En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

by Chuck Ammons

It seems everyone wants to talk, but few care to listen any longer than it takes to reload their emotional bazookas. And the space between people created in the image of God sadly widens.

In the middle of it all, there are a host of people who proudly identify themselves as followers of Jesus of Nazareth who nonetheless, at broad brush stroke, look virtually indistinguishable from the culture to which they were called to be salt and light. They are angry, afraid, outraged, and offended. All the while, precious few around them are experiencing “good news” or “great joy.”

For those who are willing to sense it, the air is shifting and you, beloved child of God, have a vital part to play in changing the atmosphere and bringing heaven to earth. It is a call to lay down our ‘rights’ and our need to be right. It is an invitation back to wonder and faith and joy. It is the necessary end to every relationship we have with entitlement and all of her friends. And it is time for “good news of great joy” to be liberally distributed again so that “all the people” our Father loves can find their way back home.

Both shame and entitlement say, “Because of what I have done, or what I have become, I deserve fill-in-the-blank.”

When entitlement is on the throne and life fails to live up to expectations, the common protest that follows is that “God is not good” or “God is not fair.”

Shame lurks most often in the thoughts that silently condemn, while entitlement patriotically camouflages itself behind our “God-given rights.” Yet whether you flip the coin to the side of shame or to entitlement, both play the game by endorsing a broken view of humanity and worth. Shame and entitlement both owe their survival to a hierarchical view of the world.

He would delight in nothing more than to get you to spend every waking hour obsessing about where you are on the ladder by assessing where everyone else is.

It is clear by many people’s resentment at God and others that many of us believe our status as a “good Christian” qualifies us to bypass the lines of misunderstandings, unanswered prayers, suffering, and waiting.

there is hope. Far before there was any game, you were already given a name. Here’s what I mean. We’ve heard all about our fall in the Garden of Eden and humanity’s so-called ‘original sin,’ but sin isn’t what was original to us. Before sin, we were created in glory by a Father who assigned us a destiny and gave us a name. When we fell down, He chose to join us in our descent, coming low to bear a cross so that the power of sin would be broken and we could be restored to our created namesake.

their entire existence was marked by trust and intimacy. The God of Creation was their closest friend and they stood as co-equal partners in the midst of a thrilling privilege to rule on earth with Him. They had purpose. They were completely in love with one another, trusting the complimentary ways they partnered to cultivate the fullness of His Kingdom on earth:

It’s about the central glorious design of humanity. We were made to walk together. And, in our most primal moment of creation, we stood unashamed. There was no need to cover our weakness. There was no room for competition. There was no place we needed to run and hide. We were naked and unashamed.

The serpent was proposing that we would be able to attain the position, prestige, and possessions of our God; that we deserved to become gods of our own destiny and not need God anymore. It was this fruit that we ate. Our fall in the Garden wasn’t an act of ignorance, nor was it some misguided naive attempt at greater intimacy. It was an act of insurrection borne out of hearts that had become entitled.

In all of our ancient ancestor’s stories, notice the common thread: they didn’t abandon religion. They merely redefined and weaponized it, calling upon the name of God to baptize their own agendas.

The road of sin always ends in despair instead of delight and in anger in place of awe, because you and I make tremendous children, but terrible compasses! God alone is our anchor. It is only when His Name, His Word, His Promise, and His Presence are elevated as our treasure that we will ever experience hope. The system of sin is built to get us to shift our gaze and to lose our days playing the game of shame, or entitlement, or both. And our enemy doesn’t care which way we minimize the Cross. He will gladly take us focusing on the mirror to bury ourselves in shame and regret, or to spend our lives comparing to and blaming everyone else. As long as we remain on the throne of our lives, it doesn’t matter which way we flip the coin.

Shame and entitlement are the illegitimate inheritance of the orphan spirit that have been sent to keep our feet from walking with God and others.

He calls us “Beloved.” Love precedes our fall. Love purchased our way home. And love still prevails in whatever moment you presently find yourself.

the animal a King sits on reveals the kingdom He sets upon you.

Further, this King came once and for all to show that He is our means of production. Where we are hungry, He says, “take and eat the bread of life.” Where we are dying of thirst, He offers, “I am the living water. You may drink and never thirst again.” Jesus’ first royal declaration in the city walls was to challenge the age-old system of us trying to be our own provider and sustainer.

For every woman who had been trapped for centuries under glass ceilings, Jesus said, “Come unto me.” For every child who was excluded until ‘one day when you’re older,’ Jesus said, “unless you have faith like a child you cannot enter the Kingdom!” To the foreigner, He appeared to show their God was “not far off, as some have supposed.” And to the sick, the blind, the lame, the demonized, and the hopeless, again and again He sought them out so that they would know for the rest of time: “The Kingdom has come for you!” The King would bear our burdens and His Kingdom would welcome the last, the lost, the least, the lonely, and the leper. But Jesus’ undoing of a broken system wasn’t quite complete. There was one final scene that would go down as one of the most obscure in the entirety of the Bible.

fig leaves,

Jesus led shame, striving, and entitlement into a systems failure.

And we have to uproot every last vestige of smug certainty, categorizing and separating, and the narcissism we’ve allowed to cloak itself in religious language and priestly garments and together, throw it in the sea. The King has come. Hosanna! Lord, save us!

“Jesus, I reject shame. I am who You say I am: Beloved. Chosen. Filled. Loved. I reject entitlement. Who am I that You would choose me? You are Good and You have been good to me. You are my portion and You alone are enough for my heart. I refuse to empower anything or anyone else. I have You. I am satisfied. And I am home! Fill me today to speak shame off of people. Convict me in any place I am seeing others or speaking about them in a way You aren’t. I want to agree with heaven. Fill me with joy and confidence to remove mountains between people and You. Amen!”

Satan is the original narcissist. There are three words in the Bible used to signify and identify the devil: the accuser, the devil, and satan. First, the word translated accuser in the Bible is from the Greek, katēgoreō. The enemy is the categorizer, the labeller. This word means to “reduce someone’s worth by defining them according to boxes and categories.”

This is more than a dude with red horns and a pitch fork whom we can blame all of our problems on. The demonic is a system of thought that is rooted in pride, aimed at enticing humanity to make our entire worlds about ourselves, so that we release brokenness upon the world instead of beauty. The devil loves to get us to stop seeing faces and to reduce people down to stances we can categorize, talk about, and oppose. Every moment, you and I are either playing the game or joining our Savior to tear the system down. There is no middle ground. The game is being played on every corner of the globe among every race, age, background, and political persuasion. The enemy baits those on the right side of the aisle and the left with equal fervency. And this is nothing new. I often hear people say, “Well, the world’s just getting worse and worse and worse…we’re going to hell in a handbasket (whatever in the world that means)!” If you have developed a view that the world is sinking and we’re just waiting for a heavenly Uber to fly us outta here, I want to tell you two reasons I believe that is just not true. The first is that Jesus already rode into town on a donkey declaring a new era where the rightful King is making everything new. In Matthew 6, He didn’t teach us to pray, “Save us from hell one day,” but instead “Your kingdom come today on earth as it is in heaven” (emphasis added). Second, the effect of sin on the human heart is the same today as when we fell. The depth of our b...

We trade our rights for His peace, His presence, and in being held in the pursuit of His wraparound love. From this place, we lose the need to be understood or celebrated or to protest when we are not. We are finally secure, settling our worth in the secret place alone. The joy of our hearts on good days and bad, in plenty and in want is just to be with Jesus.

Jesus is saying the defining mark of His Church is that she will move to every place hell attempts to set up camp and when she arrives, the enemy will have no choice but to flee. The work of the Church is the continual eviction of the kingdom of darkness in her city.

And we will never advocate for people’s transformation while we are accusing them.

Wherever it is hard to forgive, remember how much He has forgiven you. And He delights to do it! Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is simply releasing a debt from your hands (which are inadequate to judge) into God’s. It’s saying, “God, here’s what was stolen from me. You saw it. You know all about it, including all I don’t know. I lay down every self-righteous weapon I possess and ask You to return to my heart what was stolen, however and wherever You see fit. It isn’t my debt anymore. My God will supply all of my needs. I release their heart to You.”

Blessing moves beyond the passive work of releasing debts into the constructive work of building others up. It is the divine imagination that envisions what people can become as God takes up residence in their heart, and then does everything in your power to bring this image to reality.

We fool ourselves into believing that pausing to share opinions about loving our neighbor as ourselves is the same thing as courageously emptying ourselves to do it. We signal virtue where love demands we sacrifice for it.

Love isn’t love until it actually does something about the brokenness in the place it resides.

When you love, you aren’t swayed by what others think because you are only thinking about the needs of the one you love.

But blessing and protecting someone because they abide by your rules or love you back isn’t agape love. It’s merely insurance protecting our own investments. And Jesus said even the pagans know how to do that. When it comes to the foundational way Jesus called us to follow through, we don’t get a safety net. Love costs us. And sometimes the cost of love is pain, grief, and heartbreak. Love means laying down our lives:

If it doesn’t yet cost us, it isn’t yet love. Love lays down its life and we cannot do this if we haven’t first found our lives in Him. If we’re still trying to secure ourselves, we can’t possibly love our neighbor with self-emptying love. This isn’t a condemnation, but an invitation.

For all of those lamenting how bad the world is getting, may I suggest to you that our greatest hindrance to revival isn’t all of the sin they’ve been holding, but the love that we’ve been hoarding?

When love is the only law of the land, every place our foot steps is our mission field. And every face we encounter becomes a resting place for His love.

We don’t need to look for more opportunities to share God’s love. Our real challenge is in discerning where to slow down and plant roots for long term transformation.

The overwhelming emphasis on stranger evangelism using intellectual defenses of the faith in the absence of incarnational ministry amounts to nothing more than “Christian Drive-By’s.” We place great emphasis on ‘being bold enough’ to memorize proselytizing presentations apart from relationships. But here’s the deal: Jesus didn’t just blow through town to recite the Romans Road or to leave a tract on the urinal of your life. He bankrupted heaven to be born as a baby, to grow, and then to spend a lifetime on the slow road of presence. He patiently and painstakingly pursued you and me. And today, His Holy Spirit fills and guides us every moment.

But I take issue with the sons and daughters of God abdicating our universal invitation to become lifestyle missionaries in favor of firing polarizing and impersonal “Jesus bullets” at people as we drive full speed through their town on our way to somewhere else.

But if there are no tangible places and faces where you and I put down roots to carry patient love that preaches the Gospel better than any presentation, we will miss our universal missional calling. Loving everybody, everywhere means we have to start today with somebody, somewhere. And that cannot happen unless we slow to the pace of walking with others.

We do not need more training strategies for how to share our faith. We just need to slow down enough to actually see people the way heaven sees them and to pursue them the way the Father pursues them. When we do, I promise, there won’t be enough seats in churches to hold the beloved who’ve begun to find rest in their Father!

the only thing God ever made that He said wasn’t good was for you and I to walk alone (Genesis 2:18).

It is a common occurrence to sit with a precious but struggling son or daughter of God who shares that while they have many friendly people in their life with whom they share a hobby, workspace, or the banter of small talk, they don’t feel they really have any core friends who regularly see and pursue them. They express restlessness at the lack of a place to belong. They are lonely. At the same time, these are almost always the same people who tell me they are “just too busy” to join a small group, ministry team, or even attend church regularly. Chalking their struggles up to God’s injustice, their brokenness, or a problem with the church, most don’t stop to consider a far more obvious truth. We’ve positioned our lives at a pace that is not conducive for building deep friendships. We spend 38 days a year staring at a screen in third person, but have lost the relational rhythms of building roots with actual people.

On every continent, at every moment, for every person; The totality of creation is crying out wonders of God you and I don’t yet know, and we’re gonna miss it if we keep running through His library believing it is our job to teach and not to learn. “Shh! Be Quiet!”

Childish faith is seen most clearly by the following identifying marks: befriending scarcity, expecting conformity, and demanding certainty. I

If you and I will only trust the God we can tame, His mystery will become our misery, because our security will reside in our certainty.

Childlike faith, on the other hand, believes that our God has chosen to paint His glory everywhere.

Childlike faith is opening our eyes to the wonder of seeing our God everywhere and wherever He shows us a new dimension, choosing to add that to our worldview. In doing this, our capacity increases and we grow up into His image. This kind of faith is okay with God’s revelation being a run on sentence that at times seems like a contradiction.

The ditch of suspicion refers to the action of critically alienating an entire population based on preconceived conclusions or prior experiences with one or a few from that group. We walk in suspicion regarding race, class, nationality, and gender. I find that we especially do this with the generation coming before or behind us. We see it in the term “generation gap,” which should alarm us as our enemy is the divider who would love nothing more than to rob the transformative power of legacy God intended to pass down from one generation to the next.