You know that feeling you get when you’ve just been caught doing something wrong? I don’t mean any childish hand-in-the-cookie-jar stuff, but real adult-style-sinning stuff.

• You mutter some foul language and realize you’ve also butt-dialed your pastor.
• You looked a moment too long at a dirty picture on your phone and realize that your spouse was standing behind you the whole time.
• A friend you hadn’t seen in years brings up some long-forgotten story in a most inappropriate environment.

The feelings you get when these things happen—embarrassment, regret, guilt, shame—come so suddenly that it’s as much a chemical thing as it is a spiritual. Your whole body feels it. You suddenly become aware of the blood coursing through your veins as you realize that someone 100% knows your flaws.

I’m a pretty normal dude, a missionary in fact, and stuff like this happens to me more often than I care to admit. That’s why I’m pretty confident you know what I’m talking about too. We all feel it sometimes, that recognition that other people not only know about our sin but have actually caught us in the act.

It’s a terrible feeling. I hate it. I never want to feel it again.

And yet I do.

See, I sin way more often than I ever get caught for it. Every day I do things that I should regret. Nearly every day, I do things that—if my pastor were watching—would embarrass the crap out of me. Every single day I commit sins that should make me feel that same guilt and shame as I feel when I get caught committing those same sins.

And yet I could go weeks without ever feeling that jarring, blood-coursing-through-the-veins discomfort of knowing that I have been caught in my sin. How is this possible?

A couple of things are at play here. First, we all know that God sees everything.

God. Sees. Everything.

He knows everything. He knows when I sit down, when I rise up, and what I was thinking about while lying in bed last night. Nothing is hidden from Him. It’s a terrifying thought, and yet it’s one I’ve become so comfortable with, that I also completely ignore it!

Seriously. We worry so much, and we get into such a physical-chemical tizzy when some fellow, sinful human-being catches us sinning, yet every single day, the God Who has every right to damn us to an eternal Lake of Fire knows our every twisted thought. He hears our every angry noise. He sees our every sinful act. And we barely care!

Where is that terrible feeling that we hate so much? Why don’t we feel caught and trapped and embarrassed before our all-knowing, all-seeing God?

The second thing at play here, at least for us born-again children of God, is that God through Jesus Christ has forgiven us of our sins. We like to say that we’re forgiven “past, present, and future,” because it’s true! There’s no sin I can commit (in fact there’s nothing in the entire universe, tactile or not) that can separate me from the love of God. His Holy Spirit not only indwells me, but He seals me, and He guarantees my adoption to the Father through His only begotten Son.

[Don’t let anyone try to convince you differently: if you could lose your salvation, then it’s God’s Holy Spirit Who has failed you, not you who failed Him. That type of teaching just straight-up believes in a fallible God. God cannot fail. God cannot lie. You cannot lose the salvation He has given and promised to complete. Period.]

But with these two things at play—that God knows my sin and that He has already forgiven me of my sin—doesn’t it make sense that we would feel less guilty around Him? And yes, by “around Him,” I mean only during every nanosecond of our existence, since He’s also everywhere-present and dwelling inside the believer’s soul.

God knows my sin, and He has forgiven me of that sin, so I should never feel guilt. Right? That pretty much seems like a 2+2=4 situation.

But it’s not. It’s more like 2+(12/17+32/17-20/34)=4.

There is a whole lot of something else going on between my sin and His forgiveness that I way-too-often ignore: the sacrifice and advocacy of my Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s what’s missing in my life. That’s where my guilt has gone.

The guilt that I long to feel when I, as a believer and child of God, sin against my Father is the same guilt that Jesus took from me when He died naked and forsaken on that cross. He took my guilt. He took my shame. He took my embarrassment and my regrets when he bled for me on that wicked tree.

If I continue to ignore this reality, if I continue to pretend that God’s “free gift of salvation” was actually “free,” then I will always treat my sin flippantly—because after all, it’s just between me and Him. I will never feel that chemical shock of guilt when my private sins are suddenly made “public” before God.

Worse, I will never sense the urgency to attack the sin in my life—that same urgency I feel when I suddenly need to cover up or gloss over some shameful act that my Bible Study group just discovered. I will never understand how the Apostle John could tell believers: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I will never recognize that, every time I sin, Jesus stands at the right hand of God in Heaven as my Advocate, telling His Father plainly: “My sacrifice and death on the cross paid for that wicked thing Elliot just did.”

If I continue to ignore the pain and sacrifice of Jesus and His perpetual work advocating on my behalf, then I will also continue to treat my very real, very deadly sin with flippancy. I’ll continue to take advantage of God’s grace. In the words of Paul: “God forbid.”

My guilt has been taken by my Savior. He now stands as Advocate, perpetually claiming the sins that ought to shame me, and I need more awareness of His active presence in my life.

This is not a clarion call for “More guilt!” but rather for “More gratitude!” because our amazing, wonderful, powerful God gives us “More grace!”

©2022 E.T.