Freedom Series – Shame

One of the scriptures that I think about is with the woman who was bleeding for 12 years. She must have felt such shame over that time. She would’ve had to proclaim herself unclean. I can’t even get my head around what that would feel like and telling people, “Don’t touch me because I’m unclean.” People must have thought that she was under the judgement of God. She must have thought that. It’s just one of those stories that blows me away because of the pain and suffering that she must have experienced.

There’s this beautiful moment where Jesus heals her. He deals with the shame and that’s my favorite part. He heals her physically but it goes so much further than that. He says to her,”Daughter.” He knows that she’s carried shame for 12 years and she needs this encounter with Him that will set her free from the grip of shame and the best way to do that is to redefine who she is. I can imagine it, that she’s there and she’s broken and she’s stooped over. She looks at Him and He says, “Daughter,” and suddenly everything is different about how she sees herself. I remember once getting a prophetic word at a moment in my life when I was struggling with shame, who I was. This lady came to me and she said to me, “God says your name means the right thing.” Katia means pure. To me, her word was absurd. Pure wasn’t a word that I would have described myself as. I was living in a place of shame.

Shame is different to guilt. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are, to stop us from recognizing all that God has already put in us. What he saw me as, He was seeing me more accurately than I was seeing myself. I think that’s the way of walking in freedom from shame, allowing Him to proclaim over us what is the deepest truth about us. He redefines how we see ourselves so the power of shame is broken. He’s not agreeing with the enemy that we’re ugly, dirty, faulty, but rather you were made for greatness, powerful, and wonderful and that’s where shame gets broken. You are not faulty, less valuable, or dirty, or broken. You are powerful, wonderful, quite simply magnificent, and that’s the truth.