guilt on Conscience

Did you know that ever since 1811 (when someone who had defrauded the government anonymously sent $5 to Washington D.C.) the U.S. Treasury has operated a Conscience Fund? Since that time almost $3.5 m...

Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

A shoplifter wrote to a department store, saying, “I’ve just become a Christian, and I can’t sleep at night because I feel guilty. So here’s $100 that I owe you.” He signed his name then added a littl...

There was a Girl Scout who had sold thousands of boxes of Girl Scout cookies and began to get publicity for all those boxes sold. Someone asked her, “How were you able to be so successful selling so m...

There are three basic truths about guilt. If you’ll come back to these concepts anytime you begin to feel guilty, you will understand better what is going on emotionally and how you should approach th...

I just paid a parking ticket the other day. It was easy. I read the charge against me, flipped the ticket over, checked the box that said “I plead guilty to the charge,” filled out a check for $35 to ...

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World , Ron Lee Davis shares a powerful story of forgiveness about a priest from the Philippines. The clergyman had carried the weight of one particular sin that ...

A Great (and Weighty) Work of Literature That Will Delight Like Moby Dick and War and Peace , Les Misérables is a hefty novel. Affectionately known as the ‘Brick’ for its formidable length, it c...

Guilt is a moral emotion, perhaps the quintessential moral emotion, and is therefore about values.

All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.

“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

One of the most hopeful and gratifying conclusions to come out of our 12 years of research on shame and guilt is that that notion of morality is wrong. Dead wrong. You don't have to feel really ba...

Guilt comes from within. Shame comes from without.

“Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.”

Guilt is an excellent warning light that says something is wrong. Yet when it persists too long, it provides fuel for Satan’s lies and strangulates spiritual growth.

A few years ago, HBO released a gritty (surprise!) crime drama called True Detective . The show starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as the two detectives responsible for catching a serial...

Guilt is anger directed at ourselves.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

Horace Gray was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. During one of his cases, a criminal was about to be released, not because he was innocent, but because of a technicality. As Gray prepared to relea...

Imagine you’ve just purchased a brand-new car—it’s no ordinary car, it’s a luxury vehicle, with the highest trim levels, equipped with all the latest technology. Among its many upgrades is a voice ale...

[Many Christians] below the surface of their lives are guilt-ridden and insecure ... [and] draw the assurance of their acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, th...

“We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects.”

...I fear that some of us understand just enough about the gospel to feel guilty--guilty that we are not measuring up to some undefinable standard--but not enough about the Atonement to feel the peace...

I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feelin...

Perhaps the reason you feel guilty is because you are guilty. The answer to your guilt problem is not rationalization or self-justification, but forgiveness. The price of forgiveness is repentance. Wi...

Most of us are under pressure, external and internal, to do everything, be good at everything, be accountable to everyone for everything! It is not so. In the divine economy each of us has a particula...

“There is no client as scary as an innocent man."

Hobart Mowrer was Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Mowrer critiqued Freudian psychology and its assertion that guilt was merely a pathology to be dispensed with. In this...