Evicting Guilt and Shame from Our Lives, Part 1, Ep 3-11
Welcome Back! I am your host Dawn Simmons, and in this episode of Conquering Our Unseen Enemies we are going to be discussing two demonic influences, the demon of Guilt and the demon of Shame. These two demons can work separately but are intertwined and when they work together it’s like a one two punch coming against us. We are going to discuss this in two episodes and today we will begin with identifying both demons and then honing down on the demon of Guilt. Next week we will focus on the demon of Shame and talk more about how they work together against us and what we need to do to evict them from our lives.
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Let’s start off first by defining both guilt and shame.
Guilt: the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty.
Shame: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety.
In this combo, the demon of guilt will usually be the strongman. Before you feel shame for something, you will feel the guilt of it, so the demon of guilt gets there first and establishes the house.
I want to look closer at this demon of guilt and really show how he works against us. This demon is so common and is so difficult to get rid of, one of the worst. When I am mentoring and coaching, I do both, people, guilt is a frequent wall I come up against. In these conversations I ask a lot of questions so we can begin to understand what this guilt is rooted in, how the door was opened. When we can understand how the door was opened, then we can put a plan in place to close it, seal it shut. There are three main places I see guilt derive from: religious spirit, unintentional poor parenting, inability to forgive oneself.
Let’s talk about each of these three, maybe yours is different, but by looking closer at these maybe you can find some commonalities for you or someone around you struggling with this.
Unfortunately, the demon of guilt pairs heavily with the demon of religion. There are some denominations where this is more of an issue. Those religions or denominations that are based on rules, man-made rules and legalistic bondages that everyone must adhere to are most prevalent in perpetuating guilt. What I am not talking about here is our need to live righteously. The Bible talks about our need to live righteously from beginning to end. God created us in His image with the intent for us to be righteous and holy, we know that from Genesis 1:26, Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. Creating us in His likeness goes beyond physical likeness. We know, we can see throughout the Old Testament that living up to rules doesn’t work even when God makes them. So why would it be any different when man makes them and tries to force people to live by them when they go beyond what God provides, what Jesus gave us as a gift when he allowed himself to be crucified and then in his resurrection. That gift given to us which fulfills the need for meeting all the rules of the Old Testament gets washed away in manmade rules. Jesus fulfilled the law. We still live up to the righteous standards, we can do that. At a minimum, we can look at the ten commandments and live by those standards, nearly every country follows those standards to some degree. When Jesus fulfilled the law, He did not say, go and sin all you want, He said go and sin no more, that’s in Matthew 8:11. Manmade religious rules take the focus off Jesus and put them on the rules and how often we fail at the rules. The Spirit of religion creates fear when we can’t live up to the rules God never intended, the bondage, then the spirit of guilt moves in and places a hold on the mind and the heart. You are made to feel like you are the lowest of the low because you violated a rule and the penalty of that is guilt you need to carry. The feeling of never being able to be good enough begins to permeate within you and a feeling of worthlessness begins to choke you. It will cause a divide in your relationship with the Lord because the guilt makes you feel you can’t approach God and seek forgiveness. The longer this feeling of guilt lasts, the more distance is created in the relationship. Our past is carried in front of us, it doesn’t stay behind us, forgiven, because we don’t feel worthy of forgiveness. The demon of guilt doesn’t want you to feel worthy of forgiveness. The demon of guilt will tear apart your heart in this way. It deceives you into believing you cannot be forgiven because your offense was against God, so He doesn’t want you anymore. This is how the strongman becomes firmly seated in your life. When we are living in a bondage that is unrealistic or even “false” because it is a manmade religious rule, then it can be difficult to break the demon of guilt because the belief of guilt is rooted in a false belief to begin with. I have had success helping people with this, but it takes a long time. I have to keep questioning them to get them to understand why they feel guilty. If you start at the beginning and keep going backward with “why” and “why” and “why” pretty soon you get to a place where they say, “I don’t know, that’s what the church said I had to do” At that point you can try to source the “why” of why the church is saying to do something. If it’s Biblical, then we have something to discuss, but if it’s not, then you have a thought process that needs to be evicted.
Now let’s move onto the Spirit of Guilt as a result of unintentional poor parenting. Some of these issues stem out of some of the same thought processes I have seen with the spirit of religion. Things that happen to us as a child tend to have some sticking power then even when we know it’s wrong, it becomes so ingrained in us that we end up repeating the cycle and foster the demon of guilt that we actually hate having in our lives. Parenting styles have definitely changed over the last 4-5 decades, not always improving just changing. I think when we see a lot of the rebellion of the younger generation today it is in part a product of unintentional poor parenting. No matter what generation, guilt is present. You can have guilt as a seed planted from your parents that was used as a way to control you when communication and establishing trust were much better options. Some generations thought children should be seen and not heard or not so seen and not heard. That brings a spirit of unworthiness to the child that is a counterpart to both guilt and shame. When that child made a mistake, guilt was placed on them for the fact that the parents were having to “deal” with whatever the issue is, and it was likely normal kid stuff, nothing over the top, but a seed was planted in the kid. There is the poor parenting by not establishing healthy boundaries they should be expecting of other people and therefore allowing the kid to develop friendships and experience the positives and negatives that happen to all of us. When we shelter or protect kids, we leave them with an inability to cope and as a result they can feel guilty, and a sense of failure that is dramatically overexaggerated when they don’t succeed as expected. Guilt works well with failure. Likewise, I have seen a lot of parents realize they did not do their best in raising their children and let the guilt of what they didn’t do eat away at them. They try to buy their way out of it and that doesn’t work. Money cannot pay off guilt to make it leave. I’ve seen parents who have guilt issues because their kid or kids have addiction issues and they want to carry that burden on themselves and never acknowledge the choices their kids make and that there are consequences for them because of their choices. I’ve been told by one mom that she felt bad that she made a poor choice in the father of her child so now, in her 70’s she still feels guilty and is trying to make up for it by providing finances to a child who is financially irresponsible. When we try to come up with our own solutions for guilt, instead of turning to the Lord and evicting the demon of guilt, we will not make good choices. We will only walk ourselves down a hallway of more poor choices and then we feel guilty about those choices as well. The only answer is going to the Holy Spirit for how to clean up our messes.
Finally, let’s look at our inability to forgive ourselves. Sometimes I think we treat ourselves worse than we allow others to treat us. When we know we have sinned, or done something that we are not proud of, we can really paralyze ourselves, especially when what we have done causes harm to someone we love. When we have to deal with that pain, or we have to accept the consequences, we can be very hard on ourselves. When we fail to recognize that we need to treat ourselves with respect and we need to honor what Jesus tells us, He included ourselves.
Look at Matthew 6:15 for example, But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Do you realize how many people are carrying around guilt, guilt they have asked for forgiveness for, and then continue to feel guilty and hold it against themselves. Then they speak poorly of themselves and hold themselves back and say they aren’t worthy of better for themselves because of what they have done. I had that very conversation with a woman, a wife, mother of 2, has a business, just this week, 3 days ago. She is holding onto guilt from over 10 years ago for mistakes she made and in that guilt she tells herself over and over that she isn’t worthy of all the good things in her life that she knows the Lord has in store for her. That demon of guilt has been there since she was a kid, and it’s going to take some time to get it out of her. Until she forgives herself, she will remain stuck, stuck with her unhealthy and unnecessary guilt. If Jesus is your savior, then He can forgive you, but if you don’t forgive yourself, then He cannot forgive you. It’s as simple as that.
When we continue to focus on the past, or hold onto it and place it above our relationship with the Lord, we are creating for ourselves an idol. With guilt there is 1 healthy way that will show up in our lives and it is called conviction. Where we get caught up is in the condemnation. What’s the difference?
Conviction is when the Holy Spirit speaks to us, let’s us know that what we are doing, what we have done, where we are going, what we have said, whatever it is, the Holy Spirit is letting us know it is not in alignment with the Lord. That conviction is to lead us away from sin and produce in us repentance and restores our relationship with the Lord. Paul writes it this way in
2 Corinthians 7: 9, yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. 10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. Paul is pretty clear about what happens without this process of “sorrow” or conviction leading to repentance, it’s death. Guilt, failing to forgive, failing to respond in repentance to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, leads to death. That is the entire objective of the enemy, to lead us to our death. That is condemnation. We need to make a choice if we are going to be convicted or condemned, life or death, the Holy Spirit or the demon of guilt.
So far we have talked about the demon of guilt and how I have seen him work. We haven’t really touched on shame yet or how they work together. In our next episode, we are going to break down the demon of shame and see how the cycle of demonic influence gets stronger once shame enters the house. We will also talk about how we can break all of this up and evict these influences from our decision making and everyday life.
I hope this has been time that inspires you to want to learn to grow in your relationship with the Lord and build your desire to partner with Him. We want to grow in Him and learn how to work with Him to build the Kingdom and Conquer Our Unseen Enemies. The more we grow the more our life will change, and you can help change the lives of anyone around you who is willing.
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As always, let’s discuss our Top Show points:
· Part 1 of two episodes focused on the demon of Guilt and the demon of Shame.
· Let’s start off first by defining both guilt and shame.
· Guilt: the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty.
· Shame: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety.
· In this combo, the demon of guilt will usually be the strongman.
· We need to understand what guilt is rooted in, how the door was opened to know how we can put a plan in place to close it.
· There are three main places I see guilt derive from: religious spirit, unintentional poor parenting, inability to forgive oneself.
· The demon of guilt pairs heavily with the demon of religion based on man-made rules and legalistic bondages.
· We need to live righteously. The Bible talks about our need to live righteously from beginning to end.
· The gift of Jesus given to us fulfills the need for meeting the rules of the Old Testament and the importance of that gets washed away in manmade rules.
· Jesus fulfilled the law. We still live up to the righteous standards, we can do that.
· Matthew 8:11.
· Manmade religious rules take the focus off Jesus and put them on the rules and how often we fail at the rules.
· The Spirit of religion creates fear when we can’t live up to the rules God never intended, the bondage, then the spirit of guilt moves in and places a hold on the mind and the heart.
· Guilt deceives you into believing you cannot be forgiven because your offense was against God, so He doesn’t want you anymore. This is how the strongman becomes firmly seated in your life.
· Now let’s move onto the Spirit of Guilt as a result of unintentional poor parenting.
· Things that happen to us as a child tend to have some sticking power and becomes so ingrained in us that we end up repeating the cycle and foster the demon of guilt
· You can have guilt as a seed planted from your parents that was used as a way to control you when communication and establishing trust were much better options.
· There is the poor parenting by not establishing healthy boundaries they should be expecting of other people
· Guilt works well with failure. Likewise, I have seen a lot of parents realize they did not do their best in raising their children and let the guilt of what they didn’t do eat away at them. They try to buy their way out of it and that doesn’t work. Money cannot pay off guilt to make it leave.
· When we try to come up with our own solutions for guilt, instead of turning to the Lord and evicting the demon of guilt, we will not make good choices. We will only walk ourselves down a hallway of more poor choices and then we feel guilty about those choices as well. The only answer is going to the Holy Spirit for how to clean up our messes.
· Finally, let’s look at our inability to forgive ourselves.
· We treat ourselves worse than we allow others to treat us.
· Look at Matthew 6:15 for example, But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
· If Jesus is your savior, then He can forgive you, but if you don’t forgive yourself, then He cannot forgive you.
· When we continue to focus on the past, or hold onto it and place it above our relationship with the Lord, we are creating for ourselves an idol.
· With guilt there is 1 healthy way that will show up in our lives and it is called conviction. Where we get caught up is in the condemnation.
· Conviction is when the Holy Spirit is letting us know it is not in alignment with the Lord.
· That conviction is to lead us away from sin and produce in us repentance and restores our relationship with the Lord.
· 2 Corinthians 7: 9
· The entire objective of the enemy, to lead us to condemnation by failing to respond in repentance to the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
We encourage you:
· To have an active Bible reading plan, if you want a personal relationship with the Lord, you need to be active about reading His word.
· Take a look at my newest book, Conquering Our Unseen Enemies, available on Amazon or our website, Conqueringourunseenenemies.com
· Follow us in Instagram, @conqueringourunseenenemies and FB.
I have enjoyed our time this week and look forward to spending time with you again next week!