Shamed!

by Peter J Foster

“To cause to feel shame; make ashamed.”

The message of shame is that we are innately flawed and have no real value or worth in life.

A knee-jerk reaction is to try make ourselves of value and worth through performance and ‘works.’ Although this might serve us well for a while, we will always be fearful of being exposed – and so we try more and more to make ourselves look good through what we do, what we have and what we know.

On the other hand, some of us have been told from our youth that having ‘shame’ is a worthy quality so as to keep us on the straight and narrow; ie: “Have you NO shame!”

And then we see, for us Christians, that Jesus Himself (Heb:12.2) endured the Cross and scorned the shame. (Although we must remember that he never accepted the lie that he had no value.)

The point is that for us Born-again Christians, there is therefore now no longer any shame, guilt nor condemnation. No matter what the ‘world’ thinks about shame nor how it deals with shame, we are exempt from any bondage to shame.

We throw off shame – or the temptation to feel shame – in exactly the same way we throw off any other lie of the devil. For the Truth is that we are hidden with Christ in God; and just as Christ is valued and loved by the Father, so are we.

The revelation of God the Fathers’ love for us is the antidote to shame. It is, in fact, the only antidote to shame. It cannot be worked-up through effort; it cannot be earned