False Intimacy and True Covering: Sex, Shame, and the Gospel

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Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His Kingdom.

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0:00:22.6 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved. This episode is about shame, sex, and true intimacy. So let’s go! I want to share with you a talk by former Serge mentor Ruth Ann Batstone, a blessed memory. It comes from a marriage retreat that she and her husband Stu Batstone used to offer to churches. In fact, I recorded this talk when they came to my church that I was pastoring back in, I think, 2012 and it has stuck with me since then, and I hope it sticks with you. Stu and Ruth Ann are legends within the Serge community, and it’s an honor and pleasure to get to share some of their work with you today, and though Ruth Ann died a couple years ago, I want to say Stu if you’re listening, I want to offer you my deepest gratitude for the profound way that you and Ruth Ann have influenced and encouraged me as a pastor, how you’ve helped my marriage and the impact that you’ve had on establishing a culture of grace and freedom and vulnerability and courage and joy here at Serge. This talk is absolute gold, and though it was given at a marriage retreat, it’s not only for married folks. You’ll see. It’s bigger than that, and that’s why this episode may feel a little scary. It’s because it’s as if Ruth Ann looks straight through to the deepest places of our hearts, the places where we protect the most, the most vulnerable places, the places of shame. She grabs a hold of that and she points it out, and then she says, This is where you are so deeply loved by the God who sees you. I think you should listen to this over and over again, settle in with what Ruth Ann is offering, and you’ll discover deep hope in how you view yourself and in how you see your closest, most intimate human relationships, and how you learn to experience God as the only one who truly sees you and knows you and loves you. Psalm 34 says, “I sought the Lord, and He answered me. He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame.” Now, in a normal Grace at the Fray episode, I’ll pause halfway through the conversation so that we can pray together for our Serge missionaries that we at the headquarters here in Philadelphia are praying for each week, but I want to do that now so that you can settle in with Ruth Ann’s talk uninterrupted. This week, we’re praying for our missionaries in North Africa and Peru. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that You would bless these folks, guide them out of shame and into the truest intimacy of being known and loved by you. Give them joy in their work, in Your Kingdom, and the pleasure of Your joy as they follow You, give them wisdom and let Your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members and children and with the people that they serve, heal all sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, restore to them the joy of Your salvation, let Your Kingdom come and Your will be done in these places just as it is in Heaven. We pray in Your Name, amen, and without further adieu, Ruth Ann Batstone. 

0:03:44.6 Ruth Ann Batstone: This first talk is about shame and how it impacts intimacy and how it impacts the way that we think about ourselves, even before we come together in marriage. And then the second talk is one that Stu and I share, which is really a fun talk about sex and about how men and women are different. And then finally, Steve’s going to wrap he’s going to take all the little pieces together and talk about repentance and sort of so what’s hit your heart, and where might God be calling you to have to think and to act and to believe in a different way. So that’s the schedule for this morning. I always feel like this topic is a really tough one for a Saturday morning, so there is really not much to do but to just jump into it. But if you’re looking at your outline, you’re seeing that this session is called, “Nowhere to Hide: Marriage Without Fig Leaves.” That’ll give you something to imagine while we’re talking. You know, really, what we’re going to think about together a little bit is what intimacy is like in a fallen world and and in the word intimacy takes us right into sex. We think about sexual intimacy, but intimacy is something that we experience in more relationships than just our marriage. It has to do with a place where we’re really known, where someone really, really knows who we are, and it happens between women. It happens between men. It happens in families. And we live in a culture that’s so permeated with sexuality that sometimes that intimacy is just that word is really stuck in a sexual context. So we’re going to look a little bit this morning at what it means and how we can reclaim it as something that God offers for us to enjoy with him and with one another. There’s a huge focus on sex in our culture, it’s enormous. It’s everywhere but the result has been exactly the opposite of what God intended. A lot of sexuality without intimacy, without real intimacy. Sex separated from the spiritual component that God intended it to have. Pornography is a good example where sex and sex becomes disconnected from who we are, objectified on a screen. It’s a problem for men, it’s a problem for women. A number of years ago, I’m thinking it’s at least five or six Christianity today did a survey among women who read their magazines that were targeted at women, which at that time were four or five magazines, and their survey revealed that 34% of the readers of those magazines and newsletters, women, Christians, presumably, why else would they be reading that material, admitted to intentionally accessing internet pornography. This problem isn’t going to go away. It’s going to morph and change. It’s going to be a problem for your children and my grandchildren. And we can’t close our eyes to that problem. We really do have to understand that there’s something in our culture that has taken sex and made it an objectification and separated it from the intimacy that God intended. I think it’s also important, if we’re just going to stop for a minute to talk about pornography, and I’m going to lose my thing, I don’t think earrings and these were meant to coexist. There. I think it’s important, if we stop to think about pornography for a minute, that we realize that those of those people that you and I know, or maybe you and I, who have struggled with pornography, or who have been involved in pornography. They are not some strange, deranged people. They are normal human beings, just like you and just like me, who have lonely, empty hearts and are drinking from empty cisterns, who have moved away from the gospel of God’s grace, maybe even unknowingly, in the beginning, and it’s our responsibility to come to them with the gospel and the love of Jesus at the same time that we understand that we have our own addictions. We are addicted to work or money or sports or shopping or church because we want to fill up the emptiness in our hearts, and we do it in all kinds of different ways. Now, part of our problem with sexuality is that, because it’s such an intrinsic part of who we are, and because God has made it to be that way, we tend to think we can use it the way we want to. It belongs to us, and so we should be able to do whatever we want with it, and we want it to meet our needs and our desires, and we demand that it give us the payback that culture says we should have from it. We want it to give us identity. We want it to give us value. We want it to give us pleasure and the drive of our heart to fill up, the emptiness gets in the way of our really receiving from God, the beauty and the wonder of sexuality. And part of our problem is that we say I want what I want, and I should have it. So as both men and women, I think we have the ability to use sex to give us power and to protect us. But it wasn’t always like that, and if we took the time, which we won’t do, because you know that passage well. To go back and read the Genesis account of God’s creation and his creation of man and his creation of woman and his giving them to one another, we know that God took the man and the woman, the crown of all of his endeavor, and placed them in this amazing place and gave them the garden and said, here it’s yours. Enjoy it, work it, take care of it. And that place that God gave them, where they had the opportunity to explore intimacy on a level that we probably will never understand, was a place of rest. It was not. It was a place of utter rest. It was a home for their hearts. It was a place where they were protected and they had intimacy with God and intimacy with one another. But the foundation for that intimacy that they have, that they had, is the same foundation that we have. Intimacy is built on trust, and trust comes from a sense of safety and protection, and Adam and Eve had both of those pieces. It’s a good question for you to think about and to ask one another, do you know what it is that makes your spouse feel safe and protected, not just in a sexual context, but just in general? Do you know what it is that you can offer? Do you know what the words are? Do you know what the scene is that you can give to the one God has given to you that makes them feel protected and safe? Women need, we need a place where we have a sense that our hearts are cherished and enjoyed. But men, you guys need safety too, and sometimes I think it’s really about a place where you don’t always have to perform, and where you’re safe from complaints and criticism, which is very often the two things as wife that we give you most we know this instinctively, but we do just what Adam and Eve did, and that’s why this story is our story too. The safety and the intimacy of that place in Genesis 3 came from God’s command to them, and God’s command was pretty simple. He asked them to obey Him and to worship Him, and in that context of the beauty of that place, of the sinlessness of that place, of the intimacy of that place, Genesis says the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame, not the most curious thing. Why do we need to know that? Why is that part of the text there? Couldn’t we just have imagined that that was the case? Because when the story changed, they had to be clothed. But God wanted us to understand something. He wanted us to understand that in the context of obedience and trusting him and honoring him, there’s a place where nakedness doesn’t have shame attached to it. There was no shame for them when they were alone with their own bodies. There was no shame for them when they were together with one another, and there was no shame for either of them when they were naked and exposed in God’s presence. They were free, they were safe. They were at rest, and there was safety in their intimacy. But do you know that the story continues with the entrance of the villainous serpent, who just throws out this little by line and says, Did God really say and everything changed. It’s easy for us to think, why on earth did they do that? But we are Adams, and Eves through and through, Eve’s desire to take that fruit from the tree came from a heart that lusted for more. She lost the truth that God was good, and God was for her, and that God’s command for her was good, and she moved toward a promise that there was something beyond what God had promised. She listened to that serpent and came back with a heart response that said, what God has given isn’t enough. I’m missing out. It’s a lie that we hear all the time. It’s a lie that we hear in our marriages. I’m missing something I don’t have what Susie has. We don’t have what John and Kathy have. Something’s missing here, and I deserve it, and I’m going to get it. And so Eve, wanting to be like God, reached and took that fruit, and it took her in a direction far beyond anything she could imagine. She lost safety, she lost rest, and her heart, which had been created to live on the dependence and goodness of God, became independent and began to worship other things. And it’s at that point that shame entered creation. And so the first thing that we see about shame is that it destroys our capacity for worship. Just takes it right out from under us, because shame makes us self focused, and instead of being free to enjoy what God has given us, we start to focus on what we think we need. And we’re just like Eve, we go trying to find life on our own terms. We want to worship what we choose, and we seek our own satisfaction. And then when God exposes our hearts, we cover ourselves up and look for a place to hide. Shame destroys our thankfulness for God’s good gifts. You know, Paul talks about it in Romans 1. He says, we exchange the truth of God for a lie. And then he says you knew God, but you wouldn’t worship Him as God, or even give Him thanks. And you began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like, and the result is that your minds become dark and confused. And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever living God, you worshiped idols. Adam and Eve’s entrance into shame was the beginning or the end product. Probably you could look at it either way, of their idolatry, and they became central, and that’s what happens to us. None of us lives free from that destructive power, from their experience and the language of our hearts. The language of my heart becomes exactly the same. It’s I want, I deserve and I should have, and it can be 10 minutes more sleep or a new car or something in my house, or the way I want my kids to react. One time our daughter, Cara, came to visit us, she had just, I think she was, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a while back before she had children and had to think about what kind of vehicle to drive, and she pulled into the driveway with his gorgeous, brand new navy blue Volvo. So we went outside and looked at her car, and it was really beautiful, and it was fun that she had this great car. And the next morning, she was sleeping, and her car was behind mine, and I had to do an errand, and so I ran up and said can I use your car? Said, Sure, go ahead. I got in that car, and I sat behind the drive. I’ve never even desired a Volvo. I don’t even know if I’d ever driven one before. Sat in that car, turned it on, felt the seat warm up, listened to the radio, backed out of the driveway, turned the car around, and thought, why don’t I have a car like this? It was just like that. Just that fast. How is it? My daughter’s got one of these. I don’t have a car like this. I hadn’t even wanted the car 10 minutes earlier. We just shift right into that demand that we should get what we want. Shame is really powerful, and the shame was she had something better than I did. I’m the mom and she’s the kid. When we read the account of the fall. We also see pretty quickly the power of shame. So shame comes from a sense of exposure, from a sense of being exposed. You know what? There’s a new book. Well, it’s maybe six months old that I brought with me because I want you to see the copy, so you’ll remember it. Ed Welch, from CCEF, who has written many, many great books, has written a book called 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘶𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘙𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. It’s really a good book. Find a group to study it with. There are great questions at the end of every chapter. It will be disruptive. But here’s some of the things that Ed says in his book, first of all, about shame. He says it’s the deep sense that you are unacceptable because of something you did, something done to you or something associated with you, you feel exposed and humiliated. You’re disgraced because you acted less than human. You were treated as less than human, or you were associated with something less than human. And there were witnesses, real or imagined. There’s another way he describes it, shame connects three human experiences. One, you feel like an outcast. You don’t belong. Two, you feel naked when everyone else is walking around with their clothes on. You feel exposed and vulnerable because you feel like you’re seen and what others see is not pretty, or you feel unclean, something’s wrong with you, you’re dirty, even worse, you’re contaminated. There’s a difference between being a bit muddy and feeling like you harbor a deadly, contagious virus. And then he asked this question, how do we get dung on our faces, and he’s quoting a verse in the Old Testament that describes someone with dung on their face. He says, sometimes we put it there by our own shameful acts. More often someone throws it at us, or we touch someone who has it on himself. Maybe you grew up in a home where dung was thrown at you. When you hear dehumanizing, profanity laced epithets often enough, you will assume they are true and your self loathing remarks are really quotes from other sources. I think those are great definitions of different ways in which we come to shame, but, but shame, basically, is a sense of being exposed. It’s when we think someone else can see something about us. Here’s a good example. Let’s you’re on the way to go somewhere at let’s say you’re going to a wedding that’s pretty public, right? And you’re drinking Starbucks on the way, and it’s delightful, and there’s a bump in the road, and you spill it, and it goes on your suit, or it goes on your dress. What’s the first thing that you think of getting it out right? Because you don’t want to be exposed as someone who spilled their coffee. You are immediately focused on, how am I going to explain this stain on my pants? Because I might as well wear a sign that says I’m clumsy, and there’s a great example of shame in a very, very little way we feel exposed even before anyone notices. There’s a quote on page 10. I’m not going to read the whole thing, but I love this one line from Mike Mason’s book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘨𝘦. He says he’s talking about intimacy and how it exposes shame. And he says, Who cares to be really that well known by another person here it is who wishes to have the whole unexpurgated dossier of their lives opened up to close such close surveillance. But that is what marriage does. Marriage puts us in a place where the person with whom we live, the person we love, the person God has given to us, will know us in a way that no one else can and will know things about us that we don’t know about ourselves. The whole unexpurgated dossier of your life is on the table. Okay, it may take a few years, but it’s there, and suddenly it can be seen by somebody else, and it should be seen in that sense, marriage in a regular way, on a regular basis, exposes us for who we are. And what happens? We soon realize that this person that we love has an enormous capacity to enrich us and love us, but equal capacity to expose things about us that we’ve spent our entire lives hiding, and in that context, our desire to share ourselves with one another can really begin to disappear because we’re learning that intimacy provides a really powerful climate for an experience of shame. It’s a powerful human emotion. There are more biblical references to shame than any other emotion, and since shame has to do with being seen, whether it’s real or imagined, it’s an interpersonal emotion. It says I’ve been found out. You know who I am and I’m not adequate. You know, you may be successful at hiding in your marriage in a way that covers some parts of you. We can’t pursue one another with the same ability that God pursued Adam and Eve, but it will cost you to hide in your marriage. You will find yourself unable at some point to love because so much of your energy is focused on hiding. Let’s talk just for a few minutes about how shame functions and I would say that a lot of how I understand shame has come from being taught and reading Dan Allender, who is a Christian psychologist from the West Coast in Seattle, and also now even from reading Ed Welch’s book. And one of the delightful things for to me about that book is the acknowledgement from both of them that they’ve learned from each other. So Ed begins by saying, Wow, Dan Allender really did all the seminal work on this in the Christian community. And then Dan writes about what Ed has done in this book. So it feels like two people who’ve taught me have come together in one place. The function of shame. First of all, let’s talk about legitimate shame, it is a gift that leads to repentance. When shame exposes actual sin, it’s not only legitimate, it’s completely desirable. We will feel shame when our idols are challenged, and then we’ll want to hide. We’ll feel shame when what we trust fundamentally is taken away. But legitimate shame can be a biblical humbling experience that leads to a recognition of my rebellion and then on to repentance. Stu has this little thing with me. Yeah, one of the things I can be guilty of, I am guilty of, is being a little snarky about other people, especially my girlfriends. And I’ll be standing in the kitchen going on and on about Janie. I don’t have any girlfriends named Jane that I could think of. And I’ll say, oh. And you know what she did, she does it. And Stu stands on the other side of the kitchen, and he just goes, like, this, meow, it’s okay. We’ve worked it out. It’s okay for him to do that. The first time he did it, I was like, he got probably a cat scratch back. But what is he doing? He he’s exposing legitimate sin at my heart, because I’m being mean and critical about a friend, or at least critical. And that little catty thing that says you’re being catty exposes the reality of my heart, and it takes me in a direction of thinking truthfully. There’s even something about the way he does it that makes me think, oh, I don’t want to be like that. And it leads my heart to repentance. I don’t want to be critical and mean and catty. Now that doesn’t mean that my first response isn’t what Stu talked about last night in my heart to deny and defend and dismiss what he’s trying to point out. But the fact is, legitimate shame has to do with sin, and so when it’s exposed, it can lead to repentance. Your children can say something to you. They can, you know how they catch us doing things that we shouldn’t be doing, and sometimes they make a comment even when they’re very, very small. And how will you respond in your heart? What’s that kid saying that to me for or, wow, what is that child able to see about me that needs to change? If it doesn’t happen when your kids are little, I’m here to tell you it will happen when they get older. And sit down and say, Mom, so why didn’t you ever like do anything about that? Whatever that thing is and everything in you wants to say, well, I was busy doing this and this and this and this and this, but that’s not what the child wants. The child wants you, not to deflect, but to feel the shame of some way in which you failed them, and to own that and to let God take you in the direction of repentance. So legitimate shame invites us to repentance and belief, but illegitimate shame comes from a sense of failure or inadequacy. We’ll see that really didn’t come out. It’s not because we’ve sinned, it’s just because we’ve done something that assaults our dignity. And my story about this has to do with being a big conference somewhere in the south in a huge church, and having given a talk on forgiveness for a World Harvest conference. And the person, the man who usually gave the talk was in the audience, and so I was more than a little bit nervous, but he came up afterwards, and we were talking together about forgiveness and walking toward coffee, and we came to a stairway. This is interesting. Stu and I talked about this this morning. It was a circular stairway. When I tell this story, I always say it was like 12, is that what I usually say, or 14 steps? And this morning in the car, he said to me, honey, you know, it’s really only about eight steps, but when I tell you what happened, you’ll understand why I thought it was 12 or 14 steps. There are group of people behind me, next to me is my hero, this person who’s really taught me how to think about forgiveness. I take the first step, and I fall head first down this circular staircase. I was dressed in a long blue skirt, which ended up over my head, and I was at the bottom of the steps, and I could look up and see this group of people at the top of the steps who were all with their mouths open, trying to figure out how to help me. What did I feel? I could still feel it! Incredible shame, but I had not done anything wrong, except perhaps be a little clumsy, maybe not even that, and I covered my shame as fast as I could with a really big fat lie, which is, I’m fine. I was not fine, and it took a long time for my back to recover. It wasn’t sinful, it was just my dignity that had been exposed. So my first thought was, I look like an idiot. You know, I feel foolish, and I can remember the power of that shame. Shame is so powerful that when you go home today, if you try to think about times in your life when you’ve had an experience of shame, I will be surprised if you cannot remember things like the detail of the room or the detail of the place. It has enormous power to trap, to trap our hearts and I covered up with a lie. Now think about Adam and Eve again. Their shame was legitimate, but instead of moving toward repentance, they started to hide and blame shift. They blamed one another and they blamed God, and we do the same thing. Their first hiding was from themselves. They weren’t any longer comfortable with being even naked with one another at some unspoken, unarticulated level, they understood that their sexuality was connected to their personhood, and something had radically changed when sin entered in. And now they don’t want to see one another naked. They don’t want to be naked before God and they hid. They didn’t want God to see either. Their perception of how they looked had changed because sin had entered their heart, and with it came lust and anger and bitterness and blame shifting. The kind of relational intimacy that marriage offers, whether it’s sexual or emotional, makes us really vulnerable to having the hidden realities of our hearts exposed. You can hide. You may realize that you avoid deep relationships. But suddenly Adam and Eve were able to see good and evil. And when that happens, there’s some sense of, wait a minute, it’s not just that you’re evil, but I’m evil too. There’s a knowledge that came with the fruit of the tree that really brought with it shame and we are afraid that someone will see that we are inadequate and unworthy and sinful, and we make a decision at some level, I will not be vulnerable with you. It may be a decision that’s only this big, but if it’s not acknowledged, it will grow to be a very big, big part of your relationship. It’s a kind of hiding, and you may do that by avoidance or withdrawal. You can hide by being dominant and aggressive. You can hide by being seductive. It gives you a lot of control, and you can certainly hide by moving into addictions. It will numb your heart to the shame. So when we’re shamed, what do we do? Well, one thing we do is resort to contempt, and I want you to think about contempt in two different ways, and one of them, first of all, think about it as a diversion. I like I’m a big spy novel fan, so I like to think about contempt as if I wanted to steal the drum set, I would set off a bomb over there. First of all, you’d all leave. And secondly, somebody might try to fix what’s going on in that corner. And I could go right out that, I don’t know which door, but the window with the the drum set. Contempt is a diversion when we feel shame. Contempt makes everyone and allows us to look in a different direction. And it can be directed at me. It can be self contempt that says I’m so stupid. Why did I do that? Or it can be directed at you, which is, why did you do that? And how can you be so stupid? And we use contempt in relationships all the time to cover our shame. Great example, what do you do when you lose your keys, what’s your response when you lose your keys? There are some of you that will say, so stupid, I lost my keys. And there are some of you who will say, where did you put my keys? There’s a sense of shame. You know, I lost my keys. I can’t even manage my keys. I’m going to cover it up. I’m either going to say, Oh, really dumb I lost my keys, or I’m going to get angry at you, which is other-centered contempt, and say, Where did you put my keys? And shift the focus, it’s either I’m an idiot or you’re an idiot. When we’re contemptuous, we’re saying that God’s not enough to handle whatever that little bit of shame is. Clearly, there are things that should make us feel shame, but we take it into our own hands. We look to cover it up, and contempt is a way that we do that if we’re contemptuous, if we’re truly guilty, and we feel shame and we move into contempt instead, we’re saying that God’s forgiveness isn’t enough. If we feel shame because our dignity has been assaulted and it’s not sinful. We’re saying that God’s not powerful enough to give us protection when we look foolish or stupid. Page 12, Dan Allender says our identities are very loosely stitched together. Shame exposes the fragments and sinful remnants of our souls. The polished and intact image we convey to others is an effort to deny our need of God. He is the only one who can integrate the fragments of our identity, and He does this through the restoration of forgiveness made possible by Christ’s death on the cross. When we are shamed because we fail to love, we can choose to chastise ourselves, polish our performance, cover our tracks, or we can choose to respect the exposure as a gift that guides us to productive repentance and deep gratitude for Christ. See Dan’s saying, God’s given us the answer for shame. Our shame has been covered. The gospel is the answer to shame, and the message of God’s grace is our shame has been covered. Our sinfulness has been paid for, our depravity has been redeemed, and assaults on our dignity don’t have to lead to shame, even though we may feel a level of foolishness, but exposure of our sinful hearts can lead us to repentance and forgiveness and then to joy. Now I do want to just give one caveat, our lives are really complex, and some of us have stories that involve horrific shame, which really didn’t have anything to do with what we did, but with what was done to us. And if you’ve been abused or harmed or physically violated or beaten or even verbally assaulted in the way that Ed Welsh was talking about, the shame that you carry may be the shame of the person who did that the shame of the perpetrator, but it will feel like you were ashamed. All of us need help to sort out our stories, but especially in the area of shame. And so I want to invite you into some conversations about where you feel shame. Talk to a friend, talk to your spouse, if there are huge issues in your life, talk to a counselor. And here’s the thing, as couples, take the risk of exploring the topic of shame together. Talk about times when you experience shame. Have a conversation at Starbucks, in a public place even, that says, wow, okay, so I feel shame when I do this or this or this, and then take the next step to talk about shame, shame and when you feel shamed by one another, because we shame one another just like that, without even thinking of it, it can be a look. Sometimes it’s a way we touch one another. Sometimes it’s just a casual word that tags into something that’s in my heart. It may not even be meant, but it still makes me feel that way. Take that risk of having discussions about this is what it’s like when you say this to me, this is how I feel, this is what I feel. And then talk together about the times and the ways in which you use contempt to cover that shame. What do you do when you lose your keys? Now, what do you do when you failed? What do you do when you have I got a parking ticket. This is really funny. Stu often tells a story about a parking ticket that or a speeding ticket that he got, and how he didn’t want to tell me about it. And I always thought it was the craziest story. I thought, why on earth would he not tell me about it? It’s not like a big deal. He gets a speeding ticket. It happens to everyone. Two weeks ago, I got a parking ticket, $26. It took me three days to tell him, all the time I’m laughing thinking, this is what he felt like. What? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just say I really screwed up? I got a parking ticket. He’s not going to. I knew he wouldn’t be angry with me. I knew he would laugh, not at the parking ticket or the $26 but at the fact that I wouldn’t tell him, but I just, I was just, it was so dumb to get the parking ticket that I couldn’t put it on the table. Where are those places? They’re hard conversations, but they’re really important, because exposing shame is part of what releases us, releases it. And Christ has covered us in such an amazing way that exposing our shame to another human being in a relationship where there’s safety and commitment is really a holy experience. It’s a taste of worship. But when we cover ourselves and hide and think that we don’t have to do that, it’s like living a life dressed in fig leaves. If I had a pack of post it notes and asked one of you to come up here and said, Let’s see how I can cover you with post it notes. That’s what we do. That’s what we do to cover our shame. That’s what Adam and Eve did. That’s why it’s so silly that they tried to cover themselves with fig leaves. But you have to ask yourself that question, how do you cover up in your marriage? How do you withhold your heart and your soul and your body from your mate? What are the fears that you have? How does shame make you afraid to be vulnerable and open? The fear of shame will make you run and hide and when you run and hide, you are at high risk to look for pleasure in places where you really don’t want to find it. You can hide in your work, in your job, in your ministry. You can hide in busyness. You can hide in children. You can hide in hobbies. You can hide in pursuing other relationships that are easier for you than marriage. They may not even be illicit, they may just be friends, but it’s easier to be with them than to work out the difficulty of intimacy between the two of you. Pornography is absolutely a way of hiding. It’s a way to have false intimacy. It numbs you. You won’t feel shame until afterward. It doesn’t require anything of your soul. It’s quick, it’s easy, and that photograph in front of you or those videos on the screen will never shame you in the moment. But God’s done something about this. And so we go back to Genesis three, and we listen to the way in which he pursued Adam and Eve. He says to them, where are you? He knew where they were. And then he says, Why are you dressed like that? And then he says, What did you eat? All questions, He clearly knew. What was He doing? He was with incredible tenderness, pursuing their hearts and reminding them that with Him, they could answer those questions truthfully. He knew where they were. He knew why they were dressed like that. He knew what they’d done, but he allows them to tell him what He already knows, because He’s a God who pursues with tenderness and compassion, and His goal was to bring reconciliation between them and reconciliation with Him. And so He very tenderly clothed them because their fig leaves weren’t doing it. And an animal dies, and we have a picture of the coming of Christ and Jesus and God takes those skins and places them on Adam and Eve. And the picture in my mind is a little two year old who can’t button their own buttons, and He tenderly dresses them and covers their shame. Throughout the history of redemption, He has pursued his people, and He has pursued me and you in the same way. Christ is that covering our righteousness that allows us to be in the presence of God and in the presence of one another in deep, deep intimacy without shame. Hebrews says Jesus went to the cross enduring the shame. That was Adam and Eve’s shame, that was my shame and your shame, and now it’s covered by the cross of Christ, so we never have to fear it again. And here’s the promise that God gives to us from Psalm 34 “I sought the Lord, and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame.” Let’s pray, Father, we understand that when we talk about the possibility of standing before you and with one another without shame, it seems impossible, and it also seems terrifying at a certain level, but you Who created us took such great pains to pursue our hearts from eternity past and to provide for us the righteousness of Christ a covering so that shame ceases to be something that we have to fear. We may have to see it, we may have to repent of it, we may have to let it go, but we no longer have to fear it. What an amazing God that would be so committed to giving us an answer to something as intricate and personal as this interpersonal experience of shame. Jesus, you know what shame feels like, because you carried our shame to the cross. You were shamed on our behalf, and that shame came into your total innocence, and you felt the weight and destruction and power of it so that we could turn our faces to you and be radiant so we thank You, Father, Son and Spirit, for the incredibly deep way in which you long to know us and which you’ve provided for us an open door to intimacy with you and with each other. Amen, 

0:50:47.5 Jim Lovelady: Those who look to Him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame. Now I admit that my shame goes to some deep places, so if you asked me to share maybe an embarrassing moment or a source of shame in my life, it would be kind of difficult, because those things in my heart are locked away inside a box that’s locked away inside a box inside another box. But I’m learning to I’m learning how Jesus already sees all of these things, and He’s inviting me to see it too and liberate me from that shame as I hide in Him. Do you know how to talk about the places of shame in your life? Do you have people that you can talk to about these things? I want to reiterate Ruth Ann’s encouragement to do that. And if you feel stuck, you’re actually in the best position to pray this prayer. Jesus, show me the first step. That prayer is a way to allow God to pursue you, and maybe an answer to that prayer is for you to consider taking Serge’s program called Mentored Sonship, where you’ll be given a discipler who will come alongside you and help you explore these areas of shame and learn how to experience God’s freedom and love in deeper ways than you ever imagined, if you ever wondered If there was more to your christian life than what you’re experiencing, you should check out Mentored Sonship, and I’ll leave a number of other resources in the show notes, along with a link for Mentored Sonship, links to the books that Ruth Ann mentioned in her talk, a blog post for further meditation on shame in the midst of failure. There’s also a link to this episode’s landing page. Copy and paste that and text it to all your friends and family, follow the YouTube link and subscribe to Serge’s channel, like this episode and leave us a rating and write a review on your podcasting app. All of these things help share the wealth of God’s grace that we’ve experienced at the frayed edges of our lives, even the deepest places of shame. Grace at the deepest places of shame. So as you go with new ideas of how you can turn away from false intimacy and experience the true covering found only in Christ, go with His blessing. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you, turn His bright eyes to you and give you His peace in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, life everlasting, amen.