Pastor's Message - Rev. Jeffrey O. Smith
Should we feel guilty for our sins? Should we feel bad when we hurt someone? Should we beat ourselves up inside when we realize the pain we have caused a loved one?
If someone hurts me, especially if it’s intentional, something in me really wants that person to feel some or all the pain that I felt. It’s an emotional eye for an eye. Isn’t that the purpose of punishment? I’ve heard this many times before: “I want them to feel the pain that I felt.” It’s also not uncommon for parents, with the best of intentions, to tell a child, “I hope you feel bad about what you did.”
Getting even, though, isn’t a great foundation or starting place for the purpose that punishment ought to serve. The true purpose of punishment should be to correct and prevent, not to get even. Here I digress into punishment when we should be talking about guilt.
In the steps of repentance, one aspect of that process is to “make oneself guilty” (Apocalypse Revealed 531:5). For a long time, I understood this to mean “make yourself feel bad.” Other places in the Heavenly Doctrine that mention repentance say, “hold oneself guilty.” The guilt here is not about feeling bad, but rather about taking responsibility and acknowledging ownership of past infractions.
The difference between feeling guilty and making oneself guilty is very important. Feeling horrible about oneself is not from heaven and it is not really useful. If anything, feeling guilty will only hold you back from moving forward. Taking responsibility, however, allows a person to maintain proper judgment, assess the spiritual situation, and continue in the process of repentance, which involves our going to the Lord for help—guilty feelings are more likely to keep us from the Lord than to bring us to the
Lord.
This is something I appreciated about Glenn Bostock’s “Human Business” presentation at a recent Community Supper, when he said that mistakes are gold. Mistakes are learning opportunities, not something to be punished. What if we saw our sins as learning opportunities—spiritual gold ore from which, if we are willing to put in the work, the Lord is able to extract something beautiful.
Putting this into practice, next time you notice your own mistake, or maybe one of your children’s mistakes, instead of just saying and feeling sorry, try thinking of ways that you might watch out for that mistake next time, or ways that you could do it better next time.