When I was a teenager I worked on my dad’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. My dad had this tractor.

It might not look like much, but it was the best piece of equipment we had.  It was a Deutz, made in Germany, which meant it lasted through my entire childhood.  I don’t remember a time when we didn’t have this tractor.  One day dad told me to go out and cut some hay on a field that was particularly tricky because it was on a steep hill, bordered by woods.

This was second crop hay so it was July.  This was our only tractor with a cab so you might think it was pretty comfortable in there.  You would be wrong, because nothing we owned had air conditioning, and this cab wasn’t completely enclosed.  Being July and being so close to the woods, this meant the cab quickly became infested with horseflies.

For those of you not familiar with these monsters, this image is to scale on whatever device you’re using right now. Actually they are [bradtip text= “the fastest insect” tooltip=”though there is a surprising amount of debate in the scientific community entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir/chapters/chapter_01.shtml”], and have the agility of a jet fighter.  The worst part about horseflies though is that the females are bloodthirsty.  And unlike a female mosquito who has the courtesy to drink your blood from a tiny straw and even apply a local anesthetic, the female horsefly has cutting blades sheathed inside her labium. She grips with her front legs, stabs downward with the saw blades, uses muscles to spread them and vibrate side to side, and then laps up the blood from your wound. 

These horrible creatures are so painful, so fast, and so persistent that Zeus’s wife Hera sent one to torment Io, his mistress.  Shakespeare mentions these things in two of his plays.  And in Norse mythology, Loki takes the form of a horsefly to hinder the making of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir.

The reason I point out that horseflies have been the bane of mankind through all of history, is to explain what happened next.  I got a little irritated.  Like I normally do when something takes a chunk of flesh from the top of my head!  I was in the cab with these things; I could hear the buzzing as they dive bombed me, but they’re so agile when I turned  they were already in my blind spot again.  I had to act fast and bring violence.  The only weapon I had was the hat I was wearing, which was also my only shield.  So I would take the hat off long enough to swat one of them, then put it back on to protect myself.  Keep in mind I was still driving looking over my shoulder to operate a second machine behind me with a hundred loudly chomping blades that need to be lined up with the previous cut.  So even though I was good at destroying these things, their numbers inside this small cab continued to increase.  And right about the third time that I smacked one with my hat and it survived, still walking around on the windshield, laughing, I got mad!  I put my hat on and struck with my hand. But since it was directly in front of me, I struck with the heel of my hand, and broke the windshield.  It spiderwebbed to all corners and sides.

So now I’m looking at a windshield with cracks all webbed across it, horseflies still crawling on it, and I know what I should do when I get home.  I should confess.  I should tell my dad what happened. 

I decided not to wait for him to notice it and ask me about it, I was going to tell him as soon as I got home.  I said “Dad, I’m sorry but I broke the windshield on the tractor on accident.”  He asked what happened, I said “well, you see, there was this tree branch…” 

Yeah, I Lied to My Dad

It wasn’t a particularly good lie, but in my defense, there’s not a lot of ways to break the windshield of a tractor.  It’s like ten feet off the ground and has a top speed of 30 miles an hour.  I figured I lucked out by being on one of the only fields bordered by large trees with overhanging branches.  I knew it was a stupid lie, but the truth was even stupider.  I broke your finest piece of equipment swatting a fly.  I was just trying to NOT look stupid.  But of course that plan failed as soon as he opened his mouth.  With this puzzled look on his face he goes “Really, a branch?  So the muffler’s broken too?” 

If you’ll refer back to Figure 001-1, this Deutz tractor has two stacks coming up right in front of the windshield, there’s an exhaust and an intake and they’re both taller than the windshield.  So there should be no way a horizontal object coming from the front can damage anything behind those fragile muffler stacks without damaging them first.

Why Do We Do It?

Why did I tell my dad a stupid lie, when I knew that he knew better?  If you’ve got a good enough memory, you can think of some stupid lies you told your parents back in the day.  Why do we all have a hard time confessing to our heavenly Father when we know that we’re not fooling him? 

I have a theory, a rather simple theory actually.  For most of us, most of the things we don’t confess, it’s because of our shame.  Deep down, we know that everything Father gives us is good.  We also know that everything Father gives us, we break.  My earthly dad gave me responsibility and gave me tools, and I broke what he gave me.  It’s the same with heavenly Father.  He gave me marriage; what a beautiful gift! What’s the first thing I did with it?  I broke it, looking at pornography.  I was so ashamed I couldn’t tell anyone.  I broke a gift from Father, why would I want to go public with that information?  I’ll get to that, there are actually reasons why confession is important.  But my reason for hiding the fact that I had broken Father’s gift – it was all shame.  I don’t like telling him that I broke what he gave me.

There is of course the undeniable fact that by definition, God already knows what you did. In fact He’s got a better vantage point and a better memory so any confession you gave Him could never be complete enough or accurate enough. Depending on your relationship with him at the moment, this next scripture might sound like a comforting promise or it might drive you further into shame or some weird kind of cognitive dissonance.

“As surely as I am the living God, says the Lord, everyone will kneel before me, and everyone will confess that I am God." Romans 14:11-12 

That’s Paul quoting from Isaiah, then he adds, “Every one of us, then, will have to give an account to God”.  How many of Jesus’s parables end that way?  The master comes back and everyone has to give an account of what they’ve done with their specific gifts or how they treated the master’s only son.

Shame drives nearly all of our negative behaviors.

Go back to the very first sin, in the garden of Eden.  The moment they realized they had broken what Father gave them, they wouldn’t even look him in the eye.  There must have been a thousand trees in that garden, with fruit they hadn’t even tasted yet, but in one stupid move, they broke all of them.  Every one of those trees is dead now.  All the animals too.  Our sin broke everything. That’s where the shame started.  When we look back at our life, we can see a lot of beautiful gifts from Father, that we shattered.  And the shame was so intense that it made us run for a dark corner.  Some of us stayed in that shameful darkness for years.  King David wrote a lot of poetry about that.

Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.

The book of Proverbs is not theological, it’s not academic; it’s very practical.  This is talking about day to day living.  If you want to thrive, if you want to grow as a person, if you want to enjoy today, you’re not gonna do that while you’re hiding from God. Don’t fall into that trap of shame, where you start to think you’re worse than everyone else. If we choose to carry that shame then we are miserable by our own choice.  The solution to the shame is to confess everything, but that’s difficult emotionally.  It requires humility and patience. 

There is a shortcut out of the shame though, and that’s called blame.  If you’re sick of carrying shame, but you’re not humble enough or patient enough to do it the right way, there’s another option – you could just dump that shame on someone else.  Problem solved, you tell yourself.  Temporarily.  Shortcuts like this don’t work.  All you’ve done is added shame to someone else. Chances are this is someone very close to you; chances are they resent you for blaming them and they push back against the blame, as they should.  And now you haven’t made any progress, you’ve just added more shame to the situation.

Shame? Jesus has a parable for that

Jesus lived in a shame/honor culture; if you [bradtip text=”read through the gospels” tooltip=”which only takes a couple hours; we could easily read each gospel each year www.crossway.org/articles/infographic-you-can-read-more-of-the-bible-than-you-think/ “] it’s clear that a class system existed in first century Judea and the classes were based on morality. You’ve got your men who teach you the law, they’ve got to memorize all the laws, tell everyone about them constantly, and keep them perfectly. Then you had normal people who went to synagogue, memorized Torah as best they could, and observed all the festivals Yahweh had commanded. Next you had women, they listened to the Word at synagoge and discussed it at home and learned by the example of the women in their lives. Finally, you had this underclass that the Pharisees usually called “tax collectors and sinners”. Matthew was a literal tax collector. The Romans would auction off the authority to tax local districts and Matthew apparently had jurisdiction over Capernuum. He uses the term “tax collector” nine times in his book and Luke, a Greek physician, uses it eleven. Everyone knew what the term meant, but Jesus is the first person in the Bible to use it. For those of us living in a no-honor do-what-feels-good culture, Jesus will define the term in this parable from Luke 18:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

Adonai has a plan to put all this brokenness back together.

You see, Jesus had a plan formed with Father and Spirit before the world’s foundation.  God’s plan for redemptive history has two phases. Phase 2 is where God’s going to renew this world, renew these bodies, it’s gonna be an unbreakable world with unbreakable bodies, shame’s going to be annihilated, along with death.  And if that’s all God ever did he’d be worthy of eternal praise, but he’s also got phase 1 of this plan. Jesus is going to use our confession to heal us and heal others.  This gives us joy even in a broken world.  It’s not a permanent fix, we’re still gonna keep breaking stuff. We’re still gonna fight to keep the shame from sticking to us.  But the new life you gain when you confess and repent, this first new life – that’s where the joy comes from! Not only do I get new life, but I get it twice.  I get two new lives!  What a deal! 

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus

“There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  

I love this verse so much, Romans 8 is probably my favorite chapter in all the Bible.  Later in the chapter he amplifies it:

Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one.

John Piper puts it this way – what courtroom could they possibly charge you in?  It’s all God’s!  I keep this verse tucked away for when that shame starts creeping back.  I recommend you do the same.  If God dropped all the charges, who is left to convict you?  There is no one else.  Nobody has the right to put that shame back on you. This is one of the better side effects of confession, one that you get to keep for as long as you obey.  Not having that guilt is such a great way to live.  A person carrying shame everywhere will usually avoid eye contact.  You’ll notice that too in the people Jesus interacted with:

• adulterous women had to use the well in the middle of the day to avoid social interaction
• Zacchaeus, another tax collector, listened to Jesus at a distance from the rest of the crowd (and not, as I was taught, because he was a wee little man)
• Lepers in colonies near the trash gate of the city, literally had to yell at you about how unclean they were
• His own disciples asked Jesus questions like ““Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

I love the way Jesus answered that fundamental worldview question, and I love the way John wrote about Jesus in his gospel (John never once mentions tax collectors):

Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

Jesus never asked anyone for perfection, He asked for confession. In fact, the point of that Pharisee vs Tax Collector parable was if you want perfection, God himself will humble you. If however, you beat your breast (in the metaphorical, emotional sense), and ask Him for mercy, you will gain far more than mercy. Those two new lives you get if you follow Christ? The first one is awesome! I gave all my shame to Jesus in 2017. Once you gain that freedom to obey, your relationships will improve drastically. This is not self-esteem, this is Jesus esteem. An obedient person is not looking over their shoulder for the police.  I’m not worried my wife is gonna find my browser history.  Or if alcohol is your thing, what a great feeling to know there’s not a single bottle, empty or full, anywhere on the property. No, dearly loved, our guilt is gone.  We don’t carry it with us anymore.  We don’t walk around like lepers yelling “unclean”. The weight on our spirit has been lifted.

No longer do we need to look over our shoulder, beloved in [bradtip text=”Yeshua” tooltip=”Jesus’s actual name, what his friends called him, what the Roman tax census called him”]. Unless you’re up north, near the woods, and you hear the tiniest jet fighter approaching full throttle from behind you.

To find out how I deal with horseflies 25 years later, on to part 2.