Tim Keller on overcoming guilt with Jesus' love

 From Tim Keller's book, Forgive (p83):

If you have a God who is nothing but wrath, and if you have little understanding of what happened on the cross, you'll be a driven person. You'll try hard to be moral. You'll try hard to be good, but you will always feel unworthy. It will be hard to grow into a loving person, because fear cannot awaken love. Only love can awaken and grow more love.

When the voice of conscience (or maybe of Satan himself) comes and says, "You wretch, begone! Retreat in shame," you must remember the cross and hear Jesus say, "My love, come here. I bore the shame."

Tim Keller on our struggle with the idea that God is both love and fury

 From Tim Keller's book, Forgive (p74):

Modern people struggle with the idea of a wrathful God who condemns... [Yet,] the Bible never sees God's love and anger as being opposed to each other. Indeed, the Bible tells us that in God, not only are they not in tension but they are meaningless apart from each other and indeed they establish each other.

He's both love and fury. It's not that he's a split personality--being loving on alternate days and wrathful in between. The reason his wrath and love cohere is because they are not like ours--they are perfectly holy and good. When we get angry, it is usually because the things we love most are threatened. But because of sin, often those ultimate loves include our public image, our ego, or some cherished plan that we think will finally deliver life satisfaction. When these things are threatened, we get angry and often harm people and destroy things. 

When we see all the references to God's wrath in the Bible, we instinctively imagine God's anger must be like ours, and so we recoil. However, his anger is not wounded pride as ours is. God only gets angry at the evil destroying  the things he loves--his creation and the human race he made for his own glory and for our happiness.

God is not just a God of love or a God of wrath. He is both, and if your concept of God can't include both, it will distort your view of reality in general and of forgiveness in particular.