The Curse And Cure Of Shame Part1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

Shame. This emotion can be a paralyzing curse, driving us to do things we would not otherwise do. Today, we're going to explore its origins and then turn to the Bible to discover God's answer to the curse of shame. To learn more, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, is shame something that can impel otherwise good people to do bad things?

Well Dave, the answer to your question is absolutely. There is such a thing as false shame, shame that we hang onto even when we have been forgiven. But also there's some people who feel ashamed and they should be ashamed because of what they've done and because they've not dealt with what they've done. That's why it's so important that when we begin to analyze the human heart, we always need to go back to the Bible, which gives us the guidance and the direction that we need for individual lives and for society. You know, we here at Running to Win are dependent upon the faithful prayers and support of so many of our partners. And I want to take a moment to thank you in advance for standing with us. We're very encouraged when we hear that people are praying for us, interceding on our behalf.

We are so appreciative. And if you're interested in supporting Running to Win in an ongoing way, here's what you can do. Go to endurancepartners.org. Now this is where you can get information on how to become an endurance partner. Let me give that to you again, endurancepartners.org, or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. And now as always, we open our Bibles, we think of what God has revealed, we analyze what's going on and give the scriptural cure.

Stay tuned. You know, even if you can't define the word shame, all of us have felt it because all of us have done things of which we are ashamed. Shame is that feeling that we have radically disappointed ourselves, radically disappointed our friends, and radically disappointed God. As a matter of fact, shame is a very painful emotion, as we're going to discover.

It is so painful that people will do anything to avoid it. But shame was not a part of the original creation. If you have your Bibles, turn to Genesis chapter 2, where we shall be looking at chapter 2 and also briefly to chapter 3, where it said that after God created Adam and Eve, verse 25 of chapter 2, the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.

No shame. I want you to imagine what that would be like. Imagine being psychologically available and transparent, psychologically vulnerable and have nothing in your life of which you are ashamed. Not a single thought that you know will elicit disappointment if someone else knows about it. Men think for a moment of having a mind that is so pure that your mother and your sister and your wife can know every single thought you think and approve of it and there's no possibility of disapproval. You women think of what it would be like to have aspirations that are so holy, so consistent that your friends and your husband and everyone, the whole wide world can know what it is that you are thinking, know what it is that you are aspiring to, and yet there is nothing of which you need to be ashamed. No possibility of resentments, of bitterness, of grudges that are nursed, of lusts.

Wow, what a life that must be. Adam and Eve naively, gloriously free and transparent. They knew no shame. But sin changed all that, of course. We find out that after they sinned, it says that the eyes of them were both opened. This is verse 7 of chapter 3, and they sewed fig leaves together and made covering for themselves. They were hiding their shame. You know, when sin entered into the world, what happened is the serpent said that you will be like God, and there's a part of us that is God-like.

There was some truth in what he said, though he really misled them and much of what he said was totally false, of course. But now what's going to happen is as a result of the fall, I will be my little God over my little sphere of influence, my universe. You will be your God over your fiefdom, your little sphere of influence, and we as gods now are always going to be colliding. Narcissism was born here. You know that Narcissus, it is said in Greek, legend was the man who was good-looking. He was so handsome, and the girls were falling in love with him, but he paid no attention to them because he was in love with himself. He saw his reflection in a pool of water, and he so fell in love with it that the gods condemned him to self-love forever, and he died looking at himself, totally self-absorbed. That's narcissism, and it exists in all of us. But those who particularly have a narcissistic personality, they are going to interpret now all reality in relation to themselves. Let me give you a little dialogue with a narcissist. You say, you know, Mrs. Jones down the street, she's the one that baked that cake.

It was so good. Well, don't you like the cakes I bake? What's wrong with the ones that I bake? Why is it that you're talking about hers and you never talk about mine? You may say, I need to work late tonight. Oh, I know you never want to be with me, do you?

You're always finding an excuse to be out of the home. Or you may say, you know, so-and-so had a great tragedy, and we should really show them kindness. I'm just so grieved by what they're going through.

Well, nobody ever cares about me when I'm going through a difficult time. I could go on and on, couldn't I? Another example. Somebody does something evil and you express the fact that, you know, you're really sorry that this happened. Well, you know, that's something that I wouldn't do.

I do many things, but I would never do that. All of reality poured through the self. Now let's understand this. I'm king of my little world, you're king of your little world, okay?

And our worlds are constantly colliding. And now left to my natural desires, if you show me up and are better at something that I am, I will resent you. If I see that you are a threat to who I am, I will destroy you.

I will blame you. I will tell lies about you. If you have something that I want and I can 't seem to have it, I will think of a way to steal it from you. At all costs, I am going to protect my little kingdom and you're going to protect your little kingdom. And the problem is our kingdoms are always intersecting.

They're always bumping into one another. And wars and disputes and lies all to protect my territory. Well, what happened as a result of this sin that Adam and Eve committed? Let's look at the text now and realize that now that they were king of their own little mountain, number one, they hid.

I read it a moment ago. They sowed fig leaves and they hid amongst the trees of the garden. The very trees that were to provide a window into God's character, a window through which they could see the God of nature becomes now a wall that is going to protect them from themselves and from God. Now all hiding is not wrong. It was good that they sowed fig leaves to hide themselves. As a matter of fact, later on in this chapter, we find that God himself made garments for them, verse 21, garments of skin to clothe themselves, prefiguring salvation actually. God did that because there's no going back to paradise.

Total exposure now becomes impossible. One day on a plane, I read a book review of someone who wrote a book about the fact that he is the most honest man in the world and he's into total, complete honesty. So if he meets you, he's just plain honest. He might say to you, you know, I've never met you before, but I just want you to know that your breath is a little off.

Or he'll meet you and say, you know, I just don't think that the combination that you are wearing today really suits you very well and you should have chosen something else because he's going to be really honest. He also joined a nudist colony because the whole idea is that if he can be physically exposed, he can be psychologically disposed, exposed I should say, because he's going to be totally transparent. The Bible would say that that is very wrongheaded.

You know why? There is no way to go back to paradise. You can't go back to the Garden of Eden. It is good that there are some things that are not exposed. Quite frankly, I'm glad that you don't know all the thoughts that I have and I'm very glad that I don't know all the thoughts that you have. And love covers a multitude of sins. And so not everything should be exposed, but there is much that people hide that should be exposed.

The Bible says he who covers his sin will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them finds mercy. And we'll be touching on that a little later on in another message. Secondly, not only did they hide, but secondly, now they are preoccupied with appearance. From now on, the kind of fig leaves that you are wearing is going to be very, very important because you want to both hide yourselves from others and you want to expose a part of yourself to others. And people are going to be obsessed with the way in which they appear in the sight of others. And you're going to have young women who are very thin, starving themselves to death because of shame. They fear that they are fat when in point of fact they aren't. And they are going to be obsessed with the way in which they look, particularly in cultures that seem to have little else to do than to be preoccupied with the worship of the body. So now it's going to be important, your appearance, the curves that you have, the muscles that you have or don't have, the way you come across, the cosmetic industry.

Everything is now going to be on top alert now that people are going to be preoccupied by the way in which they live in the presence of others. Thirdly, the blame game begins. We already have noticed this in other contexts that when God says, Adam, vol bist du? And that just happened to slip out, by the way, because I think that God did speak German in the Garden of Eden. But God says, Adam, where are you? And you'll notice he says, I was afraid and I was naked and I hid.

And who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree? Where have I commanded you that you should not eat?

And he said, the woman whom you put here, whom you gave me, she took of the tree and then I ate. Eve also admits to eating, but she blames it on the serpent. From now on, what you're going to have is a defense mechanism set up within the human psyche that is going to say, I'm not responsible. You are responsible. And there are some people, as we shall learn this morning, who are psychologically incapable of taking responsibility for their mistakes, their misdemeanors, and their sins. And they will, through ingenious ways, if necessary, destroy all the people around them to protect themselves from all possibility of exposure. That's going to happen.

Albert Camus said in his book, The Full, each of us insists on being innocent at all costs, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself. Marital difficulties are going to escalate. Notice that the man blames the woman and Eve is not amused. Can you imagine?

The Bible doesn't tell us everything, but I can't believe that there was no argument that night. What do you mean? What do you mean? You're saying that I'm the one that gave it to you. You were standing right there for heaven's sake.

Well, yeah, but you're the one who did it, you know. And on and on it goes and pretty soon they have to sign up with Pastor Milko for a marriage counseling class. And then, in addition to that, they have two kids and one of them murders the other and that's why next week's sermon is entitled The Roots of Rage. And we're going to begin with Cain and try to understand why this anger, why this violence, why are there some men who batter their wives, why anger that is so out of control?

And we're going to, with God's help, go to the very root of the matter of what causes that. Well, there's no returning to paradise. Now, I want you to know that today there are many books being written on the topic of shame and many of them are written from a humanistic viewpoint. Here is the way in which the secularists view shame. They say shame is a result of culture, so you have shame cultures and there are shame cultures. But it's a feeling that you simply must unlearn. And the way in which you take care of shame is not because you have objective shame in the sight of God.

No. They would say that all shame is subjective. That is to say it is imposed upon us by society and the way that we get rid of it is to simply reconstruct the reality around us and have a different view of reality so that we are exonerated and that is the answer to shame. You know, the Bible has a lot to say about shame. I've got more to say about shame that I'm going to be able to preach in this message. I discovered that there are more than 100 references to shame, 12 Hebrew words just for shame, a number of different Greek words for shame. Let me tell you, first of all, shame in the Bible is very objective. It is guilt in the sight of God. In fact, in the book of Jeremiah and elsewhere, God berates the people because he says you feel no shame. Years ago, a book was written entitled Whatever Happened to Sin. We could write another one entitled Whatever Happened to Shame. People today think that the way back to Eden is to expose all the things that they've done, all of the immorality, all of the impurity and to have this river of impurity simply flowing down through this country and somehow that is going to cleanse them and make them better.

It's a delusion of the worst kind. Let me say that shame is good. Shame is the beginning of grace.

It's because Adam and Eve knew that they were ashamed, that they sowed themselves fig leaves and God came along and said, I'm going to give you animal skins prefiguring the coming of a redeemer who will die as a sacrifice. So shame in itself scripturally often is presented as objective before God. But there's another kind of shame and I want to talk about it briefly. And that is the subjective shame, shame not because of things that you have done, but because of the home in which you were raised or experiences that you have had where you have been shamed. And so you're dealing with that subjective kind of shame that is not shamed before God, but you feel it just as intensely.

And if not uncovered and dealt with, it can ruin you just as certainly. Let me give you a few characteristics of a shame based home. First of all, it's one in which there is excessive control, beatings, anger, sometimes random beatings, and that creates the anger as we'll see next time. When a child is brought up in a home like this, he tends to grow up with a lot of internal shame, sexual abuse. I remember Dori Vanstone who was sexually abused in the orphanage. I remember how she said that as she walked into school, she felt as if she was as transparent as glass and everyone could see through her.

And the only thing that she thought was shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame. There are some homes in which children growing up, any sexual curiosity is shamed, oftentimes under the guidance of scripture, the misuse of scripture, because children grow up and of course they're curious about these things because we're all born either male or female and there has to be a healthy guidance and instruction given most assuredly, but in a, in a shame based home, all that is shoved under the rug and if it is brought out, it is only to be shamed. Let me give you another characteristic, a home in which there is belittling and a lot of ridicule. A child who is constantly criticized, constantly ridiculed will be shamed through to the core. Parenthesis. Another characteristic is where in a shame based home, all blame has to be enthusiastically assessed.

So instead of the normal experiences of life where children do childish things, the children are always blamed. Who put that comb on the stove? Tell me what kind of a house do you think we're running around here? Let's get this straight. Are you going to be responsible or aren't you? I told you.

No, no, no, no. It goes. The child growing up in that context is going to struggle with an awful lot of shame. A home in which there are addictions. A home in which there is an unhealthy bonding oftentimes bring shame.

Do you remember the first message I preached? It's entitled of this series entitled, lost in a house of mirrors. And I said that the responsibility of the parent is to mirror back to the child who that child is and give him a good sense of identity. In a shame based home, what you have is an unhealthy bonding where the children end up existing to meet the narcissistic needs of the parents.

And as a result of that, the children no longer receive a mirror as to who they are, but they actually end up mirroring the parent. And that's why shame is so difficult to overcome. If you don't think shame is a difficult emotion, remember this, that the Bible says that the suffering of hell is a suffering of shame. It says in Daniel that there is a resurrection onto life and a resurrection onto damnation. And it says that some will be resurrected onto everlasting shame and contempt.

I take it that a great part of the suffering of hell is the exposure of sin, the constant exposure of sin without any remedy where everything is revealed and sin is seen for what it is. And oh, the shame. And by the way, we can be shamed too at the judgment seat of Christ. He who is ashamed of me and my words and this adulterous and sinful generation of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in glory.

This I find it almost difficult to get my mind around. To think that if I am ashamed of Christ, if I'm a businessman and I do not tell any person that I belong to Jesus because of shame, because it's not popular to be a born again Christian, that Jesus will be ashamed of me at least temporarily someday when I stand before him. Let me give you some of the consequences of unresolved shame and then we're going to get to the answer. I want you to know today that my heart is filled with so much hope and so much faith that God has given me that as a result of this message that many of you are going to experience a sense of release and freedom from the binding power of shame. Well, my dear friend, this is Pastor Lutzer. Once again, what we are doing is to try to understand ourselves so that we might better understand God's grace and the offer of redemption that we make to a very hurting, confused, and oftentimes seeking world. And I want to encourage you today to live for Jesus Christ wherever he has planted you.

It has eternal consequences and repercussions. We're so thankful for the many of you who stand with us regularly with your prayers and your gifts. It's because of you that we can continue. By the way, did you know that Running to Win is on more than 100 stations all throughout Central and South America in Spanish?

And we also broadcast in Arabic through much of the Middle East. So the ministry of Running to Win continues all because we have partners who say to themselves, we believe in this ministry, we believe in the gospel. And as you anticipate the new year that we have just entered, would you consider making Running to Win a priority in your giving? Here's what you do to find more information. You can go to endurancepartners.org. Of course, as you might guess, endurance partners is all one word, endurancepartners.org. Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. As I sit behind this microphone, in my mind I am visualizing thousands of people who are taking our hands, who are helping us, and they become a part of the Running to Win family.

Thanks in advance. For more information, endurancepartners.org or call us at 1-888-218-9337. As you have frequently heard me say, together we are making a difference.

Thank you so much. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. We've all experienced the painful emotion of shame, either because we've done wrong or because wrongs have been done to us. Tomorrow we'll learn what this means and then look to the Bible to find God's cure. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.