The sermon that I preached this past Sunday had a huge response of people signing up to be sponsors of children at the Children of Zion Village in Namibia. We had 30 people sign up to be sponsors and all but one or two of the kids have sponsors. It has been awesome to witness the response people have when called to share the love of God in tangible ways.
But signing up to be sponsors is not the only response I have received about this sermon. Some have shared with me that they do not think people should be guilted into things, that something like sponsoring a child should come from the heart of the person. While I'm not here to debate my sermon and whether or not it was in fact guilting people into action, I will say that guilt was not my intent. However, I do think that as Christians, we are called to speak out in love when other Christians are not acting as God would have us act.
But that reaction has brought a few questions to my mind. As Christians, what should be our motivation for the things we do in life? Is guilt an acceptable motivator? Is it ok to be motivated by guilt if the guilt stems from a realization that our actions are not in line with God's values? Is guilt different from conviction?
I do think there is a difference between guilt and conviction. Guilt is simply feeling bad about something that was said or done or something we didn't do.
But conviction is different. At least I think it is. Conviction often feels a lot like guilt. We feel bad or ashamed of the things we have done or chosen not to do. But conviction also has a very different component to it. Conviction means being so convinced that our current lives are not what God intends for us that we seek to change our lives to make them more in line with God. When we are convicted of something there's a change the occurs inside of us and as a result, our actions change.
What do you think? Is there a difference between guilt and conviction? Is either one of those an acceptable form of motivation?
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There is a difference between guilt and conviction, although I think it has more to do with the response of the person than the speaker. To me, guilt is backward-looking whereas conviction is forward-looking. But that might not be a very precise (or even accurate) definition.
ReplyDeleteI think we get caught up a lot in motives. Clearly it wouldn't be right to lean on making people feel guilty to get them to do something. But on the other hand, I think the benefit that the children get from the donations that came from this talk are far more important than whether it made somebody feel bad about themselves.
Wacky Neighbor,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas. I think your definition of guilt being backwards looking and conviction being forwards looking is a really great start to defining those two concepts.
I also appreciate the idea you shared that sometimes we get too caught up in our motives. One of the things you hinted at but didn't directly say here is that sometimes thinking too much about our motives can be paralyzing. We get so caught up in not acting if our motives aren't totally pure that we never actually act on anything. While it's helpful to have a self-awareness of what our motives are, we should also remember that good actions with somewhat mixed motives is better than no action at all.