I Despise Shame-The Paralyzing Effect of Shame

If the impulses of gratitude have the ability to slip over into the debtor’s ethic, the reality is that grace soon fails to be grace at all. If we begin to perceive that we can repay God for His grace in the manner we repay our creditors, this very grace we are indebted by would be a mute point-for it would not be grace at all.
Yet, the greatest problem with such misunderstanding of grace is that it runs the risk of minimizing the glory of grace by its limited past-orientation. Repayment looks back. Which is not in itself a bad thing. It is a great discipline to remember the past grace of God. But we do not live in the past. None of our future obedience and future faith can happen in the past. The past is the past. Our entire life will be lived in the future. Therefore, when we try to force our acts of repayment to empower future obedience, something goes way wrong. Especially when we consider ourselves now to be unable to repay at all. We become stuck. Our acts of faith and obedience are paralyzed in the false belief that our credited grace has been exhausted.
Such is the basis for shame: shame is the painful emotion and paralyzing reality that is caused by a consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety. The pain is caused not merely by our own failures but by the awareness that others see them as well.