God Thoughts January 29th

God Thoughts January 29th

D. A. Carson says that we do not lie awake at night recounting 

the ways we think we have brought shame to God through our 

actions; what keeps us anxious and sleepless are the ways that 

we feel shame before others. The I can’t believe I said that to her! 

sort of thinking is what we mull over. Or the Maybe I failed that 

exam, or received that academic rejection, but once I try this . . . 

then I will have arrived. Carson exposes that we have missed

the cause for deeper shame, a shame of being exposed before God 

and the shame of our attempts to cover up our shame. Perhaps 

we obsess over these smaller shame moments because we cannot 

face our real shame problem: that we live ashamed to walk and 

talk openly with our Creator.3 We are Adam and Eve, hiding 

when God pursues us and seeking to cover up with the closest 

thing near us, which in our Western culture is often our 

achievements and performance. We feel exposed before God, but 

it is easier to say, “I feel naked [exposed] in front of him, and so I 

will hide from him and blame him for my shame.” We play the 

ultimate shame- and blame-shifting game begun by Adam in the 

garden of Eden. “It was Eve—‘she gave me the fruit of the tree, 

and I ate’” (Gen. 3:12). And then when God turns to Eve, she 

blames the Serpent who “deceived me, and I ate” (v. 13). At this 

point, God does not blast Eve or Adam for their blame-shifting. 

First and foremost, he curses the Serpent, who is Satan in 

disguise. Eve told the truth about the Devil’s deception, and God 

responds by cursing evil. But he does not stop there. God can see 

through their self-deception, and he confronts both Eve and 

Adam, calling them to account for their own choices to be 

deceived and led astray. As descendants of Adam and Eve, we 

experience grave consequences every day of our lives: futility in 

work, and frustration in marriage and child-bearing and 

relationship. Not only does God confront Adam and Eve, but God 

provides for their real shame. He promises Jesus Christ. And 

when we look forward in redemptive history, we find the hope to 

cover our deepest shame of our insufficient performance being 

exposed before God. Isaiah rightly says that even our best 

attempts, our righteous acts, or even our ministry pursuits are 

like “a polluted garment” before God (Isa. 64:6) if they’re done to 

try to earn God’s approval and good standing before him. The 

things we do to try to cover up our shame bring us more shame 

than before. We feel like our work isn’t up to par, so we spend 

increasing amounts of time at the office and less time at home. 

As a result, our family relationships disintegrate while work 

continues to move the bar higher and higher up and out of reach. 

We now add the shame of failing at family to the shame of work 

performance. Or we feel exposed that we have not been good 

enough to outweigh our sins before God. We increase our 

involvement at church or in our community, showing up at every 

service project, and begin to look down on all of those who seem 

less committed than we are. Now we have added self-

righteousness to our sins, with the additional danger of feeling 

better about ourselves because of our religious performance 

while we are further away from true devotion to God. We 

desperately need to be rescued. Rescue comes only through 

Jesus. Jesus took the shame of our shame-filled (and shame-

fueled) performances and misplaced blame, and bore it in his 

body and shed blood for us on the cross. He covered not only the 

guilt of our sin, but also the shame of trying to cover up our sin. 

And the good news does not stop there! We have Jesus’s 

righteous performance in place of our feeble half-hearted 

attempts.

“For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no 

sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of 

God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

Nelson, Heather Davis. Unashamed (p. 93). Crossway. Kindle Edition.