Month: April 2012

 

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It was unbearable for the human race to lose the reality of Eden and so, almost immediately, the human race began trying to establish its own “gardens”. From the first discovery of the intoxicating effects of alcohol to the billion-dollar theme parks and resorts of the Twenty-first century we have grasped at every pleasure, licit or illicit, in an attempt to find some semblance of paradise on earth.

I believe the desire itself is not inherently evil. We were originally designed for bliss. Adam and Eve knew this bliss in the Garden and we who have become God’s adopted children will someday know it to an even larger degree in the new Heaven and the new Earth. Pleasure and fulfillment is ordained by our Creator. It is only our rebellion against that Creator, and the elevation of pleasure above His worship, which has closed the gates of paradise to us in the here and now.

Much of human life is haunted by a vague corporate memory of what our First Parent’s lost. The sense we have that things have gone very wrong is not limited to people of Judeo-Christian faith. It is a universal experience common to every man, woman and child who walks the Earth. Unfairness, loss, pain, meaninglessness; every one of these negative experiences, and many more, weigh so heavily upon us because we know we were meant for something better. As the group “Switchfoot” sings “The shadow proves the sunshine.”

The greatest tragedy springing from this state of being we share as a race is that the vast majority of us either do not know, or do not want to take, the only road back to the perfect sunshine we have forfeited. This path of full restoration can only be taken through Jesus Christ. But the majority of the human race continues to look for it in journeys down literal dead-end roads.

In most cases the roads in question are designed to facilitate a sense of escape from ourselves. Whether it is through drugs, sex, travel or any number of other potentially pleasurable activities the idea is to temporarily lose the gnawing sense that we have been denied a self that is in harmony with God and His universe through our own wrong actions. Most of us are unconscious of the fact that this is the source of all our Hedonism; all our pleasure for pleasure’s sake. But such an escape from the self is impossible. Whether we take a trip by hallucinogenic drug or by airplane we ultimately take our fallen selves with us, and either way we “crash” in the end.

Building counterfeit Eden’s is the response of a soul estranged from God to its condition. The reality of our fallenness will trump the unreality of these castles we build in the air every time. We do infinitely better to take the “road less traveled” and turn our eyes upon Jesus. The transformation He brings us will not always be pleasurable in the receiving but its end is the entrance of Heaven into our souls and thus our soul’s entrance into Heaven, where someday truly perfect pleasure will be known forevermore.

During the last few years in the United States Evangelicals have wrestled with the question of racial reconciliation in the Body of Christ. Not long ago the huge Southern Baptist Convention, next to Roman Catholicism America’s largest denomination, publicly apologized for past racism against African-Americans. The issue was a major focus in the Promise Keepers men’s movement and has resurfaced repeatedly in the Christian media in America.

 

One question often asked is why churches do not tend to be more racially diverse within individual congregations. Why are their relatively few truly multi-racial churches, even in the so-called “melting pot” cities like New York and Los Angeles? Perhaps it is because the nation is less a melting pot than a mosaic. The United States is the most racially diverse country in human history. Diversity implies differences. It also implies that those differences are not, in and of themselves, necessarily a bad thing. In the term’s most positive sense cultural distinctives are something to be celebrated, not criticized as somehow a threat to unity in either the spiritual or secular sense of the word.

 

The truth in America is that Hispanic churches tend to stay predominately Hispanic, African-American churches predominately African-American, Korean churches predominately Korean and so on. Some say that this creates an atmosphere of division among Christians. They maintain that it is God’s will that “all the colors” should, as the singer Bono sings in a song by the band U2, “bleed into one”. Surely, He does not intend for His people to be divided in any way? In one sense this is certainly an accurate statement as Scripture very clearly affirms that we are to be one in Christ. The apostle Paul tell us in Galatians that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”(Gal. 3:2.

 

The question, though, is whether there can be no unity in diversity. Does recognition of differences automatically lead to the evils of discrimination? Should the Church never reflect the cultural, even racial, distinctions among people that the Creator apparently intended when he created humankind? The Bible prophetically tells us that, one day, all the nations of the Earth will go up to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. It does not say “nation” but “nations”. This implies differences will still exist among peoples but that they will be united in worship of the one true God. Maybe the reluctance some congregations have in actively recruiting people from other ethnicities comes from the fact that they do not desire to completely lose there God-given distinctiveness as a particular fold in the larger “sheep-pen” of Christ’s flock. If this desire truly is the reason why efforts to promote integration are often resisted (rather than blatant, and yes, sinful bias against “inferior” people) then perhaps we should rethink at least the intensity of the recent handwringing about racism dividing the Church.

 

If you have the opportunity to go snorkeling or scuba diving in the Caribbean you will see fish swim by in a stunning variety of colors. If all the fish were black or white, red or yellow the experience would be so greatly diminished in pleasure. But the Divine Artist sees fit to use all the colors of the palette when He creates and that is true for His greatest creation as well as fish. A recent mayor of New York described the city as “a gorgeous mosaic” speaking of both the cultural and racial diversity within its five boroughs. Appreciating this mosaic is what can make life there so rich. It is precisely because everyone is not like everyone else that this is so. So before we arbitrarily try to force everyone and everything to blend together in the name of eliminating the evil of racism the American Church would do well to recognize that different races and cultures can work together in unity without sacrificing the kind of beauty which diversity creates.

_________________

The contemporary world’s idea of freedom is flawed because the ultimate stress is on people having there own way. Because self-rule is in, itself , the most original sin this kind of freedom is actually just another form of bondage.

 

But “perfect freedom” is something else entirely. Flawlessness and God are synonymous. But our idea of perfection and His are two very different things. On the fallen human level it is sometimes seems a state to be frantically work towards. “Perfectionism” is the result and it is sinful as well because it depends on our fallen nature’s attempt to be as God . Only God is truly perfect and His perfection is innate. In other words He does not need to achieve anything to have it. To gain it by the effort of the flesh is impossible. When we try to attain to this state in this way our own pride is often the hidden motivation behind the attempt.

 

The blessed alternative is to trust the Lord and depend on Him to make us perfect in the truest sense of the word. When we allow God to apply His nature to us by trusting in the “perfect man”, Jesus Christ, perfection becomes a gift received, not a goal we have achieved. When the Bible says “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect” I believe it means allowing Him to remake us in His image. In that way and that way alone can a human being come to know what it means to have freedom from sin, the only freedom that is worth having.

Silence is Golden

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

 

“Tis better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to speak and remove

all doubt.” –Unknown

 

We are told in several places in the Old and New Testaments that

remaining quiet is often the better alternative to speaking. The wise

are often portrayed as persons of few words and fools as those who do

not know when to stop talking. Despite the apparent clarity of

Scriptural teaching on the need to listen more than speak, we denizens

of the Twenty-First Century Church do not seem to get it. In our

media-saturated “talking-head” society every one seems to want to

make themselves be heard as often as possible. Perhaps it is connected

with the “15 minutes of fame” idea. The more we talk the more chance

we have to get our egos gratified in the public square. As in so very

many other of today’s crumbling personal disciplines Christians are

often indistinguishable from their secular counterparts when it comes

to using their mouth more than their ears. (Before I come across as

insufferably judgmental let me state for the record that the author is

terrible at keeping his mouth shut. I have somewhat improved in this

area in recent years, but the fact remains that I love to hear the sound

of my own voice. Call it “Vocal Narcissism”).

 

As the old folk proverb says, “we have two ears and only one mouth, so

we should listen twice as much as we speak”. It is probably safe to say

that the proportion suggested here has been pretty effectively reversed

in contemporary culture. In fact the two to one speaking/listening

ratio is probably too conservative to describe many of us.

 

Beyond that it sometimes seems as if the person who actually does

hold their tongue for a time during polite conversation is not doing it

to listen so much as to think about what they are going to say next.

Truly attentive listening is a lost art. This is spiritually dangerous for

two reasons. The first is the aforementioned narcissism, also known as

ungodly self-centeredness. The second is the fact that children of God

are supposed to hang on every word that comes from His mouth in

order to live a life pleasing to Him. This is hard to do when we will not

let Him get a word in edgewise!

 

Prayer, for instance, was always intended by God to be two-way

communication. Our relationship with our Lord will be stunted if we

speak our prayers without ever pausing to hear His reply. It is only in

the quiet which comes when we finally learn to shut-up that we begin

to hear that “still, small voice’ the Bible tells us is often God’s preferred

means of contact with us. God will not shout to be heard over our

verbal torrents and until we come to grips with that fact we will miss

out on hearing from the One Person it is most needful for us to listen

to.

 

I do not have any easy answer for this trend towards Christian

verbosity. It is tempting to suggest that we need to take a page from

the Desert Fathers of the early church and go to some remote place for

a good long while where we could be by ourselves. With no audience

within 25 miles maybe we would lean to appreciate the quiet and make

it our own habit to be quiet ourselves. But the world we live in today

does not make that particularly easy to do. The vast majority of us

cannot take a three-month sabbatical from human company. We have

to find another way.

 

Perhaps the answer is to carve out shorter times of solitude each day as

a way to practice quietness. Or we might do the unthinkable and

actually ask our friends and family whether we talk too much and too

foolishly. If they are honest with us we might just be shocked enough

by their answer to consider the wisdom of silence. The revelation that

our feet are regularly spending time in our mouths may actually be

enough to make us keep those mouths safely closed.

The Only Answer to Sin

Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

 

We can only progress in our sanctification if we trust Christ to bring it about. This may seem like a spiritual “no-brainer” but it has become somewhat of a revelation in my life of late. After over twenty years in the faith I finally feel like I am coming to the point of viscerally knowing something which I have been “preaching” for a long time: that Jesus is not only the center of our Salvation but the center of our Sanctification as well.

 

There is perhaps no greater temptation in the daily walk of faith than to put that faith in ourselves and call it faith in God. We do this without knowing it, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we do it without wanting to know it. But regardless of whether spiritual self-reliance is subconscious, conscious, or a little of both it is anathema to any genuine progress in the Christian life. We cannot overcome the flesh with the flesh. It is the essence of futility and the reason that not a few professing Christians become so frustrated and discouraged that they make a shipwreck of their faith, at least as far as real sanctification is concerned.

 

The fulcrum of failure in working to attain to Christ-likeness in our own strength is found in our patent inability to overcome sin. We try not to sin. We sin anyway. These two statements might seem like a Pauline truth about the believer’s walk but they leave out the Pauline solution to repetitive sin: Jesus Christ Himself. The answer to losing our remaining sin nature, our “old man”, is to reckon it crucified with Christ. Just as the resurrection of Christ made our transformation into “new creatures” possible His death on the cross makes possible the realized death of our sin nature. Part of our baptism is identification with Jesus in His death. Our sin nature died with Him. It has been crucified with Him. The answer to our ongoing sin problem is to reckon ourselves dead to sin because it is part of that within us which died before we were raised, with the Son of God, to new and enduring life.

 

The only responsibility we have as Christians is to viscerally accept the fact that our old transgressing nature has been truly crucified with Christ. It is in coming to stand on this truth that we will finally find the power not to sin. Yes, we must will ourselves to believe it, but the power itself is a function of the presence of the crucified and risen Savior dwelling in our hearts. As we progressively reckon our remaining “old man” as dead through the realization of our crucifixion with Jesus we will begin to know true victory over sin.

 

As with so many core truths pertaining to the Christian walk this one will not be completely owned by us in some kind of “flash-epiphany“ that renders us completely unable to sin. Our whole earthly life will likely be spent living more and more in the realized death of our flesh-nature. It seems no one can be as utterly sinless in deed as Jesus was in this life. That said we can come to know a growing personal holiness that will include a radically reduced tendency towards moral failure. This is part of the “re-birthright” of the Children of God, even in the here and now.

 

I hope all you who read these words will be encouraged by the same revelation that is beginning to possess my heart. We need not fight a futile war against sin in our own strength and know only defeat after defeat. It is in Christ and Christ alone that our sanctification has been obtained for us. We need only to progressively believe and surrender to this truth.

 

The Spirit of Christ within us will do the rest.

The Son of Compassion
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is impossible to know Jesus Christ without knowing His compassion. One of the most profound truths of conversion is the realization that, though we are justly condemned, the One who would rightfully condemn us does not desire to do so. As we viscerally come to know this truth, that Jesus deeply desires us to be redeemed and healed, we become willing to let Him do it.

It is easy to read about Jesus having compassion on someone in Scripture and miss the profound depth of what that means. God incarnate sees our misery and His reaction is not “they are getting what they so richly deserve” but instead a passionate desire to help. The Lord of the Universe is moved by humankind’s pain. God not only weeps over our lostness but, in Christ, He extends Himself to find us. This is the definition of compassion, not only being affected by someone’s suffering but actually acting to relieve that suffering. All the healings in Christ’s ministry are examples of this love in action, this willingness to enter into our place of pain and do something about it.

One of the hardest tasks in the believer’s life is to trust that when they hurt, God hurts. In the world we see so much indifference towards, even pleasure in, the sufferings of others. We even see it in people that call themselves Christians but who seem to glory in judging others just for the sake of judging others. These individuals get some sort of high from making others feel guilty rather than convicted. It seems impossible to believe that the kind of radical compassion we so desperately need could exist in such a world especially when it cannot be found in some of our churches! The bottom line is that the misery of this fallen place in which we dwell seems overwhelming; and so it is apart from the reality of Christ.

But in the Son of God there dwells a transcendent love for us, one that is unaffected by the darkness of this time and place. It is the compassion of the cross. The love that brought Jesus to Golgotha was also the love that ultimately raised Him from the dead and it is this same power that enables us to be brought to and changed by our risen Lord today. When we are touched from above by God, when we are freed from some pain, healed of some wound, we need to remember that the Lord is not doing this reluctantly or begrudgingly. He is simply revealing the depth of His compassionate nature. He knows our anguish and he shares in it. Our Savior has not been called the “Son of Compassion” without glorious reason. Our pain truly is His pain and, because of His very nature, Jesus Christ will not let that pain go forever unremoved.

If pressed many believers would probably admit that they have sometimes resisted grace. At such moments they instead tried to earn acceptance with God. This is, for them, a fundamental struggle in the Christian life.

 

Why do we try to earn perfection rather than rely on someone else to give it to us? There may be reasons that go beyond our inherent sinfulness. Many human beings have not experienced much unconditional love from the most significant people in their lives. Parents usually are those most blamed for this but it can just as easily be our peers, siblings or spouses who expect from us more than we can provide. If a person internalizes these “judgments of inadequacy” the result is the sense of guilt, fear and anger that result from feeling like we can never measure up. In some people these feelings are almost pervasive.

 

The theological problem that makes it difficult to get rid of this destructive perfectionism is the truth that in actuality we cannot measure up to our Creator’s standards. No man can be “good enough” to earn acceptance from God. Every human being needs to be perfect as He is perfect if they hope to be in union with Him. In Christ we see God’s loving solution. He has given us an escape from condemnation through the person of His Son. Now, instead of fruitlessly trying to earn our keep with God we can receive the perfection we need through embracing Christ and His atonement. This is the very core of the Gospel. It is Good News indeed.

 

But that good news may hard for us to swallow, especially if the “gods” in our life have mostly shown us anything but grace. How can a Christian who has been sinned against by these worldly perfectionists move from frantically trying to be good enough to resting in the truth that Christ’s death and resurrection on their behalf has made them good enough? Perhaps part of the solution is in mourning the loss we felt when we were hurt by those who loved us imperfectly.

 

In place of anger there must be the kind of sorrow which can lead to healing. While we are angry and blaming towards that parent, sister or friend we find it very difficult to forgive them. As in so many aspects of life, forgiveness is the key to freedom; in this case freedom from a fallen perfectionism. Anger is always a part of our response to conditional love. Such anger cannot be avoided. But if that bitterness is held on to it will eventually destroy us. With God’s help we instead can move on to a place of deep sorrow that has the potential to cleanse us of the negativity of our anger. In the midst of the emotional turmoil that is part and parcel of grieving we need to ask God to be present and to use the grief to move us towards forgiveness.

 

Once we forgive the inadequate god-figures in our lives we find ourselves more open to embracing the grace solution that the Lord offers us. His unconditional love will become far more real to us and we will become far more able to receive it. Grace will no longer be resisted but joyfully accepted into the deepest, and most needful, part of who we are

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved.

Today there are a multitude of voices telling us how to seek God and enter into His presence. A perfunctory look at the shelves in any Christian bookstore will find dozens of volumes purporting to contain the way to greater intimacy with Him. In fact the phrase “intimacy with God” has been so overused as to become almost a cliché in our Evangelical sub-culture. And, as with many aspects of the Christian life, the Western Church has bought into the surrounding society’s stress on “doing” rather than “being”. We want to make intimacy happen; we want to exert effort to draw nearer to God.

But what if that approach is wrong, what if we are trying so hard to get into His presence that we are actually making it impossible for God to be present to us? Could it be that all our effort is actually pre-empting Him?

The temptation to try too hard is a powerful one in this day and age. We are uncomfortable with rest. Our theology tells us that faith, not works, saves us but many Evangelical believers pay only lip service to this foundational truth. “Sure”, we say “salvation is a gift”. Then we begin what is often a lifetime of attempting to earn our way. Salvation may be free but sanctification apparently involves a lot of work. While this might be partly true work without rest is workaholism and it was never the intention of our Lord. It might be well to remember the occasion when Jesus told a busy Martha to stop criticizing her sister Mary who was resting quietly at His feet simply basking in His presence.

Would it be wrong to rest that way today? If “Basking in His presence” does not imply intimacy I do not know what does. Mary had the right idea then and her approach is timeless. Modern day Christians desperately need to stop trying to work there way into the presence of God. By doing this we may be actually working our way out of His presence.

Perhaps, in these frenetic days, the children of God need to rest a bit more than they need to work. Secular culture lures us to multi-task ourselves to death in a sort of “Protestant Work Ethic Gone Mad”. We put a religious face on it and call it a form of godliness, a proof of our zeal. Did Jesus ever rest? Yes, He did. So where, then, is the Sabbath rest for His people today, the Sabbath made for man rather than the other way around?

Maybe it is time for us to try being silent and still. We can invite the Lord to visit us in that quiet. Then we might hear Him. Then we might receive what we long for, His blessed presence and the knowledge of His love.

A mistake some sensitive Christians make is to try to completely and permanently forsake parts of their lives that are not inherently sinful but which they feel have become too important. Some examples of these not-specifically “Christian” things might include a passion for listening to classical music or painting landscapes or collecting some kind of memorabilia. Believers, especially young believers, sometimes become so alarmed at the power these pastimes and hobbies seem to have over their lives that they treat the object of their passion as something sinful, at least for them, and so they try to “put it down”.

This concern is not always an invalid one. Sometimes pre-conversion passions truly were one way that we tried to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped hole”. As such they were modern day idols in our lives that our new relationship with Christ needed to replace, at least for a time. Often, however, as we grow in our faith-walk we may sense a desire to bring these passions back into our lives, but in a new perspective. We may even sense that the call to pick up these enthusiasms again is coming from God Himself.

I believe this is often the case. Christian singer, song-writer Margaret Becker once shared that she put down her guitar for nine years after her conversion experience. At the end of that near decade of not using her talent for music-making she sensed God telling her to pick-up that guitar again and begin writing songs for His glory. It seems that after a period of “holy reorientation” our Lord will many times bring non-sinful activities back into our lives, this time with a ministry component. When this happens the old interest oftentimes is re-introduced with a sense of joy, fulfillment and “rightness” that was never there during the pre-Christian portion of our lives. When it is subordinated to God the interest in question finally takes its proper role and can be more captivating and satisfying than ever.

 

The key word here is subordination. The passion has been subordinated or put under God. This is a very different process than what we are to go through with clearly sinful vestiges of our “old” life. Sins are to be mortified or put to death. They can never be brought back into our Christian life because there is nothing in them that can be redeemed. For instance it is one thing to start dancing again, quite another to indulge in our old habit of gossiping.

We often need not permanently put to death an interest or talent that God may want to use as part of our life-ministry. It may well have to be put down for a time and, once the thing is picked back up, properly subordinated to the higher calling of knowing, loving and serving God. It need not, however, be perpetually banished from our lives as if something is inherently wrong with it.

Of course only godly discernment will tell us when and how an old passion should become once more a part of our existence. The development of such discernment takes time too and we should never “rush in where angels fear to tread” in the re-introduction of anything that once served as a God-substitute. But if we trust God, and wait on His perfect timing, we will likely be delighted to once again enjoy something that our heavenly Father never intended to take from us forever

Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is not unusual to hear messages in our churches exhorting us to give ourselves away to God. The theme of total surrender is perennial in the pulpit, as indeed it should be. One of the categorical imperatives of the Christian walk is to allow our Master to have all of who we are. Sadly it is also not unusual for believers to experience great difficulty in this yielding to the “ownership” of God. Those who have such resistance often berate themselves for what they perceive to be their own stubborn self-centeredness. But this is not always the whole story. Could it be that part of the problem is that we do not realize this total giving of ourselves to Him has been preceded by our Creator’s own total giving of Himself to us?

I do not think it necessarily presumptuous or rash for a child of God to say, “God is mine” in the deepest and most appropriate sense of the phrase. Why wouldn’t we make such a statement when other sermons affirm that God delights in giving and that in giving us Jesus He gave us His all? The Father has not been called “the Lover of our souls” without good reason. In the Person of Christ He has not only loved us fully and perfectly, but given Himself to us in those ways as well. Our union with God is described in the Scripture in terms of marriage. To love your spouse is to give yourself to that spouse and the giving is returned in a healthy union. If it is this way with the human bond between man and wife how much more must it be in the union which both inspires and supercedes it in priority and magnitude?

This does not, of course, mean that we “own” God in the sense of controlling Him. This is why I just referred to the “deepest and most appropriate sense of the phrase” when describing a Christian’s relationship with their Lord. This love between the Creator and His finest creation is indeed a two-way street, however it is not reciprocal in the sense of our having equal power or mastery over God. While it might seem paradoxical, we have “possession” of Him, but in that possession we do not in any way have control over Him. God would not be God if we did.

Perhaps this can best be explained by another human relationship, that between parent and child. A true parent would not think twice about sacrificing his or her life to physically save a son or daughter from death. How much more then does the Parent of parents love us? The bloodstained cross of Calvary provides the answer. Jesus saved us from spiritual death through a sacrifice inconceivably greater than any mortal parent could ever make. At Golgotha the Creator of the Universe gave Himself to us. Think about that for a moment. Through Jesus, God’s love, more, God’s very Self, belongs to those who receive Him! However like a human parent, God still rightfully rules His household. His children possess Him but, at the same time, remain subservient to Him. No human analogy can completely explain this mysterious combination of possessing God while remaining submissive to Him. But to receive it is to know the peace that passes understanding and an enduring joy.

 

As we are willing to open ourselves to a deeper knowledge of the One who desires to be both Father and Bridegroom to our souls we will begin to find it easier to surrender our lives to Him. The Bible tells us that we love because He first loved us. In the same way we can give ourselves to God once we come to know that he long ago gave Himself so fully to us

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved