“Thy sins are forgiven thee.” – Luke 5:20

I do not think that there can be any grief outside of hell that is more terrible to bear than the wounds of conscience. We read that “David’s heart smote him”; and, believe me, the heart can smite as with an iron mace, and smite where the bruise is felt intensely. Give me into the power of a roaring lion, but never let me come under the power of an awakened guilty conscience. Ay, shut me up in a dark dungeon, among all manner of loathsome creatures-snakes and reptiles of all kinds-but, oh, give me not over to my own thoughts when I am consciously guilty before God! This, surely, is the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched. I do not speak now what I have merely heard of; though, if you will read Mr. Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding,” you will find a striking account of it there; but I speak of what I have felt in my own soul. No pains of body can rival, for a moment, the agonized feeling of the heart, when the hot irons of conviction burn their way through the soul. When God sets up the conscience and makes it a target for His arrows, they drink up the life blood of our spirit, till we cry out and wonder how such anguish can come to a creature so insignificant. Our soul seems too small a cup to contain such an ocean of misery-too narrow a field for so cruel a battle. It is not the Lord that is the author of the misery; but He is giving us up for a while, that we may be filled with our own ways and learn the bitterness of our own sin. When the Lord comes to us with a forgiving word these sorrows are gone like the mists of the morning when the sun arises. We grieve still to think that we have sinned; but that gnawing remorse, that vulture eating up the liver, is smitten with death and the man breathes hopefully again. Though the penitence remains, the torment is removed from me, when God has forgiven me. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2207.cfm