Swallowed Up By Life

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)

Just swallow that for a second. God spoke light into being. Like, He invented it. And He shines in YOUR heart.

Sometimes the illumination is less comfortable than it sounds. As we draw into the light, things are exposed (Ephesians 5:13...the chapter that named this blog).

If you're human (and I imagine that, if you're reading this, you are), you know that humans are messy. And usually, we kind of like to wallow in our own mess. For example: last week, I found myself quite unexpectedly wracked by guilt about all the things I had done wrong in a particular friendship.

The feeling I was experiencing is called shame.

I know you've heard some little old lady exclaim, "Why, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Shame is a little-discussed feeling, but one as common to humanity as anger, sorrow, and grief. It's what happens when you do something you know is wrong, and then you want to hide it from everyone (including God) in your heart forever. You feel as though you will always suffer the burden of having done it and can never get free.

Shame calls us dirty names: defeated, inferior, damaged, unworthy.

Shame convinces us that we are not good enough to be loved by God or others, and at the same time inspires us to covet the purity we think that others have and turn against them.

Shame plays games with your mind. It is an agent of the devil to separate us from the only one who can redeem our failures and to isolate us from our brothers and sisters in the church.

Shame is a hopeless feeling. It's the reason Adam and Eve covered themselves with leaves and hid from God in the Garden. Shame is when we know we're naked and we don't want to be exposed. It's the horrible realization that we are living in a jar of clay, when what we strongly desire is to live as a righteous spiritual being.

For in this tent we groan, wrote Paul, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked (2 Corinthians 5:2-3).

We Christians are the only people in the world who ought to be free of shame, because we are clothed in Jesus' awesome robes of righteousness (Isaiah 61:10). God's love covers us (1 Peter 4:8). But ironically, we are the ones going around shaming ourselves (and others...see "little old lady" comment above).

One of the Holy Spirit's most important jobs is convicting the world of sin (John 16:8). People are drawn to the cross as a result of their realization that they have committed sin and need forgiveness. But the cross is the door. We're meant to pass through, into God's kingdom.

Why? Because the Holy Spirit's other super-important job is to manifest God's presence in us. Check out the two sentences that come right after the verse above:

For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened--not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee (2 Corinthians 5:4-5)

Have you ever had a dream where you showed up naked to school and you don't care about anything--teachers, classes, homework--except finding some dead-gum clothes as soon as possible? I think a lot of us treat our spiritual lives that way, forgetting that we have been given the Spirit as a guarantee of our decency.

The Corinthians were some folks who had serious problems. They were grieving God's Spirit in pretty much every way possible, from suing each other (1 Corinthians 6:1-4) to allowing men to sleep with their stepmothers (seriously...1 Corinthians 5:1). Judging by the admonishments in Paul's first letter, they had no idea how to relate to one another or to God.

Clearly these sins are ridiculously inappropriate. But I will say that the Corinthians always give me hope. If God can work with a bunch of people as clueless as they were, surely He'll pour His Spirit into me too.

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything (1 John 3:19).

You'd think if God knows everything, He'd get stuck on each one of our little teeny-tiny sins. But according to John, He doesn't. Instead, He is greater than anything we can do--or any condemnation we could place on ourselves.

In fact, I think the only reason we can ever feel grief at sin is because God's Spirit is at work in us.

For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death (2 Corinthians 7:10).

I think the "worldly grief" Paul is referring to is our old friend shame. Shame tells us that we have failed, that we will fail, that we will never be redeemed of our failures, and that we shouldn't even try to change because we are just a great big whopping failure, so we should probably just spend a lot of time thinking about how much we have failed.

But the conviction of the Holy Spirit is not like shame. It's a completely different ball game.

Conviction comes about because the Holy Spirit is just that: holy. Sin cannot abide with holiness, so when we are in the presence of God, we naturally feel convicted of sins. However, conviction is full of hope: it's a sudden awareness of a sin that has grieved God, followed by an eagerness to repair that part of our relationship with Him. It hurts for a moment, but then it is....well, swallowed up by life.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:16-17).

The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us (Romans 8:11), and He convicts us of sin not to shame us, but to bring us closer to Him. He makes us a better house for Himself by healing our sins and all the damage they've caused us, and He does it as steadily and completely as He raised Christ's mortal body from the dead.

Shame will eat away at your identity in Christ like the bacteria of decay, dragging you down into death. But the conviction of the Holy Spirit will heal you. (Go ahead and read Hebrews chapter 12. I could have probably just typed it out here and saved myself a lot of writing.)

In Nehemiah, Ezra read the law to the Israelites on a holy day of dedication for the new wall. The people began to weep and mourn, realizing just how dirty, how full of failure, they were. But Nehemiah said, "....this day is holy to our Lord...do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10).

Shame is about you. Conviction and healing are about God. So toss the shame and enter into the heart of a Father who wants to strengthen you with His own joy at your homecoming.