READ:
Philippians 3:12-21
ASK:
1. How would you define shame? How does shame feel like? Is shame primarily healthy or unhealthy?
2. How could shame connect us to and/or keep us from living in the hope of the gospel?
3. How is your life different when you live by grace and not unhealthy shame?
REFLECT:
Do you ever feel like there is something wrong with you? Something just not right and it doesn’t ever get better? Do you ever feel like you want to hide from others; that there are shameful, begrudging, lustful, or selfish thoughts that you don’t want the world to see? Do you ever feel, at your lowest points, that you are just not good enough or not worthy of love? That if you really showed someone your whole self you would be rejected? If you have ever felt any of these feelings, there is shame in you. David Atkinson defines shame as “a sense of unease with yourself at the very heart of your being.” Unhealthy shame is the feeling at the pit of your stomach that you are not the person you should be or that you are somehow not good enough, no matter what you do or do not do.
Lewis Smedes, in his book Shame and Grace, discusses that there are two types of shame: healthy and unhealthy shame. Healthy shame has to do with what we do or have done: ‘I hurt my friend and now I feel shame about it.’ This kind of shame can often lead us to growth and health as we respond to those feelings by trying to reconcile or repent. Unhealthy shame though has to do with who we ARE, not just what we do: ‘I hurt my friend and this just proves that I am a terrible person’. Unhealthy shame often distorts reality and keeps us from feeling forgiveness, growth, or grace, because everything goes back the reality that I didn’t just DO something wrong, but I AM wrong.
So often we respond to unhealthy shame by either constantly beating ourselves up or by spending our lives trying to prove ourselves. For ‘beaters’, when someone criticizes you, you are devastated and you beat yourself up. When you do something wrong or make a mistake, you beat yourself up. Even if you did something wrong years ago, you beat yourself up about it. For the ‘provers’, you feel good about yourself because of the way you look, the things you have, the friends who hang out with you, the image you portray, the schools you went to, how ‘hot’ or ‘cool’ you are, how much money you make, what you have made or done, etc…. You avoid unhealthy shame by doing well, yet as you know, you can never do well enough, so you always find yourself struggling to keep the image up.
So, to the ‘beaters’, the gospel says to us…Jesus was beaten up for you, why are you still acting like you aren’t good enough? Jesus was whipped; he was tortured and killed for your sins, why are you still trying to pay for them? God has made you, God accepts you, God has redeemed you in Jesus Christ…..you don’t have to hate yourself anymore! And for the ‘provers’ the gospel tells us: ‘you want to be a workaholic? You will never understand grace. You feel like you have to have fame, or position, or image, or reputation, or money to feel significant? You’ve missed the gospel and you are still trying to save yourself….you are trying to add something to salvation.
The gospel says to us that if we put our faith in Jesus Christ we are accepted, and as we begin to believe this and live in this assurance everything changes about how we see ourselves and others. Because we are saved by grace, we know that we are worse than we could know, but also that we are blessed more than we could ever imagine. And out of this we can be honest with ourselves. We can feel healthy shame and respond when we fail. We can know that we are not the sum of our failures but children of God, saved by GRACE, and accepted by Jesus Christ.
As worship leaders, musicians, and artists, as we seek to be ‘gospel centered’, it is essential for us to confront our unhealthy shame and the ways it causes us either to beat ourselves up or try to prove ourselves. This is an inward journey that sometimes will expose parts of our lives that we are not proud of as we dig to the roots of your shame. Yet if we don’t take this journey we are in danger of missing the gospel entirely and of preaching, through music, songs, expression, and words, a graceless gospel because we haven’t experienced grace.
The Grace of God in Jesus Christ is the only cure for unhealthy shame, the only way we can know God and be transformed by the love of God in Jesus Christ. As Lewis Smedes writes:
“Grace overcomes shame, not by uncovering an overlooked cache of excellence within ourselves but simply by accepting us, the whole of us, with no regard for beauty or ugliness, our virtue or our vices. We are accepted wholesale. Accepted with no possibility of being rejected. Accepted once and accepted forever. Accepted at the ultimate depth of our being. We are given what we have longed for in every nook and nuance of every relationship.
We are ready for grace when we are bone tired of our struggle to be worthy and acceptable. After we have tried to long to earn the approval of everyone important to us, we are ready for grace. When we are tired of trying to be the person somebody sometime convinced us we had to be, we are ready for grace. When we have given up all hope of ever being an acceptable human being, we may hear in our hearts the ultimate reassurance: we are accepted, accepted by grace.”
Are you ready for grace?
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Genesis 2:23-25, Psalm 34:1-5, Proverbs 3:35, 1 Corinthians 1:20-21, Ephesians 2:4-8
REFERENCES (for further reading)
1. Shame and Grace, Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes
“I Thirst”, a sermon by Timothy Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, March, 2008
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