Archive for shame
Do You Need to Forgive Yourself?
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What is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done? What is the worst mistake you’ve ever made? What is the greatest harm you’ve ever committed to another human?
Do you have your list? Did the pictures in your mind come up faster than high-speed internet?
Most of us don’t have any trouble recalling the worst moments of our lives. I imagine that when I asked those questions, you not only recalled the “bad” things you have done, but you also reconnected to some feelings of shame and guilt.
A foundational truth of Christianity is that we come into relationship with God through forgiveness based on the work of Christ. We maintain the flow of fellowship both with God and man by confessing our sins and appropriating the purifying work of Christ into our daily lives.
While we may understand the role of forgiveness in our Christian walk in relation to God and to others, we may find it harder still to be aware of the need to forgive ourselves.
Woven into the fabric of our core belief system may be the unspoken, and often unrecognized, belief that refusing to forgive ourselves shows God that we realize what dirty rotten sinners we really are and agrees with God that we don’t deserve to be forgiven.
And while we are sinners and don’t deserve forgiveness apart from Christ, through Christ we become righteous and through his grace, we are offered forgiveness. Living in that forgiveness means that we acknowledge that God offers us radical, undeserved forgiveness and we cannot make ourselves more deserving of that forgiveness by holding ourselves prisoner to past mistakes.
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8 Important Things to Know During Hard Times
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We all live in a world cursed because of sin. Part of the effect of that curse is hard times, difficulty, pain, and sorrow. I so wish I could tell you that Christians don’t have to go through any difficulties, but the Word of God contains story after story of believers in difficult times. Paul and Peter in prison, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Stephen being stoned, believers being persecuted, the very life of Jesus, and I could go on and on. And this list applies to all storms whether we caused them, Satan sent them, or God designed them. In a moment, I am going to share my list of eight things you should know about hard times but before I do that I need to give you some foundation.
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Why You Must Go Back
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God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.
This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:
1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.
Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.
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Jesus, the Healer of Broken Hearts
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If we believe that God is purposeful in His actions, then how significant is the fact that the first words of the first message Jesus preached were, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because … He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted…”? (Luke 4:18-19)
Jesus came to heal broken hearts and not only as a side benefit; it’s one of his life purposes! That’s good news because all of us who are in this world have experienced the pain of having our hearts broken in one way or another. If we look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels, we find that he moves throughout his days interacting with humanity and healing broken hearts. That healing takes many expressions. Today I want to look at how Jesus healed the heart of a woman as recorded in John 4 and what that healing means for us now.
Let’s take a look at the story.
Jesus was exhausted from his long trip. He had gone to the city well to get a drink of water. However, what followed was not a chance happening at all because we are told that Jesus “needed” to go through the region of Samaria; he was compelled to do so.
Jews did not have anything to do with Samaritans in those days. Samaritans were considered half-breeds and unclean by Jewish tradition. Yet Jesus, a Jew, chose to go through the middle of Samaria instead of making the usual trip around the area as most Jews did in order to avoid the Samaritans.
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The Truth about Shame
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Yesterday I blogged about a situation I had experienced where a mother wrongly used the Word of God with her son. In my estimation, her communication with her son was not honest and forthright. One of the most troubling things about the mother/son exchange that I witnessed was the way this mother tried to use shame to control and correct her son, all the while using the Word of God as her instrument of correction. (You’ll have to go back to yesterday’s post for more information.)
So the entire experience caused me to think about shame.
What is shame?
Why do we feel shame?
When should we feel shame?
When is shame unjustified?
How do we get rid of shame?
Dictionary.com defines shame as the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. And another definition which applies to the scenario I saw yesterday is: to drive, force, etc., through shame. For most of us, shame is another word for embarrassment yet it can be much deeper than embarrassment.
I can think back to a time when my fourth grade teacher made me read a sentence over and over again into a tape recorder in front of my entire class until I could say a word correctly. Seems my Southern brogue was already in place and was corrupting my speech. I felt so ashamed as I tried repeatedly to say the word correctly.
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