Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change

by Matt Chandler

If you want to know who you really are, watch what happens when you interact over time with other people.

when you’re dealing with the truth, that’s when you can actively work toward real change.

Because without going down into your heart to see what’s truly wrong—even if you sort of succeed at stopping the drinking or abusing or whatever—you’ll just trade out one addiction for another.

That’s what comes from “mowing over.”

covering it up.

“Covering up” is a second barrier that threatens to hinder the progress of our sanctification. It’s the “How you doing; I’m fine” approach to handling just about everything that comes at us in life,

Social media—as if we needed another way of masking ourselves behind these heavily edited, skin-lotioned personas of ours—has basically tossed us the keys to the family car.

why this obsession with pretending to be something for other people, who are pretending to be something for us?

Covering up is just dumb. You’re not gaining a thing by doing it, except keeping yourself enslaved to your secrets.

Sanctification will always be a process.

guilt and shame.

While both of them do indicate the falling short of some kind of standard, the one that guilt fails to meet is more often a clear moral code, a legality. The standard that shame fails to meet, on the other hand, goes much deeper to the core of who we really are. Our identity.

feelings of guilt if you don’t do something, as if you’re breaking a rule or law.

You feel shame for not truly being the person you claim or want to be.

Guilt is more about what we do; shame is more about who we are. It’s important to see this distinction.

Guilt (robbing us of innocence) and shame (robbing us of honor) are the double helix that creates the DNA of our worst behavior.

If we do something we shouldn’t, if we participate in something we know we don’t have any business being around, then we’re guilty. Plain and simple. And obviously, something needs to be done about that.

For instance, if you’re a person who’s wired to feel guilty unless you’re constantly busy and doing things, never able to slow down and experience Sabbath rest with a clear conscience, then you’re the one setting the standard that you’re breaking. Or if your husband comes home complaining about how dirty and disorganized the house is, after you’ve been wrangling kids and picking bubble gum out of somebody’s hair all day, then he’s the one setting the standard that makes you feel like a bad wife.

We can feel shame for all sorts of random things.

illegitimate shame. Nor have you done anything shameful yourself just because someone has taken advantage of your innocence and vulnerability as a sick way of meeting their own distorted needs.

It can make you want to cope with it by covering and hiding.

Why are we so ashamed of ourselves, of these things? The answer, really, is pretty simple. Shame is deeply rooted in identity. And the “self-ideal” we create for ourselves can often incorporate a lot of expectations that simply aren’t included in God’s ideal for us. We can exalt the wrong kind of perfect. We can select the wrong kind of heroes.

Guilt and shame

They will stir up sinful thoughts within you, will tell you how you’re supposed to feel, will cause chaos to spiral around you, and will make you want to do just about anything to stop the sting of that clawing sensation—especially

It usually starts with the surfacing of anger—

Let that frustration of guilt and shame keep building, and one heart becomes unable to hold it all in. From here we tend to gravitate

First, we feel as though other people are justified in seeing us as rather worthless too. So we begin treating ourselves cheaply, not taking care of our bodies and our diet, being casual with our haunts and our habits, making it easier to be taken advantage of and looked down on.

secondly (or simultaneously), the same insecurities can also express themselves as anger turned outward. In rages and short fuses.

If we can’t be happy, then no one else deserves to be happy. If we can’t feel good about ourselves, we’ll make sure we’re giving others some mighty good reasons why they don’t have ...

Anger has now turned into abuse—abuse of others, ab...

And then from bad to worse, because abuse also has a nasty way of coupling together with lust and sexual immorality,

One of the main reasons why people go off the rails into sexual flirtation, affairs, and pornography is because guilt and shame have so cheapened what they see of themselves, they lose the ability to see the true value in anyone else—people who’ve been fashioned by God with intrinsic worth, not to give pleasure to us, but to find pleasure in Him.

“Where is your faith?” (Luke 8:25). Jesus always asks the perfect question.

God has forgiven us “all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13–14).

Let’s just say there’s a gospel app for that. For all of that. The cancelling of your debt by the forgiving blood of the Lamb means the guilt from all your sin is gone—past, present, and future—as well as all your reasons for allowing guilt to crank itself up

You’ve been pardoned. You’re free. You’ve been given innocence.

Nothing drives away shame any faster than the thought of being fully known and yet still loved, enjoyed, and delighted in by the one who knows you the best.

shame begins to vanish when we realize we can be utterly open and confessional before our God as well as before others, especially our family of faith.

The best way to make sure that shame cannot grow in our hearts—and cannot by nature continue to grow into anger, abuse, and lust—is simply by not keeping any more secrets.

Secrets only lead to more shame.

Only one answer works: Through the adoptive nature of the gospel, they’ve realized they are fully known by a Father who fully delights in them. They’re not bragging about their shame; they’re bragging about a God who is greater than their shame.

The gospel gives it all. Justification for our guilt. Sanctification for deconstructing our false ideals. Adoption for the red face of our secret shame.

the source of their confident certainty was simply God alone.

So there is definitely such a thing as legitimate fear. Reasoned fear. Things to be properly disliked and avoided. But there are also many illegitimate fears, worries that contain no real substance or basis for belief except in the fretful reaches of our wild imaginations.

Yet every one of these fears—both the real and the imagined—give us some instructive information about ourselves. They tell us what we value most in life.

even to the children who live right here under our roof—any of them are capable of becoming an idol that drains away our trust in the sufficiency and sovereignty of God.

If we begin to drift spiritually in that direction, seeking to take over His job as best we can, our fears will become more and more unhealthy, more self-centered, more rooted in pride and presumption. And we’ll slide further away all the time from the trusting, contented place where His gospel invites our hearts to rest.

The bottom line underneath most of our fear and anxiety is that we simply don’t believe—don’t have faith—in the goodness of God.

To be a worrier means we don’t trust He’s going to provide for us, we don’t think He’s looking out for our best interests, we don’t feel convinced that He’s wise enough to know what to do for us, even if He does care and would do a better job of things if He could.

So ask yourself: Why don’t you trust Him, after all He’s done to save us from situations that are much more eternally impossible to untangle than any fears we could be facing today?