There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1, NASB.
Have you ever had a guilty feeling, and you did not know why? You finally realized that you were being oppressed by a satanic attack against you, and there really was no basis for condemnation. We sometimes call it self-condemnation, but perhaps we can understand it better if we refer to it as “false guilt.”
Romans 8:1 tell us, There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. It is very difficult to accept this completely, yet we see the same truth again in verses 33b–34a: It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth? When we get that in our minds, we realize that God wanted to take the matter of conscience entirely into His hands. He wants to give you immunity from the conditioning of your own mind and from the assault of Satan, the “accuser” of the brethren (Revelation 12:10), and especially to free you from the constant satanic input which comes to you from the Pharisees. It is very important to realize this. When God takes this over, your conscience is no longer manipulated by other forces, or even by yourself.
We know that the conscience, on the human level, is a conditioning. Think of that for a moment; it is a conditioning. For example, some of those who are raised in the slums will even come up with a conscience against revealing a crime to a police officer. They are conditioned to the society and thinking of their associates, or their peers. This is also true of cannibals; they do not have a conscience against eating human flesh, yet we know that it is wrong.
We know that … if our heart (or conscience) condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and (He) knoweth all things. I John 3:20.
But John’s Epistle also says that if our heart does not condemn us, then we know that whatever we ask in His will, we receive of Him (I John 3:21–22; 5:14–15).
This indicates that the conditioned conscience is Satan’s tool to prevent faith from being active and effective.
Wherever there is a determination to believe God, there will be an assault against His people to condemn them and to bring a false sense of guilt.
This must be realized totally and completely. If it is not, we go on constantly praying and seeking God, trying to work ourselves out of a slump or a discouragement, because we have had an input of false guilt into our thinking, into our emotions and our feelings.
Our conscious has to bear witness with the Holy
Spirit or it will miss lead us.
Does the Pharisee have a sense of false guilt too? No; he evades the real, living works of a conscience as it should be before God because he rejects the input of the Holy Spirit on his conscience; he rejects the Word of God as the basis by which one stands or falls. Jesus said of the Pharisees that they tithed of the mint bush and other herbs (Matthew 23:23).
Imagine counting all the leaves from a mint bush, saying, “This is the harvest; one tenth goes up to the Temple to the Levites.” Jesus told them, “You’re so careful about all of these things, and yet you have missed the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.”
The pharisees escape the more important issues of righteousness, truth, and love: the wonderful things that God commands of us and enables us to do. They have no conscience about them, because their consciences have been condemned by their religious flesh to details, to simple lesser things that they have magnified. They have “strained at gnats and swallowed camels.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!” Matthew 23:23–24, NASB.
Such is the conscience of the pharisee—and he would turn upon you and try to impose it upon you: “But you’re not ‘tithing your mint bush.’ You’re not doing things you should; you’re not being religious.” Thus, by condemning someone else, he continues to go about justifying himself and maintaining a conscience that is seared and conditioned by the pharisaic, religious flesh. (See I Timothy 4:2.) This is the real operation of Satan.
Satan comes as an angel of light (II Corinthians 11:14), and he tries to make you look bad and the bad people look good. If you realize this, you will realize also that this is his way of persecution in the world. Today, if you could search the hearts and lives of those who are persecuting some of the so-called “cults,” you would find that some of the groups under attack are walking much more honestly before God than their persecutors are. But the persecutors have the acceptable veneer of religion, and some of the cults do not.
This is the reason Satan persecutes all who are godly (II Timothy 3:12). He tries to categorize them together—the cults, the true, and the false—and lump them all into something that the religious world, with “a form of godliness but denying the power thereof,” can turn around and condemn (II Timothy 3:5). Jesus said, “The time will come when people will kill you and think that they are doing God a favor”—all because they have that pharisaic conscience.
“They will make you outcasts from the synagogue; but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God.” John 16:2, NASB.
In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, throw away that false conditioning of your conscience. Understand the magnitude of error in accepting a false guilt, when the blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you.
But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. I John 1:7, NASB.
Have you made mistakes and failed in certain areas of your walk with God? From now on, believe God to bless every step you take, everything you do. When you eat, bless the food, and believe God to bless it. Sometimes you cannot know if it has been treated with preservatives or sprayed with chemicals. Do the best you can, and walk with a conscience. Say, “Lord, beyond this I must have the leading of the Holy Spirit. I must have something from You that will show me what is right and what is wrong.”
When we analyze it deeply, we see that right or wrong is not always a matter of a right judgment, a right decision, or a right action. If that were true, every time you stumbled over a rock or a brick, every time you snagged your clothes, or every time you fumbled, you would be sinning. Even not having perfect coordination would be a sin. In that case, it would be a sin to become an old person; it would be a sin to be a baby. Anything that you could not do perfectly would become sin.
God does not look upon perfection in that way. He looks upon the sum total of your life. When God adds up your whole life and weighs it in the balance, what really counts? It is not how well you do according to some human scale of religious observances, so that you fall exhausted into bed and say, “I did not do enough today.” That is a lie from Satan! Do the very best you can, with faith, but then lay it all in the balances. And what is it that balances the scale? Faith! In James 2:23 we see that Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. James 2:23, NASB.
The Kingdom of God is a very scientific, orderly realm over which God rules. And whatever system He has for accounting, it is different from our system. God looks at your heart; and if you are believing Him, He counts it for righteousness. Regardless how well you and everyone else think you are doing, if you are walking with unbelief or with a false sense of guilt, if you are accepting the lies of Satan instead of the Word of God, you are not making it.
You must throw off the lies, the doubt, the fear. Throw off the false guilt! Throw away the self-condemnation! If you feel you really have done wrong, then in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, repent of your sin, and let His blood cleanse you from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9). That is not only the easier way but the only way to walk.
The Lord said, Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. Matthew 11:29.
He did not mean that you are to walk in a day-by-day torment, wondering whether or not you are pleasing God. Maybe you do not hold your mouth right when you pray. Maybe you do not have the right posture when you pray; maybe you should not sit; maybe you should not lie down. Or maybe you wonder, as you look to the Word, if you should stand when you pray; maybe you should kneel; maybe you should get on your face before God. You can be so bound up over the posture of prayer that you miss the fact that it is faith which makes the prayer work, faith which brings you into the presence of the Lord.
The morbid absorption with how well you have done, with false guilt, is wrong. You will do much better and please God more if, whatsoever you do, you do it with faith. Remember the Word in Romans 14:23: … whatsoever is not of faith is sin. Here Paul even taught about diet. “One person is a meat eater; one is not. One worships on the Sabbath; the other observes every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:2, 5). He said, “But remember that you do it with a good conscience, because whatever is not of faith is sin.”
God does not look upon the simple mechanics or the forms that we use as much as we think. Denominations have been created and have also been torn apart over the mechanics of worship and taking Communion. Is it a wafer placed on your tongue while the priest drinks the wine? Or do you drink the wine? How do we assume it? One man says we must have grape juice in Communion; another says wine was used in the New Testament. One person has gone so far as to say no to all of that; he advocates using water and a piece of bread as symbols. It becomes nauseating, for they are tied into religious controversies of straining at gnats while they miss the whole, weightier matters of the Law (Matthew 23:23–24).
Let’s get rid of the deep, morbid fear, the false guilt, and walk with faith before God. Instead of wondering, every time you stub your toe, “What did I do wrong, Lord, that You made me stub my toe?” get away from being absorbed in morbid conclusions and reasonings. Get loose from it in the name of the Lord. There is no condemnation if you are in Christ Jesus. Do not walk after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Romans 8:1–8). Be filled with the grace of God (John 1:16). If your heart does not condemn you, you know that you will receive anything you ask in His name.
In whatever our heart condemns us … God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from Him.
And this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him. I John 3:20–22a; 5:14–15, NASB.
When your heart does condemn you, you are wrapped in a self-condemnation, a false guilt which is an insidious drain of faith. It stimulates and stirs unbelief into an active, deadly thing to your faith.
For a Bible study that will bless you, read the third chapter of Philippians over again. (It would be well to read the second chapter too.) In that third chapter is Paul’s declaration of how he came to have a Kingdom conscience and to walk without condemnation. He tells how he once evaluated things: “I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews”; in fact, he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. Then he renounced everything that he counted good—every attribute, every asset, every position, the careful pharisaic walk—and he discounted it as but dung that he might win Christ (verses 5–8). That is the bottom line. That is the true apostolic vision and Word. And the way we will walk in the great restoration of the Kingdom of God on earth is by saying, “Forgetting the things which are behind” (verse 13b). Forget them! Do not carry a conditioning of your conscience along with you.
If the devil cannot get you to serve him directly, he will try to get you to serve God ineffectively. Remember that! He does not care how busy you are as long as you do not get the right thing done.
Paul had this in mind when he wrote, “I’m pressing toward the mark. Forgetting everything else, I am reaching for that prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. I want to lay hold of the thing that God had for me when He first laid hold of my life” (Philippians 3:12–14).
You could be working yourself to death for God, but are you doing the best thing? Are you really doing what God wants? Are you effective? Or are you driven by Satan to condemn yourself for that which should never bother you? Are you driven to do things that maybe God does not want you to do at all? Or are you doing the second best, instead of laboring for the one thing God wants out of your life that will please Him?
It is time to get rid of the false guilt, which drives us to try to go back and please God by the multitude of our service, and by the tedious quality of minute judgments we make about everything. Let us listen to what God is saying. What does He want? What is acceptable to Him? He has been looking for it for many generations and ages past—He is looking for people to worship Him in spirit and in truth! (John 4:23.)
“Well, which mountain do we go to? Or do we go to Jerusalem?”—we raise the old religious question, always carrying that bondage of slavery because we have been raised within the conformity of some type of religious system.
As the day of the Kingdom comes, it will not be like the period of Judges, when every man did that which was right in his own sight (Judges 17:6). Neither will it be like a despotic monarchy in which we must do exactly what someone else wants us to do. The mark of the Kingdom is being led as sons by the Spirit of God (Romans 8:14).
What are you to do? Be led by the Spirit of God! When He gives you a Word, believe God and walk in it. When you get a truth, do not let it sit around and condemn you, but say, “I see now where I can really walk with God. I see where I can be a real believer and I can break through.” Do it then, in the name of the Lord; but do not be filled with that false guilt anymore. Do not be filled with self-condemnation. Have a heart that worships before the Lord, that is “justified by faith.”
What does Romans 5:1 say? Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. When you have that, you will have peace with yourself also. The trouble comes when you do not believe God.
The troubling within your own spirit is not always the result of what you are doing right or wrong, or how much you are missing the will of God. The trouble comes because you are not believing God. Faith gives us an assurance and a standing before God; it assures our heart before Him that everything is right, perfectly right. (See Hebrews 11:1.)
The Scriptures speak about having your conscience purged from dead works, and your heart sprinkled clean from an evil conscience: How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Hebrews 9:14.
Let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience … Hebrews 10:22. Realize that one of the things that God wants to deliver you from in the old religious nature is a conscience that is conditioned to dead works. Listen to this! God loose us from the false guilt which comes from a conscience toward dead works. It is a deadly thing.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Romans 8:1, 31–35, NASB.
Satan tempts some men to be wicked; others to be religious.
The conscience should be tuned to the Spirit of God, not to what God Himself has forgotten.
Satan, the accuser, never torments you with anything valid. “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?” Romans 8:33–34.
The conscience conditioned to false guilt is the tool of Satan to make faith ineffective.
Accepting false guilt is a great sin if our Lord has cleansed and forgiven.
If Satan cannot get you to serve him, he will try to get you to serve God ineffectively with self-condemnation.
The troubling of self-guilt does not come from what you are doing wrong so much as from your not believing God.