Shame about sex that you picked up in church rarely comes from one sentence someone said. It builds from what was never said, from what got a laugh, from who was asked to leave and who was quietly kept. Healing usually begins with sorting it. Some of what you carry is false: the silence taught it, and Scripture never did. Some of it may be real guilt, which God answers with forgiveness. And some of it may be harm someone else did to you, which calls for safety and care, not confession. Grace speaks to all three. It does not say the same thing to each.
This guide helps you do that sorting slowly, with Scripture open. You can work through it alone over several sittings or with a small group you trust. The writing you do is yours. None of it has to be read aloud, and nothing here asks you to tell your story to anyone before you are ready.
Where the lessons came from
Dr. Sarita Lyons is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia and the women’s ministry leader at Epiphany Fellowship Church. Speaking with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, she described a church culture where “everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody wants to talk about it.” People want guidance about sex, she said. Yet it is “something that’s difficult to talk about just based on our own upbringing” and so everyone waits for someone else to start.
That matters for your own story. The adults who stayed quiet were often carrying something of their own. Lyons notes that some parents respond badly when a child raises these subjects because “the parents themselves are victims of sexual assault and they never got their healing and worked through their own trauma.” Knowing this does not erase what the silence did to you. It does suggest that the silence may have been someone else’s unhealed pain handed down, not God’s verdict on your body.
Her central claim is simple: “the greatest Miseducation is no education.” A church that will not speak still teaches. In her account, the quiet church ends up “treating sex as something shameful and dirty.” What it could have said instead is that sex is a good gift God created and ordained. When that second message is missing, the first one fills the space.
A first practice: the inventory
Before you read any Scripture, take a sheet of paper and draw three columns. Give yourself about twenty minutes, and stop whenever you need to.
- What I absorbed. List the messages about sex, bodies and purity you took in from sermons, youth events, jokes, family rules and silence. Use the words they came in, if you remember them.
- Where it came from. Beside each one, note the source if you know it: a person, a setting, a look on someone’s face.
- What it told me about God. Finish the line If this is true, then God is… and write whatever comes, even if it sounds harsh.
Lyons names several messages that many church kids will recognize, and you can use them as prompts rather than a checklist. She says that “women often in the church, have been made to feel like we are the gatekeepers of another man’s self-control.” She observes that when sexual sin leads to pregnancy, “the woman tends to bear the weight and the burden and the responsibility of that sin, because we tend to care about the sins that are visual.” She has heard young people warned with lines like “nobody’s gonna want you. You are like damaged goods.” And she pushes back on treating virginity as the measure of a person: “being a virgin doesn’t make you more holy than someone else.”
Some of those may be on your page. Some may not. Your list does not have to match anyone else’s, and it does not need to be finished today.
Reading Genesis before the hiding
Turn to the opening chapters of Genesis. This is narrative, so it describes what happened rather than handing us a full theory of shame. Still, the order of events is worth noticing.
Genesis 2:25 closes the account of the first man and woman this way: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Bodies and nakedness are present before anything goes wrong, and the text says plainly that there was no shame.
Then comes the disobedience of chapter 3, and with it something new. When God comes to the man, the reply in Genesis 3:10 is, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Fear and hiding arrive together. The body has not changed. What has changed is the relationship, and the man now experiences his own body as something to cover from God.
Look also at what God says first. Genesis 3:9 reads, “And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” Judgment does follow in the chapter, and the text does not soften it. But the first word is a call and a question. God comes looking for the one who is hiding.
Sit with these observations before moving on:
- In the story, shame shows up after the relationship with God is broken, not when bodies are created. Which of your column-one messages treat the body itself as the problem?
- The man hides from God because of fear. Where has fear, rather than holiness, shaped what you believe about sex?
- God’s first move is to call out to someone who is hiding. What would it mean for you to be found rather than exposed?
Sorting what you carry
Now go back to your inventory. Beside each line, try to decide what kind of weight it is. You may not be sure, and some lines may be a mix. That is fine. Use three marks.
Mark it T if it is a lesson you were taught that Scripture does not teach. Messages that sex is dirty, that women alone are responsible for men’s choices, or that one sexual history makes a person worthless belong here. Lyons ties much of this to a church that has said too little. She wants the church to grasp that sexuality “is an important issue to God” and to say so in its regular preaching and teaching. The answer to taught shame is truth. You do not repent of a lie someone handed you. You replace it.
Mark it G if it is real guilt for something you did. Jude 3 holds the historic Christian ethic that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage, and teaches it plainly, with grace and without humiliation. So for some readers, part of the weight is honest guilt. That kind of weight has a clear answer in Scripture. 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Romans 8:1 adds, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
Lyons is clear that having had sex, or an abortion, does not mean a person has “excluded yourself from the grace of God and the hope that is found in Jesus Christ.” She asks churches to hold both truths together: “I think we just need to preach on sin, and I think we need to preach on redemption. And I think we need to teach people how God can keep them.” Guilt that has been confessed to God is forgiven guilt. If you keep punishing yourself for it, you may be listening to a T message dressed up as conscience.
Mark it H if it is harm that someone did to you. This is the category churches most often get wrong, and the one where confession is the wrong response. Lyons widens what counts here. She notes that “sexual abuse is even being shown pornography at a very early age,” and that this kind of exposure can have lasting effects. If an H is on your page, the next section is for you.
If the weight is something done to you
Shame often attaches itself to people who were harmed, as though the harm says something about them. Lyons describes how churches make it worse. The first thing to do, she says, is “number one thing to believe them,” because “we harm more people by questioning their experience or making them feel as if it wasn’t that bad.” When churches rank one kind of abuse as less serious than another, she adds, that “further creates shame.”
If no one believed you, or if someone hinted that you invited it, that response was a failure of the people around you. It is not evidence about your worth before God.
This guide is not the right tool for working through abuse on your own. Lyons, who counsels people through sexual trauma, is honest that “Everyone is not equipped or able to effectively walk with someone through some of these painful experiences.” She also says that much of her practice comes through pastors who recognize the limits of what they can do and send people on. Jude 3 holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors, and caring for your mind is part of caring for the life he gave you. A good next step may be one appointment with a licensed counselor, ideally someone with trauma training.
If you are being harmed by a partner now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If shame has turned into thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Either step is an act of courage, not a lack of faith.
Purity as a direction
Many people who absorbed church shame think of purity as a record. Once it is broken, it is gone. Lyons offers a different picture. She says that when she studied the word, she found its root means to be single-minded. That is her account, and arguments built on word roots should be held loosely. But the idea stands on Scripture without it. James 1:8 says, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways,” and James 4:8 says, “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.” For James, the opposite of purity is a divided heart, not a damaged history.
In Lyons’s words, “purity is to be focused.” She describes it as being about “God’s loving protection of you,” something God does with you rather than a test you pass or fail alone. And she speaks about herself without pretense: “I’m someone who constantly has to repent and constantly fails and keeps getting back up.” A record can only be kept or lost. A direction can be chosen again today.
Hebrews 12:2 points to the one who went ahead of us here: “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus was stripped and exposed publicly. Shame was done to him, and he did not let it have the final word about who he was.
A second practice: write the reply
Choose one line marked T from your inventory. Only one. Underneath it, write a reply in two or three plain sentences, using a passage you have actually read in this guide or elsewhere. Do not write what you think you are supposed to feel. Write what the text says. Then read your reply once a day for a week. If it starts to ring hollow, ask why, and write that down too.
If you chose a G line instead, bring it to God in honest confession, and consider telling one mature believer you trust that you did. You are not asking them to absolve you. You are asking them to remind you of 1 John 1:9 when you forget it.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- What did the silence in your church or family suggest about God’s attitude toward bodies? Has that picture changed at all as you worked through this guide?
- Which was hardest to sort: something you were taught, something you did, or something done to you? Why do you think that one was hard?
- In Genesis 3, God calls out to someone who is hiding. What has hiding looked like for you, and what would being found require?
- Lyons describes women being treated as responsible for men’s self-control. Where have you seen that pattern, and how did it shape the people involved, whether women or men?
- If purity is a single-minded heart rather than a clean record, what changes in how you see yourself or someone you have judged?
- Is there a T message you might be passing on to someone younger, by your words or by your silence? What would a better word sound like?
If you are leading a group
Do the inventory before the meeting, or give people quiet time to do it during the meeting, but never ask anyone to read their columns aloud. Discussion should stay at the level of patterns and Scripture unless someone freely chooses to say more. Assume that someone in the room has been harmed. If a person discloses abuse, believe them, thank them, do not press for details, and follow up privately with the help described above. Know your church’s care contacts before the session. And do not let the hour turn into a debate about other people’s sexual ethics. The purpose here is to let each person examine what they were handed.
Psalm 34:5 says of those who turn toward God, “They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.” That is not a promise that shame will lift on a schedule. It is a description of where to look. A question to carry this week: When the old message speaks, which way am I facing?