When our sins are uncovered, the normal first reaction is to hide them from God, others, and even ourselves, a tendency common to humanity since the first two human beings. The Bible recognizes this human inclination to justify oneself, but God does not look kindly on such ploys, as they can lead to destruction. We often use excuses like "It's too hard," "There wasn't time," or "The devil made me do it" to justify our lack of productivity, yet Jesus Christ judges us by our fruits as doers, not by our intentions. Parents may also teach justifications by excusing their children's bad behavior with phrases like "It's okay, honey. You didn't have your nap," passing down a legacy of self-justification that can devastate even nations when leaders influence their heirs. Using excuses such as "After all, I'm just human" or "Everyone is doing it" does not justify personal sin, for God is interested only in our repentance, overcoming, and growth, forgiving only as we repent. If we convince ourselves that our faults and sins are excusable, we gain nothing but the penalty of death, as self-justification cannot grant eternal life. Only the shed blood and sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, who suffered mightily for us, can justify us. He seeks those who will admit their faults and work daily to overcome them. David, after justifying his grievous sins of adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, repented bitterly when confronted, loathing his sin, seeking God's cleansing, and determining to correct his conduct. He stands as a model of repentance and overcoming, showing that by admitting faults and striving to overcome, we work out our salvation and seek eternal life.

Guilt, like bitterness and resentment, can be psychologically corrosive. It can eat a person up from the inside. Many people down through history have come to realize that. Aldous Huxley said, Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. The Roman playwright Plautus said, Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt. Clinical psychologist Dr. Kenneth Wapnick said, Guilt is the sum total of all the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves. And author Gretchen Rubin wrote, Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life. They're big flashing signs that something needs to change. It is not only natural for us to feel guilty, but it has an important role to play in our lives as a thermostat on our character and if we are full of guilt, that means something needs to change. We know these things. We are here in God's church at least partly due to guilt. Of course, the main reason why we are a part of God's church is because of God's calling, but He often makes use of guilt to motivate us. He sometimes turns our guilt meter up just a bit, makes us feel really guilty to begin to move us toward change or to seek Him. Let us look at Luke 5. This vignette here in Luke is a little different from what we see in some of the other gospel writers about Jesus' calling of the first four, but it is really interesting what he adds in here because he highlights Peter's guilt. Peter's guilt was pretty deep. Maybe he was feeling guilty for kind of pooh-poohing the idea that Jesus would know where to catch fish. Maybe it was his tone of voice, but maybe it was a lot more than that. Maybe what Jesus had done in this miracle made him think of how totally unworthy he was and he just felt dirty. He felt sinful. He felt all that guilt come to the surface, and he asked Jesus, his Savior, to leave him because it felt so terrible to have all that guilt come down, pressed down upon him after seeing this miracle. Normally that you would see a great miracle like this, just hundreds of fish in this boat, causing them nearly to sink, and you would be, Oh yeah, that's great. Look at what happened. Not Peter. It was something that stirred in him this feeling of worthlessness that he did not like. He liked it so little that he wanted the cause of that, which he determined to be Jesus' righteousness and His holiness, to leave him so he could go back to being normal, have these normal feelings of self-worth. Standing next to Jesus, he knew he was not an okay guy. He was full of sin, and he felt it to his very bones. Like Peter, we know that we are sinners in need of redemption and forgiveness. We are often full of doubt and unbelief. And that is especially so when we are being called, that we see the grime of our lives, we see how awful we are and how we have been to people and how we have treated God, our very Creator. And that drives us to seek a Savior for the remission of our sins, to pay the penalty in our stead, and remove that guilt that burdens us so much. That is a far better solution than what Peter had. Getting rid of the Savior, telling Him to go away. That was not the right reaction. Guilt is a bad thing. It is a bad thing because it means we have sinned. It means that we have something to be guilty about. We have transgressed God's holy law, which defines what sin is. And by doing so we have incurred the death penalty and so that adds to the burden. Not only have we sinned and done this terrible thing against God and against our fellow men, but we have only death to look forward to because that is what we deserve for sinning. We have been judged guilty of sin against God, against our loved ones, or whoever we have sinned against, and we are guilty of sin against ourselves. We do terrible things to ourselves. We treat ourselves awfully by what we see, what we ingest, what we allow ourselves to do. There are literally thousands of destruc