We get absolutely flooded with questions here at APJ way more than we could ever get to and answer.

And you know this already.

If you've read the stats I put in my little history of the podcast and the APJ book.

But here's something interesting that you might not know.

Quite a few of those questions coming in are actually from authors who are working on new book

projects. It's quite something to see Ask Pastor John episodes popping up in the footnotes of books

these days. You see it all the time now, and there's a very good chance today's episode is

going to show up in a future footnote as well, because our question today comes from author,

Scott Christensen. Scott is a friend of ours. He's a heavy hitter. When it comes

to tackling big questions, I mean, just look at his books, what about free will and what about

evil? Not exactly light reading. Those are big books, so he does do shorter versions of those

books as well. Thank you for that, Scott. Scott's new project dives into true and false shame,

true and false guilt. Pretty meaty stuff. And here is the email that he sent to us. Pastor John,

hello, I've got three questions for you. First up, how do you separate shame from guilt,

then what makes false shame and false guilt different from the real thing. And finally, where does each one come from?

I keep thinking the conscience must play a huge role in all of this.

Thank you.

Back in the 1980s, I wrestled a good deal with the concepts of shame and guilt because they were very prominent in pop psychology.

There was a popular book, for example, by John Bradshaw called Healing the Shame That Binds You, published in 1988.

That book was shaping a lot of the discourse in evangelicalism and around my church.

And I found it very problematical, that book. But I haven't kept up with the way psychotherapy

in the last 40 years is talking about shame and guilt. So I don't know whether

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