A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me a collection of Scripture verses I keep by my coffee pot so that they are the first thing I see in the morning as I reach for my cup. Last week, I flipped to this one and carried it with me for the rest of the day: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

All day long, I meditated on these verses word by word and phrase by phrase. While I started my day somewhat discouraged, I ended my day greatly encouraged because of the truth of where any and all of our suffering leads.

Any and all suffering you and I have experienced this year does not lead to a dead end of disappointment or despair, but if we will let the storms God allows or brings into our lives have their perfect way in us, they will lead to hope.

At the end of the year, it’s easy to look back and focus not just on the things that have gone well with us but the things that have been hard for us. None of us can get to the end of a full twelve months, 365 days, and think, “Wow, nailed that one.” “Did this year perfectly.” “Nothing I regret about the past 12 months.” “No disappointments buried in the last 365 days.” If I took the time to do a survey just with the people on my block or around my very own Thanksgiving table last week, each of them would have sorrows, disappointments, and failures lying side-by-side their accomplishments, successes, and joys.

But Romans 5 reminds us at the end of the road for any and all suffering in our lives is not perpetual disappointment or stinging shame but hope.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about the nature of hope. In order to feel hope, we must be unbound from our shame. But shame isn’t a concept we talk about very often because we don’t understand what it is or how to get rid of it. The most common mistake I make in my own life is mixing up guilt and shame. Experiencing guilt means we know we have done something wrong, but experiencing shame means we feel like we are wrong. Our entire existence seems to be summed up in one embarrassing moment or act.

While it’s possible to experience shame for something we have done that is morally wrong, it’s also possible to feel shame for things that have nothing to do with morals. We can feel shame for wearing the wrong shirt or being uninvited to the right party. We can feel shame about not having a certain body type, tripping and falling in front of a certain person, not making a certain grade, or not earning a certain income. We can feel shame about anything and everything that makes us feel on the outside of a party everyone is invited to but us, whether or not that party is perceived or real.¹

Here’s another thing I’ve come to understand about the nature of shame: we don’t need someone to forgive us for our shame and offer absolution, we need someone to accept us in our shame and offer redemption. While we need forgiveness to absolve us of our guilt, we need acceptance to lift our shame. And we can’t provide or initiate this acceptance on our own. We need someone greater and more glorious, beautiful, and powerful than us to step into the room and come looking for us, moving towards us from the outside in.

This kind of movement, mercy, kindness, acceptance, forgiveness, hope, and healing for both our guilt and our shame is what the season of Advent is all about.

From a Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge on November 21, 1943 and said: “Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other – things that are really of no consequence – the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside.”

As Bonhoeffer reminds us, Advent is not about us mustering up enough effort to save ourselves and move towards God; Advent is about God moving towards us. Lighting the prophet’s candle the first week of Advent reminds us of this.

The prophets were one voice after another reminding God’s people to repent, turn from their evil ways, and remember to obey the covenant God established with His people. From Moses in the Pentateuch to Malachi to every prophet in-between, the prophets were God’s reminders to His people that He was ready and waiting to come to a people who were ready and waiting for Him. But God’s people were too dead in their sin, too buried in their guilt, and too stuck in their shame, to ever make a move towards Him. If hope and healing was ever going to happen, it had to be dependent on God to make the first move. We see this movement of God towards in His people in the opening pages of the Gospel of Luke.

Luke addresses his letter to Theophilus, a typical materialistic, worldly, sophisticated Gentile who, most likely, is not either superstitious or gullible. But in the first chapter alone, Luke mentions the Holy Spirit and break-through of a supernatural world into this one in four specific incidents: Zechariah’s son is to be filled with the Holy Spirit (v. 15), May’s son is to be born by the power of the Holy Spirit (v. 35), Elizabeth greets Mary with a cry inspired by the Holy Spirit (v. 41), and Zechariah celebrates John’s birth with a prophecy in the Holy Spirit (v. 67).²

If you were trying to convince a worldly, materialistic man from a dominant culture to believe in a supernatural event from a no-name culture, this is not how you would write your story.

But Luke isn’t concerned about twisting the facts to tickle the ears of his audience. He is concerned with the vital matter of salvation and communicating the only way he knows it can come to all people, Theophilus included (see Luke 1:77).³

And the way the story of salvation begins in the Gospel of Luke is through the lifting of shame and breakthrough of hope in one the lives of one elderly, barren couple. The healing of their hearts sets the stage for the healing Christ comes to accomplish throughout all the world.

When the angel Gabriel announces this movement of God towards His people with the conception and birth of John, Zechariah’s response is full of self-protective doubt rather than trust and joy. Like we talked about in a previous blog, God used nine months of silence to heal Zechariah’s heart with remembrance of His Word.

But God did not just come to transform Zechariah’s suffering into a place of healing, hope, and joy, He came to heal Elizabeth as well.

To be barren as a woman in the ancient world did not just mean you without a child, it meant you were without true identity, significance, and purpose. To be barren was to be wrapped up in shame, not for doing something wrong but for being wrong. While both Zechariah and Elizabeth were childless, Luke makes it clear that barrenness was Elizabeth’s problem, not Zechariah’s; she was the barren ONE (Luke 1:5). And if I know anything about barrenness from my wait to have a child, it is this: barrenness always breeds shame. No matter how kind or understanding your spouse or the people around you are, the underlying narrative a barren woman fights to drown out is not, “I’ve done something bad,” but “I am bad; there is something deeply, inherently wrong with me.”

Perhaps you have not experienced barrenness in terms of child-bearing, but each and every one of us has experienced barrenness at some level. For at its core, experiencing barrenness for any person in any culture means hearing and believing the narrative, “If I don’t have __________, I am nothing.”⁴ The blank for Elizabeth was a child. The blank for you could be a certain relationship, marriage, a steady job, a certain level of income, a clean bill of health, a particular degree or level of accomplishment, a certain promotion or seat around the table, or an invitation to be a part of a certain group of friends.

But God’s desire, just like it was for Elizabeth, is to lift your need to feel significance, identity, or purpose from anyone or anything but Him. Because at the end of the day, even if you got exactly what you wanted, it would not satisfy or give you the feeling of security and belonging you so deeply crave. True security is something that can only come from Him.

Once Elizabeth is pregnant, she hides herself for five months (Luke 1:24-25). Her womb may have been healed, but like Zechariah, her heart was not.

Throughout Scripture, hiding often implies fear and running away from God’s presence instead of towards it (see Genesis 3:9-10). While we do not know why Elizabeth hid, I do think it’s safe to assume part of her hiddenness was tied to fear and shame. Fear that perhaps this good gift from God would not last and she and Zechariah would be disappointed again. Shame that for so long, she was unable to produce a child, the one thing that gave her value, identity, and significance as a woman.

But what we see throughout the Gospels is that any miracle Jesus performs is never just about a brute display of power; it is always to heal the hidden recesses of the human heart. God didn’t just want to give a barren couple a child; He wanted to fully restore Elizabeth’s heart.

Again, it’s helpful to remember that for shame to lift, we cannot lift it ourselves. Neurologically speaking, shame shuts us down and paralyzes us. Someone else has to make a move towards us. So, after five months of hiding, in the sixth month, what happens? Who makes a move to come and find Elizabeth?

“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, `Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’” (Luke 1:39-43, emphasis mine).

Mary, filled with the presence of Immanuel, comes to find Elizabeth, the barren one. And with His arrival, everything changes. When Elizabeth steps out of hiding into the light of the presence of the Lord, joy springs into life and hope bursts into bloom. Like Romans 5 so beautifully illustrates, her suffering led to endurance, her endurance led to character, her character led to hope, and her hope did not put her to shame because love, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of Immanuel, came to find, heal, and restore her heart from the inside out.

When we look back at the end of our year, the temptation will be to focus on all of our deprivation, disappointments, and ways others have hurt us, life has failed us, or how we have hurt ourselves.

But we cannot step into the end of the year or the beginning of the Advent season without the presence of hope. Because Luke’s Gospel reminds us – hope is why Jesus came. He did not just come to heal our bodies, something we see Him often do throughout the New Testament, but more importantly and significantly, He came to heal our hearts. He came to remind us, no matter how vital a certain person, accomplishment, job, paycheck, or place seems to be to our health, happiness, or security, the only thing that really matters is Him.

When the most powerful, beautiful person in all of history steps into our stories, looking for us in all of our barren places, shame has no place to hide any longer. It dissipates in the light of who He is and the power He holds to secure us, save us, and make us whole.

At the end of the year, all of our deprivation is simply invitation for Him to come.

So this week, pull the words of Luke and the proclamations of the prophets from long ago into your present to remind you that Christ has come, Christ is here, and Christ is coming again. And as you wait, you too, along with Elizabeth, can recognize the presence of Immanuel, God with you, through His Spirit, who has come to restore your heart, give you hope, and bring you great joy.

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1:76-79

1. To understand more about the differences between guilt and shame, see the book Beyond Identity by Dick Keyes. ↩︎
2. The Bible Speaks Today Commentary, Luke 1. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. I first heard this definition of barrenness years ago from a sermon by Timothy J. Keller, “The Gospel According to Abraham: Real Joy and Laughing Woman.” ↩︎