Episode 3-11: Evicting Guilt and Shame from our lives, Part 1

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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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. What’s the difference?

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!