If Jesus died for my sins, why do I still feel guilty?

As Christians, we need to take the truth of what Christ has done for us and apply it to our own experience, so that we believe it in our minds and feel it to be true in our hearts. Sometimes we know in our heads—Christ has paid for all our sins and I’ve been forgiven—but we don’t feel it. Having faith means believing this is true and enjoying the grace in which we stand. And we need to be specific in applying it to ourselves.

If you feel guilty, ask God by his Spirit to put his finger on the particular sin. Confess that sin to God and turn from it. Acknowledge that Christ has died for that sin and thank God for that. Take a Bible verse about what Christ has done and take God at his word. Ask God to help you feel that truth applied to this particular sin.

You could maybe sing through a hymn or song praising God for what Christ has done. It’s as we take God at his word that we experience a cleansed conscience. Hebrews 10 v 22 encourages us to “draw near to God … with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience”.

One writer put it like this: “We must take trouble to purge and cleanse our consciences with the blood of Christ. If we find that we have sinned, we must run straightaway to the blood of Christ to wash away our sin. We must not let the wound fester, but get it healed immediately. As we sin daily, so he cleanses daily, and we must daily go to him for it … Be sure with each day to clear the sin of the day. Then shall our consciences have true peace.”

If you’ve done that and your conscience is still troubled, it could be that you are not repenting of sin. Christ did not die for us so we can just keep on sinning with a clear conscience. We do need to repent. And where we’ve wronged others, we need to put that right, by saying sorry to them and making amends where possible.

Or it may be that you still feel guilty because you have an over-sensitive conscience. Sometimes a Christian may be worried about things that the Bible does not actually condemn—perhaps extra rules that we feel under compulsion from our upbringing to obey. The solution is to go back to the Bible. As Luther said: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God”. We need to keep shaping our consciences by the word of God, and trusting that the death of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

This is just one of the many questions about the cross that Marcus Nodder answers in his newly released book Why did Jesus have to die; and other questions about the cross of Christ and its meaning today.