Many Christians who believe in the forgiveness of Christ often struggle with guilt and shame, even after coming to a saving experience in Christ. Shame is that awful thing that hinders our trust in the Lord and becomes a roadblock to intimacy with God. In a previous article, I dealt with guilt, but in this article I want to deal with the fruit of guilt, which is shame. Shame is the emotional feeling that can stop our development emotionally, physiologically and practically as we seek to develop our God given abilities. If a person has unresolved guilt, or what I call “Shadow” guilt, shame chains us to our yesterday. 

Many Christians today believe that if they pray and have faith then God is obligated to preform a miracle or give them what they ask for in prayer.  However, this mindset often fails to take the whole of scripture into account when trying to understand when and if God will move on our behalf with a miracle. I believe Christians today have a patch work understanding of scripture and not a cohesive understanding of what God is communicating in his word.

Ask anyone who has had a disease or crippling physical problem and they all will say they would loved to be healed and would do almost anything to get healed. Yet there are millions who have never received what they longed for or prayed for. People in many different age groups from young and old will tell you the doctors and medicine don’t seem to be able help them even with all our advanced discoveries. Some sicknesses and problems in life we don’t seem to recover from, so people have to live with chronic illness for the rest of their natural lives. I know this isn’t a popular thing to say but many people, Christian or not, will not receive their healing. In many Christian circles, especially if you believe prayer makes a difference, this seems contrary to what they have been taught in scripture.

As we grow in our trust of God in our daily walk there are some  things he may choose to hide from us. The reasons for such actions I’m sure are many, yet to understand the basic reasons would be helpful to us so that we can know if God is withholding truth because we are not prepared for it, like the early disciples who walked with Jesus in ministry.

The Church has been wrestling with the concept of grace for ages. In fact, ever since the reformation of the 1500s when Luther, Calvin and Zwingli helped usher in the start the reformation from the corruption of the Catholic church, theologians and pastors have wrestled with the simply awkward definition of Grace as “Unmerited Favor.” To be honest, many doctrines the church has embraced and taught today came out of an over-correction of errors that the Catholic church was steeped in. When there is an over-correction of concepts often the new “Version” is flawed as well. The word and concept of “Grace vs Works” is one of them.

We live in a strange time in history because we live with so many images of people who are “Inauthentic” and just pretending to be genuine.  For example, news commentators and politicians continually craft an image or narrative instead of being authentic about who and what they believe about God and life in general. It seems that modern culture has increasingly traded good character for a good image.  The really sad thing is that can be expected from the world but many pastors have gotten in lock step with the world when it comes to working on their image more than their character.

When I look at the average believer today I am saddened by the lack of the ability to understand what’s going on in the spirit in any given conversation, let alone what’s going on in one’s own personal life. Too many believers walk in life as if they were never born again but only have the knowledge that God loves them and Jesus died to forgive them.

We live in a day and age when this life is hard pressed on so many fronts. Turn on the nightly news and one quickly sees people are so stressed out they end up doing extreme things that are out of control, like pulling out a gun and shooting someone for little to no reason other than they were mad. It seems people have little to no ability to control their emotions these days.

I have spent four articles thus far building the case that the average Christian believer walks out their Christian experience periodically fueled by their knowledge of the Scriptures and yet very little by the counsel and power of the Holy Spirit as evidenced by the carnality within the church or individual believers. If one would just study the nature of the church today you would quickly discover that most churches and denominations came out of church splits, and not expansion from evangelism since the 1500s when the reformation happened. To be truthful, this had to happen because carnality had been settling into the church since Constantine in 320 AD and the breakaway factions wanting to get back to what the bible said about living as Christ intended believers to live. 

The first article I wrote on this subject asked the question of whether we are fueling our Christian life by the Holy Spirit or just by our human will power.  I used the Jesus Movement as an example of what I and others of this time period noticed, namely the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit in the lives of many believers. It was a powerful time to grow in Christ and I believe it could happen again today if believers become informed and hunger for God like never before.