© Paolo Dala
Shame
...we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, if it’s always good to move beyond shame, then shame must always be a bad thing.” That would be a trap, I think. That would be like saying, “Since we should always seek healing from having our skin cut, therefore surgery is always a bad thing.”
...Having your skin cut by a knife is not in itself a good thing, and neither is shame in itself a good thing. But given the reality of disease, being cut by a knife may become a kind of good thing because of what it leads to - namely, healing. That’s the way it is, I think, with shame in the New Testament.
Sometimes shame functions like surgery to bring us to the healing that we need, but that doesn’t mean that all shame has a healing function, any more than all skin cutting leads to health. There is surgery, and there is stabbing. So, we need to make distinctions...
...there’s misplaced shame, the kind we should not have, and well-placed shame, the kind we should have, but only temporarily while it does its healing work.
This is 2 Timothy 1:8: “Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner.” So, there are two kinds of things in that verse that you should not be ashamed of, shouldn’t feel shame about:
speaking about the Lord Jesus [and]
being associated with somebody who’s in prison for the Lord Jesus.
It doesn’t matter how many people belittle you or make fun of you. Which shows us that, for the Christian, the source of shame should not come from the false opinions of other people, no matter how belittling they are. That takes a great deal of self-identity in and for Jesus to live through that.
Another example is when Jesus said, “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). If human opinion is more emotionally powerful than God’s opinion of us, and if the power of human opinion cripples us and silences us with shame because we claim to be a Christian, we are not going to stand in the judgment, Jesus says...
Now, what about well-placed shame - namely, the kind we ought to have, at least temporarily? Paul says to the Corinthians who were doubting the resurrection, “Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame” (1 Corinthians 15:34). They ought to feel shame, he’s saying. And in 1 Corinthians 6:5, when the Christians were disputing with each other and taking that dispute into the secular courts, he says, “I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers?”
...I conclude that well-placed shame says you should feel shame for having a hand in anything that dishonors God, no matter how strong or wise or right it may look in the eyes of men. Now, when I say that we should feel shame if it is well-placed because of our wrongdoing, I don’t mean that we should feel shame 'indefinitely', any more than we ought to spend the rest of our lives on the surgeon’s operating table. I call it well-placed shame because it ought to be there, but it ought not to stay there.
So the key question for both misplaced shame and well-placed shame is, How do we properly move beyond both of them? How do we get rid of both of them?
...[A] promise from God that covers both cases of misplaced shame and well-placed shame, so that we can get rid of both of them appropriately, quickly. Here’s Isaiah 45:17: “You [namely, you who believe] shall not be put to shame or confounded to all eternity.” Which Paul then applies to Christians with these words in Romans 10:11: “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” No one, finally, will be shamed in the kingdom of God. It will be over.
John Piper Shame: Its Uses and Abuses
