Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I’m delighted to have with me Brent Osterberg. He has served as a pastor at Living Hope Bible Church in Mansfield, Texas since 2015. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Sam Houston State University and an M.Div from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a D.Min degree in expository preaching from the Master’s Seminary. He’s been an ACBC-certified counselor since 2009 and he serves with the Center for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship, which is a training center of ours in the DFW area. He’s been married to Carrie for 20 years and they have three children. Brent, I’m so delighted for you to be here to talk about this topic, which is growing in popularity. When some folks heard the title of today’s podcast, they probably had to rewind that and listen to that again: “Scrupulosity.” Thank you brother for joining us.
Brent Osterberg: It’s a pleasure to be on today Dale. Thanks.
Dale Johnson: Scrupulosity, what in the world is that? It’s a term that many people probably are not familiar with. So what exactly are we referring to when we use this term “scrupulosity”?
Brent Osterberg: Some people refer to scrupulosity as “religious OCD.” We’re thinking of people washing their hands repeatedly, straightening things, being intolerant of disorder or germs and uncleanliness. Scrupulosity: think the word scruples. Michael Emmett has called it a “tender conscience on steroids.” It deals more with issues not of cleanliness and orderliness but of issues related to right and wrong or sinfulness and holiness, that tends to be the focus. It starts with an obsessive thought that provokes fear in a person. Have I sinned in some certain way? Am I the kind of person that would choose to do such awful things? What would happen if I neglected this responsibility? This thought feels relentless and tormenting to the person, so they seek relief through a compulsion. It disarms the obsession, but only in a very temporary way, before the cycle starts all over again. Those compulsions can be related to the obsession itself, but it’s not always the case. There are compulsions related to scrupulosity, which could be ritualistic confession of sin, morbid introspection, avoidance of places where there’s potential temptation, incessant research. Christians can tend toward this kind of OCD, especially considering that many of us have been taught that the evils of sin need to be put off and repented of and put to death urgently. While this is right and good, the person who struggles with scrupulosity capitalizes on that truth of putting sin to death to the neglect of other realities in Scripture.
Dale Johnson: That’s really well said, where we’re not saying that we shouldn’t put off. However, there are equal truths that we have to hold solidly in our hands. That tends to happen. We find ourselves off-kilter when we overemphasize certain things to the under-emphasis of other glorious truths in Scripture.
Brent, It’s really interesting you talked about this as a tender conscience. I think that’s one of the better descriptions that folks will find, not necessarily in a negative way. We want to have a tender conscience before the Lord, but this is something that begins to rule the heart in a certain way. You’ve actually had some personal experience with this. Your story is a little bit related to this particular problem. I want you to tell us about that journey that you’ve personally been on, seeking to understand how God’s word speaks to this kind of fear and this kind of tender conscience.
Brent Osterberg: It was about ten years ago for me that I began struggling in earnest with this type of fear. I began experiencing the obsessive thoughts about things like whether or not I had hit somebody with my car when I felt a bump. I could hit something like a speed bump or a pot holder or a curb and just have this tormenting thought that I had hit somebody and injured them. These graphic intrusive thoughts in my mind of a person lying there in the street. There would be this compulsion to check. Is there somebody actually there? I would make the block and go and have to assuage that obsessive thought, or at least I felt like I needed it.
I would have obsessive thoughts that I had lied to somebody, that I did not represent the truth accurately, that I didn’t tell them everything that I could have told them about a particular instance and that made me a liar. Just because I sensed in my heart a desire to paint myself in a certain light or to save face that meant that I had lied to them in order to make myself look good. That is something that’s instructive when it comes to this particular sin struggle. There’s a tendency with this sin to equate desire or thought with performance. I thought, I desire it; therefore I’ve performed it on the outside. You can see why somebody would get to that place when we have texts of Scripture like Matthew 5:27-28, which talk about adultery and lust being adultery of the heart. A person struggling with scrupulosity or that tendency can take that verse too far and think that that desire means I’ve actually done something on the outside. In a compulsion with things like this, might be a morbid introspection, plumbing the depths of the heart to prove that I’m not that kind of person, that I don’t do those kinds of things.
I was also obsessed over the thought of offending people with my words whether feeling anger in my heart meant to me that I’d actually said something that was curt to them, or maybe I joked with them and I went too far. There would be this desire for certainty about those things. I was fearful that I had offended them somehow in conversation. In those cases, the compulsion looked like going to that person and asking that person if I’d offended them, asking forgiveness of that person, just in case I actually sinned. Trying to deal with the sin and not really sure if there’s actually been sin, but I’m going to ask forgiveness just in case. I was in a dark place for a while, turning inward with this problem. I was trusting myself to assess my own heart and then trusting myself to come up with a remedy in the form of some compulsion. But at the time, I didn’t really realize exactly what I was doing, but I knew it wasn’t helping. I was committed to the sufficiency of Scripture and biblical counseling, so I knew I needed to decrease and Christ needed to increase in my heart.
We were actually as a family out in California for the summer doing some church planting training at Grace Community Church. I was away from my church family and that was a recipe for hardship in that regard, whenever this comes started for me. What I needed to do and what I felt like needed to happen was in order to get my mind on Christ, where I was exalting Him instead of concentrating on my own heart and assessing my heart and my way and for my own appeasement. I took a stack of 3×5 cards and I started writing Scripture on each of those cards and quotations from good biblical counseling books. Whenever I would struggle with an obsessive thought or an experience or an intrusive thought, I would just start going through those 3×5 cards. I think deeply about that truth and pray through it and have it be something that was wearing a path in my heart. At the time, another ACBC counselor, Jason Cruise, shared a verse with me that became very very instructive and one I continue to turn to today. It’s Psalm 119:59-60. The psalmist writes, “When I think on my ways, I turn my feet to your testimonies; I hasten and do not delay to keep your commandments.” With morbid introspection being a kind of compulsion and the tendency to want to just dwell and spin my wheels thinking about why I’m not as bad as I perhaps am tempted to think I am, I needed to turn quickly to God’s Word, turn quickly to obeying. Not just thinking about His Word but obeying His Word. That became a lifeline for me.
Dale Johnson: Thanks for being so transparent and sharing a little bit about that story. I’m certain so many listeners are resonating with exactly what you’re describing. Obviously, we don’t want to sin against somebody or swell in doubts and fears. That tender conscience is seen as a healthy thing before the Lord in so many ways but there’s a time where, one of those things in fact, is thinking that there are things that you have to do in obsessive or compulsive ways to overcome those particular things, where we’re not holding the truths of Scripture in-hand together. Before we move on, you’ve given some of these expressions, particularly in your own life. What are some of the ways that this idea of scrupulosity can manifest itself in the lives of others?
Brent Osterberg: It could be that a person struggles with obsessive thoughts about shouting out obscenities in public. Particularly for Christians and maybe at church, the worship service. By the way, these intrusive thoughts that a person struggles with, they don’t have to have any history with this sin in order to be fearful of it. They may not be the kind of person who’s ever done anything like that, but because they thought it, because it seems so strong and tormenting, they think “I must be capable of it.” The compulsion may be there. Avoiding church, avoiding the worship service, avoiding the very means of grace that God used to help us, to draw us out of ourselves to Jesus Christ.
Another way it might manifest itself in people is somebody is struck with the thought that they’re a perverted person or they’re a pedophile and that really haunts them. Because they had those even graphic images in their head, that they don’t want there, they think, “I must be that kind of person.” There can be this plumbing the depths of the heart, this compulsion of morbid introspection to prove to themselves, “It’s not true, I’m really not that kind of person.” I remember reading a book where the author talked about introspection as basically opening up your eyes to look around in the pitch darkness. Going to the bottom of caves to shut out the light, then you open your eyes and you can’t see a single thing. That’s what morbid introspection is like. You’re going into your heart, you’re going there yourself, you’re going there without the Gospel, you’re going there without Christ and you’re opening up your eyes and can’t see anything. It’s so pointless to do such a thing. It actually brings you further away from God in your experience.
There might be another way that this shows itself in other people: the intrusive thought of hurting someone. Whether through active anger or neglect of safety protocols. There tends to be this compulsion of concentrating intensely on their actions when they’re around other people so they can remember exactly what they did. “I didn’t hurt that person. I didn’t slap that person or push that person; I buckled my child’s seatbelt thoroughly. I made sure that I was concentrating on what I was doing, I wasn’t distracted.” That could be a compulsion to temporarily relieve that obsessiveness. But again, it comes back with a vengeance later on whenever there’s a provocation.
Dale Johnson: To live with this type of mentality, what a difficult taskmaster. It’s built in this religiosity and that’s the difficulty of it. You can see the flip side and why it’s difficult. I want to make sure my child’s seat belt is buckled. I don’t want to hurt somebody and not think about it, not have a conscience that is burdened by legitimate things. That’s that constant wrestling. This is how the Word is good in helping to teach us appropriately and the importance of our conscience growing in understanding the Word. Talk about some of the distinguishing marks of a person who tends toward this type of sin in their life of scrupulosity.
Brent Osterberg: One of the things that we can tend to do in this struggle is to be selective in what we choose to think about and not think about. We can be selective with our sins. You can tend to think about this one sin that you’re particularly afraid of, to the neglect of other sins in your life that your concentration on that sin makes it so that you’re sinning in other ways because you’re so infatuated with this one sin and preventing it in your life.
There can also be selectivity when it comes to the Bible. There are Scripture texts 1 Peter 1, where we’re called to be obedient children and pursuing holiness, like our God is holy. Be holy for I am holy. Peter quotes that from the Old Testament, obviously. The person that is dealing with scrupulous fears is thinking, “I must be holy.” They’re forgetting other texts like 1 Peter 2:24, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed.” The same book of the Bible and yet they can tend to focus on those commands, those imperatives to the neglect of indicatives in the Word of God, about what Christ has actually done for us and who God is for us.
We can be selective about the attributes of God, concentrating on His holiness, His wrath, His justice to the neglect of His compassion, His grace, and His mercy. We can think about Exodus 20, where you hear, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the father’s on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” You can concentrate on that to neglect of the next verse, “But showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me keep my commandments.” There can be selectivity on the attributes of God and also, what’s true of the inner man. So yes, it’s true that we still have that Romans 7 reality within us, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” that’s true of us and the scrupulous person might concentrate on that reality, but then forget that 2 Corinthians 5:17 says that, “If you’re in Christ, you are a new creation.” The old has gone, the new has come and so what has been what is true of you now? Like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, “Such were some of you.” If you forget those kinds of things whenever you’re concentrating on the flesh that is still within us and forgetting that we are new creatures in Christ. We have a new identity because of what He’s done for us in Jesus.
Dale Johnson: I want to ask you though, as we continue to sort out and recognize how the Bible speaks about these things and how we can be overcome by certain fears. What type of idols do you find are usually at the heart of a scrupulous person or at the heart of their fears, the things maybe that they treasure? What are those types of things?
Brent Osterberg: Keith Palmer got into some of this last year when he was on the podcast, but there certainly is a demand for certainty. “I must know if I am that kind of person, if I’ve committed that kind of sin.” It’s an intolerance of any ambiguity in the heart related to these gray areas of life or anything that is unclear about whether or not you have sinned in a particular way.” The person who struggles with this needs to remember that God is the one who has omniscience. 1 Chronicles 28:9, David’s talking to Saul and he says, “The Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought.” That’s not us, that’s God.
There’s also, at the heart level, a demand for control. For us, control is really an illusion. We want to control our circumstances so that I can prevent these things from happening, these things I’m so very fearful of. I want to control my life so that I don’t get to a place where I commit that sin or I think that I’ve committed that sin that really I can’t imagine tolerating in my life. That person needs to remember that God is the one who’s in control, the only one who’s in control. Isaiah 46, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose, I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass.” Part of addressing the heart of a scrupulous person is to truly be confronted with who God is in contrast to who we are.
One more thing is that there is a misdirected love at the heart. Those who struggle with this particular sin struggle, they are saying to themselves, “If I have committed that sin or if I’m that kind of person, then I could not live with myself.” There really is a love of self at the root of this. “I can’t imagine living my life if these things are true, so I’ve got to prevent it. I’ve got to control my circumstances. I’ve got to make sure I’m not guilty of these things.” Those are some of the things I think that are the root of the problem the items that we struggle with there.
Dale Johnson: If we can identify these types of problems in the way the Bible describes them, then we’re not far off from seeing the beauty of the hope that the Lord offers in helping us deal with these things in a Biblically appropriate way, walking in the truth that God has provided. Brent, I am looking forward to you coming back next week to talk about some of the particulars on how we can respond properly and biblically to these types of issues.
Brother, thank you for bearing a little bit of your heart and using the comfort that the Lord has comforted you is to now then comfort others.
Helpful Resources:
Scrupulosity booklet by Brent Osterberg
The Biblical Solutions & Biblical Evaluation Booklet Series
