Shame

This morning we are going to cover the subject of shame, what it is, where it comes from and what it does to us, and how to be healed of its effects. To introduce the subject we can now look at the fourth “big lie”, which I believe is the biggest and most powerful lie of our enemy. First though, I want to us to remind ourselves of the other three big lies, they are:

· I MUST MEET CERTAIN STANDARDS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.

This first lie is about performing to feel worthy.

· I MUST BE APPROVED BY CERTAIN OTHERS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.

This second lie is about getting approval from others to feel worthy.

· THOSE WHO FAIL ARE UNWORTHY OF LOVE AND DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED.

This third lie is about condemnation leading us to feel unworthy.

And now we come to the biggest lie of all:

· I AM WHAT I AM. I CANNOT CHANGE. I AM HOPELESS.

Has anybody here felt that way? Can any of us here describe a time when this lie was circling around in our minds? Maybe someone has felt it recently and can go through the circumstances surrounding feeling like we cannot change. (Discuss)

What is going on in us when the feelings surrounding an event cause us to have a sense of hopelessness or maybe powerlessness? As you might expect from our lesson subject, what we experience is something called shame. Shame is an emotion, and in my opinion it is the most powerful emotion that we ever experience. Let’s define it now, so that we can all start from the same reference point.

Shame Defined.

Webster’s dictionary defines shame like this:

Shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety.

In a book by psychoanalyst Michael Lewis (Shame: The Exposed Self) he defines shame this way:

Shame can be defined simply as the feeling we have when we evaluate our actions, feelings or behavior and conclude we have done wrong. It encompasses the whole of ourselves; it generates a wish to hide, to disappear or even to die.

There are so many definitions of shame that it is usually a totally confusing emotion to get a grip on, but we all know what it feels like. So let me attempt to lay it out clearly for us.

Shame is a strong, powerful, and painful secondary emotion. It comes after we experience a primary emotion resulting from the exposure, or fear of exposure, of something we have done, something others have done that reflects on us or something that happens around us that we experience as a lack of personal value. The three major primary emotions that can lead to shame are guilt, humiliation and worthlessness.

So we can all fully understand what I’ve just said, let’s go through the elements of shame:

· It is an emotion! This means that it is internally generated inside our soul as a response to circumstances. It belongs to us, nobody can give it to us, and we own it.
· It is strong and powerful. Shame has the ability to sink us, to change the direction of our lives or to stimulate us to choose to change.
· It is a secondary emotion. This means it is felt after we feel a primary emotion like guilt, humiliation or worthlessness.
· It is always preceded by exposure or fear of exposure of something. We could have a sinful action exposed, or an embarrassing situation arises, or we simply realize something negative about ourselves. Other people could be involved in the exposed actions or we could experience an internal exposure of something.
· It is all about who we are! The end point of shame is that we have a sense of being less than we thought we were, or being less than what someone else thought we were.
· Shame is most often accompanied with a desire to hide or run away somehow.
· Shame is usually held in the deepest and darkest part of our inner being, and is kept secret.

Before we move on, I want to be sure to answer everybody’s questions about this definition.

The Purpose of Shame

Were you aware that shame has a purpose? What do you think it might be? (Discuss) God created all things, including the difficult painful emotion of shame. He didn’t do that to control us through the punishing effects of shame, He did it out of His love for us. This is what God’s purpose for shame is:

· The purpose of shame is to reveal our need for God.

One of the best ways to show this is by looking at the account of the fall in Genesis. Let’s look first at Gen 2:25:

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. NASU

This was before the fall; Adam and Eve had never experienced shame, much like our very young children demonstrate that they have no shame in them.

Then came the fall and the result was this, as laid out in Gen 3:7-10:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, " Where are you?" He said, " I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself." NASU

In the context of shame, was what happening here? (Discuss) Adam and Eve realized that they had done something wrong, and experienced guilt. They saw their nakedness, that they were fully exposed in a physical sense, and felt the humiliation of it. They also realized that they had been less than the Lord might have expected, and felt that they had little value, which is worthlessness. The sum of these things brought them to shame, and fearing exposure to the Lord, they tried to cover themselves up and hid.

Instead of going to the Lord, they ran away. Isn’t that so like us today? Shame is a state of broken heartedness, and only the Lord can heal it. That is why shame is designed to reveal our need for the Lord. Without His assistance we cannot get rid of it. We might be able to find some relief from it in some ways such as addictive behaviors, but it will still be there until we take it to the Lord, and let Him remove it. This has been so true in my life, until I confessed my shame and all the baggage that went with it, I couldn’t receive His healing.

Shame in the Scriptures

Throughout the old and new testaments shame is viewed as a just consequence of sin and a way to punish people. In fact we see, particularly in the Psalms, that the writers would pray that their enemies be brought to shame. Let’s look at a couple of examples, Ps 31:17 and Ps 109:29:

Let me not be put to shame, O Lord, for I call upon You; Let the wicked be put to shame, let them be silent in Sheol. NASU

Let my accusers be clothed with dishonor, and let them cover themselves with their own shame as with a robe. NASU

Evidently God wants us, through His word, to understand that shame is something to be avoided as it is painful to endure, and that the best way to avoid it is to live in obedience.

How Shame Works

This is how it works. Something occurs and we experience shame as a result of it. At that point the emotion is just sitting inside our soul and we have to resolve it, or deal with it in some way. My question for you here is, “what do we usually do with it”? We typically take one of two paths, God’s path or our own. I’m going to start by looking at what we normally do to deal with shame.

Let me introduce you to a new idea, the emotion closet. We all have an emotion closet; it is the place where we hang up all our emotions. In my bedroom closet at home I have my clothes hanging up in sub sections, shirts there, pants over there, shoes on the rack, and underwear and socks in the drawer. The stuff I really don’t like is relegated to the back where I can’t see it easily. It is organized, but it doesn’t have to be, it could just be all thrown in and be a complete mess. That is how your personal emotional closet is, you might have an anger section, a shame section, a pride section, your guilt is thrown on the floor and your humiliations you keep in a drawer. The shame section is kept way in the back, because we really don’t want to deal with it, so it gets stuffed in the deepest and darkest place we can find. You also have places you keep your joy, peace and happy emotional clothes, and the whole thing could be organized or might also be a big mess. And we all know people we might call “messed up” don’t we?

Except there is a big difference, you treat your physical clothes and emotional clothes differently! With your physical clothes you wear them, and when they get dirty you clean them, when they get worn you usually throw them out. With your emotional clothes after you’ve worn them you hang them back up in your emotional closet. Over the years you manage to accumulate a whole stack of emotional clothes. By the time a person is an adult they have got a fully stuffed closet.

Now the problems begin to happen, because we haven’t been keeping our emotional closet clean. Let’s use shame as an example. What are we supposed to do with shame? Take it to the Lord. When we don’t, we find our closet is full of emotional clothes, some are okay like joy and peace, but the positive emotions are typically overrun by the negative ones like shame. What we actually do is to take our shame out of our emotional closet and put in on again. After we’ve worn it a while we put in right back in the closet, and this leads to more problems.

Consider this, let us say we took out an article of new clothing from our clothes closet and wore it, and then we hung it up after we had finished with it, without cleaning it. Then a while later we took it out again, wore it and hung it back up. Then we did that a few times. What would the clothes be like? More importantly what would the closet be like? Yes, the clothes would be dirty and they would get stinky, if you don’t believe me try it! The closet would also get smelly, wouldn’t it? In fact the other clean clothes might even pick up the odor.

It is the same with shame. If we leave it in our emotional closet, we will continually take it out and wear it, and then put it back on its hanger. Eventually it begins to smell and it dominates our whole soul. This is what psychologists call a “shame based identity”; the smell of unresolved shame taints everything about our soul, our thoughts, feelings and actions. Any joy, peace, serenity or other positive feeling that comes into our life gets quickly infected and seems to disappear. Shame is a gigantic burden that many of us carry around, usually as a well-kept secret. It stops us from leading a victorious Christian life.

God’s Remedy For Shame

What does God say to do with shame? There is no actual verse that says something like “give me your shame” or “to dispose of your shame, drop it in the offering plate at church”. We do have a promise from Christ that addresses all burdensome emotions like shame, anger, worthlessness, hopelessness and guilt. We find it in Mt 11:28-30:

"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." NASU

This is a reaffirmation and clarification of the promise found in Jer 6:16:

Thus says the Lord, “Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls.” NASU

There is a large amount of spiritual meat in the promise that Christ made. So let us dissect it to fully comprehend how shame, and any other painful emotion, is to be dealt with.

First, Jesus says, “come to me”. He is speaking here about coming to him as one would a friend, as a part of an intimate relationship. If a person has accepted Christ, they have the necessary relationship, if they have chosen their own path, Christ can only wait until they chose to accept Him.

Next, we see the phrase “weary and heavy laden”. Jesus is talking here about the emotional burdens that we carry around in our emotional closet. These are the ones that keep us awake, or disturb our sleep, and cause us to worry; they wear us down and wear us out. Shame will do this.

Third is the emotional exchange. Jesus says, “I will give you rest”. He is offering to take our emotional burdens and replace them with the emotions of rest such as peace, support and comfort.

Then he moves to saying, “take my yoke”, which means, “do these things like me”. He says we are to learn from Him, which means we can learn to help ourselves in the handling of the burdensome emotions. What do we need to learn? Please don’t miss this, because here Jesus gives us the antidote to the poison of painful emotions. He says, “For I am gentle and humble in heart”, and that is what we are to learn. We are to learn to develop Christ like gentleness and humility.

Fifth comes the promise that if we do all these things, have a relationship with Christ, bring our painful emotions to Him for exchange and learn Christ like gentleness and humility then “we WILL find rest for our souls”.

Lastly, we see that all this is true because His “yoke of gentleness and humility” is easy and His “burden of our painful emotions” is light.

When Shame is Unresolved

The last point I want to cover today is about what happens when shame is allowed to continue to stink up our emotional closet. We develop something that psychologists call a “shame based identity”. Basically we start to act on shame-induced beliefs such as, we are not worthy, we have no value, we are hopeless and we are not loved. These are painful things to deal with, and so we will develop methods of relieving the problematical emotion of shame. We will typically self-medicate somehow by doing things like indulging in addictive behaviors, withdrawing from relationships, striving to perform and becoming perfectionistic.

This is where I return to the purpose of shame; it is to reveal the need we have for God. For it is only God who can heal us of shame, and He can only do that if we turn to Him.

Let us resolve to not be like Adam and Eve in our response to our own feelings of shame. Let us not run away, hide and cover up our shame. Let us not hang up our shame in our emotion closet and stink out our soul. Let us take it to God for healing. We can choose to retain a shame-based identity, or we can choose to accept the identity that God has for us. How we deal with our shame is a mark of how far we have come in our Christian maturity. Consider what the writer of Hebrews says to us in Heb 12:1-2:

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. NASU

This is a great place to end the lesson. Seeing what Jesus did with His shame, He took it to the cross and despised it. In the same way, we ought to follow our leader by taking our encumbering shame to the cross, and hand it over to the living God.