Steve Brown, Etc.

Matthew Porter: Have you ever felt like you needed to win God's approval? Ever feel like you'll never be good enough? There is a solution. Let's talk about it with author Toni Kim on Steve Brown, Etc.

He's an old white guy, an author, broadcaster, and seminary professor who's sick of religion. And he's brought friends. Please welcome Steve Brown, Etc.

Yeah, that's the name of the show, Steve Brown, Etc. I am not Steve Brown. I feel better. I just want to get everything straightened away at the front. Full disclosure, I am not the old white guy. I am Matthew Porter, your humble guest host.

Everyone else who's here is top-shelf. Let's start off with Jeremy, our producer. He's in the little glass booth. Jeremy just had a birthday. So, happy belated birthday. Jeremy, as a professional musician, when people sing you "Happy Birthday," are you ever tempted to go, "That was great. Can we try it again? You were a little pitchy over here."

Jeremy: A lot of it is that you ever seen the joke that the sheet music for "Happy Birthday" sung at a restaurant is just happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear. Yeah, that's it every time. It's a chord cluster. John Cage would be proud. You just buckle up and then you don't have to do this again for another twelve months. Usually, I have to accompany my own birthday song. They sit me down at the piano and I have to play it for myself. No rest for you.

Matthew Porter: Our one-man IT department is here, John Meyer. He's in the tech bunker. John recently discovered Detroit-style pizza. It's basically like regular pizza, except it's been stabbed several times.

John Meyer: Authentic. Extra oily.

Matthew Porter: Did they use the water from Flint? These are great. Where were you guys when I was doing show prep? That would have been appreciated. I'm happy to go. If we were, then you couldn't have said humble.

Dr. George Bingham is the president of Key Life. George recently heard news that there's a Canadian translation of the Bible. In that version, Adam and Eve cover themselves with maple leaves.

George Bingham: You think your stuff is funny, don't you? I worked all weekend for that one. I don't care if you guys like it. I like the maple leaves. And Adam said, "The woman made me do it, eh?"

Matthew Porter: And Kathy Wyatt is the soft feminine side of the program. Kathy hails from Connecticut, where this time of year they're having an event that I believe they call fall. Am I saying it right?

Kathy Wyatt: Indeed. Especially with maple leaves. They're the most colorful maple leaves.

Matthew Porter: And if you're keeping score at home, that's two fall jokes in a row. Little theological, little geographical. No more three-day weekends for you. I have too much time on my hands.

Despite what you've just experienced, I can tell you we have a good show ahead for you. We have a fantastic new friend to the program. Toni Kim is Director of Spiritual Care at the National Association of Evangelicals. She previously served more than twenty years as a pastor in Vancouver and Boston. Note the Canadian reference there, too. Was that a coincidence?

Toni's new book is called "Shame Redeemed: Learning to Live in Christ's Freedom." Toni, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Toni Kim: It's a privilege to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matthew Porter: You have a great laugh and you're immediately my best friend. Somebody who has a good sense of humor. "Shame Redeemed," the subject, the theme is in the topic of it, but tell us about the book.

Toni Kim: Shame is a difficult topic to talk about, but that's why we have to talk about it. The amazing thing is that the Bible talks a lot about it and there's a lot of good news with regard to our shame. What I'm hoping to do is to give people vocabulary, to give people permission to talk about our shame, and then to find that God gets the last word about our shame and our identity.

Matthew Porter: Christians would hear shame and you're like, yeah, that's not something good, but is it going too far to say I think shame can be dangerous sometimes to our spiritual health, to our whole person?

Toni Kim: Absolutely. Shame can be very devastating to our soul, to our identity. But the solution of getting rid of all shame is not the right solution because we all know there's a difference between being shameless and being unashamed. Unashamed is a good thing, like you have no cause to feel shame. But when you're shameless, you don't care. You're just going to do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want.

We think that's what freedom is. That kind of shamelessness actually leads you to more shameful behavior and increases your shame problem rather than decreasing it. We've got to tease out when shame is actually good. When you do something wrong, you should feel shame. That shame should cause you to repent, to ask forgiveness, to fix what you've done wrong, to receive that forgiveness and repair. Sometimes you should feel shame and sometimes you shouldn't feel shame. We have to figure out when we should feel shame and what we do in different circumstances.

Matthew Porter: That's fascinating because a lot of people go, shame never again. It might be a part and parcel of how God put this together. So tell me, when you're writing this book, who are you writing this for? Who are you picturing in your mind that this is for?

Toni Kim: Basically all of us. I'm picturing myself at different stages of my life. I'm picturing the different people that I've spoken to over the years. I actually had the chance to speak at a family retreat recently. It was interesting to me that immediately afterwards I had middle school girls come up to me and shame is obviously a huge part of their experience because they're shaped by social media at this time.

But I also had people who are living in senior living homes coming and talking about the shame of feeling discarded by your family and kind of put off to the side, put out to pasture. From very young ages to the wiser ages, we're all dealing with some aspect of shame. There's no age where we just get over it. We're going to have to have this conversation today.

Matthew Porter: Tell us as a bit of setting the table, because we're going to totally dive into the book and I already have questions just rolling through my head. Give us a little bit of your background and your story and how did those experiences guide you towards saying I need to write this book?

Toni Kim: I'm born and raised in Texas. You can tell by nothing. You can tell only because I tell that to you. My parents immigrated from Taiwan. As an Asian-American, I really understood what shame is viscerally. Asian culture is a shame-based culture. Having to live between these two different identities, not white enough to fit in with my Caucasian friends, not Asian enough to fit in with those who immigrated, who am I? Where does my identity lie?

I became a Christian in high school and then started to understand who is this God and what is the most true thing about my identity? Understanding the gospel not just in terms of how he solved our guilt problem, which he absolutely did, but also how he has addressed our shame problem. It's been this multi-decade exploration of how God solves our shame problem.

Matthew Porter: You mentioned the culture thing. It's an awkward thing to ask about because there's different cultures who have different tendencies towards certain things and you don't want stereotypes. I feel like we should be able to say, in this culture and that culture, here's something that is kind of a part of the spiritual communal makeup. If we talk about this, you might have a little bit of a deeper understanding of where this person is coming from with the understanding that they are more than just their culture. With all that said, shame is in the fabric of Asian communities?

Toni Kim: Absolutely. And it's become the fabric of everybody's because social media is a shameless shame culture. The cancel culture is all about shame. Right now all of us, no matter what your ethnic background, we are shaped by shame because we're afraid one little offhand comment can go viral and ruin our lives. That's all about shame. We're afraid of being shamed publicly. I would say Asian culture has insight into it, but now we're all in the shame culture.

Matthew Porter: It's so funny that even a secular culture has a sense of these things are right, these things are wrong, even if they're calibrated differently. There's a component even in a godless society of somebody transgresses a certain boundary that I believe in and there must be punishment, there must be shame associated with it. What they don't have is an instrument, a means of getting out from under that shame, but of course we do. We know what the answer is and the answer is the content of this book that we are talking about. The author, Toni Kim, my new best friend because you seem like a very cool person to hang out with. We're going to get more into this on the other side of the break. You're listening to Steve Brown, Etc., minus Dr. Brown. We'll be back on the other side of the break. Don't you go anywhere.

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Thank you very much for joining us here on Steve Brown, Etc. We are talking to author Toni Kim. Her new book is called "Shame Redeemed: Learning to Live in Christ's Freedom." Toni, multiple questions come to mind. One in particular, as I was going through the book, you talk about kind of at a foundation in our tendency to misapply shame or shame in the wrong places is misunderstanding about who God is, God's character, the lies about God. Can you talk a little about that?

Toni Kim: This is a lot of what the Steve Brown ministry is about. God's not mad at you. God's not angry with you. Because so much of our families are broken, so much of our relationships are broken, when we think about God as our father, sometimes that's not a very helpful image because we often experience fathers as angry or absent, even abusive at times. When we think about God the Father, sometimes we think that he's just out to get us.

We end up acting more like slaves who have no part in the family. The Bible and Jesus himself talk about the difference between a slave who has no part in the family versus a son who belongs to it forever. What does it mean for us to have the status of the beloved children of God? If we were to understand how stubbornly God loves us, how thoroughly he is defending us, how much he delights in us, that would transform everything about how we view ourselves, how we interact with each other, both inside the church and outside the church.

George Bingham: I'd like to jump in right there. Toni, interesting that George brought this up because I was diving into chapter three, exposing lies about God. In there it was interesting to me because some of those are the God of dos and don'ts, the thought that God doesn't care, that God is stingy. I loved that one and then leading into God is mean. Without obviously giving our audience enough information, can you highlight those four? Because I found them, especially the stingy part, I found that very interesting.

Toni Kim: I'm going through Genesis 3 and just comparing what Eve says versus what God said and showing the ways that even in the garden, those lies about God's character sneak into our perception of who God is. First of all, there's the whole legalism in there. We must not even touch the fruit. God didn't say you can't touch the fruit. But what Satan wants to do is to question God's character. Does God really have your best interests at heart?

As we think about is God just stingy, does he make only the one that is forbidden? Does he make everything else ugly? Really what he's doing is he's setting us up for failure if he does that. But all of the trees were pleasing to the eye and good for food. There was this bounty that God has provided for Adam and Eve. But we're the same way. God may give us everything, but the one thing he doesn't give us, we're like, you don't love me, God. If you loved me, you would give me the spouse, you would give me the career, you would give me this. Because you don't do this, because you're so stingy, of course I don't trust you. If we can learn to not just fixate on what God does not give us and to see actually he's not stingy, he is generous. He gives us all these things. If we can ask God to open our eyes to what have you provided me with, what are you pouring out so that even in the midst of devastation, we can see God's generosity to us instead of feeling like he's stingy.

Matthew Porter: That's a provocative and very universal sentiment. What you just touched on, I think a lot of people are like, oh, okay, Toni's got my number there because this is my thing and I didn't get what I want on this and this is proof that God is not who he said he is and he's not actually good and all of our dysfunction stems from that, from questioning God's real character.

Kathy Wyatt: Well, and it's a very small step to go from God is stingy to God is mean. You don't have to go very far past stingy to say, and he's downright mean as well.

Matthew Porter: I've thought about that before. It's not just the fruit that Satan was presenting. It's a bad narrative. It's saying God is not who he says he is and if you buy into the bad narrative, the apple sells itself.

Kathy Wyatt: Well, and the other thing she said in this section about God is mean, which I had not thought about it before, but you said banishment, you're talking about how they have to leave the garden and you said banishment is actually not punishment, it's for our protection and our good. I've always thought, well yeah, you guys really messed up bad, so you're out of here. So there's, I mean, and that's only chapter three.

Matthew Porter: Can you tell us talk a little bit about that? That is intriguing.

Toni Kim: It's definitely a spoiler alert, but our imaginations are shaped by this expulsion out of Eden that Adam and Eve, they had it so good in the Garden of Eden, but then they rebelled against God and then it's all downhill from there. We live in this banished east of Eden, we're doomed to live like this until Jesus comes again to make all things right.

But even before they leave the Garden of Eden, there's this verse in Genesis 3:21 it says, "The Lord God made garments of skin and clothed Adam and his wife." You think what? Even in the Garden of Eden, God sacrifices an animal and he takes away the leaves, whether they're maple leaves or fig leaves, he takes away those leaves, but not to leave them exposed and to expel them in their nakedness, but to clothe them with better clothing, this robe from animal skin. That robe doesn't just cover their physical nakedness, it also is this mark of inheritance. He's saying, "You are still my children."

When he casts them out of the Garden of Eden, it's not just to punish them, it's to prevent them from actually taking from the tree of life, which was not forbidden beforehand, so that we can live redeemed and find God's freedom and live eternally only clothed with the righteousness of Christ. It's such a powerful and rich visual.

Matthew Porter: I want to get into that more on the other side of the break because it's a stunning concept when we fully embrace what that is. Plus, guilt and shame are those two different things? What's the role of each? We'll get into that and talk more about identity and how we can get God's perspective on who we are and who he really is. The name of the book is "Shame Redeemed." We're talking to the author, Toni Kim, and we will be right back.

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Thank you very much for joining us here on Steve Brown, Etc. We are talking to author Toni Kim. Her new book is called "Shame Redeemed: Learning to Live in Christ's Freedom." Keep up with her at tonikim.org, that's T-O-N-I, not T-O-N-Y, and on Insta @tonihoangkim, that's T-O-N-I-H-U-A-N-G-K-I-M.

Before the break, we were talking about a couple of concepts. One, shame is not 100% there's a purpose for it and I would love to get into that more. But it's always going to be kind of a part of our makeup, something we're always dealing with. Right from the get-go, we understand that God is not just done with us, that he is in the process of covering our shame. Talk a little bit about this clothing metaphor. Let's explore that a little bit more because it's really powerful.

Toni Kim: The way God treats us is so gracious. I think we're afraid that when we go to God, he is just going to expose us and make us feel even more shame than we already feel. Yet the surprising thing even we find in the Garden of Eden is that when God brings forth the shame, it's to cover us with a better covering. He takes away their fig clothes but gives them these garments of skins.

That's a foreshadowing of what he does for us in Jesus. In Galatians 3, it talks about for all of us who have been baptized into Christ have clothed ourselves with Christ. Of course, Jesus is the lamb who was slain at the creation of the world. So we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. When God looks at us, he is delighted in the same way he delighted in his son Jesus. Delights in his son Jesus is how he delights in us.

Matthew Porter: Not even making a joke, what's one of the common nightmares that people have? They're at school, they're somewhere in their undies. I'm exposed, I'm shamed, I'm fearful. And then what is Jesus' story, the prodigal son? Get the robe. I've done all this stuff. No, no, no, I got you. I've got this for you covered. That's the one story that anytime a preacher shares that story, I'm like, ah, you got me again, God. All right. Because it just answers our deepest fear and our deepest need.

George Bingham: And maybe just following up on that, you use at one point describe a Spanish artist, I think it was.

Toni Kim: Murillo's picture of the prodigal son.

George Bingham: Talk a little bit about how you use that. That may go into the way you structured the book, kind of a process-type question. You not only give the content but give an opportunity for spiritual meditation along with a memory verse. But anyway, talk a little bit about how you use that painting to illustrate.

Toni Kim: We all know the right answers. Yet we don't know it here in our hearts and we don't know it in our bones. A book is not going to change your life, but conversations you have with God on the basis of this book, conversations you have with others on the basis of this book, that will change your life. What I tried to do in the structure of the book is to make sure we don't just read and leave the information here.

We actually interact with this. We actually use this to turn it into prayer of like, God, this is what I want, but my life doesn't look like this. How can we bridge the gap between what we know should be true or is true and what we experience? These spiritual formation exercises are to help us do that. And the scripture memory is because there was a pastor in Texas, very influential in my early formation, he said when you're cut, the Bible should be so much a part of you that when you're cut, you bleed Bible.

We need to hide God's word in our hearts so that when we're cut, what comes out of us is the truth of God that will help to bring healing. For this prodigal son thing, the Murillo has a painting and I love you can see just the love the father has for the son. You can see the fatted calf being brought out because the son has got this prepared speech and the father dispenses with that speech and runs to his son and embraces him.

Then there's the robes of inheritance, there's the ring that again is reinstating him, giving him status. I ask people to it's called Visio Divina to make it sound more holy, but really it is you just take some time and look at that picture and think about what would it look like for you to be embraced by God the Father. To know you screwed up and you took half of my inheritance and I'm going to run off and all I'm hoping for is that you just make me a hired hand. Instead, God runs to you and embraces you and says, this my son, my daughter who was dead is now alive and let's celebrate. Welcome home. Just sit with that and to imagine what it would be like because that's actually what's true. That's how God greets us, that's how God embraces us, and that's what God declares to be the most true thing about us.

Matthew Porter: What a freeing sentiment that shame is just a part of our spiritual ecosystem and there's dealing with it in a healthy way and dealing with it in an unhealthy, unbiblical way. I want to do it the right way. I think it all comes down to seeing God as who he is and sometimes we just need to be reminded of that.

George Bingham: Toni, in the book, you identify different kinds or different sources, I guess is probably a better word, of shame like our own sin, sins that are committed against us, and failures that involve no sin at all. That was somewhat surprising to me because how can there be shame if I haven't done anything wrong?

Toni Kim: Because we think so much of the good news about just about our guilt, then there's all these things about our shame that don't get addressed. I can't ask for forgiveness for something that was done to me. One of the things that grieves God's heart the most is that the survivor of abuse feels shame when the perpetrator feels neither guilt nor shame. She has a shame problem caused by someone else's guilt.

We can't just tell her, "Well, just repent." Repent of what? She doesn't have a guilt problem, she has a shame problem. If we don't give her the vocabulary to say what you're experiencing is shame, then we've left her kind of struggling with, well, I just need to forgive and maybe that's going to help me feel better. But the good news is that God himself entered into shame. Jesus experienced shame.

He took the form of a slave. He was mocked, he was abandoned, he was tortured, he was crucified naked. He understands the shame due to someone else's guilt and he has entered into that and then conquered it all when he rose victorious. He has given us new life. The abuse, the things that have caused this shame, those are real, those are heartbreaking, but they are not the summation of who we are. What defines us is the fact that Jesus died for us and Jesus rose and invites us into this new resurrection life, this new identity as his beloved children.

Matthew Porter: Just to follow up on that, you've talked about there's shame from mistakes we make, there's shame that is not due to us at all but somebody else's mistakes, and there's the third category of just shame from choices. You had a very powerful story in the book about when you were hiking and an incident arose and you felt shame. Can you tell us that story?

Toni Kim: I was not hiking. I was actually being medevaced over the Grand Tetons. If you have to be medevaced, it's not the worst view. It's not the Walmart parking lot. They thought that I was either having a heart attack or had just finished having a heart attack and so they needed to get me to a cath lab as soon as possible. This could be fatal. This could be the end.

You think, well, I'm going to be thinking about eternal things. All I'm thinking about is I'm too young to have had a heart attack and it's my fault. I'm so ashamed. Those pandemic pounds I put on is because I had no self-control. I'm feeling this deep sense of shame. Of course, my husband's sending out these prayer texts to everyone. One of my closest friends was going to be in the Olympics but had a heart attack in his 30s. I realized, oh, okay. Having a heart attack, which I actually didn't have a heart attack and I didn't die, believe it or not.

Matthew Porter: You know, that's a great relief. I should have told you that before I started the story so that you weren't on the cliffhanger as to whether or not I died or not.

Toni Kim: We can feel shame for things that are not sinful. Just part of being human. You had a phrase in the intro of "ashamed of struggling with shame." I thought that was an interesting twist on it.

I think we can't eliminate shame, but we can eliminate shame about shame. Let's as a church, let's eliminate shame about shame. Let's make it so that the shame that didn't prevent us from committing a sin, let's not let that shame prevent us from confessing that sin. Let's confess our sins to each other and pray for each other so that we may be healed. Let's not be ashamed. Let's not let Satan isolate us in our shame. Let's bring the shame to light and find out that when we do so, God doesn't just expose us and leave us naked and even more shamed. He covers us and we can cover each other and help each other to find that clothing, that freedom in Christ.

Matthew Porter: The clothing illustration literally in the Garden of Eden and symbolically in the parables, what strikes me is God was not caught off guard. God knew what was going to happen. He had provided for it ahead of time. Does that not emphasize a loving God yet again? One last thing before we go. Somebody's struggling with shame from any of these sources that we talked about. What's the most important thing for them to hear right now and for them to do next?

Toni Kim: God loves you. God loves you even in the midst of what you're struggling with right now, even with what you have hidden. See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. Number one, know that God loves you. Number two, take the risk to share this with someone else and let them help you to understand that God loves you who are in process and he will never let you go.

Matthew Porter: I love it. No better way to end this conversation. Step three, get a copy of the book. It's called "Shame Redeemed: Learning to Live in Christ's Freedom." What a freeing sentiment that shame is just a part of our spiritual ecosystem and there's dealing with it in a healthy way and dealing with it in an unhealthy, unbiblical way. I want to do it the right way. I think it all comes down to seeing God as who he is and sometimes we just need to be reminded of that. Toni, thank you for joining us. We'll be right back.

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How cool was Toni Kim? Just amazing. So friendly and just not into intellectual stuff, but like, seriously, God loves you. It's like the end of "Good Will Hunting," if you've ever seen that, where he says, "It's not your fault." It's just a truth and it needs to be repeated sometimes. And then sometimes it just finally you're like, oh, I've known this all my life, but when I start to really wrap my brain around this simple truth, it reshapes how I see everything. And as bright a personality as comes through Toni, she really is a personification of the concept. She really understands it and is a great communicator of it.

I had never heard that thought before of the shame being like, "Hey, that's just always going to be there. It needs to lead you back to Jesus. You don't need to be ashamed of struggling with shame." What a great and I guess it applies to all shortcomings and struggles and everything, but it's nice to hear somebody say that. She's an expert. She wrote a book, so she's got to be. She must be an expert indeed. She laughed at something I said, so I'm like, we're friends for life. We won't hold that against her. Look forward to my Christmas card every December from here forward. That's how easy it is to make friends with me.

Hey, by the way, do we have a guest next week? You know, we actually do. I hope. Who is it? Steve Brown is going to be our guest next week and we are going to delve deeply into the deepest of crevices of his new book, "God's Not Mad At You: Confronting the Lies of Guilt, Shame, Fear, and Regret," which will be a great follow-up to today. I think those four things cover pretty much the waterfront on stuff that we struggle with. Be sure to tune in for that. Thank you very much for hanging out this week and until next time, be safe and stay dangerous.

This is Pete Alwinson, and if you're a guy, I want to show you how to recover and reclaim an intimate growing relationship with your heavenly Father. Check out "Like Father, Like Son: How Knowing God as Father Changes Men." Available now at keylife.org/store.

Believer, I want you to remember that where sin abounds, grace does much more abound. And you will run out of sin before God runs out of grace. Grace, the real good news of the gospel. Find it now on keylife.org/store.