Becoming The Person God Created Me To Be
Part #3 “Shame,--On Me”
There’s an old song of the church
Once I was bound by sin’s
galling fetters,
Chained like a slave, I struggled in vain;
But I received a glorious freedom,
When Jesus broke my fetters in twain.
A fetter is a shackle, like hand cuffs
Sin—had imprisoned me.
My life was filling full of broken, damaged and unhealthy relationships.
No matter how hard I tried,
I seemed to wind up in the same place,
Kept making the same mistakes.
Somewhere along the line God’s Prevenient grace convinced me of a better way.
Prevenient means that which comes before.
Grace is the desire to be and the power to do God’s will.
It is God’s Prevenient grace that convinced me
That I am a sinner in desperate need of a savior.
It is God’s Prevenient grace that revealed to me that
Jesus was the savior that I needed,
It was grace that convinced me to believe.
It is God’s Prevenient grace the persuaded me that if I accepted
the fact that I needed a savior and believed that Jesus is
that savior that I had better commit myself to
living for the one who died for me.
God accepted my little faith,
And poured into my life justifying and sanctifying grace.
He forgave my sins,
Made me a new creation in Christ,
Reconciled me to Himself,
Adopting me as His child,
That’s God’s free gift of justifying grace
Not only did God set me right with Himself,
He empowered me to become the person He created me to be.
That’s sanctifying grace.
Jesus pulled off a jail break.
Sprung me from sin’s prison,
Snapped the chains of egoism that had me bound.
That my friends is a glorious freedom.
The scripture reveals to us that this glorious freedom is veiled to the faithless.
But when Prevenient grace removes the veil and we are born again,
We reflect the glory of the Lord.
2 Corinthians 3:18 (NLT)
So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.
As we continue to learn what it means to be a disciple of Christ we are changed.
We become more and more like Jesus.
But we’ve learned that the issues of the old way of life can emerge and grab us,
Trip us, beat us up, and effectively prevent our transformation into the image
of God.
So far in our series of Becoming the Person God Created Me To Be:
We learned that we all have Issues,
We do a great job of denying them,
But we’ve all got them.
Issues are indicators of wounds
We discovered that it is easy to get wounded.
We get wounded when we are most vulnerable
The season of greatest vulnerability is childhood.
We tend to underestimate the severity of our wounds,
“It’s only a flesh wound,” when actuality it has incapacitated us in
our spiritual development.
Wounds cause pain.
They hurt because they are shaming.
Shame is soul damaging,
if the wounds are great enough,
shame can be soul shattering
We develop child like ways to deal shame and the hurt it causes.
Most of our adult issues are the childish solutions we use to protect
ourselves from being re-injured or reminded of our wounds.
Those issues affect our relationship with God.
We expect that God is going to treat us like we have always been treated so
we go into hiding, preventing us from presenting our authentic selves to God, which we must do, in order to travel this path of
discipleship.
Today I want to concentrate on how to deal with shame.
What shame does to us,
How shame affects all our relationships,
And then how to deal with shame.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (NLT)
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.
Today I want to continue to add the tools you will need to put childish things away,
To heal from shame so that you can become who you were designed to be.
First: What Shame Does To Us.
Shame causes us to reject our self
Shame convinces us that we are flawed and defective,
that we are unacceptable as we are.
So we hide who we really are.
Shame is old way thinking,
its part of the life you left behind when God accepted you as His own.
Sometimes we hide the “real me” behind the “Four P’s”
Perfection, Performing, Pretending and Pleasing.
The Four P’s are our answers to three fundamental questions:
Can I Be Safe?
Can I Be Me?
Can I be Accepted?
According to the way you are hardwired,
You may think that in order to earn love and acceptance
you can never be wrong,
you can never make a mistake,
or have an accident, you must be perfect.
Therefore you strive for perfection.
Your expectations for your self are impossible to meet
But practice makes perfect.
You may think that the way to earn love and acceptance is
By achieving, creating, producing, out competing,
What ever you do its never enough,
Everything always requires just a little more.
In fact, “the more shame bound we are the more intensely we need to push
ourselves.” (Wilson p 105)
You may think that in order to earn love and acceptance
You have to fake who you really are,
Pretend to be someone you are not,
Project the right image,
Substance doesn’t matter its people’s
perception of you that counts.
“We jump through behavioral hoops and twist ourselves into emotional pretzels
to earn the approval of important people in our lives.” (Wilson 104-05)
You may think that in order to earn love and acceptance
You must please everyone.
You’re all about making people happy,
If you can make others happy,
then they will appreciate you, value you, want to keep
you.
You can spend so much time on trying to make other people happy that you
completely neglect taking care of your own needs. (Wilson p 118)
Do that an eventually no ones happy.
Call it the prison of the 4 P’s,
Forgotten shame can do that to you just as easily as a wound you remember.
Not only can shame drive us into hiding,
Shame can bring you an adversarial relationship with yourself. (John Bradshaw, Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing your Inner Child.)
It’s like an internal civil war.
“Do you treat yourself like a friend or an enemy?” (Wilson p. 102)
Before you answer, consider this:
1 Corinthians 3:16-17 (MSG)
You realize, don't you, that you are the temple of God, and God himself is present in you? No one will get by with vandalizing God's temple, you can be sure of that. God's temple is sacred—and you, remember, are the temple.
Simple connection here-- you, your bodily self, is the temple of God.
Shame can push you to wage war on your own body.
The weapons we use against ourselves are sleep deprivation,
zero or abusive exercise,
chronic dieting, sleeping pills, fasting, overeating,
bingeing, and purging, relaxation deprivation. (Wilson, 106)
We engage in this temple demolition project through self-medicating our
pain with just about anything that will deaden our emotions.
Anything that will help us to keep running away from the
person we reject,
yet when the person we reject is ourselves,
we can never get away.
Booze or bon-bons, extreme sports, work, gambling, shopping,
When we use substances or activates
to eliminate our pain,
shame can be at the bottom of it. (Wilson p 111)
Shame can also visit you with depression, anxiety, co-dependency, extreme
shyness, anger, bragging, boasting about what you’ve done, who you know,
what you can do and then there’s anger,
all over rejection of your own self.
Then when things aren’t working shame has three suggestions for us,
Try again, try harder, and finally try your hardest. (Wilson p 103)
That drives us to frustration,
We quit, we give in, we give up, and settle for being far
less than God created and enabled us to be.
We believe the lie and we become the lie.
We’ve learned to be helpless.
We’ve learned to be the victim
And very often become the victimizer.
Don’t you want to put those childish ways of doing your adult life away?
One of the tricky aspects of shame is that
“Shames convinces us, “That we don’t have any wounds…
I certainly don’t need to change. Everything in my life is basically OK.’” (Sandra P Wilson page 103)
So shame hides from us.
You have to look at how you do relationships to see if
shame is one of the major problems that can stop
your spiritual growth.
Two: How Shame Affects Our Relationships.
Shame steals intimacy.
When you reject yourself,
When you are hiding yourself,
You really can’t connect with others because you are
afraid that if they see the real you they will reject you.
You end up with lots of acquaintances but few real friends.
You’re lonely.
Shame can cause you to burn through relationships.
Burn through means you only get just so close to people and then you pull
away.
Again its fear of being found out,
Get to close and people will see you and reject you.
So to avoid that pain you politely excuse
yourself from further close personal contact.
Shame can cause you to sabotage relationships.
When the mask begins to wear thin,
You start looking for an escape route,
Often you need to blame someone or some circumstance,
for why you are leaving.
“They” become the bad guys,
To justify leaving the relationship.
This often leads to a bad ending, with a lot of collateral damage.
Shame can cause you to stay in unhealthy relationships.
You lack the will power to leave or to attempt to change the situation.
You feel trapped, you want things to be different,
But can’t seem to do anything about it.
Ever hear of the axiom: “Like attracts like?”
It’s similar to “takes one to know one.”
Like attracts like simply means you tend to gravitate towards that
which is similar to yourself, towards what is familiar.
Shame can convince you that “nothing about you is okay.
You feel flawed and inferior;
you have a sense of being a failure.
You are an object of contempt to yourself.”
( http://soulselfhelp.on.ca/tshame.html )
Because of like attracting like,
Shame my cause you to be drawn into relationships with people
who feel the same way about themselves as you do.
That’s another recipe for relational disaster.
Shame can cause us to hurt the ones we love.
As we try to work out the pain of past in all our present relationships.
Shame “shuts us down.” (Allender p. 105)
“It blocks us from receiving and giving real love” (ibid)
We’re afraid to be truthful, to be honest.
Truth is the glue for any healthy relationship,
Without truth and honesty any relationship will
eventually fail.
Shame is about self-alienation and isolation.
If you reject yourself, it prevents you from accepting others.
There can be no acceptance and belonging if you live in emotional
isolation.
What shame ultimately does to us is block intimacy.
Littering your life with unfulfilling, dysfunctional,
and destroyed relationships.
What does shame do to us?
Shame causes us to reject ourselves.
Shame always moves us away from love and into extremes.
How does shame effect our relationships?
Shame eventually deters, damages and destroys right relationships.
So how are we going to deal with shame?
How can we be healed?
Last week I gave you homework.
I gave you a scriptural description of who the new you is.
I asked you to read the statements and read the scripture and ask God
to convince you of its truth about you.
When we practice the spiritual disciplines we invite encounters with God and those
encounters renew our thinking,
replacing our old way of thinking about ourselves
with the God’s way of thinking about ourselves.
Romans 12:2 (NLT)
Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.
The Homework was to get you into the first two spiritual disciplines.
Bible Study and Prayer.
The way we deal with shame is through the third, Fellowship.
You have to be loved out of shame.
I believe that is why the Apostle James tells us:
James 5:16 (MSG)
Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.
James tells us that God brings healing to us through the love of others.
I’ve told you before about our need for a confidant to help you grow in your faith.
A confidant is someone you trust.
Someone you are sure is going to accept you no matter what.
Someone who is not going to judge but rather love,
To seek to meet your need.
God puts these people in your life.
The first step in experiencing a healing of our shame is to come out of hiding.
You come out of hiding through fellowship.
Wisely share your feelings
Reveal your thoughts about yourself,
Expose your wounds,
with someone you trust.
This trusted confidant could be your spouse, a sibling, a close friend,
maybe even your pastor or a therapist, your secure home group,
regardless you have to bring out into the light what you
have been hiding.
Their job will be to communicate grace and truth to you in love.
Grace without truth excuses you’re behavior and usually turns in to a
sympathy fest or a pity party.
Truth with out grace turns into something judgmental, harsh and cruel.
In a fellowship each one speaks Truth with Grace in love.
Your job is to hear their message of love and acceptance.
Your job is to see your self in the light of grace and truth spoken in
love reflected in the eyes of your confidants.
Start to see yourself how they are seeing you.
Start to accept yourself as they accepting you.
Start to love yourself as they are loving you.
I wish I could tell you that healing shame is quick and easy,
Just follow these steps and presto: you’re better.
But that’s just not the case.
It takes time and consistency.
I’ve told you before it that it was about 6 years into our marriage when one
day Carol said, “Mike, you know I love you.”
And I said, “Carol, I think you convinced me.”
Healing shame takes time, consistency and hard work.
I don’t know how long it will take you to get free of the old shame
based way of thinking,
But I do know that this is the path,
Are you ready to walk it in order to become the
person God created you to be?
Psalms 139:23-24 (MSG)
Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I'm about; See for yourself whether I've done anything wrong— then guide me on the road to eternal life.