The God Who Takes Our Shame
Psalm 25
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
2 O my God, in you I trust;
let me not be put to shame;
let not my enemies exult over me.
3 Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame;
they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
4 Make me to know your ways, O Lord;
teach me your paths.
5 Lead me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all the day long.
6 Remember your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love,
for they have been from of old.
7 Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions;
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for the sake of your goodness, O Lord!
8 Good and upright is the Lord;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
9 He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way.
10 All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.
11 For your name's sake, O Lord,
pardon my guilt, for it is great.
12 Who is the man who fears the Lord?
Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose.
13 His soul shall abide in well-being,
and his offspring shall inherit the land.
14 The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him,
and he makes known to them his covenant.
15 My eyes are ever toward the Lord,
for he will pluck my feet out of the net.
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
17 The troubles of my heart are enlarged;
bring me out of my distresses.
18 Consider my affliction and my trouble,
and forgive all my sins.
19 Consider how many are my foes,
and with what violent hatred they hate me.
20 Oh, guard my soul, and deliver me!
Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
21 May integrity and uprightness preserve me,
for I wait for you.
22 Redeem Israel, O God,
out of all his troubles.
I have three goals for this sermon: Clarity, Complexity, Resolve. By the end, I hope we will have clarity about an important emotion that we feel. I hope that we can celebrate the complexity of God’s relation to us. And I hope that, with God’s help, we will have fresh resolve about walking in God’s ways.
Setting the Stage
I want to begin at the end of the psalm, because this is where David tells us about his present circumstances. What is David facing, as he prays Psalm 25? He’s lonely, isolated, cut off from human companions. He’s afflicted and in distress. The troubles of his heart are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This affliction and this trouble includes his own sins (“forgive all my sins;” 25:18) and his enemies, who hate him with a violent hatred. That’s where David is. It’s a place that David often is. He’s stuck and surrounded.
And so he prays. “Turn to me. Be gracious to me. Forgive me. Consider my affliction and my enemies. Guard my soul. Deliver me. Let me not be put to shame.” And that last request is where I want to pursue clarity. I want to spend some time thinking about shame, and how David deals with the prospect of shame.
Clarity
Psalm 25 is bracketed by shame. It opens with three quick mentions of shame, and then ends, as we just saw, with another reference to being put to shame. Shame is a thick, complex biblical concept that will require some untangling. In our modern context, many people only view shame in negative terms. Shame is the sort of thing that we want to move past. They say, “In the past, we shamed people for just being who they are. Now we want to put those days behind us. No more shame.” Modern people don’t want people to feel bad about who they are or what they’ve done.
At least, that’s what many modern people tell themselves. But the reality is that we’re almost addicted to shame and to shaming. From cancel culture to ransacking someone’s old tweets to get them fired and publicly ostracized, we still love to shame people. Just the other day, we saw a crowd of people banish the mayor of Minneapolis from their presence with cries of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “Go home, Jacob!” because he refused to support their political platform.
Our culture, which often verbally rejects the concept of shame in favor of individual expression and freedom and “Be yourself, without fear, without shame,” still loves to shame. And this is because shame is deeply connected to who we are as human beings. So to get clarity about shame, I want to think about the definition of shame, the spectrum of shame, and three key aspects of shame.
Here’s a rough definition of shame: Shame is a painful emotion, birthed from a negative self-evaluation because we know we’ve fallen short of some standard, and we’ve done so under the watchful gaze of others. In this sense, shame is a social emotion. It has to do with how we relate to other people and live before other people. And as a result, shame has a positive function in society. It’s the glue that holds communities together. As human beings, we want connection. We want relationship. We want to be honored and respected and accepted by other people. And so the prospect of being shamed and humiliated before others keeps us from violating the community’s standards. Shame substitutes for physical coercion as a way of maintaining cohesion and connection in a community. Shame helps us to internalize our community’s standards, so that we feel shame when we violate them, even if other people don’t know. We imagine what would happen if they did, and we anticipate the shame we would feel. So shame is a painful emotion, birthed from a negative self-evaluation because we know we’ve fallen short of some standard, and we’ve done so under the watchful gaze of others.
Now let’s talk about the spectrum of shame. Here I’m thinking of a spectrum of intensity, from embarrassment at one end to humiliation at the other. Embarrassment is a milder form of shame that we feel over a purely social flaw. If you have spinach between your teeth, if you put your shirt on backwards, if you say something ridiculous, you feel embarrassment. With embarrassment, the standard we fall short of is not a moral one, but a social one. Sometimes, it’s even an imaginary one. We feel embarrassed because of the possibility that we might do the wrong thing.
If embarrassment is driven by social and often external and superficial factors, shame proper is driven by exposure of our character or some fundamental aspect of our identity. We feel shame most often when we fall short of a moral standard (though it doesn’t always have to be moral). Two biblical examples can illustrate this, both having to do with birth. In Matthew 1, when Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus, Joseph understandably assumes that she’s been unfaithful to him, and so we decides to break off their marriage. But because he’s an honorable man, he wants to do it quietly, because he’ “unwilling to put her to shame.” If he made a big deal about her pregnancy, if he publicized her apparently sinful behavior in front of the whole community, he would be putting her to shame because she violated a moral standard. On the other hand, in Luke 1, when Elizabeth becomes pregnant with John the Baptist, she rejoices because God has taken away her reproach or her shame. In this case, she felt shame, not because she did something wrong (barrenness isn’t a sin), but because being a mother was so core to her identity, and so she was “falling short” of that ideal.
Finally, at the other end of the spectrum is what we can call humiliation. This is shame, but it is accompanied by two things: first, we are held in contempt by those around us. When we’re embarrassed, other people might feel embarrassed with us. Many of Elizabeth’s friends might have felt pity for her in her embarrassment. But humiliation occurs when those around us deride us, mock us, and hold us in contempt. That’s the first addition. The second is that humiliation often carries with it a sense of injustice, because those who hold us in contempt have unfairly put us in this place. Mayor Frey was humiliated, when that crowd invited him out there and then mocked and derided him for his answer.
So we’ve got a definition, a spectrum, and now we can look at three additional aspects. First, shame involves objective reality and a subjective feeling (and sometimes these are out of sync). There are actions which are objectively shameful. But when our internal assessment doesn’t correspond to this objective reality, something is off. If we don’t feel shame over shameful actions, then we say that we’re shameless. Now in recent weeks, we’ve had protests and rallies that, at their best, have been an attempt to express pain, anger, and solidarity over injustice. But what if, instead of protests over injustice, people marched in a parade to celebrate actions and desires that God hates. What if instead of feeling ashamed over shameful acts, people marched to celebrate those shameful acts? That’s being shameless, or, to use Paul’s phrase in Philippians, they are glorying in their shame.
Second, our experience of shame often looks back to the past. I’m guessing that most of us have distinct childhood memories of when we’ve felt shame and embarrassment, maybe even humiliation. We did something, said something, made some mistake, or something happened to us, and the shame we felt in that moment has marked us. We never want to experience that again. Or maybe we committed sins in our youth, and we look back on them with pain and regret and shame. We cringe to think about things that we’ve done and said. That’s past-oriented shame.
Third, shame often looks forward to the future. When David speaks of “being put to shame,” there’s this idea that a day of exposure is coming. There will be a day when secrets will be revealed, when honor will be given (or not), when vindication will come (or not), and it’s the prospect of that future moment that creates anxiety about shame in the present. We anticipate the shame we will feel, if we’re exposed on that day.
A final illustration that brings many of these things together. Earlier this week, I watched two videos related to the turmoil that has been rocking our country in recent days. In the first, a young man, dressed all in black, with his face covered, is spray painting and busting out the windows of a police car during one of the protests. And while he’s doing it, others in the crowd are yelling at him to stop. And his response is brazen. He uses very crude gestures, and continues to shamelessly destroy the police car. The second video is a few days later when that same young man is walking into the court house, flanked by his parents, while reporters badger him for a comment as he prepares to turn himself in for his shameless acts of destruction. In that video, there’s no brazenness; neither he nor his parents make eye contact with anyone. The day of exposure has come, and he has been put to shame for violating the standards of the community before the watchful gaze of others.
Now what does all of that have to do with Psalm 25? In this Psalm, David is concerned that he will be put to shame. Why? Because he’s put all of his eggs in the Yahweh basket. “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust.” All of my prayers, all of my trust, all of my hope are in God. And yet he’s lonely, afflicted, and in distress. Which means unless God shows up in a big way, he will be put to shame before the contemptuous gaze of enemies who will exult over him. If God doesn’t show up to vindicate him, what does that say about David? That he’s not worthy, that he’s not good enough, that God doesn’t care about him. And so David waits for God, and remembers the promises that those who wait for the Lord will not be put to shame, but only those who do causeless and wanton evil will be ashamed. On the day of exposure, they will be humiliated for their brazen acts of treachery and destruction. David has confidence that the wicked, that sinners, will be exposed and shamed when God shows up.
Complexity
Which brings us to the complexity of God’s character and his relation to us. On the one hand, David’s hope is that God will expose and judge and shame sinners, the wantonly treacherous enemies surrounding him. On the other hand, look at 25:8. “Good and upright is the Lord, therefore what?” Therefore he shames sinners. He crushes sinners. He exposes and judges and condemns sinners. But that’s not what it says, “Good and upright is the Lord, therefore he instructs sinners in the way. That’s surprising. Apparently the relation between the good and upright God and sinners is complex, and so we must think and make some distinctions. Why does God expose and condemn some sinners, and instruct other sinners in the way?
Some sinners are wantonly treacherous, causelessly false and evil, and filled with violent hatred. In other words, they are unrepentant in their sin. But there’s another kind of sinner. Notice the parallels between v. 8, 9, 10, 12, and 14 in terms of who God teaches and instructs. In other words, these are humble sinners, covenant-keeping sinners, God-fearing sinners (v. 12, 14).
Now you might think, “Oh, these must be little sinners. They commit minor sins in small quantities.” But no, look at 25:11: “For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.” David is a great sinner; that’s one of the reasons why he’s lonely and afflicted. He’s committed great sin. But great sin means great forgiveness when you pray in the great name of God.
So the first aspect of complexity is that there are different kinds of sinners in Psalm 25. There are the unrepentant, reckless, and brazen sinners who will be put to shame on the day of exposure. And then there are the humble, God-fearing, covenant-keeping, great sinners whose guilt will be pardoned and who will never be put to shame.
Now this complexity in God’s relation to sinners leads to a complexity in David’s prayer. This is amazing. Look carefully at the three “remembers” in 25:6-7.
Remember your mercy and your steadfast love. In other words, remember your eternal attributes and your ancient and everlasting character.
Don’t remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions. Forget my sins.
But don’t forget me. Remember me. According to the steadfast love (v. 6), remember me, for the sake of your goodness. Remember your mercy, and then remember me, but not my sin. That’s the complexity in Psalm 25.
Resolve
A major theme in this psalm is the ways or paths of God (v. 4, 8, 9, 10, 12). There is a way that we are to live and walk, in order that we not be put to shame in the end. And this way includes the kind of complex prayers we just discussed (“remember me, but not my sin”). It includes where our eyes look for help. “My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the net” (25:15). And the result is well-being and children (v. 13), blessing and offspring, prosperity and posterity. More than that, walking in God’s way means that we are his friends. “The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him.” We are welcomed into God’s secret counsels, and thus we’re not hung out to dry or put to shame. And then, because we are walking in God’s ways, our integrity and our uprightness preserve us and keep us as we wait for the Lord to act (25:21).
And so we want to walk away from this psalm with a fresh resolve to walk in God’s ways, to follow his paths, to keep his covenant and his testimonies. We want to look to him for help, pray to him for blessing, and wait on him for deliverance.
And this is where I want to enrich our understanding of the clarity, the complexity, and the resolve by bringing Jesus into the picture. Let’s go in reverse order.
How does Jesus help deepen our resolve to walk in God’s ways? Well, that does Jesus say to us when we’re lonely, troubled, and afflicted? John 14:1, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.” In other words, put all your eggs in the Jesus basket. You have to go all in. This faith feels like a risk. We’re putting ourselves out there. We’re not tapping the ice to see if it will hold us; we’re putting our full weight on the ice and trusting that it will hold, and that Jesus will rescue. There’s no hedging your bets; you have to choose a path and start walking. You have to select a way. And (John 14:6), Jesus is the way. I am the way and the truth and the life. We look to him for deliverance and salvation. In Psalm 25, David keeps his eyes ever toward the Lord; now, we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. So Jesus gives us fresh resolve to walk in God’s ways because Jesus is the way, and our eyes are fixed on him.
More than that, Jesus illuminates the complexity of God’s relation to us as sinners. How can a good and perfect and upright God forgive sinners and instruct sinners in the way? Listen to Romans 8:1-4.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Notice the same complexity: no condemnation for us (despite our ungodliness) because God did what the law couldn’t do: condemn our sin without condemning us. In other words, Jesus makes it possible to separate sinners from their sin, so that the sin gets punished and the sinners are forgiven and instructed. Romans 8 explains why we can pray: “Remember your steadfast love, O Lord. Remember me, but not my sins. Pardon my guilt for the sake of your name, because my guilt is great and Christ is a great savior.”
Finally, Jesus is central in addressing us in our deep fear of being put to shame. We all fear exposure. We all look to the future with foreboding because we wonder what will happen on the day of exposure. Will we be shamed and humiliated? Will we be enough? When the secrets of men are revealed, when people finally see us for who we really are, will we be mocked, derided, put to shame? Jesus is the answer to that fear, because Jesus took our shame upon himself. He was exposed on our behalf. He was mocked and derided. As we seek to run the race set before us, walking in God’s ways, we look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God. He despised the shame. He held shame in contempt. He didn’t shrink back from it in fear. He knew it was coming. He sweat blood and had great anguish of heart as he contemplated. But he gained fresh resolve and said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And so he despised the shame. And his confidence in God was not disappointed. In the end, he was vindicated. His enemies, the principalities and powers, were put to open shame when he triumphed over them on the cross and resurrection, and he now sits at the right hand of God the Father.
And he calls us to follow him, to risk it all, to put all our eggs in the Jesus basket. This is what the saints of old did, and I want to conclude by reading my favorite biblical passage on the fear of shame:
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return (no waffling, no hedging). 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13-16).
The ultimate answer to our fear of living under the contemptuous gaze of others is to know that when we put our trust in the Lord and wait on him, he is not ashamed to be called our God. We are his beloved, his creation, his treasured possession. Whatever the world may think, whatever rejection and exposure we may face, he has prepared a place for us and he is not ashamed to call us his own.