After years of ministry with teens and adults, I find many of us are carrying a persistent and gnawing sense of guilt and failure. Sometimes it is masked by other emotions like anxiety or anger. This guilt arises from moral failures in our life that feel insurmountable and unforgivable. 

 

These failures haunt us and encourage us to doubt God’s love and our worth as His children. This is the desire of the devil, who the book of Revelation calls, “the deceiver of the world” and “the accuser of the brethren” (Rev 12:9-10). That is, he is the one who constantly whispers the lie, “your sins are too great, God cannot forgive or love you” or “you do not deserve to be forgiven.” 

 

This insidious lie is effective, if like Judas, we allow it to prevent us from seeking God’s forgiveness and fall into despair (Mt 27:3-6). The devil desires to separate us from God. 

 

When we allow the lie to persist, we do his work and separate ourselves from God. We stop praying, receiving the sacraments, and grow distant from God. Like Adam after the first sin, we try to hide from God (Gen 3:8). This is precisely the opposite of what we should do. 

 

Throughout Scripture, God is constantly demonstrating that His mercy is inexhaustible (Lam 3:22-23). The absurdity of the devil’s lie is the assertion that your sin is more powerful than Jesus’ death and resurrection. This is a perverse delusion of grandeur of the highest order. 

 

Despite knowing our sins “can” be forgiven, we may harbor a feeling of unworthiness. We recognize the real harm that our sins have caused others and ourselves. Our gut response is like that of Peter after first witnessing a miracle. Peter “fell at the knees of Jesus and said, ‘Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man’” (Lk 5:8). We cannot understand how God could still want us. 

 

Paul addresses this when he says, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ by grace you have been saved…” (Eph 2:4-5). 

 

Paul is saying that even when we were at our worst moment, “dead” in our sins, God still loved us and still chose to save us. He emphasizes that salvation is not offered to us because we are good but because God is good. True, we must cooperate with God’s love through repentance and conversion, but our hope rests in God’s grace, not our own worthiness. Ephesians 2:8 goes on to say, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God…”

 

The resolution to our unworthiness is the realization that apart from grace, not even the greatest saint is worthy of salvation. Fortunately, God does not deal with us strictly in justice, giving us what we deserve. Instead, because of His fatherly love, He deals with us in an abundance of mercy—that is, giving us what we need, forgiveness and grace, despite not deserving it.

 

To impress upon us the merciful nature of God, Jesus tells the story of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32). A young man abandons his father to pursue a life of overindulgence and sin, only to return broken and empty. When the father sees his son, he does not reject him because of the severity of his sins but instead runs to embrace him and celebrates his return to life. 

 

We are that prodigal son or daughter who must fall into God the Father’s loving embrace. To this end, Christ gave the Church the sacrament of reconciliation so that we might have a place to encounter the Father and know with certitude that we have been restored to life. 

 

For more on mercy and forgiveness: experience the embrace of God in the sacrament of reconciliation, explore the Mary, Undoer of Knots novena and read Psalms 25 & 51.