Moving into Freedom From Guilt and Shame

All this is well and good. But how do we move beyond cognitively getting our minds around this (which for some of us is hard enough) but to actually inhabit this as reality, as the most true thing in the universe (which it is)?

A couple of thoughts:

1. The Spirit of God is not the Spirit of shame and guilt. God's Spirit is always the Spirit of faith, hope, and love who leads us into faith, hope, and love--even and especialy when disciplining us. This is foundational for how we relate to the voices in our heads.

2. The Spirit does bring conviction. Sometimes in our internal experience, it's hard to know if what we're feeling is genuine conviction or false shame and guilt.

If we've sinned, it is appropriate to feel guilt and shame--we are guilty and we have something to be ashamed of! The world in many ways would be a much worse place if no one ever experienced guilt or shame.

But the Spirit's goal in bringing conviction is always to lead us to repentance. The goal of the Spirit's "no" to us is to bring us to the "yes" of re-connection with God.

Therefore, if we have repented of our sin and the feelings of guilt or shame still linger, it's not the voice of the Lord we're hearing any longer. It may have been initially, but that work is done. We can confidently war against the guilt and shame at work in us after we've repented. Post-repentance, those voices (whether they were true convictionn initially or not) are not the servants of the Lord.

3. The process of forgiving ourselves (i.e. dealing with our guilt) is just that--a process. There have been times when I've been so angry with someone that I've needed God to help me to forgive them just 500 times that day. And by his grace, tomorrow it'll just be 450 times.

Similarly with us. Embracing forgiveness offered to us by the Father for ourselves might require that we fight for it, work for it, and remind ourselves 500 times today that we are forgiven. By God's grace, perhaps tomorrow it'll just be 450 times.

4. If guilt is focused on the past, shame is often focused on our present and future. Am I man or woman enough to deal with the present or future challenges? Do I have anything in me that is valuable or worthwhile?

The gospel says both "no" and "yes" to this question.

First, the no. In and of ourselves, we cannot do what is required of us, least of all what is required of us by God. Our flesh and our gifts and abilities, no matter how well-developed or disciplined or cultivated, cannot do the work required by God.

But yes, by God's grace, we can do the work that he has prepared in advance for us to do because it is not just us doing it. Paul is adamant throughout the NT that it is God's grace working through him, the Spirit working in him, God at work in him.

It is this fresh inhabiting, indwelling of God that empowers us, enables us to rise to the challenges of our lives. We live out of the new name he has given us, and in that, we are confident to move ahead.

5. We need community to speak all this back to us, because we will forget it.

If we have not spoken the gospel of grace, forgiveness, new name, the Spirit's work in us, to one another, we have failed to be the community and family of God that he has called us to be.

Freedom from Guilt and Shame for my 7-Eleven Employees

Sunday I'm preaching at Raleigh Chinese Christian Church--it's the English service, for those of you who are concerned that my Mandarin and Cantonese might be a bit rusty.

I'm re-working a talk that I've given twice before because the concepts continue to be fresh and needful for me: Freedom from Shame and Guilt.

I've posted on this each time that I've given this talk, but since blog readers turnover faster than the employees at your local 7-Eleven, I want to gather up some thoughts from previous posts and then share some fresh developments tomorrow.

The reason why a talk on shame and guilt matters is because all of us hear the voices. Those voices in our heads speak to us about our past mistakes (that's guilt) or our current deficits of ability or character (that's shame).

Guilt is feeling bad about something you've done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Since we all hear voices, and we generally don't like what they tell us, we all have various strategies to deal with our voices:

1. Religious stuff--maybe if I get God to like me, it'll all be okay
2. Hedonism/Escapism--how many drinks or sexual experiences or highs or movies or hours of sporting events or hours of video games does it take to quiet the voices?
   
3. Moralism--never mind religion, I'll just try to be good enough to prove something to whoever that is that's talking to me about my shortcomings
4. Activism--if I save enough whales, I'll make up for what I did
   
5. Work-a-holism--if I make it through law school or dental school or med school or if I make partner or manager or vice-president or make enough money, then I'll prove myself

The problem, of course, as most of you realize by now if you stop long enough to think about it, is that none of this actually works. That's why most of us don't stop long enough to think about it. We feel stuck.

In fact, if it's up to us to figure out a way to quiet the voices, then we're dead. Nothing we can do will silence them.

The Christian story has a fresh invitation for us: it's not all about you. Jesus is Lord, not you. And that's good news because that means that it's not all on you to try to silence the voices of guilt and shame.

To live under the gracious umbrella of the Lordship of Christ is to be freed from the onerous and impossible task of trying to take make up for your past. If Jesus is Lord, then you no longer have the last word on you; Jesus does. If Jesus is Lord then he is Lord over all of you: present, past, and future.

If Jesus is Lord then your life is not your own and your future is not yours to worry about and your past is not yours, not even yours to regret. Let me say that again: if all of you is given over to Jesus, then your past is not yours any more, not even yours to regret. It is in Jesus to redeem, to heal, to mend, to fix, to make whole, to wash away. It is not up to you to fix it.

The solution to all our guilt and shame is not more work, but rather a cessation of work. Freedom is found in submission. Submission to the Lordship of Christ. That's the good news of the Christian story. That's the invitation that all of us are called to respond to.

Super-Sized Me v. Easter: Shame Part 3

Enter Easter. What happens when super-sized me meets Jesus on the cross and the empty tomb?

First, and perhaps counter-intuitively, Easter confirms all our own worst fears about ourselves. Much of the anxiety we feel about ourselves is actually true. We are creatures that do not live as we were designed to live.

God is not interested in comforting sick people by trying to tell them that they are not sick. He is interested in healing sick people, which means that we have to get to the first step: admit the problem.

Easter is God dying a nasty execution-style death for you and for me. Easter rails against the soft-pitch humanism that is so rampant in our culture that would have us to only celebrate the potential of our humanity (which is true) while working overtime to ignore all that is disordered, broken and evil that is at work in us.

Easter declares that we are guilty. Easter does not excuse the brokenness and rebellion and selfishness and arrogance in us. Easter forgives it. There is a tremendous difference between excusing and forgiving.

Easter also confirms our desires for a new name. The super-sized self that we create is a feeble attempt at making ourselves live up to our potential. It fails, because simply imagining a super-sized self does not give us the power to live up to it.

Instead, the Scriptures say that God himself has come to give us our new names and also to re-wire us to actually be able to live into that new name: specifically a new heart and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Easter is God's buying back the right to name and re-name us and then gifting us the power to live into our true new name given to us in love by a good Father.

We long to be more than we actually are. Shame reminds us of that. Of course, some of our shame is false shame, just like there's false guilt. And false guilt and shame are made all the worse when they're put in the context of religion--Christianity worst of all.

Because the point of Christianity is that God meets us in the midst of that mixed bag of true and false shame and he replaces our super-sized self that would rule as a tyrant over us and instead gives us a true new name, a new identity to live into that doesn't kill us but instead affirms us to the core of who we truly are.

When we're living into that new name that God gives us in Christ rather than the self-invented super-sized self, shame is eliminated. Forgiveness and grace are the operating system instead of fear or anxiety or guilt. We don't owe anyone anything any more, all our debts are paid. Freedom and joy and life are ours.

Super-Size Me: Shame Part 2

So one question that has always rolled around in my head has been this: how is that people can in be overflowing with confidence bordering on arrogance in one moment and then within just a few seconds swing in the complete opposite direction towards self-hatred and self-despair?

It would seem that the two are related, but I didn't really get the depths of the connection. And then this summer, I read a tremendous book that pulled the two extremes of arrogance and self-hatred together.

The book is called Sin, Pride and Self-Acceptance. I posted on it multiple times over the summer as the book pulled the curtain back on these issues for me. If you're interested, click here and scroll down to the June 20th post and then scroll back up from there.

The author draws on the work of Karen Horney, an early 20th century psychologist. Horney suggests that early on in our lives we experience anxiety on two primary levels: inter-personally and intra-personally, that is, within our own selves about ourselves.

To deal with the intrapersonal anxiety, Horney contends that the way that we cope is by creating in our imaginations our "idealized selves."

The idealized self is an image of ourselves where we take all of our own understandings of our own best qualities and blow those up exponentially. It's us, super-sized and super-human, performing perfectly. Here's how Horney explains this:

"A person builds up an idealized image of himself because he cannot tolerate himself as he actually is.

The image counteracts this calamity; but having placed himself on a pedestal, he can tolerate his real self still less and starts to rage against it, to despise himself and chafe under the yoke of his own unattainable demands upon himself.

He wavers then between self-adoration and self-contempt, between his idealized imgae and his despised image, with no solid middle ground to fall on."

So returning to my battle with shame over the bounced check. If shame is fundamentally working out the equation "I owe me," where is that "me" coming from? Who's telling me that I am "the type of person who doesn't bounce checks?" Where does that idealized image of myself come from?

We've created our own monsters, a super-sized image of ourselves that is impossible to actually live up to and that continuously looms large over us. When we actually "hit the mark" of that supersized person from time to time, it results in pride. When we miss that mark (which is most of the time) the result is shame: I owe me.

Anger, Guilt, and Shame in the Ledger, Part 1

Back in February I posted some thoughts on anger riffing off of a podcast from Andy Stanley. Stanley proposes that at the root of our anger is an open account: "you owe me."

Your friend owed it to you to not stab you in the back. They did, so you get angry.

Working off of this, guilt is also about an open account: "I owe you." I've done something to wrong you and now I'm in debt to you, I need to make it up to you somehow.

The problem is that usually the debt can never be paid back. Your friend said what they said, it can't be taken back. You can't take back what you said or how you harmed the other person.

So what we need to do is close the ledger, forgive the accounts. We need to extend forgiveness where we're angry. Otherwise that anger will destroy all our relationships. We need to accept God's forgiveness where we feel guilty (even if the person involved isn't willing to extend forgiveness to us), because guilt is a ball and chain, hampering our ability to take risks and love in relationships.

I've been thinking about this the past couple of days in relation to shame. I'm wondering if we might be able to uproot shame if we can understand some of how it is woven into our lives.

Leaving anger behind for a moment and framing guilt and shame a slightly different way, guilt is feeling bad about something that we've done, shame is feeling bad about who we are.

And so I wonder if we might use Stanley's ledger analogy and frame-up shame in this way: shame equals "I owe me."

If I bounce a check, I feel guilty as a husband for costing our family the bounced check fee. But at a deeper level, I feel ashamed because I have not lived up to my own sense of being the kind of guy that doesn't bounce checks.

I have a self-image as a responsible, reasonably intelligent human being who can balance a check book. And my sense of shame is the result of my inability to live up to the internal voices and standards that I have created or set for myself.

Shame, then, is a self-inflicted disease.