Alcoholics Anonymous forces on people a guilty conscience.
When Jesus died on the Cross, He offered us a new and living way, one which grants to us a pure conscience, one free of any sense of guilt.
In Romans, Paul merely reminds us that every person, Jew or Gentile, is born with a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, and thus a sense that we are wrong and need to do something to fix this upset in our lives.
Cultures around the world devised different ways of getting rid of this sense of guilt and frustration in our lives.
Even the Aztecs in the Americas would sacrifice PEOPLE to shed blood in order to keep the sun shining and the world moving.
This knowledge within every one of us pushes us to shed blood for the wrongs done in our lives.
AA pushes people to resign themselves to a life of paying for their sins every day.
Ask God for direction, let God direct your thinking and your steps, then at the end of the day, review what you did right and what you did wrong.
There are no standards in place to determine whether a person did something right or wrong. So, a person is usually left with a conscience that is never quite satisfied.
Did I do a good job today? What if I screw up?
These kinds of questions never left me.
A guilty conscience can never be put to rest through our efforts. We just never find ourselves doing enough.
Thank God for the blood of Jesus Christ.
While the sacrifices under the Old Covenant could never perfect anyone:
"which is a symbol for the present time. Accordingly both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make the worshiper perfect in conscience" (Hebrews 9: 9)
The blood of Jesus has taken care of everything:
"For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." (Hebrews 10: 14)
This blood speaks better things than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12: 24)
This blood cleanses us forever more (1 John 1: 7)
Someone I knew in AA had heard about the blood of Jesus, how it continues to cleanse us from all sin.
She did not believe it, she did not accept it.
She worked her inventory until she killed herself.
The Law, the Ten Commandment, or any written ordinances of men turn into a ministry of condemnation, because no one can measure up. No once reach into our hearts and remove an eternal sense of lack, guilt, shame, reproach.
Because of the New Covenant, cut by Jesus Christ at the Cross, we can rest in the full and forever knowledge that we have been purged forever from all sin.
Yet if we continue to take our inventories, if we continue to confess our sins, believing that we have to pay for what God has already paid for through the death of His Son, then we have nothing left but a fearful looking after of judgment (Hebrews 10: 26)
In other words, we have a guilty conscience which continues to harp on us that we have not done enough, that the payment has not yet been made.
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