guilt on Exclusion

In Guilt and Grace , Swiss physician and Christian, Paul Tournier, writes… I cannot study this very serious problem of guilt with you without raising the very obvious and tragic fact that rel...

No child of God sins to that degree as to make himself incapable of forgiveness.

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

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

It does not spoil your happiness to confess your sin. The unhappiness is in not making the confession.

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...

He hurls our sins overboard. What a picture of the way God treats our sins. Corrie ten Boom, a dear saint of the last century, used to say, “And then God put up a sign saying, `No fishing allowed.”‘ W...

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

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

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened...

A magistrate regards someone as a criminal and punishes him if he catches him among thieves, even though the man has never committed anything evil or worthy of death. Christ was not only found among s...

The only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing.

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...

...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...

Guilt comes from within. Shame comes from without.

This is not make-believe. You are indeed guilty in yourself, but God no longer regards you as guilty, because the guilt of your sin has already been borne by Christ as your substitute. The sentence ha...

We find the defendants incredibly guilty.

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

When grace moves in... guilt moves out.

[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...

Suppose my god is sex or my physical health or the Democratic Party. If I experience any of these under genuine threat, then I feel myself shaken to the depths. Guilt becomes neurotically intensified ...

While exploring an experience of deep guilt and shame with her spiritual director, the author of Madeleine L’Engle, wrote One time I was talking to Canon Tallis, who is my spiritual director as we...

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

In the interior silence that contemplation opens, Merton recognizes his own complicity in the injustices of society. While the news-as-scoreboard model invites us to view ourselves as the “good guys” ...

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...

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

In a famous Earth Day 1971 Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly, the titular Pogo and his companion Porkypine are enjoying nature when they come upon a clearing filled with trash. Pogo says the iconic line,...

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 ...

“So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

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...