Don't Go through Life Overcome with Guilt

What Should I Do with My Guilt?

One of the deep values of the Psalms is the way it helps us move through life in light of the reality of sin and guilt. In fact, some specific psalms are totally devoted, from start to finish, in giving us language to pray to God when we know we are guilty.

The Psalms give us language to pray. . . .

Often as we move through life we feel a vague sense of guilt hanging over us and we don’t really know what to do with it. Other times we know something concrete and specific we’ve done that has offended God or others. The Psalms give us language to pray—without minimizing the sin at all—our guilt to God and then to receive total forgiveness from him.

The Great Sin Eliminator

And of course, the great culmination in Scripture of the Psalms' expression of God's forgiveness comes about a millennium after most of the Psalms were written. It comes in Jesus Christ who is the great guilt assuager, the great sin eliminator, who switched places with guilty rebels.

So as we read the Psalms and come across psalms of confession—Psalms like 32 or 51 or 130—we can read knowing that Jesus is the reason we pray those psalms with full confidence that we are forgiven. We can know that we are God’s son or daughter, the child of a loving Father, and not the person being indicted by an angry Judge.

Dane C. Ortlund (PhD, Wheaton College) serves as senior pastor of Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers and Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners. Dane and his wife, Stacey, have five children.

Introducing the 'ESV Devotional Psalter'

April 05, 2017

The devotional content of the ESV Devotional Psalter is intentionally designed to point to and highlight the biblical text, and to build bridges from the Psalms into the reader's heart.