To this day, I consider the friend who introduced me to my church in the fall of 1991 (only a week or so after I met him through someone who worked with me at an inner-city youth group on the near west side of Chicago), one of the most valuable people to ever come into my life.

I swear when I’m on my death bed in the last minutes of my life, he’ll be one of my loved ones who's somewhere in my head.

The sad thing is I don’t know what happened to him since he dropped my church in 2001. In fact, no one that I know has ever heard from him since. He just disappeared without warning or explanation.

Whenever I visit my church, which has only been a handful of times since I left Chicago in 1999, someone will always ask me, “Have you heard anything from Daniel?”

Apparently, none of us will ever know what went wrong, but there are some theories we’ve come up with.

My thinking is, that among other things, he found it too hard to take on the “adult sonship” position he had been so thoroughly versed in from both his intensive daily study of the Bible, and from the other men at church. For him, the hypocrisy, shame and embarrassment from his Christian walk became too overwhelming and he didn’t see any way out but to divorce himself completely from the whole environment.

When I went through my depression spell earlier this year, I had to really examine this whole thing about psychological guilt.

For awhile I was kicking myself every minute of the day knowing how much I wasn’t doing for the cause of Christ and getting the gospel out to unsaved people.

I even began looking at every person I passed on the streets of Manhattan, or, worse yet, dealt with in carrying out my daily activities, etc., as someone I needed to at least pass a gospel tract to.

But each time I did go out with my tract—and I would hit Times Square, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, the subways, etc.—I was filled with nervous tension, embarrassment and a general distaste for the task.

I’ll never forget Valentine’s Day of last year when I was so wracked with loser feelings that I went out in the freezing cold to Penn Station, telling myself, “Just pass out five tracts and you’re done.”

I purposely looked for people who seemed down in the dumps, knowing Valentine’s Day can be very depressing. When I came up to this one guy with my tract in hand and said, “I’d like to give you this free information about Jesus Christ,” he simply grunted in a low voice, “Stick it up your ass.”

I remember not even being all that upset because it was such an unexpected response and he was the fifth person and I thought, “Well, that’s my cue to quit and cheer myself up with a Grande Mocha at Starbucks as I vegetate on today’s New York Times crossword puzzle.”

*****

Here’s a passage from a sermon my pastor, Richard Jordan, once gave on how to recognize psychological guilt vs. real guilt and godly sorrow:

“The issue of freedom is the heart cry of the soul. Martin Luther King shouted, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last.’

“What Jesus Christ did at Calvary was set you free. You can’t find this freedom in a performance-based system where you perform in a certain way and then God will accept you.

“We have liberty from sin’s slavery. From the anger, resentment, holding grudges, brooding, vengeance, greed, malice, perfectionism, and all the other things that bind and hold us.

“He died to put away the guilt and the slavery of sin so we would no longer be shackled with the chains of unresolved guilt about our sins.

“When I see my failures—my faults in life on a daily basis—rather than being immobilized by the psychological guilt feelings that are not real guilt, they’re just the feelings authored by the old sin nature and come about in my life on the basis of a performance-based acceptance. . .

“Psychological guilt is fear, shame, rejection, alienation. It’s not godly sorrow, it’s just the immobilizing unresolved guilt issues that come from your psychological nature. They’re designed to cause you to avoid accountability; to deny, shift the blame to others, to perform to make up for them.

“Grace eliminates the condemnation, the judging down for my sin. The answer to sin is not rededication; it’s not yielding and more surrendering, fasting, more praying. It’s not a holy war against sin in your life, it’s not confessing your sins.

“All those things focus on the problem. If focusing on your problems solved your problems, your problems would have already been solved. You’re free from sin’s dominion because of Calvary.

“Rom. 4:6 (‘Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works’) is so fantastic. Here’s what happens when you just trust God and you don’t try to do it yourself. When our sins are covered over with the blood of Jesus Christ there’s no chalkboard in the sky for God to write it down on ever again. Rather, what God does is give us absolute complete forgiveness.

“This is an inside out job. It isn’t external religion based in legalism and performance.”