No Longer Ashamed

Based on John 13

We’d taken our seats quickly. The tension felt thick. The room buzzed with the slow murmur of voices, everyone concerned about the escalating anger toward Jesus we’d felt on the street.

I saw Jesus stand up and take off His outer garments. What is He doing?

He slowly wrapped a towel around His waist and picked up the basin of water near the door. My heart dropped. I knew. I looked down at my feet, caked thick with dirt. Where were the servants who usually did this chore? I’d noticed when we sat down that no one had washed our feet, but I didn’t even consider doing it. And now Jesus was taking up the task?

Bent low over Matthew’s feet, our teacher, the Son of God, looked more like a servant.

I couldn’t stand it. The Son of God reduced to washing our dirty feet.

When He came to me, I quickly pulled back my foot. “No. You cannot do this, Jesus.”

He reached out again for my foot. “If I do not do this, Peter, you have no part of Me. This is the entrance to My new way. We begin here, Peter. All that I am about to reveal to you begins here.”

I wanted Him, I wanted His way, I wanted in. “Then wash all of me!”

But it was my feet He had to wash, the dirtiest part of me. And I would have to let Him.

“Put out your dirty foot, Peter.”

I felt ashamed. I regretted not getting up earlier when I noticed that the servants hadn’t come to wash our feet. I felt embarrassed my feet were so dirty. I felt uncomfortable as the others at the table sat in silence, watching our leader wash my feet. I felt terrifyingly vulnerable.

He said, “Unless I wash your feet, you have no part in Me.”

He was offering something I hadn’t even known I needed. But He knew. He knew what was coming even that night. The very feet He was washing would carry me lying and running from Him. If I could go back to that night I would say, “Wash my feet, Jesus. Scrub harder. Clean me and tell me I am right with You, I am part of You.

“And when I start to run, hold me to You.”

I didn’t say those words to Him that night, but that is what He did. That is what He does.

The Stream of Grace

I sat between my two girls in the most humble of church services with dark ash on our foreheads. It bothered me to see their foreheads smudged with dark ash. I wanted to defend them. They are pretty pure-hearted almost always. My youngest one still twiggy and naive to most of the darkness in the world. My older one cries easily when she learns of people suffering, whether across the cafeteria or around the world. I wanted them to be above the dark soot representing our human, fallen, dark hearts, all prone to wander and sin.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

No human is separate from this reality.

We are all so terribly small and fragile. The ash reminds us of it. We hate to be reminded of it.

The ash felt heavy on my forehead too. But unlike my optimism concerning my darling girls, I knew it belonged there.

The ash. It screams that I don’t measure up, that I am small, I am broken, I am a sinner, and I am dust. It feels heavy but it feels right. The ash is the right message to the world. It is my physical proclamation. I know! I know I am not enough. I know I need God. I know I sin.

In the weeks and months leading up to that moment, most of the people looking on would judge my life and think I was pretty good, or at least that I was trying to be.

But I knew. I’d felt distant from God, and that usually is because of sin. I knew that…

I often live driven more than I live called.

I’ve wanted to not fail more than I’ve wanted to see God save souls.

I’ve wanted a God I could predict and control more than I’ve wanted a rush of His uncontrollable Spirit.

I’ve tried to prove myself at the expense of loving well.

I’ve wanted to be seen more than to see.

I’ve doubted God more than believed Him.

Yes, all of that. I need God and my girls do too, and we always will.

We don’t confess so that God will forgive; we confess to remember and enjoy that we already are forgiven. Jesus has handled this problem fully and completely and replaced our sin with His goodness.

But our enemy is after us, and he wants us to believe the lie that this dirt defines us, that we are frauds for speaking of Jesus when we have sin in us. He wants us to doubt our freedom and doubt our God.

So let’s call his bluff and say what is true.

Yep. I sin. I am a sinner.

So many of our problems come when imperfect people try to act as if they have it all together. We all have been there. And what’s the result? We hide behind images we create of happy, clean, impressive lives. We are exhausted. Because if you create an image to hide behind, you’ll have to spend all your energy holding it up.

When the goal becomes being liked, no amount of approval ever feels like enough.

When the goal becomes a bigger platform, no platform ever feels big enough.

When the goal becomes more money, no amount of money ever feels like enough.

When the goal becomes success, no promotion or award or sales numbers will quite cut it.

And when the goal becomes being thin or beautiful, no number on a scale ever feels like you’ve finally arrived.

In the years that I fought my eating disorder, I hated it. I wanted to stop caring about my weight and appearance. I remember wondering how I could ever retrain my brain to stop focusing so much on myself.

For many, their eating disorders progress to the stage where medical intervention is needed. But in my case the bottom line was that my thought life was just completely consumed with food and what to eat or not eat and when to work out. My brain hovered there as if it were stuck on a TV channel, with no remote and no way to turn it off or switch to a different program.

It had never occurred to me that this was sin that needed to be confessed and that God had given me the power to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.”¹

I remember the day those words leaped off the pages of my thick dark-green study Bible, soon after I learned I was pregnant for the first time. I reread and reread them. In shock as I realized that my thoughts were mine to control. It was the first time I got on my knees and confessed my addiction to my image and my worship of control. I asked God to help me take my thoughts captive. The concept thrilled me. Maybe it was possible to escape this prison of self-hate and control, and with the knowledge of a new life growing in me, I had even more motivation to make a shift in my thinking.

Healing rarely happens overnight. But now I wasn’t alone in the fight. When thoughts flooded my mind about what I could or couldn’t eat or when and how I would exercise or weigh again, when I would pass a mirror or zip up my pants or look at a menu, or when someone noticed or talked about my weight, through every anxiety that invaded, I clung to Jesus. I thought of Him, I talked to Him, I asked for His help, I asked for His perspective, I read His Word, I recited verses that came to mind. So now flooding my brain alongside the obsessive thoughts was Jesus and His love for me and His words.

And over time the truth of Jesus changed my perspective. He freed me, thought by thought, hour by hour, day by day. And while I couldn’t say exactly when it happened, one day I woke up and I knew I was free.

I spent a lot of my life trying to be perfect. And that’s an exhausting way to live.

The fact is, I’m not perfect. And now I choose regularly to display my imperfections. I don’t get to be as awesome as my ego would like to be, but I get to enjoy the places God has me rather than fight to keep myself somewhere I never deserved to be. I get to be free to be known by God and those closest to me.

I pick that. I pick being the sinner and letting God get the glory.

Nobody wants your fake perfect version. Nobody. Not God, not your people, and not you.

THE END OF PRETENDING

Every once in a while I get around someone whose soul is full of God. Their souls are so content, Jesus is just coming out of them. Do you know people like that? It is so refreshing. It is beautiful. They are not needy. They’re not trying to prove themselves. They’re not trying to measure up. They’re not trying to get your attention or affection. They hold no judgment for others because they are aware of their own sin.

My grandmother lived this way. We called her Gaga, though as we got older she insisted on Grandmother. An elegant lady raised in the Deep South, she loved Jesus, though faith was private for her and she rarely wore her spirituality for others to see. Rather than talk about Jesus, she lived like Jesus. She was at home in her skin, and she put others at ease as well.

She was self-deprecating and deeply aware of her own shortcomings. As her grandkids, we did so many things over the years that should have disappointed her. She should have judged us and told us how out of line we were. But she always left the judging to God and pulled us in all the closer.

She knew grace and she gave it away. It all was rooted in her understanding of the amazing grace that saved a wretch like her. Faith and the gospel were simple and real to her. She didn’t need to wax eloquent over theological points; she just chose to love, to never speak ill, to believe the best, and to let God be God. No need to try to be a god when He was plenty good at His job.

Something about her core identity was altogether different from most of the world’s. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She also wasn’t defined by and in bondage to her sin. She was forgiven and free, and her life gave that away.

Grace breathes more grace.

Who are you?

Are you impressive?

Or are you broken?

Or are you forgiven?

In John 13 we look on as God, who owns every universe, pours water in a basin and begins to wash the disciples’ feet, to wipe them with a towel that was wrapped around Him. His identity drove His humility. Jesus was the Son of the almighty God; He was clear and secure in that fact. Therefore He had nothing He was grasping for. He had nothing to prove here or to these men.

When you have nothing to protect and nothing to prove, God moves through you.

When you have nothing to protect and nothing to prove, you know freedom.

Of course He comes to Peter, and Peter does what all of us would have wanted to do. Lord, no. You can’t wash my feet. And he pulls back his dirty foot.

We do not want to put our dirt out. We are on pedestals. We are in positions that seem to require our perfection and our morality. Yet when we pull our dirt back, we miss our need for God and we miss any real depth with other people.

When Zac and I planted the church in Austin, we didn’t want a place where people would come and feel a need to pretend they were okay and that they had it together. We told our small band of a launch team that we believed every one of us was a recovering sinner and needed to treat that seriously. Zac called our whole church to a twelve-step program called Celebrate Recovery. It is a tool developed for churches, similar to an AA program for addicts.

Everyone was shocked, unsure their sin was bad enough to need such a big commitment. Yet, slowly, some of the most godly, seemingly perfect people began to enter small groups and go through the process of coming face to face with their sin and tendency to seek hope in things of this world.

In those months our small band of leaders confessed, some for the very first time in their lives,

• decades of unforgiveness,

• pornography addictions,

• abortions,

• sexual sin,

• alcohol dependencies,

• addictions to approval, and

• overwhelming debt they had been hiding.

A few months into this, after our initial launch of about five groups, our core team members looked at one another and said, “If these issues are hiding in our small church, imagine how many people are hiding their issues and struggles around the world.”

It terrified me that we have accidentally built an institution in direct opposition to the call of Christ for the church. We should be the safest place on earth to bring our sin. We are the only ones that can offer hope for it!

The power of the Holy Spirit swept forward in the coming years through that surrendered, brave, free, forgiven group of people in ways I had never seen before. Instead of all our fears coming true—that we would be rejected, that we would be judged, that we would be shamed—the exact opposite happened.

People were set free. People experienced the grace and forgiveness of Christ like never before. People grew closer and more connected than they had ever been before. Healing and restoration became contagious, and people who got close to us didn’t even want to hide.

Our church rallied around each person and met needs. When someone confessed debt he had been hiding, the small group rallied to help pay it off and to hold that person accountable to not fall back in. When someone confessed pornography addictions, the small group rallied to help build protection and accountability in that person’s life. It was a wildfire of holiness, and it wasn’t legalistic. It was the most life-giving, community-building, God-honoring revival I have ever seen.

We don’t just confess our sin; we throw in with each other, point each other to the One who forgives and gives us the power to fight it! We have grown apathetic about sin, my friend. We have let it take hold in our lives, and in the dark it has all the power.

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”²

EXPOSING OUR DIRT

We are ashamed of the dirt of our lives, but Jesus wants to move right into it. Jesus goes to the very dirtiest part of the disciples and invites them to need Him.

I have often heard Jesus washing the disciples’ feet taught as the example of servant leadership, that this is how we should lead others. And sure, later Jesus mentions that we are to serve others as He served them. It’s a good lesson. It is a correct interpretation of the passage.

However, it isn’t His main point at this moment.

This moment, by the way, is terrifying to Peter because he is thinking, I respect You, Jesus. I worship You. I follow You. I do not want You washing my feet. I don’t want You stooped down cleaning the worst parts of me. Peter still wanted to prove himself on his own, without God.

But Jesus said, This is not a small thing, Peter. This is not about you eating here with clean feet. This is about your soul being clean.

Jesus’s men had all been trying to measure up, trying to be the greatest, trying to hide their dirt, still thinking that God wanted their performance, when all He wanted was their souls. Just as He wants ours.

Peter’s faith was real and his salvation secure, yet Jesus was clear: he still must have his feet washed. Each of us needs a regular cleansing of our souls that leads to freedom. But we often separate ourselves from other people, and we tuck away our sin because we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t want to put out our dirt.

And I think that Jesus is saying to us, Hey, if you believe Me, if you believe that I can wash your foot, if you believe that I can wash your soul, why would you not put it out there? A dirty foot only needs one thing: to be washed clean. Ultimately, that is what Peter and all of us need.

All our inclinations to strive and prove ourselves point to our need to be rescued. Our greatest needs begin to be filled when we admit we have great needs and turn to the only One able to meet them.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”³ It’s terrifying to put it out there and admit our need, just as Peter experienced. Right now, you are thinking about closing this book and pretending you never read it. But you want to be on the other side of this, I promise. You want to be clean and free.

A word that I rarely hear anymore is repentance. The word repent means “to turn away.”

The Christian life can be summed up in three words: repent and believe. You confess all your sin, the worst of it, and you believe the truth of God.

We agree with God about our sin, and we don’t just confess it, but we let the cleansing stream of Jesus’s grace pull us away from our sin. This will take humility. In my experience, humility usually involves a bit of humiliation. Every time I am honest about my struggles and honest about my sin and honest about my pride and honest about the mistakes I’ve made and honest about the sin in my soul, I find it humiliating.

And do you know what happens right after I confess it?

I immediately feel kind of small. I immediately feel all the things that I don’t want to feel—the shame, the fear, the isolation, the embarrassment. I do feel them for a minute. I feel caught.

I let that feeling wash over me because the next wave coming is relief. I actually get to be cleansed now, and the shame that I’ve been feeling, that inevitably had affected me and everyone around me, starts falling off and recedes with the waves of grace. I find grace and I find connection to Jesus again, a deep, honest, sincere-in-my-soul kind of connection with God, because I’ve admitted I need Him and I’m close to Him again and we’re right.

Maybe you have been doing things for God for a long time, but you’ve never really had this kind of relationship with Him. Maybe you are thinking, I don’t know if the Spirit of God is in me. I don’t know if I’ve ever trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Do you go to Jesus with your sin regularly?

Do you experience His forgiveness?

Enjoying His grace does cost us something. One thing: death. Death of our old selves. Death of our pride. Death of thinking we can be enough on our own. It’s hard; it’s messy. You will hate it for a moment. But you know what happens in your soul? You get free. You know what happens when you are free? Other people are set free. When you put your dirt out first, everybody else gets to do the same. It’s contagious. Other people are freed through our honesty and confession. We don’t need to tell the world; we just need to tell a few warrior friends who won’t settle for our being plastic or fake.

We expose our dirt because Jesus has the power to wash it and free us from bondage to it. God’s grace is exquisite and enough for the dirt that seems impossible to clean.

We want to see revival happen in our places. We want to see God move in the souls of people while we are alive, however long that is. Yes? We want that.

It starts with us. If we are not moved by the Spirit of God, why on earth would anyone else ever be moved? If we don’t experience His forgiveness and His grace on a regular basis, then how could we give away His forgiveness and grace to anybody else?

THE GREAT EXCHANGE

Jesus knew that in a few hours Peter was going to deny Him and that for the next three days Peter was going to feel distant from Him and that he was going to feel rejected by Him.

Peter loved so passionately, and he made some of the biggest mistakes. He was prideful and passionate. We are just like Peter.

We are zealots.

We are sinners.

Jesus knows this.

And Jesus knows what Peter doesn’t know yet. You do need this. You do need My forgiveness. You don’t even know what you are capable of. But you need this forgiveness today.

I wash your pride that thinks that I need you.

I wash your doubt that you think I can’t handle.

I wash your fear that stops you from obeying.

I wash your shame that makes you hide.

I wash your independence that makes you think you don’t need Me.

I wash your performance that you think proves your worth.

I wash your betrayal that haunts you.

I wash your arrogance that resists your need of forgiveness.

I wash your striving for your own name.

I wash your love for your own honor.

I wash your mistakes that you cannot name.

I wash your anger that lashes out sometimes.

I wash your feet and set them on My path—a path of service, a path of love, a path of rejection, a path of suffering, a path of joy, a path of setting people free.

A few hours after He washed the feet of Peter, Jesus chose to die on the cross to wash all our filth and dirt away. In one violent, costly act, He washed us of all our sin. We were needy, and Christ became sin and paid the penalty of that sin so that we would be with Him forever. His blood in exchange for ours.

Repent and believe. This is what it looks like to fill our souls with streams of living water, bread that does not ever leave us hungry again, and light that takes over the darkness. We are not defined by our worst or our best; we are defined by our God.

We put out our dirt and we let Jesus wash it and then we go tell everybody about it.

Is your heart hard? Does God feel distant?

This is the road back. Repent and believe.

The first time I remember hearing a public confession, my little perfection-seeking self stood jaw-dropped, stunned. I was watching a man share his most shameful dark secret in front of hundreds of people. Hearing his broken repentance undid me. And it made me wonder, What if instead of hiding my sin I’m supposed to bring it out in the open?

Guess what? We are. We have nothing to prove to anyone, to ourselves, or to God, because Christ has proved it for us.

STEP INTO THE STREAM

What sin are you afraid to bring to Jesus?

WADE IN DEEPER

Write a letter from God to you concerning your sin. What would God say to you about His love and forgiveness for you?

QUENCH YOUR THIRST

Identify patterns in your life that keep you from confessing your sin. Get a few notecards and write out some verses that remind you of the truth of God’s grace when you fall into one of those patterns of shame. Stick those verses everywhere—in your car, on your bathroom mirror, on your bedside table.

THE OVERFLOW

Go on a walk with a mentor or friend you trust and share what God is teaching you about His grace. Ask each other these questions:

1. Where are you craving grace?

2. In the past, how have you experienced God’s grace in your life?

3. What is keeping you from bringing your sin to Jesus?