Once there was a man who was racked with guilt, but he did not know that this is what it was. All he knew was that he was frightfully unhappy and miserable, and that no one else ever seemed to treat him as he thought he deserved to be treated. He had never really heard the Scriptures faithfully preached, but it has to be said that this was because he wouldn’t listen to it in grateful and simple faith, and not because the Word was never spoken in his presence.
Guilt is a powerful force, and when it does not drive men to Christ it does not cease to be a powerful force. Guilt feels morally inferior, by definition, and there are only two possible responses to this. One is to come to Christ to be cleansed. The other is to embark on some sort of crusade or endeavor that will make the guilty one feel morally superior, by dint of raw exertion. A man who feels guilty over his girl friend’s abortion that he paid for back in high school, and which he still defends to himself, will go on a crusade to prevent pregnant women from smoking, in order to fight the pressing social problem of low birth weights. These are the choices—either the Substitute, Christ, or a paltry, ridiculous and posturing substitute.
But this man that I am speaking of was a professing Christian, and so his substitution had to occur within the church. His nagging guilt meant that his crusade had to be decked out in Christian terminology, and he had to be seen as a defender of orthodoxy. And this is why he was always quarreling. Now the problem was not that he was defending orthodoxy, but rather that he was not doing so. True orthodoxy is defended in gratitude and gladness, and not with pointed faces and jabbing fingers.
One day, at Sunday dinner, when he had again taken up the task of showing his family all the ways in which the sermon was deficient, the choir pitiful, the assembled worshippers hypocritical, and the liturgy abysmal, his five-year-old son, who had not yet been cowed into dutiful respect like the rest of the family, suddenly asked, “Daddy, are you happy?”
The rest of the family went white in the face, and braced for an outburst of righteousness. They hated outbursts of righteousness. But the man just sat at the head of the table for several eternal minutes. “No,” he finally said.