Sermon Tone Analysis

Shame

For the last six weeks, we spent a good amount of time hearing from different people in our community as they shared their stories about how God has met them in the midst of their mess.

Our heartbeat for the series was centered around one general idea: your discipleship to Jesus affects all every aspect of your lives.

Each of the stories was different from the last and yet so many of the questions that you guys asked were centered around one particular topic: Shame.

It came up almost every week.

Here are just a handful of examples:

How do we deal with guilt from a past sin?

How do you forgive yourself for what you’ve done?

Do you find it hard to accept the fact that you are forgiven and redeemed at all?

What are some things you did to break the unhealthy patterns of shameful thinking?

What advice do you have for someone whose parents body shame them (unintentionally and/or intentionally)?

We live in a culture in which shame is pervasive and there’s not a single person in this room tonight that shame hasn’t touched or affected.

One Doctor put it like this:

“It is ubiquitous, seeping into every nook and cranny of life.

It is pernicious, infesting not just our thoughts but our sensations, images, feelings and, of course, ultimately, our behavior.”

So as we get to talking about this, I think it’s important for us to define exactly what we mean when we talk about shame.

It’s really easy for our definitions to get mixed up and I love the way one scholar defines it.

"Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

So I want to be really careful here because it would be really easy to slip into a flippant belief that we aren’t flawed and we’re fine just being ourself and don’t have to worry about anything or ever striving to become more like Jesus.

As disciples, we belief that there are always things that we’re going to need to grow in and to put things to death in us.

What we’re talking about when we’re talking about shame is a deep-seated, intimate belief that you are incapable of being loved.

So our remedy to dealing with shame isn’t going to be rooted in a message that says you’re perfect and don’t need to change anything about who you are.

Rather, it’s going to be rooted in the fact that we are loved sons and daughters of a good Father and were made in His image to reflect His character to the World.

So what I want to do tonight and next week is to unpack what we call a Biblical Theology of shame.

What that means is that the bible has a great deal to say about who We are and what that means for our capacity to view ourselves rightly and to be loved by God.

So tonight, We’re going to talk about where shame comes from, and what it does to us, while spending time next week to talk about how we can be people who work through shame to view ourselves rightly.

So with that being said, Let’s open our Bibles and dive in to see what the Scriptures have to say about who we are.

Genesis

So we’ve talked about this a lot, but we have to get this in our heads if we’re going to understand how shame works.

You were created good.

You were to image God to creation.

You were to rule with God.

You were to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.

This is royal language.

God wanted you to rule the world with him.

So in the opening pages of Scripture, we have this beautiful picture of a man and a woman created to work and rule with God.

To create culture, to build cities, to have kids.

To rule.

Everything about their world was good and peaceful.

Jump down to Verse 25.

So we need to stop here.

The authors are doing some brilliant.

What we just read in all of Chapters 1 & 2 finds its’ culmination in verse 25.

So let’s stop and imagine this for just a second.

Think about all of the pressures we feel on a daily basis.

You need to be thin

You need to be smart

You need to have x amount of friends

you need to dress this way to be cool

You need to have a certain amount of money

you have to have x amount of instagram followers

If we don’t have these things, we’re considered less than.

Imagine having no concept of feeling less than.

This was the world that God designed you for.

That you were good and that you would feel no shame.

So I want to put the definition of shame back up on the screen.

"Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Imagine for a second that you would never feel or believe these things.

I even think about the term naked.

NAKED

When we think about that word in today’s culture, it makes us laugh or even cringe.

I was talking to Kyle today in his office and even saying the word naked has this weird sense of don’t say that so loud.

But let’s take that farther.

The word naked brings up all kinds of connotations for us.

We jump to either thinking about how we’re not satisfied with how we look or we jump to images that we’ve seen while viewing pornographic websites.

Even saying the word naked out loud can bring up feelings of shame and distress.

This is the first time the word naked is used in the Scriptures.

There’s a practice in reading the Bible called the principle of first mention.

What this principle argues is that the first time a word is used is meant to color the way we read it throughout the rest of the Bible.

So.

The first two humans were naked and felt no shame.

So where does this whole idea and concept of shame come from?

Let’s keep going.

Ok.

There are a couple of things we need to stop and see before we continue because they’re really important.

So the word crafty here sounds really similar in the original language to naked.

So the word for naked is AROM.

The word for crafty is ARUM.

So what’s the deal there?

The author of Genesis is trying to get our attention in how the two words are going to interact together.

I love the Bible!

These guys were genius in how they wrote.

Ok.

So crafty is the same word as naked and we’re going to see exactly how that plays out.

He asks the question.

“Did God actually say, “you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?”

So right away, the serpent is twisting God’s words to say something that he actually didn’t say.

CRAFTY.

Genesis 2:

So a couple of things to notice here.

At first she does a good job of remembering what God said, but she slips a little bit at the end.

God said, you shall not eat of it, but he didn’t add the ‘neither shall you touch it piece’.

She’s adding that part on her own.

Let’s keep going

Genesis 3:4-

Alright so this is a really important text that we need to spend some time with.

The serpent is hitting on some things that teach us a great deal about shame & how it operates in our lives.

The first thing we see is that after the serpent has already questioned God, he now directly contradicts what God has said.

“You will not surely die”.

“When you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.”