Sermon from February 17, 2002
When we lived in Portland, I had one, especially tough critic of my preaching. It was his way or the highway, and that made dialogue difficult. As I listened to his complaints over a couple of years, one of them caught me by surprise. He said to me, "The problem with your preaching is that you don't make me feel guilty."

I asked him to explain, and he said, "When I come to church, I don't come here to feel good. I need you to preach in such a way that I feel guilty before God. If you don't do that, you haven't done your job."

That seemed to me unhealthy and even unholy. I was having none of it and bluntly told him so. Why he would think that way presented one of those puzzles of human nautre. After a few years of thinking off and on about that puzzle, I came to a conclusion about it.

There is a strain of thinking in conservative Protestant Christianity that places high importance on feeling guilty. It has a certain logic of forgiveness that goes something like this. Christ died for our sins. Unless a person feels guilty about sin, he will not feel his need for Christ. Therefore, part of preaching is making people feel guilty.

It is tricky business. For one thing guilt belongs to healthy human experience. God made us to feel guilty when we violate our consciences and also in those unexpected moments when the reality of God breaks upon our consciousness. The sense of awe and the sense of unworthiness that follows are both healthy and holy.

On the other hand, the moment that I try to induce you to feel guilty, I have introduced something dangerous, not only into our relationship but also into the message of Christianity. A persistent effort with a congregation of people to keep them feeling guilty and therefore feeling their need of God is a form of spiritual abuse.

Please hear me. Repentance belongs to the gospel, and preaching repentance belongs to a faithful presentation of the gospel. However, trying to make people feel bad by making them feel guilty is a deficient way to preach repentance and a dreadful way of representing Jesus Christ to the world and in the Church.

When Christ Himself preached repentance, what did He say? "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" He gave people good news and called on them to change their minds about any rival claim to good news and follow Him.

I think The Four Spiritual Laws, published by Campus Crusade for Christ, hit just the right note. The first spiritual law says, "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life." It is good psychology, and, best of all, it is true to scripture, as I hope to show you in the next few minutes.

So, am I saying that guilt does not matter? On the contrary! I say again that guilt belongs to healthy, human experience. I am also saying that many evangelical, Protestant Christians and many Roman Catholics in their presentation of Christianity have given far too great a prominence to making people feel guilty. The way of Christ is far better, and it is time we took a closer look at His way as revealed to us in the Gospel of Mark.

This closer look follows the experience of the disciples in this Gospel. Take a walk with me through Mark, beginning in Mark 1:17. "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." He said that to brothers, who earned their living as fishermen. Can't you just imagine their response?

"You mean we can catch people for the kingdom of God the way we catch fish for a living? Andrew, come on, let's go. This is good." There is no attempt to induce guilt. Jesus offers good news, so good that men leave their gainful employment in order to be in the vanguard of the kingdom of God.

Look next at Mark 3:14-15. Jesus takes Peter, Andrew and ten other men up to a mountain retreat, and this is what happened there. He appointed twelve – that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons.

He gives recognition, status and power to those twelve men, just the sort of thing that men like. Something big is brewing, and they are in on the ground floor. Their anticipation of something good and even the exhilaration of opposition tie them more closely to Jesus Christ; and what Christ promised He made good on in Mark 6:12-13.

They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. From village to village throughout Galilee, like Jesus, they gave people good news and called on them to change their minds about any rival aim to good news and follow Jesus in what was about to unfold in Israel.

Success like theirs instilled confidence in them, some would say an exaggerated confidence. Look at Mark 9:33-34. They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the road?" But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

Modern readers may find their self-importance arrogant or even disgusting, not to say misplaced. But men don't talk like that unless they have high hopes, and high hopes come from good news. Just how high their hopes could go show in Mark 10:35ff.

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. "Teacher," they said, "we want you to do for us whatever we ask."

"What do you want me to do for you?" he asked.

They replied, "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory."

"You don't know what you are asking," Jesus said. "Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?"

"We can do it," they answered.

To have two disciples going behind the backs of the other ten strikes us as politics as usual among over-ambitious men. No doubt we are right, and the name-calling and faultfinding that ensued speaks poorly about the disciples; but again, their overweening ambition rises out of men, who are confident of success is a great cause.

Their ambition is not their greatest fault. Their greatest fault is to miss repeated signs along the way that should have tempered their ambition and high opinion of themselves. For example, look back at Mark 4:40. 

They are huddled in fear in a boat after Jesus has just prevented their death at sea by calming a storm, and He said to his disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" No faith? These men have left gainful employment to follow Jesus; in the face of rejection by His own family and a harsh verdict by Jewish authorities, they have stuck with Him. How can He question their faith? It was a bad moment, but it seems not to have slowed them down.

On a second ride across the Sea of Galilee in Mark 6:52, Jesus comes to them walking on the water. He gets into the boat, the wind dies down, and Mark says this about the can-do disciples: they were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened. I guess they were hardened; the experience did not shake their self-confidence.

Or how about the first time Jesus predicted His coming rejection, suffering and death. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men," (Mark 8:32-33).

That would get the attention of most of us. Peter seems unfazed, as he participates in the later discussions about who was the greatest, and joins the others to sit on James and John's devious attempt to grasp power in the kingdom of God.

Perhaps nothing shook the disciples more deeply than Jesus' announcement that one of the twelve disciples was going to betray Him; and within a few hours or less Jesus declares that in a coming crisis all the disciples would abandon Him. It is too much for Peter, says Mark 14:29-31.

Peter declared, "Even if all fall away, I will not."

"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "today – yes, tonight – before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times."

But Peter insisted emphatically, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you."

Within hours Judas kisses Jesus in betrayal, and after a short skirmish, mostly of words, Peter and the rest abandon Jesus to His fate at the hands of the Sanhedrin. Then Peter feels some real guilt. Somewhere on the Mont of Olives he comes to his senses, and, says Mark 14:54, Peter followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest. There he sat with the guards and warmed himself at the fire. Rash, perhaps, but not lacking in courage.

The Grand Jury style hearing finds Jesus guilty of blasphemy and bundles Him off to some other room for a formal charge against Him. At some point in the process Peter comes to the worst moment of His life. We pick up the action in Mark 14:66-72.

While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came by. When she saw Peter warming himself, she looked closely at him. "You also were with that Nazarene, Jesus," she said. According to Acts 24:5, the early Christians were called the Nazarene sect. I don't think it was said to flatter. No doubt the servant girl had heard it around the campfires, as soldiers and others used it to ridicule Jesus, who came from the despised hamlet of Nazareth. Peter felt the sting of the name and the precariousness of his own position.

But he denied it. "I don't know or understand what you're talking about," he said, and went out into the entryway, which was also the exit. Everything that had made Peter run in the Garden of Gethsemane is working overtime in that courtyard.

When the servant girl saw him there, she said again to those standing around, "This fellow is one of them." Persistent little thing, don't you think? Verse 70 is terse and relentless. Again he denied it. The attention given to Peter also seems to be relentless and decidedly on one track.

After a little while, those standing near said to Peter, "Surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean." They could tell by his accent. But what can we tell about him from his response?

He began to call down curses on himself, and he swore to them, "I don't know this man you're talking about." It is awful to read what comes next.

Immediately the rooster crowed the second time. Wretched rooster rousing memory! Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him: "Before the rooster crows twice you will disown me three times." All the banshees in hell seem to conspire to surround Peter and taunt Peter and crush Peter, until the old Peter dies. And he broke down and wept, the unhappiest man in the kingdom of God.

Now, we are ready to talk about guilty feelings. We glibly talk about a person who comes to the end of himself. Peter had come to the end of himself. It is a mercy that the Gospels leave the next few days of Peter's existence in privacy. My friend in Oregon who felt good about feeling bad had no idea what he was asking for.

His form of guilt-laden Christianity trivializes the reality of human sin. Peter's experience, terrible as it was, models more faithfully what is true about the downside of human nature. He was captured by something good beyond belief, which in turn showed him something of an evil beyond belief within his own soul.

Scripture can say the most piercing things about human nature. Jeremiah 17:9 says, The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Romans 3:12 says, All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.

The great Isaiah, in a moment of blinding, self-knowledge, says, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty." Isaiah too finds goodness (the vision of God in his case) to be the thing that shows him something of the depths of the evil within his own soul.

We hear these scriptures and continue on, seemingly unperturbed, and quite properly so. They seem to violate what our own eyes tell us and how we have been taught to think. We seldom see the face of evil in others, much less in ourselves. We have been taught to think, "I may not be all good, but I am no worse than anyone else." It is of course untrue and shallow, but it is not malicious.

But if you believe that scripture tells the truth about the evil capacity of human beings, it can be very tempting to take the fatal step of trying to make people feel their guilt. Evangelists, pastors and moralists sometimes take that fatal step. They seldom succeed in doing the good they set out to do.

God is the only one who can truly and safely teach us about our own evil, and He seems to do it by capturing our hearts with something good, and that good becomes the occasion for showing us something of the depths of the evil within our own souls.

The great danger to Peter's dreams of following Jesus was Peter. He learned that in the courtyard of the high priest. Pursue your dreams, and you will discover the evil within you soon enough. You will know that you are truly on the road to sanctity, if you can take responsibility for what you have done to damage your own dreams.

And here is the good news, the paradox of grace. When the second cockcrow brought Peter to the end of himself, it also brought Peter to the beginning of his new self. He could see the emptiness of his arrogance and posturing. What he could not see was how to proceed. Only Jesus could help him see that, and He did.

When you fail, take responsibility for what you did to fail. Don't pass it off to someone else. It will prepare you for the big moment, when God draws back a corner of the curtain and shows you the evil in your heart. Then, you will understand Peter, Paul, Isaiah and all the great ones. Then, you will know why we need a Savior and worship.