‘- Part II –
It is good news that there is a pathway to freedom from guilt, and that pathway is found in Jesus Christ. So, the first and essential step on that pathway is to have a personal relationship with him. That’s what it means to be a Christian—it means you have confessed your sins to Jesus, received his forgiveness, and committed yourself to be a Christ-follower. As Jesus put it, it means you have been born from above, given new life in Christ, and when that happens, you receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ and your identity then becomes connected and dependent on your relationship to Jesus. You are acceptable to God because Jesus has imparted his righteousness to you, deposited it to your account, as it were, and therefore God sees you “in Christ”—a new creation, fit for heaven and alive in new and wonderful ways.
I just want to make sure that you understand what it means to be a Christian. There are many misconceptions about that but the Bible makes it abundantly clear that it’s all about Jesus and your relationship to him. So, the pathway to freedom from guilt must begin with this first step. If you have not yet done that, I earnestly encourage you to do so. It is the most important decision you will ever make, for it determines your eternal destiny.
However, I know that I am speaking today to some true Christians who are still living under the bondage of shame. Because of something in your past—perhaps something you did or some lies that were told to you or abuse you have suffered—you have been saddled with a sense of shame and unworthiness. If freedom is found in your relationship to Christ, why are you not yet free from shame? That’s a legitimate question.
Consider this verse from Galatians 5:1:
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
The Apostle Paul is writing to believers in the church at Galatia—people who have truly been born from above—and he is telling them that they must stand firm in the freedom that Christ has given them. In other words, it is possible for believers to miss out on the freedom that is theirs in Christ if they do not claim their freedom and stand firm in it. That’s what is happening to Christians who are still in bondage to shame. If you continually feel the weight of shame in your life, and you are truly born again, then somehow, somewhere you have not stood firm against the enemy of your soul and he has been able to get a foothold in your life and burden you again with the yoke of slavery to shame.
You recall that while he was on earth, the enemies of Jesus were continually trying to shame him. Though he was totally innocent of any sin, they were always accusing him of some sin or another. They accused him of being possessed by demons, of being a glutton and a drunkard. They did their best to dump shame on Jesus. They told lies about him, made untrue accusations, trumped up charges against him, trying to ruin his reputation and bring shame on him.
And the ultimate shame and disgrace they could bring down on his head was to demand that he be crucified. The Bible says that in that day anyone who was hung from a cross was cursed. It was the worst shame anyone could endure.
Yet, consider this truth from Hebrews 12:2:
For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Jesus endured the cross because that was the only way to pay for our sins. But he scorned the shame. Do you know what scorn means? It means to feel or express contempt or derision for something. Jesus had contempt for shame—he refused to take it on. The cross was considered an instrument of shame, true, but Jesus scorned that shame. He endured the suffering of the cross, but refused the shame. His cross was not a cross of shame; it was a cross of redemption, of salvation.
This is our pathway to freedom from shame—we must scorn it, refuse it, reject it. Not because we may not deserve it; not because our words will work some magic; not because we have the strength in ourselves to stand against it. But because of who we are in Christ, we have the authority and the power of the risen Christ to stand against the onslaughts of the devil.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians about standing firm in the freedom of Jesus Christ. He said:
Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
If you want to know freedom from the bondage of shame, you must be diligent about putting on the full armor of God every day. Don’t leave home without it! I mean to literally take this passage from Ephesians 6, recite it, and pray each piece of the armor on, and by faith stand firm in the freedom that Jesus has already purchased for you.
This is your key to victory, because as you take up the shield of faith, you defuse every tactic the enemy will use to try to keep you full of shame. Taking up the shield of faith simply means that you confess that you believe Jesus has set you free from shame and by faith—not by feelings—you claim that victory.
Another thing that is important to finding freedom from the bondage of shame is to identify where that shame began. It may go back years, and if you can find that place where shame began to accumulate in your life, then you can bring that wounded place to Jesus and ask him to set you free, to heal that wound. You may have kept it buried for decades, even since childhood, but if you can bring that wounded place out into the open, tell Jesus about it, and ask him to heal you, it could be a new beginning for you. That is part of what it means to stand firm in the freedom which Jesus has given you.
Then the battle is in your mind—you must learn to reject the thoughts of shame, replace them with the truth of God’s Word, and live in the freedom that Jesus offers you.
2 Corinthians 10:
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
Shame is a pretension that tries to destroy the truth about God and about who you are as created in God’s image. It pretends to be the truth, but it is not. It is an argument; that means, it is a battle in your mind and for your mind. The enemy of your soul, Satan, is an absolutely expert liar—that is his language and he speaks it well. If you are caught in the bondage of shame, it is because you have believed his lies about who you are and you have not used the weapons we have been given to demolish that stronghold of bondage.
One of the devastating effects of shame is that it affects all of our relationships. First, it affects our relationship with God. Instead of approaching God’s throne of grace with confidence, shame makes us want to hide from God, like Adam and Eve did when they saw their shame after they sinned. So, that shame keeps us from praying and from God’s Word, and often from fellowship with other believers. We don’t see ourselves clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which is our true condition as born-again believers in Jesus Christ, but we see ourselves in our own tattered clothes, and we forget that God has forgiven us and removed our sin from us and remembers them no more.
Shame also affects our relationships with others. It pushes us to isolate because we feel exposed. And when we harbor shame on and on, it feels so terrible that it opens the door to uncontrollable emotions like anger and rage, and we often lash out at others and cause damage to those relationships, all because of this shame which is holding us in bondage.
One woman told how she learned to discard shame using a physical gesture of throwing her hands in the air and saying, “I release this shame; this shame does not belong to me.” This can be a powerful way to reinforce your decision to let go of the shame in your heart. Jesus scorned shame—rejected it—and we can do that, too.
Your most powerful weapon against shame is the truth of God’s Word. Use it today to begin your pathway to freedom from shame. For example, if you start thinking those thoughts of shame, instead of indulging in them, find some place where you can be alone for a few minutes and address those lies. Throw the Word of God in the face of shame and it cannot stand. Talk back to your enemy, Satan, telling him you are not fooled by his lies and you refuse to be condemned by him, because there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.
As you become more and more aware of how those thoughts of shame invade your mind, and you stop each time to confront them and reject them, you will be building spiritual muscle and you will be fighting back with the powerful divine weapons that we have to demolish strongholds, as we read in 2 Corinthians 10. Quote Scripture to those feelings of shame; talk out loud to them if you can, and remind yourself who you are in Christ. You do not have to accept that shame any longer. Jesus came to set you free.
Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
You can know freedom from the bondage of shame if you continually stand firm against the lies of Satan.