Feeling Unworthy? Read THIS!
Picture this: you’ve just blown it–majorly screwed up big time. And it wasn’t an accidental moral blunder committed without forethought in the heat of the moment, either. It was a premeditated sin you carried out into fruition with full knowledge of what you were doing.
Now, you’re sitting in the aftermath of your choice. Any pleasure once associated with the sinful act has died down to nothing, like the cold and dried-out embers of yesterday’s campfire. Taking its place is regret, and it’s hitting you in a major way.
Dismay, guilt, and shame rush over you, ushering you into a state of intense self-loathing. It gets so bad that you think twice before serving God or even praying–not out of a neglect of duty but out of a profound sense of unworthiness.
In other words, you now think you’re too despicable to even approach God and receive His forgiveness, much less go about ministering to others in Jesus’ name. It’s as if you have become disqualified from the Christian life and Christian service altogether.
If you are struggling with this or have wrestled with it in the past, then let me share a quick, scripture-based message of hope with you.
Now, you may be expecting me to offer a brief pick-me-up in the form of an inspirational one-liner often found on blogs like this, such as “when God sees you, He sees something absolutely precious and valuable,” or “your service is too valuable and eternally consequential for you to let this one mistake or series of mistakes weigh you down.”
Those two sentiments are correct, but they are not where I am going with this. Those statements alleviate the symptoms we call shame and guilt, but I instead want to talk about the overarching source of the problem (in other words, I want to see what’s causing the headache instead of giving you Advil): this feeling of disqualification we often experience after messing up rests on a flawed premise, which is the notion that in order to have relationship with God or participate in His work, one must be “qualified” to do so.
If this were the case, absolutely nobody would be serving, and nobody would enjoy open community with God. I’m sure most readers are aware scripture declares “there is no one good” and “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” but sometimes we don’t act as if these truths are, well, true.
I’ll speak for myself. Often, in an unintentional act of pride on my part, I assume my relational standing with God and my ability to serve rely on how “good” I am. Essentially, as long as there has been a sustained period of time since my last moral failing, I feel “worthy” of God. Inversely, if I have just erred, I do not even feel fit to approach God and ask His forgiveness. I have a tendency to fall into a woefully performance-based philosophy. Perhaps this sounds familiar to you.
But when you think about it, this way of thinking is inherently broken because it makes our behavior the mediator between ourselves and God instead of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Simply put, that is a burden we are not supposed to bear (and, in fact, it is impossible for us to bear).
1 Timothy 2:5 tells us there is only one thing that makes us worthy of God, and it certainly isn’t our personal levels of piety: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.”
Furthermore, scripture tells us in 1 John 9 that if we earnestly ask for forgiveness, God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (emphasis mine). Do you know what this means? It means your last major screw-up does not define you, and it has not caused God to love you any less.
You are not the deciding factor in your worthiness to go boldly before the throne or to live the life God has called you to live. You never were worthy. Neither am I. But Jesus is. And His blood, if you are in Christ, covers you.
Turn your eyes upon Him, Shift your focus from within in order to direct it towards He Who has equipped you to do every good work. You won’t believe what He has in store!
