Nobody likes to make people feel bad. I’ve poked around on Twitter enough to know trolls do exist, but overall, it’s a rare day I see someone who gets their kicks from bringing people down. Nobody wants to be the person that makes another feel bad.
Except, I wonder, what about preachers? What if part of your job is to help people see their wrong? What if the job description is, in part, to “afflict the comfortable”? At least as a beginning step to finding the Savior.
I’m thinking about repentance. It’s Jesus’ #1 sermon: “Repent.”1 It’s Peter’s #1 sermon: Repent.2 It’s the #1 thesis Martin Luther pounded on the doors of the Reformation, nailing down “all of life is repentance.” It’s why Jesus wrote to five out of the seven churches in Revelation.3
Repentance is predicated on the idea that there is something not right about us. I tell my students to think of a U-turn. Repentance is a U-turn of mind and direction-- turning from self and to Christ. Repentance admits we are positioned the wrong way. Repentance says, “I’m not okay.”
We live in a culture where repentance is considered a toxic message, even border-line abusive. The word brings up a snarl of negative words, chief among them “shame.”4
Perhaps nowhere is this snarl more true than among women’s circles. May I invite you Abide-brothers into the broader world of the women you minister to and care for? Among the women’s empowerment and “mommy blogger” worlds (that whole constellation of social media sites, self-help videos, TED talks, manifesting mantras and “take back your power” podcasts), we women are hearing the exact opposite message of repentance. We hear:
“you are perfect just the way you are”
“you are enough”
“self-love is self-care; if you aren’t happy, nobody will be”
“stop doubting your greatness”
“live your truth, be your dream”
These messages have pull. In the comparison-frenzied worlds of Instagram, Pinterest, Tik-Tok and even church potlucks-- when women already feel overwhelmed and underappreciated, overweight and under-toned, inadequate and insufficient-- to be told “you are enough” feels so reassuring. To be told all that’s needed is take care of myself, affirm myself, express my truth then everything will be okay – that message feels like a hot cup of tea and freedom.
It's no wonder then that these messages become the NY Times best-sellers for women:
Glennon Doyle: Untamed (2020) - note: this book has been on the best-seller list for 94 weeks and counting
Jen Hatmaker: Fierce, Free and Full of Fire: A Guide to Being a Glorious You (2020)
Rachel Hollis: Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shamefree Plan to Achieving Your Goals (2019)
Nadia Bolz-Webber: Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad about Feeling Good (2019)
See the trend? Besides all these writers coming out of the Christian world, (with a wide appeal to a general Christian audience), the message is the same:
Self is good; Shame is bad; You’re enough; Be free; Be you.5
Let’s say I’ve been marinating in these messages all week, and then on Sunday, I sit in a pew and the Word of God is proclaimed. It’s a head-on collision.
To be explicit: say on Saturday night, I curl up with Untamed and read Glennon’s call: “When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world's expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women full of themselves.”6
Next day, on Sunday morning, I hear Jesus’ call:
Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it… Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.7
What will happen when these calls collide? Whose call wins the imagination of my heart? Or of my mom’s group? Or of my church? Or, even, a Synod? Only God knows. But I suspect that the increase in the push-back against the preaching of repentance, and the increase in Christians decrying the naming of sin as “shaming people”, is related to the answer to this question.
We are always being discipled. But who is discipling us? Glennon, Jen, Rachel, Nadia and the culture they represent? If so, then the gospel increasingly is nonsensical, even offensive, to us. For how can we “express ourselves” and “own our wanting”8 ala Glennon and also “deny ourselves” and repent of our wanting ala Scripture and the catechism?
When the Catechism talks about Self, it bids it “come and die.” Self must be dying away and a new self come to life.9 This is not only a one-time event; it is a moment-by-moment declaration that I’m not sufficient and I’m not good. Jesus is my sufficiency. Jesus is my goodness.
Orthodox theologian Frederica Mathewes-Green puts both clearly: Repentance is the doorway to the spiritual life, the only way to begin. It is also the path itself, the only way to continue. Anything else is foolishness and self-delusion. Only repentance is both brute-honest enough, and joyous enough, to bring us all the way home.10
And the song on repentant lips --while we make our way home?— it’s “just from sin and Self to cease/ just from Jesus simply taking life, and rest, and joy, and peace.” That’s good news!
The gospel of Self-Actualization, Self-Fulfillment, Self-Expression is a false gospel. It is not good news. It’s exhausting. It’s lonely. It’s empty. And hurtful to family. And hurtful to community. It cannot deliver on its promises.
For how can the place from which the problem arises also become the place to find the answer? How can the self cure the self? How can a subjective place (like ups and downs of my individual heart) give me an objective place to find worth?11
Rev. Kevin DeYoung put it like this: “The good news of the gospel is not, “Relax, you rock!” The good news says to believing sinners, ‘You deserve to be humiliated and condemned for your sin, but God sent his Son to be humiliated and condemned in your place.’ … God can give us a double portion of honor instead of the shame we deserve.”12 Thank you, Lord.
If Self really is a dead-end and Jesus really is Life-eternal, then when He says, “unless you repent, you also will perish” that’s not so much a warning. That’s an account of the way things are. An account also issuing from the same One who implored “Repent! Turn! Why will you die?”13
To repent, to turn, means that sometimes feeling bad is the honest precondition “to life and rest and joy and peace.”
And I’ll take that over “being enough” any day.
Repentance as Jesus’ core message: Mt 4:17, 11:20-41, 21:32; Mk 1:15; Lk 5:32, 13:1-5, 15:7-10, 24:47. Note: whereas John never employs the word repent, he chooses other more vivid pictures to show the idea: “you must be born again,” “leave the dark… come into the light,” “cross over from death to life,” to be convicted “of sin, righteousness and judgment”, etc.
Repentance as Peter’s core message: Acts 2:38, 3:19, 5:20,31, 8:22, (10:43) 11:18, 2Pt 3:9.
To Sardis, Laodicea, Pergamum, Ephesus and Thyatira (to the latter two, Jesus calls for repentance twice.)
I originally wanted to look at the evolving definition of “shame” for this article. I didn’t have room, or capacity, to really get into it. But allow me to recommend these two super helpful resources for your own exploration:
An hour-long interview with Dr. Te-Li Lau from Trinity Evangelical Divinity about his book Defending Shame on Kevin DeYoung’s podcast Life, Books and Everything, episode 48, 2022.
A 2019 Kevin DeYoung article on the Gospel Coalition. “We Are Supposed to Feel Bad about Stuff.”
Lest the men think they are off the hook, there are male versions and examples of these messages in the culture as well. We can think of numerous presidents, CEOs and church leaders who have both lived by these mantras and preached them. Check out the 2010 book by Twenge and Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, for more. In fact, according to research in this book, more men demonstrate narcissistic beliefs than women. So even if women are currently reading more about a self-centered self-love, men, it seems, still take the cake in living by it.
Doyle, Untamed, pg 75. (Emphasis mine.)
This “lose life=save it” is the most often repeated teaching of Jesus. With some variation, it is quoted in all four gospels, six times, within four distinct events: Mt. 10:39, Mt. 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24, Luke 17:33; John 12:25.
“Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple.” (Doyle, Untamed, pg 121-122.) Good heavens! Is this Luciferian language dressed in capris?! “Father forgive, they do not know what they do.”
Someone has said, “always be killing sin, or sin will always be killing you.” God give us this humility and the humility embodied in Lord’s Day 33: “to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more and to run away from it. And the new God-focus that results: “wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.”
The gospel proclaims there is an objective place, where God Himself was pinned to a tree and dropped great drops of blood, to save us. His death and resurrection declare our worth. To paraphrase Tim Keller’s famous line, the cross says emphatically “You are NOT enough” for it took nothing less than the death of the Son of God to save you. But the cross also says emphatically “You are worth so much to Him” that He’d do it.
Kevin DeYoung, “We Are Supposed to Feel Bad about Stuff.”
Luke 13:1-5 and Ezekiel 18:30-31
Lora A. Copley is blessed to be a wife, a mother to four children and an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church. She serves as a director for Areopagus Campus Ministry, a ministry of the CRC classes of Iowa at Iowa State University.