Can we talk about shame? Can we talk about facing into it, in order to live free from it?

Honestly, I wanted to talk about favor, to focus on Psalm 23:5 and the joy of resting in God’s favor. I wanted to mention briefly that shame can block us from receiving favor, and leave it at that.

But God would not let me. Every time I tried to write the post I had in mind, I could not go forward. I was blocked on every hand. Finally, I realized the picture God was painting, and the point he wanted me to see:

No matter how we try to go about it, we cannot rest in God’s favor until we deal with shame.

Consider David’s words to the Lord his shepherd:

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows. (Ps. 23:5)

Here, God poured out great favor, and David received it. Can you hear the emotion in David’s voice as he describes what that looked like for him?

Shame is the opposite emotion to that. What’s more, shame can block us from feeling that delight. And it can block us bigtime from receiving the good things God is pouring out.

In another post, we’ll explore the joy of resting in God’s favor. But first, let’s look at how in the world we can get there when shame is blocking the way.

In order that favor can flow

Shame cries, “Something bad about you has been exposed!” Even when it’s not true, it feels true. It feels painful – sometimes, excruciating. It may seem the pain will never stop.

In your body, shame can feel most intense in your gut and in your face. You may flush and cringe, and want to disappear.

You may have been told, you may have thought, that Almighty God inflicts shame on us, and delights to keep us mired in it. Why might you think such a thing? Because people can treat people that way. And you may have looked to shaming people to help you know God.

But the Everlasting Father gave people the capacity to feel shame for the same reason he gave us the capacity to feel pain when we touch a hot stove. He intends momentary pain to alert us to avoid disaster.

When, instead, shame attaches to us, the Prince of Peace delights to free us from it.

To offer us that freedom, Jesus gave his life. To receive the freedom he offers, we say yes by faith to knowing him as Lord. And we say yes again and again to seeing what he is revealing and acting on it.

It’s not a little thing to face into something as painful as shame. It takes courage, and trust. Yet to experience the life, freedom, favor our Lord holds out to us, it’s vital to let him show us when we’re feeling shame. It’s vital to let our Wonderful Counselor reveal as much as he knows we need to know of the why behind the shame.

It’s also vital to know: The why may be different from what we’ve been led to believe. It may be different from what we want to believe.

Four sources of shame

→ We may feel shame as a result of treating God and other people badly. Actively or passively, personally or collectively, we’ve said, done or agreed with what opposes the Lord or uses or dehumanizes someone else.

→ We may feel shame because of brutal, humiliating or invasive things others have said about us and done to us.

→ We may feel shame because we’ve misunderstood what God counts shameful.

→ We may feel shame over aspects of our lives that are not sinful but we (or others) perceive as bad or flawed.

The Lord intends shame as a strong signal:

Something about us
that we don’t want known
needs to be faced and dealt with,
in order that favor can flow.

Wise ways to deal with shame

Wise responses to shame will vary, depending on whether:

• We’ve behaved in ways that God counts shameful.
• We’ve been treated in ways that God counts shameful.
• We’ve unwittingly demonstrated that we’re not superhuman.
• We’ve attached shame to something else that we, our family or our culture frowns upon, but God doesn’t count shameful at all.

When we’ve behaved in a way that God counts shameful, it’s crucial to humble ourselves and agree with the Spirit, who convicts us of sin. He convicts, not to demean, but to deliver and redeem. And when our own sin is involved, we cannot banish the shame until we deal with the sin.

When shame has attached to us for other reasons, it’s crucial to remember: The Spirit convicts us of righteousness too. In the midst of tremendous deception and confusion, he can show us what is good and right in us that we’ve believed to be shameful. He can lift from our shoulders any shame we’ve carried that belongs to someone else. Deep within, we can feel his pleasure in our humanness and our uniqueness. We can feel his delight when our heart cries for him.

The not-so-great escape

Ah, but ever since Adam and Eve first chose to sin – and felt the hot flush of disgrace – people’s soul-response to shame has been to hide. When we feel that heat in our face and that ice in our gut, we too may try to camouflage ourselves with every possible version of fig leaves.

We may believe that covering up the shame will make it disappear. Or we may believe the only way to get rid of shame is to make ourselves disappear. But the more we try to escape from shame in those ways, the more it rules us. It may torture us endlessly. Or we may not feel it at all. Either way, it rules us.

Relentlessly shame goads us to:

• Wrap ourselves in fig-leaf shields, that we think will defend us, but instead open us to ruin.
• Take up two-edged swords, to thrust blame and shame on someone, anyone, else.
• Seek favor in all the wrong places, all the wrong ways.

“We are covered with shame”

Ultimately, shame that is not uncovered covers us. That’s true of personal shame, and of collective and generational shame.

Daniel knew that. He wrote,

I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed:

“Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame – the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. We and our kings, our princes and our ancestors are covered with shame, Lord, because we have sinned against you.” (Dan. 9:4, 7-8)

When shame covers us, it’s not a blanket that protects and comforts. No, when shame goes undealt with, it can bury us alive.

“Shame covers my face”

Scripture says, too, that shame can “cover our faces.” The face is the part of us that most readily reveals who we are. Yet shame can hide our true identity behind an impenetrable veil. It can keep us from being seen and known.

You may think that’s a good thing. Shame can convince us that’s a good thing. It is not.

When I won’t see what God wants to show me

As we’ve noted, our Lord intends shame to jolt us awake to something we desperately need to see but do not want to see. We may even believe we cannot see it and survive. Yet when God opens our eyes, he does so in a way that saves from death and leads to life.

If we try to escape shame without facing what the Spirit of truth is revealing, shame masks the truth instead. It blinds us to what God wants to point out to us. It keeps us from recognizing and embracing who he created and redeemed us to be. It blocks us from true relationships with the Lord and with people.

When God’s people under the Old Covenant forsook the Lord and ignored his every warning cry, they found themselves in that dire situation. For generations, they didn’t look or live like God’s people at all.

“We are disgraced,” Jeremiah wrote, “and shame covers our faces” (Jer. 51:51).

When I carry shame that doesn’t belong to me

People who shame other people may try to get rid of their own shame by projecting it onto someone else. King Saul and those who followed him treated David that way. David described the excruciating experience in Psalm 69. Here’s a snippet:

Lord, the Lord Almighty, may those who hope in you not be disgraced because of me; God of Israel, may those who seek you not be put to shame because of me. For I endure scorn for your sake, and shame covers my face. (vv. 6-7)

With this cry, David admitted something I didn’t see for a very long time:

When people are determined not to see you, no amount of showing them or telling them who you are will help them see you.

But also, David knew what does make a difference when shame covers your face. Again and again, David took that shame to the Lord.

Answer me, Lord, out of the goodness of your love; in your great mercy turn to me.

You know how I am scorned, disgraced and shamed; all my enemies are before you.

Do not hide your face from your servant; answer me quickly, for I am in trouble. Come near and rescue me. (Ps. 69:16, 19, 17-18)

Let us look to Jesus

As we, too, begin to look to the Lord and trust him with our pain, he gives us grace – gently, firmly, little by little – to face into any shame we’re feeling, and to see its causes.

He also gives us grace to see, to feel, to know in the deepest part of us, how deeply he has identified with us. As Isaiah foretold:

He was hated and rejected by people. He had much pain and suffering. People would not even look at him. He was hated, and we didn’t even notice him.

But he took our suffering on him and felt our pain for us.

The punishment, which made us well, was given to him, and we are healed because of his wounds. (Isa. 53:3-4, 5 NCV)

Shame was heaped on Jesus. And he conquered it. In the process, he opened the way for us to break free from shame too.

Jesus took our punishment

All my life, I’ve been taught that – and it’s huge.

God designed guilt to alert us when we’ve sinned. In addition, he intends shame to alert us when we’ve gone beyond wrongdoing into evildoing. When guilt and shame rightly cry, “You deserve punishment!” Jesus offers us the opposite.

Accepting his offer requires facing and owning the truth of our sin, turning from it by God’s grace and yielding fully to the One who gave himself in our behalf.

In other posts and more than one of my books, I’ve focused on this key truth repeatedly, because it’s so important to know and practice, and so hard to do. It can be especially hard for those of us who identify as Christians, and may truly know Christ, to admit to having done what God counts evil. But again, it is vital to knowing his lordship and favor and life.

Jesus bore our pain

Growing up, I didn’t hear much about that – yet it’s an equally key truth.

Throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, and most visibly on the day of his crucifixion, people despised, rejected and shunned him. They stripped him naked and lifted him up for all to see. They subjected him to torture, physically and emotionally.

As he bore all the pain inflicted on him, he also took on himself all your pain and mine. He carried the full weight of it all, in order to be able to lift it off of us.

Later, Hebrews 12:2 would urge:

Let us look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (MEV)

Jesus endured the cross

He did not spend his days on earth letting evil walk all over him. No. The Father and the Son so loved us that the Father gave his Son an assignment to be fulfilled on a specific day, in a specific way. Jesus accepted that assignment and persevered through it – trusting his Father to turn defeat into victory, death into life, evil into good, curse into blessing and sorrow into joy.

Jesus despised the shame

The word translated despising in Hebrews 12:2 literally means “to think down on.” Some English translations say that Jesus ignored or disregarded the shame. But the nine occurrences of this word in the New Testament indicate a much more strongly negative “looking down on.” Most often, the word is translated despise or scorn.

When Jesus felt the pain of shame, he did not try to squelch his feelings of revulsion. And yet, he did not turn those feelings on himself. In the moments of his greatest suffering, the Lord of love didn’t even aim his disdain at the people treating him so shamefully. Rather, he despised the shame itself.

His disgust said, in effect, “Shame on you, shame! You are not doing what I created you to do! You are condemning the innocent, instead of convicting the evildoers!”

The initiator and completer of your faith

→ Our Lord took our punishment, including the punishment for grave wrongs we’ve done before or after yielding our lives to him.

→ He bore our suffering, including the searing pain of shame falsely thrust onto us.

→ He overcame our shame for us.

Now risen and ascended, he is seated at the Father’s right hand. Ephesians 2:6 says we are seated there too.

And by his wounds we are healed.

You don’t have to know what to do with that, dear one. Please don’t try to figure out how to make it “work.”

To access what your Lord has done for you, look to your Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. He is the initiator and completer of your faith.

Spirit-to-spirit, day in and day out, embrace his love. Trust his faithfulness. Learn to know his voice. Humble your soul and yield to him.

He will give you grace to see each next thing he wants to show you, to hear each next thing he wants to tell you. As he uncovers the shame you’re feeling, he will show you how to cooperate with him to walk free from it.

This is not a heavy thing. Your Lord is not setting you up for more shame. He’s guiding you in the lifelong process of growing in him. He’s giving you grace to say each next yes to him. You and he will work out how that looks.

Then, as he pours out favor on you, in ways he’s designed just for you, you’ll realize: I received it! I rejoiced in it! And shame did not get a say.

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The original version of this lightly edited repost was published December 18, 2021, under the title, “Can we talk about shame?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Companion posts

• My cup overflows: Resting in God’s favor
• The blessing of rest

See also

• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• Sabotage, coerce, shame: Bullying in the church
• Shunning in the church
• The world in church clothing
  
  
• Heartcry of one who overcomes
• Divorcing: When God does what he hates
• Humble your soul, release your spirit
• Spirit to spirit: A matter of life and breath