Discover Your True Self - You are Competent, Part 1

Shame is a powerful feeling of regret, self-hatred, and dishonour. A painful feeling or experience of believing that we're flawed and therefore unworthy of love or belonging. Some people ignore it.

Some people are crippled by its weight. What does Jesus answer to shame? That's today. You don't want to miss it. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge is an international discipleship ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Durwey, and in this program, Chip continues his series, Discover Your True Self. Just before we get started, let me encourage you to try using Chip's message notes while you listen. Chip's notes contain his outline, his scripture references, and much more.

For a quick download, just go to livingontheedge.org and click the broadcasts tab or fill in notes on the app. Now with this message, you are competent. From Ephesians chapter one, here's Chip. The first most important thing is how you see God. The second most important thing about you as a person is what comes into your mind when you think about yourself. Sort of that collage, that mirror of how you see yourself.

There's all kind of fears that shape us, but there's not just fears that warp our view of ourself. There's certain feelings. And at the top of the list of the feelings that probably does more damage to how you see yourself and impacts every relationship and nearly all your behavior is a feeling called shame. If you pull out your notes, I want you to get an actual definition. Shame is a painful feeling of regret, self-hate, and dishonor.

Brene Brown describes it as a painful feeling or experience of believing that you are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. It's interesting. You can teach something and then have interaction.

And the interaction after the last service really shaped how this one came together. What people shared with me. I had a number of really great illustrations that I shared, but they weren't even close to the number of people sitting in this room and last night who lived with the shame that there's an abortion in your past and you've never shared it with anyone or you're a man who pushed someone to have an abortion. And when that bubbles up to the surface, there's a part of you that feels unlovable and like you're being punished. There's a number of people in this room that have an unbiblical divorce that they just got fed up and you broke away or someone left you or you have a divorce in your past and literally people don't know it was like 20-some years ago because somehow you think that marks you as a second-class Christian, that it's the unpardonable sin. For others, drug addiction, sexual promiscuity, and then you've had this major change and now you're walking with God and yet there's just parts of your past that when those things come up, certain songs you hear on the radio, man, the last thing in the world you want is a friend or any of your kids to know sort of what you quote used to be like. It's shame.

And that's shame. That does something to you. You are who you are. Some of your struggles, the drivenness, the desire for everything to look good and for your kids to be so much different than you and, man, it just shapes us. And for others in this room, it wasn't personal things that you did. It's some things that people did to you.

It's interesting to meet people that look really great and find yourself in a living room or at a coffee shop and as my wife has done every year with different groups of women and I mean they all look great and like within, she never tells me names and she's super with confidentiality. She said, Chip, you cannot believe the pain in our church. One woman broke down in tears as her father committed suicide and it's marked her life.

I have three women out of the 22 that were sexually abused as children. One woman said she's never told anyone she currently has a son in prison but she feels ashamed and therefore, what I want you to know is shame is debilitating. Shame marks your life. Shame is what keeps you from believing that you're worthy and it's like BB's off of a tank when I talk about God as your father and you're adopted and you're valuable and you're redeemed and he paid for you and he loves you and all that is just like BB's off of the tank where you feel like I've got to earn it and I've got to perform or some of you are living in shame right now with private lives and duplicity and addictions because you medicate and you feel inferior and you're desperately afraid like all the rest of us.

If someone really knew who the real you was, they'd reject you. We're going to go to a very sensitive place. Notice in your notes shame usually results in guilt and self-depreciation.

Here's the good news but it can also lead us to search for God and his answers. I know what I just shared. I just wish sometimes I'd have a video camera and you can see you the way I see you. After what I just shared, if you could see the faces and the body language, you know what?

You would actually feel really good because you would go, wow, I'm not the only one and I was trying not to show it. Everyone in this room has been deeply marked by shame, some far more than others. In fact, the unhealthy things that happen when that impacts our life is we have feelings of inferiority often that people never see, self-destructive behaviors.

Within the last 12 hours, I've heard of two specific suicides of people whose life was going well. They lost their job and they just couldn't face the future. Self-pity, passivity. Some of you haven't taken a risk in so long you can't remember. Some of you when we talk about getting in a group or using your gifts, no way because you're convinced that you're not competent, that you'll fail and that people will think less of you just like your parents did or that teacher did or your peers did. Withdrawing and hiding is a very common response.

For some of us, we go the other direction. I'm a driven person. I've covered my shame and my inadequacy and my insecurity by being the ultra overachiever. I was the shame of the shortest kid in my class who couldn't make it and I've been living most of my life at least apart from Christ with, I'll show you. I'll show you what someone really short and really skinny can do if I work harder than everyone else. And that imprint, that imprint has taken years to transition and understand I don't need to prove anything to anyone.

I am loved and accepted by my Father. There are some even in this room that when you look in the mirror, it's painful because you don't like how you look. And if you're a young woman in our world, you have been so overwhelmed with you're not skinny enough, you're not beautiful enough, you're not smart enough, you're not anything enough. Girls have never been more successful, GPA, college enrollment, all the rest.

And they have never felt more like they don't measure up. Teen depression, teen suicide, boys and girls is off the charts in our day in climbing. And a lot of it is parents creating a world that you need to be a super girl or a super guy and have everything together. And if they don't excel at everything and no matter how much they excel, they're driven to the next level.

And all with the good intentions of parents who quote want them to be successful and when they don't measure up, they feel shame. Turn in your notes and let's get to the answer because shame is powerful and debilitating but grace is more powerful. So what's God's antidote to shame? From the first time that shame entered the planet, it happened in a garden. And it was true shame, not false shame.

It was the shame of knowing the right thing to do and wanting to be God, wanting to usurp God and believing that if you would do this thing that you would be just like God and God has dealt with shame in that first garden then the way he does now. First he asks a question to get you and me to be honest. Have you eaten? Have you done something wrong? Second question, face your shame.

Who told you that you were naked? And then finally he covers their shame and he forgives and even repairs and starts a journey of healing. The Bible's promise is that if any man or if any woman is in Christ, you are a new creation. The old things literally, the tense is passed away, they're gone. Behold, it's a process.

All things become new. God's antidote to shame is the gospel. His antidote to shame is that God the Son came and lived a perfect life, died in your place, rose from the dead and offers healing and restoration. But how does that work? That's easy to say.

How does that really work? And if it's true, why are there so many Christians whose lives don't seem to be that much different or that privately are still living with shame after years and years and years of being a follower of Christ? The apostle Paul's gonna show us exactly why that is and how it can be different. In the book of Ephesians, the context is he's reminded that Ephesian church in us of this dramatic new standing with God. That we have every spiritual blessing in Christ and then in one long sentence, verses 3 to 14, he said, Remember you're chosen, you're wanted. He said, you're adopted, you have a father. He said, you're redeemed, you're valuable. You're secure, you've been sealed with the Spirit. All these amazing things, he says, these things are true of us. And then he does something. Cause I don't know about you, some of these things I've known have been true of me for years and years and years and years and yet I still try to overachieve. I still have the same old things.

And I'm guessing you do too. So how do you get things from your head, truth that you agree with, to truth that's not just with you but in you? The apostle Paul models something for us. Look at verse 15.

For this reason, what reason? Since all these things are true of you, the apostle Paul writes, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, notice how many times he talks about the power of prayer. I haven't stopped giving thanks for you.

Focus on the change and what's happened in your life. Remembering you in my prayers, I keep asking, present tense continually, I keep on asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, here's his request, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation. The spirit of wisdom is insight. Insight and awareness, it's that aha moment that God would by his Spirit, as we pray for others and pray for ourselves, would take these truths about adoption and about redemption and, oh, this is how it actually applies to me and my history and my shame and my failures. And not only he would give me a spirit of wisdom but a spirit of revelation. In other words, the word just means that the truth would be unveiled, that you would see it like never before. And the goal is that you would know God better. Please put a box around the word no in your notes. There's two primary words in Greek for no.

This is one of them. It means an intimate personal experience. We know by way of personal experience, he's praying that all those truths will come from their head to their heart so they would know in their soul, in their emotions, that how they would view themselves would completely change because they would begin to actually believe and experience God's my Father. I'm actually wanted. You know, my dad didn't want me but God does.

I'm actually valuable. I was called a loser but God says I'm valuable and those things would go from here to here because we would see God for who he is. But that's only the first prayer. Notice the second prayer. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. You might write above that grammatically, it's actually that the eyes of your heart having been enlightened. It already occurred. The moment that you receive Christ, the eyes, not just of your intellect but of your heart, the understanding ability of what God has done in your life, it begins and it's a process. He's praying that the eyes of your heart having been enlightened, I, in order that you may know and then he's going to give us three things that you may know. Guess what you should do with the second word, no?

Put a box around it, that's right. This is the other word for no. This is a word for facts, completely objective. I'm glad, it's data, it's true. Two plus two is four.

E equals MC squared. This is just absolute facts. First, I'm praying for an experiential knowledge of what's true of you. Second, I'm going to pray that three specific facts are true of you that you could go, yes, that's true.

Number one, fact. The hope to which he has called you. And in your notes just drop my salvation. By the way, when the Bible talks about hope, it's not like we do in English. We hope our kids turn out right. We hope if we're single, we meet the right person. That's called wishful thinking. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean, we hope it doesn't rain when we're having a picnic. But the word hope in the Bible means an absolute certainty. In other words, the blessed hope is Christ is returning. There's a new heaven, a new earth, a new life. My hope is in him means it'll never change. And so as a fact, he wants you to understand and believe that this calling, this new relationship, it's certain. There's confidence. Your past has been put behind you. Second, fact is that the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. It's a fact. Now did you notice earlier we studied, we talked about our inheritance.

Put a circle around the word his. Who's it talking about? He wants you to know the fact that not only is your hope absolutely secure, but he wants you to know the riches, the glorious riches of God's inheritance in you. I have tried to explain this for many years.

There's a sense of awe that I can't get other people to grasp and I can't put into words until this morning. And I was thinking of this this morning as I was praying. And I thought, what's this really mean? And then I thought, Chip, you got to adopt two kids, yeah. You have your estate plan done, yeah. When you die, those two kids like your other two kids are going to get an inheritance. But how have they been your inheritance?

And I thought for whatever amount of money I'm going to leave them is so minuscule compared to my inheritance. I've had two young men become my sons. I've watched them grow up and change. They've brought joy to me that is inexpressible. I've watched them go through ups and downs and then marry well.

I've watched one write songs that people all around the world worship Jesus through and another one learn a skill that he heals people's bodies and tells them about Christ the way he does. And then between them they've given us five grandchildren. And what I realized is my inheritance, they are so wonderful. Are you ready for this? What if you believe that's how God saw you?

What if you believe that yes, you get an inheritance, but what if it's an absolute fact the Heavenly Father, the Creator of the world goes, you are my treasure. And yes, you have your ups and your downs and you failed and you've had struggles and my son is taking care of that. And there's coming a day not only today when you change and you grow and it brings me such joy and you talk to me and we get connected, but then there's going to be a final day where you and I forever and ever and there'll be no sin, there'll be no shame and you're my treasure. He says that's what I want you to believe as a fact. The third thing is the incomparable great power.

Who? For us who believe. And then he describes this power and he literally takes out his thesaurus because he just can't communicate clearly enough the extent of the power that's inside every genuine follower of Christ. He says that power is like the working of his mighty strength which he exerted in Christ. And then he gives us three specific, like if you want to think about power, I mean this is like awesome. Let me give you three examples of how great, how surpassing this actual power is inside every single believer the moment you receive Christ. He says it's the same kind of power that was exerted in Christ when one, he was raised from the dead. And not only that but seated at the Father's right hand in the heavenly realms.

Where is that? Far above rule, authority, power and dominion. That's in the Jewish mindset those were sort of these classes of angels and principalities. And every title that can be given.

In this world or in the world to come. Second, and God placed all things under his feet, that's authority. He's at the right hand of God, this is the authority.

And third, he appointed him, Jesus, to be head over everything of the church which is his body, us. The fullness of him who fills everything in every way. I mean he's reaching, reaching, reaching. Are you ready for this? This first word that I put in bold power, guess what word we get in English? Dynamite.

It's dunamis. He says this power that dwells in you when you feel like I can't break through the shame. You know I can't, I can never change and you know I can never learn to be patient enough. I'm not a good parent.

I'm never gonna, I can't break this addiction. He says this power is the power like dynamite that has capacity and potential. The second word is working and we get our word energy.

It's an operational power. It's not just capacity but it's a kind of power that makes things happen and brings about change. The third word is mighty. And the word mighty here is used to bodily strength or muscular force. And the last word is strength and it's power to overcome obstacles, resistance or control. It's literally the apostle Paul goes, do you have any idea not only who you really are but what God has actually given you?

Now here's the question, how do you access that? I mean if you're thinking much with me right now, if that is really true of every single person here whom the spirit of Christ lives in or anybody watching or listening someday somewhere, how do you access that to overcome shame? The fear of punishment, the fear of rejection, the fear of death.

That's where we're gonna go. He's gonna explain it very, very clearly and I'm gonna take this passage that we just taught and I wanna now help you see what does this truth look like in your life and mine everyday world. How do we overcome true and false shame? We're living in a day when shame is viewed as a psychological term and any shame that you have is not your fault. There is true shame. True shame is the kind of shame of your past failures, your moral lapses, your greed, your immorality in mind, our manipulation, our lies, the way that we use people, stuff that we have done or are doing, we should feel.

We should feel a sense of regret, a sense of I blew it, a sense of I don't measure up. But there's also the shame that's false shame, cultural standards, ones your parents or the culture put on you, ones even at the church. The church has made a lot of people feel shameful.

Religion in many ways regardless of the background has tried to control people through shame and get them to behave in certain ways by shaming them into it. Well, how do you break through that? Number one, you receive Christ.

We talked about it last week. As many as receive Christ, to them he gives the, what's our word? Power to become children of God, even those who believe in his name.

I'm just gonna pause just for a moment here. In a church like ours that talks a lot about discipleship, that talks a lot about spiritual growth, there is a danger that you can come here and you can sit and you can learn and you can think sort of I'm on this gradual journey and I'm kind of putting some of these things into practice but you even start to agree with what's true but you've never crossed the line. You have to be born again. There has to be a certain day at a certain time when you say it's not about me getting some self-improvement with a little Jesus help. I have sinned before a holy God. I'm in desperate need but Christ has paid the penalty for my sin. At this moment in time, I'm telling you that I don't measure up. I'm placing all my faith on Christ and I'm asking you to come into my life to save me and I want to follow you the rest of my days. If you've never crossed that line, can I encourage you today's the day.

Don't let it go by. There is no power and everything I'm talking about does not apply to anyone that's outside of Christ. Not because God doesn't want you. It's we kind of want God on our terms. Before we go any further today, I want to ask you exactly what I asked the people that were in the room when I taught this.

I'm not asking you if you're a nice person or whether you're trying to be moral and kind to others. What I want to ask you is have you ever placed your faith in Christ where you would say to God, Lord, I don't just believe in you in some generic sense or that you're a deity out there or there's some systems and forces at work or there's positive or negative energy but I believe that you are the creator of all the world and the universe and that you, God the Son, came and lived a perfect life on this planet and you lived upon the earth and you helped the poor and you spoke words of life and you healed people to reveal and declare what God the Father is really like and that you and the Father are one and Jesus what you did was to come and show me what God is like and then to give your life on the cross to pay for my sin but then you told me that I need to receive that as a free gift. If you have never done that, could I urge you the greatest anxiety in the world is what happens after you die and Jesus says I want to give you peace. My peace I give to you and the peace he wants to give you first and foremost is to say come to me just today right now call upon me ask for my help just say Lord Jesus I need you I have sinned I know I've done things wrong will you forgive all my sins right now and will you please come into my life I believe you died in my place I believe you rose from the dead and I'm receiving your gift of eternal life right now and then thank him in your heart of hearts Lord thank you so much and so Lord I pray I pray for the courage of my new brothers and sisters who've prayed and ask you for forgiveness and I thank you that you've granted it in Jesus name amen.

If you prayed with Chip, I hope you'll take a minute and call us at 888-333-6003. We'd love to hear your story and get a free resource in your hands that will help you understand the significance of your decision and then give you a couple of next steps on your journey. That same resource is available if you tap special offers on the app or go to the new believers tab on our website livingontheedge.org.

We just want to help you get started and say welcome to the family. Before we close today's program, I just have to share some things that are coming into us as people listen to the broadcast and do the daily discipleship on Ephesians chapters 1, 2, and 3. One writes, Dear Pastor Ingram, I want to thank you for your ministry and your discipleship study in Ephesians. I've learned so much from this study, like who God is and who I am in his eyes. I'm continually praying that God will move this knowledge from my head into the depths of my heart.

I'm becoming more aware of the lies that are so ingrained in my mind and the constant barrage of negative thoughts that plague my mind every day. I'm trying to be patient and remember that this is a process and a journey. I just wanted you to know how impactful this has been to me. I send you, your dear wife and the rest of your family and all the Living on the Edge team, God's blessing. Be well and safe and may your work continue for God's kingdom.

Sincerely, and it's from Madison, Ohio. I read that for those of you who maybe feel like you don't do much, but each month you make a gift. You may not think it's a whole lot, but each month you support Living on the Edge. As you do that, those stories stream in and you pray for us. God is working. Because of your faithfulness, we were able to create these daily discipleships.

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They go all around the world. Let's keep pressing ahead. Just do whatever God leads you to do. And let's be difference makers. Let's do it together. To send a gift or to become a monthly partner with Living on the Edge, just go to Living on the Edge dot org, tap donate on the app, or give us a call at triple eight three three three six zero zero three.

Together, we're making a difference. As we close, we want you to know about an easy way to listen to our extended teaching podcast. Hear Chip anytime on Amazon's Alexa Echo and Echo Dot. Just say Alexa open Living on the Edge and you'll hear that day's extended teaching anytime you want. Well, I hope you'll be with us again next time. For Chip and everyone here, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.