Do your ever feel overwhelmed by shame? Perhaps you failed and made a huge mistake. Maybe you did something which hurt someone you love dearly. In the Psalms, we find a deep resource to navigate our shame and even overcome it! In this 3-day reading plan, Scott Savage shares how the Psalms equipped him to overcome shame.
Scott Savage
Day 1
Scripture: Psalms 32:1-5
Do your feelings ever feel overwhelming? Ever struggle to know what to do with intense emotions?
Perhaps you grew up in an environment that didn’t equip you to process challenging emotions. Maybe you grew up being taught that all emotions were sinful and not to be trusted.
However, Jesus offered a different model for our emotions. The Gospels record Jesus experiencing a wide range of emotions from anger and grief to happiness and disgust, while never giving into the temptation those challenging emotions create.
Repeatedly, Jesus drew on wisdom from the Psalms when He had challenging emotions to navigate. Over the next three days, we will turn to the same book that Jesus did, as we work through an especially difficult emotion to navigate.
Experiencing Shame:
Is there a worse feeling than knowing you’ve wounded someone you love?
I’ll never forget sitting in a therapist’s office across from my wife, as she shared through tears about an experience in our past where I’d wounded her emotionally. If the knowledge of the pain I’d caused her wasn’t bad enough, I found myself struggling to remember the experience she described. How could I not recall something which had her in tears several years later?!
The guilt I felt initially was replaced with a deep sense of shame, making me feel unworthy of her love and undeserving of the forgiveness she shared with me that day in therapy.
Whenever my days became quiet, a condemning inner voice reminded me of what I’d done and how I’d hurt her. That inner voice made me feel despair about the past and discouraged about the future.
Is there an area where you feel shame today? Can you imagine what your life would be like if you navigated shame differently?
Shame lies to us, driving us away from life with God. In 2 Samuel 11-12, David sins against God by having sex with another man’s wife and abusing his power in the process. When the woman notifies David of her pregnancy with his child, David has her husband killed to hide his sin, even as the man fights in a war on David’s behalf.
David doesn’t face what he’s done until the prophet Nathan confronts him with the truth through a very carefully worded parable.
Psalm 51 is a well-known writing of David, penned in the aftermath of that confrontation with Nathan. Psalm 32 is a lesser-known passage which scholars believe was written after Psalm 51. In Psalm 32, David describes the physical experience of shame, as well as how God’s power was ultimately victorious over it.
After you read the passages in today’s devotion, identify 3 to 5 words that summarize how shame feels in your body.
Tomorrow, we will dive deeper into David’s experience and the two songs he wrote as he navigated his shame. Just as he experienced God’s power and presence in his shame, I’m praying you’ll experience the same thing in yours! Shame doesn’t get the last word when it comes to your worth and value.
Day 2
Scriptures: Psalms 51:7-12, Psalms 51:16-17, 2 Corinthians 7:10
During a summer in college, I got a well-paying job and began spending a lot of money. When the job ended, I stopped making money but kept spending it. Over the next four years, I amassed over $10,000 in credit card debt.
I felt deep shame about this predicament because my parents taught financial management classes when I was a kid. I should have known better! To make matters worse, I was engaged, so my debt was about to affect my fiancée.
Shame kept me from connecting with my family’s wisdom and inhibited intimacy with my fiancé. I was ashamed of what I had done and afraid of being condemned.
Ultimately, a premarital counseling session opened the door for me to confess my problem. Together, we identified a plan that would lead to financial freedom.
Do you know what shame is keeping you from experiencing? Can you imagine what your life would be like if you navigated shame differently?
David’s shame was deadly. Uriah was a “Mighty Man of David”—one of 37 elite soldiers who protected David and went into battle for Israel. After David summoned Uriah’s wife to the palace and impregnated her, David’s shame led him to create a scheme to call Uriah back from battle in an attempt to cover up the pregnancy.
When Uriah proved to be more righteous than David, David ordered one of his most loyal soldiers to be abandoned in battle, killing him. As we explored yesterday, David felt like he was in the clear. That is until the prophet Nathan confronted him.
Shame thrives on secrecy. David’s shame had the most destructive power when it was secret. But when he discovered his actions were not secret, shame lost power. He moved towards repentance and ultimately experienced restoration in his relationship with God.
When what is causing us to feel shame moves out of the darkness and into the light, shame loses power to control us. Our guilt remains but our shame can subside.
Guilt is inevitable when we make a big mistake and feel the weight of our actions. Guilt is not necessarily a bad thing! The question is whether our guilt produces Godly sorrow or worldly sorrow (also known as shame). The Apostle Paul wrote about how God can work through intense feelings like guilt and sorrow, noting that “Godly sorrow brings repentance.” This kind of repentance leads to salvation, whereas shame or worldly sorrow condemns us.
Therefore, I encourage you to take inventory in your heart today. Are you experiencing Godly sorrow or worldly sorrow about your sin? Guilt or shame? Are your feelings drawing you closer to God and others? Or do you feel unworthiness, causing you to hide from God and others?
May you experience the freedom David found in Psalm 51 when he confessed his sin and experienced God’s mercy. I look forward to tomorrow when we’ll wrap up this series by exploring how understanding our true identity builds our resilience against shame.
Day 3
Scriptures: Psalms 51:1-4, Romans 8:1, Psalms 139:13-16, Romans 8:14-16
“Where is your brother?”
I came home after being out of the house for a while. I could only find two of my three kids. When I asked my daughter about the location of her brother, she said, “He’s hiding because he knows he’ll be in trouble.”
I found my son in his bed under the covers. When I finally coaxed the story out of him and ultimately coaxed him out from under the covers, I discovered an ashamed little boy who had been careless while playing and accidentally broke something he knew was important to me.
When he did something wrong, my son’s instincts to feel shame and hide kicked in—instincts that connect him back to the beginning of the Bible. When Adam and Eve sinned by doing the one thing God told them not to do, they felt shame and hid from God. Sin and shame cause us to hide from God and push us away from each other.
David experienced this shame. He had pulled away from Uriah—one of the Mighty Men who guarded his life—after abusing his power to have sex with his wife, Bathsheba. He was deceptive with Nathan, even though the prophet eventually learned the truth of what David had done.
Shame deceives us into thinking that if someone else knew the truth about us, they would reject us. We feel unworthy of love and belonging because of what we’ve done. In these moments, we see how much of our identity is attached to our performance.
David’s psalms offer us great reminders about shame. David wrote Psalm 139 describing God’s complete knowledge of our thoughts, the hairs on our heads, and each of our days.
Our shame causes us to think that the more someone gets to know us, the more likely they are to reject us and push us away. Yet, we see a very different line of thinking in the story of David in 2 Samuel 11-12 and the songs he wrote in Psalms 32, 51, and 139.
Here, we see God who knows all, including our best and worst. God responds to our repentance with mercy, forgiveness, and grace. We find a favor with Him that is neither earned nor deserved. As we learn how God sees us, we have the opportunity to trust God’s voice more than we trust the mental soundtrack which our shame produces. We can begin to accept that what God says about us is the truest thing about us.
Our enemy wants to use our past failures to condemn us and cancel our future. God takes our shame and forgives us, opening the door to a life we couldn’t have imagined for ourselves.
It truly is a gift that we have 150 of these songs in the middle of the Bible to remind us of the truth amid our shame. In the Psalms, we discover the hope we have because of God’s deep, enduring love for us.