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Joshua Reich

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3 Things that Make a Great Marriage

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Healthy relationships take work. Healthy marriages that people want to stay in don’t just happen, although we think they do. We think two people magically just work together, never fight, never have an issue or disagreement to work through, but they do.

So, where do things go wrong? How can a friendship that was working so well, a marriage that seemed so right all of a sudden seem all wrong?

Here are five ways relationships go from working to broken:

5 reasons marriages stop working.

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1. It’s too much work. Healthy relationships take a lot of work. It means being patient, listening, hearing someone out, and putting your wants and privileges aside. That’s work.

2. It hurts too much to face their past or do the hard work. As we’ll see later, almost every fight in a relationship is not about what you are fighting about. You are fighting with a past incident, a hurt you haven’t dealt with, a person you see in the person in front of you. They remind you of your dad, your mom, they said words similar to an abuser or someone who you were supposed to trust. Healthy people face their past and in the power of Jesus see it redeemed. Unhealthy people use their past and stay the victim instead of finding healing. This is hard work and can be incredibly painful. In any argument you have to ask the crucial question, “Are we actually fighting about this? What are we really fighting about? Who am I really fighting with?”

3. They’re lazy and selfish, they want the other person to do all the work and all the changing. Just like #1, being lazy and selfish in relationships is easy. Serving, putting in the work, putting the other person’s needs and wants first takes work. Often, too, we want the other person to put in the work to become the healthy person while we stay unhealthy. “I’ll hold on to that incident and bring it up whenever it suits me. I’ll remind them of my hurt instead of dealing with my hurt.”

4. They think they are better than their spouse or the other person. Sometimes people are in an unhealthy relationship because they think they are less sinful than the other person. They look down on them. They wouldn’t say this, but they hold the other person’s sin in contempt, thinking, “How can they not see that? Why do they struggle with that?” They turn up their noses at the thought of putting in the hard work to reconcile with a spouse or a friend. They will say it is the other person’s fault, but deep down they are the least sinful person they know.

5. Confuse what reconciliation means. Reconciliation doesn’t mean you are friends with everyone. You might need to protect yourself from an abusive situation, and you may need to protect your kids as well. Reconciliation does mean that you don’t hold it against the person anymore, that you don’t bring up the past. You stop saying, “Remember…?”

5 things that hurt a marriage.

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So what do healthy couples do?

They do many things, but here are a few:

1. They grow close to Jesus. This may seem obvious, but if you stray from Jesus, stop reading your Bible, feel your relationship with Jesus suffer, lots of things go wrong. Your desire to fight sin goes down. Your desire to serve your spouse goes down. Your desire to love your spouse goes down. Your desire to stay pure goes down, all because of one thing. Couples who make it to the end keep God at the center of their marriage. They grow together spiritually, they take control of their spiritual lives and don’t leave it to chance. They read solid books together, they pray together, they have a plan for how they will disciple their kids (they don’t leave that to chance either). They attend church together, are in a Christian community and serve to use their gifts and talents. God is not some figure that appears periodically in their marriage but is what the marriage and family revolve around. Men are asking how they can help their wife grow and become all that God has called her to be.

2. They protect their marriage. This is something couples kind of stumble through. They take their vows, wear rings, but too many don’t protect themselves when it comes to their minds, hearts and eyes. Yes, they make sure not to sleep with someone they aren’t married to, but everything else is fair game. A couple who lasts does not do that. The only thing on their menu is their spouse. They protect their eyes, they aren’t looking at porn, they aren’t fantasizing about that girl at work or the guy in the movie. They aren’t dreaming about their romance novel, they aren’t acting out (even with their spouse) in their mind. They act out with their spouse (and only their spouse). They make sure nothing will tear them and their spouse apart.

This isn’t just about vows and promises but about the priority you place on your relationship compared to other relationships. Your kids matter and you love them, but your kids come after your marriage. One of the fastest ways to go from a great marriage to being roommates is placing your kids above your spouse. One day your kids will be gone, and you will have only your spouse. At this point, most couples split because they no longer need to stay together for the kids, and they have nothing in common. Don’t let that happen. This doesn’t mean you neglect your kids and not do anything with them, but it means they come after your marriage. If you’re not sure where you stand on this, here are 10 ways to know you are putting your kids in front of your marriage.

3. They pursue each other. Pursuit is what got you married (because you started pursuing when you dated). Pursuit is what keeps a marriage healthy, and pursuit is the first thing to go out the window of most marriages. The couples who last don’t leave this to chance. They make time for their spouse, they have a yearly getaway with their spouse, weekly date nights and they do fun things with their spouse. I’ve never had a couple who did this tell me they regretted it. I’ve had lots of couples tell me how they long for this. Here are some ideas for doing date night at home, some rules we have for date night and some help for when date night falls apart.

Know that affection is the first thing to go and fight against that. Affection is what goes first. Kissing when you say goodbye, holding hands, snuggling. Life is busy, you know your spouse, you have them now, your kids are climbing all over you, you are running late, you are tired and want to sleep, you are worried if you snuggle he will want sex and you just want to go to sleep. All of these things happen to couples who couldn’t keep their hands off each other at one time. Fight this. When you kiss, kiss for 5-10 seconds. Throw some tongue in when you are just saying hello or goodbye. Gross your kids out. Hold hands in the car. Kiss at a red light. Snuggle at night. I’ve said this before and people tell me I’m wrong, but I’m not: the amount of sex you have, the amount of affection you have, is one of the best barometers for where your marriage is. Show me a couple with little affection and little sex, and I will show you a couple going in opposite directions.

3 Things that Make a Great Marriage.

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The relationships that are healthy and growing take intentionality, and they take specific choices. Otherwise you drift into unhealthiness.

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An Important (And Overlooked) Part of Your Leadership

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Leadership is difficult. It can be hard to be a leader. Tiring, exhausting and exhilarating, all at the same time.

People often debate what makes a leader, what they do, and what you should look for in a leader.

There is one reality of leadership that I think often gets overlooked, and that is the role that a spouse plays for a leader.

Often the only time a conversation comes up about a pastor’s wife is when considering whether to hire a pastor (I think this is too narrow for leadership, as it only looks at a man as a leader). The question is often asked, “What should a pastor’s wife do in a church?”

The reality of leadership in a church is that your spouse is an extension of you, in good and bad ways.

If you and your spouse are at a meeting but you don’t get to talk with everyone, whoever has talked with your spouse feels connected and heard by you.

While the spouse of every leader is wired and gifted differently, one of the most important things a leader’s spouse brings is their presence.

This presence can be felt through actually being there, conversations, visibility, prayer or giving ideas and leadership to certain tasks or activities.

All of those things will come out of a spouse’s level of capability, life stage of kids, desire and passion, as well as capacity to do certain things.

These are important questions to ask and come back to on a regular basis.

Because of how relational leadership is, particularly in a church, this becomes all the more important.

This also, when done right, creates a lot of energy for the church and the leader and their spouse as they are working out of their unique wiring and bringing value to each other and the church.

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The Power of Sex and Our Longing for Intimacy

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Many times in our lives we underestimate the power of sexuality, ours and those around us. We underestimate our desires, longings, addictions and past sexual histories.

When you read Scripture, you see that we are created for relationships, for intimacy. We are created for knowing and we long for that. Yet, our culture has connected sex, love, and intimacy and made it a big mess.

You can be intimate with someone without having sex. You can have sex with someone without being intimate.

Sex, love, and intimacy aren’t the same things.

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This confusion has led many of us to look for intimacy in places we can’t find it.

We look for it in sexual relationships outside of marriage, affection from co-workers, emotional relationships outside of marriage and porn.

Often I’ll hear people say, “Believing sex outside of marriage is wrong is so prudish, so old-fashioned. Doesn’t everyone have sex before marriage, out of marriage, look at porn?” Here’s my question, “Has sex outside of marriage made your life better? Has looking at porn made your life and relationships richer? More meaningful? Deeper? Has cheating on your spouse made your life better? Less stressful?” The answer is no. But we think it will, so we do it.

Where it Begins

It is important to understand where this begins.

Why?

1 Thessalonians says: For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.

We must understand as best as we can where our sexual desire got off track. For many of us, that got off track at a young age and in a painful memory.

Having sex as a teenager, being raped, abused, or molested. It was the discomfort we felt when friends pressured us to kiss someone, or struggling with same sex attraction and not being sure what it meant.

Too often in Christian circles we read verses like Matthew 5:27 – 30 on lust and adultery and look for ways to battle them, which is important, but we rarely understand where they came from.

Yet, if we don’t desire holiness and purity, if we don’t understand where things became broken, we won’t know what to fix or what we’re even trying to get to.

For me, this is facing what I learned about sex at a sleepover when I was 11, and the dad brought down a box filled with porn and said to us, “It’s about time you boys learn about this.” I need to look at what that taught me, how that shaped me and changed me. How has that impacted my way of relating to others over the last 27 years?

What is often the most painful about this looking back is we see what was taken from us.

Redemption and Sexuality

Many times we’ll struggle with this question: If God is in control, why didn’t he stop that? Why did he allow that first experience? This is a heart-wrenching question.

As a follower of Jesus, according to the New Testament, you are in Christ. You were in Christ before the foundation of the world. Ephesians 1 says that if you are saved, a follower of Jesus, redeemed, you were chosen before the foundations of the world, your eternity and hope were sealed before God created anything.

This means everything in our lives is ‘in Christ.’ Our joys and pains. All has been redeemed and is being made new. We only think about what we’re walking through right now, in the future or from the time that we became aware of Jesus. But there was a time before we were aware of Jesus that he was aware of us.

Being in Christ means that those painful moments, that abuse, pain, heartache, destruction, addiction, Jesus was not absent or somewhere else, but was with you. And, because he knows holiness, beauty and goodness, the way God intended things to be, he feels and knows your pain and my pain even deeper than we ever could, because he knows how it should be. This is what took him to the cross, to redeem and make new, that pain, that abuse, that destruction.

Being ‘in Christ’ means I have the power to battle all the sin I face and experience the life Jesus experiences with the Father.

I think it is interesting in Matthew 5 that Jesus puts anger/murder next to adultery/lust. Both destroy people, both rob people of life and joy.

What Jesus is pointing to is a greater righteousness and hope.

Many times when it comes to our love lives, dating, marriages, addictions, sexual histories, broken promises, broken commitments and broken hearts, we say, “There’s no hope.” The gospel of Jesus, the hope of Jesus says, “There’s always hope.”

Jesus came to make you whole. This doesn’t mean that your past, your hurt, the scars you carry on your body, heart, brain or soul disappear, but it does mean they change.

This is the invitation that Jesus has for us in Matthew 5. Do we trust that his picture of holiness is better than our picture of broken connection through our sexuality?

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How to Have Healthy Relationships

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All of us want healthy relationships.

Whether we’re married or not, we watch married couples and we think, “I’d hate that, I’ll never do that.” Or, “I like that.”

We watch parents, whether we have kids or not. We look at their relationships trying to discern what is working and what is not.

We then take those observations and apply them to our relationships.

Sometimes those results work, sometimes they don’t.

After decades of studying thousands of couples, Dr. John Gottman thinks he found the foundational, most important issue to a healthy relationship.

Trust.

He said, “What I found was that the number one most important issue that came up to these couples was trust and betrayal. Can I trust you to be there and listen to me when I’m upset? Can I trust you to choose me over your mother, over your friends? Can I trust you to work for our family? To not take drugs? Can I trust you to not cheat on me and be sexually faithful? Can I trust you to respect me? To help with things in the house? To really be involved with our children? Trust is one of the most commonly used words in the English language. It turns out that when social psychologists ask people in relationships, “What is the most desirable quality you’re looking for in a partner when you’re dating?”, trustworthiness is number one. It’s not being sexy or attractive. It’s really being able to trust somebody.”

We know this, but what does trust look like in relationships? How do we keep trust at the forefront so we have healthy relationships?

Trust comes into play when we have relational hurt or relationships fall apart.

How to have healthy friendships.

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Repairing of those relationships is more likely if we have relational change with that person and we have built into that person’s love bank or emotional tank. If we are constantly making withdrawals, trust is hard to repair.

In Matthew 5, as Jesus looks at relationships, He raises the stakes.

The religious leaders looked at the command of murder and saw murder. That was the end of keeping that commandment, don’t kill anyone, which is good advice.

Jesus raises the stakes of righteousness (Matthew 5:20) by saying that anyone who insults someone, has anger towards someone, wants to retaliate against someone, is the same as murder.

Jesus uses an interesting picture in verse 25 of Matthew 5, of being in prison. When we don’t deal with relational hurt, we are in a prison. We hold grudges, are bitter, and we’re stuck. This describes many of our relationships and hearts.

Stuck. Bitter. Hung up. Not moving forward.

Let me give you four questions that I think help us get to relational health:

How to have healthy relationships.

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1. What am I hurt about? What am I really angry at? Can you define what hurt you? Why is that relationship broken and not healthy? It might be with a spouse, child, friend, parent or boss.

Define what you are hurt about. What did they say? Do? How did that make you feel? Name your feelings. It might be afraid, hurt, lonely, isolated, run over by them. That you couldn’t stand up for yourself, or you couldn’t meet their standard.

2. Do I have any sin in this? This is crucial because many times we are angry because of sin and blind spots we have.

Did we do anything to cause the relational rift we have?

When it comes to your reaction to someone or a situation, a great question to ask is: Is my reaction proportional to the situation?

3. Am I dealing with it or simply talking to others about it? Many times when we’re hurt, we talk to everyone but the person who hurt us. One person, a spouse, a close friend, yes, so they can tell you when you’re being irrational or help you see things clearly, but broadcasting it on Facebook, telling everyone you come into contact with, is not healthy.

In fact, that’s gossip.

Bryan Miles said, “Gossip is taking your problem to someone who can’t do anything about it.”

Gossip is taking your problem to someone who can’t do anything about it. @bryanmiles

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4. What does moving forward look like? This is the goal. The goal is reconciliation for broken relationships, but reconciliation looks different for each relationship depending on what happened, what boundaries are healthy and what your heart can handle.

Why is this?

We are responsible for our part of every relationship we’re in.

We are responsible for our part of every relationship we’re in.

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Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky

Leading can be difficult. It can lead to headaches, heartaches, difficulties, loneliness, and pain. It can also be exhilarating, exciting and filled with incredible joy.

For many pastors, we underestimate the cost of leadership. We think of the cost in terms of suffering or something connected to culture, but many of the costs of leadership will come inside of us or inside of our churches and the people we interact with. Not because they are intentionally out to get us, but because we are all human, and we all struggle with change and being led.

I re-read a few books on my shelf, and Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change is one of those books.

Let me share three lessons for pastors and leaders, and then I’ll share some favorite quotes.

3 things pastors must do to survive in leadership.

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First, pastors must get to the balcony in their leadership.

Getting to the balcony comes from the idea of being at a dance, and how you experience the dance while you are on the floor versus when you are on the balcony. We experience it differently. The sights, the sounds, the band, our dance partner, the size of the crowd, all of it.

The balcony provides you with a different perspective and experience. Too many leaders only experience their church or business on the dance floor.

This is the white space a leader needs to think, to process, to pray.

The second lesson is to orchestrate the conflict.

Now, for a pastor, this does not sound very pastoral. Yet in relationships, teams, churches, and organizations, conflicts arise. Too often, as the authors point out, we are so attached to our roles that we make ourselves the issue of the conflict instead of something else (not someone else). There’s a crucial difference.

Many times when things have gone awry during conflicts in my leadership, it is because I or another person became the source of the conflict instead of the issue.

Lastly, anchor yourself by separating yourself personally from your role.

Honestly, this is one of the hardest things for me to do because being a pastor is something I love. It is hard to separate that and just be Josh.

When we are not able to separate ourselves from our role as a leader, we do those closest to us and those we lead a disservice.

3 things pastors must do to thrive in leadership.

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Here are a few other things that stood out in the book:

  • Exercising leadership can get you into a lot of trouble.
  • People do not resist change, per se. People resist loss.
  • Leadership becomes dangerous, then, when it must confront people with loss.
  • To survive and succeed in exercising leadership, you must work as closely with your opponents as you do with your supporters.
  • People are willing to make sacrifices if they see the reason why.
  • You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations.
  • Exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.
  • If people do not feel the pinch of reality, they are unlikely to feel the need to change.
  • When you lead, people don’t love you or hate you. Mostly they don’t even know you. They love or hate the positions you represent.
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Links for Leaders 1/19/18

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It’s the weekend…finally. The perfect time to grab a cup of coffee and catch up on some reading. Below, you’ll find some articles I came across this week that I found helpful as a leader and parent and hope you do as well.

Before diving into those, in case you missed them this week. Here are the top 3 posts on my blog this week that I hope you find helpful:

I had a post published on Ministry Pass this week called When You Quit too Soon that got a lot of traction. If you’re struggling to stay engaged in your role, at your church or thinking about leaving a ministry job, I wrote this post to encourage you.

Also, Casey Cease and I released a new podcast this week on self-leadership, weight loss and the role food plays in leadership. I think this is often overlooked by pastors, church planters, and leaders. I hope it helps you reach your goals in 2018!

Now, onto the books, blogs & podcasts I enjoyed this week:

If you’re a reader (and you probably are if you follow my blog), I finished up John Ortberg’s new book this week called I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me: Getting Real about Getting Close. I’m an 8 on the enneagram, so intimacy and closeness do not come naturally to me. This book was incredibly helpful in that area. If that’s a struggle for you, I’d highly recommend it.

I loved this podcast with Josh Shipp on How to parent annoying kids. Not because I have annoying kids, but because I have kids that can annoy me in my lowest moments as a parent. My annoyance as a parent (and probably yours too) is usually from my lack of patience, lack of sleep or a long day.

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for new leaders, whether that is staff, elders, volunteers. People you can help reach their potential. But how do you find them? Scott Cochrane has 5 helpful ways to spot talent.

You probably have a list of goals for 2018, things you’ll do by the end of the year. But do you have a ‘to not do’ list? You should. Here’s why.

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What Really Needs to Change in Your Life

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For all of us, something or someone runs our lives. When this happens we find ourselves not living the life God has called us to. When we stop long enough to catch our breath, we realize how tired we are, how much debt we have, how we said yes to things we should have said no to.

If we aren’t careful we simply jump from “I need to lose weight”, to “I need to get out of debt”, to “I need to slow down”, and we try to make changes in those areas. We get on the latest diet, sign up for a financial class or clear our calendar for a week.

If you are like most people who try this approach, a month from now you’ll look up and see the same problem.

The question becomes, “What then?”

In most church counseling sessions we would look at the sins in your life. We would talk about your addiction to porn, your willingness to give your heart and body away in relationships, the pace that you keep, how you go into debt buying stuff you can’t afford, how you always gossip, or why you push yourself and your kids to be the best and attain a certain kind of lifestyle. We often want to move to fixing those things and think, “I’ll just stop doing them.”

If you’ve ever tried this approach, you know it doesn’t work. We can’t simply change our behavior and see lasting change. Until we understand why we do something, change and freedom will continue to elude us.

Have you ever been to a buffet – one where the plates are stacked, and whenever you pull a plate off, they all move up? Think of your life and sins as being like that stack of plates. Most of the time when we sin or hear about sin in a sermon, it is about the plate on top. To see true change, to see the things that crowd out our lives get conquered by the power of Jesus, we have to keep pulling up plates until we get to the last one, what we’ll call the sin under the sin.

If we aren’t careful this sin under the sin starts to drive our lives. What makes this easy to miss is that it is often something good that we give prominence to in our lives. Things like our kids, a job, money, keeping a clean house, retirement, a dream house or another goal.

These things are what drive us to go into debt, to run at an unsustainable pace on our calendar, which leads to an unhealthy lifestyle. This is the why.

Let me put it another way: often when we sin, without realizing it we are looking for meaning. We sin from a place of emptiness.

We sin from a place of wanting to be filled up, a hope to feel better, more alive, a part of something, or to take away the fear of missing out on something.

As well, for many Christians we pursue changing the wrongs things. We change what we see, what is obvious to ourselves and those around us. The image of an iceberg comes to mind.

In How People Change by Paul David Tripp & Timothy Lane said:

Many Christians underestimate the presence and power of indwelling sin. They don’t see how easily entrapped they are in this world full of snares (Galatians 6:1). They don’t grasp the comprehensive nature of the war that is always raging within the heart of every believer (Romans 7). They’re not aware of how prone they are to run after God replacements. They fail to see that their greatest problems exist within them, not outside them.

 The surface of our lives is what we see and present to others. Confidence, fear, approval, control or a drive to succeed. These things come from a place deep within us, we don’t experience change until we get to the source. We don’t experience change until we get to the last plate.
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The Drive of the Apostle Paul (and a Pastor)

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This post originally appeared on Ministry Pass.

Many pastors and churches like the theology of the Apostle Paul but not his drive and urgency.

Let me explain before you get mad.

Many pastors and churches like the theology of the Apostle Paul but not his drive and urgency.

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The Drive of the Apostle Paul (and a Pastor)

In many church circles, the Apostle Paul is held up as a theologian of theologians. In the reformed world, the book of Romans and Ephesians are ones every pastor loves to preach from and talk about. Yet, there is a drive in Paul, an urgency that many pastors do not have.

Why?

Pastors are shepherds. They are to be compassionate, have strong character, care for those in their church, helping and walking with them as they grow in their faith. All of those things are good and true.

In fact, when I bring up the drive of a pastor, urgency in ministry, or even feeling the weight of the church I pastor, someone will quote Jesus and say, “Jesus said he will build his church, not you, Josh.” And that is true, and I wholeheartedly believe that.

But feeling the weight of being a pastor, the calling of being a pastor, having a drive, passion, or urgency for what you do is not the same as not trusting Jesus to build his church.

Consider what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11:28: And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

Urgency

Throughout Acts we see Paul going into places, causing riots and being thrown in prison. Why? He was urgent about what God had called him to. His passion ran all through him.

As you read through Acts or the letters that Paul wrote, you see a deep care he has for the people he is writing to, the churches he planted and the people he is speaking to. You see him understanding their worldview, doing the hard work of understanding their belief systems, what makes them tick. Why? So he can better share the gospel with them.

As you read his letters, you feel the urgency he has. History will tell us that he spent a lot of time in prison and so was that where his urgency came from? Maybe. But think about the culture we minister in. Is it any less difficult? Is it more secular than the Roman Empire Paul was in? No.

An Example

I’ll give you an example, maybe this is extreme. Recently, a pastor reached out to me on Saturday night asking if I knew anyone who could preach for him the next day. I thought something horrible or catastrophic happened to him or his family, so I asked. Nope. He just didn’t feel it for tomorrow morning was his response.

When I read through Acts, I see a man driven by the passion of redemption that he experienced in Jesus. An urgency that says, “My life is not forever.” The moment Paul stands up to speak, you feel that this might be the last time he preaches.

If you’re a pastor, can you take control of your church and believe that everything rises and falls on your efforts? Yes. Is that a sin? Yes.

A Deep Calling

I also believe you can and should be a pastor who feels a deep calling to your church and your city and feels the weight of what God has called you to. If you don’t, I don’t know if you are serious about what you are doing, because so much hangs in the balance of what God has called you to. Eternities, lives, kids, parents, marriages, careers, hopes, dreams, joys and failures. We are brought into so many holy moments as pastors that we should always feel the weight of.

Remember, feeling the weight of something is different than feeling it is all up to you.

Feeling the weight of something is different than feeling it is all up to you.

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We have a saying at our church that we stole from another church. We tell our volunteers and teams, “Every Sunday is someone’s first Sunday at Revolution.” If you’re a church planter, do you remember your first Sunday? When you arrived at your new job at your new church, do you remember you first Sunday? The butterflies, the wondering if anyone would show up, what they would think, how you would connect, the excitement and passion you had. You probably put a lot of thought, energy, and prayer into that morning and sermon.

Let me ask you, did you put the same energy, prayer, and thought into your last sermon?

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Letting Go of Shame

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Shame.

We begin to hear it and feel it as children.

Being the last picked for dodgeball, not being asked to the dance, parents telling us “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” Boys don’t feel that. Girls don’t do that.

As adults, it grows and gains ground in our souls.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface that many of us feel from things like abuse, abandonment, divorce, isolation. As we push those down, and they inevitably find their way to the surface, we wonder, “What else am I hiding? What else am I forgetting?”

What we often overlook is how much shame shapes our identity and our lives. It becomes a driving force in our lives, how we work and how we relate to others and God.

In Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God, John Piper says shame comes from three causes:

1. Guilt. This is the one many of us know well. The addiction, the hidden sin, the abuse we don’t talk about, the affair, the divorce, the poor parenting, our failure at work and in life. We carry around guilt for ourselves and often without thinking, for others. When guilt becomes public knowledge, we have shame. Now we are known for what we have feared.

2. Shortcomings. Shortcomings and failures are something all of us experience. Some of them are real and others imagined. Some are life shaping, and other shortcomings we simply shrug off. It is the ones that are life shaping that lead to shame. When our frame of mind says, “You are a failure, you aren’t good enough, you aren’t beautiful, strong enough or worthwhile”, we experience shame.

3. Improprieties. These are the experiences in our life where we feel silly, look stupid or are embarrassed. We make a mistake, and it feels like everyone knows about it.

What hope do we have with our shame?

After all, Romans 10:11 tells us that if you are a follower of Jesus, you will not be put to shame. But we feel shame. Many of us see ourselves as shame.

I think Jesus’ first miracle is telling. It is often talked about as a miracle about wine, but more is going on here.

Jesus’ first miracle wasn’t just about wine—it was an act of purification from the Messiah, one that saved people from generations of sin and shame.

It wasn’t until working on a sermon on John 2 that I began to see the significance of Jesus’ first miracle. A miracle that, according to Tim Keller, can be seen as simply fixing a social oversight, but has so much more going on:

When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. –John 2:3–11

During this time, marriage was an enormous event. The entire town would be invited and the celebration would last for up to a week. This was not simply about the couple, but was a sign of the strength of the town and community.

For the wine to run out was not a simple party oversight. This would be seen as an insult to the town and the guests. The ramifications of this happening could be felt for decades to come in terms of standing in the community, business dealings, and overall appearance. The shame heaped upon this family would be no small thing. In the same way, the shame in our lives that we carry around often comes from things in our family’s past. We feel the effects of an abusive grandfather we have never met or an alcoholic grandmother who is whispered about.

But Jesus didn’t just change water into wine to save this family from embarrassment and shame.

You see, for the Jewish people, weddings were a sign of the Messiah. Weddings were a picture of his coming, of what heaven would be like. There were also prophecies in Joel, Hosea, and Amos indicating that wine would flow freely over a barren, dry land from the Messiah (Joel 2:24, 3:18; Hosea 14:7; Amos 9:3). This imagery would not be lost on the Jews who saw this miracle.

John also points out that Jesus had them fill up purification jars. This was not what they normally used for wine, as these were the jars the Jews used to cleanse themselves to worship God, to enter the temple, to purify them. Jesus, at a wedding, which is a picture of the Messiah coming, with wine. Using purification jars that are used to make one right with God, turning guilt and shame into joy.

Later in the Gospels, Jesus will bring his disciples together for a Passover meal, hold up wine and declare it to be his blood (Matt. 26:28). Then, in Revelation 21, John tells us that when Jesus returns, it will be as a bridegroom at a wedding (Rev. 21:2).

It is easy for us to miss all this without the history and picture. But, we do another thing that hinders our joy. When we read in the Gospel and Epistles of John about God loving the world or Jesus taking away the sins of the world, we picture “the world,” a globe filled with people. We don’t picture ourselves.

How do we apply this to our lives? Can I suggest six ways to apply this passage and the message of grace that combats our shame?

6 ways to move forward from your shame.

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1. Name your shame. If you don’t name something, it takes ownership of you. This is a crucial step. You must name the hurt, the guilt, the shortcoming, the impropriety, the embarrassment, the abuse, the loss, the misstep, the sin. If you don’t, you stay stuck.

Whatever you can’t name in your life takes ownership of you.

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I’ve met countless people who couldn’t say the name of an ex, name the situation of hurt or talk about something. This doesn’t mean that you are a victim or wallow in your pain, but naming something is crucial. Without this first step, the others become difficult to impossible.

The saying, “Whatever we don’t own, owns us”, applies here. This is a crucial, crucial step.

2. Identify the emotions attached to it. Many times when we are hurt, we are an emotional wreck and can’t see a way forward. All we know is that we are hurt, that life isn’t as we’d hoped, but we aren’t sure what to do.

What emotions are attached to your shame? Is it guilt? Loss? Failure? Missed opportunity? Sadness? Hopelessness? Indifference?

Name them.

Name the emotion that goes with your abuse, abandonment, divorce, failed business, dropping out of school, not meeting your expectations or the expectations of someone else.

Often times we feel shame when we have a different emotion attached to it, but shame is far more familiar to us. Do you feel neglected or hurt or sad? What emotion is conjured up from a memory.

3. Confess the sins that are there. Do you always have sin when you feel shameful? No. Sometimes it is misplaced shame. It is shame you have no business owning. You didn’t sin; someone else sinned against you.

Sometimes, though, there is a sin on your part. You may have sinned, and that’s why you feel shame. Sometimes your sin might be holding on to that person or situation.

Sometimes you need to confess that your shame is keeping you from moving forward and keeping you stuck.

Bring those sins to light.

4. Grieve the loss. When we have shame, there is a loss. This loss might be a missed opportunity or missed happiness. It might be bigger than that and be a missed childhood, a loss of your 20’s, a loss of health or job opportunity.

It might be a relationship that will never be, something you can never go back to.

As you think about your shame, what did you lose? What did you miss out on? What did that situation prevent you from doing or experiencing? What hurt do you carry around? What will never be the same because of that situation.

5. Name what you want. This one is new for me, but it has to do with your desires.

Often the reason we stay stuck is because we know what stuck is. We don’t know what the future holds. Beyond that, we don’t know what we actually want.

We carry shame around from a relationship with a father who walked out. Do you want a relationship? Do you want to be in touch?

We carry shame from a failed business. Do you want to get back in the game?

Can you name, in the situation associated with your shame, what you want?

Sadly, many people cannot.

If you can’t name what you want, if you can’t identify a desire, you will struggle to move forward.

6. Identify what God wants you to know about Him. When we carry around shame, we carry around a lie. In identifying that lie, we are identifying the truth that God wants us to know about Him.

If you feel unloved, the truth that God wants you to know is that you are loved. If you feel unwanted, God wants you to know you are wanted. If you feel dirty, God wants you to know the truth that in Him you are clean.

All throughout scripture we are told that God is a Father, that He is as close to us as a mother nursing her child, that God is compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, gracious, tender, strong and for us.

The list goes on and on.

In that list, though, is the truth, the antidote to your shame and what you need to remind yourself of to move forward and live into the freedom of Jesus.

6 ways to move forward from your shame.

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Freedom is hard.

Let’s be honest, freedom is difficult. Living in sin, shame, guilt and regret is easy. It is what we know. It is where most people live and reside.

Freedom is scary. Freedom is unknown. Freedom leaves us vulnerable. Freedom leaves us not in control.

Yet, this is what it means to be a child of God. To live in freedom. Overflowing freedom.

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When You’re Tempted to Quit Too Soon

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At some point, we are tempted to quit something.

It might be a job, a church plant, a team, a diet or workout plan, a book, a degree program or even a difficult marriage.

Why?

Because we’re human, and when things get difficult, many of us want to pack up and go home.

 

But what if on the other side of that difficulty is what we have longed for all along?

I think many times when we quit, we miss out on what God has for us.

Why do we quit?

Sacrifice.

It is hard.

Difficult.

Painful even.

Ross Perot said:

Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.

I think what often sets people apart is their ability to persevere in something when it is difficult.

If you watch great athletes, the ones who win the gold medal, hold up the trophy or score the winning point, you will often see someone who was willing to live through pain, hardship, and difficulty. What you don’t see is the workout at 4am, the eating plan they put themselves through, the saying “no” to a night out with friends to get 10 hours of sleep. You don’t see the 1,000 jump shots they took each day, the miles they swam or ran, or the weights they lifted beyond what even they thought they could do.

When you see a couple in their 50s laughing together and genuinely enjoying each other’s presence, what you don’t see are the sleepless nights because they wouldn’t go to bed angry but instead worked through that argument. The tension of dealing with past hurt and past baggage and bringing it all to light so they could move forward. The hours spent holding hands and praying together about facing the road ahead. You don’t see the hundreds and thousands of compliments and little annoyances they decided to overlook instead of making a big deal about it.

What is on the other side of that difficulty or hardship? Very likely the breakthrough you’ve been waiting for.

Most leaders are tempted to quit moments before their critical breakthrough. – Carey Nieuwhof

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But how do you know? How do you know if you should quit or keep moving, especially in a job like leadership?

Here are some things that I ask myself or encourage others to ask themselves:

Am I getting enough sleep? Often, but not always, the reason we are in a difficult season or want to quit is related to our sleep. When we are tired, we make poor eating choices, cut things out of our life that could be beneficial, have a short fuse with people and have a fogginess when it comes to our choices and thinking. This is why we often make better decisions in the morning instead of later in the afternoon.

Do I have enough outlets for stress? Leaders need outlets for stress – things that recharge them and help them keep going. Those outlets, when used correctly, will often help you stay the course. Things like sleeping, sabbath, eating well, working out, community. All of these are incredibly important to staying the course.

What led up to this season or desire to quit? A desire to quit often comes when we don’t know what else to do, but looking backward can be a helpful thing. Was there a leadership choice, a hire, a new launch that led to this season? Sometimes, we want to quit because we are running from something and a new opportunity or throwing in the towel is easier. Whenever a pastor calls me and says he’s thinking about leaving his church, the first question I ask him is, “What about your church is difficult right now?” Often, we are running from difficulty.

What does my community look like? It is easier to throw in the towel when we’re alone. Most sin happens in isolation. Community has a way of shining the light into places it needs to be. Many leaders leave a place because of isolation and loneliness.

What is my relationship with God like? Lastly, what is your relationship with God like? Too many pastors fall into, “God told me to leave” because it is hard to argue with. God may have called you to leave, but He may be telling you to endure as well. I can tell you that one is easier.

Only you know if you should quit something. You know what led to that season and choice, but you don’t know what’s on the other side of it. There have been many times in my over 10 years in Tucson that leaving would’ve been the easier choice, but each time I’ve stopped to ask myself these questions and others, I’m glad I kept walking in what God called me.