today who come to church regularly to pray and yet have never really made this most fundamental discovery. Deep down they know they are guilty, but instead of resolving their guilt God's way, they bury it.
The symptoms of that buried guilt are so easy to spot. A lack of self-esteem, a low self-image, an inferiority complex. They go around complaining, 'I'm no good at being a Christian. I don't feel excited about being a Christian, I've got no assurance of salvation, no joy in worship, no enthusiasm to witness. I'm a lame-duck Christian, that's what I am.' Countless people are burdened in this way. They say they're depressed, that they can't cope, that they always make a mess of things, that they're no use to anybody and it's pointless trying to improve themselves. What's wrong with these people? What's the source of this spiritual debility?
I don't want to oversimplify by generalization. The pastoral problems involved may be very complex. But I am convinced that a considerable proportion of these folk are suffering from unresolved feelings of repressed guilt. Christians though they are, or say they are, their attitudes are shaped by this guilt-denying world of ours. And as a result they have never been truly convicted of sin, never properly understood God's remedy for sin, and therefore have never really felt truly pardoned of sin. That's why they feel inadequate, that's why assurance eludes them. The one person you can never forgive is yourself. So long as this spectre of unacknowledged guilt deep within their psyche haunts them, they will continue to suffer the destructive consequences of subconscious self-hatred eating away inside them, destroying their motivation, their ambition, their assurance.
What's the answer? The answer is that they must come and stand where the tax man stood. Justification by faith must cease to be a cerebral article of their creed and become instead an experimental truth in their hearts. They must stand where the tax man stood, with all the
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