Shame Murders Love
Shame leads to Murder
God created a beautiful paradise for us. Someone messed it up. After causing the fall of humanity, Adam & Eve did manage to obey one of God’s commands: “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Gen 1:28) They had two sons, Cain & Abel. (Gen 4) Cain was a farmer, Abel was a shepherd. God told them they needed to bring a sacrifice. Cain brought some of his harvest, Abel killed a lamb. God didn’t accept Cain’s offering but did accept Abel’s. Why didn’t God accept Cain’s offering?
When God banished his parents from the Garden of Eden, he sacrificed an animal to make clothes for them. (Gen 3:21) This was the first blood sacrifice. We can only infer that God, being loving and caring, took that time to explain to Adam & Eve about their need to offer sacrifices to God for their sin but it’s not spelled out to us.
So after Cain’s botched offering, God spoke directly to Cain, even after not accepting his offering. God wasn’t mad at Cain. He said, “Why are you mad? Why is your face scrunched up? You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you.” (Gen 4:7) Cain knew what the right sacrifice was but he chose to make his own offering, do his own thing, then got upset because it wasn’t acceptable. When God corrected him, he still didn’t offer an acceptable offering to God. He certainly didn’t heed God’s warning him about sin. Instead, he blamed Abel. He was jealous and angry and it led to him killing his own brother. He never apologized for Abel’s murder either. He only got upset when God banished his awful self.
How did he get there?!
Shame. Cain brought his best fruits and they weren’t good enough. Cain tried to do it his way and it wasn’t good enough. He was angry at God for not accepting his offering. He was jealous of Abel because it was less painful than feeling the shame of rejection. When we know what the right thing to do is and we don’t do it, that’s sin. That takes repentance. Cain never repented which led him down a disastrous road with terrible consequences.
Did God shame Cain? Did God reject Cain? Cain certainly felt that way. Why didn’t he talk to God, tell him how he felt? God told him to try again. You got it wrong this time, but you know the right way to do it. Was he ashamed of asking his brother for a lamb? It would be understandable if he was but not excusable.
“Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad.” ~ Brene Brown
Shame is like looking at ourselves in one of those wavy mirrors at the county fair. Everything is all distorted depending on how the mirror is bent – you look too tall, too wide, too short, you’re head’s comically too big… We laugh. We question if that’s how we really look. Maybe you’ve looked in the same mirror your whole life and you don’t even realize the mirror isn’t giving an accurate reflection. When we talk to ourselves through the filter of shame, our viewpoint is distorted in a similar way.
Comparison is the Murder of Love
After listening to Brene Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, episode, “Brene with Sonya Renee Taylor on “The Body is Not an Apology”, I had a huge epiphany. I have always been looking at myself through a distorted mirror. I have compared myself to others since I was a little girl, starting with a plastic Barbie doll. “I’ll never have blonde hair like that. I’ll never have curves like her. My legs will never be that long.”, which equated to I will never be good enough or pretty enough or worthy enough. I continued that mindset by comparing myself to petite friends, supermodels, and even porn stars. (can we say “shame”?!)
What Sonya Renee Taylor says is that (I’m paraphrasing) my value is not determined on someone else being greater or less valuable than I am. We are all different and beautiful in our differences. I don’t have to compare myself to anyone because I am valuable in my own skin, in my own uniqueness. I don’t have to look or act or be like anyone else to be good enough. I am good enough because God says I am.
I can’t love myself and see myself as valuable or worthy of good things if I am constantly comparing myself to others, having unrealistic expectations, putting myself down, hating myself. There is no room for both. It is exhausting hating myself!
Cain compared himself to his brother. He wanted to try to make himself worthy, his hard work worthy, his pride in himself worthy. What God was trying to tell him, “Son, you’re already worthy.” I believe that God was proud of Cain and his crops but it wasn’t the right time to offer them as a sacrifice for sin. The offering was about God not about Cain. It was about remembering their sin and separation from God but Cain took it as favoritism. He missed it. We can miss it too if we continue to look through the shame mirror.
How do we smash the shame mirror? How do we see ourselves truthfully?
“Let us make human beings in our own image, to be like us.” Gen 1:26
“God breathed the breath of life into them.” Gen 2:7
From the very beginning of time, God has tried to reveal to us, his creation, that we are special, we were made in the very image of our Creator, we have the very breath or spirit of God filling us with life. No other creation has those traits. Isn’t that incredible?! You are created in the image of God. I am created in the image of God. Just because we look different doesn’t mean either of us is “less”. I can’t accept God’s love if I constantly compare myself to others and think of myself as less than who I am.
I’ll say it again!! God made you. God created you in his very likeness. You are worthy. You are valuable because you were made to be valuable. The very breath in your lungs originated from heaven. Don’t let shame distort that reality!
| Shame says: | Love says: |
| I am fat. | I am confident. (Phil 1:6) |
| I am ugly. | I am God’s workmanship. (Eph 2:10) I am God’s treasure (1 Pet. 2:9-10) |
| I am worthless. | I am bought by the blood of the lamb. (John 3:16) |
| I am stupid. | I am gifted with love, power, and a strong mind. (2 Tim 1:7) |
| I am a lost cause. | I am gifted with a hope and a future. (Jer 29:11) |
How you view God will determine how you view yourself.
God is not a god of hate, self-destruction, or condemnation. (Romans 8:1) If you are having thoughts that fit those descriptions, they are not Godly thoughts and therefore are not truthful. God is not sitting in heaven waiting to throw a lightning rod down at you. He has a plan for your life, one filled with hope and a future. (Jer 29:11)
Many of us may not have the best relationship with our dads so we equate God with our dad. He does call himself our Heavenly Father. God is not an absentee dad who only calls on your birthday. God is not an abusive dad who has done unspeakable things to you and your family. We can’t equate a perfect God with human traits. I’m sorry you went through that.
God invites us into a relationship with him. (Romans 5:11) He wants us to know who he truly is, his strength, his magnitude, his deep deep love. Until we choose a relationship with God and ask him to show us his nature, we will continue to live with a distorted view of everything. It’s only when we ask God to reveal himself to us, that we’ll smash the shame mirror. When we see God’s true nature, his true nature begins to rub off on us. It rubs off all the lies, the shame, the guilt, the sin. We become a new creation. God begins to help us unpack the baggage we’ve been carrying around for so long.
Jesus Brings Everything Full Circle
God loves you so much that he sent his one and only son to die a horrible shameful death so that we wouldn’t have to (John 3:16) because our great x100 grandparents, Adam & Eve, broke the covenant when they sinned against God. Shame entered the picture when Adam & Eve ate the fruit from the knowledge of good and evil. They heard God calling them, covered themselves with leaves, and hid. (Gen 3:7) From then on, a sacrifice was required for the forgiveness of sins.
When Jesus went to be baptized by John the Baptist, John called him “the lamb of God”. (John 1:29) The people who heard this would have been startled at the least, horrified at most because they were very familiar with what happened to a lamb consecrated for God – sacrifice.
Jesus took the place of the sacrificial lamb. We no longer have to offer blood sacrifices because of Jesus. He was and IS the most perfect, sinless, Lamb of God. We no longer have to live feeling dirty, shameful, fearful, or guilty. He took all of our sins upon himself when he died on the cross. All. Of. Our. Sins.
In the book, Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing, there is a beautiful poem that explains covenants much better than I.
Covenant God
A covenant in the Bible was an unbreakable
contract- written not in ink but in blood.
You’d kill an animal and say, “If I don’t keep
my promise, let me die like this animal!”
God made a covenant like that with his
children and said, “I will ALWAYS love
you!” We were supposed to promise, “We’ll
always love you too!”
But we ran from God and broke our side
of the contract. And the law called for our
deaths. And yet God spared us. How? Did
he just ignore the law? No.
God himself kept our side of the covenant
for us-and, in Jesus, died instead of us.
God’s promise to always love us is written
in blood-the blood of his son.
[Jesus said,] “This is my blood, which confirms the
covenant between god and his people.”
MATTHEW 26:26, 28 (NLT)
God is so loving and so perfect, he held up both ends of the covenant! He loves us so much, he was not willing to settle for a relationship that required separation and sacrifices. Jesus came so that we can make a new, personal, covenant with God. We ask God to come into our hearts, forgive our sins, and we promise to listen and obey Him. Sounds easy. It doesn’t mean life becomes easy from then on. It means you now have access to all the resources of heaven to help you on your journey.
“You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~ C.S. Lewis
God wants to rewrite your journey. He doesn’t want any of us to be bogged down in sin & shame. C.S. Lewis said, “You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending.” Right now. Change your story. Change the trajectory of your life by letting God show you his ridiculously abundant love for you. He wants to change your shame to love. He wants to speak truth over you in love. There may be times, like Cain, where we don’t get it right the first time, but we can learn from Cain and ask forgiveness and accept the second chance God is always offering us.
Dear Jesus, Forgive me of my sins. Forgive me for believing the lies of shame. I ask that you come into my heart and clean all the fear, sin, shame, & guilt from my heart. Begin a new work in me. Be my friend from today forward. Thank you for your love and peace that floods my soul in any situation. Amen.