Repenting and Rejoicing - Romans 7:21-8:2

2007-07-08 Canaan message

Good morning church. I hope you were able to get some rest and relaxation during the recent 4th of July holiday, recognizing not just the freedoms we have as citizens of this country, but more so enjoying the freedoms we have access to as citizens of God's Kingdom. I'll touch on this a bit more, later in today's message.

My original plan for this message was to follow up with Pastor Dan’s message from last week about “Pressing On Towards the Goal”, stopping to evaluate how you are doing in your spiritual journey as a disciple of Christ at the halfway point of the year. To that end, I provided some questions of reflection for you in the bulletin, as well as an insert covering the various lessons taught in sermons this year, in case there are any lessons that you need to revisit. I’d encourage you to take some time and let God speak to you in your spiritual journey so far.

As I was prepping, however, I felt God leading me to go in a little bit of a different direction. I want to talk a bit today on the topic of guilt and shame. A heavy topic, I know, but this happens to be a theme that God has been working out in my life over the first half or 2007.

Our church’s theme for this year is learning how to Rest, Renew, and Revive, where the overarching goal is to see how Jesus draws us in with his invitation lay our own worldly burdens down, and to take on the yoke of discipleship to find rest for our souls. Through spiritual disciplines such as prayer, reading the Word, fellowship, fasting, service, and giving, we have avenues to live out the love relationship with God that we were designed for. Then, living out of this God-given restful spirit that is deeply embedded within us, we can experience the transforming power of God in our attitudes, in the tasks of our lives, and in our relationships.

In my own life, I’ve tried to practice this spiritual rest as often as possible this year. I’ve tried to give Jesus the first thought of each day, and to have conversations with God throughout the day at work and at home. I’ve been able to see some fruits of this – such as gaining more discernment in decisions I’ve had to make about ministry and the use of my time, and also having some opportunities to talk about this kind of personal relationship with God with some friends of mine who aren’t Christian.

However, in this experience God has also been showing me that one way I can be blocked from experiencing the fullness of this love relationship with Him that I’ve been designed for is because of shame. In a psychological study entitled “Facing Shame”, two therapists defined the difference between guilt and shame this way: "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person." To repeat – guilt a reaction to our actions, shame is a feeling about our very self.

Throughout my life as a Christian, for every wrong thing that I’ve done to another person or every sin that I’ve committed against God, I’ve internalized the feeling of guilt that would naturally arise so that it moves from being a regret for my action into a belief about the nature of who I am. I sometimes fall into the trap of believing that God couldn’t still love someone like me who fails repeatedly - or at the very least, makes up for his shortcomings by performing more spiritual activities, or serving more, or bringing more people to Christ.

Have you ever felt this way, or found yourself falling into a similar trap? Have you ever wondered why God wired human beings with the ability to feel guilt, and what purpose it could possibly serve to enable us to have a love relationship with God? Today I’d like to take a look at a few teachings from the Bible about the nature of guilt and shame, what repentance looks like, and why it is important to our ability to mature spiritually to have a right understanding of this aspect of human nature.

The first point to understand about guilt and shame is that the capacity for shame is built into every human being, but it was not originally intended that way. See Genesis 2:25 – after God creates the world, he creates man and woman. This verse says that they “were both naked, and they felt no shame.” There’s a perfect vulnerability and innocence that exists between man and woman, and between God and mankind. To illustrate this in modern terms, picture a toddler running around naked while his mortified mother runs after him with his clothes. The child has no idea that being naked is shameful, he just knows that he’s running around and having the time of his life. It is not until chapter 3 where, after the fall of man, they realize that they are naked, and they rush to try and cover up their shame with fig leaves. So since then, every person has the capacity to feel guilt due to our actions or behavior, and when we internalize that feeling to believe it about ourselves, then we have this shame to deal with.

The second point I want to make about guilt and shame is that often, we feel like we need to make some kind of restitution – we want to "pay back our offense" somehow. I'm sure you've felt it, or seen it in your parents or something - when you receive an unexpected gift or done a favor by someone else, you need to repay that person. Similarly if you screw up, it's not enough to apologize and accept forgiveness, but we feel like we need to make up for what we did. Now, don't get me wrong - in many cases it can be good and proper to try and repair the damage that we cause. However, the tragedy is that even if the offended party has forgiven us, until we make the attempt at paying it back, we don't feel like we're forgiven - we impose some kind of debt that stays with us, a debt that the forgiver doesn't want to impose on us.

For example, there was a time almost ten years ago where I was driving down to LA for a vacation with a car full of friends, while leading another car full of friends. Since I was speeding, and the other driver was trying to stay with me, when I saw the police lights flash behind me I had the double guilt of not just getting a ticket myself, but also getting my friend into trouble. Despite the fact that she promptly forgave me and forgot the incident, since mistakes happen, I ended up dwelling on that incident for the duration of the vacation, trying to think of ways to make it up, and preventing me from really being able to enjoy the vacation. On our way back up, I approached my friend to offer to pay for the ticket/driving school. She was stunned. "You're still thinking about that?" she asked. For no good reason, I had robbed myself of the enjoyment of the vacation. So again, the trap we can fall into is not being able to embrace forgiveness because we feel like our guilt or shame isn’t “paid back” in some way.

The final point I want to make about guilt and shame is the feeling that God must not want us back because of our repeated failures. Try as we might, we can’t help but see God as a kind of Cosmic Umpire who grants us only a few chances of repentance. In Luke 7:48, the story of the Jesus’ encounter with the sinful woman who anoints him with perfume, he says, “Your sins are forgiven.” In our minds, we have added the “If you sin again, though, that’s strike 2. 1 more sin after that, and I’m afraid you’re outta here!”

Those who have been in dating relationships may recognize this fear. When there is a fight, or an offense committed against one side, there will often be the accompanying anxiety that maybe this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back – that the sum total of all previous offenses, even if they are repented of, will cause the relationship to break.

Seeing repeated failures in our relationship with God can easily lead to the attitude, “What’s the point? Why keep trying? Won’t I just keep failing and acquiring more and more guilt?” As the famous American thinker Homer Simpson once said, “You tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”

So to reiterate, we are all built with the capacity for guilt and shame, we often feel like we need to do something about it to pay it back, and we believe that repeated failures can eventually lead to the exhaustion of God’s or another person’s patience and they will kick us out of their presence.

How do I reconcile John 10:10, Jesus' promise that those who come to him "will have life, and have it to the full", with the fact that it seems like my life is always in catch-up mode with all the busyness there is, and on top of that I either feel helpless or ashamed that I am not the Christian I should be?

The apostle Paul knew this dichotomy very well. Please turn with me to the book of Romans, chapter 7. Romans is considered by many Christians to be the most theologically-oriented books of the Bible. Here, the Apostle Paul has just spent several paragraphs writing about this very conflict – trying hard to be a Christian, but invariably failing. Let’s pick it up in verse 21:

21So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24What a wretched man I am!

The Apostle Paul, who might very well have been the greatest Christian in history, struggled with the same issues many of us struggle with today. No matter how hard we try, by our own strength we can’t win the battle between the mind and heart that want to follow God, and the flesh that pulls us to earthly lusts. In his proclamation, “What a wretched man I am!” it sure sounds like he’s feeling aspects of the guilt and shame I mentioned earlier as being built into every person. But moving on with verse 24…

Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. 1(but) Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

Note that in the original text, there was no chapter break here. It’s apparent from context that the thoughts of chapter 7 are intended to continue into the beginning of chapter 8. Here are a few lessons that we can learn, some that I’ve gleaned from Pastor Ray Stedman of PBC and some others that I observed in the text:

First, God is not angry with the struggle that we have. He knows we will try, and sometimes fail, to manage our lives in a way that honors him; he knows that we will sometimes fall prey to temptation. However, we see here in Romans that Paul’s struggle with his sin, the guilt that he’s feeling, causes him to run to Jesus. God intends for the natural feeling of guilt and shame that is inevitably a part of every person’s life to cause us to run to him because he is the only one who can do something about it! Rather than hiding behind the fig leaves of our shame, in this love relationship that he wants with his people, he designs even guilt to be used as a way for us to return to him.

Rather than the Umpire waiting to call us out when we use up our strikes, the illustration of this struggle is more akin to that of a father watching his child take his first steps. There are many babies around Canaan now, many of whom we’ve seen learn to walk before our very eyes. Of course they’re going to be clumsy! Of course they’re going to fall and maybe bang their heads on a railing or scrape their knees! But do you see their parents running over to them and yelling at them for being dumb enough to fall? Of course not! They pick them up, dust them off, maybe kiss a scrape, encourage them, and show them how to do it right. God is not angry with our struggles and failures when we confess them and repent of them; rather, he delights in these attempts to walk because our struggles drive us to Christ for help.

Second, for anyone who has ever felt guilt or shame, verse 1 of chapter 8 may be the most beautiful words you can hear – For those who are in Christ Jesus, there is now NO CONDEMNATION. No condemnation! None! There is no rejection by God of those who are in Christ. There is nothing we can do to “pay it off” when there wasn’t any condemnation in the first place. We don’t need to fear that he will leave us, because of how bad our sin is or how often we fail, because we can remain in Christ and not be rejected by God.

Finally, we have the hope of victory – Romans 8:2 says, “Through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” One day, this struggle will be no more. So for those who are in Christ Jesus, there is no condemnation for our struggles today, and one day these struggles will cease as we experience the freedom of the Spirit of life setting us free from sin and death.

So how do we make sure that we are in Christ? The Bible teaches about a concept called “repentance.” Talking about repentance could easily be an entirely new message, but simply defined, this means admitting our wrong, feeling sorrow for it, and returning to the love relationship with God that we are designed for. Whether or not you already count yourself a follower of Christ, the feeling of guilt and shame that we all have can, on its own, cause us to live very narrow, dissatisfying lives marked by the fear of doing anything because we might do something wrong, lacking hope that there might be more to life than trying to avoid shame. However, as we’ve learned today, the guilt and shame of wrongdoing can, at its best, cause us to run to God and restore that relationship with him that he wants with us, and in our hearts, we want with him. God turns this seemingly destructive, universal quality of guilt into the motivator which drives us back to him.

Combining this idea of repentance with the lessons from Romans helps us address the other issues of guilt and shame. First, we don’t have to impose a debt on ourselves to act as payment for an offense against God. When we repent, we have already been forgiven. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, remember? It is a tragedy when we deny ourselves the enjoyment of God’s presence because we think we haven’t “earned it”, the truth is we haven’t earned it because we can’t - but he gives it to us because he desires this love relationship with us.

Second, we can rest assured that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, and nothing we can do to make God love us less. As Pastor Tim Keller puts it, “We are more despicable than we ever dared believe, yet we are more loved than we ever dared hope.” We don’t have to fear strike 3 from the Cosmic Umpire when we are in Christ, because we are assured that God loves us and our destination is secure. We can venture out in the freedom to live our lives with excellence, we can fail without having to fear, and we can continue to repent and return to God with love and rejoicing - without thinking that God will run out of forgiveness to give.

Finally, we have the best blessing of all – the opportunity to experience the kingdom of God in the here and now. Brother Lawrence, in his book “Practicing the Presence of God”, wrote that as he worked and went about his daily business, he would begin by asking God to grant him the grace to continue in His presence. He would continue the conversation continually, offering all his actions to him. Periodically he would examine himself, give thanks to God for any good work done, ask for God’s pardon for any bad work or deviation from the conversation with God, and then immediately continue to enjoy God’s presence. He said, “By rising after my falls, and by frequently renewed acts of faith and love, I come to a state where it would be difficult for me not to think of God.”

We won’t have time to go into this in depth this morning, but I encourage you to find some time to go through Psalm 51, which is David’s prayer of repentance after committing multiple sins due to his adultery with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11. I’m going to invite the worship team to come up for a few final songs of response, including singing through this Psalm. I know that history shows that by Wednesday of this week, you will probably have forgotten this message, but I pray that God might touch you during this time to be able to repent if you need – and to rejoice because he gives you the reason to.

Prayer:
Father, we thank you that you gave the life of your Son to pay the penalty of death for our wrongdoing. We thank you that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. As we continue to learn and practice what it means to rest in you and be renewed and revived by you, we pray that if we ever feel any guilt, that we would run to you and repent of our wrongdoing. Then we will be able to rejoice in you, the God who loves us and welcomes us back each time. In the name of Jesus, Amen.