Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
009 | Everything I Ever Did: Shame | Theology AMA
585 Plays5 years ago
If we view ourselves as unworthy, we act unworthy. The world knows this, so it approaches shame from a self-centered perspective - if we love ourselves more, we will feel shame less… right? But how many of us have seen that repeating “you’re worthy” doesn’t remove the sting of what we’ve done, or resolve the pain of who we used to be? In this episode we talk about what shame is, how loving ourselves doesn’t remove it, and why trusting God’s word about your identity is the key to freedom. Mentioned: The Gospel Primer by Milton Vincent
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Impact of Coronavirus on Schedule
00:00:30
Speaker
Well guys, you may have noticed that last week we didn't have an episode. This was due to a complete schedule upset because of the coronavirus. So we are back to a somewhat normal schedule this week and I was able to record the last two episodes of this season. Can you believe that we are already at that point?
00:00:51
Speaker
We are looking at the last two chapters in the next two weeks of Stop Calling Me Beautiful. If you are new to the podcast, we have been going through each chapter of my brand new book, focusing on the topic and kind of flushing it out in a conversation.
Exploring Shame in Christian Faith
00:01:08
Speaker
So if you have the book, you can follow along or you can listen to the episodes independently.
00:01:13
Speaker
So we're talking about shame today which is the 11th chapter in Stop Calling Me Beautiful and kind of the summation of a lot of what we've talked about previously. So we've talked about legalism and broken sexuality, we've discussed anxiety and grief and you know here we are getting towards the end of this this look at the victorious Christian life
00:01:39
Speaker
And now we're addressing shame, which I think truly underlies a lot of these other struggles that we have discussed.
00:01:49
Speaker
So Brene Brown is probably the most well-known speaker, teacher, educator on shame. And the way that she defines shame is the experience or fear of believing we're not worthy of connection. So shame prevents vulnerability because vulnerability puts us at an emotional risk.
00:02:11
Speaker
I have personally experienced this because in the seasons of my life when I felt the most shame, especially during my journey through sexual sin, which is talked about in the sexuality episode, I developed this very hardened exterior to control how I was perceived. My own heart condemned me and I couldn't bear the condemnation of others. So it was easier to act confident than to do the heart work necessary for true inner confidence.
00:02:39
Speaker
to actually bring the shame to Jesus and walk with him through its removal. So my bondage to shame personally was a driving factor behind my insecurity, my legalism, my fear of man, things we've talked about in previous episodes.
00:02:56
Speaker
So shame can make us do really strange things. Again insecurity is one manifestation of it and it generally pushes us to this state of self-protection and for some people that might be oversharing or trying to
00:03:13
Speaker
connect with anybody who will listen.
Secular vs Christian Views on Shame
00:03:17
Speaker
Other people, it may be that hardened exterior, that unapproachable, you know, intimidating front that's put up to protect them from being hurt. And so shame manifests itself quite a few ways and our culture sees that it's negative.
00:03:34
Speaker
But the secular solution to shame keeps falling short. What they promise us is, if you change how you view yourself, you change the culture, change the world, shame will be defeated. If you embrace your truth, and I say that in quotes, nothing will undermine your confidence. But the non-Christian reference point for overcoming shame is within ourselves. And what if ourselves are the problem in the first place?
00:04:04
Speaker
So if we view ourselves as unworthy, we will act unworthy. And our world says, hey, if you just embrace who you are, if you just love yourself more, remember that you're worthy because you're you, then this will eventually go away. You'll feel more confident. You will, you know, process your problems. And in a way, some of that really does work because we do see how spiritualism and
00:04:28
Speaker
you know, new age ideologies, give people a degree of freedom. And they would say to you, if you ask them, I, yeah, I'm so much more free. I don't walk in shame. I do feel confident. So clearly, some of these things, even from a pagan standpoint, can work, but they can't work long
Identity in Christ and Overcoming Shame
00:04:47
Speaker
term. They can't work eternally. They definitely can't remove the eternal weight of shame and sin.
00:04:57
Speaker
And we realize that as we walk further into this conversation and further into studying shame, because what happens when you mess up? How do you view yourself if you've blown it? How do you recover from that with this secular ideology? There's no redemption for big mistakes in the secular approach to shame and brokenness. There's just this hoping that it goes away with time, maybe asking for forgiveness.
00:05:24
Speaker
Even that is debatable. Forgiveness really isn't a high priority in a lot of secular narratives. So, brokenness, it really can't be put back together. This shame issue really can't be put back together with just an I'm sorry. There's this side of shame that's completely beyond our control. And self-actualization can't even begin to fix it.
00:05:48
Speaker
I knew this when I was struggling with sexual sin, because shame was ever-present with me during that season, and telling myself I'm worthy because of who I am never would have given me confidence. The things I had done made me completely unworthy, and I knew that. So loving myself more wouldn't change the damage I had done to myself or to others.
00:06:12
Speaker
So when I finally did start sharing my testimony, it wasn't because I had learned to love myself, it was because I'd finally accepted God's love for me. It was His love that freed me, not my love. My love is too limited, for others or for myself.
00:06:29
Speaker
it cannot completely free me. It was shifting my eyes off of my shame, off of my past, not focusing on loving myself more, but on loving God more and understanding His love for me that was the basis for my confidence and what finally broke the yoke of shame over my sexual history.
00:06:49
Speaker
So Christianity as a whole has really gotten comfortable with talking about brokenness. We welcome brokenness, we talk about being broken people, but what happens once that brokenness is acknowledged?
00:07:04
Speaker
The sinfulness is acknowledged. Is it healed? Is it replaced? Is it redeemed? That's where the conversation gets weird. If we are talking about sin, which doesn't often happen in women's ministries today, we tend to focus on this word brokenness, but then don't really say what happens with it. We're just broken people. Well, that's not who we are in Christ. That's not our identity. Jesus didn't die for us to identify as broken.
00:07:32
Speaker
So when we tell this half gospel, we're telling people that our redemption is only eternal, it's not present. And this is why so many women are existing both in Christ and in shame. They're self-helping their way through life, they're reading the same books over and over and over again, and they're not seeing any real change.
00:07:54
Speaker
But in Christ, something better does exist. It's the abundant life that Jesus promised in John 10.10. It's something better than picking ourselves up by the bootstraps, trudging through the day with a Bible verse and willpower. And it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be easy. But it's possible with the Lord. It's possible to walk out of brokenness and out of that former identity.
Testing Faith and God's Unwavering Love
00:08:22
Speaker
So facing this reality of sin and shame is hard. It's one of the hardest things we'll ever do. But our attempts to cover that brokenness instead of acknowledge it, bring it to the Lord will cause it to stay with us for weeks and months and years until brokenness is a part of us. And if it's a part of us, we're not going to see any problem with the temporal hope of the self-help gospel.
00:08:48
Speaker
When we live this way, when we think this way, complete redemption and healing isn't even on our radar. We're just looking for more fig leaves like Adam and Eve. We're trying to cover ourselves with these fig leaves, this manufactured way of making ourselves righteous.
00:09:04
Speaker
Scripture is clear. Jesus did not die so we could identify as broken. He died so we could be reconciled to a holy God. He died to secure us an eternal home. And in Romans 8, we see this. Paul says, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, for your sake we face death all day long. We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
00:09:33
Speaker
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." That's verses 35 through 37. So even in the height of these troubles, as I am recording this, we're as a nation under quarantine to try and prevent the spread of this virus. That's a form of a trial. In Africa right now we have this locust plague that's a trial to those people.
00:09:59
Speaker
We go through individual trials and economic trials, especially because of what's happening in our world today.
Identity, Reconciliation, and Repentance
00:10:07
Speaker
And in these moments, we can know nothing can remove us from the love of God. So are we going to sit there and dwell on our brokenness, dwell on, you know, who we used to be before Christ, or are we going to repent of any sin that we have in our lives and walk with the God who saved us?
00:10:26
Speaker
That is the right and the privilege of every person who's in Christ. And many Christians don't take God up on it because they think it's presumptuous. But if God gave you this right, if He won this for you, it's not presumptuous. He chose to give you that opportunity. So it's not presumptuous to take Him up on it.
00:10:47
Speaker
I don't know where this twisted theology comes from, but it's focused so much on sin and brokenness that it fails to even see Jesus as Savior. It fails to actually live with Jesus as Savior.
00:11:02
Speaker
So as a church, we've strayed one of two directions. We have this unwillingness to give up our hurts, habits, hang ups, that's the three terms I hear a lot, for the victorious life, or we have this unwillingness to believe what scripture says about who we are in Jesus.
00:11:22
Speaker
So instead of embracing victory and speaking it over our lives, we rehearse all the ways we are sinners. Now obviously scripture says that we should be repenting when we sin. I'm clearly not saying that we shouldn't be repenting for any sin that is in our lives or be aware of it. But our identity, who we are in Christ, is not sinner.
00:11:43
Speaker
It's not. Our identity is daughter. Our identity is heir. It is friend of God. This is who we are now. It's not, oh, I'm a sinner.
00:11:57
Speaker
It's I am a son. And when you reframe that, shame cannot live. It cannot abide there. It cannot have a hold on you. And when you sin, repentance comes so naturally because of your identity in Christ. It's that confidence to come back to the Father. I look at the prodigal son whose relationship with his father, clearly prodigal son had a lot of problems, but when he came back to the Father,
00:12:24
Speaker
Humbly, the father ran out to meet him. He came back repentant. The father ran out to meet him. And that image that Jesus gave us of God's heart and how God responds to repentance is something that can only be understood when we believe that we are sons, we are daughters, not we are sinners as an identity.
00:12:52
Speaker
So yes, he sinned, the prodigal son sinned, but his identity was son. And then when he repented of that sin, he was welcomed back. He was embraced. He was restored.
00:13:09
Speaker
You're going to have a really hard time trusting God's restoration, forgiveness, and love for you if you don't get this theological principle straight, if you don't understand the identity that Christ has given you and what happened at the cross.
00:13:27
Speaker
We really tend in the church to take certain principles and expand them beyond their meaning. So when Paul says, I am the worst of sinners, yeah, he was the worst of sinners, but what else does he say? Nothing can separate me from the love of God. I am an apostle. I am, now obviously that was a role, but he was not questioning
00:13:52
Speaker
his identity in Christ in saying that he had been a sinner. And so it's important that we understand identity being distinct from action because in Christ we have an unchangeable identity.
00:14:09
Speaker
We can take sinful actions or we can take righteous actions. The righteous ones line up with that identity. The sinful ones line up with that shameful old self that you have to reject by the Spirit's power. And so as a church, as a community, we have this choice to either concentrate on these hurts and habits and hang-ups or to believe what Christ said about us.
00:14:34
Speaker
And as I said before, I absolutely am saying that repentance of sin is a vital part of the Christian life. 2 Corinthians 7, 9. But repentance is an action begun by God's Spirit, not by self-flagellation.
00:14:48
Speaker
We're not walking around whipping ourselves as penance, but that's what Christians do. They do a verbal, mental, spiritual self-flagellation, just like the monks in medieval times did, except it's all in our heads. It's how we talk about ourselves. Repentance is begun by God's Spirit, and it results in Spirit-led change.
00:15:10
Speaker
So we glorify God best when we turn from our sinful ways, embrace the worthiness He's given us in Christ, and live out that worthiness by the Holy Spirit's power.
00:15:23
Speaker
In 1 John, the author points out that Jesus' rule as
Forgiveness and Identity through Christ
00:15:27
Speaker
our intercessor is the foundation for living confidently in our worth. He says, if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world.
00:15:46
Speaker
Jesus was the sacrifice for our sins. He died to redeem brokenness and to make us whole. And a little further in this passage, there's a powerful statement. He says, I write to you young men because you are strong and the word of God lives in you and you have overcome the evil one.
00:16:06
Speaker
When I read this verse, I notice that this is a very present wording. You are strong. You have overcome. Not you will be. Not you will overcome. You already have. And John can say this because it's true.
00:16:23
Speaker
Christ defeated death and the enemy, Hebrews 2.14. He secured us in eternal inheritance, Titus 3.7. And Jesus lived out his John 16.33 promise. He overcame the world. And that promise wasn't just for eternity. It's also for today.
00:16:44
Speaker
I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true. But it's not the whole truth.
Conquering Shame through Christ's Love
00:16:56
Speaker
The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women.
00:17:03
Speaker
So if you're tired of hearing the watered down Christian teaching and you're hungry for a deeper spiritual life, I have something for you. It's my brand new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful, Finding Soul Deep Strength in a Skin Deep World. Stop Calling Me Beautiful is a book about going deeper with God.
00:17:20
Speaker
I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon or for more information, head to my website FeliciaMasonheimer.com and click the book tab.
00:17:47
Speaker
So as we're walking free of shame and we're walking out of these old patterns of thinking and these old patterns of behavior, we're going to have to make a choice. Where are our eyes going to focus? Who are we going to believe? And I think a great example of this is the Samaritan woman in her conversation with Jesus at the well.
00:18:12
Speaker
When he spoke life to her, when she finally believed him, she went into the city and told everyone, this man told me everything I ever did. Come, could this be the Messiah? See, you can't share something. You can't share your story with this level of transparency if your identity is bound up in brokenness. Something has to break the bond of shame. And for the Samaritan woman, and also for me and my own story of sexual sin,
00:18:42
Speaker
was Jesus. This was Jesus. That's the turning point. When I stopped identifying as a victim of defeat and started embracing who he was and shifting my eyes to him and believing him, I started to experience the shame free life. Now, this doesn't mean that we'll never struggle again, that we'll never be tempted again. Obviously, temptation will happen the rest of our lives.
00:19:10
Speaker
But now we know how to face broken choices. We know that our brokenness is not insurmountable. This is the hope we have in Jesus. This is the hope of having an intercessor. And when we sin, we can repent, turn back to Christ, and live as more than conquerors once again. There's a little book that truly transformed my life in this area, and it was called The Gospel Primer.
00:19:36
Speaker
And it's by Milton Vincent. It's written in this super old sounding language. I don't think it's that old actually, but it's amazing. It just breaks the gospel down for you. And he has an entire section on people who believe that repenting soon after sin is presumptuous.
00:19:53
Speaker
This is a common thought process regarding sexual sin. Well, if I just sin sexually, if I go back and repent right now, that's presumptuous. God's not going to hear me. I need to wait a few days and whip myself and then I can come and repent. But that's not what we see in Scripture. Run back. Run to Him. Break the hold of shame. Don't let it fester. Don't let it grow. Don't let the enemy speak lies over you. Go back immediately and repent.
00:20:23
Speaker
because that's how you walk in step with the Lord. That very act of repentance is your first step to conquering sin. And that's why I love 1 John 1.9 so much that says, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us of all unrighteousness.
Grace and Living Victoriously
00:20:44
Speaker
This confession is the antidote to shame.
00:20:49
Speaker
So we have this choice that we can either dwell in who we used to be or in the sins that we commit or we can repent and we can come back and we can walk in step with him. So the final part of walking free of shame.
00:21:05
Speaker
is embracing the grace of God. Man, this can be so hard because His grace is so hard to believe. It's amazing grace, isn't it? It's phenomenal. It's unbelievable that we have to actually trust what God says about who He is, who we are, and what we've done. We have to cast ourselves on His mercy.
00:21:29
Speaker
So going back to 1 John in chapter 3, it says, So if our hearts condemn us, God is greater.
00:21:49
Speaker
Some people have a hard time understanding the difference between condemnation and conviction. So conviction, that's like, oh man, I know that this was a sin. And it draws us near to God through repentance. But condemnation pushes us away from God through guilt. When you're feeling condemnation, typically the way I've noted that it happens is it happens after repentance.
00:22:14
Speaker
So you felt convicted, you repented to the Lord, but then it re-emerges after you've repented. That's condemnation, because we know that if you repent, he has promised
00:22:26
Speaker
to cleanse us, to make us righteous. So anything you're hearing after that is not from Him. That's condemnation. Because conviction restores, condemnation separates. And you can speak God's greatness over any condemnation you feel. Your heart does not have the right to tell you who you are. God does. So as we are learning to embrace grace,
00:22:52
Speaker
You have to know that the enemy will work overtime and fight back. He does not want to lose in this area because when he has control of our thoughts and our emotions, he can control so many of our actions, so many of our words. But when our thoughts and our emotions, how we think about ourselves and how we think about God are rightly orchestrated and aligned with a word, then we are far less likely to be deceived by him, to be misled by him.
00:23:23
Speaker
But here's the thing guys, without grounding ourselves in the word of God, we can't live by the truth of God. And without living by the truth of God, we can't live out the freedom of God. Overcoming life, victory over shame is the product of consistent exposure to God through his word. I say this every episode, but it's so important. You've got to be in the word.
00:23:50
Speaker
This isn't just another me nagging you. Do your quiet time, do your devotions. This is a fight. Your enemy wants to keep you away from the word of God because that's truth, that's freedom, that's the way. And you will be fighting back every time you make it a priority to seek God through his word.
00:24:09
Speaker
You might even fall flat, but you can repent. You can be restored. Remember, victory is a lifestyle, not a destination. And in Christ, you have every hope. You have everything that you need to live a life of godliness.
00:24:30
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.