[thinxtoomuch]

My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. (Psalm 38:4)

Tossin and Turnin

It's the worst feeling in the world... You can't sleep, aren't hungry, don't want to talk to anyone, or be bothered... You have a short temper, everything gets you mad, sometimes you feel sick, other times just really tired. Concentration goes out the window, you can't focus on anything... You might want to punch someone or something, or maybe just cry. Your mood changes by the minute and you really don't want to explain why... You just want to be left alone.

What causes all these terrible things? Guilt. You tear yourself up inside because of something you did... It might be something small, might be something big... Maybe you gave in to an addiction... You stole some money or items from someone. You had to have it, so you did the only thing you could think of... Took it. There was no way you were going to pass that Geometry test, so you wrote down the answers and taped them to your backpack so you could get a good grade... Pushed your brother down the steps and watched him fall, then told your parents he just stumbled and fell all on his own...

You know what you did... And all you can think is, "Why? Why did I do that? How could I have done it?" Whether what you did was something you always struggle with, something you only do once in a while, or something you did for the first time... You really enjoyed the activity, thought it was the only way to get something, or did it because someone deserved it, the minute it was over you felt terrible inside... You just don't understand how you could have done that... You knew it was wrong, but you did it anyway...Drugs, sex, drinking, stealing...

Dust yourself off.

Those are all pretty big mistakes... You probably never did any of those... But have you ever felt guilty about something else? The way you treated someone... A lie you told... When you feel guilty about something, you probably replay it over and over in your mind. You keep waiting to get caught. You just can't let it go... And that's what keeps you up at night. If you think back, you can remember every time you messed up... Sure... You try to push that into the background... But when you mess up again, the guilt is even worse... You still feel bad about the other times... And now you have a whole new thing to feel guilty about...

Psalm 130 really speaks to all of us who might feel guilty about messing up... "If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness" (vs. 3-4). Wow! It's another example of how loving and full of grace our God is. Even though we keep a record of all the times we mess up, and the guilt keeps piling on, and we feel worse and worse, God forgives us... If that isn't the greatest feeling in the world, what is?

Guilt is so powerful. Somehow we manage to push it aside when we're in the middle of messing up and try to forget about how bad we'll feel after it's all done. Then, the moment it's all over... That's when the guilt piles on. We're ashamed of our behavior, we feel terrible about what happened, and we're afraid of what will happen if we get caught... There are penalties for doing some of the things we feel guilty about, but at least we know that God doesn't keep a huge list of all our mistakes. We can go to Him in prayer, talk to him about our mistakes and our weaknesses, ask for forgiveness, and move on... With a new determination to do the right thing the next time...

[KATSRUS5]

I'm not sure it is such a great idea to take just one verse out of a passage that has 3 very distinct sections within it. The first section is from verse 1 - 8. These verses are describing how David's sin is causing him to suffer. However, that is not the entire extent of the chapter. The second section (verses 9 - 14) is describing how David feels alone because of his sin. In verses 15 - 22 David is confessing his sin.This Psalm is David's cry to God and his confession of his sin.

I don't even really follow your whole progression of ideas. It feels very sloppy and very unsupported. I don't know if someone could make a logical conclusion from just verse 4. Especially when you are quoting from what must obviously be a paraphrase. Paraphrases are much more biased than a more formal translation. Your paraphrase has over simpilified the verse and it appears to have left out a few ideas.