Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection

by Edward T. Welch

All this, of course, took place before we were born, which begins to explain why shame doesn’t always have a clear starting date in our lives. We experience shame because we have ancestors who did something shameful and we are connected to them. We didn’t have to do anything to be contaminated by the family traditions. We just had to be born. Yet, once we are born into this fami...

Please don’t think this means that your shame is essentially a result of your own sin. We have all sinned; no one can deny that. But all sins are not necessarily shameful sins—at leas...

Scripture distinguishes between shame that comes from our own actions and shame that comes from the actions of others. If you really want to know cleansing and acceptance, you should distinguish between them too.

For now, what things have you done that you prefer to keep private? What things in your life do you insist on keeping secret? That’s where we will find the shame that is attached to what we do.

We turn from those we think will damage our reputation and we turn toward those we think will enhance it. We identify with a rock star, a fraternity, or a club because we want to be connected to something we find prestigious.

You might believe them because their anger is confident, and confident people are hard to disagree with.

When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, they were not separated from other people. At least they had each other. Hagar’s shame is more extreme. She is unwanted and excluded by others and she is sent into exile alone. Yet the message of her story is surprising and unmistakable: In the desert, she learns that God cares for the marginalized, the oppressed, and the outcast—for her.

Shame’s hold over you leads you to believe you don’t deserve to be rid of shame. As a result, you treat hope as if it were a contaminated substance.

Instead, try a counterintuitive approach to escape shame. Try changing the subject so it is more about God than about your shame. The basic idea is to focus on the matchless worth of the Lord God and then get connected to him.

These words are exactly what you need. They say that God is the better King. He invites you to his kingdom. He is faithful to you because of his love, not your worthiness. He loves us not because we are lovable but because he is love. And, in this particular passage, he is talking to scoundrels who are certainly no better than you.

The character of God is the basis for our connection to him, not our intrinsic worth. Self-worth, or anything we think would make us acceptable to God, would suit our pride but it has the disturbing side-effect of making the cross of Jesus Christ less valuable. If we have worth in ourselves, there is no reason to connect to the infinite worth of Jesus and receive what he has done for us. So if you feel unworthy of God’s love, you can turn in one of two directions. You can turn inward, in which case you are looking for a little self-worth to bring to the Lord, and that is pride. Or you can turn to him and discover that he has a heart for the unworthy. He pursues those who, like Hagar, have no glory or honor in themselves.

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6).

Both our actions and our associations make us unclean, and uncleanness doesn’t belong in his kingdom. That doesn’t mean the unclean are unwelcome, but it means God must do something for them before they can enter his presence.

The unclean were cut off from other people. They were untouchable. They had to be sent outside the camp. To re-enter the community they needed to be cleansed, sometimes by offering animal sacrifices. This is an ancient way of thinking, to be sure, but if you know shame, it makes perfect sense: people can be unclean. What you may not have anticipated is the fact that the unclean could return to the community.

You already know that this land of the clean exists. Your sense is that most people live there and you never will. You are a crab (an unclean animal), and a crab can’t suddenly morph into a cow (a clean animal). You assume that there is no path between the two, only thick, impenetrable walls. And you are right. You can’t simply decide to walk over to the clean part of town. But you can do something.

In the Old Testament you went to the temple, the symbolic place of God’s presence on earth, and you brought whatever sacrifice you could afford. The way of cleanness always went through the temple. If you couldn’t afford much, there was no reason to worry. You didn’t have to bring a high-class sacrifice. An ordinary pigeon would do. The cost of the sacrifice wasn’t the critical matter. The important thing was the shedding of blood. Sounds barbaric, but the Old Testament was reminding us that there was a significant cost involved in moving from unclean to clean. You didn’t have to pay it, but it still had to be paid. That sacrifice might be accompanied by the sprinkling of water. Maybe you would wash your clothes too. Then you were clean. You could go back with everyone else, have free access to the temple, and no one would either stare at you or completely ignore you.

Would you do this if you had the opportunity? Would you go to the temple and have the sacrifice made on your behalf? Yes or no? If yes, keep reading. If no, you still think you are too disgusting to receive cleansing and acceptance. Maybe you feel like you have to punish yourself a little longer—a kind of self-imposed exile: “Bad girl, go to your room and you can’t have supper.” Be careful—lie alert. The truth is that God himself gave this system to ...

You could put it this way. If you were an Old Testament Israelite, you could make up your own system to make yourself clean, which would be ineffective and silly. Or you could a...

If you are still reluctant, there could be one other explanation. You are plain stubborn and ticked off. You believe there has been an injustice done against you, and God didn’t do much about it. Now you face a stalemate. You can’t win, but you don’t want to resign. To resign is humbling. Sometimes we are willing to be unclean if it allows us to indulge a good snit. But, though you feel stuck, you can be sure that God isn’t. He is the one who makes the first move. He w...

He is holy and anything he declares uniquely his is also holy.

Granted, every created thing is his, but certain things are set apart as his possessions or, to put it more intimately, his treasured possessions (Deuteronomy 26:18).

To come into the King’s courts, you had to be clean; to come into his presence you had to be made holy.

Holy means that a person or object is uniquely devoted to God. The person or thing belongs to God and thereby shares in his holiness. It is set apart in the best way. While the unclean were set apart because of their contamination, those made holy were set apart because of their special relationship to the Holy One. They were uniquely honored.

Here we see that the entire people of Israel were called to be holy. They were called by God to be his holy nation. God’s mission was to possess a people and make them his own. It’s enough to make you wonder if this exclusive category of the holy is less dangerous and more attainable than we think.

In the New Testament the journey from common to holy is called sanctification.

We aim to be holy and enjoy the presence of the Holy One. That is the deepest answer to the problem of shame.

If you moved toward her and tried to converse with her she was certain that you were only showing pity, which made her feel even more like an outcast. She heard about cleanness and uncleanness, and she could hear little slivers of hope in the possibility of feeling normal, being whole, without self-consciousness. But it didn’t go very deep because she didn’t feel contaminated or dirty. She felt disgusting, and a bath couldn’t help. Her shame came from her sense that she was ugly—so ugly that people would either stare or turn away. If you feel ugly you will experience shame. The two are bound together. She needed a makeover that would bring beauty. Without it she didn’t believe there could be any possible acceptance and love.

What we know so far is that humans were created naked and unashamed; they made themselves naked and ashamed. As a result they ran and hid. They did not want to be seen. God’s response was to cover them with animal skins.

Glory, beauty, and consecrate are all words that identify things that are holy. They belong to God, and everything that belongs to him is made beautiful by association.

First, these priests were flawed human beings, just like you. They were men who had done wrong and they came from a family line that had all the problems of the worst modern families. The point is, you don’t have to be perfect to be made holy.

The point of cleansing is not simply that we can be clean and acceptable in the community. The deeper reason for the cleansing is that the Holy One can then come close, so close that he touches us.

Other people may indeed be dangerous, but God can never be rightly understood if you are looking at him as if he were someone else, especially someone who has damaged you. To do so is to ignore the refrain of “Holy, holy, holy” that echoes through the universe.

Pause again. Are you still under the delusion that you can clean yourself?

Ironically, our desire to clean ourselves actually minimizes the problem of uncleanness. It assumes we can give ourselves a good enough scrubbing to get a little holy before we meet the Holy One. But beware of any approach to uncleanness that doesn’t rely on the cleansing power of God. The reality is that unclean people can’t wash anything. Only the Holy One can make us holy.

The Holy One is not human. The triune God is not human. Don’t limit God’s character by your expectations of what a decent human king might do.

A delusional person can study someone else’s perspective without ever adopting it. She opted, instead, for a better plan. In humility and faith, evidenced by how she confessed her tendency to believe her interpretation of God rather than his own self-revelation, she submitted to what God said about himself,

Hope is a steely confidence that God is in this story of shame and he is up to something good. Like Isaiah, you might not understand the details of how the Lord will put shame to death, but he has revealed his character to you and that is enough. Contrary to your expectations, he has a unique affection for the marginalized and discarded.

Yes, Jesus was royalty. Your life actually depends on it. To discard shame, you must be connected to someone highly honored. To this end, both Matthew and Luke highlight his royal lineage. Yet Matthew also makes a point to include Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, embarrassing limbs on the family tree that others might want to prune. One became pregnant by her father-in-law, one was an outsider and prostitute, the other was an outsider who was reduced to nothing. Plus, they were all women, who didn’t have much worth to begin with in those days.

Exiles have no privileges or reputation. And of all the places to go into exile, Jesus was taken to the land that had once enslaved his people. It would be like a Jew fleeing to Germany to escape persecution while the memory of Nazi atrocities was still alive.

The best you can say about Jesus’ geographic origin is that he was a commoner. Common and poor people saw him as one of their own, while the ruling class thought he should stay in his place.

Scripture is giving Jesus’ credentials to you. He is a commoner and an outcast who knows you and identifies with you, so you can identify with him. He is also the King who takes you to the heights of honor and privilege.