How can I get free from shame?

It was only after I got back home that I realised what I had done. I had just handed over a significant sum of money to some very sharp salesmen, and got basically nothing for it. I had been scammed. And I was angry - furiously angry. But I wasn't angry with the people who had scammed me.

I was angry with myself.

I was angry, of course, because I'm a man, and anger is often how men express our negative emotions. Underneath my anger, I was feeling a failure at managing my money, I was feeling stupid, and I was feeling worthless. I was feeling angry because I was feeling ashamed. In fact, I used to get ashamed of myself a lot; I was what psychologists call "shame-prone." Any little embarrassment would knock me back and make me question my own worth. Life was a constant competition to prove myself and defend against the nagging voice of my shame.

How did I get free from shame? I think God showed me three things about shame which transformed my life.

First, he showed me that I had died. We're all used to the idea that Jesus died for us, but the Bible equally talks about how we die too.

Romans 6:8 says that "we died with Christ", as does  Colossians 2:20 and 3:3; Romans 7:6 tells us that we were released by "dying to what once bound us". It's true what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: that Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. When we begin our journey with Christ through baptism, we symbolically die to who we used to be and begin a new life in Christ; being a Christian means to "count yourself dead" (Romans 6:11).

For me this was tremendously freeing. There are things in my past that I'm ashamed of, that God forgave me of, but that *I* still hated myself for. But the person who did those things is dead and buried. That's not who I am.

Shame seeks death. We hide ourselves away, make ourselves invisible, hope the ground will swallow us up. In extreme cases, and in some cultures, the shamed person will deal with their shame by committing suicide. When we die with Christ, we put our old shameful self to death.

Second, when Christ makes us alive in him, he gives us a new way to see others and to see ourselves. Shame comes partly out of our sensitivity to the people around us. When we're hyper-aware of how the world judges us, we live in fear of how we come across and what other people might be thinking about us.

But Jesus showed us that the way the world judges us is completely upside-down. So much of his teaching was calling us to realise that God is not impressed by power or status or cleverness or anything else the world values; for Him, the greatest of those in the Kingdom are the children, the least, and those who serve with humility. We don't need to live according to the standards of the world when God's standards are so much higher.

Finally, he places us in a new community. The church isn't just a side-effect of God's salvation, but for people suffering from shame, it is *part* of His salvation. Why? Because His church is a community of His people who live out these new standards. If we see each other with God's eyes and as His children, this can take away the sting of shame from those judged by the world.

The church at its best can also be the place of God's restoration for the shamed in other ways. Those who have become convinced by shame that they are useless can be trusted and given new opportunities to be useful again; those who need to confess shameful things in their past will be met by the acceptance of those who see them through God's eyes.

I know the church can mediate God's salvation for shame, because it has for me. But that's something we have to live out for one another. We need to rediscover the things that God values in His children, and begin to see one another the way that He does. We need to ensure that we are developing spaces of grace in our Christian communities where the shamed person can find freedom and release. If we do this, we can bring hope to the many shame-prone people around us.

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