Guilt and Shame Part 2: Processing Well-Placed and Misplaced Shame

If you haven’t already, I recommend reading “Guilt and Shame Part 1: What’s the Difference?” before reading this! It may provide some helpful clarity around what guilt and shame are and how God uses them.

In Part 1 of this blog, we looked at how guilt and shame are appropriate responses to sin and it affects how we see the gospel. Understanding how God uses guilt and shame in the grand scheme of our salvation is important, but how does that practically apply to our daily lives? It can get easy to get stuck in feeling guilt and shame without a roadmap out, especially when we intellectually know that we’ve been rescued out of our guilt and shame but our hearts don’t rejoice in that truth. It is a bleak and emotionally exhausting place to be. 

I don’t remember where I learned this process, but it has been a game-changer for me, as a person who easily gets swallowed up in shame. I think of our lives as lines, progressing towards greater degrees of holiness. When sin leads us away from that path, we need to process through it in order to get back on track and move forward. Here’s a visual representation of this process: 

As you can see, temptation leads to sin, which leads to guilt and shame. But things turn back around when we confess, which is just communicating our guilt and shame to God through prayer. I think this is where most people get stuck - it’s easy to feel horrible for our sinful nature and our tendency is to hide from the Lord without talking to Him about it. Confession doesn’t serve to notify God of your sin, He already knows about it - this is to help you move into repentance. When you bring your sin in front of a holy and righteous God, that sin will seem ugly and small in comparison to His glory and goodness. In your confessional prayers, it helps to specifically name your sin and how it goes against scripture’s commands, examine your motivations, express your depravity, and genuinely apologize. 

And there you’re met with the beauty of the gospel, specifically forgiveness and grace. Christ’s blood has covered your sin and you’ve been washed clean (1 John 1:9). Condemnation no longer casts its shadow on you - you can leave your shame behind because it has no place in light of the cross. You can rest in the assurance of your salvation and rejoice in the relief of your atonement. This resounding truth can settle into your heart: your truest identity is found in God’s redeeming love for you, far and above your sin and shame.

From here, we can move towards repentance. Our “I’m sorry” is met with “you’re forgiven” which leads us to say, “I don’t want to do this again”. When we reflect on God’s commands and promises, we can look at how it contrasts with our disobedience, remember the pain of guilt and shame, and joyfully turn away from it. We realign our hearts and our actions with God’s will, with full faith in His promise to sanctify us. This doesn’t mean we won’t sin again - we may even replicate the same sin we’re presently repenting of - but we know that God, in His timing, will give us more and more strength to resist temptation. Because of God’s undeniable holiness, this step should be reverent. And because of His abundant love and grace, this step should also be thrilling.

So far this process is private, but it should not be secret. We are called to tackle sin in community, not in isolation. This is where accountability comes in - we share how we’ve sinned and process our plans for repentance with someone we trust to be honest, loving, and biblically-sound. They can give us counsel on how to avoid falling back into the same temptation in the future. This person should be someone who can observe your life and call you out when necessary. They can follow up with sins you’ve shared in the past, help you deepen your understanding in one of the above steps, or point out blind spots in your life that you may not be able to notice on your own. I understand how intimidating this sounds - this level of transparency can be scary, especially if you fear judgment. But good accountability partners humbly balance truth with grace. I speak from experience: God works in incredible ways through faithful accountability.

Something to keep in mind here is that these steps refer to heart posture, not just intellectual acknowledgement. If we don’t take sin seriously, we won’t truly reckon with our guilt and shame and can’t truly confess until we do so. If we aren’t really present in our confessional prayers, we won’t walk in true repentance. It is okay to linger in any of these steps and ask the Spirit to make it weigh heavy on your heart before you move onto the next step. He will be faithful to answer that prayer because 100% of this process happens in His power. We cannot progress at all without Him. 

As much as we’d like for this process to happen as little as possible, the reality is that we will sin, grapple with shame, and repent over and over and over until we’re face-to-face with Jesus. If we stick with the loop visual, our earthly lives look like this: 

I know the inevitability of our continual sin can feel bleak or discouraging. But remember that God promises to sustain and empower us to do good works more and more as we abide in Him. As we grow up in our faith, those loops get further apart and smaller. And we can eagerly anticipate the new heavens and earth, where the patterns of sin and shame are no more. 

When does shame get out of hand?

So far we’ve addressed shame that is rooted in our sin. But should we feel ashamed for things that aren’t our own sin? Is all shame good? The answer to both of those questions is no. Let’s look at 3 ways shame can be misplaced.

Well-placed shame that lingers too long

Sometimes we can feel haunted by the sins of our past. It feels impossible to shake the lingering effects of our darkest mistakes even after we’ve repented. This shame no longer serves to point us to repentance because we’ve already turned away from it. The Lord’s forgiveness is not fickle or incomplete, He holds no grudges. Whenever we feel weighed down by our previous sins, we must remember that the Lord has already cast them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). If the perfectly holy God has put your sin behind His back, why are you still clinging to it?

This is an easy thing to mentally recognize but still grapple with it in our hearts. If you find yourself holding onto well-placed shame for too long, I would ask yourself where that shame is coming from. Do you fear that it ruins your reputation in the eyes of man? Do you see it as falling short of a standard of perfection or excellence from yourself? This lingering shame may seem holy on the surface, but it’s probably linked to a pervasive source idol in your life. Take time to reflect on the reality of forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ and dig to find the roots of this self-shaming tendency.

Shame about things that aren’t our own sin

It is easy to assign yourself (or others) blame for the sins of others or bad circumstances out of anyone’s control. For example, a daughter may feel shame because her father had an affair. She didn’t play any role in that sin, but her proximity with his transgression is enough for her to feel ashamed. Even if she doesn’t feel it on her own, others may assign her that shame by mocking or judging her. Or someone could feel ashamed for being born into poverty because culture looks down on the poor. This shame by association (with others’ sins or bad circumstances) is very prevalent in honor/shame cultures, where shame spreads through families, people groups, and socio-economic classes.

A tendency I’ve seen in believers who genuinely want to pursue Christ, is a pattern of feeling shame around “not doing enough”. It comes from a good desire to challenge ourselves to pursue and obey God as much as we can, but we can easily take it ttoo far and internalize every flaw and draw faulty conclusions about our identity. This often looks like taking something like “I want to read my Bible more” to “I am a bad Christian because I didn’t read the Bible this morning”. This line of thinking often results from things like comparison and pride. We mistake others’ strengths as standards for our behavior or we expect an unreasonable level of excellence from ourselves. This kind of shame can become the driving force behind our obedience if we’re not careful. And it’s a terrible motivation - it leaves us burnt out and discouraged every time. 

We must remember that the only standard we live by is God’s perfect one and we ALL fall short of it constantly. But in His mercy and grace, we have a new identity in Christ, one that cannot change even when we do mediocre good deeds. This propels us to serve God out of joy and love for Him, not out of shame-based obligation. And when we don’t do things perfectly, we show ourselves grace, because the Lord showed us grace first. 

Feeling ashamed of godly things

Sometimes we can even feel ashamed about doing godly things. Living for the Lord will often stand in contrast to the priorities and norms of the world and it can be easy to get embarrassed about living in a way that doesn’t make sense to non-believers. 

Paul touches on this in Romans 1:16-17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith,as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” The power of the gospel to radically change our lives is one that the world does not recognize. But we understand the miracle of salvation and walk boldly by faith. This faith sustains us, even in the midst of judgment, ridicule, or even persecution, because we know that the gospel is far more valuable than the opinions or values of the world. And the more our lives look more like Christ, the more we can be a testament to the faith we have.

Guilt and shame can be tricky to navigate, but we can know one thing: they will constantly come up in our lives on this side of heaven. Whether it’s a stop along the path of repentance or a bind to break free from, it is crucial that we know how to deal with shame. Knowing the difference between guilt and shame and how to know when it is misplaced will help us to live our lives with endurance and hope.