Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: Welcome. The following message is a ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is known for ministries such as the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, as well as nationally syndicated radio programs like The Bible Study Hour, Every Last Word, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

Our purpose is to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Thank you for listening.

Guest (Male): Here's as I understand it, the way things have been organized for these two days. Harry and Tim will be talking about pastoral ministry as we're moving toward the church. Steve Estis and I will be talking about—if I maybe put it this way—the church sort of coming at us and making difficulties for our own lives.

So, what I'd like to do this morning is don't think about your church so much. I'd like to speak to you rather than what you're going to be doing in ministry or certainly there are ministry implications to this, but I simply want to speak with you.

The topic with that book in mind is let's identify it as rejection. Sense of failure, disapproval, people being disappointed with you, being controlled by the opinions of or the possible opinions of other people. That word disappointment, by the way—that's when my wife is disappointed with me, I beg her to be angry with me. Please be anything but don't be disappointed with me.

I think the basic idea is that some people are up and they see you as somehow less than. Or some people are in and you are not quite in; you're disenfranchised from the larger group. That's the experience that I would like to identify this morning and I'm assuming that unless we're autistic, we know something about that particular experience.

Keep these things in mind. Essentially, I simply want to encourage you this morning, recognizing that you must struggle with this particular issue. I also want to encourage your confidence in Scripture because this is not simply a pastoral issue, it's a human issue.

There have been different phases in publishing where the world has taken a shot at being controlled by the opinions of other people, dealing with rejection. Their last shot was a vain attempt of "distance yourself from people who are mean and love yourself more." That was as far as they could go and you could imagine that particular phase died quickly and there's been nothing to take its place.

So here's a place where Scripture goes deeper than any worldly wisdom and I simply want us to be encouraged by that this morning. Let me begin by encouraging you this way: it is God's will that you are rejected. It is God's will that you are rejected. Now, does that sound good? It actually is good. Let me see if I can explain.

Everybody experiences rejection. It is universal. So as a result, as you are thinking about yourself this morning, certainly everything that Scripture offers you and the Spirit does in your heart you will be able to offer to others because everyone struggles with this particular problem.

Yet not everyone is called to this particular problem. I would argue that especially as you look at Second Corinthians, Paul is not simply telling war stories. Paul is giving a template for ministry. In other words, Paul is saying this is what ministry will be. It will be a life of rejection by those that you love. It won't always only be that, it will be more than that, but it will at least be a life of rejection.

In Second Corinthians, he plants this church. They ask for his resume essentially. They say you just don't quite seem like the kind of person we want. You don't have the reputation, the stature to be the kind of person we want to be associated with. There's this rejection from the very people that he loves.

Paul is giving us a template and I suspect that Paul was surprised by that at one point. The Spirit having been given, the love and unity that has now been poured out and given to the church. For him to experience this kind of rejection at the hands of those he loved who had the Spirit, it had to be surprising until he recognized, "Oh yes, this is—I am following the rejected servant. I am following the one whose life was notable because the shame that was heaped on him over and over again."

You can almost see Paul's wheels turning. It is God's will that you experience and suffer rejection and shame, which means that as it knocks on your door—and it is and it will—you can smile. You can say, "Ah, this—I am in the—" curiously it feels as though you're on the outs, but you're actually in the very center, following in the footsteps of the Messiah.

So be encouraged if you experience rejection and shame in the sense of being unloved by those around you because I think the Apostle Paul is saying that is the template for pastoral ministry and they just didn't explain it to you in seminary. They gave us a different story there.

I'd like to take two ways into this experience of rejection. One: we are too concerned about our reputation. We call this side the fear of man. The other is that we are undeserving of anything. We are a failure. We are outcasts. If people really knew who we were, we would be let go from the church immediately. Fear of man on one side, shame on the other.

We should even be encouraged by that because if this is a universal problem and if it is a universal calling for pastors, then we would expect that Scripture would be crammed with what the Lord says to those who go through rejection and shame and it indeed is. And I'm just going to identify sort of two ways into it this morning.

I want to start with fear of man and then move to shame. Fear of man—well, think first about the experience of rejection that you can have in ministry. People who are unmoved by things that you say, people who are sleeping in the midst of things that you say, or people who leave your church.

And if they leave your church, they can have all kinds of reasons, but somehow you have not quite measured up. They're not moving out of the area—it's something about you. With those—I'm assuming that you can multiply rejection experiences and you have some present ones, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to identify them—let's just see if we can get into Scripture and be blessed by how the Lord is aware of this and speaks to it so profoundly and also gently.

If we trace it out historically, it goes something like this: being controlled by the opinions of other people. It starts with fear for our very lives. Those who have the power of life and death are the ones we're afraid of. And you see this in Numbers 13 and 14 where the people were reneging on their commitments to the Lord because of the power, the bigness of the people in the land.

That's sort of the way into it. But it quickly—this fear of man quickly moves into its very modern appearance of being concerned about the rejection of other people, being concerned about our own reputation. In Deuteronomy chapter 1, for example: don't fear man. In other words, don't be controlled by the opinions of other people in the way you make judgments because you can easily bend your judgments in favor of somebody because you want to be liked by them.

Your very judgment in the lives of the people is going to be affected by the fear of man—your desire to have some sort of status and reputation among the people among you. I'll just take a few random stories here just to remind us that there's a tradition here in Scripture. King Saul: what was arguably the turning point of his ministry?

The Amalekites were not destroyed. Why? "What would the people think of me if I did such a thing?" Being controlled by the opinions of other people, the possible rejection of other people, becomes really the turning point in Saul's kingdom. You get to Proverbs 29:25: "The fear of man will be a snare to us."

Isaiah 51: it then moves from the fear of death to the fear of reproach and the fear of insults. These are the things that can move to controlling proportions in our lives. As you move into the New Testament, what do you find? You find the Pharisees, because of their fear of the people, wouldn't confess Jesus.

You find that Jesus stood out among the teachers of the day and we don't know exactly how this happens, but he does not seem to be trying to win the approval of others whereas all the other teachers of the land, there seems to be this concern about their own personal reputation. Jesus seemed to be indifferent to such things and that is identified as one of the places where he contrasts with the leaders of the people.

The most blatant experience of a desire for reputation and concerns for rejection would be the story of Peter, obviously. And it seems as though Scripture's trying to accent this when, in one of the denials, it's a young servant girl. All three of those, her stature is very, very small and in the midst of this young servant girl asking a simple question, Peter denies Christ.

So my point is that this is a tradition that goes throughout Scripture and it is now your calling. You will know the insults and the rejection of other people. We come from a community that has not always done well in dealing with the rejections and insults of others, but Jesus and the Spirit of Christ somehow revolutionizes our experience of this and our response to it.

So just very briefly, this one side of rejection—and I'll speak personally here. I'm going to more or less summarize a few things briefly just from my own experience. In the midst of people leaving, in the midst of people falling asleep, in the midst of people being indifferent to sermons and to ministry—when rejection is fueled by my own interest in reputation, it's simply the question—and there's an implicit repentance in this—"Why am I so concerned about me? Why am I so concerned about me?"

The gospel gives us the privilege—and this has been one of the greatest privileges for me in the gospel—it has taken me from sort of an inward, introspective person to being able to think about myself just a little bit less often. It's not you think lower or higher of yourself as we come to Christ, it's we simply have the privilege of thinking less often about ourselves.

So that implicit sort of repentance: "Why am I so concerned about me?" And then Scripture goes further and where it leads us is into this highly unbalanced life. Let me explain. We're accustomed to symmetry in our art, in our writing, but our world is highly unbalanced. This is the world we proclaim. We have been loved more than we will ever love in return. That's the very foundations of our lives.

We have the privilege of loving Christ more than loving the people around us. I think that if you would ask my wife, one of the prominent goals in my life, it is to love Christ more than I love her. Because I can only love her well if I love Christ more. This seems silly, it seems juvenile, but my desire in life is when I see Christ face to face to be more enthusiastic about seeing him than seeing my wife.

If my wife predates me in death, to be looking forward to, hoping more in seeing Jesus face to face than actually seeing my wife. There's that unbalance again that I want to love Christ more than I love my wife. And then there's a third way we can put the unbalance and this has been very helpful for me.

I want to love others more than I want to be loved by others. In other words, of course rejection is not wrong, it just can simply run amok. That's the problem. Will we be hurt by the rejection of other people? Absolutely we will be hurt. Our desire is not to somehow assuage our pain. Our desire is to be less controlled by the rejection around us.

Our desire is to love others more than we want to be loved by them. And this seems to be especially obvious in the Apostle Paul. Here's Second Corinthians chapter 6. Let me just read you a couple of verses here. "We have spoken freely to you Corinthians and open wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affections from you, but you are withholding yours from us."

This is a very embarrassing thing to be writing: "I love you more, I love you more, I love you more. Love me in return." And it's not because he's concerned about his own reputation, it's not because he feels like he's bereft of approval and affection. It's no, this is the way the church of Christ should work.

That's his calling. This is the way the church of Christ is glorious to heavenly beings who are observing the work of the gospel. Paul knows this unbalanced world. How does he deal with rejection? He just maintains that course. "I want to love my people more than I want to be loved by my people."

Does he want to be loved by them? Absolutely he wants to be loved by them. But when he is not loved well, what you seem to see in the Apostle Paul, it's as if nothing has changed. He continues to be oriented toward love toward these people. Let me just read a little bit more. This is not necessarily pastoral strategy that we will have, but he's our template.

It is our calling to know rejection. And in that rejection, we love more than we want to be loved. "Make room for us in your hearts"—this is Second Corinthians chapter 7. "We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have exploited no one. I do not say this to condemn you. I have said before that you have such a place in our hearts that we would live or die with you."

Then he speaks of his pleasure in them. "I have great confidence in you, I take great pride in you, I'm greatly encouraged in all our troubles. My joy knows no bounds." We're assuming rejection is a calling in your life. It's a calling. What would these things look like?

Simple is moving toward people. For the uninvolved, to ask them to pray for us that we would be able to speak of Christ accurately and well and clearly. Or to ask for prayer from another person, which is a humbling thing to do to ask for prayer. We're saying that we're needy.

To ask for prayer from people who perhaps are rejecting us and say, "Here's the deal. I never want to preach a sermon that hasn't taken my own heart. Could you pray for me that everything I speak will come out of the Spirit first having done this work in me?" What is it? It's simply the question: "How do I love this person now?"

How do I move toward this person who in their indifference they leave me marginalized? To be humble before them perhaps and to ask for prayer. I'm sure that many of you have done these things. I'm going to say something else now. You've done this, but you might forget how amazing it is.

A few years ago, I was talking to a pastor and there was somebody leaving the church. And they were leaving the church because of him ultimately. They didn't say that, but it was implicit in everything. They knew he knew, he knew they knew and it was simply because of him. He was a failure as a pastor before them.

And he wanted to meet with them, he wanted to pray for them before they left and then he simply asked, "How can I help you get settled in another church?" How can I help you get settled in another church? I suspect probably three-quarters of you have done that. And if you have done that, that's the unbalanced life.

Here is rejection coming from a person and you're simply a normal Christian person. You've been loved much and nothing is going to hinder your love and you simply ask, "And how can I help you now?" If you have ever done such a thing, do you realize the power in that?

Might you have just done the most notable thing in that person's life? The thing they will remember forever? When they left this pastor and "good riddance" and he responded in just normal affection and pastoral care. Here's this category of rejection: you are called to it, you will experience it, it is tied to your very job description of following Jesus.

Here's one way the Scripture responds to it: "Why am I so concerned about me?" And then that to embark on this wonderfully unbalanced life. I'll just say maybe one other thing before we move to this other side. When I think of this, I think about ministry—I think about anybody who's in public ministry, they're going to experience a certain amount of rejection.

I think about it in ministry, I also think about it in marriage. Where I could tell the story of my own marriage in a number of different ways, but one way is I want to respond with greater godliness when I feel rejection from my wife. Now, when do I feel rejection from my wife?

It's not so much my wife's problem, it is I have a desire for reputation and respect and love and affection and admiration. Essentially, I have the desire to be the greatest thing in the world to my wife, where I am greater than all other men. Is that too much to ask?

And she responds with patience and love, but sometimes she doesn't treat me as I think my station deserves. And here's—this is embarrassing—my instinct in life has been to just sort of turn away. She says, "Honey, is everything okay?" "Yeah, everything's fine." To turn—the horror of such a thing.

To turn my back on a person I'm called to love when I have a God who's never turned his back toward me. The horror and the ugliness of that. What am I saying? I'm saying, "All right, okay, you do your penance and grovel and finally say I'm the greatest guy in the world and then I will reengage in a relationship."

It is humiliating to offer such a story. Does it work? It might in some relationships. My wife finds that kind of behavior really loathsome. So it really backfires badly. But let's say my wife hurt me in something she said. To be unwavering, to continue to be turned toward my wife and say, "Honey, everything okay between us?"

What you said, it seemed a little more prickly than usual. Are you angry at me? How basic and simple can you get in a relationship? But perhaps you're missing that this is the power of the resurrection at work. A man who is interested in reputation and affection and who at least if we're after fifty-fifty in our relationships rather than an unbalanced life, that's the way it will always go.

Because I did the right thing toward her, she hasn't quite done her fifty percent and I'm going to reject her until she does the fifty percent in return. That's sort of the way we sometimes maneuver marriage. But to simply have that simplicity: "Sure, I'm a little more interested in her than myself. What's up? Something seems to be bothering you."

Actually, ouch, yes, something you said just hurt. But you see, it's not "how dare you hurt me", it's "how are you? What's happening with you? Is there a problem we're experiencing in our relationships?" That's the ordinary way that love works out and of course it is extraordinary. And that's just part of it.

Here's this category of rejection. If Jesus knew rejection and shame, he's going to guide us into it, but he's also going to speak words that are unusually powerful and comforting in the midst of it. And let me take this other side now. Fear of man would be one side. Something much darker is on the other side.

It's not a clamoring for reputation because we believe that we are a big fat zero. We are nothing. And I'm speaking about nothing in the eyes of other people. There's this sense of exposure: "When will people see me? When will they find out who I really am? That's when they're going to fire me."

This sense that you are utterly unlovable. Now, I realize there are nuances to this that we could speak of. But I'm speaking of shame here and I'll speak personally. There are different ways that shame can come on us. Shame can come on us simply because we are born human beings.

Shame can come on us because there are sins in our lives that are a little bit different than the sins of other people and we don't want them to be seen. More often, shame comes at us because we have been dealt with in shameful ways. We have been treated in humiliating ways.

Again, this is a bit embarrassing, but one of the questions I've had in my relationship with the Lord is "How could he love me?" It just doesn't make any sense at all. And I would even bring that into my marriage. That I would say, "Sherri, I love you and highly respect you, but there's one thing that I don't respect and that is you married me. What's wrong with you that you would do such a thing?"

And of course she would respond, "Oh Ed, you're so great, I love you so much." "Oh, thank you, now I feel much better." But that's what you would do initially. After a while she'd just say, "Would you shut up? That's a bad question. Just deal with it," which was probably much better advice for me.

But this other category, it's not so much arrogance. If you can say one is rejection because we think too highly of ourselves, the other is rejection that's devastating because we are nothing. We think too low of ourselves, if you will. It's called shame. It's not wanting to be seen.

It's the experience occasionally I have when I preach and nobody says a word. They're relatively friendly, but nobody says a word and I find my instincts are I would like to get out of the church quicker. And the next day, I would prefer not to see a human being. It's not the way it goes, obviously, but I find those sort of instincts.

That gets close to the instinct of shame. The words that capture shame are "you feel exposed." You feel that something is wrong with you. You feel almost contaminated. And here's—two Sundays ago. Here all the people in the church they're talking among themselves and I have just spoken and nobody's even looking at me.

I'm begging for a conversation with one person and that sense of being sort of marginalized. Unlovable, unworthy, disgraceful—these are some of the words that come from this other side. Let me do the same thing with shame as I did with the fear of man.

There is a history to this particular experience. See it in the garden—if it's common to humanity, you're going to see it in the garden. And what do you see in the garden? This sense of nakedness. That's when the image of nakedness really begins. It begins right away: "Don't look at me."

How many people can resonate—how many highly successful people can resonate with their clothing themselves with their resumes? People I talk to, therapists I talk to in New York, the rich and famous speak to them. What are they speaking about? "When will I be exposed as something who is defiled, as something who's an abject failure? When will my resumes and reputation, which is nothing, when will it fall off?"

That experience of nakedness. By the way, as you follow the Genesis account, you see that triad of nakedness and being cast out of the garden, being separated. And then it moves by the time you get to the Levitical literature to this sense of being unclean. That seems to be the triad that you find going through the Scripture with this.

Shame is a human condition. Let me just give you some idea of the prevalence—we're talking about ourselves here. And rejection is going to be overwhelming because of fear of man, but also because of shame. I was speaking to a class at Westminster a number of years ago.

And I had a shameful experience in my own life that week. And I was going to be talking about shame and so I shared a little bit about the shameful experience. And then I said, "And by the way, how many of you experience shame? But let me say it a little bit differently. How many of you experience shame in a way that it is palpable? In a way that you experience it every single day? It is an intruder in your life."

So I was trying to up the ante on shame as much as I possibly could. I didn't finish the question when every single person raised their hand. "This is what I experience every day." I was stunned. Here I was hoping one person would raise their hand because I'd just put myself out there with this experience that wasn't a very pretty experience.

I was just hoping one person would sort of enter into my circle so I wouldn't quite be so alone. It was tragic when every single person raised their hand in unison. My point is that we experience it here, but how can we capture what Scripture says so it speaks to our own hearts so then we can speak it and disseminate it to those who live with shame even though they look like normal people?

They act like normal people, but—a woman who was a bit quieter one Sunday. I don't know why I noticed it. So I just asked, "You seem quieter than normal." She said, "I'm afraid to open my mouth." "What do you mean you're afraid to open your mouth?" "Well, I'm afraid if I open my mouth, I will defile other people."

"What are you talking about?" "I'm afraid that if I open my mouth, this black contaminant will come out of my mouth and it will contaminate every single person." Here's one of your Sunday School teachers who's a little quieter at church because her shame is a little bit more pronounced than usual.

She doesn't want to open her mouth because the contaminant will come out. This seems to be everywhere. And if it's everywhere, we expect Scripture is going to speak everywhere about it. And indeed we could argue that Scripture is the question, "I was naked without shame, but now I am naked and ashamed. Now what?"

The question of Scripture seems to be: what do I do with my shame? This sense that I am no longer part of that I am rejected, I am not part of this whole. I'm rejected by the people and I am rejected by God himself. Scripture identifies the clean and the unclean and Leviticus 10 seems to go something like this: one of our aspirations is to go from unclean to clean.

There is another category, it's the category of the holy, but those are the things devoted to God. They're not us. So we're just meandering around trying to be clean. Problem is it's always a losing proposition because we become contaminated by the unclean things around us. We're always just falling back into the unclean.

What do we do? Scripture identifies the fact that we can feel unclean and outcasts, but where is it going? Where is the story going? Exodus chapter 28. Don't feel exposed. The eyes of other people have been there and rejection. It's the story of the priestly robes. "Make them these priestly robes to give them dignity and honor."

Who would have thought? What's the opposite of shame? Your head is lifted up. Dignity, honor, belonging, beloved—those are shame's opposite. And here's the Lord by his own initiative. He's not clothing everyone in their nakedness, but he's clothing our representative priests and somehow we participate in that.

These priestly garments are these beautiful garments and of course the little placard on the hat is "Holy to the Lord." So something's happening. You're hopeful. You don't know exactly what it's going to be, but it seems to be good news. That's where the story goes. Proverbs 34:5—I'm skipping over tons of passages of course.

"Those who look to him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame." Here's where Scripture goes to places—everybody in the universe is familiar with shame. The older cultures of the world, the question of older cultures is "How do we deal with the shame that we experience?"

The younger cultures, shame is still in the background. We haven't figured out how to identify it or to deal with it very well. But how do we deal with shame? We try to enhance our reputation. We try to achieve something and then we show it off. That's the culture of the New Testament.

And here's another way: that you get attached to the honorable one. You get attached to the right person. It's all about relationships, apparently. So those who look to him, those who are next to him or turned toward him, who say, "I belong to you and you belong to me," they are radiant. Their faces can never be covered with shame.

And you see that passage and it's enticing. But then you see shame galore as the Old Testament story continues. Isaiah 54, on the heels of Isaiah 53, the ashamed woman: enlarge your tent because there's going to be more progeny than you could possibly imagine. Now the question is how is this taking place?

The pinnacle of that passage seems to be your Maker is your husband. It's all about relationships. It's all about who you are identified with. We get the reputation of the one we are united to. That's the tradition that's already moving in the Old Testament. And then we move into the New.

What do we see? Our desire, our hope, is to preach Christ in such a way that everybody who raises their hand when they say they're familiar with shame, when we preach Jesus, they recognize that he is their people. That if you are rich and famous in a church, one of your concerns is: does he love even me?

Because the preaching of Christ is a preaching that goes to the outcast. He was born as an outcast. The beatitudes are—what are they? The honorable ones are the ones that are the marginalized. Those with the sicknesses. Those who are poor, who are on the outskirts. Those are his people.

And what do you find? You find even early in Luke two things. He's eating with tax collectors and sinners. Sinners meaning people who are known by their sins. Everybody's a sinner, of course, but these are people who are identified by their sins. No Messiah could do such a thing.

He associates with unclean people. And he touches the unclean, he pursues the unclean. It's as if he makes these jagged lines in his ministry, seeking one unclean person after another. And early in his ministry what do you have? You have him dealing with the demon possessed, the pinnacle of the unclean.

Moving toward them. The people with diseases, they recognize him as one of their own and one who has the power to deal with their own shame and so they're looking to touch him and somehow to be healed. They're looking to be associated with him. The accurate preaching of Jesus is everybody who's familiar with shame and that kind of rejection—and they're everywhere—their ears should perk up.

Maybe he actually does see me. Maybe actually I can—maybe I'm actually invited to touch this one. That's the story of the New Testament. Shame is in view as the centerpiece of God's activity. Luke seems to be especially interested in these things. Luke 7 and 8 seem to be a compressed series of stories in Jesus' ministry about shame, about the shamed.

What do you have? You have the widow of Nain where he goes and he contaminates himself by touching the dead body. And there's that purposeful touching and you're beginning to get a sense that something is happening. That he is identifying himself with the shameful and somehow absorbing shame and giving power in its place.

You see the beginnings of that great exchange of the gospel itself. Then it moves to a woman who was known by her sins, who got Jesus. She was next to him, she was touching him, her tears were on his very feet and so her hair and her perfume and her tears become his bath.

She understood him. She understood that he was for the outcast. Now this particular person was shamed because of what she had done. That is one version of shame. Then it moves to demon possession again, the Lord just eyeing these unclean people and this exchange background.

He gives something, he gives liberation to the unclean and somehow takes that uncleanness on himself. And then the most vivid story, of course, is the story in Luke chapter 8 of the woman with the bleeding. A short anecdote, but it's such a vivid picture. She gets Jesus.

She's heard the stories and she's heard that shame people are his people. She's heard that people are actually touching him and she doesn't know everything that touching means, but somehow in identification and association with him something happens. She goes, she touches him and Jesus for our benefit makes it more public.

Something just took place. That power has gone from him. Holiness has gone from him, if you will. Now this unclean woman is associated with the holy one. And by the way, an unclean person next to a clean person, you make the clean person unclean. That's just the arithmetic of it.

But an unclean person next to a holy person, they become holy. Holiness is able to trump all uncleanness. That's what happens. And the holiness of Christ is given to this particular woman by her faith, by her identification with Jesus. And what we don't see is that he's continuing to absorb the shame of the world and go through the worst of shame preceding the cross.

So what are we doing? We're first identifying shame as "oh yes, indeed." That sense of not wanting to be seen, the sense of being on the outs, the sense of there's something wrong with me that makes me somehow different than everybody else, almost unlovable. That's the experience we're identifying.

And then what Scripture does is it says just sit back and listen, watch. Watch the story unfold and keep watching until you are persuaded that it's as if he has eyes for you alone. He is the God who is familiar with shame. And then you watch this pageant of shame preceding the cross.

Where the writers of Scripture understood that he was this man of shame and they were going to make sure all of us saw it. It's the degradation, it's the spitting upon and those kinds of things, the humiliation of Jesus before the cross. That was essential to the crucifixion and the resurrection.

It's the death of death in the death of Christ. It's the death of shame in the death of Christ and then he dies a shameful death. In his vindication at his resurrection, everything changes. What you get is Hebrews chapter 12 verse 2. And what is it? He looks down his nose at shame.

That's what Jesus did. He holds shame in disgrace. Instead of shame being heaped on him, he has been victorious over shame and he said shame has no more power in the lives of his people. And then the Apostle Paul comes along and he gets it. And what you find in Paul is if this is the way of the Messiah, then heap the shame on.

And it seems what Paul is saying is you don't have to follow me—shame will find you. So you don't have to look for shame, but I am going to make a point that shame has no more power and I'm going to seek it. So I am going to craft my ministry in such a way that it is discarded, it is disrespected, it is on the outs, it is rejected at all fronts.

I am going to speak in certain ways that don't measure up to the orators of the day—even though he was ironic with that because some of his writing is just plain elegant. I am going to go without an entourage, which is not what you do during the day. And then you go to Second Corinthians and what does he do?

Let me boast if I could, let me boast. And how's he boast? "I've been shipwrecked, I've been beaten" and don't forget it's that phenomena that people who are on the outs with God are the ones who go through the worst things. So here he is, he's identifying himself with people who were construed as being the shameful and the lost and the marginalized and he's advertising these things.

He says let me go on, let me go on, let me say some more about my resume—this resume of being the last in the procession to die. And if this accentuates my shame, so much the better. Because it's in that that the power of Christ can be especially obvious. Here's some of the genius I think—here's one of the great genius of Paul—that he understood the nature of shame.

This was one of the questions in all Scripture. This experience of rejection: we are on the outs. This is a human problem. Jesus went right into it and he captured, he brought it on himself and everything has changed. He has defanged shame of its power and Paul is advertising that to us by saying, "Bring it on."

Bring on shame and I will show you that the greatest power that people in this culture think—this rejection and loss of reputation—it has no authority anymore. That's over and over and over again. That's what Paul is doing. For example—I was just thinking of First and Second Corinthians there.

But in Philippians, a group of people that as far as we can tell, a group of people that were very Greek in their thinking and it was see and be seen. And so he says, "Let me introduce myself. I'm a slave. I'm a slave." He uses that word I think uniquely in Philippians. Why? He says, "I am lower than the low."

Here these people are concerned about reputation, "You're our guy?" And then he tells the story of Jesus. The exalted one goes lower and lower and lower. And then he tells his own biography. And what's he trying to do? He's trying to overlay his biography as much as he can on the person of Jesus Christ.

He has no redemptive power but if that's the course of his God, then he could there could be nothing better than that. And so what does he say? He says, "All these trappings of reputation that made me feel like I was on the inside, they're all shameful. That's what they are. They're shameful."

I spit on those so I can have this union with Christ in his death and in his resurrection. That's the power over shame. That's the way he tells his biography. Question: what do we do? What do we do with this amazing way that our God speaks into the nature of shame?

We're stunned. We're stunned at the descent of Christ. We're stunned at the way he identified with shameful humanity. What else do we do? When shame comes your way—and it does and it will—you smile. My own tendency in life is toward self-loathing.

There are a bunch of reasons for that that are not important. But here's where this angle on shame has led me: that when self-loathing kicks in, "I am just a jerk, I am a failure, there's nothing I can do right." Ah, and they are exactly his people.

That puts me in the very center of the people of God. If I am feeling marginalized and discarded, they are the ones that God sees. So it's not quite "bring it on", but it's moving in that direction. If shame allows me to see more clearly the character of God, the love of Christ, and if it allows me to see my own belonging in Christ, then heap it on me.

It's a counter-intuitive way of responding to shame, but nothing is as we suspect as we get to the gospel of Christ. Those who are identified with him, their faces are radiant, never covered with shame. We are united with our Maker, we are united with the Holy One and we share in his reputation.

Our own reputation is long since died. Just one fascinating illustration of that in First Corinthians chapter 7 I think it is. Here's the way the world works. If you're married to an unbeliever, divorce that unbeliever because the unbeliever's unclean and you're clean and you're going to become unclean.

So you divorce the unbeliever. That's just the natural logic that this woman would have. But Paul says if the unbeliever's willing to live with you, stay. You know why you stay? Because you're now the holy one united with Christ. And the contamination in your home, the holy wins.

Now your children who would be unclean, now somehow they are identified with the holy one because they're identified with you. This is something total upheaval in the world as he speaks about this. Not to mention the fact we eat with unbelievers and those kinds of things. To bring it on, to say bring it on.

And then to know we are not alone. That everybody in our congregation is raising their hands when we talk about shame. And to invite people to the Lord's Supper as you invite yourself. Because what is it? It's many things, but it's you eat with your people.

That's what you do. You eat with your people and he identifies ourself in that very personal intimate meal. We participate in this holiness. You invite shame people to the Lord's Supper. And perhaps you also do this. You can see this is the way Scripture goes. We talk about ourselves, but if we got Scripture accurately, we find ourselves encouraged by the gospel and then we start thinking outside of ourselves.

It's just irresistible to do that. So we start thinking of people who have shamed us or have been shamed by other people. And like the Apostle Paul, how can we see the beauty in them? Shame people don't think they're very beautiful. Shame is associated with ugliness and so you have this wonderful little picture in Second Corinthians chapter 3.

Here's the New Testament believer: no more veils on faces. If they're looking to Jesus their face is radiant. And when you see a radiant face, you gotta say something about it. What does it mean? It means that you're going to move toward those who are the marginalized and the outcast.

And you're going to listen for Christ in them and it's going to be irresistible. You're going to be compelled to speak of their radiant face. And when you speak about their radiant face they're not going to believe you because their experience of life is that they are contaminated.

But you're going to persist in that as the Apostle Paul certainly persisted in such things with his church. Insisting on how he would see Jesus in them. And then you're going to do this. Peter, the one who was most familiar with shame—he's not as biographical as Paul is in some of his letters.

But it's not surprising he writes this particular summary. All right, who are you? Who are the people that you are speaking to? You know this, but you've probably used this as a benediction. But if you're familiar with this theme of shame that enters into this experience of rejection, all of a sudden you realize everything in this benediction is being spoken to shameful people.

If you're on the outs, you get this benediction and you know probably what I'm going to say. This is First Peter chapter 2. You are a chosen people. Shame people, they're not chosen. Part of the experience of rejection, it's sort of that old you're the last person picked or you're not even picked for the team. That's sort of the phenomena.

You are a chosen people before the foundations of the world you were chosen. You are not just a priesthood dressed in those Exodus chapter 28 robes, you are a royal priesthood. You're associated with the King. You're not just a nation, you're a holy nation. You see these are words that are attacking shame and they're spitting on it saying shame has no more power.

This is what happens as we are united with Christ. A people belonging to God. Most of us are very we enjoy seeing covenant in Scripture. What is covenant? I am yours, you're mine. A people belonging to God. And now we have a mission—we're not on the outskirts that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into this wonderful light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Let me pray. Father, we're just—here's this universal human experience that apparently you have called us to and then you don't leave us in it.

You speak. First of all, you enter into it and then you speak. You bring us into it gently and you speak to us throughout. We are astounded that your word—who are we that we would be the recipients of these kinds of things from the Holy One?

May we be proclaimers to those who are rejected and on the outs. May we speak accurately of Christ to them in such a way that they are intrigued, they even turn and seek to want to touch Jesus and be touched by him. We pray these things because we have been touched by the living God. Amen.