Free from Condemnation

Leslie Basham: Do you ever feel that even when you’ve confessed your sin before God, He can’t really forgive you? Here is Sharon Jaynes.

Sharon Jaynes: I know God has forgiven me, but I just can’t forgive myself. That is like saying that what Jesus did on the cross isn’t enough; that there has to be something more.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Thursday, August 18, 2011.

Nancy: Well, we are talking today about lies. As you know, this is something that has been a subject of interest to me since I first wrote the book Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free. Our guest today has that same heart and message in a book she’s written called, I’m Not Good Enough and Other Lies Women Tell Themselves.

Sharon Jaynes has been with us as a guest on Revive Our Hearts before and Sharon, I want to welcome you back to the broadcast today.

Sharon: Thank you Nancy.

Nancy: I think you’ve identified what is such a crucial issue for all of us as women because as the proverb says, “As a man or woman thinks in his heart, so is he” (Pro. 23:7). So for believing things that aren’t true about ourselves or about God or about others, we’re going to act upon those lies and end up with strongholds and patterns in our lives that put us in prison rather than living those free and abundant lives God created for us.

We talked in the last program about a set of lies that I think many, many women, particularly in our culture, seem to be in bondage to. Lies like: “I’m not good enough,” “I’m worthless,” “I’m a failure,” and one we didn’t talk about but falls into a similar category, “God doesn’t love me.” We talked about inferiority, inadequacy, insecurity, and things that so many, many women relate to.

As we were closing the last program, you identified for us four steps to freedom from the lies. For those who weren’t with us on the last program, just tell us again what those steps are.

Sharon: Nancy, these are the four steps that God used in my own life to be able to conquer the lies that I believed. The first thing is that I had to realize the enemy’s true identity. It wasn’t really that I was fighting against lies that I’d heard in the past from other people, but the true enemy is Satan himself.

He is the deceiver, the accuser of the brethren it says, and he is the accuser of the sisters too, let me tell you! But, we have to realize there is a spiritual battle and realize who the real enemy is.

Nancy: And that he wants to put us and keep us in bondage. He doesn’t want us to walk in freedom.

Sharon: He doesn’t. And here is the thing: We know the Scripture tells us that when we come to Christ we are free. We are free, we are redeemed, we are saved.

Nancy: We are a new creation.

Sharon: We are a new creation, and he can’t do anything about that. But what he can do is make us feel like we’re not clean; to make us feel like we’re not free. If he can continue to affect the way we feel, then he will affect the way we live out our Christian lives. So we’ve got to recognize there is an enemy out there who wants to kill, steal and destroy. He can’t kill us anymore because we have eternal life, but he can certainly steal from us, and he can certainly keep us from experiencing the abundant life that God has planned for us.

I see so many Christians today are not experiencing the abundant life that God has planned for them because they don’t believe the truth.

So the first one is, we have to realize the enemy’s true identity. The second one is that we have to recognize what the lies are. For most of us, we tell ourselves the lies so often we don’t really realize it is a lie: “I am so stupid, I can’t do anything right.” “Nobody loves me; nobody cares about me.” We repeat that so often that we don’t even know that we’re doing it. It just becomes a part of who we are.

Nancy: We start to think that is the truth.

Sharon: We think that is the truth but it is not the truth, and so that takes us to the third step: We must reject the lies. We have to stop and say, “That is not true.” The Bible talks about putting on the armor of God, and it talks about the shield of faith. I think the shield of faith is when we just hold that shield up, and we say, “That is not true,” and those lies of the enemy just bounce off.

I look at my hands as two little shields of faith right here. I don’t do it in public, but when I’m at home and I think one of those lies of the enemy, I actually hold my hands up like a little shield of faith, and I say, “That is not true.”

After I stop the lie and say, “That is not true,” then what do I do? The fourth step is I have to replace the lie with truth. I put in what is true. For example, if I say, “I can’t do anything right.” I might make a mistake and say, "I can’t do anything right." I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. I need to stop and say, "That’s not true because the Bible says the truth is, 'I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.'” (Phil. 4:13) So I replace that lie with the truth.

Now when we look at these four steps, we see that is how Jesus had success against the enemy in the wilderness, and we see that this is how Eve failed in the garden.

So many times we think it is our circumstances that are the problem, but you’ve got Eve here in the garden and that is where she failed.

Nancy: You couldn’t get better circumstances than she had.

Sharon: You could not get better circumstances; she lived in a perfect world. And you’ve got Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days, fasting, and He had victory. So it is not our circumstances. It is the fact that Jesus knew when Satan came after him and fed him the same thing, three lies, they were different. They were different because Jesus was different from Eve, but when he fed him those lies, Jesus fought them with the truth. He did that process that we’re just talking about right now. He rejected the lie and he replaced the lie with the truth of God’s Word, and that is how he had victory.

Nancy: Of course, that means you have to know what the truth is. If you’re getting a lot of intake, as so many are, from the world into your thinking, if you’re reading the world’s magazines and romance novels and watching its advertising and listening to your friends and listening to the culture more than you’re listening to the Word of God, you are going to be fueling the lies. You are not going to know what the truth is, and you’re going to be defenseless against the attacks of the enemy.

Sharon: Here is a great example of that Nancy. I am so glad you brought that up. If you remember back in 1999, that is when John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed his plane into the ocean. Now the thing about that crash is he was leaving New Jersey and flying to Martha’s Vineyard. That night it was a very soupy mix; it was a very dark and stormy sky. John was trained to fly by sight It is called visual flight training.

So in order for him to fly correctly, he had to see the horizon. That night he couldn’t see the horizon. So when the plane tilted left, his equilibrium got off, vertigo took over, and he felt like he was straight. Then he tilted too far to the right. Again, his body felt like, because of equilibrium, that he was flying straight. So then he went up, he went down, he made all kinds of erratic maneuvers until he crashed into the ocean, and of course, he and two other passengers died.

But here is the amazing thing. Right in front of John, right there in front of him, was the instrument panel. Now, he knew how to use the instrument panel. He could have pushed some buttons, and he could have landed that plane safely. But you see, he wasn’t trained to fly a plane with an instrument panel. He was only trained to fly by sight.

Nancy: When you are trained to fly with the instrument panel, you have to be willing to trust what the instruments tell you regardless of what your sight tells you. Regardless of what it looks like out there, you have to trust the instruments.

Sharon: When I was reading that in a magazine, they were talking about that trust that you must have for the instruments. They called it “recovery from unusual attitudes.” I thought, “Wow!” That is what it is; that is what we need—recovery from unusual lies, unusual attitudes. You have to put your feelings aside, and you have to trust that control panel. Well, that is what we have to do.

Nancy: Of course, our instrument panel is the Word of God. That is the only thing that is absolute and unchanging. But I think we are so programed to trust our feelings, to trust what other people say to us or about us, to trust our circumstances, and those things can be like that soupy mix the night John Kennedy was on that plane. They (our feelings) are not trustworthy, they are not reliable to base our flight on and that is how a lot of us end up in these crash landings in life because we trust something that is not reliable.

Sharon: We have to pay attention. Yesterday when I flew in the plane to come and join you, the flight attendant was giving the emergency procedures. I looked around the plane and not many people were paying attention. But there was one man in front, an older fellow, and he was listening to every word she said. He got out the card and read along with her. He was going to be prepared.

But, we weren’t paying attention. Not because we were being rude necessarily, but we’d heard it before and it was "old hat." However, if that plane started going down, we would get out that instruction card, and we would be speed reading!

That is what happens, unfortunately, with many of us Christians. We are speed reading when we get in a difficult situation rather than paying attention and getting into the manual, getting into God’s Word so that when a difficult situation comes along we know where that Scripture is. We know what God has to say about it, we don’t have to speed read, we don’t have to panic because we know what God says about it.

Nancy: Something I often say to women and to myself is that we need to counsel our hearts according to the truth of God’s Word. I am thinking about a section in this book where you do just that. You are talking about the lies, “I’m not good enough; I’m worthless; I’m a failure,” and you provide for us a list of things that God’s Word tells us are true about us if we are children of God, if we’ve placed our faith in Jesus Christ. I want you to read several things from that list because this is an example of how we need to counsel our hearts according to the truth of God’s Word.

So when my mind, my emotions, my feelings tell me, “You’re not good enough; you’re worthless; you’re a failure; God doesn’t love you,” tell us how we counsel our heart according to the truth.

Sharon: Well, Romans 8:1 says that “you are free from condemnation.” First Corinthians 2:16 says, “You have the mind of Christ.” Second Corinthians 5:21 says, “We have been made righteous.” Ephesians 1:3, “You have been blessed with every spiritual blessing.” That is amazing! I just get excited reading about that!

Ephesians 4:24, “You are righteous and holy.” Colossians 1:14, “You have been redeemed and forgiven of all of your sins.” And Nancy, here is just the list. Let’s just look at a one-word list of who we are without giving the address.

The Bible says this about us. We are:

• chosen
• accepted
• adopted
• appointed
• valuable
• justified
• reconciled
• redeemed
• righteous
• free from condemnation
• holy
• sealed
• complete
• completely forgiven
• equipped by God
• empowered by the Holy Spirit
• enveloped in Jesus Christ

I mean, how can we say, “I’m not good enough,” when we look at how God sees us.

Nancy: And that really becomes our instrument panel. That is what we trust to get us safely through the soupy mix of life. I think it is important to note that the key to dealing with these feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and insecurity that plague so many of us, is not to just look at ourselves and say, “Oh you really are worthwhile; you really are good; you really are something,” because the fact is, you can have parents who affirm you, who tell you that you’re really wonderful, precious, sweet, adorable, and your own heart can still condemn you.

You can still have those feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and insecurity. The fact is, we are not good enough apart from Christ. We are worthless; we are failures. So in a sense there is truth, but what we have to do when we recognize that truth is lift our eyes up from ourselves and look at Christ.

He is the only one who is good enough. He is the one who is worthy to receive glory and honor and praise and blessing. He is the only one who has never failed. He is the one who is perfect love. Because of what he has done for us on the cross, we are in Christ.

When God looks at us He doesn’t see us as the failures, the worthless, the not-good-enough people that we are, He sees us as being clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That perspective will change the way that we look at ourselves and all of life.

Sharon: We just need to emphasize that, that in ourselves we are not good enough, but because of Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross, because He indwells us, we are good enough because of Him.

Nancy: He’s the one.

Sharon: He’s the one that is good enough. He is in us, and we are in Him. He is innocent on the inside and the outside, and we are surrounded and enveloped in Jesus Christ, and that is what makes us worthy. Not because we have any special talents or gifts on our own accord, but because of what He has done.

Nancy: That leads me to another lie that women tell themselves, women (and men too, I’m sure), that you address in this book. That is this issue of feeling "I can’t really be forgiven. I can’t forgive myself," is the way that some people would say that.

One of the things you say in this book that I think is so true, Sharon, is that two of Satan’s greatest weapons against women today are shame and condemnation. Even though we know God has forgiven us, many rise each morning to put on familiar dirty rags.

I find so many women who are living with this sense of bondage to what they’ve done in their past. The infidelity, the abortions, the wrong choices, the sinful habit patterns. Even though they might have confessed that and repented of it, there is again this tape playing in their mind, again and again and again, that you can’t really be forgiven. That shame and condemnation I think is a way of life, a stronghold for so many women.

Sharon: Satan wants you to feel that way. He does not want you to feel like you are forgiven, so he continues to bring up your past and to bring up that shame. When we say, “I know God has forgiven me, but I just can’t forgive myself,” that is like saying what Jesus did on the cross isn’t enough; that there has to be something more. I think the root of that really is because deep down in our hearts we know we don’t deserve to be forgiven.

Nancy: Right.

Sharon: If somebody has had an abortion they would say, “I don’t deserve for God to forgive me for that.” If they’ve had an affair or they’ve been sexually promiscuous, “God, I don’t deserve it.” But you know what? You don’t deserve it. Nancy, I don’t deserve to be forgiven, and that is the thing about a gift. We don’t deserve it, and we can’t earn it. That is the definition of grace. It is receiving a gift that you don’t deserve, and we don’t deserve it, but God forgives us as a gift.

It’s like Corrie ten Boom says, "God throws our sins into the deepest of seas and then he puts up a sign that says 'No Fishing Allowed.'”

Nancy: I think a lot of us know these truths; we know the gospel; we know that Christ died to forgive our sins; we know 1 John 1:9, the Christian’s bar of soap it’s been called. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

So Sharon, why is it that what we know in our heads for so many people doesn’t penetrate their hearts? They still feel in bondage to that tape. They are still thinking back to that foolish choice they made, that wrong decision, that sin they committed, and they still allow those voices of condemnation to come and hold them in bondage.

Sharon: Well, I think as long as we take the bait . . . Satan is going to throw that shame out there, and as long as we take the bait, he is going to continue to do it. We still listen to those voices of condemnation because I think honestly we don’t believe it. We don’t receive that gift of forgiveness.

We hold the package in our hands, but we’re not taking the bow off. We’re not lifting the lid up, we’re not receiving the gift that God has given us. We have to do that by faith. We just start praying, “God, thank you so much for forgiving me” for whatever it is that you’ve done, that you have been carrying around with you. Thank God that He has forgiven you, receive that forgiveness. He is holding it out to you; it is just a step of faith. You might not feel any different, but it is just a step of faith.

You worry about the feelings later—that will come. Just continue to thank God for that gift that He has forgiven you.

Nancy: And that forgiveness is made possible because the price for that sin, the penalty for that sin, has been paid by Jesus Christ. I love that verse in 2 Corinthians 5:21 and it says “God made Him Christ who knew no sin to become sin, to be made sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

So all of my sin, all of that failure was placed on Christ at the cross. He took it on Himself so that we could be clothed in his righteousness. That is why Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
I know there is not a person listening to our voices today who is not guilty of sin. We all are, and there are some who have been living in that bondage.

Thinking back perhaps weeks or months or years or decades ago, to choices that were made, sins that were committed. Maybe something that you’ve never told anyone else about. You’ve walked through all these years with that shame, that condemnation, that sense that you could never be truly forgiven. It’s that abortion, that adulterous affair; it’s that lie, that deception, that broken relationship, that broken vow.

I want to just challenge you right now to lift that sin up into the light; to acknowledge it, which you may have done in the past, as a sin; not just a failure, not just a mistake, but as a sin against a holy God.

And then if you are a child of God, you know that you’ve repented of your sin and you’ve placed your faith in Jesus Christ, then look to the cross, look to Christ and say, "Thank you Lord Jesus that You became that sin for me. That sin, my sin—and name it for what it is—it was placed on You. You paid the penalty for that sin. You bore my condemnation in Yourself. The wrath of God that I deserved was placed on Jesus Christ. And so now by faith I receive Your righteousness, Your cleansing, the freedom. Thank You that You look at me as if I had never, ever committed that sin."

Counsel your heart according to the truth of God’s Word. By faith receive God’s forgiveness and then do what Corrie ten Boom said and that is put a “No Fishing” sign up here. Say, "I’m not going to let the enemy continue to wreak havoc in my life, continue to put me under the pile or the bondage of guilt of sin that has been confessed and put under the blood of Jesus Christ."

Oh Father, how I thank You for the truth, the power of the truth to set us free. I thank You for Jesus. I thank You for the cross. I thank You for the blood of Christ. I thank You that I can stand before You today—clean, forgiven, no condemnation, no guilt in life or in death, because Christ is mine. His righteousness is mine.

I pray for my sisters who are listening. Oh God, would You this day begin that wonderful process of setting women free by Your grace to walk in the freedom of forgiveness? Through Christ our Lord I pray, amen.

Leslie: That’s Nancy Leigh DeMoss. She’s been talking with Sharon Jaynes about the condemnation so many women feel and the freedom that comes through understanding God’s forgiveness. If you’ve been carrying around a weight of condemnation, I hope you just prayed with Nancy.

To help you in the process of counseling your mind with the truth, we’d like to send you a copy of the book by our guest Sharon Jaynes. It’s called I’m Not Good Enough and Other Lies Women Tell Themselves. The book will help you identify lies that have threatened you. It will show you how to believe the truth and find freedom.

When you support Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any size, we’ll send you the book by Sharon Jaynes. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. Ask for the book Lies Women Tell Themselves when you call.

Well, you have a chance to interact with our guest, Sharon Jaynes, today. She is part of the Revive Our Hearts listener blog. If you visit ReviveOurHearts.com and scroll to the end of today’s transcript, you can leave your comment about today’s program or ask Sharon a question. She’ll be checking in throughout the day, reading the comments and answering whatever questions she can.

Do you want to watch God change what seems to be a hopeless situation?

Sharon: We do not like waiting. Think about instant messaging. Think about this “twitter thing” (I’m not even sure what that is). We pull on the fax because it's not coming fast enough, and we tap our foot because the microwave is taking 30 seconds; we don’t like waiting.

I remember reading a story of when Moses went up to the mountain where God was going to speak to him and Moses waited seven days. On the seventh day God spoke. I thought, “Would I do that? Would I sit in total silence, alone by myself, and wait for God to speak to me?” I’m not sure, but I thought that is just so counter-cultural to the world, this fast-pace world we live in.

We don’t like to wait for anything, and I think that is why we don’t see more miracles in our lives, and we don’t see more restoration, and we feel like things are so hopeless, because we’re not even giving God time to work and do what He needs to do.

Nancy, that is just something we can just cling to today as we’re praying for loved ones, as we’re praying for family members. Don’t give up; don’t stop. My dad was a mean man. To think that God could bring my father to his knees and he could become one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known, that was such a miraculous thing. I always remember that as I’m praying for other people, to not give up.

Leslie: Sharon Jaynes says, “Don’t be impatient and run away from the hopeless situation.” She’ll tell you more tomorrow. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

All Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.  

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