CHESTER: Yeah, and I didn’t know how it fit together, but I heard come out of my mouth ‘through abandonment.’ And there’s all different forms of abandonment. Anytime we get separated, isolated from somebody else that’s some form of abandonment. Anytime that gets in there it raises the question: ‘What’s the matter with me that this is happening to me?’ And we always it seems like the devil helps us, we come to a wrong conclusion. We decide there must be something the matter with me, I must be deficient somehow or these bad things wouldn’t be happening to me. And out of that conclusion we get ‘Well, what if other people find out? Then they’ll abandon me too. I’ll get more wounded.’ You know we humans go through life trying to avoid pain. And the pain of abandonment is probably as big as any because God designed us for fellowship with Him and with other people. And so when we get abandoned we get a lot of pain. And so the shame: something the matter with me, gives place to fear: what if they find out, and then we give place to control: I’ll keep them from finding out. And I grew up in the old wild west you know, in eastern Oregon, and I can just see control. It’s like the sheriff in the old outlaw days, you know, the sheriff’s staggering down Main Street, he’ got his 2 six guns and he’s sayin,’ I’m going to protect you, I’m going to keep people from finding out about your shame.’ And we sometimes shoot ’em up, don’t we, we mow other people down if they in any way come in and touch or abuse us in a way that exposes or threatens the exposing of the shame. So about 2 weeks after we meet this lady and we share all this with her, Betsy and I are sitting on our couch one evening after a day of ministry and I turn to my dearly beloved, and I say ‘We’ve been talking about this, you know, from a clinical point of view.’ And I say, ‘You know you’ve got this too, you’ve got this shame, fear, control.’

BETSY: I DO NOT! And even if I do, you got it worse than I do!

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

CHESTER: So she gave herself away-

BETSY: Let’s just get real- there we were. [laughing]

CHESTER:  That’s one way control operates. We put others down to make them worse than what we are so that we won’t feel so bad about our shame. So I’d already been thinking about it so it wasn’t shameful for me to say, ‘You’re right, I do have it too and it probably is worse than yours, but it’s not a competition!’

BETSY: No!

CHESTER: But it’s an understanding, and faith can arise and why don’t we get free of this?

BETSY: So we decided we were going to make war on this thing-

AUDIENCE: Amen. [CLAPPING]

BETSY: that we were tired of being under its feet, yeah! It was holding us back, it was stopping us, it was messing in our marriage, it was messing with our kids, and all of our relationships, and we just decided ‘enough is enough!’

CHESTER: Yes. And that’s the only way we found to get free of this. Yes, we apply the integrated approach, we deal with the ancestral sins, we deal with our ungodly beliefs, we deal with the wounds of our heart, and we cast demons out, but it’s not an instantaneous thing, or a one day or a two day thing. We have to declare war on shame and keep the war going until these strongholds, these super strongholds are eradicated from our lives. So Betsy, why don’t you talk some about the fruit, the different ways this can manifest in our lives.

BETSY: Okay- let me find this- yeah, I actually would like to talk just a little bit more about the roots. Chester mentioned that abandonment was one of the major roots.  But you know we have so many different kinds of abuse in our society right now. We got verbal abuse and put downs. We’ve got spiritual abuse. We have physical abuse. We have sexual abuse. You know we have abuses that just devastate us, and have so much shame associated with any one of those kind.

CHESTER: And they’re all different forms of abandonment because they separate us from each other.

BETSY: And they’re all, they are. They separate us from each other. We’ve got poverty that has a lot of shame with it. We have illegitimacy, which was my story which has a lot of shame associated with it. We have alcohol and all the addictions. We have the shame by association. If you grew up in an alcoholic home you know what I’m talking about, where you are ashamed to be associated with a family or a group of people. It’s the key of understanding shame is it’s really got to do with any way that you feel different from other people that makes you feel less than others. I mean it can be simple like you’re the only kid in the class with red hair, or you’re the only one with glasses. Or you’re really tall and everybody else is short. It doesn’t have to be you don’t have to be handicapped in some way in order to feel a lot of shame. But it can really shut down our spirits, it really does.

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