My Shame

WELCOME

Pastor Chris Paavola:

Isn’t that beautiful? It’s never too late to know who Jesus is. Can we just give a hand to the Hamilton’s and praise God for what he’s doing in their life? It’s exciting. It’s really exciting. I’m thrilled for their baptism a little bit later on at the 11 o’clock service. We wanted to start making videos like that whenever possible to just show people what it is. When we say we have a baptism and you’re not able to be at that service, that you can still celebrate it. So yeah, I’m excited. And honestly, what I love about their story is I just love when the redemption of Jesus and what he brings becomes known to people and it liberates people. I love that. And that’s what I’m hopeful for all of you this morning and why I’m excited to share today’s word with you guys is because I think there’s a redemption and a freedom in Jesus that whether you’ve been to church once, this is your first time here, which by the way, we’re glad you’re here or glad that you’re tuning in right now.

Or if you’ve been here a thousand times, there is still depths and freedom in Jesus that we can find.

STORY

And I’m going to talk about that today as we continue our series greater than this week two of the series Greater Than where we’re following along the life of this man named Moses. And we’re discovering as he does a life greater than we know with a God who is greater than we know. And today we see this dark chapter in Moses’ story and we see that God is still present and uses that. But we see Moses make a mistake and then he tries to run from it, but he actually runs into something else and there’s regrets for the mistakes he made and the consequences. And as we look at Moses’ story and we kind of unpack it, my hope for you is that if you are here today and you’re feeling any sense of regret or shame over the mistakes that you’ve made that you can walk out of here with freedom because that’s what we eventually see in Moses’ story, but it doesn’t need to take as long for us.

Again, when we just discover the full redemption that Jesus brings, you just heard the reading of the story, but what you didn’t hear is a little-bit of the backstory and context. So to refresh your memory or bring you up to speed, the people of Israel, this is about 1500 years before Jesus and the people of Israel have been living in slavery for about 150 years and they go from like slavery to like outright just infanticide and just a horrible oppression. And the people of Israel are just begging God to free them and rescue them and God uses this man Moses. And Moses through a series of unlikely circumstances, Moses is a Hebrew, a Jewish man, right? And he’s born, but he’s adopted into Pharaoh’s house and Pharaoh’s daughter, the princess of Egypt, raises Moses as her own child. And he spent 40 years of his life being educated in the Egyptian education system, likely he’s working in some type of politics, just nature of who he is and the family that he belongs to.

And then one day you could take the boy out of the Jewish neighborhood, but you can’t take the Jewish neighborhood out of the boy. One day he looks and he sees this Jewish man being mistreated by an Egyptian and the text, I like how it says, he looks this way and that to like make sure because he knows what he’s about to do is wrong and then he attacks this Egyptian and kills him. And then he finds out that he’s been found out and in that world it’s eye for eye life for life, right? And so he runs away, but so many of us who have lived a little bit longer lives than others we could detest, like you run out of one consequence and you just exchange it for a whole other set of consequences because it says that Moses runs to Midian. And that doesn’t mean anything to you like Midian, okay?

…..Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian…

       Exodus 2:15

Midian is not Miami. It’s not Maui. It’s not the Maldives. Midian is the desert. This is a picture of Midian right here.

There you go. That’s a picture of Midian, not a very pleasant place less than ideal, right? It is a harsh sun parched land with sand and stone and snakes and scorpions. And can you just picture Moses running through that, huffing and puffing, wearing silk royal robes, wearing his pajamas, stumbling through the wilderness.

SHAME

And yeah, he saved his life, but he also lost the life he knew. He doesn’t have to face Pharaoh, but he’ll never see his mother’s face again. Never see his friends again. He leaves like the luxury of marble and ivory and trades it for that. But hey, at least he wasn’t caught.

And when we look at the life of Moses and we see this chapter, he’s going to spend the next 40 years in Midian, 40 years and he escaped guilt. He escaped justice. He ran from one set of circumstances into another set of circumstances, but there’s something else that he ran into there in Midian. And it’s what I want to spend our time talking about today and free some of you from because when he got into the desert, he brought with him shame.

SHAME

Shame is this word that like we know what it is, but we don’t really know what to do with it because it’s unpleasant and it’s kind of a taboo thought. In Eastern cultures, like in some Asian countries, anthropologists will call them a shame and honor based culture.

And in the West, in America, we have what’s called a guilt innocence culture. We’re built kind of on the legal system. And so we understand shame and honor, but we don’t really know what to do with it. We don’t know how to process it and we end up living with it for years and years in our own Midian. Shame is this thing of like, we’ll talk about what it is, but we all know what shame is. It’s shame over the way you responded in that argument and some of the words that you used and what you said and you feel shame. Shame is what you did on spring break in college and you still think about it 20 years later. Shame is the way you mistreated your employees. Shame is that addiction that you do in the darkness. Shame is what you feel when you look at that thing on the computer.

Shame lingers with all of us and we all know what it is, but because it’s like an underdeveloped idea for us in Western culture, we don’t know what to do with it. And again, today I want to take a few moments to talk about shame and free you from it, especially if you’re carrying it in here this morning. Now, before we get into this too much, I’m going to grab the whiteboard over here. So while I do that and get set up, why don’t you turn to the person next to you? Here’s what I want you to talk about real quick. Growing up in your house when you were younger, how did your family or your parents, how did your family treat this idea of shame? How was shame viewed in your household? Okay. Turn to the person next to you and just talk about it.

Go.

I failed to plan that some of you might be sitting next to your parents. That was not intentional. I’m sorry about that. I mean, anyone here where shame was just kind of like, eh, there’s a Lasse fair kind of household and just that, it doesn’t matter. And you just kind of moved on and it was kind of this apathy towards shame or callousness towards shame. Okay Anyone? Anyone have shame like weaponized against them and like shame came before the crime and they told you what they’re going to think of you if you even think of doing it. Yeah. So I think the best way for us to talk about shame is to kind of talk about a word that we use synonymously, but it’s not the same. And that adds to the confusion of why it’s so hard for us to deal with shame is because again, we don’t know how to think about shame and we have kind of a distorted or conflated definition of it.

GUILT VERSUS SHAME

So, before we talk about shame, I want to talk about this word right here because we are in, again, a guilt – innocence based culture. The legal system makes sense to us. Guilt, we all know what guilt is.

GUILT

Guilt is failing to meet some type of standard placed on you. Even it could be your own standard for you. It could be some type of ethical moral standard others have of you like your parents, or you failed to meet a legal standard, right? Guilt is what you feel if you speed and you see the cop behind you, it’s like, oh my goodness, because you know in that moment there’s a legal standard you’re held to and you’re failing to meet it. And in our understanding, I mean we like this idea of guilt because you could take care of it with one of two things. You handle guilt in the sense of justice in one of two ways and you could be like Moses and run from it and that’s where we get into shame in just a moment.

But you handle guilt in one of two ways. One is you pay a penalty.

JUSTICE – PUNISHMENT

You did wrong. You did the crime, now you do the time or you pay the fine, right? And we like this. We like when there is kind of this eye for eye tooth for tooth kind of sense of justice because we can deal with the penalty, but then there’s another way you can handle guilt. This works mostly in a legal system. Like I said, you speed, here’s the price. You steal. Here’s how many days you’re going to serve in jail. We like that because it makes sense, it’s clean, but it doesn’t really work in the more moral or social settings where we fail to meet the standard of us. And in those circumstances we have the other way we can deal with guilt, mercy.

JUSTICE – MERCY

So, we do this like if a husband goes and plays 18 holes and decides it’s going to become 36 holes and they come home and the wife is mad.

Well, we’ve got to appeal to her mercy so we buy flowers. There’s not really a penalty that we can attach to that other than an angry wife. And so we do something to try to receive mercy. Now I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating because it’s so important to understand. Mercy is not getting the bad you deserve just penalty. Paying a penalty is you getting the bad you deserve, but mercy is not getting the penalty you do deserve. By the way, it’s not wiping the slate clean, pretending it never happened. It’s deciding that the victim will absorb the cost. Somebody hit my car in a parking lot. I decided to not figure out who it was. Not this parking lot, though our spots are pretty narrow. We’re fixing that. But I was at a parking lot out in Kalamazoo and I came out and there was a dent in my minivan and I had that moment I could have like gone to the cameras, find the person and gotten justice so that they paid the penalty, but I was like, “It’s not worth it.

” And now I drive a minivan with a dent in it because of mercy. I decided to absorb the cost. That’s mercy.

SHAME

And this makes sense to us, but it’s different than this word. Shame. Guilt is I did bad. Shame is I am bad. Guilt is I broke it. Shame is I am broken. Guilt is an action. Shame is a feeling, cause, and effect. And shame, let’s got some problems. Chief problem being is that we can take care of guilt through a penalty or through mercy. But shame remains. How do you remove shame for what you’ve done? Shame has this way of lingering. It becomes our identity. I am unworthy. I’m wicked. I’m broken. It’s who I am. And shame has this way of remaining. Moses in this story will spend 40 years in Midian ashamed of what he did in one moment of indiscretion. And eventually when God comes back into his life and calls Moses to something greater, Moses will tell God no. I don’t deserve this because of what I’ve done.

Send someone else, not me, Lord. And he self-sabotages because of the shame that he feels and he can’t get rid of. I’ve sat at the bedside of people when they’re dying. Just happens to be part of my profession every once in a while. And I have heard people confess things that they did decades ago, not because they didn’t feel forgiven or they didn’t feel like God forgave them, but they’re still carrying shame. Shame remains because we can’t get rid of it and we don’t know how. And if you walked into here ashamed of what you have done this week, this month, this year, this decade I want you to walk out of here free from shame.

The other problem with shame is … Well, okay, so the problem with shame is we can’t do anything about it. So what do we do? We cover it. That’s why the universal symbol for shame is this. You hide your face. When you’re on a jumbotron at a Cold Play concert, right? It’s the first thing you do. You try to cover it up. When you emerge from a courtroom and the paparazzi is all around you, you cover your face and get into the limousine because of shame. It’s the response that we have to this guilt so we cover our shame. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the very first sin. What do they do? They hide in the Garden of Eden. Then they cover themselves with fig leaves because of shame.

But what that does, that covering, you’re physically representing what’s going on. There is now separation between you and the people around you because of what you’ve done and the shame that you feel. It is a divide, enmity, division, separation from the relationship that was once whole. And so yeah, you’ve covered your shame, but it’s come at a price of broken relationships. But that’s all we can do is just cover our shame.

STOLEN MATCHES

I wish my kids weren’t in the room as I tell this story. So if you need to use the restroom, by all means, go ahead, sweetie.

But it’s a perfect example of this. The 1980s were a crazy time, y’all. And if you were there to experience it, we would go to restaurants and the hostess would ask you smoking or non. People smoked in restaurants. I know it’s impossible for your millennial brain to figure, but it was people smoked in restaurants and as such, people needed matches all the time. And so restaurants would have, you remember they would have little matchbooks at the register with their logo on it. And so eight year old Chris is walking by a register and I see this matchbook, the matchbooks for the restaurant and I’m like, “Ooh, freebie.” So I grab one and I pocket it, right? It’s free, fine. And I now have a book of matches and I’m like eight years old. And we get home and I’m in the family room there and I’m by myself.

Do you remember this? You had to tear off the match and then fold over the book and pinch the match to pull it and start the fire. And I’m like, eight, this is like the first time I’d ever done this. And I’m like eight. And I figured out how to do it and it worked. And first of all, like it’s dramatic when a match flares up. But then like I noticed there’s smoke and I’m like, “Oh, they’re going to smell this. ” And it was hot so I dropped it and I watched for a nanosecond as it landed on the carpet and started burning and I had the wherewithal to like stomp it out. But then when I removed my foot and I picked up the match, there was a black spot of sin still on the carpet and I tried to clean it. I think I did the spit method, like trying to wipe it up and it didn’t go away.

The carpet was singed. And so I decided I would just sit crisscross on the spot until my parents sold the house. That was my solution. So I sat crisscross on the carpet in front of the TV and just started watching something. And my parents came and they were doing their nightly routine of like mash and cheers. You remember that? And it was a little strange that their son, their eight year old wanted to watch mash with them, but okay. And then when it came bedtime, my mom said it’s time for bed and I didn’t move. And then my mom was like, “Move your butt, go to bed.” And I did and there was the black spot. There was a guy named Israel in the Bible one time and he prays and he says, “God, I’m too ashamed to turn my face to you that covering again.” And I couldn’t even look up at mom.

I just said, “I’m sorry because we don’t know what to do with shame.” So since shame remains, we just cover it up and pretend it’s not there.

SHAME-BASED

In psychology, this shame-based thinking when shame remains and we just cover it up, well, it starts showing up in other areas of our life, right? It doesn’t make sense that an eight year old is watching Mash unless he has shame-based thinking. It doesn’t make sense that Moses is living in Midian unless shame is driving his behavior, shame-based thinking and shame-based thinking is why. Let me give you some examples. Somebody who has guilt over what they’ve done and feels shame will suddenly start being hypercritical, condescending, cynical, and veil humor with a thin veil of sarcasm towards others who threaten them because of shame. Somebody who has shame-based thinking will actually turn down opportunities like whether it’s a promotion at work or some new opportunity in life because they think, “I don’t deserve that because of what I’ve done.” Shame-based thinking, I’ve seen people get into beautiful relationships with somebody and then as the relationship is going on, they will self-sabotage the relationship because they don’t feel worthy of love because of the guilt of what they’ve done and the shame they feel for it.

I’ve seen people not come to church because everybody knows what they did, but the guilt is taken care of. It’s the problem is shame. We don’t know what to do with it because nothing can take away our shame except one thing.

GRACE

There are two things that can take away guilt, penalty or mercy, but the only thing that can take away shame is grace. Hear me clearly. There is nothing in the world that can take away your shame, except grace. With response to our guilt, there’s penalty and there’s mercy, but with response to our shame, there’s grace. A penalty is getting the bad you deserve. Mercy is not getting the bad you deserve, but grace, listen, grace is getting the good you do not deserve.

Where shame says you’re unworthy, grace says you are worthy. Where shame says you’re wicked, grace declares you righteous where shame says you are separated, grace says you are restored. Shame is ashes and grace is beauty. Shame is dishonor. Grace is honor and it’s rare. It’s so counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense. That’s why it’s called amazing. You can do something about your guilt. You can earn mercy, but you can’t earn grace. If you could earn it if you deserved it, it’s no longer grace. That’s why we call it amazing. And when you experience grace, it’s otherworldly it’s divine because it comes from something beyond us.

And when you experience it, it changes you. I know far, far, far too many people who live half the story. Christians who think, Jesus died for my sins, the ends. No. Yes, Jesus paid the penalty for your sins and in Christ, God takes away your guilt and by his mercy. Yes. But that’s only half the story. In Christ, God lavishes grace upon you. Grace upon grace, upon grace, he calls you holy, beloved, worthy, precious child who belongs. That’s grace. It’s the cross and the tomb. And if you still feel shame for what you have done, listen, if you still feel shame for what you have done, then this morning I want you to experience the grace of God because grace is the only thing greater than shame.

Nothing. Nothing is greater than shame, but grace, unearned, unmerited, undeserved grace. And the world will still look at you and hold your sins against you, but not God. He gives you grace. How many of you in here are tired of shame? How many of you are tired of the shame? Let’s do something about it.

No one who puts his trust in Christ will ever be put to shame.

   Romans 10:11

This morning, maybe for the first time ever, you can experience the irrational, unfathomable, unearned grace of God and finally do something about your shame. Let’s pray.

PRAYER

Heavenly Father, first of all, we acknowledge that we have failed to meet not only our own standard for ourselves, but your standard for us. We have fallen short.

But as the Apostle Paul says, no one who puts their trust in you will ever be put to shame. And so God, I pray for this room of people that maybe have understood on a legal level how the death of your son forgives their sins and they’ve experienced your mercy, but this morning, God, I want you to help them experience your grace. And when their shame is great, God, show them that your grace is greater. Take their eyes off of what they’ve done and turn their eyes to what your son has done, turn their thoughts from the mistakes they’ve made to the life you give and help us walk out of here, people of grace. In the name of your son, Jesus, who taught us to pray:

Our Father,

Who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name,

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven,

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those, you trespass against us,

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil,

For thine is the kingdom,

And the power,

And the glory

Forever and ever,

Amen.