Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

One of the things I will often hear from people is, “I know God forgives me, but I can never forgive myself.” Or, “I know ___ blank forgave me, but I can’t move forward. I’m stuck and can’t forget what I did.”

Our past continues to creep up on us and doesn’t stay in the past, no matter how much we’d like it to. 

In Genesis 3, we understand how God wants us to deal with our past and the things that keep us stuck. I’m so thankful to Chuck DeGroat for pointing these out. 

When Adam and Eve sin, God comes and asks 4 questions: 

• Where are you?
• Who told you? 
• Have you eaten from the tree?
• What have you done?

What gets us stuck, and keeps us stuck, is we start with the 4th question: What have you done? And that is all we focus on or answer. But there is more happening in us and around us that God wants us to face. 

And most importantly, God doesn’t start with “What have you done?” So, it is a good idea to start where God does. 

In these questions, we find what is broken in our lives, the shame we carry, and the way forward. 

Where are you? This is the question about hiding. God isn’t confused about where Adam and Eve are, and He isn’t confused about where you are. He is asking about where we are internally. Why? He wants us to know where we are. 

What do you use to hide? It might be your personality, jokes, work ethic, or something else. But all of us do something to hide whenever we feel exposed. Part of forgiving myself is seeing what I use to hide and keep people at arm’s length. 

Where did this come from?

Somewhere in your early life, you probably learned what it means to be safe and secure in relationships and have continued to do that again and again in your adult life. But as one of my mentors says, “What worked for you as a little person works against you as an adult.” We need to see what we do to hide, where that came from, honor how that protected us in life, and see how that can keep us from freedom now. 

But this hiding might also be the brokenness we carry and our secret sins. 

Who told you? This helps to identify who told us about our nakedness and our shame. 

What are the voices that have gotten us to where we are? This isn’t about blaming but about identifying our past. 

Have you eaten from the tree? This question helps us to identify what we did. 

What Adam and Eve did, and our tendency now, was to blame someone else. This is another way of staying safe and distancing ourselves from what we did. We have less ownership and guilt if we can say it was someone else’s fault. 

Ultimately, this often leads to regret, shame, feeling forgotten, guilt, and bitterness.

But God won’t let us stay there. He patiently moves forward and asks, What have you done?

As I said, we usually start here, but God doesn’t. We need to get to this question, but this question isn’t the starting point. God wants us to get under the hood of our lives and ask deeper questions before getting to what we have said or done. 

But in the goodness of God, He doesn’t leave us standing there with what we have done. He helps us to name it and move forward to freedom. 

In 1 John, John writes to his church struggling with sin and seeing themselves correctly.

There was a group in his church that, when it came to sin and struggles, though they didn’t sin, they weren’t sinful (or as bad as our culture talks about it), and there were no consequences to their sin. It didn’t do anything or harm anyone.

Now, no matter what you think of sin, you do things wrong. There’s a good chance that in the last hour, you’ve done multiple things wrong. You may not call them sins. You might call them mistakes or failures or missed opportunities. But (and this is crucial) if we don’t see them correctly, we will miss God’s grace and forgiveness. And if we don’t see them correctly, we will end up with regret, shame, guilt, and eventually bitterness.

This is why John points us to confession in one of the most famous verses in the Bible.

1 John 1:9 is a great reminder: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Confession is being honest with yourself and God about who you are and who He is.

It is seeing yourself through the lens God sees you, which is the only path to freedom.

This path takes us from comparison, being the victim, and even moping around. It takes us to freedom because, through confession, we can let go. We can drop our bags of sin, guilt, shame, and regret.