Sunday, November 16, 2008

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.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

The Blame Game

Today we come to the third “big lie” from our book, but before we look at it I want to open the floor for any lingering questions over the first two subjects of “Performance” and “Approval”. Let’s start by remembering the first two “big lies”.

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

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

Let’s begin the actual lesson with a real life situation. This week a mannequin dressed as Sarah Palin with a noose around its neck was hung by a Mr. Morisette from the roof of his West Hollywood home. What should be done about this? (Collect thoughts)

Let’s remember what we came up with as we move to today’s big lie:

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

There are no “wrong” answers to my opening question; in fact you may have more than one thought on this. The question is, what does this “big lie” mean to you? (Open) Here are some of my answers:

· That guy really messed up; he’s probably going to lose his job.
· She deserves to get what coming after treating my friend like that.
· I hope he catches something for sleeping around so much.
· Miserable drug addict, she has always been a loser.
· It’s not my fault; they should of………….
· If only they had not done that, I would think more highly of them.

Having considered our collective answers does your answer to how to how to deal with Mr. Morisette change?

What is going on here? Why do we indulge in finger pointing, blaming others and self-condemnation? Why are we so willing to punish other people, seek revenge or beat ourselves up? Why do we in our daily walk believe this new “big lie”?

The answer to this can be traced back through our motivations to how we were originally designed, which is where I’ll start looking at the why question. Let’s consider Adam and Eve, do you think they knew right from wrong? They did, although some may say they didn’t because they originally did not have knowledge of good and evil. Let’s not get this mixed up, wrong is not the same as evil. When Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit they knew that it was wrong, but it was a colossal mistake not an evil action. The ability to recognize a transgression of the boundaries for living a godly life were therefore in the soul of each of them, they were designed in, and they are to be found in all of us. Don’t believe it? Let’s look at the book that contains a lot of theology, turn to Rom 2:14-16:

For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus. NASU

Paul here is speaking about the people we used to be, unsaved Gentiles or non-Jews. He is stating quite clearly that they have the work of the law, and therefore the actual law, written on their hearts. It is important to remember that Paul’s perspective on the heart was that it was synonymous with the mind or will, that inside our soul all three were connected and worked in unison. This means to us that all people have God’s law, the Jews have it written on their hearts and in their Torah, non-Jews have it written on their hearts only. Christian non-Jews, since they believe, have the law both in their hearts and in the Bible. No matter whom we are talking about, we will all be judged according to this thing we call the law.

Since we all have the law on our hearts, we also have the capacity to know right, matching the standard of the law, from wrong, failing to meet the standard, and the knowledge that there is a consequence of failure! This is where we add in a little corruption of the mind, which is usually called a fallen nature and we can start to see how all the blaming, revenge and self-condemnation can be understood.

Starting with the fact that we all have the knowledge of right and wrong inside our soul, after the fall we added a deceived and misguided view of everything, the source of which is our self-centeredness. Let’s see this from scripture, look up Jer 17:9 and Pr 21:12:

The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it? NASU

Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts. NASU

Now I have a gem of a question for you. What happens when someone knows the rules but is self-centered with the ability to pass and execute judgments? They become the prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner all at once; they disallow a defendant any right to present their case or a defending attorney to help them. They become the moral police, dispensing instant justice. That is us; and it all comes from our self-serving hearts.

Now you know where the blame game originates. Let’s look at a few of the major self-centered reasons we want to blame others or ourselves. First I’m going to list them:

· To distance ourselves.
· To feel superior.
· Because we feel unworthy.
· Because we reject forgiveness.
· Because we feel threatened.
· We want to play Judge.
· We want to hang on to resentments.
· We fear punishment.
· We want to avoid dealing with feelings.

Now I’m going to say a few words about each of these, please feel free to jump in whenever you want to discuss one more thoroughly.

To distance ourselves – We often want to remove ourselves from the being close to a person who has failed or an event where failure occurred. That way we are not blamed or tarnished by them or it, at least in our own eyes. An example could be where parents allow their 18 year old to throw a party, but leave for the night. When the kids get drunk they say, “We were out, we didn’t have anything to do with them getting drunk”. One of our neighbors actually did this.

To feel superior – We often point the finger at others so that we can feel good at how much better we are than them. Have you ever said, “I would never do that”? What is unsaid here is the end of the sentence, which is, “because I’m superior in my behavior to them”. The actual real basis for actions of this type is our own low self esteem, we try to drag people down to below our level, and condemnation is one way we do it.

Because we feel unworthy – When we fail or make mistakes we can often feel unworthy of being loved or held in high esteem. We link our not “doing” well with our not “being” well. This is when that belief that you are a human doing instead of a human being kicks in. We talked about this in lesson 2 – The Performance Trap”. An example is when a high school boy really wants to be on the team, but he is not talented enough compared to those around him. What might he feel? He certainly could feel a sense of failure, and if his parents have really been pushing him to get on the team, he might feel that he is not worthy of their love. Does anybody have an “unworthy feeling” story?

Because we reject forgiveness – This is a big one. Some of us blame or condemn others so that we can avoid giving forgiveness to them. Not only do we carry around an unforgiving heart, but also we will often exaggerate the offense to make it worse and therefore less excusable and forgivable. This further justifies our lack of forgiveness, in our own heart and mind! In this we are wholly disobedient to God. Some of us even beat up on ourselves about failure, believing we have committed unforgivable sins, thereby actually committing the sin of unbelief, unbelief that God will forgive all our sins. This is a good time to remember what God says about this subject of forgiveness; turn to 1 Jn 1:9, and also to Eph 4:32:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. NASU

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. NASU

When someone has done something that affects you negatively, and you want to blame him or her, it is always wise to see if unforgiveness is lurking in your own heart first.

Because we feel threatened – When you are out with your spouse at a social event and they say something off-color, demeaning or embarrassing, in your opinion, you can feel threatened. It is not that your physical safety is at risk; it is your personal self-worth. You get worried about what people think of you because of what your spouse has said. Then you condemn them; sometimes you might even tear them down right then and there. This is so that you feel better by separating yourself as much as possible from your spouse and what they said. That act, ladies and gentlemen, is an act of self-centeredness and is also an act of disobedience to the command we just read in Eph 4:32. That command is to be kind to one another. At the core of dealing with this problem is that we must make a discerning judgment about whether the offense was a mistake or a sin. Sins do have to be addressed, but mistakes can be dealt with in loving kindness, sometimes by being immediately excused and forgiven.

We want to play Judge – another big one! Some of us try to do the convicting work of the Holy Spirit under our own power. The problem is our clumsy attempts at being the moral police actually result in condemnation of others who we are attempting to correct. While it is normal to be intolerant of injustice or other sinful actions, we haven’t been given a license from God to be His “Godly Punishers” or His “Sin Seekers”; God reserves that role for Himself. Did anybody ever see the “church lady” on Saturday Night Live? I always enjoyed watching that character, she is a great example of what not to be like of course, but that character showed us what we look like to the world. Even the world recognizes what hypocrites we, in the church, can often be in our judgments and condemnation of others.

In John chapter 8 we see the story of the woman caught in adultery, let’s read the very end of it, verses 10 and 11:

Straightening up, Jesus said to her, "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more." NASU

In this story Jesus points out the truth, all have sinned and therefore all are condemned by the law. We are all under condemnation. It is the gracious and merciful act of God that saves us by Him choosing, as in this story, to say, “I don’t condemn you”. Notice that he ends by saying, “Go, and sin no more”. Shouldn’t we follow His example, don’t deny the sin of someone we are tempted to condemn, instead encourage them to change to a more godly way of life.

We want to hang on to resentments – When we indulge in blaming and condemnation of people who are close to us we usually develop things called resentments. These are hard feelings of anger towards other people that we hang on to as it gives us a sense of power and control over them. The problem is resentments don’t work that way. If the person we resent knows about a resentment, they either ignore it or move emotionally away, since we have become unsafe. If they don’t know, then the resentment is nothing to them. When we blame others for stuff and develop a resentment, we have laid an emotional cancer within us. Just like physical cancer, emotional cancer can slowly kill us if it is not dealt with. Scripture speaks to this in Job 5:2, let’s look at how both the NASU and NIV translate it:

For anger slays the foolish man, and jealousy kills the simple. NASU

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple. NIV

I think you might agree that hanging on to resentments generated by our desire to condemn others for our own selfish reasons is not smart.

We fear punishment – This is very straightforward. Often we blame others so that we won’t get punished. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Did anybody take the fear of punishment test on page 82 of the book? (Discuss)

We want to avoid feelings – Living a lifestyle of blaming and condemning others can allow us to not feel the pain or hurt caused by the actions of people or events. We focus on the object of our condemnation, which helps us to deny what we are feeling. The problem is that the feelings are there to tell us something. I can’t say what that might be, since all people and situations are unique. I can say that it is hard but smart to embrace the pain in a situation and do one’s best to learn what it is telling us. If the pain is deep or lasts a long time, get help from accountability partners or a formal counselor. Avoiding feelings never works, emotions must either get resolved or we will “stuff” them and they will come out later in ways and at times that we don’t expect. (Discuss)

The final thing I want to say today is this. Let us not appointment ourselves as the divine corrector and punisher in other people’s lives. There are three reasons to avoid this:

· We victimize people when we do this, attempting to exercise our own power and control over them.
· We have not been equipped or empowered by God to do this job for Him.
· It is a path of personal destruction for us. While we are attempting to straighten others out, we are actually hastening our own physical death and destroying our relational life.

That is it from me for today. Next week we will cover God’s answer to this big lie, propitiation.