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PROGRAM W-1793 – Part I
Shame is much more than just feeling guilty. It is a deeper-rooted, often long-time emotion which attacks a person’s worth. Consequently, shame truly keeps people in bondage, away from the freedom Jesus came to give us, and missing the joy of our salvation. Far too many people are carrying around a baggage of shame that truly is robbing them of becoming all God created them to be and doing the good works God put them here to do.
Let’s examine the difference between guilt and shame. I’ve written a book on guilt—Why Do I Always Feel Guilty?—where I go into a lot of detail about true guilt and false guilt. In that book, I remind us that God does not want us to live under a blanket of guilt. If it’s true guilt where we are truly guilty of something we’ve done wrong, then the cure for true guilt is to confess it and be forgiven. If it’s false guilt, then we need to recognize that it has no foundation in truth; it is a feeling of guilt without being guilty, and it must be renounced.
Guilt is usually associated with something you’ve done that is wrong—or something you think you’ve done that is wrong. Certainly, we can become guilt-ridden people when we take on guilt and don’t deal with it. But I believe that shame is guilt on steroids. It takes guilt to the next level, so to speak, and therefore it is more harmful and more difficult to overcome. Shame is believing there is something wrong with you; believing that you are basically defective in some way.
Sometimes shame begins with guilt. The enemy of your soul wants to keep you and me in bondage to guilt and he wants to turn that guilt into shame. Harboring guilt can indeed be the gateway to taking on shame, and that happens when we think about our guilt and keep remembering it, or when we fail to confess our guilt and find forgiveness.
First, I want to encourage you to search your own mind and ask yourself if you have been harboring some guilt over something in your past. Have you allowed that guilt to plague your mind and your thoughts so much that it has burrowed down into your soul and become shame? If so, your first step is to make sure you have confessed whatever needs confessing and ask for God’s forgiveness. First John 1:9 promises us that if we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, God’s Word is either true or not—and I can assure you that it is. So, if you confess, you will be cleansed and forgiven.
But sadly, many who have asked for and received forgiveness from God for something in their pasts still harbor the shame of that past. They haven’t yet forgiven themselves; their identity has become attached to their sin. Instead of living in the truth that if they are born from above through faith in Jesus Christ, their identity is now attached to Jesus—to who they are in Christ—and in the truth that they are righteous in God’s eyes because they have been given the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Have you ever thought about how you see yourself—from what or whom do you derive your own self-image? Do you see yourself as the guilt and shame of your past? I’ve met and talked to many people who have allowed their sin, their past, or the lies they have believed to become their identity. In their minds, that’s who they are.
Think of the woman at the well whom Jesus met. She saw herself as a disgraced woman with a shameful past, a woman who could not associate with other women because of her shame. Think about the woman caught in adultery. Talk about shame—it doesn’t get much worse than that. She was dragged out into public—probably half-clothed—and the accusations against her were true: she had been caught in the very act of adultery.
How does Jesus deal with both of these women? He deals with their “stuff”—their pasts and their sins—and then he sets them free from that shame to become the women he created them to be. He says, “I don’t condemn you; go and sin no more.” Of course, their past lives would still create consequences for them which they would have to live with, but no longer were their pasts their identity. No longer were they women of shame and ill-repute—not to Jesus, not to God. As they were set free by Jesus from their past shame, they were set free indeed.
This is a truth which must be accepted by faith. You believe it because God said it—whether you feel it or not. Then you must begin the battle of bringing every thought into captivity and making it obedient to Christ, as we read in 2 Corinthians 10:5. That guilt and shame has found a nesting place in your mind; it’s like an evil bird who has built a nest of shame right there in your brain, and that shame is controlling your thought life. Shame resides in our thoughts. Therefore, to get rid of shame, we must push out wrong thoughts and replace them with truth. That’s what it means to bring every thought into captivity and make every thought conform to the truth of God’s Word.
Another source of shame is the lies which people have told us about ourselves. For example, I think of a woman I met quite a few years ago who was told by her mother almost every day of her life that she was a mistake, her birth was not planned and should not have happened, and because she was born, her mother’s life was hard and troubled. What does a child believe when she hears this from her mother? She believes she has little or no worth; she believes her birth—her life—is one huge mistake, and she believes that her very existence is a problem.
Of course those were lies, but they were lies that she believed into her adulthood. Then she was introduced to Jesus Christ, his love for her, and how he valued her, and amazingly her whole attitude about herself was transformed. She never could get over the truth that God loved her and valued her. She’s now in heaven with Jesus—leaving us too soon—but she was set free from that shame which had shadowed her all her life when she came to know how much Jesus loved her. It was shame she took on because of lies told to her.
I think of another woman I know whose husband decided to walk out on her in his mid-life crisis for a younger woman and, in an attempt to justify his actions, his parting words to her were that she was not a good wife. She said to me, “I thought I was a good wife, but I guess I wasn’t.” She let his lies find a nest in her mind and cause her to believe that if she had been a better wife, he would not have left her.
How about you? Have you believed some lies about yourself? Can you locate those lies, name them, and renounce them? Tell Jesus about those lies and ask him to heal you from them. Fill your mind with the truth of God’s Word—more and more spend time in his Word, reading it, memorizing it, listening to it, until you drive out those wrong thoughts and replace them with the truth.
Do you remember that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were free from shame until they sinned? In Genesis 2:25 we read, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” However, with sin, shame entered their lives and their eyes were opened to their nakedness. Then they ran from God and tried to hide. Shame caused them to try to isolate and cover up.
Shame almost always causes us to hide from others because we’re fearful of being found out. We don’t want others to see our shame, just like Adam and Eve. So, we keep it inside and it begins to accumulate. Many people have accumulated shame from childhood for all kinds of reasons, and that accumulated shame doesn’t go away with the passing of time. Often it comes to the surface in very destructive ways in times of stress or fear.
This is what happens when we don’t deal with our “stuff.” When you keep pushing it down, trying to ignore it or pretend it’s okay but never find the healing that Jesus wants to give you, then in a moment often totally disconnected from the shame you feel, you erupt and those feelings of shame come out as anger, rage, or condemnation of others. It’s bound to happen when you don’t find God’s release valve for your shame. It’s like a pressure cooker that finally explodes.
In one of our recent weekend getaways, as a friend was sharing her story, she talked about her shame and how God had delivered her from years of living with shame. It touched such a note with so many women at that event that a large part of the group came forward for prayer to be delivered from the shame in their lives. I was amazed—again—at the pervasive destruction of shame in the lives of so many people. Some of these were women I knew personally and I had never realized they were carrying such shame. We’re all pretty good at covering up, aren’t we?
Would you like to be set free from whatever shame you are living with now? If you’re born from above and know that Jesus has redeemed you, it is foolish for you to carry around all that heavy shame. I think of the story of the man who was carrying a heavy load on his back, and a friendly man driving a truck stopped and offered him a ride. He gladly climbed onto the back of the truck and accepted the free ride, but after a few miles, the driver looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the man was sitting in the truck with that heavy load still on his back. He stopped and asked the guy why he didn’t put that load down instead of leaving it on his back? He said, “Oh, you were so nice to give me a ride; I couldn’t ask you to carry my heavy load as well.”
That’s a little of what it’s like when, as a child of God, you continue to carry your heavy load of shame. Jesus has already paid the price and provided the freedom from your shame; it’s a done deal. Jesus paid it all, as the old hymn goes. He’s driving the truck of freedom and you’re in the backseat. You don’t have to carry that load of shame anymore. He’s totally capable, willing, and able to take it from you and give you his light burden in exchange. But you must let go and trust him.
