Can we talk about facing into shame, 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.
Pause for a minute and savor 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. Ahh, favor given; favor received. 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 delightful emotion. And it can block us bigtime from receiving the good things God is pouring out.
So in my next post, we’ll look more closely at 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 also feels painful. It may feel excruciating. It may feel like 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.
We may have been told, we may have thought, that God inflicts shame on us, and delights to keep us mired in it. Why might we believe such a thing? Because people can treat people that way. Because we may have looked up to shaming people to help us know God.
But the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, gave us 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.
It’s not a little thing to face into something as painful as shame. It takes courage, and trust. Yet to experience the abundant life and rest and 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.
Here are four potential sources:
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 denies 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.
The wise way to do that 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. In our inmost being, we can feel his pleasure in our humanness and our uniqueness. We can know his delight when our heart cries for him.
The not-so-great escape
Ah, but ever since Adam and Eve first chose not to honor God as God – and felt the hot flush of disgrace – people’s soul-response to shame has been to hide. We too, when we feel that heat in our face and that ice in our gut, 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. We may numb ourselves until we feel little or no shame. Or shame may torture us without end. Either way, it rules us.
Relentlessly:
- Shame goads us to trust in fig-leaf shields, that we think will defend us, but instead open us wide to ruin.
- Shame goads us to take up two-edged swords, to thrust blame and shame on someone, anyone, else.
- Shame goads us to 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.
Shame can cover your face when you’re determined to deny what God wants to show you.
As we’ve noted, our Lord intends shame to jolt us awake to something we desperately need to see but typically 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 found themselves in this dire situation, both Daniel and Jeremiah confessed it. For centuries, the people had forsaken the Lord and ignored his every warning cry, until they were taken captive by Babylon (Jer. 51:51). For generations, they didn’t look or live like God’s people at all.
Shame can cover your face when people mired in shame relentlessly put shame on you.
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 long, 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 the 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 to 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.
And also, he 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 – and it’s equally huge and equally key.
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 at a specific time, 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 originator and completer of your faith
Our Lord took our punishment, including the punishment for truly evil things we may have done before or after yielding our lives to him.
Our Lord bore our suffering, including the searing pain of shame that has been falsely and relentlessly thrust onto us.
He felt our pain for 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 him who is your Wonderful Counselor, your Mighty God, your Everlasting Father, your Prince of Peace. He is the originator 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.
Time and again, he will give you grace to see the next thing he wants to show you, to hear the 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:
- Perhaps, he’ll call you to turn from sin you have not wanted to face.
- Perhaps, to refuse shame that is not yours. Maybe he’ll teach you to shame that false shame.
- Perhaps, he’ll advise you stop trying to explain yourself to people determined not to see you. And to stop looking for approval and favor from them.
- Perhaps, to embrace what you’ve counted shameful but he absolutely delights in.
- Or, he’ll lead you to take another step he makes clear to you by the Spirit and the Word.
Stop. Breathe. This is not a heavy thing. Your Lord is not setting you up for more shame. He is guiding you in the lifelong process of growing in him. He is giving you grace to say each next yes to him. You and he will work out how that looks.
Along the way, he will pour out favor on you, in ways he’s designed just for you. And you will realize: I received it! I rejoiced in it! And shame did not get a say.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Thanks so much, Deborah, for expressing the heart and mind of our loving God with the eloquence, grace, and clarity that are hallmarks of your writing. From one Christ follower to another on a similar journey, once again you have reminded me where our identity and worth find our home, by the Spirit of truth wrapped in Jesus’ grace. May God bless you abundantly for pointing us all back to him as our Source of healing and restoration.
Thank you! ♥️
I’m reading this one again, pondering it slowly, and being bowled over by its profundity. So much deep truth–I heard myself breathing “wow” again and again. Thank you so much for the labor of love you poured into this article. God bless you, friend.
Labor of love. Yes. Very much so. ♥️ Thank you, friend!