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What Fruit has come from Shame? (Romans 6:21)

August 22, 2024

What Fruit has come from Shame? (Romans 6:21)

“You should be ashamed of yourself !” When was the last time someone said that to you? Perhaps it was a long time ago. Maybe it was your father or mother. They probably weren’t wrong. Shame is most often attached to a bad action or bad choice that we have made. In psychological usage today, shame is more often a harmful result of what has been done to you. But shame in the Bible has more to do with your own personal failures.

Our verse today, Romans 6:21, asks “what fruit had you then in those things of which you are now ashamed?” What was the outcome? What was the benefit? How did that work out for you?

Perhaps a parent has said, “You should be shamed of yourself,” and you weren’t. Your actions were what you wanted, and you were not embarrassed and you did not feel guilty. Your parents were upset, but you were not. That happens with God as well. He has established a standard of right and wrong, consistent with His character, which does not change over time. There may be rules that apply, say, to Israel in the wilderness, or further back, with the patriarchs before the Law was given. But God’s outlines of morality do not change. We, being more shaped by our culture than we know, tend not to hold to God’s standards, since the culture doesn’t. We fall into patterns of behavior which, if measured against what God has said in His Word, are found wanting. But if God were to say, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” we might say, “Really?”

But then we hear the Gospel, both the bad news and the good news. We hear how our sin separates us from God, and we hear how we stand in condemnation, waiting for the penalty to be executed. We realize that there is nothing that we ourselves can do to remedy our situation. But we also hear that God in Christ has come to the rescue, sacrificing and substituting in our place, for our sins, so that we can be saved. One of the key benefits of this salvation is that our sins are forgiven. The sentence has been paid by Another. We are no longer under condemnation, but are justified through faith in Christ.

In all of this, something happens to our shame. It had become overwhelming when we grasped our guilt before God. But now, in
Christ, that shame is taken away. The stain of guilt has been removed and the trauma of shame is lifted like a fog when the sun
breaks through. We see ourselves in light of what Christ has done, not in gloom of what we have done.

So let us now come back to our critical question: “What fruit had you then in those things of which you are now ashamed?”

It almost seems as though question should read, “what fruit had you then in those things for which you should have been ashamed, but weren’t?” Now, seeing the gravity of these actions apart from Christ, we realize that we running a fool’s course. We were plunging headlong to hell. And for what? With what result? For what kind of gain?

But now, in Christ, when we sin (and we continue to do so), we are not overwhelmed by guilt and shame, because we are taught in the Gospel that our focus is Christ’s performance, not our own. We don’t listen to our guilt, which says to us with a certain amount of truth to it: “You should be ashamed.” Rather, we listen to Christ who says, “I am not ashamed of you. I bore your shame for you. It is yours no longer. I took it from you and bore it away.”

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