Shame, Guilt, and Why We Hide From the God Who Pursues Us

Editor’s note – Every parent knows a moment like this one: a child blurting out an unscripted truth that the rest of us spend a lifetime dressing up in polite theology. The author traces his toddler daughter’s panicked cry – “Don’t tell Jesus!” – all the way back to the Garden and forward to the cross, asking why we still hide from the God who already knows. What follows is a plain, pastoral look at the difference between guilt and shame, and why so many believers keep running instead of turning around.

I recently walked into an unexpected conversation with my young daughter’s teacher at her daycare center.

Normally she says something like “Ellie had a good day today” and offers a smile. Or perhaps, “Ellie didn’t nap today” with a more somber tone and look. It seems there’s a clear correlation between nap success rate and the overall assessment of the day. But there was no nap-related discussion this time.

Instead, she looked at me and started laughing.

In between the laughter, she relayed a story about how the wild and rambunctious two and three year kids had been especially unruly that day. The madness had led her to verbalize her need to pray for divine help.

She said something like, “I’m really going to need Jesus to get through today with y’all.”

Amen to this! We all need more Jesus.

My young daughter, however, had a different reaction. She looked horrified upon hearing her teacher’s prayer plans.

And then she screamed at the top of her lungs, “DON’T TELL JESUS!!”

It’s a little bit funny. And it’s quite sad. And it’s so very relatable, isn’t it?

Our Default as Humans

This is the natural position for humans.

We know how we are supposed to live. Even if we don’t understand why, we instinctively understand that there is a moral law that should govern how we live our lives.

And we know we should listen when a trustworthy authority figure gives us clear instructions. Whether that authority is a well meaning daycare instructor for a toddler or the moral law of God in our own lives.

We know we should be honest instead of dishonest. We know we should respond to kindness and generosity with gratitude. But under the right circumstances, we will be dishonest and ungrateful anyway.

Something drives us to go our own way instead.

Then we strive to cover up our failure to avoid being exposed. Like my daughter, we don’t want God to know when we miss the mark.

And if our cover-up fails and we get caught, we move to justify ourselves or shift the blame elsewhere.

This is not a new pattern.

Back to the Garden

It’s been this way since the Garden.

God perfectly provided for our ancestors in the Garden. But they listened to the serpent and believed the lie that God was holding out on us humans. Maybe the Creator didn’t have our best interests at heart after all.

So humans ignored His unexplained, yet perfectly clear, instructions to stay away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Instead, with the subtle encouragement of the serpent, we chose to do what was right in our own eyes and eat from the Tree. Then our eyes were opened and we began to see we had been deceived.

The “knowledge” we gained wasn’t simply a boost in intellectual capacity. It was a new personal and experiential encounter with suffering and evil that we had previously been protected from.

And with this experiential knowledge came a brand new emotion. An intensely self-conscious emotion called shame.

So Adam and Eve tried to run. To hide from their shame and from the God who had created them and called them good. But God went after them, asking Adam where he had gone.

10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." [Genesis 3:10]

Then came the blame-shifting.

Shame is corrosive to the human mind and body. We cannot abide it. So we look for somewhere else to place it. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent, the nachash.

There was a violation of the perfect trust and communion between Man and God, but Man did not attempt to repair and restore the break. There was no repentance, yet there was still a cost to be paid for the ruptured relationship.

So God delivered His verdict with the consequences for the man and his wife and for the deceiving serpent:

For breaking faith with God, humanity was exiled from the place of perfect communion with the divine Creator.

The nachash was cursed to crawl on his belly and eat dust.

And enmity was decreed between the serpent and his offspring and the offspring of the humans.

Editor’s note – It’s worth noticing that Adam and Eve’s first instinct wasn’t repentance but concealment. That instinct hasn’t changed in six thousand years; neither has the question God still asks us – “Where are you?” He isn’t looking for information. He’s inviting us out of hiding.

Shame vs. Guilt

According to a 2025 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, shame is toxic to the human psyche.¹ It harms our brains and our bodies.

Shame is often confused with guilt, but the two function in very different ways.

When we make mistakes, which we all inevitably do as humans, guilt and shame say different things and lead to very different outcomes.

• Guilt says, “I’ve done something bad.”
• Shame says, “I am bad.”

The feeling of guilt points to a specific rupture that we can repair through repentance and restoration.

The feeling of shame, however, leads us in the opposite direction.

Shame leads us to hide ourselves because we suspect we are unworthy and can never be made acceptable. And we can’t abide coming face to face with our shame.

God is still calling and asking where we went, while the serpent whispers that we’ll never be forgiven anyway and that we should stay away from God.

So we avoid God and choose from different strategies to cope with the traumatic fallout.

• We reject the blame and believe the serpent’s lie. Many today work to convince themselves that maybe the serpent was the good guy after all. If the serpent truly came to help and not to harm, we don’t need to confront our sin because God is against us. Instead, we simply need to reject any thought that might lead us towards feeling guilt because we confuse it with shame.
• We shift the blame and justify ourselves. Like Adam and Eve did, we can focus on finding someone to blame for our condition. Perhaps we blame family. Perhaps we blame the devil. Perhaps we blame God.
• We try and follow all the rules. If we never make a mistake, we reason we won’t have to grapple with the trauma that comes from being exposed before God. So we use religion as a shield against God. And we may become judgmental of others as an outward projection of our inner self-condemnation.

The Bible is full of stories of a God who loves His human children and desires that they turn to Him instead of running away. Have we never read the Parable of the Lost Son?

It’s not quite that simple.

Editor’s note – The distinction here matters more than it might first appear. Guilt can drive us toward confession because it names a specific wrong; shame convinces us the wrong defines who we are, so it drives us away from the only One who can fix it. Scripture never asks us to manage our shame – it asks us to surrender it.

We Don’t Actually Believe God is Good

My daughter’s story is a perfect example.

We talk about Jesus a lot at our house. She likes flipping the pages of her Children’s Bible when she eats breakfast. We sing “Jesus Loves Me” every night before bed. My daughter loves playing with those mini Jesus figures and often wants to take them with her when she leaves the house. She joins in when we pray over our food and thanks the Lord for His provision.

I’m aware of how destructive it is to imagine God only as a cosmic judge and not also as a Good Father who loves us intensely with mercy and grace. I want my daughter to know the God who is perfectly loving as well as the God who is perfectly holy.

But all that intellectual knowledge can go out the window when we suddenly realize our flaws are exposed before God (or a daycare instructor). If He’s truly the perfectly holy Creator of the universe who has an absolute claim on our lives, how can we stand before Him in our sinfulness?

Don’t tell Jesus, that voice inside whispers (or yells). Look what you did. He’ll never forgive you.

So, just like Adam and Eve did, we try to run and hide again. We want to keep from admitting to God what He already knows.

The Story of the God Who Pursues

The good news is the Good News.

In The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, Michael Wyschogrod argues that the Bible is a story of God moving progressively farther and farther out towards humanity.²

He followed after Adam and Eve in the Garden and He’s been pursuing us ever since.

He promised Abraham that He would bless all of the world through His descendants.

He chose one people group from those descendants, saving them out of slavery, and made them His Chosen People.

He told His Chosen People that all of the world would be blessed through them. And when circumstances looked bleak, He promised them a savior who would come and bring restoration.

What they never expected was that God Himself would come as the ultimate Savior. They couldn’t imagine God continuing the theme that Wyschogrod identified in the Hebrew Scriptures and bringing it to a dramatic conclusion by accepting the guilt and the shame that Adam and Eve ran from.

This is Jesus. The one identified as the “second Adam” who sets all things right for those who turn to Him in faith.

The Jesus who came to take all of your sin and your shame. He knows that you were not made to carry it.

If only we will stop hiding and will actually give it to Him. He will take it and will give a whole new heart that is set on fire for Him.

Editor’s note – This is the heart of the Gospel the author is pointing to: God did not wait for humanity to clean itself up before approaching. He crossed every distance Adam and Eve’s sin created, and He did it in the Person of His own Son. That is not a technicality of doctrine; it’s the whole reason confession is safe.

Just Tell Jesus

It seems too good to be true. But it’s true.

It seems terrifying to expose our shame to God. But it’s worth it.

It’s counterintuitive, but honest repentance is a balm for the human soul.

We don’t need to work to save ourselves by living a perfect life on our own… we can be saved by the only One who lived perfectly and carried our sin and our shame for us.

Despite what the world around us says, we can actually admit that we don’t have it all together.

That’s true whether we’ve never come to Him or whether we’re Christians who are still hiding broken places inside.

We can do it today. We can do it right now.

Just tell Jesus.

1: The harming power of shame: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12695017/

2: Body of Faith: God in the People Israel: https://www.scribd.com/document/1015017826/The-Body-of-Faith-God-in-the-People-of-Israel-Michael-Wyschogrod

A Word from the Editor
Shame tells us to run; the Gospel tells us we don’t have to. First John 1:9 puts it plainly – if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That promise doesn’t depend on our composure before we speak; it depends on His character after we do. Whatever you’re hiding today, you can stop. He already knows, and He’s still calling your name.

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Editor Comment: This piece offers a tender, honest look at how instinctively we hide our shame instead of bringing it to the God who already knows and keeps pursuing us anyway.

This article appeared on Medium and is reprinted with modifications and by permission.