Our Guest Chester & Betsy Kylstra
CHESTER: Let me just mention that as we minister in the United States we find at least 80% of the people we minister to having a root of shame and what we call shame-based personality, giving place to fear, giving place to control. So, you know, you’re a pretty good-sized group here, but if we take 80% a lot of us probably need to deal with this. In other nations that have more abandonment in their culture we find 100% of the people are shame-based. So this is not a little problem, folks, this is major and the devil uses it to keep us out of our destiny, because the more shame-based we are the more fear there is. We won’t take risks and to walk in faith it calls for a life of risk-taking, doesn’t it?
BETSY: Okay, let me tell you a few of the symptoms. Mine was that I was always apologizing. ‘I am SO sorry. Please forgive me for breathing your air.’
AUDIENCE: WOW!
CHESTER: She really said that.
BETSY: I mean I really apologized about everything. His was perfectionism and always having to be right.
CHESTER: Oh yeah, I did things perfectly, you would have been proud to have me [as] your- employee- yes-
BETSY: But oh my goodness did it get old quick-
CHESTER: And very tiring, exhausting.
BETSY: And very tiring for all of us! And then this performance and victim mentality, and unworthiness, and anger and lot’s of jealousy. You know when you feel shame you always feel like somebody else has it better, and so there’s a lot of jealousy that comes out of that.
CHESTER: Which is by the way a weapon the devil uses to get one Christian to provide an open door to attack another Christian. When you and I are jealous of somebody else we are providing an open door and that’s why a lot of people have problems and they don’t even know why they’re having it.
BETSY: They found a lot of back problems connected with being a target of jealousy.
CHESTER: Back problems, yeah, and financial issues.
BETSY: [agreeing] And financial issues as well. So, there’s a lot of territorialism. -When you feel shame you don’t feel good about yourself, then if you have a little thing that you do, you try to hold onto that to make yourself feel important. ‘I just want you to know that I’M the one handing out the bulletins. Now you just leave. You’re not handing out bulletins today. I am!’
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS IN AGREEMENT]
CHESTER: And other really important things- [joking]
BETSY: Okay, I mean our church is full of the manifestations of shame.
AUDIENCE: Uh huh!
BETSY: And we can have a shame-based leader and a controlling pastor. Or a controlling leader and a shame-based congregation. It’s really interesting the mix and match that you can get when you start to think about how does a stronghold operate.
CHESTER: So the moral of the story is we’ve need to declare war on shame and get it out of our lives.
AUDIENCE: Amen, yes.
CHESTER: But because we’ve lived with it all our lives up to this point, I don’t want you to be casual about it or to be naive thinking well I’ll pray a simple prayer and that takes care of it. This is a false identity that we have given place to. We take these on as a lie about who you and I am. And you can always identify false identity ’cause you can use a statement like ‘I am- afraid- I am- now none of us say ‘controlling’ but we might say ‘protecting myself all the time.’ If I asked you to raise your hand and, you know, admit that you’re a controller none of us would do this. One, ’cause we haven’t thought of it that way and Two, because it would stir our shame if we admitted to it, so I’m not going to ask you to do that. But we’ve learned pretty much all of us are controllers. Some are nice controllers, you know, you’re doing it for the benefit of somebody else-
BETSY: I was a very nice controller.
CHESTER: Betsy, Betsy was very nice, yes. Now this is a little hard because I don’t want you to do something you’re not willing to do or ready to do. But this is warfare so I’d sort of like you to stand up, but if you don’t stand up, which is perfectly okay, then you’ll be shamed because you won’t be joining in to do the warfare, (laughter)
so it’s okay to stand up and if you don’t want to do the ministry don’t enter in. Okay? We’ve gotten healed enough now, we don’t need to control other people. So I want you to do what you want to do, you and the Holy Spirit. Okay? We don’t want to in any way to abuse you spiritually or any other way.
BETSY: I just want to share one or two words of knowledge I had as we were preparing-
CHESTER: Okay.
