Sermon Cloud

Psalms 130:1-8: “A Song of Ascents. Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!  2 O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  3 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?  4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.  5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; 6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.  7 O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.  8 And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities."

We’re continuing our series in the Psalms as we look at what to do with our emotional lives as followers of Jesus.

What I love most about the Psalms is the invitation that God holds out for us to be as honest with Him about our emotions as the Psalmists are.  It’s as if God is saying, “See, you can be this honest with me and I won’t leave you or forsake you.  Come to Me with your doubt, your tears, your fear, your anger and your guilt and pour out your heart before Me so that I can heal it.” 

Our emotional responses to the circumstances of life reveal our hearts, which is why God doesn’t want us running from them, but running to Him.  We do the things we do, say the things we say, think the thoughts we think because our heart is the source of all of our behavior and emotions.  This is why Scripture says, “As water reflects the face, so a man’s heart reflects the man” (Proverbs 27:19).

When we find ourselves dealing with difficult and troubled emotions its good for us to ask questions: ‘What do my emotions say about what I want?  What are they pointing to?  What am I really believing about God and myself right now?’  These help us understand what our hearts are worshipping and trying to rest in.  They help us to remember that even when our feelings are strong and seem overwhelming, even when our circumstances are painful and difficult, I am not bound to believe lies instead of truth.  It is not inevitable that I will continue to choose what is false over what is true.  Because from my heart these things are born, so it is my heart I must question and it is my emotions that reveal what my heart believes.    

We’re going to look at two emotions that are often felt but rarely admitted and often misunderstood.  It is the emotions of guilt and shame.  This is why we’re looking at Psalm 130 because in it we see the Psalmist in the midst of these emotions and yet he is doing what we’re invited to today.  He’s bringing these emotions before his God and processing them in His presence.  In fact, the Psalm begins with this person already sinking in this emotion.  Listen to his experience:

Sinking in the Pit of Guilt and Shame

Verses 1-3: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!  2 O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  3 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” 

Guilt is the deep well he’s fallen into.  It’s the roaring sea that is pulling him under.  It is the quicksand that is swallowing him.  The feeling of failure and regret brought on by our guilt, whether justified or not, feels like we’re drowning.  It feels like our air has been cut off.  It feels like our life is slipping away.  It feels like our feet are slipping and we’re sinking.  It feels like we can’t stand.  Other Psalms describe this same feeling:

Psalms 69:2: “I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.”

Psalms 40:1-2: “…he inclined to me and heard my cry.  2 He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”

This is what slipping into guilt feels like.  It feels like the more we kick, the faster we sink.  It feels like it’s around our necks.

And instead of running to God like this Psalmist, when I feel guilt I often want to hide.  I want to isolate myself.  I don’t always want to be open about the guilt I’m feeling because if I was, I’d have to admit that I failed. 

It’s strange in our culture that as a badge of honesty we readily admit we’re failures, and that nobody is perfect, yet we have the hardest time admitting specifically where we’ve failed.  We want to acknowledge guilt as a general feeling, but we don’t want to specifically talk about where we’ve blown it.  I think the reason is simple; the truth of our failure is too much to bear.  When we get specific with our guilt we’re reminded of that specific sense of failure and regret and that feeling isn’t pleasant, so we avoid it at all costs. 

So many of us carry guilt around with us, hiding it from ourselves and from others, yet never able to fully root it out.  And this guilt works like a cancer and destroys everything good and healthy around us if it’s not healed.  It is a stain on our soul that we can’t wash out no matter how many good things we do, no matter how many friends we accumulate, no matter how much money we make. 

It follows us from one relationship to another.  We carry it with us and in doing so make others cash the checks that our own guilt has written.  We have guilt over our lack of faithfulness, so we become very suspicious.  We have guilt over our dishonesty, so we refuse to believe others.  We feel guilt about our family, so we pretend they don’t exist.  We have guilt because we feel unhappy, so we become more and more miserable.  And with of the additional guilt we pick up along the journey of our lives, we take away our ability to be honest and truthful with ourselves, with other people, and with our God. 

Uncured, ignored guilt is deadly. 

But not all guilt is unhealthy and deadly.  Some guilt is helpful.  For the Psalmist, this guilt is legitimate as we can see by His cry to God for mercy in v. 2.  He’s able to see his failure and even though he feels the strangling effect of guilt, he knows the character of his God and can trust that he can bring this to Him.  His sin caused guilt, and his guilt awakened his conscience to deal with it.  In verse 3 he recognizes that if God held his sin against him, no one would be able to stand, no one would be able to survive.

So I don’t want to give the impression that all guilt is bad.  If we’ve done something sinful and wrong, or we’ve failed to do something we should have, we should feel guilt.  It is wrong; it is sin.  But it’s what we do with that guilt that makes all the difference in the world.  I’m concerned that most of us are simply trying to stuff down all our guilt instead of responding to the invitation to come to our Father and deal with it like the writer of this Psalm.

But guilt isn’t the only emotional response to our sin.  If our guilt is ignored and not dealt with, shame becomes the dominant emotion.  

Guilt and Shame

Even though these emotions are often together, it’s important to make a distinction between the two. 

• Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong,” shame says, “There is something wrong with me.”

• Guilt says, “I’ve made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.”

• Guilt says, “What I did was not good,” shame says, “I am no good.”

• Guilt is feeling bad about something I’ve done, but shame is feeling bad about something I am. 

• Guilt is about breaking the rules, but shame is our failure to live up to what I know I should be.

The opposite of guilt is innocence or moral purity.  The opposite of shame, though, is not innocence; it is honor and glory.  This is why Hosea 4:7 says, “…I will change their glory into shame.” 

And though our culture attempts to divert this sense of guilt and shame, the truth is, we can’t escape it.  We sense that we are not living up to what we ought to be.  This can be a clear sense of not living up to the holiness of God, and for others it can simply be a sense of guilt that we can’t live up to our own standards, the standards by which we judge others.  Today, shame is usually more dominant than our sense of guilt because we’ve been taught for 40 years now to not feel guilty.       

As much as we try to say we decide what’s right and wrong, for us, the problem is that we can’t even stick with our own morality!

Guilt often produces shame because as we come to see that we’ve done wrong, we begin to feel that we’re not being who we believe we should be.  When you lie to someone, you not only feel guilt for lying, but you feel shame because you see how much of a coward you are, or how much of a conman you are.  Shame brings you face-to-face with the inconsistency of your identity. 

We can try and stuff down our guilt by saying we’re the ones who determine right and wrong, but shame still thrives in our culture.  Image and beauty are one of the ways we feel shame.  We have a standard we find attractive and our sense of that beauty causes us to want to be that beautiful and when we see ourselves in truth, we feel shame for not living up to that standard of beauty.  So we hide our body, we hide our blemishes, we hide our flaws.  We’re driven by this shame of not living up to standards.

It can be the same sense of insignificance if you’re a man.  You see the heroes of our day, the money they make, the fame they have, the reverence they receive, and we want that, but we fall so incredibly short.  And it brings shame.  And, glory is a word that means weight and significance.  In other words, in our desire to live up to be significant, to live up to glory, we realize we’ve fallen short but can’t do anything about it.  So, we always will feel like we’ve failed, like we’re insignificant.

In other words, we see a glory that we find attractive and appealing and we desire it but can’t live up so we feel full of shame, full of failure.  Even without guilt, we’ll still have shame.  And shame will eat us alive.  Guilt causes us to believe we’ve fallen short of the standard and shame causes us to feel we’ve fallen short of beauty, of glory.

And when we diminish guilt we only increase the shame.  You see, with a standard or rule we can clearly see what’s wrong and where we’ve failed.  With shame, it’s not definable and so we sink under a sense of failure but don’t know we’re it’s coming from.

What do we do with our guilt when we’ve fallen short of the rules? What do we do with our shame where we’ve fallen short of glory?  What are we going to do?

Rescued by Another

The wisdom of the world would say, “Don’t feel guilty.  You decide what’s right and wrong.”  But this doesn’t deal with our guilt when we break our own standards.  Or the world will say, “Don’t feel shame, you’re accepted just as you are.”  But this doesn’t deal with our sense of falling short of significance and glory.  It doesn’t deal with our inherent shame. 

But the thing about drowning or sinking is that at some point you become aware that in all your flailing, you can’t save yourself, you can’t pull yourself out.  In fact, in quicksand, the more you fight to save yourself the faster you sink.  That’s much like being swallowed up in guilt.  We fight to get out and the more we fight the worse we feel because we can’t clear our own guilt, we can’t cover our own shame.  We need another to come and rescue us.

Guilt Needs Forgiveness

The problem is that there is a standard, we are guilty before God.  This is why we need forgiveness.

Verse 4: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” 

Verse 8: “And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.”

The beauty of there being a standard is that you can discern from God’s word whether or not your guilt is legitimate or false.  Many of us are racked by false guilt, a guilt we received from our parents, boss, friends, and lovers.  This guilt feels the same, but may not be something we should carry.  It may be cultural, it may be relational, but it doesn’t make it sin, yet we’re carrying it around like it is sin.

With God, there is a standard and we can know it, which means we can bring it to God if it’s legitimate and we can discard it if it’s false.  When we say, “We create the standard,” what we’re doing is putting ourselves in a no-win situation because our standards are continually changing.

When you feel guilt and shame you have to have some way in which you can decide whether to resist and fight it or accept it and bring in to the cross.  The only way to deal with this is by having an objective moral standard. 

Luther had to fight this sense of guilt and this is what he says when we’re accused.

“Therefore let us arm our hearts with these and similar statements of Scripture so that, when the devil accuses us by saying: You are a sinner; therefore you are damned, we can reply: The very fact that you say I am a sinner makes me want to be just and saved. Nay, you will be damned, says the devil. Indeed not, I reply, for I take refuge in Christ, who gave Himself for my sins. Therefore you will accomplish nothing, Satan, by trying to frighten me by setting the greatness of my sins before me and thus seducing me to sadness, doubt, despair, hatred, contempt, and blasphemy of God. Indeed, by calling me a sinner you are supplying me with weapons against yourself so that I can slay and destroy you with your own sword; for Christ died for sinners. Furthermore, you yourself proclaim the glory of God to me; you remind me of God's paternal love for me, a miserable and lost sinner; for He so loved the world that He gave His Son (John 3:16). Again, whenever you throw up to me that I am a sinner, you revive in my memory the blessing of Christ, my Redeemer, on whose shoulders, and not on mine, lie all my sins; for ‘the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all’ and ‘for the transgression of His people was He stricken’ (Is. 53:6-8). Therefore when you throw up to me that I am a sinner, you are not terrifying me; you are comforting me beyond measure.” What Luther Says 3:1315

Shame Needs Hope in Glory

Verses 5-7: “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; 6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. 7 O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.”    

Hebrews 12:2: “looking to Jesus, the hero (archegos) and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Zechariah 3:1-5: “Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.  2  And the LORD said to Satan, ‘The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?’  3  Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments.  4  And the angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘Remove the filthy garments from him.’ And to him he said, ‘Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.’  5  And I said, ‘Let them put a clean turban on his head.’ So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD was standing by.”

Revelation 3:17-18: “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.  18  I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.”

With guilt, the solution is to have your sins atoned for, the penalty to be paid.  With shame, the response is a desire for glory, to be covered.