Month: April 2012

Spiritual Amnesia Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved The world looks like freedom when our spiritual life is largely bound up in fear and compulsion, when spiritual discipline seems mostly like duty and not blessing. At such times we are in danger of believing the lie that the life we left behind was somehow more enriching than the life of a disciple of Christ. The grass appears to be greener in the lives of those who have not given themselves to God. We forget the times of blessing when we knew His touch and the things of this world grew “strangely dim”, when being in His presence convinced us that nothing was greater than staying there. This spiritual amnesia weakens our resistance to transgression. Staying in such a place is dangerous because temptation is never more powerful than when a believer starts to envy those who live in sin and seem to enjoy their condition. Temptation’s voice tells us that we should do as the society around us does and seek whatever gives us pleasure. The idols of the world masquerade as roads to fulfillment and doubting Christians are far more likely to make a wrong turn down one of those roads if they become disgusted with their spiritual walk. The Apostle Paul spoke of the true freedom that comes from living the kind of life which seems an unbearable bondage to fallen man, a life controlled by God. Life led by the Spirit is a life abundant with meaning, purpose and liberty from all that might destroy us. To reach our full potential in Christ is to, among other things, fully know the freedom from fear that His perfect love makes possible. This is the best conceivable state for human beings to find themselves in. It is the state of right relationship with our Creator. The problem is that many of us are still trying to earn our way with God. We mistake fleshly effort for sanctification. The result is slavery to legalism so miserable as to tempt us to see the fallen, Hell-bound existence we once led as superior to it. When much of what we do in the spiritual life is done in the wrong spirit for the wrong reasons the world’s idea of freedom appears attractive. But this is an illusion and a perilous one at that. Sin is crouching at the door and we are ready to open that door self-deluded into thinking it a liberator rather than the cruel captor it is. We have become blind to reality and once again tarry in the self-deception that we lived in before our conversion. The answer to spiritual amnesia is not to pretend that a rule-bound Christian walk is the real thing. Instead the believer who has been looking at the world through rose-colored glasses needs to seek the true freedom that is given to us through the unconditional grace of God. We desperately seek pleasure in wrong ways because we do not experience enough of the joy of knowing Him in spirit and in truth. When we turn our sanctification over to God we can glory in the freedom of being a deeply beloved child, a child who does not have to worry about being disowned. From that realization comes blessed relief from fear and the ability to live and thrive through the perfect love of our Savior.

Wounded Healer or Wounding Judge?
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved.

How often do Christians wrongly judge one another? All too often. Self-righteousness manifests itself in believers across all levels of Christian maturity. I suspect that even the most spiritual among us still sin in this way on occasion. We know from Scripture that by doing so we are in danger of being judged ourselves. This is bad enough, but what of the person being judged? Someone may feel as though they are dying emotionally and spiritually and instead of imparting the healing love of Christ we kill them a little more.

Among religious people of any belief system it has been said that only Christians “shoot their own wounded”. To be sure this is an overstatement but it is sometimes all too accurate in the Church. Our ego-driven, and patently false, sense of righteousness leads to the condemnation of others. We usually think of this sin as being one against God and that is certainly true but, as stated, it is also destructive to those being judged. Whether it is withholding fellowship for non-biblical reasons or openly accusing another believer without justification the result is much the same: unnecessary pain for a fellow child of God.

Much needed restoration can be limited or even destroyed when we attack someone who may not be so much in sin as in weakness or infirmity. The wounds this life brings can often lead to behaviors which might appear more sinful than they are. As an omniscient and just Judge, only God knows where weaknesses end and sin begins. We dare not presume on that exalted knowledge or, more importantly, on the Exalted One Himself.

Even if the one judged truly is in a sinful state the accuser cannot know the whole story behind it. Again it is an issue of not understanding, and perhaps not wanting to understand, how much pain a person may have endured in life through no fault of their own. That pain is fully known and taken into consideration in God’s eyes and heart alone. We can and should only confront a fellow Christian when love for that person is strongly present. Otherwise that which we presume to say about the person’s character may only hurt and destroy them, and that surely is not the will of God.

Nature and Beyond Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved C.S. Lewis once wrote the following about God’s earthly creation and its role in the Christian journey: “We are summoned to pass in through nature, beyond her” he said, “into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.” Lewis was an inveterate nature lover. He spoke often of his walking tours through the English countryside and the blessing they invariably were to him. I suspect that many of the great sages and mystics of the Christian faith have had similar points of contact with the natural world in whatever part of the earth they were destined to inhabit during their own pilgrimage through this life. In recent years I, too, have fallen in love with the “direct creation” of God, the term I use to describe nature as opposed to the material utilization of nature that results in manmade things. Actually what has occurred in my life of late might better be called a “re-falling” in love as I sense that awe and wonder in the presence of the direct handiwork of God was something I intensely knew once before, in childhood, without knowing it was of God. At the risk of an unintended pun it is “natural” for human beings, and especially for those who know God in a personal way, to be caught up in the glories of the animate and inanimate things that our Lord has chosen to populate the world we presently co-inhabit with them. Whether it is through common or saving grace men generally have some sense, be it conscious or unconscious, that nature is redolent of its Creator. It is His presence in the natural realm that gives it the compelling sublimity and mystery that we sense when we take in a spectacular sunset, or the rush of falling water, or the sight of the wind gently swaying a tree branch. In some paradoxical fashion God inhabits His creation even as He stands definitively apart from it. The handiwork of the Holy One somehow seems to be a dwelling place for Him as well and this, I suspect, is why those of us who worship the God of the Bible often feel closest to him when we are in the midst of the beauty of the world He directly created. Of course, as with all things in this fallen world, nature has its dangers. One of the most difficult things for the Christian who loves those sunsets, waters and swaying trees is the recognition that evil still exerts its malign presence on the natural world. The handiwork of the holy is also the temporal home of disorder, chaos and even cruelty. We see this in blights and parasites, in the devastation of extreme weather, even in the fact that some of the “higher” non-human predators have been observed to kill their prey for sport rather than consumption. The fall of man has spoiled the pristine perfections of nature and this will remain a sad and enduring fact until the return of Christ sets all things right. In the meantime this unfortunate truth is used by God to inoculate His children against the pantheism that seems more and more ascendant in the West today. Through the ugliness of nature at its fallen worst we are reminded that it is not good in and of itself. The goodness and beauty it retains it only through the preserving presence of God in this short period during which He has temporarily let evil have a continuing presence on the earth. We who apprehend the truth of the Biblical narrative regarding the age we live in are not easily caught up in the reverence of nature as a god. We see and deeply appreciate its loveliness, we even see a divine presence in it as the Holy Spirit allows, but we do not hold the illusion that nature’s remaining goodness is either complete or somehow self-generated. We may love the creation but we do not worship it. This caution is always tonic, especially when it comes to how Christians interact with non-believers who may also love nature but, in addition, have unhealthy illusions about it that lead to an inordinate love of the creation for itself alone. That said, believers have reason to put nature before their physical and spiritual eyes often. One reason, among others, is that direct creation is so much bigger in physical scope than we that it can provide a particularly profound comfort. In pondering the natural realm we may find a release from ourselves, a blessed re-focusing on something larger than self and, in the midst, Someone Who is infinitely larger. Focusing on the physical world reminds us of a spiritual world that is far greater. I believe that this is what C.S. Lewis meant when he referred to passing “through nature” on the way to a deeper communion with the God Who is not only its Creator but it’s Master and ours as well. In the same essay of his with which we began Lewis says that someday we will find the final redemption of nature to be a part of our own. He writes that we “will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.” Lewis seems to point us towards a future when we will somehow become perfectly intimate with fully redeemed nature as a byproduct of becoming perfectly one with our Lord. For those of us who are coming to love nature in proper proportion to our greater love for God this is a future to be very deeply desired.

Dealing with Mystery Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved. The famous Christian author John Bunyon once wrote the following: “The mysteries and contradictions which the Christian revelation leaves unsolved are made tolerable by hope.” No one who has read the Bible with an open mind can honestly say that they have never been perplexed by it. While some might condemn the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress for using the term “contradictions” rather than something like “paradoxes” honest believers will admit that certain things in Scripture do at least appear contradictory. The thinking Christian must wrestle with these seeming contradictions. Some might say that the problem is intellectual conceit, that the Word of God is completely understandable to anyone who has the simple, childlike faith which Jesus commended in the Gospels. Such a statement may be partially true but it must be remembered that He also re-enforced the first and greatest commandment telling us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with ALL YOUR MIND and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:30). Checking our intellect at the church door is not an option. Bunyan knew this. Yet, despite this, it could be suggested that even a great saint like Bunyan might just as well have spoken of “mysteries” and left it at that. The word “mystery” is a lot softer than “contradiction” and perhaps more accurate as well. It implies that some Scripture speaks of realities which are absolutely true but also absolutely beyond the realm of human intellect. All knowledge of God is limited by our current condition and is seen, as the apostle Paul put it, “through a glass darkly” (1st Co. 13:12). It is impossible to tie up every seemingly loose end in the Bible, at least with the fallen minds we currently possess. Some things are simply too great for us to know, at least for now. One key to balancing our questionings with the inerrant nature of God’s Word is humility, a conscious trust that the God of the Universe knows what He is doing. Becoming humble means we no longer presume to place Him, as C.S. Lewis put it, “in the dock”, meaning in the role of a defendant in court. Those who write off the Bible as untrue usually do so more out of personal arrogance than because of honest inquiry. If someone is offended by the message of the cross one of the easiest ways to respond is by using that old stand-by, ‘The Bible contradicts itself’. The other key truly is, as Bunyan states, hope. Throughout the life of a believer God sends what someone once described as “postcards from Heaven”. These are sublime glimpses of how all reality is ultimately summed up in the Person of Jesus Christ. Such epiphanies give us the precious hope that everything will make sense in the end on all levels, including the intellectual. Such hope, indeed, makes everything “tolerable” and sometimes, blessedly, does far more than that.

Filling an Empty Well Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved. We love because God first loved us. This verse from 1 John chapter 4 tells us all we need to know about where the ability to truly love someone originates. Love is not something that we summon up within ourselves apart from God. It is something that a believer appropriates from the Spirit of the One who is love. Yes, that appropriation comes from inside in the sense that the Source is living within us but, ultimately, love comes down from our Father in Heaven. If only we could live more deeply in this truth. Who among us has never known an absence of love in ourselves at a time when the giving of it was so needful? At such times we may try to obey the greatest commandment by performing a loving act despite feeling like we have nothing to give. Perhaps this is sometimes necessary but if we are always not acting from God’s love within us then our attempt to love in our own strength will eventually turn to bitterness. The problem is that we are trying to scrape love from the bottom of an empty well. In time we weary of the effort and even begin to resent the person we feel that we should love. When this happens it is a sign that a Christian has strayed far from the only true Well. How, then, do we love with the love of God? The only way is to receive His empowering love for those who need it is through receiving that same love for ourselves. Only in this way will what has been called our “love tank” be filled to the point that we can overflow to others. This sounds so simple. The problem is that what seems so elementary on an intellectual level is not so easily grasped in our hearts. There are blockages which keep us from knowing the love the Lord has for us in such abundance. These blockages need to be worn down until they no longer frustrate His will to bless us, and others through us. It is here that our wills come into play. We have the responsibility to search out the causes of the walls which hinder divine love from reaching the core of who we are. These causes sometimes have to do with damage done to us by others. Other times they may be the result of sins we ourselves have committed. Often it is a combination of the two, we are sinned against and then sin in response. Once a believer knows what these issues are he or she can decide to take responsibility for dealing with them. If the problem springs from pain we have suffered that has made us wary of love we can surrender that pain, and its results, to the healing hands of Jesus Christ. If it is more an issue of our own sin we can make the decision to sincerely repent of whatever that sin may be and ask His forgiveness. It does not matter if it is healing we need or pardon from sin or both. God Himself will tear down the walls keeping us from His love if we are willing to surrender our “right” to hold on to them. This may take time, just as it took time for us to become people without the ability to truly love. But however long it does take the God who is love continues to love us and because of this we can eventually come to love both Him, and others, in a way we could never have hoped for.

The Myth of Control Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved   The term “control freak” entered our contemporary vocabulary at some point during the late Twentieth Century. It describes an individual who has a deep compulsion to micromanage all aspects of life, to be in command of every situation at every moment in every way possible. Often this desire for control extends beyond the person’s own life into the lives of others. Controlling parents, spouses, bosses, etc. are rife in our society today.   While it is true that such choleric souls have existed throughout the world and throughout human history there seem to be more people like this than ever these days, especially in the West. This should not be much of a surprise; our culture breeds control freaks.   At no other time has there existed a civilization like ours. We live in an age of technological mastery, a period which has seen us not only tame elemental powers that for thousands of years were untamable, but actually harness them for our use. We have electricity, automobiles, computers, telecommunications, and jet aircraft. We’ve even learned to release the enormous energy of the atom. In short the human race, or at least the portion of it that lives in affluence, has attained to a place of power beyond the wildest dreams of the Ancient World. In countless ways we appear to be masters over our destiny. This is, of course, an illusion. As Christians we know, or we at least are supposed to know, that only God has complete control over all things.   However, the reality is that many believers are just as prone to a controlling spirit as the average “pagan”. We, too, are so insulated from the basic survival needs that drove our race for most of its existence that we have often forgotten that we too are mortal. We have also failed to remember that we live at God’s pleasure, not our own. The greatest among us is still always just one breath away from death. The length of our days remains the one thing that we can never have control over, no matter how much personal power we think we have.   It is wise to often remember the fragility of our existence because, apart from the issue of overweening pride, the bottom line is that trying to control every aspect of our lives, or the lives of others, is truly “a chasing after the wind”. The person who is always attempting to have power they cannot or should not have will reap only frustration and ultimately lose the life they were unwilling to abandon, in faith, to God’s care.   Despite the chimera of human sovereignty true security and contentment comes only with the surrender of personal power to the One who has the right to control all, the One who does all things well.

Thanksgiving and Enjoyment: Which Comes First?

Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

 

Are we not more thankful to God for the good things in our lives because we do not enjoy them enough? Or is it more that we do not enjoy them as much as we might because we are not more thankful for them to begin with? In other words does the enjoyment of God’s gifts determine our level of thankfulness or is it the other way around? Perhaps a spirit of thanksgiving not only must come before any true enjoyment of a blessing but also largely defines the “level” of enjoyment.

 We live in a world replete with blessings from our Maker. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. God blesses the just and the unjust and blesses them both abundantly, though in different ways. In the case of Christians these blessings go beyond the realm of common grace to include the unique and transcendent favors that only the possessors of saving grace can experience. But, in both cases, God is a giver by nature and all of us are the recipients of the good things He “scatters abroad” to the creatures He has made in His own image.

 But it is one thing for God to give us His gifts and quite another for us to fully receive them. The Church has no lack of believers who feel unfulfilled and listen with frustration as their brothers and sisters give thankful testimony to the unremitting goodness of God in their lives. These frustrated Christians ask themselves, “Why am I not enjoying these things that it seems second-nature for others to enjoy?” They may have felt some of the benefits of God’s favor in their individual Christian walks, but it seems in much smaller proportion to other saints in their midst.

 In my experience the most joyful followers of Christ have almost always been the most thankful. Thanksgiving and the experience of joy are indissolubly linked in the economy of God. You cannot have one without the other. In the reality of this “spiritual law” I think most, if not all, believers would agree.

 But the question of which comes first, thanksgiving or enjoyment, has not always been so clear. In some congregations it is implied, if not explicitly taught, that the pleasure supposedly inherent in whatever good thing our Lord has granted us is the greatest motivator for giving Him thanks. At the very least the gift is assumed to generate the impulse of gratitude. I would agree that there is some truth here, especially at the beginning of our Christian lives when we have just received salvation as a free gift that we only had to sincerely ask for to receive.

 In fact it seems a bit illogical to give thanks for something we have not even begun to enjoy. “How”, we might inquire, “does one feel thankful for a gift just given and not yet benefitted from?” The answer is that the spirit of thanks does not necessarily wait for that to happen. For instance we can be thankful for the birthday gift someone gives us, one that we knew we wanted, as soon as the package is opened and the gift received. This thankfulness precedes the actual use of the gift and is different from that which arises from its use. We are initially just thankful for the thoughtfulness of the giver.

 Beyond this it may be that it is the initial appreciation of the person doing the giving that makes our enjoyment of the gift all the more satisfying. This is because we do not enjoy the thing simply for itself, but also for the love expressed by the one who gave it to us.

So it is too, I believe, for those things that come directly from the greatest Giver of all. When we cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving towards that Giver as a first priority in life, we may come to a far deeper enjoyment of His gifts than we knew when we tried to be thankful based on how much we enjoyed whatever the thing was that He gave us. In this paradigm thankfulness does both precede and follow the blessing, but it is the initial gratitude that makes the blessing so much fuller.

 After all, ultimately, it is receiving the Son of the Giver of all good things as our Lord and Savior that we have the most to be thankful for. Christ, Himself, is the greatest gift any of us will ever know and receiving Him both precedes and far exceeds any single gift that His Father, in His great love, may grant us afterwards.

The Religion of Roswell

Copyright 2002, 2006 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

There is a reason why UFO’s and space aliens are so popular in America these days. For many people with little or no belief in the traditionally religious idea of the transcendent; faith in a superior civilization coming to Earth is used to try to fill in part of Pascal’s “God-shaped hole”. It also is becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that things are not getting better in the world. This was true even before 9/11, though that horrible day certainly emphasized it. In the place of a thoroughly discredited Positivist Humanism, and in the presence of evils like terrorism, some have looked to the heavens.

A few years after becoming a Christian I revisited a favorite film of my youth, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, one of Steven Spielberg’s earliest hits. This movie about the arrival of peaceful, glowing visitors from another planet held me in thrall when it was first released in 1977. The passage of time did not diminish the emotional impact of the film and each time I, then a professing atheist, watched Close Encounters I could feel the goose bumps rising when the huge mother ship arrived at the end. After watching it as a Christian, it occurred to me why. The beings of Spielberg’s imagination had come to save humankind.

It was strongly hinted that the alien’s “advent” (and I use the word intentionally) was the beginning of a new and better epoch of human history. Their coming was certainly depicted as a quasi-religious event in the lives of the movie’s characters. When lead Richard Dreyfuss is allowed to join the warm, welcoming beings as they leave Earth at the end of the picture his aspect is one of awe; the kind of awe that earlier generations reserved for the Divine. The thought and feeling transmitted to the audience is that he is being redeemed from the humdrum family life he has left behind. In fact at that point in the story it is easy to forget the fact that Dreyfuss is abandoning his wife and two children to make a possibly permanent journey into space. All we know is that he has seemingly been rightfully delivered from “on high”.

Since Close Encounters made its debut, many other films and novels have painted aliens as the potential redeemers of modern man  and inspired a growing number of spiritual seekers to believe in such a redemption. We might call the people whose primary belief system is derived from faith in the existence of these benevolent beings from another world “Roswellians”. The name is taken from the desert town of Roswell, New Mexico, home of the infamous Area 51 where our government allegedly has hidden evidence of an alien landing during the late 1940’s. The number of adherents to this new religion has never been as large as they are now. Perhaps not too surprisingly the aliens of the Roswellian imagination frequently resemble the aliens of Spielberg’s movie, both physically and spiritually. It is also often, though not always, implied by these believers in benign aliens that such creatures are not only technologically but morally superior to earthlings. The hope is that they will lead humankind out of its primitive vices as well as its primitive technology. Roswellians are always watching the skies for the coming of what they expect to be our extraterrestrial saviors.

The desire for such saviors is, of course, not evil in itself. Many, perhaps most, human beings know in their hearts that something is profoundly wrong with our race. We instinctively yearn for someone or something to come along and make everything right. The fateful question is who or what is the real deliverer. Here Christians are posed with a challenge. We need to counter this “feel good” error by communicating that our God is not only awe inspiring but, more importantly, real, present and relevant. We do not, unfortunately, tend to have Hollywood help us in the endeavor. What we do have is the Holy Spirit and the reality of profoundly changed lives. Believers need to share with our Roswellian friends that our true hope lies above as well. It is just that we are watching the skies for Jesus.

 

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

 

I recently read a disturbing article in “Books and Culture: a Christian Review”. In it the author, Jean Bethke Elshtain, herself quotes an edition of the New York Times from last year which “informs us of the startling and alarming fact that the use of antipsychotics by young people in the United States rose fivefold in one decade”. While I was aware that more American children than ever were being prescribed behavioral-modification drugs I had no idea that the practice had so mushroomed over the past ten years; “startling and alarming” indeed. Whether it is for Attention Deficit Disorder, mood swings or violent conduct millions of kids are daily swallowing pills designed to address emotional and psychological issues, sometimes taking up to three or four such medications at a time.

 

Elshtain zeroes in on one of the reasons such “pacifying” drugs are being requested by parents in the U.S. and that is the fact that ambitious mothers and fathers who work long hours are spending less and less “quality time” with their children. These kids are often benefactors of the material riches such workaholism makes possible. What they do not benefit from is the sacrificial love that is an absolute requirement of good parenting, and this is resulting in a myriad of disorders.

 

The fact is the very term “disorder” is being used as valuable cover for people who want to believe the problem lies in their child’s physiology rather then in neglectful parenting. Pharmaceutical companies and some doctors are happy to go along with this charade. Moral absolution is followed by a prescription and another son or daughter is placed on a medication or medications with what Elshtain accurately describes as “deleterious side-effects”. She also goes on to point out that these drug’s long-term effects are unknown.

 

One explanation for this trend is not greatly explored by the author and desperately bears further reflection. Another reason why so many children have behavioral problems today is because they are children of divorce. Enough studies have linked the trauma of divorce on kids with resultant antisocial behaviors to make this a bit of a “no-brainer”, yet too many American parents continue to believe the fallacy that “it is better to come from a broken home than to live in one”. Somewhere along the line we have also rejected the possibility that “staying together for the sake of the kids” has considerable merit. A little-known and little-heeded recent study indicated that children of divorced parents are substantially less likely to be able to enter into or sustain their own marriages once they reach adulthood then those who come from intact families, even from intact families that were marked by a considerable amount of ongoing marital conflict.

 

No one in progressive, secular America wants to grapple with that particular revelation. To do so would be to admit that the liberalization of popular opinion about (and laws pertaining to) divorce in this country during the past 35 years has been the chief reason so many of our nation’s children are growing up emotionally crippled and unable to sustain their own marriages.

 

So instead, when Jane or John begins to manifest the behavioral scars that living through a nasty divorce has been repeatedly proven to cause, the custodial parent goes to the local pediatrician and gets a Ritalin prescription. During the 1960’s “mother’s little helper” was Valium. At least then she only took it for herself. Today she feeds some of its more modern medicinal replacements to her kids.

 

You may by now be wondering why this article seems aimed at American culture in general in a column that usually addresses issues in the American Church. The reason is simple and profoundly saddening. Some statistics indicate Christian parents are divorcing in numbers approaching the national norm. Some of these same parents are also medicating their children. Just like their unbelieving neighbors more and more Christian parents have jumped on the pediatric-antipsychotic bandwagon and I will take the risk of betting that a disproportionately large number of those who have are single parents by reason of divorce

 

It is imperative that the Church in the United States recognize one of the greatest threats to the “family values” we so often like to identify ourselves with today and that is the growing acceptance of unbiblical divorces by both congregations and the leaders of those congregations. Make no mistake about it, the breakdown of Christian marriages is breaking down the church itself and at some point we may wake up to find out that we have passed the point of no return.

 

You cannot medicate away what is basically the result of this acceptance of sin, whether it’s inside the church or outside. Drugs may have their place in helping kids who have been so badly affected by bad parenting and easy divorces that they need to be medically stabilized for a time but, ultimately, the results of sin cannot be removed this way. What is required is parental repentance and the true healing that can only result from it. Beyond this we, as the Church in America, need to corporately repent for taking on the world’s idea of marital morality rather than the Biblical model. Repentance in both cases will be a hard road, but it is the only road back from what our selfishness as adults has wrought in the lives of both our children and our churches as a whole.