No Shame

This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that reject fear and champion faith. Shame is a painful emotion that clouds our lives, but we are called to repent and turn back to God. We were created perfect but fell due to our selfishness and the evil intent in the world. We constantly sin based on our fleshly desires. However, we are not called to be sinners and can turn away from shame through repentance and walking in God's ways. The power of repentance helps us become aware of our wrongdoings and kills our ego. We can approach God boldly with brokenness and worship Him. If we remain broken before Him, there is no reason to fear. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Ezekiel 39.26 They will forget their shame and all their trespasses by which they have trespassed against me, when they dwell securely in their land. No one will make them afraid. Shame is a terrible thing. It clouds so much of our lives. Shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety. It's a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute. It's something to be regretted. These are all true definitions of shame. But shame is not where we are called to live. Shame is meant to be the point of swivel. Repentance is more than just, I'm sorry. Anyone can be truly sorry and shamed by their behavior, but go out and do it again and again. Ask any addict. We're called to swivel, turn around, to repent. By repenting, we turn back, go in another direction, fleeing from that which caused shame and entering the refreshing of the Spirit of God. Acts 3.19-21 We can live in a place where we have no sins left. Sin blotted out so much that we will forget the shame part of what we did and dwell fearlessly in total reverence of Yahweh God. We were not created to be sinful. It was not part of our design. Like a screen door on a submarine, the evil intent that permeates this world sinks us. By choice, again and again, we let our actions be determined by the flesh. We let the evil intent advise us, and sin gets in. We are not sinners by nature. We are those in whom there is sin, 1 John 1.8. That sounds like gobbledygook, I know, but think about it. We are not sinners. It is not a state of origin, like being African or Asian or European. It is not a state granted to us by an act of government, like being Swedish or German or American. We were created perfect, but we lost a component of our nature when humanity fell. We lost the righteousness we had been granted by an act of God. Without that righteousness, we are susceptible to our fault, the genetic fault we inherit through the first Adam's lineage, the fruit of betrayal, evil intent. In our hearts, we have it, and it speaks to us 24-7, 365 and a quarter. We exchanged our righteousness granted by God with the idea of self. We have free will, but our flesh is selfish. It will choose the evil intent every time we let it. It is a strong habit, because it is all about us. It permeates this world. So we have our desires, our wants, our needs, our thoughts, designs, and imaginings. It isn't hard. We don't have to give up anything. We don't need to be retrained. We don't need to be renewed. There is no birthing process. We can give ourselves over to all that our hearts can think up and call it right, because it came from us. It is unbridled feeling. It is sensory input made to be content, like a random assortment of ingredients in a bowl for baking or hours of footage shot for entertainment. The stuff in that bowl will not make an edible cake without curating what goes in. That footage will not make a great video if it isn't edited. Our flesh doesn't curate or edit. It feels and then does with nothing standing in between the two but our free will. Our free will takes effort. Our default setting is, yeah, do it. Like a toddler or the parent of a newborn being asked for things by their three-year-old at 6 a.m. We let things move along at whatever rate they are coming to us and without doing anything to alter it, because an object at rest has a tendency to stay at rest. Once you're coated with mud, it's hard to tell when more mud gets on you. When you are convinced that A is true, it is hard to conceive that B might be the truth. It seems foreign. It seems wrong. We are creatures of appetites because that's how the machine of our body survives and functions. But if we let our world be run by appetite, we aren't going to do well. Just look at your cupboards when you went shopping hungry versus when you went feeling satiated. We as people have no issues training ourselves to conquer our feelings and not let them control us, but only when in the service of other feelings. To take an example, polyamorous relationships are individuals who feel attracted to more than one other person and create a group dynamic as a relationship. Now that's individual relationships with multiple people, not orgies. They constantly need to fight feelings of possession and jealousy. They retrain their natural feelings and thoughts to accommodate the feelings and thoughts that they want to promote within themselves. The world approves of this. The world says, good for you, you do you, no judgment, and pats them on the back. But as soon as we talk about sin, as soon as we talk about retraining the mind to follow God or wanting to change to accommodate godly values, and you get a very different response. So we are not beings that were created sinful. We are beings that were created perfect, who fell because we have a weakness of the promotion of self. We consciously chose it. And then, because we're selfish and we have the evil intent in this world, we give into it again and again, and we sin constantly. We keep doing things that are based on flesh. We don't do things based on godly morals. And so we sin, and we sin, and we sin, and we are sinners. And no matter how good we think we are, we're still sinners. And we're just lost in that. But we're not called to be as the world is. The prayer that the Israelites pray every day is Deuteronomy 6, 4-5, and this is taken from the Lexham English Bible. Hear, Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is unique. And you shall love Yahweh your God with all of your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your might. Let all of our mind and all of our inner selves, as hard as we can, with all the strength we can muster. And if you feel that you don't have strength or the willpower, remember Romans 10, 17. So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. We gain strength and depth through our faith by hearing the word of God, by meditating it day and night, Psalm 1, 1-2. This is why we're not told to party and dance and play all the time, but to daily take up our cross and follow Jesus, Matthew 16, 24-26. It isn't a life without joy or play or parties, but it is a life of choice, of intent, of walking in His ways. As a child, we put on the shoes of a parent and walk around, but we have to walk around carefully, slowly taking each step while we follow. Our walk with Christ is much the same. You see, so instead of letting shame consume us, because of Jesus, in Jesus we can turn around and we can walk in His ways as repentant, obedient children, because Jesus pays the price for that sin that we keep choosing. And with each step we take in Jesus, we become more and more aware of all that He has done for us, but we also get farther and farther away from that shame. So the power of repentance is that we become really aware of what we did wrong, and we know the weight of the sin which Jesus removed from us, but we don't have shame about it. We don't let that feeling run us. Instead, we gain a complete knowledge of our unworthiness, which helps us to kill self. It's hard to have an ego about things you've done that you know are wrong. It's hard to have an ego when you can't accomplish anything by yourself. It's easy to be humble when you're telling everyone that all the good about you is a gift from the Father, and it's really the Father they should thank. Not saying that to appear holy or humble or spiritual, but simply because it's the unvarnished truth. Jesus did the same thing. You see Him again and again acknowledging the wonderful and awesome things about Himself by stating unequivocally that it was the Father who originated them, enabled them to come to be, gifted them, and was the one who did the works in the first place. Jesus never once took the glory on Himself. Now, this is brokenness. Thanks to the work of Jesus, we can go boldly before the throne of the Father. Hebrews 4.16 But at that throne of grace, we are not coming to say, Look at me. We are coming to see the Father and tell Him we love Him, to thank Him for doing all of the everything, to be profoundly repentant of all that we do that isn't in faith, to thank Him for His outpoured Spirit, to acknowledge and affirm that we only prosper in any way when our faces are set on the Lord, and then worship Him because that is where we have set our face, on Him. This is the message which we have heard from Him and announced to you that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in the darkness, we lie and don't tell the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1, 5-9 When we remain broken before Him, there is no reason to fear. How can we fear recrimination and guilt when we are truly repentant? They can wail and moan and scream at us, but we are secure and at peace because we are blameless in His sight. You, being in past times alienated and enemies in your mind and your evil deeds, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death to present you holy and without defect and blameless before Him. If it is so, that you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the good news which you heard, which is being proclaimed in all creation under heaven, of which I, Paul, was made a servant. Colossians 1, 21-23 Now that's security. That's peace. That's the Lord as your refuge and your strength. Psalm 91 Your high tower and solid rock. Psalm 27 Why should we be afraid? Why should we be anything but confident? If we aren't worthy and we cannot accomplish it, then it is Jesus in us who does. And if God does the thing, then the thing will be done. We can be confident because the Lord is trustworthy. The Lord is gracious. The Lord never fails. We know this, and so we have no fear. We are far from shame and terror, but in our repentance and in our brokenness we have peace. The peace of the Lord that passes all understanding. Amen. Our daily affirmation of God's love is Revelation 22, 1-5. A pure river of life. Leaves that heal more than ailments. No more curse. Seeing God face to face. Our faces gazing full on into His. Stained and built up. Again, no more curse. Illuminated by the Lord Himself. When we are having a baby, we nest. Not only getting around us the select group of trusted humans we can rely on for protection and support, but also preparing the space that the new child will inhabit. Laying plans that are sometimes far-reaching and at other times more intimate. From college funds to extra sleepers and boxes of diapers. If we get excited about the possibilities of little us's running around, how much more does our Father in Heaven get excited? How much more does He nest for us? Preparing us a place to live, worship, feed, refresh, and dwell. How eager is He, looking down from Heaven and laughing in glee that soon, very soon, He will be able to talk to us face to face. To be bathed in knowledge and breathe in wisdom. The conversations that He's rehearsed. The wonders He's prepared. It can boggle the mind. But if we can lay hold of a bit of that vision, if we can truly understand just a part of it, then we will have something to build our realization of the love the Father has for us onto. Because He does love us more than anything. Next time you lie down, start to imagine all that the Father has and is preparing for you. Feel His excitement at every move you make. We will see Him soon, and man, what a smile is awaiting our arrival. As we close, remember that you have worth. You are precious and valuable. I declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love. And to the things about you that He loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you, just because you're you. 1 John 4, 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent His only-born Son into the world, that we might live through Him. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin, and it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because He first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.