Psalm 119:80 Shameless

May I wholeheartedly follow your decrees,that I may not be put to shame.

Psalm 119:80

Not all shame is the same.

False shame comes from how people have treated you, the things they've said to you. It's a self-loathing that is taught in the most unkind of ways.

Brenda sat on the back row of the prison chapel, turning pages on her Bible, one after another. I sat next to her and asked what she was doing.

"A bad thing happened to me today," she explained, "and I'm trying to find what it was I did wrong that made God punish me."

Like many people, her image of God the Father was mixed up with her experiences with her own father. He had obviously trained her to feel shame for every small error, real or imagined, by harshly punishing her..

Others in the prison found themselves caught between the extreme expectations their family placed on them and peer pressure toward a life that promised a dangerous kind of freedom. False shame can also comes from failing to live up to a misguided idea of who you think you should be.

True shame comes from the failure to be the person God intends you to be. You know you've fallen short. You've sinned against His best intentions for you.

To deal with shame, first identify whether your shame is false or true. Set aside the false shame and focus instead on the true shame. It will be there, i promise you, hidden beneath all the other things you've been ashamed of.

Then wholeheartedly set about rebuilding your life around God's best way of living. Use II Corinthians 7:8-11 as your guideline. Godly sorrow - godly shame - leads to repentance and results in intentional actions that will reconstruct your life piece by piece, back to being the person God created you to be.