Guilt Free Living

Does someone around you make you feel guilty?

Do you feel like it’s always your fault? 

Many people struggle with guilt their entire lives. Guilt has its productive purpose, but when you allow it to stay and establish a home in your heart, you won’t experience the kind of hope and freedom everyone longs for.  

Healthy guilt

Guilt can be productive! Our conscience is valuable and guilt is necessary to educate us about repeating the same mistake. Like a warning, healthy guilt seeks forgiveness and motivates us to develop restraint and correction. Guilt is a mechanism for learning.  

The way to live guilt-free is to offer compassion to others, self-forgiveness, acceptance of a limitation, and then send the guilt away. Letting guilt stay too long is when we damage ourselves and others.  

Excess Guilt

Unprecedented guilt is unhealthy for you and your relationships. Is somebody putting you on a guilt trip? It is your choice to get on that train. Guilty people use guilt as a tool to control others.  

Even if you have people reminding you of your weakness and failure, wallowing in guilt is a choice that indulges your ego. Inflating error is a form of selfishness. Degrading yourself is a way to punish those around you, and a passive-aggressive attempt for others to feel sorry for you, in hopes they will feel guilty too. Your ego gets secret pleasure from negativity.  

Getting Free from Regret

Some degree of remorse and regret over past errors is inevitable, contributing to the development of compassion for self and others. Making allowance for yourself and others begins a journey to maturity and wisdom.  

Leaving regrets is often a conscious decision. Like a highway in our thought patterns, we can construct a roadblock and simply choose not to overthink mistakes and results you don’t understand.  

When Your Best Isn’t Enough

Who are we too label something a failure? Without involving God’s redemptive work, we dare not label our work, our lives, our kids, our jobs, our existence as failures without seeing the entire picture! Massive surprises await us, some in this life some in the next. Let’s not reduce ourselves to our failures, but receive forgiveness and mercy from Jesus.  

Living guilt-free isn’t just a concept, it’s an invitation. 

Your internal world can change in an instant.

You may not see the immediate wrongs made right,

But you can experience alignment in a moment in God’s presence.

Hear more about this topic on Episode 123 of All About Relationships Podcast with Bob and Audrey.