“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah” (Psalm 32:3–4).
At first glance, this doesn’t look like a very uplifting passage, but it holds a sweet mercy in its warning. When we hide our sin and hold it close, we begin to break down from the inside out. Sin eats us up. God made us whole people–body, mind, soul, emotions–and sin is a disordering, deficient, destructive effect on all that God designed. We think about sin most often in spiritual terms, how it harms our relationship with God, and that is the most foundational damage it does. But harboring sin, keeping it in, has psychological and physiological effects on us too.
When we hold on to sin, the hand of the Lord is heavy on us, and that might sound like harsh judgment, like God is beating us down. But God’s hand is heavy on us as a mercy. The guilt and sorrow and suffering we feel when we are holding on to sin is God’s discipline–not to destroy us, but to correct us. Psalm 94 says the one God disciplines is blessed, and Hebrews 12 says God disciplines us as sons, and Proverbs 3 urges us not to dismiss the discipline of the Lord–it is specifically intended to call us to blessing instead of suffering.
The burden of guilt we feel over sin is our heavenly Father’s summons, his call, his warning. So often we treat guilt as an internal problem, a psychological bug for which we need a remedy. In reality, guilt over sin is the hand of God tugging on our bridle to bring us to blessing. He loves us and yearns for us to be whole, to be healed, and to be guilt-free.
Wrote on this theme in my latest blog post yesterday: "Summer Heat"
So thankful for God's severe mercies