Feeling Abandoned by God in your Shame?
Feeling abandoned by God after something was done to you? Why that shame needs different treatment than guilt, and what met me at sixteen with a knife.
Article
What to do when you are feeling abandoned by God
Feeling abandoned by God usually means you are carrying shame that belongs to somebody else. Guilt answers to confession. Shame from what was done to you does not, which is why praying harder has not worked. Scripture gives you language for the complaint itself (Psalm 142:2).
A note before you read this
This one gets heavy. I am going to talk about childhood abuse, about wanting to die, and about hating God out loud.
If any of that is close to your own history, read it slowly. Stop if you need to. Nothing here is urgent enough to cost you a bad night.
Two different problems that look identical
Most teaching on shame collapses two things that are not the same.
Guilt is what you have done wrong. Shame is the feeling that you yourself are wrong. Those already need different answers, and Ed Welch’s Shame Interrupted is the book that separates them properly. Guilt is settled by forgiveness. Shame needs to be covered and brought back into belonging.
But there is a second split underneath that one, and almost nobody names it.
Some of your shame comes from sin you committed. Some of it comes from sin committed against you.
That second category does not respond to repentance, because there is nothing there for you to repent of. And yet men keep bringing it to God as though it were their fault, getting no relief, and concluding that God has walked away from them.
He has not. You are just applying the wrong medicine, faithfully, for years.
That is what feeling abandoned by God usually turns out to be on inspection. Not absence. A treatment aimed at the wrong wound.
What happened to me
I was born into a Christian home. My mom had us in church constantly. It was also a legalistic church, the kind that ran on hellfire, and I was a sensitive kid trying to work out how to be good enough.
I was abused as a child. I was shown pornography at four or five years old.
The person doing it told me it was fine. We were just experimenting. We were just learning about our bodies. And I was told to keep it a secret, which I did.
Something in me knew it was wrong. But I also had a church telling me that sin sends you to hell, and I could not work out the difference between what was being done to me and what I was participating in. So I reached the conclusion a child reaches. This is my fault, and I am going to hell for it.
Eventually we moved and it stopped. And I buried the whole thing so completely that I forgot most of it.
The year it came back
At thirteen, it all came back at once.
The memories, and with them every threat I had absorbed at church, arrived in the same moment. And I was furious.
I had been the good church kid. I wore the three-piece suit. I was obeying as well as I knew how, and the deal I thought I had made was that obedience produced blessing. Instead I had been abused.
So I decided to get back at God.
I did not walk away from church. I did something worse. I kept showing up and built a double life underneath it, and I went hard after everything I knew Scripture forbade, specifically because I knew it. That was the point. It was not appetite. It was revenge.
By sixteen I had slept around, picked up an STD, and hated myself. Now I had both kinds of shame running at once, the kind from what was done to me and the kind I had earned, and I could not tell them apart.
I reached out to a counselor. He handled it badly. I will write about that separately, because it deserves its own treatment, but I walked out of his office angrier than I walked in, thinking that if this is what the church has to offer, I am finished.
Three in the morning
I slept with a knife under my bed. I still could not tell you why.
Around three or four in the morning I took it out, and I told God exactly what I thought of him. I hated him. I hated my life. I could not understand why he would allow it when I had been a little kid trying to do what my mother told me.
And underneath the anger was the thing that actually frightened me, which was the suspicion that I was shouting at nobody.
I put the knife to my throat.
What happened next I cannot fully explain, and I am not going to oversell it. Somebody will tell you it was psychological, and I am not interested in arguing.
What I experienced was God speaking into that room: have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not be frightened and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
That is Joshua 1:9. I did not know it was Joshua 1:9. I had not memorized it and I could not have told you it was in the Bible.
I fell apart. Snot running down my face, the whole thing.
And here is what I understood in that moment, which took me years to say properly. I had spent three years demanding an explanation. What I actually needed was a person.
The part I usually skip
I want to be honest about what did not happen next, because testimonies get sanded down and then they stop being useful.
I did not surrender my life to Christ that night.
What I said was closer to: if you are real, and that was actually you, then we are going to do this slowly, and I am going to ask you every hard question I have, and you are going to have to show me you are here on an ordinary Tuesday, not just once at four in the morning.
It took a few more years before I gave him my life.
If you had one moment that was undeniably God and you are still not sure what you believe, you are not a fraud. That was my exact position, and he did not withdraw the offer while I checked.
But God did not stop it
Here is the objection, and I am not going to give you a neat answer, because I do not have one.
If God was there the whole time, why did he not intervene when it was happening?
I do not know. I have never been given that answer, and I have stopped expecting it in this life.
What I can tell you is what Scripture does with that question, which is not what most Christians expect. It gives you the words to ask it.
Psalm 22 opens: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, why are you so far from saving me, why do I cry by day and get no answer. That is in the songbook. Somebody set that to music for public worship.
And then Jesus quotes it from the cross (Matthew 27:46). The sinless Son of God, being tortured to death, reaches for the abandonment psalm.
If that sentence is acceptable in his mouth, it is acceptable in yours.
Isaiah describes him as despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). He was mistreated, humiliated, and stripped in public. Whatever you are carrying, you are not explaining it to someone who does not follow.
Diane Langberg has spent decades working with abuse survivors and makes the case that trauma is not primarily a theological puzzle to solve but a wound Christ enters. That matches what happened in my room. I did not get a reason. I got company.
Naming what you are carrying is where this starts. The free 5 Hidden Desires assessment is five honest questions that surface what actually sits underneath the behavior, and it ends with one practical next step. It is private and it takes about three minutes. Take the assessment
What actually helped
Three things, and none of them is fast.
Admit you are lonely. This one cost me the most, because I am the joyful extrovert. High energy, quick with a joke, capable of standing in front of a room looking like a man with his life handled. I did that for years while none of it was true. You cannot get help for a condition you are still performing your way out of.
Be raw with God. I grew up believing that if I told God how I actually felt, or swore at him, I would be struck down. So I said sir, yes sir, and told him nothing. The night I finally unloaded everything was the night something moved.
David models it: I pour out my complaint before him, I tell my trouble before him (Psalm 142:2). Not a polished prayer. A complaint, filed directly.
Get one trusted person. A friend, a pastor, or a good counselor. I have had bad counsel, and it nearly finished me. I have also had good counsel, and it is part of why I am here. The bad experience is a reason to choose carefully, not a reason to stop looking.
Paul makes it a command rather than a suggestion: carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you fulfil the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). That verse assumes somebody knows what your burden actually is.
What it costs
The honest price is that this is slow, and the timeline is not yours.
I was sixteen in that room and it took years afterward. There was no single conversation that finished it.
It also costs you the version of the story where you were only ever a victim. That is a real loss, because it is a comfortable place to live. I had genuinely been sinned against, and I had also spent three years sinning deliberately to hurt God. Both were true. I had to deal with my half while refusing to accept the half that was never mine.
Sorting which is which is most of the work, and it is very hard to do alone. That is the whole reason the third step exists.
What I’d have you do this week
Say one true sentence to God, out loud, in the words you would actually use.
Not a prayer you would be comfortable having overheard. The real one. If it is angry, be angry. Psalm 22 got into the canon.
Then send one message to one person. A friend, a pastor, a counselor. It does not have to explain anything. Something like: there is something I have never told anybody and I think it is affecting me. That is enough to start.
And if what you are carrying was done to you, hear this plainly, because nobody told me and it cost me a decade. It was not your fault. You do not owe God repentance for it. What you owe yourself is to stop treating somebody else’s sin as your guilt.
Whoever you are, and whatever was done, you are not shouting into an empty room. He was in mine before I believed he existed.
Kill shame. Stand strong in Christ. Live on mission.
If you are stuck, do not sit in it by yourself. Tell someone this week. And if you want writing like this when it goes out, the newsletter is one email, only when there is something worth sending. Join the newsletter
About the host
Ken Freire holds a Master of Divinity and serves as a lay pastor. He has spent roughly fifteen years walking men through recovery from sexual sin, shame, and childhood abuse, and hosts the Shame(less) Podcast. He is a husband and a father, and he writes about this subject as someone who came through it rather than as someone observing it from outside.
Sources named in this article
- Ken Freire, on the Shame(less) Podcast
- Ed Welch, Shame Interrupted
- Diane Langberg, on trauma and the care of abuse survivors
Scripture: Psalm 142:2; Joshua 1:9; Psalm 22:1-2; Matthew 27:46; Isaiah 53:3; Galatians 6:2.
Show Description
Have you ever felt weighed down by shame, like you're completely alone in your struggle? You're not alone. In my first podcast episode, I share a bit of my story one of deep pain, shame, and ultimately, healing.
From experiencing abuse and being introduced to pornography at a young age, to hitting rock bottom and wanting to end my life, I was trapped in a cycle of shame. But in my darkest moment, I realized something profound: I didn’t need all the answers, I needed Jesus.
If you’re feeling abandoned by God or alone in your battle today I discuss how being with Jesus helped me through my darkest moments.
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Transcript
welcome to the Shameless podcast where I help Christian men kill shame stand strong and live on Mission I'm your host Ken play and I'm bringing you real stories practical insights and biblical truths that equip you to break free from your sin shame and live a life of purpose let's step out of the Shadows together and Into the Light of Christ welcome back to another episode of the Shameless podcast I'm so excited that this podcast has gotten a great turnout from all my friends and people sharing it so thank you for all of you who have been doing that and uh I want to let you know that these podcast episodes are also on video there will be times that I am doing some presentations or my guests who come on will have a presentation or slide deck so you're more than welcome to go check that out on YouTube or Spotify or even my Apple podcast now if you don't know this will actually show the video so I would encourage you to check those out on video format if that's your jam and as always we'll have them also on audio but for those of you who have been sharing it thank you thank you guys so much I encourage you to keep sharing it all right now there's going to be a lot of nuances today and different things that I'm going to be talking about today uh in regards to the topic because it is going to be a heavy topic so I wanted to just let you know from the offset if at any point in this conversation it brings back certain memories for you or struggles that you might have or something triggers you that you would just take a pause step back pray may the Lord comfort you because it is going to be a heavy topic and there's no easy way to transition the topic but what we're going to talk about today is just feeling abandoned by God when you're struggling with sin and shame now when we think about shame okay the reason we struggle with shame there's multiple reasons but the two top reasons if we have a really big category for it is that number one it's sin that we've committed right so when we commit sin we have guilt and shame guilt is what you've done wrong shame is feeling wrong about it that you as a person are wrong right but at the same time there is sin committed against us and we feel that and sometimes it's a small sin sometimes it could be slightly traumatic and other times it could be an egregious sin where it's actually hurting you quite a bit and that's what we're going to focus on today is the sin committed against us now a few episodes back we discussed this in the five top reasons why people struggle and kind of had gave you some categories and one of those categories was the socially embedded category and the reason I wanted to give you that context is because when people commit sin against us sometimes we feel like we don't know what to do and we don't know how to deal with the shame cuz we take it on ourselves and we end up acting like oh my gosh this was my fault this was all on me and the reality is no no no we have to learn how to differentiate between things that we've done and things done to us so today that's what we're going to talk about things done to us now for me as I share my story I want to let you know that there were several things that happened to me and I'm going to break it out into multiple episodes because it'll be a very long podcast episode if I decided to to do all of it at once but for me one of the things that I realized is that I was trying so hard to overcome my lust and my addictions and I didn't know how to I I was just struggling a lot but one of the main reasons is because when I was younger I had been abused and that was the sin that was committed against me and at that time I was also introduced to pornography when I was like four or 5 years old and this radically changed the way I've you life to give you some context uh I was born in a Christian Home by my mom she took me to church all the time and my siblings and that's the thing that I I grew up in but the problem was that it also was a very legalistic Church where everything was kind of for the lack of a better word Hellfire and brimstone and I just didn't know how to as a kid conceptualize everything that was going on in my life right and then what the church was telling me how I should live and what I should do but what I do remember is all this abuse and all this manipulation that happened to me telling me that these things were okay and that it's okay to just mess around and we're just experimenting and we're just trying things out right learning our bodies and I just remember thinking to myself this doesn't feel right but I was told to keep it a secret and I couldn't share it and lo and behold after a while my my parents and I we we moved to to a different place and that situation stopped but what I do remember is that I repressed all of those painful memories and the pain two painful memories right that I was having was the abuse and also the church telling me that I would like if you sin if you do anything you're going to hell right like it was very very like like Hellfire guilt driven and I just didn't know how to handle that I I was a child who had a very sensitive spirit so in one side I know I'm sitting or or sin is happening towards me and then on the other side I felt like because the sin was happening towards me and I was feeling like I had to participate then it was my fault uh so then now I had the church's view in my mind thinking I'm going to go to hell for what has been happening to me so I repressed a lot of these memories uh till I was about 13 years of age and then around 13 I remember just like the flood of me memories just started coming back of everything that happened to me all of the thoughts that the church that I was feeling came crashing into like one moment and I was so angry at God I felt abandoned by God I was just like wait a minute I was trying to be a good church kid I was wearing this three-piece suit going to church I remember trying to just obey as best as I could as I best as I knew how I was trying but instead of getting blessings what the church was teaching I was getting abused so I was so angry I just blamed God for what had happened to me so what I ended up doing at the age of 13 is that I fell into extreme licentiousness I mean I went from Super legalistic to like screw this I'm going to go live a double life I'm going to still go to church I'm still going to try to play things off but I am going to like when people aren't looking I'm going to manipulate I'm going to feed the lust of my desires but a lot of that came from just being angry I wanted to get back at God I was like so I knew what God wanted and what God Said in his scriptures but because I felt like he didn't protect me I was just like screw this I'm just going to do whatever the heck I want so I started to follow walk into a lot of sexual IM morality right and we'll go through in details at some point what all that kind of looked like like but I just remember thinking this is my way to go against God fast forward at the age of 16 I just kind of hit rock bottom I mean I was doing all the stuff that I knew uh would go against God's word and I did it on purpose because I just hated him so much and I remember around this age I had slept with someone I got an STD and then I just felt so sick and I was just like I can't live this life like all the anger in my heart was starting to eat me alive and all the sin that now I was committing I felt the guilt I felt the shame and it was this Perpetual cycle that I was in of the shame that I felt from the sin committed to me and now I feel the guilt and shame from the sin that I've committed because I was blaming everything on God and blaming it on the person that had done it to me and I was just in this crazy cycle and I just didn't know what to do and I started getting to a place where I wanted to end my life I was like if this is what life is supposed to be like I'm done so at the age of 16 I remember thinking to myself hey I'm going that's it I'm done and I was going to end my life I remember reaching out to a counselor and sharing my struggles with this counselor and the counselor did not do a good job at all and I'll go into that in a different episode because that's a story within itself but did not do a good job and I remember walking out of his counseling office and said if this is what the church has to offer I'm done like this is supposed to be the professional the counselor and he did not give me any good advice in fact he made me even more angry I just remember thinking like I freaking hate the church I I hate God and I'm just done so that day I decided to go in my life and I went home and I was going to uh I normally slept with a knife under my bed why I don't I don't know why that you know like sometimes I think about that now as a old person I'm like what or I'm not that old right but like I remember thinking why would I sleep with a knife like what was I going to do with this thing right but I just remember thinking it was like around 3 or 4:00 in the morning and just took the knife and said God I hate you I hate my life I hate everything that's happened and I just don't understand why you would allow this as a young kid I was just trying to serve you I was just trying to do what my mom told me I was just trying to obey I was just trying to do all these things and I was starting to just like vent at God but I felt just completely alone and I remember thinking to myself who who am I even talking to God may not even be real and I was just crying out of my frustration and around 4:00 in the morning I remember taking the night knife opening it up putting it to my throat and getting ready to in my life and it was at this moment that I when I talk about this it was probably one of the most miraculous one of the most miraculous things that have ever happened to me I don't know how to explain it I don't know exactly what all transpired right some people might be like oh there was just some psychological trauma that you might have gone through but it was one of the most intense moments where I feel like God has intervened into my life because when I literally was going to com just end my life I felt like God audibly spoke to me in my room and this is what I heard I heard this have I not commanded you be strong and courageous do not be frightened and do not be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go and when I heard this it shook me to my core one because if some of you know this verse and if you've been around Christianity long enough is Joshua 19 at that time I don't remember memorizing this passage I don't remember anyone talking about this passage but I felt like God had audibly spoke into my room and quoted this verse and the moment that I heard this I started balling and I started just shattering because it was this moment when I realized is that what I needed in my life wasn't an answer to the problems and the suffering that I have been through I needed a person to be with me and that person was Jesus Christ and years later now as I've helped people overcome addiction I've realized that a lot of past trauma is one of the biggest factors for overcoming addiction and so I share my story to let you know that I know how it feels to be completely alone in this battle where you feel like no one would understand cuz that's how I felt I I felt like no one could understand the pain that I went through the sin that I've committed the shame that I was under and that I was always going to be feeling this no matter how hard I tried but God had a different story you see God started to show me that the reason that I was going through all this pain is that I was trying to find an answer to my pain but I wanted a person I wanted someone to hear me to know me to see me for what I was going through and this is what I started to realize is that God actually deeply cared for me and if you're listening to this I want you to know that God deeply cares for you in your pain because if there's one thing I know about shame that sin has been committed when you feel isolated when you feel completely abandoned by the world you want someone to just look at you in the eye and say I see you I hear you and I know you and that's what God did to me in my room when he quoted joshua9 he's like do not be dismayed do not be discouraged the Lord your God is with you wherever you go and it was in that moment that I mean I I was balling I had like the snot kind of dripping down my nose and it was just horrific but I was just like God why did it take you this long why did it take you 16 years of me being in anguish and in pain to finally answer me and you know what it was one of those miraculous moments where I started to realize like man God was probably trying to speak to me but because of my anger and my pain I was just pushing him away I did not want to hear him and the partly too because of the way the church uh you know treated me and not the whole church specifically this counselor I just kind of brush it off and I and I blame the church for one person's actions so what I had to realiz and as I've counseled a lot of guys through this now is that if you're feeling abandoned by God today or alone in your struggle here are just some quick tips right and I want to be careful when I use quick tips like this is going to solve this this this actually was a a few years of process of me walking through it because at the age of 16 it's not like I gave my life to the Lord even though it felt like a miracle happened in my room I didn't I I literally told God I was like God if you're real and you actually are intervening in my life we're going to take this low and we're going to actually let's ask all the hard questions and I need you to show me that you are with me on a day-to-day basis I'm not just going to believe this because of this one moment and it took me a few years later to like finally get to a place where I've surrendered my heart and I gave my life to the Lord but if you are in that situation today where you're just like man my shame is coming from the people who hurt me my shame is coming from and again it doesn't have to be as egregious as what had happened to me what I want to share with some of you is that whenever you have sin committed to you right I don't want you to minimize that I don't want you to compare it to like oh it's not like Ken or it might be even worse than Ken or it's like no no no your suffering your pain your sin your shame right that happened to you and if it's affecting you and affecting your relationship with God affecting your ability to overcome certain sins that you have in your life right those things are important that we deal with right so let's not minimize your suffering so if you're there I want to just give you some tips that have helped me in this season and as I give you these tips remember it might take a while to process this number one acknowledge your loneliness I think what happened to me was that I just was not acknowledging the fact that I was how lonely and how much I felt abandoned and despair and we try to hide it right if you know anything about me me or hopefully you'll get to know me a little bit more I am a very joyful very like I'm optimistic I like to joke around a lot uh I'm an extrovert right so like I could get in front of a group of people and I could look like I got everything under control and I'm happy gol lucky but you know what I was doing that for years I was just hiding who I was and sometimes we just try to hide what's really going on in our lives so what I want you to do is just acknowledge your loneliness acknowledge where you're at that you're like man God I I actually need you in this moment in life so that's the first thing that you want to do and it might take a process right it might take a while for you to get there but when you do you lead to the second part where I want you to be completely raw with God and let him show you that he's there you see I think that for me at least when I was 16 and that situation that happened in my room it was one of the first times that I was just raw with God that I let all my emotions out with him every single thing every every cuss word that came through my mind I just Unleashed it right because when I was younger I I was scared I was like if I told God exactly how I felt I'm going to go to hell if I cuss at God I'm going to go to hell like it it was I was so scared so I just and I had this really high view of God that I'm like he's he's Lord I'm the servant I just say sir yes sir right I don't talk back that's kind of how I grew up with my relationship with God that I just didn't know how to just be raw with him and this is when I started to just unload everything it felt like the weights started to come off my shoulders as I started to share that with him and just in case for some of you feel like oh man I don't know if I'm allowed to do that I can't do that let me give you two passages Psalms 40 I believe it's verse three where he says like I give my complaints to God right like where he's like he's frustrated King David is frustrated he's angry he's mad he just gave his frustrations to God the second one which I want to read is Psalms 22 1-2 and he says this and this will be very familiar if you've been in church for a while but King David he's saying this it's a Psalm he says my God my God why have you abandoned me or some passages you've heard why have you forsaken me why are you so far from from my deliverance and from my words of groaning my God I Cry by day but you do not answer by night yet I have no rest man do you hear like King David is just like this is how I am this is what's going on this is like what the heck god what have you done why is this happening and do you know who quotes that Jesus Jesus quotes that at the cross and if you think about Jesus he never did anything wrong he didn't sin he didn't do anything and Jesus too was abused and mistreated and he understands your pain better than anybody and Jesus At The Cross he said my God my God why have you forsaken me you see how raw he was that he was just like Lord I need you father in this moment in my deepest pain I need you and he just went all out and we know the story of how Jesus right he dies he rises again and he's completely in Union with God the father right but for us we are right now in this Gap and for you you may be feeling that pain even as I'm talking about it and you are just wondering God where are you I have been praying for years for this sin to go away I'm trying to serve you I'm trying to be a good dad I'm trying to be a good husband I'm trying to be a good son I'm trying to be a good man of God and I just can't seem to get rid of this sin and I just can't seem to get away from my past and perhaps it's because you just haven't been completely raw with God and just letting him show you that he's there where he says do not be dismayed do not be discouraged for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go and at the last point that I would share is that I want you to find a trusted friend a pastor or a good counselor to be with you while I have had bad counsel before I've also had really good counsel and I want you to be at a place where like you find someone that you can share your story and your pain and again it doesn't have to be as egregious as mine you might not have had the same emotions that I have felt but if you're feeling lonely out there if you're feeling like you're stuck in your sin and you just don't know how to overcome it and you're just like I don't know who to talk to reach out to someone and if you don't know who to reach out to man reach out to me like reach follow me on social media or or send me a DM right if you're one of my friends who you have my contact number like please reach out I know how it feels to just feel all alone and like you are carrying the weight on your shoulders and like it says in Galatians 6 like I want to help you carry your burdens so if that's you if you are in that place I'd be more than happy to reach out to me on social media my personal profiles like if it's on Instagram or Facebook it's Ken FR if you want to follow the podcast episode it's Shameless corod and you can find me on all major social media Outlets but please don't listen to this and just walk away okay I want you to know that God is with you that God is there for you sometimes you just need a trusted friend or counselor or Pastor that can actually walk you through that right I hope this is helpful again you may be in a place where this is going to drop a lot of emotions it's going to be kind of hard for you to process um but I want you to know that there is hope on the other side I for the last 15 years I've helped a lot of guys overcome this pain the suffering that they've gone through and it's been a blessing it's hard but it's worth it okay now with that being said there's so much more that we could talk about and you might be actually nervous you might be like I know I need to find a counselor I know I need to find someone who I can trust all right well in our next episode I will be talking about bad counselors versus good counselors and actually how to find a good counselor right because I want to equip you with the knowledge and the proper questions to ask people when you're trying to find a good counselor this is something that I've helped a lot of people with and I do it even now when I'm trying to look for a counselor cuz sometimes they may have all the right credentials they may um sound good but there's certain characteristics that you need to be looking for for a good counselor especially especially if you've gone through a lot of trauma yourself until next time I want you guys to continue to keep killing shame stand strong and be on Mission hope you have a great day and God bless thanks for for joining us today if you found this episode helpful make sure to subscribe and leave a review remember killing shame isn't just about breaking free from the past it's about walking boldly into the future God has for you