When We Owe Nothing We Give Everything

Despite inevitable feelings of guilt, we really don’t owe anyone anything.  All our debts-of-conscience were paid for two millennia ago.  

We must understand this if we’re to live, and let’s not underplay this; we’re too apt to succumb to guilt.  

Guilt is most often love contorted, bruised, mugged and hidden.  

There is always love a little beyond the feelings of guilt.  We therefore endeavour to get beyond this sordidness.

The fullest measure of love wants no part in others feeling guilty for what they did or didn’t do to or for us.  And this love is of God.

Love is God.  Love wants us to know there’s nothing to feel guilty for.  Love wants us reminded that apart from the momentary guilt that motivates repentance—a loving proactive action—there’s no good purpose in it.

When we grasp that God really wants us to know this guilt-freeing love we won’t have a problem feeling less guilty, and fuller and freer in our joy.

God’s done it all at the cross.  Accept to be free.

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We accept Jesus to gain our freedom, because a sinless man died to wear upon his back the stripes of our contempt. Righteousness became unrighteousness enough to descend into a hellish abyss, to greet what we deserved all along so we wouldn’t have to.

Because we owe nothing, having accepted the beautiful gift of salvation, living free of the guilt that would otherwise impinge, we look forwardly.

When we have nothing to lose we live in a way where we have much to gain in the way we wish to give.

Could there be a better thought regarding life than owing nothing, disregarding the power and size of our debt? And although we do not deny this calamitous reality, God does not continue to thrust it into our faces to make us feel less than we ought to.

God’s true desire is that we will acknowledge the truth that, in the Lord, is our only chance at true life. Only by living a life true to ourselves are we to come to understand how appropriate it is that we owe nothing.

We owe nothing such that we would feel we owe nothing, taking the Lord at his Word.

Jesus didn’t suffer that horrendous death so that we would creep around all our lives guilty and ashamed. He died that we would be freed, and put back together in partnership with God, with the ability to approach life on life’s exacting terms. And not just that! Now we owe nothing we are free to give everything of ourselves to God.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.