religious ocd

Hello my friend! This is a very tough question and I will do my best to answer it. Looking at your profile, I see you are Christian. I am also Christian. So, I am going to assume you are talking about the Christian God, you believe in Jesus Christ, you are saved, and you believe in the Bible. I also believe/am all of these things. The first thing you must accept is you can't know for sure sometimes. Part of the Christian faith involves ambiguity. God did not write out exactly what to do in every situation. The Bible was not written like that. It is not a list of what to do all of the time. Yes, it sometimes has lists of rules or things you should not do stated explicitly (adultery, murder, stealing). But it also has stories. Parables. Prophecy. All of which must be interpreted. You have to figure out what lesson to take away and apply it to your life. This concept ties in with Christian freedom. Paul writes that you are saved by grace and so now the Law, the specific rules established in the Old Testament which condemned all of mankind is not over you any more. You do not have to hit that standard. You are justified through grace, not your own actions. (Romans 5, 6:14) So should we sin because we are no longer under the Law? Paul asks in Romans 6:15. No, you shouldn't. Why? Because you are supposed to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4). How do you do that? You die to your old self, patterning your life off of Christ's death on the cross, striving for the spiritual instead of the earthly. (Romans 6:4-8) I know you may be reading this and say to yourself, "Well, you haven't really answered my question." And you would be right. I haven't. The truth is, I can't tell you when the Lord is convicting you. What I can tell you is this. When God convicts people in Scripture, it almost always for something very obviously wrong (Paul persecuting the church, Jonah disobeying God's direct command, Moses disobeying God's command with the staff, David's adultery). These individuals are convicted of obvious sins which are explicitly forbidden in Scripture. That's typically how conviction works. So my question is - Are you doing those things? Are you lying? Cheating? Stealing? Murdering? Lusting? And so on. Are you directly disobeying a command of God in a blatant and obvious way? In that case, you can be pretty sure that it is God convicting you. If you aren't. If your problem falls into the realm of Christian freedom, then you might need to start suspecting OCD. For example, I personally started to worry I wasn't praying right. I would get distracted. Or I wouldn't feel the right things. Or I was worried I wasn't saying the right things. There is no command that says that's a sin. I was letting OCD trick me into worrying about how I was praying. Now, there are better ways to pray and worse ways. But it isnt a sin to pray poorly from time to time. It's a sin to murder. So what do you do? How do you know what to do with all the stuff that isn't explicitly talked about in Scripture? Easy. You strive to be as Christ-like as possible, dying to your flesh and striving after the kingdom of heaven every day. Read Romans. It talks about this entire process. However, you won't have certainty. Give that up. In fact, you can be certain of one thing, you will mess up. But that's okay. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. (Romans 5:20) There is no perfect answer. There is striving. Strive to do better everyday. Strive to do better today than you did yesterday. And read the Bible. Learn the stories. Grow in your understanding and wisdom so that when a tough, morally grey situation arises, you will have the confidence to make a choice, knowing that even if you do make a mistake, God's grace is what saves you, not your righteousness. All the glory to Him! You are not your thoughts! I will pray for you! :)