The Weight of Shame

Christy Dragotta explores the heavy burden of shame, how it affects us from childhood through adulthood, and practical steps to process and release shame through faith, confession, and God's forgiveness.

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Hey friends, I'm so glad you're with me today. Today we are going to be honest about shame, and this is kind of a big one. It can be heavy. That's why I called it the weight of shame because shame really bogs us down, and the enemy uses our shame to get us isolated and feeling bad about ourselves, really reliving the most inglorious times of our life on the earth, and it is a cycle that is really hard to get out of. I hear people a lot say that they have a hard time forgiving themselves, and boy, do I resonate with that because I've been stuck years really in places where I just couldn't forgive myself or let go of the shame of a particular event that continues to make me feel like there's something I can't come back from. There have been choices I've made and events that I've created in my own life that feel like you should have known better, you could have done differently, you should have done differently, you've let everyone down, you are a disappointment. All of those voices are the voices that are associated with shame and the accusation of the enemy. And so we're gonna just dive right in today because we all have places where we have been ashamed. This can start even in childhood as embarrassment, and it can be something that somebody else kind of puts on you. I remember being a little girl and I was a very sensitive child, like very sensitive. And my teacher would correct me in front of the class. I mean, immediately my whole face would turn red, I would be so embarrassed because somehow, somewhere, and I don't even know where, I learned that to do something imperfectly, you should be ashamed of yourself, you should be embarrassed for that. And I I really don't remember that teaching coming from my parents at all, so I don't really know where I picked it up, but I knew that I was embarrassed that I was in trouble from my teacher, and so I actually would start crying. That's how sensitive I was. I wanted so badly to have approval of my teacher, I would cry. And then, of course, some of the kids in the class would make fun. Are you crying? You know, they would make fun of me, and that was even more embarrassing. So I would put my head down, you know, on my desk. I would just put my head on my hands, and I would sit and just cry on my desk or tell myself, get it together, you look like an idiot, you know, and all those things, those voices were already there. It was probably in first and second grade. It was so early on that I remember being embarrassed and being ashamed of myself. And I mean, that's a small minute example. There have definitely been times in my life that I've blown my whole life up in shameful ways, and my shame has been public and it's been out there for everyone to see and hear about. When you love the approval of man, those things will actually kill you because you're so dependent on what other people think about you that you can't get out from underneath the feeling of how stupid you look or how bad what you've done is. And so I just want to deal with this um in a very simple way. And it's something I'm still learning. This is something the Lord is teaching me, but I am still learning how to process the shameful parts of my life and then just let them go, release them because it is a difficult thing because the enemy is ever there to tell you. And let's be real, sometimes people are there to tell you as well. Sometimes there are people who make judgments about you, and in their judgments about you, even if they don't think about you very often, but when they see you and they judge you, I really do believe that you still can feel that weight of shame coming from other people. And so it's very important to make sure that our discernment tells us how the Lord feels about us, how God is dealing with us instead of how people are dealing with us, because people don't have the authority that God has to release you from that shame or to keep you bound in shame. You should not let someone else have that much authority over you. Only the Lord can tell you where you stand, right? And so that's where it's important to go to Him. And I think the first step really is just confessing the truth to yourself, right? You have to be able to look at what you've done and say, I made a mess of this. This was bad. I hurt this person, I hurt this person, the effects on my life were this, this, and this. I am embarrassed because, and you just go on and you list out, I would encourage you to write it down. List out all the ways that you tanked yourself on this deal, that you've embarrassed yourself. I would even write out who you are embarrassed the most to be around or the details of it. Because what we're gonna do is at the end of that, is we're gonna take it, everything that we've written in honesty with ourselves, and then we're gonna share it with God. And if you get one thing out of this message today, I really hope it's this thing. Do not hide from God. It's what Adam and Eve did in the garden. As soon as they were ashamed, as soon as they had messed up, they hid from him. And that creates an entirely different chain of events. But when we go to God and we take that list that we've written, that's as inclusive as we can make it at the time, and just say, God, look at all of this. This is how I feel, this is what I've done, this is terrible, and I hate this choice that I made. And I'm even starting to hate myself because of the choice I made. And you're honest before the Lord, he's never gonna look at you and say, Well, I'm pretty disappointed in you as well. He's not gonna do that. He's gonna say, Come here, come here, come here, come here, come here. Yeah, you you did some things here. I know that you're not feeling good about this. This isn't who I've made you to be. Learn from it. He invites us to learn, but the biggest truth is that this is what Jesus paid for. When he died on the cross, he took all of our sin and all of our shame and he nailed it to the cross. It was nailed to the cross, and then he said, It is finished, your debt is paid in full. That's the truth, and you have to get to that truth to restore sanity to yourself. And that doesn't mean that if you hurt people in the process, that you oh well, you know, sorry about that, God's forgiven me. I know when I was a lot younger, um, I hurt someone really badly, and I had just had a moment where the Lord had been working for months on a specific sin issue in my life, and he just continued to bring it to me in every sermon, it feels like I think four sermons in a row, I heard the same message, the same message, the same message, and he was giving me a message very clearly, but it took me four sermons, which we know is at least a month if they were back to back, and and a marriage conference, I think. So it was four sermons and a marriage conference that helped me to come to the conclusion of what he wanted me to do and to deal with my shame. And I remember being with the Lord and confessing to him how I had sinned against him and how it was terrible and how I had hurt someone else in the process. And in that repentance, it was truly a repentance moment because I was brokenhearted, I was grieved over what I had done and how it was going to hurt people that I loved. And so I talked with the Lord about it, and in that time, literally, he let me feel the sorrow and the pain of the hurt that I had done, but then he restored me to himself because I wasn't hiding from him and I wasn't lying to myself and I wasn't lying to him. And he said, Okay, come here, come here. And he cleansed me in a way that was so deep, and that young, I didn't have the spiritual maturity when I went to confess to the one that I had hurt the most. I confessed and I was sorry and I did cry, but I immediately followed it up with, well, God's forgiven me, and I know he's forgiven me, which was true. But to that person in that moment, it just felt like don't really care if you forgive me or not, the Lord has forgiven me. And that's not the way, that was not the right way to handle that. So I'm not suggesting that you just go and you unload on somebody and then be like, Well, but the Lord forgave me, so I'm good. I feel like in those moments, you with the Spirit, the help of the Spirit, you confess what you've done against somebody to them and how that hurt them, and then you allow them to just process it with you, knowing that where you sit with God will not be undone or changed by where you sit with that person. If they are unable to offer you forgiveness in that moment, it's okay because God has fully and finally forgiven you for that, and he nailed it to the cross. And so, what the enemy loves to do is once we've had those moments with ourselves, the truth that we speak to ourselves, and then the truth that we confess to God, the enemy loves to continue to bring it back up to us, and he will do that. Sometimes other people will bring it back up. It may not just disappear in the natural world, but in the supernatural world, it has been dealt with, and that is reality. That is the place where we have to live from in order to continue to move forward, because let's face it, it's not like we're gonna go the rest of our lives without doing another shameful thing. We are broken humans and we come from places of deep brokenness and some trauma that's big and some trauma that's little, and all of that affects the way that we walk out our life. And when we're not believing the right things about ourselves and the right things about God, we are prone to end up right back in that shameful place. And so one of the things that the Lord showed me is every time that the enemy comes and accuses me, whether he's using somebody else to accuse me, or whether it's just that voice in my mind that I'm hearing that says, Remember that you did this, remember how stupid you looked, remember how many people you hurt, remember, and I think my pastor says this, which I think is just it's such an interesting thing. Just, yeah, you're right. That was stupid, that was really foolish, and I did look really dumb. But the truth is, it's already paid for. I've confessed it to the Lord, and he's released me from the sin and the shame and the guilt of all of it, and now it is finished, just like he said on the cross, it is finished, it's done, so I don't need to remember it anymore. And that is the truth. You've got to speak the truth of God's word into that deep dark place of shame. And if it takes you a thousand times to speak the truth, that's where you are taking every thought captive and you are making it obedient to Christ. That's where you don't have to say, no, it wasn't that bad, blah, blah, blah. No, you're right. It's probably worse than I even know. But God has dealt with this and He's forgiven me for this. 1 John 1 9 says that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So not only are we forgiven, but we have been forgiven and we have been cleansed. And you may say, Well, Christy, I don't feel cleansed. I don't feel forgiven. I can't forgive myself. And I would just ask you: if God takes forgiveness so seriously that he says that you must forgive others, there are so many places in the word where he talks about forgiveness. If he takes forgiveness that seriously, how do you think he feels about you not forgiving yourself? How do you think he feels about you keeping yourself on a hook that he's already let you off of? And so it's very important that you not waste a bunch of cycles sitting in shame. You need to be truthful, you don't need to minimize it or try to reduce how bad what you did is. You need to confess it all, you need to write it all out. The as far as you can see that it reaches, you need to go out and say this and this and this and this and this. And then you need to get a stamp, a red marker, a sharpie, and say, It is finished. It's done. God said it's done. I've taken it to him and he's forgiven me. And so the holy God can forgive you. Who do you think you are that you wouldn't be able to forgive yourself? Basically, what you're doing is saying that Christ's payment on the cross just wasn't enough. It just didn't quite cover this thing that you've done or these things that you've done. Some of us have patterns of sin and shame in our life based in some trauma from way back here that we've never gotten help for. And so I want you to just really think of that. Would you, if Christ was standing right in front of you, say what you did wasn't enough? I'm sorry, it just didn't quite cover this. No, you would never be able to look at Christ in the face and say that. And so you've got to take yourself back and tell yourself the truth. And maybe you won't feel it for a while. Maybe you have to continue to tell yourself the truth for a while before you actually feel like it is finished. But do it as many times as you need to do it. Tell yourself the truth. It's finished, it's done. Christ paid for this, and his blood was enough. It was enough. Another part of it that I think is really important is to not waste cycles on the should's or the what if I or could'ves. A way that this can be productive would be after you have confessed to yourself and to God what you've done and potentially even other people, it would be productive then to sit down and say, at what points was I trapped by the enemy? At what points was I tricked? Like what are what are the things if you were the enemy trying to trip you up, what would you do? So just be aware of the places that are easy for you to slip. For me, when I'm tired, when I have a headache, when I'm hungry, these are places where it's just easier for me to be grouchy with somebody or to not treat somebody in love. So these are areas that I already know if I'm feeling any of these certain ways, it's probably not the best idea to have an in-depth personal conversation about some place that I'm wounded. It just isn't wisdom to do that. So these are places where you can learn, and that's where it becomes productive. Okay, Lord, and go to it with God. What would you have me know about where I fell, why I made the choices I made, and what I can do differently the next time this set of circumstances comes. What have I learned from it? And then write down the beauty, the gold, the treasure that you have unearthed, even through that process of pain and shame. Because there is treasure to be found in every place that we've failed, there is treasure to be found that we can move forward in a new understanding that will help us the next time something like this comes. It's building us up in the faith and in our character. And so it doesn't feel like it because it feels like we have really just trashed our character and no one will ever take us seriously again. But the truth is it doesn't matter what God puts in motion will stay in motion until He stops it. So we don't have to worry about the approval of man, we don't have to worry about what they think. We have to get free from that bondage of the fear of man. And that's all over the scriptures as well. I really want to help you guys get out from under shame. And I think it's really important to write down what you've learned and what you want to do differently next time, because then you will not be unaware of Satan's schemes against you. Maybe you were the first time it came, but now you've learned something. You know something you didn't know before, and you can break free from habits and patterns of doing the same things if you can diagnose what's the root, what's at the very root of it. And this is where, you know, I don't talk about this very often, but I think it's really important. The Holy Spirit is our counselor. Talking with God and working through these things with God and asking him questions about yourself and about situations will reveal to you so many truthful things. But this is where you need community. And sometimes it starts with getting a counselor, just someone that you can go that isn't there to make all these judgments about you. They're there to hear you, to hear you share your pain that you came with. They have an outside view of it. You didn't hurt them, it's not against them, so they can help see in a way that you can't see right now. I think counseling is very important. You need to be able to talk to someone, but it's also important to have a community of people around you. And maybe the community of people around you are the people that you hurt. That's really difficult because unless everyone there has got a relational, healthy maturity in their spiritual relationship with God and with you, there may not be able to be reconciliation for a while. There may need healing to happen for them and for you apart from that community, but you must find community to be a part of that's gonna speak the truth to you in love. So not somebody that just cosigns on your behavior and says, Oh yeah, that wasn't really that big of a deal. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a safe group of people that says, Yes, what you did was not okay. And we're gonna be here to love you through the consequences of those actions. We haven't left you alone because God doesn't leave us alone. He doesn't say, Go stand in the corner. I'm not gonna look at you until I feel ready to look at you. He says, Come here, come here, come here, come here, draw, draw near to me, and I will draw near to you. When you're heavy laden and burdened, come to me. My yoke is easy, my burden is light. He offers that even when it's our own hand that has caused the burden to come on ourselves. That's the loving, merciful God He is. He is compassionate and full of loving kindness. It knows no ends. That's the thing. God's love does not have a boundary, He just loves. He is love, and He loves you, and He loves you when you're broken, and He loves you when you've made the same mistake over and over again. It grieves His spirit, it grieves his heart because He wants you free. He wants nothing to stand between the understanding you have of His love for you, and the Bible tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God, but we can believe we're separated from Him, and that belief is so detrimental because then we just go into this spiral of shame and usually bad choices that have yucky consequences. So don't let the enemy get you caught up there. Get quick about getting free from that bondage that the enemy wants to put it on you, and just tell the enemy, you're right, that was terrible, but it was covered, and I am forgiven. And Christ nailed it to the cross and said, It is finished, and God loves me, He delights in me. That's the truth, and we have to take our thoughts captive and get back to that every time the enemy tries to throw it at us. So I just want to encourage you today: don't hide from God, accept his forgiveness, teach yourself how to get free from the lies, take those thoughts captive and stand in the truth that he loves you and his love never fails. His perfect love is gonna cast out all fear. That's the truth. And how do you know these truths? By spending time in his word, by reading his messages to you. It is all over the Bible that he is compassionate and loving and merciful, he delights to be merciful. And isn't that wonderful? Because we need his mercy constantly. I know I need his mercy. So don't waste any more cycles on your shame. Believe the truth about God and about yourself in relation to God. And that doesn't mean arrogantly walk around, well, I'm forgiven, so I can act any way I want. No. Accept what you've done, confess it to God, confess it to others, and then be free from the burden of it. I pray that the Lord will go before you in this, that he will take this and put roots down deep that you would trust him, that he is loving and compassionate and forgiving and merciful. I'm gonna pray us out today. Father, I just love you. I thank you for these people that are listening right now. I thank you, God, that your mercy and your grace is so much greater than anything we can imagine. And your grace is sufficient. And Christ's death was sufficient for us. There is nothing lacking in what He did. And so I just pray that you would help people to understand, receive your heart of love and forgiveness towards them and move forward in whatever way they need. And if they need to go talk to somebody, I pray God that you would bring someone to them that they would know is a safe person to talk to, whether that's somebody that they hire and pay, or whether that's a friend that they can just be real with in their life. But I pray that people would come out from hiding, get out from underneath that shame, and walk in the identity that you've created them. And I just love you, God. I thank you for who you are. And I just want to bless these people who are listening, Lord. And I thank you for the ways that you've blessed me through this message. And I love you, God. Amen. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really pray that you walk away lighter and freer. And if you can't yet, because your mind is still cycling on that shame, I encourage you today, don't wait till tomorrow. Today, set aside some time to go write a lot of stuff out and deal with it. Okay? Get free, guys. Love you. See you next week.