Tag: mental health

Abuses of Faith

· 1 Comment ·

Content warning: This post addresses endemic sexual and spiritual abuse within Southern Baptist churches. No graphic descriptions are given, but please care for yourself if this content could be triggering.

Many of you have at least seen this week’s headlines about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Southern Baptist churches are loosely autonomous, but united under the SBC and the same understanding of doctrine. The SBC and its organizations range from church planters in the States (North American Mission Board—NAMB), to missionaries and church planters overseas (the International Mission Board—IMB) to the Southern Baptist Seminaries and State conventions of cooperating churches in most of the 50 States.

If you have read the news this week, you have learned of the horrific extent to which spiritual leaders have abused those under their care. Those who were meant to be shepherds, instead of caring for their people have directly abused them or covered up for those who did. Not every pastor or every church has been implicated, but the shocking numbers from a third party report indicate that many more of us have been touched by this egregious sin that we would like to believe. If you would like to read the full report, you can find it here, as well as the actions proposed by the investigation team. 

My Experience

I have a particular stake in this endemic abuse. While I have not been sexually assaulted by a Baptist leader, I have been in the petri dish that provides a nurturing environment for abusers. I have both experienced great abuse and brokenness within the SBC, and great healing and care. If you are tempted to breeze past these headlines, to wonder why they’re important to you beyond this week, I want to tell you. If you have experienced abuse and lived in the dark with it, I am so very sorry. I want to speak up with you and stand by your side when you cannot speak. 

Too often, to our shame, abuse survivors are pushed to the side. Their stories are silenced or muffled, or worse, discredited and ignored because their words are ‘divisive’ or ‘hyperbole,’ or perhaps because they’re seen as a radical whose beliefs do not align with most Baptists. If my experiences and my history mean anything to you, if they help you sympathize with abuse survivors or recognize the lifelong consequences of abuse, I will share them. If the platform I stand on helps you listen or understand, I will use it. 

I was born to Southern Baptist parents, and even after multiple moves I have only ever been a member of Southern Baptist churches. SBC summer mission camps led me to follow the Lord to the mission field overseas and in the States. I have faithfully attended, volunteered at, spoken, and taught in these churches, and worked for nearly 6 years overseas with the IMB. But more than those facts can show, Baptists have been home for me. They have prayed for me, fed me, paid my salary, and been my family. They have discipled me and held me while I healed. I have come to know the Lord and follow him in obedience through a Southern Baptist lens. 

But I have experienced sexual harassment and mild assault while performing my job with the SBC, and many of my claims were ignored or handled poorly. I was asked not to speak openly about these experiences for a variety of reasons. I have experienced specific instances of discrimination from IMB leadership, both as a woman and as an unmarried person. I suffered sustained emotional and spiritual abuse from IMB leadership, and experienced retaliation and reprisal as a result of reporting this abuse. And while some of my concerns were heard and responded to in the end, the hurt and trauma are not erased. 

I bear these emotional scars, and they run deep enough to affect the rest of my life. Like Paul when he ‘foolishly boasted’ to the Corinthians, I share these facts not out of pride or desire for respect or notoriety. I foolishly speak of these things to this end: I wish for you who read this to understand that my words are written here not out of a spirit of malice or a desire to sow disunity. I want you to know that my eyes see the decaying roots in the SBC, my experiences help me to understand it, and my memories still feel the rot. 

I still have tremors in my hands when I walk into a church. The part of me before who could speak freely and movingly to a congregation has been quieted and replaced by a dry-mouthed and fumbling speaker, unsure and shrunken under the gaze of men and women whom my mind will no longer allow me to instinctually trust. I have questioned many times whether I should leave my work in the hands of others and abandon what feels like a sinking ship. I have fought with my conscience time and again over the ethics of my paycheck. And I have stood my ground with the support of other Southern Baptists to leverage my experiences for the sake of repairing that sinking ship. 

What This Means for Survivors

To any of you who have left the SBC denomination because it is no longer safe for you, to any who have stepped aside from churches at wide because they have not healed from damage and hurts, to any who see the apostasy, hypocrisy, or corruption of the SBC and their consciences will no longer allow them to stay: I understand and stand with you. I sympathize and empathize. The Lord will give us all convictions, and obedience and self-protection can look different for each of us. 

But to those of you who stay, you need to understand what an abuse survivor may have experienced. Unfortunately, sexual abuse is part and parcel of power abuse at large. Believers still sin, and those far from the Lord and walking in sin can fall into patterns of abusing whatever influence or control they hold. This love for power is the same root underneath racism, sexism, discrimination, spiritual abuse, and emotional abuse in our churches. And if any of you are completely shocked that such abuse could happen here—in our fellowship halls or youth rooms—you have not been listening to the voices of your brothers and sisters with different shades of skin who have cried out about the mistreatment they’ve experienced from behind our pulpits. You’ve chosen to look aside from the smaller paycheck the women or divorcees on church staff receive compared to others. You’ve failed to recognize when singles are understood to be less spiritually mature than married individuals on principle. 

If you have missed these signs of abuse or neglect, there is plenty of time to open your eyes to them and recognize that they are not accidental or isolated incidents. You have plenty of time to turn your eyes to your wounded brother on the side of the road instead of walking by. These reports show clear patterns of abuse across our denomination, and the safe assumption right now is that you know other church members who’ve been abused, and that your church could do better in preventing or caring for abuse victims. 

To let these headlines pass you by without evaluating your actions is tantamount to what David did for Tamar. After David’s illicit sex with Bathsheba (arguably rape), it took him some time to see his sin. When he did, he repented and married her, but that was not enough to bring her husband back from the dead, or to save their baby from death. Later on in David’s life, his greater love for his sons, or his own hesitancy to hold others accountable for mistakes he felt capable of making himself, kept him from caring for his own daughter Tamar when she had been raped by his son. That sin festered all the days of their lives. Tamar lived alone and abandoned. Her rapist was murdered by a half-brother who’d fruitlessly urged David to take action. And the half-brother murderer soon claimed David’s throne for his own and exiled his father, before the son’s tragic death and David’s overwhelming grief. Abuse festers. When we are tempted to ignore it, only exponential hurt can come from that path. 

Because of the manipulation inherent to abuse, many survivors like myself still struggle to tell their story without still wondering, in their heart of hearts, if it wasn’t their fault. And telling their story can be painful, often because in the SBC environment we live in, the risk of not being believed and the consequences that would follow are just too great. Will they be fired from their jobs? Lose their standing in the church or community? Will they be blamed for disrupting peace? Will they lose their church family altogether and be looked on with mistrust until they finally leave the church voluntarily? 

Those are all fears and consequences we have in our hands to change. By denouncing abuse openly, we set minds at ease who fear revealing it. By aligning ourselves more with the kingdom of God than any political or administrative kingdom, gender or skin color here on earth, survivors can trust us more to treat them with the compassion and healing Jesus would. By openly expressing support for abuse survivors, over the SBC or a particular leader or ideology, we show our value for people made in the image of God. If we truly value each person made in the image of God the same, we owe abuse victims the dignity of valuing them with urgency when they have suffered so great a spiritual, physical, and psychological blow. 

Many abuse victims, myself included, have been answered with the subtly destructive phrase, “let’s keep the main thing the main thing,” or its variation of “We need to put the gospel first.” But recognize with me, church, that the gospel is not just a message of Jesus on a cross and heaven eternal. The gospel message was embodied in Jesus, whose kingdom values compelled him to welcome women as well as men in his closest circle of followers. The gospel compelled Jesus to provide care for his marginalized mother even as he was dying on the cross. The gospel compelled Jesus to stop his teaching and welcome little children to him. The gospel compelled Jesus to stand between a woman accused of adultery and to take on her case and shame in the eyes of her accusers. Jesus himself said he came to call out good news to the poor, to release prisoners, give sight to the blind, and set free the oppressed. And those weren’t metaphors or solely spiritual realities. Who else are victims of abuse but the poor in spirit, those blinded in the dark by their isolation, prisoners of lies, oppressed by their abusers?

Church, the gospel IS the main thing, and it compels us with every fiber of our being to be a balm to the hurting. And that includes those abused in our church buildings and by our pastors and leaders. 

Where I Stand

So how am I with all of this? This week has been a hard one. With every next piece of news, both my mind and body have to process through tension, grief, anger, humiliation, helplessness, devastation, and so many more emotions. The grief is so fresh and deep that some days I feel like I’m right back in the middle of what I experienced. Many others who have suffered church abuse are experiencing the same things. Plenty of you have reached out to listen and encourage, and I have been more than happy to talk with many of you as you process and understand what this means to and for you. I still have plenty to learn myself. But for now, I feel convicted to stay with the dumpster fire and help put out the flames. Having been burned a few times myself, maybe I’ve learned how to help suffocate the fire in the process. 

This very Sunday as I stood trembling in church, praying for the Spirit to overpower my anxiety and help me to worship and learn, the congregation started to sing “He Leadeth me.” In the few churches or groups I’ve spoken to since I’ve been stateside, the ones who’ve reacted most powerfully to what they have heard were the ones I told my personal story to. When I revealed some of my deeper hurts and how the Lord sustained me, others connected to stories of their own and the Spirit connecting us was a strong encouragement. As I sang that song in church, I sank into my seat and fell into a silent prayer. I recognized that the Lord had led me to and through my experiences. He led me out the other side not quite the same Caroline who went in, but with a story to tell and a burning desire to see the church comfort her abused and broken brothers and sisters. 

Later that same Sunday the news broke about the SBC investigation, and the Lord had already answered my questions for me. I will stay and be a safe person for others to come to. I will keep in dialogue with those with IMB and SBC already hard at work to help things change. For now and until I hear otherwise from the Spirit. I’ll be the man Jesus healed who was told to stay and tell his story to his village. I’ll be the woman at the well who took a risk and shared her shame so that others could come to know the Lord. 

I do not believe that our southern Baptist theology and beliefs necessarily end in abuse. Many Baptists on my path toward healing have proved otherwise. But I do believe that our cultural identity at this point does lend itself to abuse. We have to roll up our sleeves and return to the Word to see how Jesus honors the dignity of the vulnerable and oppressed. We have to keep pressing our doctrines and theology until they meet our practice and show through in all the ways we interact with women, men, and sexuality in our churches; until the pages in our Bible reflect the pages of our lives as leaders humbly shepherd, and use their influence to protect and nurture instead of tear down or feed their own egos.

What this Means for You 

Those are my convictions for now, and I plan to continue evaluating to make sure I obey the Lord. You might not land in the same place I do, and that’s okay. But for what it’s worth, my opinion is that further involvement with the SBC should be a choice instead of inaction. If you stay, if you move past this news, please do so with the knowledge of the hurting around you. Do not turn your eyes away from them. If you stay, stay with a task and a calling to learn, to rebuild, to comfort, and to change. 

If you have caught yourself wondering if this affects you, it does. If your body is diseased, the whole system is compromised. Even a small infection can multiply and damage the whole body. In the same way, a disease in your church, however subtle, affects whether or not your body of believers worships in spirit and in truth. If your church’s handling of this causes even one of the little ones who would come to faith to stumble, it would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck before you’re thrown into the ocean. Jesus is SERIOUS about protecting his sheep, and he is serious about those in power who could cause them to stumble, or mislead them, or even make the gospel unwelcoming and turn away those who could become little children in the faith. 

If you believe this sin is only at higher levels in your church or organization, the same applies: a pattern of sin unchecked at any level is dangerous. As Paul says, an eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,’ and the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you.’ God put the whole body together, and there should be no division within it. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If we Southern Baptists align ourselves together and understand each other to be a part of the same body of Christ, we cannot ignore a destructive habit in one part of the body and assume it has not manifested in the DNA or cellular level elsewhere. 

If you don’t believe that you are contributing to these problematic abusive patterns, you are most certainly enabling them. I say that not to condemn, but to point out that these patterns that allow abuse are ingrained even at the smallest levels. If you are not knowingly and actively working against them, they will continue on, unchanged. If you are not advocating for transparency and safety in your church, if you aren’t praying for the integrity of your leaders, or advocating for their accountability, you are contributing to a pattern in the same way that the religious leaders left the wounded man on the side of the road because they assumed he wasn’t their problem and would be more trouble than he was worth. 

If you are one who wants to give grace in situations like these, please recognize the nature of grace. In Ephesians 3 and 4, Paul writes about how we are all united by the same faith and the same baptism. If we believe that, we believe that any Christian is united with any other through the same Spirit of God who lives in them. Paul says that he became a servant of the gospel by God’s grace, so that he could make the gospel known to others and it would unite them. Grace unites and makes whole.

God’s grace isn’t something that spares us from judgment: our judgment still exists, and Jesus suffered it in our place. Grace from God is that Jesus suffered to redeem us to live rightly before God. Grace redeems and restores; it does not turn a blind eye to sin. Grace in the case of abuse holds an abuser accountable so that their sin has consequences and they can learn to live more fully like Christ. And grace for an abuse survivor restores them and treats them with the dignity they have as an eternal bearer of the image of God. As Paul says to the Ephesians, “Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” To truly show grace, we must speak truth both to abused and abuser. We must recognize that if sparing a legal consequence of pain for one member causes ungracious suffering for an another in the present or future, it is not grace we show.

            The emotional scars that I bear most likely will not go away in this lifetime, before I see my redeemer face to face. Be mindful that there are similar scars in your congregation. Whatever his reason, the Lord has given me the privilege to see many of my own scars begin to heal. He has given me a community of faith that supports me and reminds me through their own actions how the Lord loves and restores. So as often as I can, I intend to wear my scars as a badge of honor to glorify the Lord. Jesus proudly showed his scars to his followers to testify to the Lord’s power over death. Let my own scars show that, as deeply as sin can wound, the Lord can heal even deeper. As much as my scars may ‘disfigure’ my experiences in church or with spiritual leaders, their dull ache will always remind me of the hope I have in a Lord who will heal all wounds and dry all tears.

If you have experienced sexual abuse, please reach out to safe people around you for help, or go to this website for resources or to file a report. You can also call the national sexual assault hotline 24/7 at 800.656.4673. If you have experienced abuse of any kind connected to the IMB, you can call the confidential hotline at 855.420.0003 or email advocate@imb.org . 

Resources: 

Practical steps: A few simple actions to take in response

  • Talk with your church to clarify how to report abuse.
  • Confirm your church’s procedure on what to do in the instance of an abuse report.
  • Develop a plan or procedure if your church does not already have one.
  • If you work for a faith-based company, educate yourself on their HR procedures and policies.
  • Urge your church or workplace to develop a more formal HR department or procedure to ensure that complaints and accusations are taken seriously.
  • Encourage your church to vet ministers they hire by following up on their references.
  • Help your church plan a service where they address abuse and make their commitment to stand with survivors clear. Your congregation should hear loud and clear that your church is committed not to make it more painful for them to speak up than to stay silent. 
  • If an abuse victim should speak with you about their ordeal, do not treat their confidence lightly. Believe, support, and report. 
  • Give survivors safe time and spaces in which to process and to have holes in their faith.
  • Educate yourself on spiritual abuse so you can understand how an abuse survivor has been made to believe that God himself sees and treats them the way their abuser did. 
  • If someone in your life has been vocal with his or her story of abuse, listen to them and hear their perspectives and experiences.
  • Verify that your faith-based workplace has HR policies for responding not just to sexual abuse, but also to spiritual, physical, and emotional abuse, and advocate for policies if there aren’t any.

The Accuser and The Advocate

·

“Give yourself some grace!”

“Be kind to yourself!”

“Have more realistic expectations—be gentler on yourself.”

“Cut yourself some slack!”

“Stop being so judgmental of yourself.”

If I’m honest, those phrases make me cringe. They feel like hollow platitudes someone says to make you feel better when you’ve failed. They’re a consolation prize that says, “You messed up, but you can’t fix it. So just try to feel better about yourself since you can’t change anything now.”

Maybe those thoughts are unique to me, and maybe I’m harsher on myself than most people are, but from what I’ve gathered, lots of us deal with our own inner-critic. It’s the voice in our head that tells us we aren’t good enough, that we can’t learn from our mistakes, that we’re deeply broken enough it makes us unfit or unworthy or unwelcome.

From a secular perspective, we’d call this problem low self-esteem. We recognize it can be crippling, so we feed ourselves feel-better messages about our worth as a human and our general goodness at heart. “Girl, wash your face.” “You are a QUEEN.” “You deserve to be happy.” “You are your own worst critic!”

From a scriptural perspective, we just call it plain sin. Of course we’re broken; we’re sinners, even if we’ve been redeemed. We don’t deserve grace. Our sin deserves to be called out and punished. And until we’ve been sanctified and glorified in heaven, we can reliably count on our own sin to cause us to fail again and again.

But that’s not the WHOLE story of Scripture. Of course, we have inherent worth and value because we’ve been made in the image of God. And of course Jesus conferred value on our lives when he gave his to save ours. But the Bible teaches much more holistically that even though all the above things about sin are true, if we see our sin and failures as an insuperable barrier in our relationship with God or to spiritual growth, we give too much credit. Or, more to the point, we credit Satan with the win if we think God sees our sin first when he looks at us.

Recently trauma has loomed large in my own life. The stress of pandemic and national lockdown has uncovered buried traumas for many local friends and acquaintances, especially for refugees. Several people I’m close to—local, expat, and international friends—are working through their own traumas. And some of my own past trauma has been shaken loose by an accumulation of stressors and triggering reminders. Heck, the whole world is struggling right now. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had more or different stress this year than you’ve had in a long time. It’s not unlikely that you’re struggling to get a handle on some trauma of your own.

For many of us, these traumas and their recent resurfacing have tipped us farther away from a place of mental health. Especially where abuse or sexual trauma were concerned, we tend to lean into self-blame, harsh judgment, or setting high standards for ourselves that are impossible to meet. Our inner-critic plays on loud-speaker in our minds, sometimes drowning out even rational defenses. Maybe since our brain can’t cope with what happened, we try to blame ourselves when we experience sin so evil and destructive it seems to defy explanation. We’re just trying to make sense of the broken world around us, so we ask ourselves, “DID I do something to cause this sin against me?” Or, even worse, we skip the question and jump straight to, “I should have known better.”

That assumption, and all of its brothers, are destructive: I should have planned better; why didn’t I see this coming; this is all my fault; I caused this; I should have listened; I am too naïve; why am I still so immature; I wasn’t praying enough; I should have worked harder; if only I hadn’t…; if I had just done…

The TRUTH of the matter is the Bible doesn’t leave room for ANY of these accusations. Sure, we should let the Holy Spirit convict us of our sin. But a proper response to that is repentance, forgiveness, and praise for our redemption. Nowhere does scripture teach us that self-judgment or self-accusation for our sin is productive or God-honoring. In fact, 2 Corinthians 7:10 says, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.” You know what that whole list of accusations brings? Regret. And a morbid sorrow. Blaming ourselves in these ways—either for sins we committed or for sins committed against us—fills us with a living death instead of the abundant life the Lord intends for us.

Scripture is VERY clear that, if we follow God as our Lord, we have an unquestionable standing before him, and no accusations against us hold up. No matter how broken or dirty or at-fault we feel, we have a place in the heavenly throne room. We’re invited to approach God’s throne boldly.

In Zephaniah, the Lord gives the prophet a message to tell his people how they will suffer. He foretells judgment and devastation that will be a consequence of the people’s own sin but also of the sins of their leaders and ancestors. In the midst of describing justice and punishment that is surely due, among the threats and warnings of suffering to come, the Lord comforts his people with some of the tenderest words in the whole Bible.

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

No matter how broken or full of blame we feel, the Lord is kind to see and treat us in these ways if we are his. He is our mighty protector. He saves us from disaster. He is delighted with us. He loves us deeply. He is so full of joy when he considers us that he bursts into song! Eternal God, ever-present in the always-now, sat with his people the Israelites BOTH in their time of suffering and in their time of redemption. He saw them in the depths of trauma they felt from the consequences of their own sin AND in trauma they felt from others’ sin against them, and he consoled them. We aren’t the Israelites, but we are God’s people if we follow him as Lord. And since his character never changes, we know his care for his loved ones remains the same, whether it is directed at us or at the Israelites.

He told them that despite their sin, he saw them as precious. As worth protecting. As worth saving. As delightful. As worthy of love. As a muse to inspire singing. He saw them this way before their trauma, after their trauma, and in their trauma. When we can see nothing good in ourselves and focus only on judgment we think we deserve, God sees these good things in us instead of the blame we heap on ourselves. But perhaps we aren’t the only one working to shovel to bury ourselves in accusations. Maybe it’s more sinister than that.

In Zechariah 3, another prophet describes the throne room of God himself, as seen in a vision. The high priest Joshua stands before the Lord, dressed in filthy clothes that make him unclean and unfit to be in the Lord’s presence. But he does not stand alone. To his right stands Satan, the Accuser. And the Angel of the Lord is also there (some understand him to be Jesus). Satan accuses the man, but the Lord will hear none of it. He rebukes the Devil and silences him. Before everyone present, the Lord claims Joshua as his own. He rebukes Satan and says he has chosen Joshua, and saved him from destruction. Then the Lord takes away the man’s clothes that display his sin and mark he does not belong. The Lord gives him new, clean clothes to give him a sense of dignity and belonging—things he did not deserve, but that the Lord gave graciously.

Perhaps Satan had grounds to accuse the man in Zechariah’s vision, but the Lord would hear none of it. Instead, God listened to the angel and cleansed and gave the man a place in the throne room despite his sin. In case we are tempted to dismiss these ideas from Zechariah and Zephaniah as only an Old Testament theme that doesn’t follow to the New, listen to John’s words.

The name “Satan” itself means accuser. This is a fitting depiction of Satan’s actions in the Old Testament. The first chapter of Job presents a vivid picture of The Accuser appearing before the Lord to report, as if this were his habit. Zechariah also describes Satan in the Lord’s throne room, waiting by to accuse Joshua. These and other passages build a picture of Satan as a character in a courtroom, the formal accuser.  

But when Jesus comes, he promises another character to stand beside us in the courtroom. As John recounts Jesus’ encouraging words to the disciples in the upper room just before his death, he tells us much about the Holy Spirit and the role he will play after Jesus’ resurrection. In John 14:16 Jesus says, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you forever—the Spirit of Truth.” The word Jesus uses to describe the Holy Spirit there is a legal one. It refers to legal counsel, but also to someone in the courtroom who would formally stand up against the accuser and defend or advocate for the person on trial. Even here, before his death and the means of our justification, Jesus promises that the Spirit will stand with us and advocate for us before the Lord, against The Accuser.

Jesus models this again clearly in the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:2-11). She is dragged into the temple and humiliated, put on display in front of all the Jews and religious leaders gathered there. She is singled out alone—the man she must have been caught with was not brought along and accused in the same way. As the religious leaders repeatedly ask Jesus to condemn the woman for her sin, he repeatedly ignores or refuses their questions. In perhaps what was embarrassment or indignation on the woman’s behalf, Jesus awkwardly doodles in the dirt while her accusers wait. Finally Jesus tells them if there is anyone sinless among them, throw the first stone and begin to execute her punishment.

As everyone slowly goes on their way, the woman is left with the only sinless one among the crowd, at her feet, playing in the dirt. The only one with the right to condemn and punish her stands up not to take her life, but to address her with dignity, as a human. He protected her from fatal judgment. He advocated for her and stood his ground even when his own reputation and life were at stake because the religious leaders were trying to find fault and accuse him. “Where have they all gone?” he asks. “Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I.” He frees her to leave that place and her sin behind, to live in the freedom of repentance and forgiveness. Jesus had every right to accuse her, but instead chose to offer his wordless, calming presence as an embodiment of grace. He stood by her, included in the halo of her shame, when all looked to her to condemn and judge. And instead of accusing and serving fatal justice, Jesus freed her from the dragging weight of her sin and accusations.

So what do we learn from all of these passages about accusation—merited or unmerited? Simply this: God desires grace and forgiveness for us. He does not hunger to bury us under the weight of vindictive accusation. The running dialogue of crippling judgment in our heads is not from him if it leads to regret or a deadly weight or anything other than joyful repentance. So if the inner-critic, the voice in our heads, judges us more harshly than Jesus does, we hear nothing but the voice of The Accuser himself. And the only appropriate response is what Jesus said when Peter rebuked him: “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me… ”

So friends, believers, whether you’re dealing with an overly judgmental trauma brain, or wounded thought processes that bite at you from stress, or unhealthy mental patterns that come from anxiety and depression, or just your average level of self-criticism, dig into these scriptures for yourselves. DON’T give yourself some grace, because it’s not yours to give. But remember the grace the Lord offers you, even knowing full-well the depths of your sin or your innocence in the situation you’re concerned about. He is a just God and he doesn’t blindly dismiss the things you judge yourself for. He is a gracious and loving God, full of compassionate mercy. He dismisses the accusations leveled against you because your sin has no hold on you—it has already been paid for and punished through Jesus’ work on the cross. Nothing you or Satan accuse you of should weigh you down, because Jesus stands before you and the Spirit advocates for you in the great cosmic courtroom. Listen for the voice of the Advocate through your prayers, rather than the jarring voice of The Accuser. God has already silenced him and his accusations, so you have privilege to ignore him as well.