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The Joy of Salvation: Shame & Guilt

For a long time in my life I have not felt joy. Desperate to feel joyful, I asked my counsellor, “How can I have more joy in my life?” For the next twelve months, we went through a series of exercises that would help me to be joyful. And after a year do I feel joyful? Well, the therapeutic exercises were eye-opening and helpful. I am certainly less stressed and less depressed. But joyful, I am not quite there yet. This is not because my therapist failed me or counselling did not work. Truth is, joy cannot be found through human undertakings.

One day last week, I heard God whisper to my heart that I am not joyful for three reasons: shame, guilt, and fear. God reminded me that because I have held on tightly to the shame and guilt of my past wrongs I am unable to enjoy His manifold blessings in my life. I feel undeserving of every good thing in my life because at some point in my life I decided that “if only people knew me, the real me, and the things I have done, they would not think so highly of me.” I have no joy because I live in bondage to shame, guilt, and fear.

Fortunately, God did not just drop this bombshell on me and leave me to wrestle with it alone. As God always does, He has also filled me with His encouragement on how to overcome guilt and shame so I can live a life full of joy. For the past few days, every scripture I have read has been a weapon to counteract the voices that scream “guilty,” “undeserving,” and “unworthy.” I will share one with you. Let this scripture wash over you:

Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases… The LORD is compassionate and merciful, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. He will not constantly accuse us, nor remain angry forever. He does not punish us for all our sins; he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve. For his unfailing love toward those who fear him is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth. He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west. The LORD is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust. Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows, and we are gone—as though we had never been here. But the love of the LORD remains forever with those who fear him. His salvation extends to the children’s children of those who are faithful to his covenant, of those who obey his commandments!

Psalm 103: 3, 8-18 NLT

God’s voice of truth reminds me that I am forgiven by a loving father who understands that I am only human. God does not accuse me, and neither is He angry or disappointed. My sins and missteps and associated guilt are removed as far as the east is from the west. In place of guilt and shame, God offers His love and salvation.

When we accept His free gift of salvation, God deposits His Spirit in us (2 Corinthians 1:22). The Holy Spirit fills us with His fruit which is joy, love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22 – 23). This gift of joy is also known as the joy of salvation: the Holy Spirit is the conduit and joy is the fruit. Let me contextualize this with another scripture. When David was convicted of his sin after he had slept with Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, and killed him to cover up the ensuring pregnancy, he prayed (Psalm 51: 10-12 NLT):

Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me.
Do not banish me from your presence, and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and make me willing to obey you.

The joy I speak of is not just the feeling of intense happiness; neither does it propose a state free of suffering and sorrow. It is that quiet confidence that I have knowing that regardless of whatever is going on around me I have found something of value: God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:26). This is the joy of salvation. Jesus described this joy with many parables, one of my favourites being the parable of the treasure: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field…” Matthew 13: 44 NIV

Recognizing that in our salvation we have gained everything and then some (eternal life in glory) ought to fill us with great joy. But shame and guilt rob us of the privilege of experiencing this. Instead of appreciating the gift of salvation and all it brings, we shy away, and like our first parents Adam and Eve, we hide from God. Even though I know cerebrally that God loves me something fierce and unconditionally, shame tells me I am unworthy of this love that He so freely gives. What a sad way to live! However, this is not our reality at all. Our reality is more like this:

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right side to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire?” Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.” Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.”

Zechariah 3:1- 4 NIV

Jesus takes away our filthy rags and exchanges them for His righteousness. Shame and guilt do not stand a chance when we stand in God’s love. With his nail-pierced hands, He points to the accuser and rebukes him for your sake. “Forgiven” ,“Redeemed” and “Loved” that is who you are. Now scroll back up and read Psalm 103: 3, 8-18. This ought to fill you with joy, the joy of salvation.

So what am I going to do with truth? I am going to spend sometime chatting with God about every thing from my past that brings me shame and guilt. I am going to speak God’s forgiveness over all of those situations and give myself permission to be forgiven. I am going to visualize God removing those sins as far away from me as the east is from the west and hold on to that visualization. This is so I can recall this image the next time shame or guilt comes calling. I am going to meditate on Psalm 103 until it sinks in. Finally, I am going to revel in the fact that God is my portion forever come what may! What a blessed assurance!

I may have to do every time guilt and shame rear their ugly heads. But soon it will get easier, and the process will be less onerous and less frequent as I lean in to the Holy Spirit and allow my heart to be overwhelmed by the joy of my salvation. I pray this for you too.

Yours truly.

p.s. I will deal with the topic of fear in another post. Stay tuned.

Posted on by intentional4christ

Finding wholeness in your story

Yesterday something interesting happened to me. I had started gathering together my thoughts for this post and all of a sudden I had writer’s block. So I decided to put the post aside and pick it up again after church and guess what we talked about in church? The power of sharing your story! I know without a shadow of doubt God is telling me something important and so here goes.

I have spent the last three weeks thinking about wholeness and how to find it after going through harsh life experiences (whether it was by your own doing or not!). I had been reflecting particularly about the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and how she was transformed from the woman who went to fetch water at midday so no one would see her, to one who run into the city screaming and drawing attention to herself. I concluded that sometime during her encounter with Jesus and when she left her pot and run she found wholeness.

For those of you who do not know the story, it is found in John 4:1-42. Jesus tells this woman about the things in her life that had brought her shame and instead of pushing those things into the deepest, farthest corner of her heart and mind, she brings it all into the light and allows God to replace her brokenness with wholeness. She had a sordid and maybe scandalous history with men and so she goes to the well when no one can see her or gossip about her and yet after her encounter with Jesus we see her running into the city screaming “come and see a man”. The very thing that had impugned her, we see her declaring with all boldness, “I have met a man”

There is something liberating about owning your story and being prepared to speak to the transformation that happens after we encounter Jesus. Personally, I believe that is how we manifest and live the wholeness that God perfects on our inside on the outside. Something powerful happens when we own and tell our story: the shame and condemnation that secretly creeps up on us when we dare look in that deep dark place in our minds where we hide our past sins and failures lose their power. Those areas get illuminated by God’s light as we bring them to light through our stories.

But if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

1 John 1:7 NIV

When we encounter Jesus in our situations, and allow Him to, He makes us whole. But feeling whole is a different story! Here is where embracing the concept of growth becomes important. To feel whole, we need to give ourselves permission to grow from our experiences. The Samaritan woman would have never had the confidence to speak about any man (let alone a Jew) in public if she did not embrace this concept of growth. There is a quote that I have come to adore that spells this out clearly:

Just because you did something wrong in the past does not mean you cannot advocate against it now. It does not make you a hypocrite, you grew. Don’t let yourself or others use your past to invalidate your current mindset. Growth is a concept. Embrace it.

UNKNOWN and I have modified.

Growth means being able to appreciate how far you have come and that means being honest with yourself about where you’ve been. Many Christians “conveniently forget” or to be blunt pretend they have never done anything wrong even to themselves all in the name of “old things have passed away”. And while I am not advocating for constantly dredging up the past, I believe it is important to acknowledge it and be willing to confront every aspect of you, the good, bad and ugly so none of it has a lasting hold on you.

For some, telling our stories means being consistent in telling people about God’s goodness in our lives. And for others it means James 5:16. But for most of us, it means acknowledging that thing that we are so ashamed of in our lives and then refocusing on what matters most. The samaritan woman did this: she acknowledged that she was living a scandalous life but did not stop there… she took the conversation further to explore how this dark thing in her life had affected other areas of her life… primarily her ability to worship God freely; and that is how she became whole.

Wholeness is within our grasp and one way it can be found is in having the boldness to share your story of how God transformed you and how he has brought you into His light.

Yours Truly

Posted on by intentional4christ · 1 Comment

The big “V”

Vulnerability, the big V is something that you seldom see in churches. As far as I know…church leaders have never sinned in their lives! They never get discouraged…! They never feel like God has let them down…! Oh, and they do not get sick…! I grew up with this mentality of being a Christian and especially as one who was involved in church leadership. I always had to have it together and be well-composed especially for those who look up to me.

I recently listened to a TED talk by Brene Brown on the power of vulnerability and I will summarize what I learned and how I apply it to my walk with God.  From Brene’s research which spanned over a decade she discovered that:

We are hardwired  as humans for connection however, there is one thing that unravels connection in society and this is shame. Shame is simply a fear of disconnection. “Is there something about me that if people knew then i won’t be worthy of connection?” [This reminds me of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they sinned; they hid from the presence of God because they were filled with fear and shame].

Shame is universal and is underpinned by vulnerability. Vulnerability is not comfortable or excruciating but it is necessary, and yet people struggle with it so much. According to Brene, we deal with vulnerability by numbing the grief, the shame, the fear, the disappointment, but unfortunately, we are not wired to selectively numb some emotions and leave out others. When we numb all the bad stuff we also numb joy, happiness, peace. We make the uncertain certain- so religion which used to be “I believe in faith and mystery” becomes “I am right, you are wrong. shut up!” We pretend that everything is ok and that the things we do does not have an impact on others.

Through her research, Brene discovered another set of people: A group of people who live life wholeheartedly and have a strong sense of belonging. What she found that those people had in common were that they had courage (to be imperfect), compassion ( to be kind to themselves first, and then to others), connection (the willingness to let go of who they thought they should be, in order to be who they were) and finally vulnerability.

Brene discovered that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and unworthiness but it also is the birthplace of joy, creativity, of belonging,  and of love. After listening to this talk I wanted to see what the bible says about vulnerability and I was led to many scriptures but I will highlight a few:

  • 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
  • Romans 7:23-24
  • 2 Corinthians 13:4
  • James 5:16
  • 1 Corinthians 2:3-4
  • 2 Corinthians 11: 27-30
  • 2 Corinthians 4: 7

If you read those scriptures you will see a common trend. Vulnerability is about declaring our weakness before others and before God. This allows God’s grace to flow. When we are weak, we leave room for grace to pour in. I will take Brene’s conceptualization a little further to say vulnerability is the birthplace of grace. It is the portal that allows us to receive more of God’s grace in our lives.  I am reminded of a parable of Jesus:

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. Luke 18:9-14 NIV

The pharisee would not allow himself to be vulnerable even in the place of prayer to take a hard long look at his life. And when you contrast the Pharisee with the tax collector, the tax collector encountered grace and was justified (for we are justified by grace through faith.. Romans 3:23-25). I believe Brene was on to something here: those things that bring us shame, fear of disconnection, and unworthiness in other words those things that make us vulnerable are the things that we need to be the most real about with ourselves (because you cannot lie to yourself), to God (because He knows all things) and to others (because vulnerability in the place of confession with prayer, brings healing)

I come broken to be mended
I come wounded to be healed
I come desperate to be rescued
I come empty to be filled
I come guilty to be pardoned
By the blood of Christ the Lamb
And I’m welcomed with open arms
Praise God, just as I am

Yours Truly.

P.S. you can listen to the Brene’s TEDtalk by clicking here