Year: 2012

Accepting the Unfinished
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.”
-Rabbi Tarfon

There are divine works that we are called to participate in but not finish. God often does great things over periods of time that exceed the human lifespan. The Apostle Paul tells us that the great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament could only look forward to the coming of the Messiah. Even though they played important roles in preparing His way none lived to see the Advent. Similarly, David made Jerusalem a great city in preparation for the construction of the Temple of the Lord but it was left to his son to see it built. We who today labor for the Kingdom may not be here on Earth for its consummation at the return of Christ.

These examples all relate to major biblical events but this truth can just as accurately be applied to any Christian’s life ministry. Some of the goals God has called us to work towards will be accomplished during our earthly pilgrimage and some will not. The problem for contemporary believers is that we have a tendency to see all things as attainable not only in our lifetime but in a few months or years. This is because many of us have been beguiled by the “instant gratification” culture of the 21st Century. We forget that the Lord of time does not work according to our idea of time. Some trees, after all, do not reach maturity for hundreds of years. He is the God of the Tortoise as well as the Hare. It may even be accurate to say that the greatest things in our lives are the things that take the longest for us to attain. We should not be surprised that this is at least as equally true for ministry.

It is important for believers to be reconciled to the truth of this. If we are easily frustrated by what seems to be a glacial pace in the fulfilling of a mission we know we have been called to then we run the risk of losing heart. How many promising ministries have been abandoned in their infancy because results do not fulfill our expectations? It is sobering to ponder the possibility that God has left His human servants with the power not only to advance but also to hinder the gospel. The hindrance can occur in a number of ways for a number of reasons and one of them is impatience with the timing of results. The temptation to impatience typically begins with an unrealistic expectation. An example of such an expectation might be the idea that a new Bible study or small group should draw large numbers of people in a very short period. The fact is that such ministries do not always achieve “respectable” numbers for quite some time. If the organizers do not factor that possibility into their thinking from the beginning they will be sorely tempted to give up altogether where a willingness to wait might produce great fruit in season.

It is not for us to know the time when a ministry will produce an abundant crop for the King’s storehouse. What we can know from the Scripture is that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Pe 3:8.) It is imperative that the implication of this verse be allowed to sink into our minds and hearts. Once we realize that God does not operate according to our schedule it will be much easier to do His work while leaving the timing of the harvest to Him. Even if we do not see that harvest here on Earth we will once we get to Heaven and become, ourselves, part of the completed work of our Lord.

Sins of Escape
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

One of the times we are most likely to indulge in sins that provide illicit pleasure and distraction is when we are suffering. Psychologists use the term “self-medicating” to describe the tendency of those in significant emotional distress to seek relief from its pain in the unhealthy indulgence of agents like drugs, alcohol, sex or overeating. The result of such indulgence is the lessening of whatever the suffering is for a short time. In short, we choose sin over suffering in an attempt to escape it.

Unfortunately it does not take long to realize that what we have done to temporarily escape whatever the pain in our lives happens to be has actually exacerbated it. The usual result of giving into the temptation to act out these “sins of escape” is the addition of feelings of guilt and alienation from God to whatever the pain is we are trying to relieve. It is, quite literally, a Devil’s bargain. We exchange our suffering for more suffering.

Yet, despite the seemingly obvious logic of avoiding such a dark equation, believers today seem to be more and more falling victim to the allure of the quick, sinful fix. Why? The answer lies in the wholesale embrace of the spirit of the culture that we are supposed to be in, but not of.

The philosophical heart of contemporary secular culture is the avoidance of pain at any cost. It is re-enforced by two attractive lies. The first one is that human beings are naturally good and therefore deserve to feel good all of the time. The second is the idea that we can have perfect fulfillment in this world. We are bombarded by these two deceptions every time we tune into any kind of mass media in the West today. Christians have been seduced by both of them and the result is the disturbing increase in addictive behavior within the church.

The only real answer to the destructive practice of sinning to escape pain is one that sounds counter-intuitive at best and impossible at worst. We must embrace our suffering. By this I do not mean some kind of masochistic “cult of pain”. Suffering is not a good thing in and of itself. We should no more go looking for discomfort for its own sake than we should go looking for sinful relief from suffering we cannot avoid. The key is in the last four words of the preceding sentence, “suffering we cannot avoid”.

Much of our pain cannot in any way be circumvented. The fact of the matter is that we live in a terribly fallen world of our own making. Our corporate and individual pain is the deserved result of our race’s rebellion against our Creator and His perfect order. This is a hard reality and human beings have a tendency, sinful in itself, to avoid reckoning with it at any cost. But it is only in reckoning with it that we can both live in the truth and find a loving God’s way of deliverance from the results of our disobedience to Him.

When Jesus Christ came to redeem us He fully entered into human suffering, He did not avoid it. The Bible tells us that He learned obedience to His Father through suffering and those who follow after Him are called to do the same. The pain of this world serves two purposes in the child of God, to create in us the character of Christ and to bring us into the deep dependence on His Father that is our ultimate good.

We must choose to suffer without sinning so that, in the fullness of God’s time, we may be fully delivered from that suffering forever. Making this choice is one of the hardest requirements of the Christian walk. It can only be done if we come to want God’s presence and purpose in our lives more than we want relief from the pain that is the unavoidable result of living in a sin-cursed world.

Learning to seek our Lord in moments of suffering, rather than seeking illicit relief in sinful actions, will most likely not happen overnight. It will take a lot of empowerment from the grace of God. The habit of indulging in moral transgression to find temporary release from whatever is hurting us is difficult to break but it is only in breaking it, with divine help, that we will begin to know the eternal release that is ultimately to come.

Sanctification and Surrender
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved.

Sometimes we wonder why the heart-change we know we so desperately need never seems to happen. We pray, we fellowship, we read the Bible and still the old negative patterns re-assert themselves. In time frustration takes its toll and the temptation comes to blame God for not saving us from the things that are so destructive in our lives. On some level, though, we know that He cannot be at fault. If the spiritual life has hit what seems to be a dead-end it is fruitless to blame God. Beyond that, it is also dishonest and deep-down we know this too. There has to be another cause.

That cause might be this: we may be trying to do God’s work on the soul. Sanctification is not brought about by the flesh. The fact that a human being cannot accomplish the transformation implied by that term apart from God is one that most Christians will give intellectual assent. However applying it in our hearts is another matter. It is part of fallen human nature for some of us to try to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. People who have not had grace modeled for them by the most significant people in their lives are most prone to this particular sin. If you grow up being told you never measure up to some human standard you will be more afflicted by a tendency towards self-effort (Unfortunately, this tendency usually carries over into the Christian life and continues until we are able to forgive these significant people).

The results of pure self-effort can be disastrous. Instead of receiving the loving grace that the Lord intends to use to free human beings from perfectionism individuals prone to relying on their own works resist it. This may be a conscious or unconscious rejection of His help. Either way it sets up a person for failure as long as he or she continues to believe the lie that we cannot trust God to do what we cannot. At this point the reader may protest that surely we must all play a role in our spiritual growth. Yes, but there is a vast distance between “playing a role” and trying to purify ourselves, by ourselves. When we do the latter we make an idol of an innate, personal ability to change that we simply do not have. John 15:5 says that apart from God we can do nothing, nothing good that is.

So how does a person escape this condition? Surrender is key. We must give up on self-improvement and begin to allow “God-improvement” to take over in the construction site that is our heart. This will most likely take time. True surrender to God is rarely accomplished in some one-time flash of insight. Salvation may happen in a moment but sanctification is a process. This is true no matter how hard it is to swallow for those of us raised in an “everything now” culture. It is a process that cannot become what our Lord wills it to be until we relinquish to Him the reigns of our sanctification. It is only in this yielding that we can escape the bondage of self-effort. It is only then that we will begin to reap the blessings that come from the kind of change only God Himself can accomplish in us.

The Lie of Self-Redemption
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

Understanding and accepting that we do not deserve salvation is one of the most important factors in making our salvation possible. It is impossible to fully come to this place as long as we harbor the idea, either consciously or unconsciously, that we have any worthiness in and of ourselves.

Today many human beings think themselves worthy of Heaven. Many others think that they are on their way to being worthy. To some degree we are all born with this lie embedded in our souls. It is part of the inordinate pride inherent in our fallen condition. Some might even say that this belief is the essence of the curse we have lived under since the garden. Its only antidote is the hard remedy that comes with the conviction of our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We are confronted by a new knowledge of ourselves, the awareness that we are not “good people” and never have been. Accepting the truth of this is one of the most difficult experiences a person can go through but, paradoxically, it is also one of the greatest for in this terrible new understanding is the potential bloom of certain knowledge that they need a Savior. Salvation often follows soon after an individual’s eyes are opened in this way.

But our initial salvation experience often does not completely erase our tendency to try to earn our way to the God we have entered into relationship with. We still have a sinful nature to crucify, and part of this nature is made manifest in the voice that tries to burden us with an ongoing sense that we have to measure up to God if we hope to stay in His love. All too many Christians are still listening to this old deception, often without conscious awareness that they are doing so. The result is burnt-out, spiritual workaholics who fear they can easily “lose” their salvation. Obviously this is a prescription for despair.

As long as we are working in any way for God’s acceptance we will not be able to rest in the fact that we already have it through Jesus Christ. It was ours from the time we asked Him to forgive our sins and become our Lord and Savior. Only a progressive abandoning of the notion that we must earn our own way will usher us into the peace and joy we long to possess in our relationship with our Redeemer.

But often we must first bring our spiritual compulsivity into conscious awareness. Many times our innate sinfulness in this area has been compounded by having parents and/or other people in our lives who withheld love from us if we displeased them. Because of this we may have emotional wounds that we do not deserve blame for. These wounds are often sublimated, with the result that they become deeply rooted in our subconscious. When this happens our entire view of reality can be affected without our knowing it. This may be why some believers have a much harder time surrendering their lives to the grace of God than others.

God Himself is the answer. Sometimes the Spirit directly enables us to see what is driving our impulse to try to earn the Father’s love. Other times He uses counselors, pastors or close friends to help bring these subconscious tendencies to light in us. As this takes place (most often progressively, rather than instantly) we can use this new awareness to enable us to surrender this part of who we are to the cleansing, healing and transforming power of God. Then our increasing knowledge of His character, as opposed to our own, begins to free us from the impossible burden of “self-redemption.” We then find ourselves on the way to a new destination, a blessed place where we deeply drink from the ocean of acceptance and belonging that we were made for and desperately need, an ocean that can only be found in the One who loves us beyond our fondest dreams.

What We Still Haven’t Found
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

While we remain here on earth there always seems to be a sense that we have not truly received the thing we desire most. This is the nagging sense that something we desperately want remains just out of reach. We sense its reality, sometimes even its partial presence, but we remain displaced from it. I believe this thing is the final redemption of our souls.

An argument could even be made that those who have not yet experienced a saving encounter with Jesus Christ might still have a sense of the need not only for salvation, but for this “something else” beyond salvation, yet contingent upon it. That “it” is the complete perfecting of our being that is inviolably linked to standing before our Lord and Savior past the veil of death. For our purposes here the question of whether it can be sensed by both the saved and the unsaved is not the most important thing. What is important is the fact that not yet possessing this final state of being is the driver for the fundamental sense of incompleteness, and its resulting pain, that all men know in the here and now, here on earth.

The Irish rock star Bono, of U2 fame, once sang that he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. He penned these lyrics despite the fact that he and two out of three of the remaining members of the group were professed Christians at the time. Some have since used the song to verify their judgment that the members of U2 “aren’t really saved.” but I take a different view. Bono actually speaks of Jesus breaking his bonds and loosing his chains later in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, but something is still missing and he knows it. I believe many thoughtful believers can relate to this knowledge. I know I can.

Maybe what is missing is the one thing that even an authentic Christian cannot fully possess in this life: the experience of both fully knowing God and being fully known by Him. This must wait for the spiritual departure from this world that comes with the end of our present physical existence here. It is absolutely impossible to know this fullness of knowledge as long as we sojourn in the “far country” of a fallen world which is, by its very nature, not only impermanent but profoundly imperfect.

We should not underestimate the pain this causes us. It is sometimes agony to crave this thing that is denied us in the here and now. It does us no good to use a less powerful word. The sense of displacement from both He who we are meant to know fully, as well as from what we will become once we possess that knowledge, is perhaps the most agonizing experience a human being can have.

This hard fact must, of course, be tempered by the reality of what have been called “postcards from Heaven”. These are the sublime experiences of the presence of a loving God that we sometimes know even now. As a follower of Christ becomes more seasoned in the faith such “mountain-top experiences” may become more common or less, but either way I believe all true believers are graced with them periodically through out their earthly lives. Such experiences are drinks of cool water in a land that is more commonly parched and they are moments for which we can be profoundly grateful.

But no matter how good these occasions are they are not the thing itself and we find ourselves needing to accept that the thing itself cannot be had today unless today is the day we are called home. This does not mean that we are to simply lie down and wait for it. Sanctification is a journey that embraces both our lives here and our completion there. We are told to pick up our cross and follow our Lord in this life because He is using that walk to prepare us for our homecoming and the ultimate joy that will follow it. He also uses our time here to help put others on the same path we walk, a great joy in and of itself.

In the meantime it is OK to know that we “still haven’t found what (we’re) looking for.” Likewise it is alright to confess to the pain this reality can bring but, even so, may it also be that at such moments of pain we trust God to once again lift our heads in preparation for finally finding it.

Better than We Could Ever Dream
by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God’s perfect will for us is better than our greatest idea of what that will is. This is important for believers to remember when it seems like the best thing we can imagine for ourselves is insufficient to equal the trials and tribulations we invariably experience in our earthly lives. It can be a great comfort to know that God’s plan for our lives, both here and past the veil of death, will ultimately be beyond our noblest hopes and dreams. The truth is that if we are open to God’s will for our lives He will make us into something so wonderful that our struggles here on earth will someday pale into insignificance by comparison. In fact on that day we will be thankful for Him allowing even the worst of those struggles, for without them His all-surpassing plan for our ultimate good might not have been fulfilled.

It is a common fault, among even the best Christians, to think we can imagine “what God has planned for those who love Him”. We suffer from the conceit that we know what is good for us. This conceit is another facet of our flesh. No one more knows what is best for a creature than its Creator. This statement has the ring of common sense, but it is a great challenge to believe it in its full import. It is our tendency instead to stubbornly cling to the idea that what we want is what is best.

How many children of God have embarked on errant journeys to fulfill their own idea of what God’s will is rather than simply daily waiting for the Lord to show them the latest small steps they can take to fulfill His idea of what His will is? So many of us have had to learn the hard way that God’s ways are not our ways, at least not obviously. The author was once convinced that God wanted him to go to seminary and then enter into a particular kind of ministry. The result of assuming this was the divine will rather than my own culminated in one of the worst “dark nights of the soul” that I have ever experienced. I hit the brick wall my false assumptions brought me to so hard that my seminary career ended with me dropping out in the midst of a deep depression that took not months, but years to climb out of. It was there I learned the hard way that my idea of what is best for me is often anything but. Since then I have been more circumspect about my knowledge of God’s will for my life and more open to Him taking me places I would not expect Him to. As a result my life is now experientially far better than it was during the time of my folly.

As we come to know God better we will realize that He is the Lover of our souls. Beyond that, and because of that, we will begin to deeply believe that our Lord not only knows the absolute best for us but also is absolutely capable of bringing about that best. He is both the Author and the Finisher of our faith and the Author and Finisher of our lives. Our job is to let Him have His way with us rather than put up roadblocks through trying to live out our wrong ideas about what we are destined to become. As with most, perhaps all, of the Christian journey the key to letting God have control of our lives on a day to day basis is faith. Someone once said that we cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend Him. In other words while we cannot know the full plan God has for our lives we can, based on what we know of His character, trust Him and cling to Him for our forward progress in sanctification.

If we do one day we will wake to find ourselves to be what He always planned for us to be. On that blessed day of completion we will be exceedingly thankful to our God for making us more than we ever could have dreamed of in our own dim, human view of our potential.

The Cult of Haste
Copyright 2012, 2023 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The speed of contemporary culture has had a deep influence on the evangelical church. In a profound sense most Westerners are caught in an ever increasing quest to have as much as possible as soon as possible. It is reflected most clearly in our love affair with technology. From the microwave oven to e-mail we have sought to erase the need for time. Everything must be now, everything must be instantaneous. The rhythm of life has become a staccato. Befitting our identity as the original “instant gratification” society we have made a virtue out of impatience.

This cultural ethos has penetrated the church most obviously in the tendency for Western believers to expect spiritual growth overnight. From a biblical perspective discipling and sanctification do not appear to be processes operating at a high rate of speed. A good argument can be made that salvation is an instantaneous event but nothing in the word of God hints at spiritual maturity being gained that way. No one becomes a perfected saint without grace and truth being moderated by time. Paul knew this; more importantly Jesus knew this. In the haste we Christians share with our secular fellow travelers we have forgotten that the Inventor of time has not, even with the advent of human technological innovation, ceased to use it. There are no “10 Easy Steps to Spiritual Maturity”. God never intended the journey to be easy…or short.

Many believers today are caught in a cycle of frustration. This is because we often hear messages that imply two things. The first is that we are not where we should be. In and of itself this is not always a bad thing to be told. There is always room for growth and change in our walk with God. But it is also true that we cannot arrive at perfection, at least experientially, in this life. That must wait until we are face to face with our Lord. The problem is that, all too often, the tone of the “we are not where we need to be” sermon communicates not only that are we not where we should be but that we should be approaching panic because of it. Grace to grow at our own pace, which perhaps might be God’s pace, is not part of the message.

The second implication in these messages is that we can accelerate our growth if we take whatever the approach of the teacher happens to be. In fact sometimes the not so subtle inference is that we can reach whatever the spiritual goal of the moment is immediately if we simply repent of our lack of faith. The problem, we are told, is that we do not believe God can do it in a moment if we just confidently expect Him to. This message is very dangerous. Why? The answer is that God does not expect us to grow faster than He designed us to be intrinsically capable of growing. It is analogous to Him expecting a Giant Redwood tree sapling to grow to its mature height of 200 feet overnight rather than over hundreds of years. God does not hold the sapling accountable to do that, in fact it is a safe assumption that the thought never entered His mind. Why would it when He, in divine wisdom, created the tree to grow at a much slower speed?

Both these messages are influenced less by Scripture than by how much we have unconsciously embraced the values of our secular culture. We want spiritual growth and we want it now, just as we want money, pleasure, respect and any number of other things now. The amount of lottery tickets Christians buy is mute testimony to this fact. What we are setting ourselves up for is frustration and disappointment. The sad thing is that people who claim to know God, and I include myself here, should know better.

There is an answer and it involves a different kind of repentance. Western Christians can decide to opt out of the manic pace of a macro-culture that they are supposed to be in but not of. Admittedly we cannot all become Luddites and buy a farm in the country. In fact nowhere in the Bible is their some kind of blanket condemnation of technology. God has gifted the crown of His creation with the ability to invent, to create instrumentalities that can improve the quality of life. But He has also warned us not to depend too greatly on the works of our hands or, for that matter, to let them define the pace of our lives.

We need to intentionally cultivate a counter-cultural resistance to speed for the sake of speed. We can start by giving ourselves the grace to grow at the pace our Lord ordained us to rather than what others tell us it should be. Those in our midst who have baptized and hung a cross around hyperactivity should be actively challenged to rethink their approach to the Christian life. Voices need to be raised in affirmation of God’s sovereignty over time and against attempts to speed up sanctification according to human timetables rather than His. Finally, in prayer, we can to take a surgeon’s knife to our daily lives and cut out that which is wedded to the Cult of Haste. This may result in a lowered standard of living for some as they purposely seek to do less and live more attuned to God’s perspective on time but it can liberate them from a life lived out of step with Jesus Christ. The result of that kind of change will be a blessed collective sigh of relief from a church that has been unnecessarily pressured into ungodly haste. We will lose nothing but the self-inflicted misery that comes from trying to live up to the expectations of men rather than God.

The Hard Question
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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How can a good Being send sinners to Hell?

The apparent severity of the doctrine of eternal punishment has troubled believers since Jesus Christ walked the Earth and fully expounded it. Those who have remained outside the faith have used it as a reason to continue to reject Christianity. It seems impossible to reconcile a loving God with One who would send someone, anyone, to somewhere as horrific as the place Scripture describes as the final destination of the unbelieving. Our minds recoil at the thought of Hell and, by extension, we are tempted to also recoil at the thought of its Author. It just seems far too severe.

We cannot deny, however, that Christ talked more about Hell than Heaven during His earthly ministry, we have no choice but to grapple with the seeming dissonance of a God who is love, yet consigns those who finally reject Him to a terrible place of punishment. One of the best ways to reconcile these two truths is to take a serious look at the nature of God in its totality.

We are living in a time in church history when the holiness of God often gets far less pulpit time than His love. To some degree this imbalance is a correction of the angry fundamentalism that has long infected some wings of the Evangelical Church to the detriment of the essential doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith. We have also lately emphasized our Lord’s love because so many of us had parents who loved us very imperfectly, or not at all, and we desperately need to know that our God is the greatest parent we could ever hope to have. So the contemporary stress on love and grace is understandable. Unfortunately it is still unbalanced and can lead to a perception of God that leaves Him portrayed as One who does not punish the evil we see not only all around us, but within us. Such a portrayal may seem comforting but it is a deception because it does not take into account the ramifications of relating to a Being who is perfectly good.

God truly is perfect love, but He is also perfect holiness and, by holiness, we mean that He is completely separated from evil of any kind. There is no shadow of turning in the nature of divinity. Our Lord dwells in unapproachable light because there is no darkness in Him and there never will be. He is good in an unalloyed and ultimate sense and, because of this, God cannot co-exist with evil of any kind or amount because evil is imperfect in the most profound sense of the word. Evil, in the end, must be permanently cast away from the presence of God and that is exactly what will occur at the Last Judgement. Eventually evil, and those who embody it in any way, must be eternally removed from His presence. To be eternally removed from the presence of God is perhaps the best definition of Hell.

Yet because God is also love, and because He extends that love to the human race, we have been given a period of time to live on Earth, in a sense half-way between Heaven and Hell, and been sent a Rescuer in the form of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The answer to our seemingly hopeless appointment with the wrath of a perfectly good God can only be found at the Cross, through faith in the One who died there on our behalf. When God, the Son, sacrificed Himself for us He truly became “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”.

But apart from this one perfect way that God Himself has made to bring us into an eternal love relationship with Him we remain evil, imperfect people whom He can never be in relationship with. The time must and will come when our Lord will lower the curtain on human history and separate the “wheat from the tares”. At that time we, who have all demonstrated our darkly imperfect natures in countless actions, small and great, will either be made perfect by our faith in Christ and brought into the embrace of God or will be forever removed from God’s presence because we preferred the darkness of our own profoundly imperfect self-rule to the thought of surrendering our lives to Jesus to gain our redemption.

Again, perfect love can never co-exist with evil and so God cannot forever co-exist with us in our unredeemed state.

How can a perfectly good being send unrepentant sinners to Hell? How can He not?

A Unique Joy
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Some of the truest, most powerful experiences of joy can only be felt as we are enabled by God to transcend difficult circumstances our lives. This is not to say that joy cannot be felt in favorable circumstances like a wedding or the birth of a child, these certainly are occasions when it can be known, but perhaps not in so unique a way as it can in the midst of hard experiences.

Sorrows and misery are a part of every human life. It is a basic truth of our present existence that no one is immune from the effects of the Fall of our race. While some might know pain more often and to a deeper level than others it is always only a matter of time and degree that differentiates one life from another. We all suffer. As Job 5:7 tells us “man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards.” The way such trouble comes into our lives is through the negative circumstances that haunt every one of us.

The believer, however, has an option for dealing with adversity which others do not. This option is found in the power of the Holy Spirit that comes from our identification with Christ, and the cross He bore. We can choose to seek this power to enable us to transcend pain even as we are experiencing it. While no one can escape bad circumstances the Christian can know the joy of Christ in the midst of them, and it is a special kind of joy.

I have tasted of it many times along the road of my own faith journey.

There have been moments when I have been able to truly focus on God while enduring some of the worst periods in my life. At such times I have been amazed to find myself suddenly knowing a kind of sublime elation where even a moment before I knew only misery and deep struggle. It is an incredible thing when one’s heart truly finds solace in the reality of the love of God. I am given to the belief that this is perhaps better than any other experience we can know on Earth. At the least it is, for me, an incredibly powerful sort of joy; this moment when the Lord invades my darkness and lightens my spirit in a way that is to some degree indescribable.

It is important to remember that entering into this state is not permanent as long as we continue to sojourn as pilgrims here. Some seasoned Christians seem to experience it far more often than others. I, myself, wish I could know it to the degree that these brothers and sisters do. Perhaps, with enough time and grace I will. I pray that you will too.

The final and eternally enduring triumph over our circumstances must wait, of course, until we enter the gates of Heaven. In the meantime this unique joy of the Lord can be our strength whenever we truly require it to be. All that is necessary is the willingness to seek Him in real time, no matter what may be afflicting our lives, and the faith to trust Him and Him alone for solace when we truly need it most.

It is sometimes difficult to see the truth in a given situation. It is even more difficult to see the truth if we are reeling from some pain connected with that situation. All human beings, Christians included, are plagued by the curse of a negative subjectivity that can be overwhelming at times. We may find it very hard to “see the forest for the trees” at such moments, especially when it feels like the tree in question is a Giant Redwood someone has chopped down in our heart.

We are told that the gift of God is a sound mind and part of having a sound mind is possessing a certain degree of objectivity in any circumstance we find ourselves facing. When we are thinking rightly, meaning from a truly biblical perspective, we have the ability to rise above the problems that confront us, even potentially very painful ones. Seeing things in spirit and in truth gives us the wisdom to react as Christ would, at least in principle. The problem is that many believers have not yet come to such a place of maturity, at least not many whom I have known and, truth be told I myself cannot number myself among them.

Moreover some of us often feel unduly oppressed, insulted or merely misunderstood because of both abusive trauma we have experienced during our formative years and our own bitter response to that trauma. For some of us the results of both this injury and response to injury have blended with genetic factors and coalesced into what the world calls “psycho-pathology”. These days we can give a name to feeling like our glass is half-empty. Depression and anxiety are two that the author is personally acquainted with.

For people like us regular transcendence of negative circumstances in our lives is more problematic than for most. Indeed we may come across as overly sensitive to some because adversities in life that are generally accepted as normal and manageable by others are magnified into deep crisis in our damaged hearts and minds. When this happens it is absolutely right to admit that we are not in our “right minds”. When we are in the throes of an attack of anxiety or a depressive episode we are almost never accurately “painting” reality. It is at times like these that people with a different, perhaps more objective perspective are desperately needed to speak into our lives. Whether such persons are loyal friends, pastors or counselors they are a Godsend because they can help restore to us the objectivity we need to avoid making a bad situation worse.

Compounding the challenges to people like us is the surrounding society’s increasing emphasis on feeling over reason in determining what is real. We are incessantly being told by our culture to “follow our hearts”. Well, that is all fine and good if our hearts can be trusted as safe and effective guides. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the biblical Christian knows that the human heart is not the most trustworthy guide, rather Holy-Spirit inspired reason is. This is not to completely discount feelings, but feelings are subjective for all of us and especially so for those of us afflicted with emotional problems that we are still learning to handle in a responsible, Godly way.

In my own life I have taken comfort in realizing that when I’m not accurately seeing things as they really are I can seek help from Godly human beings and, for that matter directly from my merciful God Himself, to help me see the truth. Because of these divine resources I am slowly learning not to make bad decisions during times of circumstantial turmoil. As the grace of God continues to flow into my life I am learning that for every trouble I encounter the old adage, “this too will pass”, really does apply. I can trust that real emotional healing lies in my future at the hands of a Savior who always knows what is really going on in my life, and how to use it for His glory and my good.