Shame

 Disclaimer: Obviously I am not an actual angel. However, I feel like God speaks to my heart and I would love to share it with you. Please enjoy.

Our pastor, (my nephew) Chris Light, gave a powerful sermon yesterday, and I really want to share it with you. Of course, it will be in my words, and I am sure I will not express it as well as he did. However, I will try my best.

We hear so much about how, as Christians, we are not to carry any shame. Actually, that isn’t true. God uses shame to bring us to our knees and turn to Him. Without shame there is no repentance. Without repentance there is no forgiveness. Without forgiveness there is no Christianity and eternity with God.

Unfortunately, God has to bring punishment on us to wake us up. How long and painful the punishment is depends on how long it takes us to fall to our knees and repent. As you probably know, repenting is far different than apologizing. Very often people apologize to God but there is no change of heart. They are just afraid of going to hell, as they should be. If they are not truly ashamed of their sin, then apologize it is. God doesn’t listen to apologies. If that is all it is, when we meet God He will have to tell us to depart from Him because He never heard us.

Punishment is seen by many people as God just being angry at us and taking out His belt to give us a good whipping. The Bible says that punishment is God’s strange work. Strange doesn’t mean weird in this case. It means unusual. That is not what God normally wants to do.

When a parent properly punishes their child, it is not to take out their anger on them, but rather to correct the child, in an effort to cause the child to see what they are doing is wrong. The goal of the parent is to teach the child right from wrong in order for them to become a good person as an adult. God has to teach us right from wrong also.

Chris compared punishment to a prescription for our sin. One of the requirements of taking a prescription is that you have to continue the medicine until the illness is gone. If you stop the medicine early the illness will come back on you and might be worse than it was before.

It is the same with sin. If God were to stop the punishment before we are truly rid of the sin it could come back with a vengeance. Stopping the correction before we really understand how bad our sin is will give us a false sense of being cured. It can make us feel like the consequence of our sin wasn’t so bad. If I sin again I can go through that because it didn’t hurt all that much and the sin was kind of worth it.

God knows the punishment has to be painful enough to truly cure us. Only then has the prescription been completed. Only then will we turn our eyes to God and seek Him. He says when we seek Him we will find Him. When we cry out to Him, He will listen and forgive.

We will carry our shame until we understand how bad our sin was and have decided deep down that we will never want to experience this again. Then and only then can God take away our shame, because we no longer need it.

The shame God gives us is for our benefit. There is another kind of shame that beats us down and destroys us. That kind of shame is from the devil and has no redeeming quality to it. That is the kind of shame we don’t want or need. God does not want shame to plague us for the rest of our life. It is for correction only.

Tears are not always a sign of repentance.

When Esau sold his birthright for one morsel of food he shed many tears about it but to no avail. Why did his tears mean nothing to God? Because he was crying because he wanted his birthright back. They had nothing to do with being truly sorry for selling it in the first place. His tears were just self-centered. They had nothing to do with repentance. When you cry about the judgement you are receiving, is it because you are ashamed of what you did, or because of the price you are paying?

When we have sinned in a way that causes our friends and family to no longer trust us, we cannot expect them to start trusting us as soon as we repent. We have earned their distrust, and in turn we must re-earn their trust. We must prove to them that we have truly changed. That can take a long time, but we have to do it. After all, we caused the loss of trust and we have to earn it back. It is not their responsibility to learn to trust us again. It is ours.

Godly shame for what we have done will cause us to do whatever we have to do to fix it.

So, to shame or not to shame. That is the question. Don’t worry. Trust God. He always gets it right.

Think about it.

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