seem a very admirably humble way of thinking. See Psalm 8:4: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
The Psalmist echoes a humility that is seen throughout the Bible, and most especially in Christ: see Philippians 2:11: “And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Yet the Psalmist does not leave us to assume a low valuation. The very next verse sees the value here questioned set rather higher than we might expect. See verse 12: “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
See next Psalm 8:5: “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” Notice “For thou hast made him.” I cannot emphasize this phrase enough. Our value comes from God. Setting our value low is not true humility, but a perverse form of pride. This word perverse describes a stubbornness that goes against expectations in a moral sense; it is therefore the best adjective I know to describe the pride of self-loathing.
You may object here that you ought to know the value of your life, even its relative value, as you are very familiar with it. Ah, but are you really? Do you know George Bailey? In the classic film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Mr. Bailey felt confident to assess the value of his own life, saying plainly: “I’m worth more dead than alive.”
Yet when George is allowed to see a world he had not lived in, his worth becomes very clear to him. This manager of a small-town loan operation, who failed to accomplish any of his dreams on the edge of total ruin, had indeed lived a wonderful life. George’s initial assessment failed because he could not see the true impact of his actions, how many lives his life had touched. George got to see something very few of us ever will. Nevertheless, we can learn from his near-fatal failure that we are poorly equipped to assess our own worth.
You see, we really aren’t meant to sit in judgment upon our lives. We read in Acts 17:30-31, Revelation 20:11-12, and elsewhere that it is Christ Jesus the Lord who alone is the judge of the living and the dead:
- Acts 17:30-31: “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:”
- Revelation 20:11-12: “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
Christ, who faced all temptation common to mankind and came through without sin (Editor’s note: See Hebrews 2:18, 4:15), who died and rose to extend grace to all who would receive it through faith, the God-man alone is fully able and qualified to sit in judgment.
When we judge ourselves, we take His seat, and declare that we are better able and qualified than He to pass sentence. We make ourselves to be like God, knowing good from evil, falling for the same lie as Eve and Adam.
That is not humility, but the very heights of arrogance! Pride is what locks into the prison of guilt. There is no escaping the destructive tendencies of survivor’s guilt without first humbling ourselves before a better judge. Beloved, none of us can balance the equation, or make the numbers work. Doing the math does not lead to the solution in this case, it only leads to suffering.
Balancing the Equation
Evolutionary theory teaches us that we are the product of chance, and that we live and die by chance and strength. Our experience of survival often undermines this brutal worldview. We cannot find in ourselves the superior strength that warrants our survival. Chance does satisfy our innate desire for reason. We look for reason on instinct. We expect it to be there, and evolution cannot explain that expectation. The best explanation is that a personal, reasonable force at work throughout all of history. We look for a reason because in our heart of hearts we know there is one.
Genesis 1:1 and following affirm our sensibility in this regard. God created, and God maintains. He is there, and He is not silent. So, there is most assuredly a reason that we are here while others are gone. The trouble is we do not get those reasons. God has rarely arrived with a full incident report to explain exactly why this or that happened as it did.
While we greatly desire just such an explanation, God is under no obligation to provide it.
The writer does not explain themselves to the characters in their novel. The artist does not seek approval from the painting, nor is a sculptor judged by the clay. Even when we are dealing with our beloved children, we often withhold our full reasoning; either because they are not prepared to appreciate it, or because time does not allow us to. God as Creator has all rights over the creation as human artists hold over their creations. As Father God has every right we assume with our own children.
In both instances, God’s position is far above our own, because He is set apart and pure. God is perfect. God defines the term. That is why in Isaiah 6:3 the circling seraphim pronounced God not just holy, or even holy, holy, but “holy, holy, holy.” See verse: “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”
R. C. Sproul notes in “The Holiness of God,” that in Hebrew, repetition of a word raises its intensity. So, to say that God is “holy, holy, holy” means he is the holiest one, the single most holy being ever. That is a difficult truth to hold onto when we are struggling to come to terms with loss, or questioning our continued existence. At such times it is tempting to pronounce God imperfect, to find some fault with Him. That is foolish; it is the same foolishness that led our first parents astray in the Garden.
This next truth is particularly difficult to hear, especially if the people left behind were close to us, or, as in my own story, apparently innocent. I am asking you to stay with me; at the end, there will be greater comfort, I assure you. Romans 3:23 says: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” God is holiest of all, and we are unholy. The unholy cannot exist in the presence of the holy; such a thing violates nature.
For us to enter into relationship with God, we must become holy. But a dirty rag does not clean anything; it only spreads its dirt. See Isaiah 64:6: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
The picture here of a rag that has been soiled by excrement. No one would think to clean anything with such a polluted rag, and yet that is the only sort of rag we have. Rightly is it asked and answered in the Book of Job in verse 14:4: “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.”
This is why Ephesians 2:8-9 insists, along with Romans 6:23 and many other passages, that salvation (consisting of imparted holiness from Christ in justification, being made holy in likeness of Christ sanctification, and arriving at holiness with Christ, glorification) is given us as a gift by God. Grace is unmerited favor; it is not earned, unlocked, or merited in any way.
God has not loved us because we are lovely or lovable; certainly not because we first loved Him. See 1 John 4:10: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” O, beloved, how unsearchable is the mystery of God’s love; it is never understood, only accepted and appreciated by faith. How could the finite ever understand the infinite? Yes, even the fact that we can know of this amazing love is itself a sign of that love.
God owes us nothing but wrath; His love is freely given to those who do not deserve it. That is the Gospel in a nutshell, and it informs our worldview even and especially when tragedy strikes.
Jesus dealt directly in Luke 13:1-5: “There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”
Jesus did not express sympathy or outrage, or even assurance that these people deserved it more than others. The Lord implies that the wonder of the thing is not that a few suffered this way, but that not everyone had. The victims had it coming, but so does everyone else!
Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? See Luke 13:5-6: “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. He spake also this parable; A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.”
Even in the seemingly random tragedy of a tower collapsing, Jesus turns our thinking on its head. He says in effect, “You should be trying to figure out why the tower fell on these people; you should be trying to figure out why towers haven’t fallen on all of you.” The tower might have fallen on anyone, and the answer would be the same. All have sinned; all have earned a payout of death. The ones who were crushed under that tower were no better and no worse than the ones who walked away.
Here we protest: this one did some good deeds, or that one did some evil deeds; this one was an upstanding citizen, and that one was a criminal. We need to take in the lesson of Matthew 5, where Jesus equates unrighteous anger with murder, and lust with adultery. The standard of righteousness is much higher than we believe.
So, what we want is for Jesus to spend the rest of Luke 13 explaining why God had the tower fall on those particular people, and not others. Instead, Jesus launches into a parable about a fig tree that does not bear fruit and is therefore removed. God judges; He gives each of us an allotted time to live, and He does not explain Himself. Well, He does not explain Himself the way we often demand.
Here is the trick: God Himself is the explanation. God is the ultimate solution that balances our equation. Now, for that to make any sense at all, we have to know God not as an abstract concept, but as a personal being. When we know that God is holy, that He is wisdom and knowledge, and that He is justice, and that He is love altogether, inseparably, and at all times, then and only then do the numbers add up. They add up because they are in good hands, God’s Hands.
I said at the beginning that the answer could be given in three words. Here they are, “God is there.” God is right there in the midst of that moment you are reliving. He is there, and so there is a reason, a good reason. Because God is there, you no longer have to be. You do not need to know the reason; you can know the one who establishes it.
Imagine you are locked in a room with a whiteboard containing the most difficult math problem you have ever seen. You cannot leave this room until that problem is solved. You throw yourself at the numbers for all you are worth, but nothing you try gives the solution. As you rack your brain for something else to try, the single greatest mathematician you know appears beside you. Putting a comforting hand on your shoulder, the mathematician says, “I’ll take care of this for you; you go on with your life now.”
The door to the room is unlocked and opened. Are you going to stay there and watch over this genius’s shoulder? Would you even be able to tell if he was getting things right? Well, if you didn’t know anything about the mathematician, maybe you would, but God is not a stranger. You know God’s love, His wisdom, His ability, His holiness, and His faithfulness; you know He can solve the problem because He displayed all His character while solving the ultimate problem of sin and death upon the cross. The empty tomb is the assurance you want that He can do all He says.
Easy enough to say, easy enough to hear. Easy enough to believe? Perhaps. To the well-adjusted who have known unconditional love, it may come easily, but many of us have had mixed experiences of love. The message of God’s love reaches the ears, but has a rough time making its way straight to the heart. We have questions, doubts, and delusions that get in the way of receiving the solution of God’s love. We need to get to the root of these hangups if we are truly going to solve the problem at hand.
Accepting the Solution
At this point we ought to have settled the whole matter. For some readers we have, but as we said before, survivor’s guilt is a stubborn condition. The distortion of personal worth pushes loved ones away. It also pushes God away.
God’s Love is difficult to accept. We may take it in part, but deny its fullness. While we are ultimately responsible for our own thoughts and beliefs, the churches of these United States have done much harm by spreading errors. Sometimes those errors are spread with full knowledge and intent; at other times they spread through ignorance without malice.
We very much wish to see both scenarios come to an end, and for every churchgoer to encounter the true Gospel of Grace in Christ during every service. We wish too see each believer come to a full understanding of grace in Christ in all of life. To God’s Glory may it be granted.
I want to address some of the most prolific and harmful errors individually. The great danger of these errors is that they are mingled with pieces of The True Gospel. It is like poisoning chocolate; the chocolate masks the deadly presence of the poison. It is sweet and easy to swallow, and only as the poison takes effect do we become aware of it.
Love Means Getting What You Want
The Prosperity Gospel is not well masked; its greed, selfishness, and absurdity are plain to most, but the notion of God’s blessing coming as material wealth fits well with the American dream and slips neatly into otherwise Biblical worldviews. When health is failing, wealth is out of reach, and material prosperity seems little more than a fantasy, we can conclude that God’s favor has departed from us.
Conversely, if we have health, money, and material possessions, we can glibly assume God’s favor is with us. Tying God’s love to what we get from Him is childish. “You must not love me because I do not have this!” “If you truly cared about me, I would have that! “Oh, how much like spoiled brats we sound. How ridiculous it is for us to address the Lord of all Creation in this way. He who laughs at the mustered force of the nations is not all threatened by the waving of our puny fists.
Nowhere in Scripture is there any universal promise of material prosperity. There are few examples of prosperous Christ followers, and even those who are did not enjoy prosperity in all seasons of life. The old song says that, “into each life some rain must fall,” and that is surely the case here. God uses material suffering to produce spiritual prosperity.
If that seems little comfort to us as we stock shelves for minimum wage and ponder how we will pay the bills this month, well, that says more about limited vision than God’s unfailing love. The psychologist Abraham Maslow put together a hierarchy of needs; he theorized that we cannot pursue higher needs until our lower needs have been met.
Maslow is half-right; we do fixate on the immediate basic needs such as food and shelter to the exclusion of higher needs like meaning and purpose. But the man who satisfies his hunger has a matter of hours before he fills the need again. The man who satisfies his need of a purpose in life is set until that purpose is achieved. In his pursuit of the higher need, the lower need is put into perspective; it now serves a greater purpose.
When the lower needs are met apart from the higher needs, they are left unchecked. Your hunger is The Master. What Maslow got the order of reversed. God did not. God offers the greater treasures of the immaterial, knowing they are more valuable to us than any amount of wealth.
Paul tells the Romans that God has already given them the very best gift that could ever be given in Christ. This is true. So, when tempted to think that poverty signals that God is withholding or withdrawing love from you, answer, “but I have been given Christ.” Christ is given continually; see John 15:5: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”
Therefore, God’s love remains with you.
Love Comes From Works
The angry rants of full-on legalists are hard to misconstrue as anything but works righteousness. But there is a gentler, more palatable kind of legalism that only wants to help you with life’s challenges through five secrets to managing your money, or seven keys to a happy marriage. The emphasis is on what you are doing, or ought to be doing, and not on what God has done. We got into the family, but our standing now depends on our personal performance.
Where are the chapter and verse for that? Yes, the Bible gives us many precepts for living, but these are not performance standards handed down by a strict Father concerned with reputation. No, these are loving guidelines from a good Father who is trying to prevent our getting hurt. When God looks at you, He sees the image of Christ’s perfection See Ephesians 2:13: “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”
This does not mean our disobedience goes undisciplined, but that even in discipline, especially in discipline, God’s love for us is unchanged. It means that you have been fully installed into the family with every privilege of an heir.
Little God, Little Love
Making God small makes God’s love small. We excel at making God small. We shrink God by lopping off portions of Scripture. We shrink God by cutting the anchor line of theology from the Bible. We shrink God by focusing our attention on ourselves. We shrink God by enshrining our own preferences as sacred. We shrink God by making ourselves as big as can be. Then when God has become pocket-sized, and we think we might be giants, we end up feeling very small.
We have also shrunk God’s love by ignoring the reality of His wraith. Without the wraith of God against sinners, the love of God loses its definition. The Cross is the great contest of these two attributes of the Almighty in which God’s just wrath is satisfied that love might be extended. Lose the justice, and the love is cheap. Editing God’s self-revelation does nothing to balance the account, or to serve anyone; it only distorts the Gospel till it is no longer Good News at all.
When God’s love is cheap and cheaply given, we presume upon it. We think it is deserved, that we are entitled. The gravity of the situation shifts as we go into orbit around ourselves. This is when we begin to argue and divide about carpet colors and choir robes. We run rampant, fulfilling our own desires because those desires cannot find their ultimate fulfillment in submission to God and in the reception of His love. We are searching for something that has already been there, only we did not recognize it because we were deluded into making little oof it.
Ed Welsch wrote the book on this folly, and R. C. Sproul touched upon it in his masterful “The Holiness of God,” both are worth reading. Here I can do little better than to say, God is not small! God is massive: you really won’t believe how supreme big He really is. God is too big to be held by our four-dimensional existence. He goes beyond space and time to the extent that they have no meaning for Him.
We pay lip service to this reality, but very little is left in our weekly gatherings to acknowledge it. Pastors take the pulpit as if they were talking about something mundane; our song service comes off like a concert, and the sanctuary is little more than an auditorium. We have lost the gravity of God’s presence; no wonder so many of our congregations are coming apart. No, we seem to have trouble holding ourselves together. For when God is not hallowed in our assembly, it is like the Sun has been removed from the galaxy.
God’s love is God-sized, big enough for all of life. You will never come to the end of God’s love, never get out from under it, never get over it, or around it. Humans often love just a little, but God is not a man that His love should change. We change; God does not. This is why we must be reminded week after week of the Good News contained in the full counsel of Scripture.
Allow me to summarize what we have learned here: God’s love is unconditional. The covenant is not filled with fine-print legalese; trust Christ completely, submit your life to Him, and by grace alone He grants your life now and forever. God’s love is vast. God’s love would overflow the oceans. When God’s love seems to have departed, it is not because the love is gone; but we have gone astray. What we need is to stop playing judge, accept God’s love, and release ourselves from the burden of being lovable. We are loved well before there is anything lovable about us, and God is making us lovable in Christ.
Much like Sam Cooke,” we only hurt ourselves when we scoff at the love of God.
How to Know God’s Love
If God wants you to abide in His love, then Satan and his forces want the opposite. The enemy wants you doubting, rejecting, belittling, and abandoning God’s love. I am sure they have a hand in setting up the deadly equation of survivor’s guilt. They certainly have their hand in the humanistic, materialistic, secularist worldview that keeps those numbers from resolving into a peaceful continuation of life.
If God wants you freed by grace, Satan wants you burdened by works. The enemy does not surrender easily; they will continue attacking until you are out of range. You do not face a single battle, but a series of battles in a campaign. The reason so many of us fail to appreciate and live in the full love of God is that we fail to hold the truth of God’s love constantly in our thoughts.
When you find yourself thinking that God does not love you, or does not love you fully; you must immediately confront that thought with the full counsel of Scripture. You must rush upon these malicious lies with all the force of truth, demanding, “What about the Cross of Christ?”
When you feel downcast and dejected rather than giving way to despair you must interrogate these feelings as the Psalmist did in Psalms 42 and 43, “Why are you downcast my soul, and why is this turmoil within you,” then the demand, “put your hope in God for I will praise Him again.” Then do just that, praise God. Praise Him for the least little blessing to the greatest. Praise God for what was, and for what is. After you have praised Him and your soul is uplifted, then lay out your requests before Him. See Philippians 4:6: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”
And I know that is easy to write, but not so easy to execute in the throes of our troubles.
I might go on encouraging and admonishing, and even correcting and rebuking; but these activities mean much more when they are provided face-to-face by a minister who is sent to you. Listen on Sunday morning to your preacher as if he were speaking directly to you, and for you on behalf of God: because he is.
If you are left in need of spiritual care, reach out to this man of God. He is there to help; he is set apart for just that purpose. We often deny these men the chance to do their jobs by withholding information. You do not expect your physician to prescribe for an illness you never tell them about, so why do we expect a pastor to treat a situation we haven’t confessed to them? Pastors do not receive a special “ministry-sense” that lets them know when they are wanted.
That point is especially true if we have not been to church regularly. John 15:5 implies that absence from the congregation may well cause us to feel isolated from the love of God, as one avenue for sharing that love is through fellowship. When we are among believers, serving and being served, the love of God is ministered throughout the assembly. Go to church, find a place to serve.
Read the bible, and pray as you read; talk to God with His word open. Read books about Him. Read books about those who trusted Him in days gone by. Always be reading something of God. Take care not to read too much darkness, godlessness, or morbidity. Take care with the kind of godless self-help that urges you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The same applies to music.
Conclusion
You are not responsible for history; take that word in two His-Story; it belongs to God amen. He has not asked you to make sense of any of it; you cannot find that command in Scripture. Your part is to trust God. You do not understand leading to faith, but like Anselm, your faith grants understanding.
God can be trusted; His love is well proved. You can receive that love by grace apart from works. You do not have to earn it. You do not have to make up for this, or answer for that, even if you did wrong. Christ already paid the penalty on your behalf. You only have to accept it. Beloved, do not linger in this prison of guilt. Do not impose on yourself a punishment you cannot bear, or even one you think you can. Give it to God. Go and live for Him. Live with love, joy and peace.
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