Month: June 2012

Our God is both infinite and incarnate. That He is both is an almost unspeakably glorious paradox. Do we realize that, not only 2000 years ago but at this very moment, God is incomprehensibly and unspeakably transcendent in the spiritual sense while at the same time fully manifest in a physical body in the Person of the risen Christ? Do we contemplate the sublime truth that He is an omnipresent Spirit Who, nevertheless, is also a material Presence in a specific place?

It is sometimes easy to forget that the same Jesus who walked the dusty paths of Judea two millennia ago did notwith His Ascension become a non-corporeal ghost. Our Savior now has a glorified body, but the “physicality” remains. Somewhere in His heavenly home Jesus Christ has sat down at the right hand of the Father. I do not believe that the term “sat down” is some kind of a metaphor. The Son is literally at the side of His spiritual Father in a material form. This form may indeed be one we cannot at this time fully comprehend but nonetheless it remains, at the least, one mode of the glorified Christ’s existence.

He did not become incarnate to then throw away that incarnation at the end of His time on Earth.

This is a biblical proposition. The Father is, indeed, a life-giving Spirit, but He not once disdains the physical or the physical realm in the Scriptures. The idea that the material is somehow specifically inferior to the spiritual in the eyes of God finds its origin not in the Bible but rather in the Neo-Platonic notions of the earliest Gnostic heresies. As C.S. Lewis once wrote referring to the Creator of all things “He likes matter. He invented it.” When the fullness of time came He chose for His Son to partake in a very particular form of the material, the human body. Nothing in the Gospels or any book anywhere else in the New Testament suggests that Jesus ever shed that Body. He now lives as a glorified expression of it but He remains embodied, He remains Incarnate.

Simultaneously God the Father and God the Holy Spirit exist in the realm of the purely spiritual, while staying in complete and perfect union with God the Son in His physical form. Could this not be the greatest divine paradox we can contemplate? It is an astonishing thought, one that truly lies beyond our ability to fully comprehend in any intellectual sense. The believer does much better at apprehending it with his or her own spirit. There has been at least one not fully expressible moment in my own meditative life when I have briefly but consciously sensed this particular aspect of the glory of God. It is a wondrous impression, one of the most profound I have known in my twenty years of faith. That moment, more than any proposition found in a theological or metaphysical text, is responsible for this essay.

Even as created, and fallen, human beings we ourselves know something of an internal wedding of body and spirit. In fact we do not ever precisely know where the dividing line is between the two. There is union between them, but also a separation, a distinctness. Both exist in a kind of harmony most fully, if not only, present in the redeemed person. This is perhaps a very, very faint echo of the aspect of the Trinity that we concern ourselves with here. It is a function of our being made in the image of God.

So what do we do with the reality that the divine appears both corporeally present in a fixed location while also being spiritually and infinitely present in all locations? I do not think we try to analyze it. Such analysis, especially taken to an extreme, only leads to intellectual paralysis. Instead we can add it to the myriad of reasons why we worship Him. The Christian Faith is full of such glorious paradoxes that, if we let them, call forth praise. This is just, in my opinion, one of the more profound.

We are asked to give up so much in this life once we come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. There seems no way around the fact that much, if not most, of what was integral and important to our lives before our conversion must progressively go, or at least be transformed, if we are ever to move forward in our sanctification. This is a profoundly disturbing thought for those of us whose lives before Christ did not seem to be “all bad”. I would imagine that those souls who knew only misery and degradation before God rescued them have a much easier time with this principle. If your pre-Christian life consisted mostly of felt misery then what would keep you from looking to the cross and happily dumping all that was so obviously not of God?

It is not quite as easy for those of us who grew up in relative affluence, with disposable income that allowed for many of those “First World” pleasures that worldly people assume is their birthright, some of which are inherently sinful and some not. We are the ones who only half-jokingly sing that classic parody of missionary zeal “Please don’t send me to Africa” or the not so innocently reworded classic hymn, “I Surrender…Some”. For us the idea of complete surrender of all we ever had or knew during the “not so bad” days of our previous lives can be, quite frankly, frightening.

Of course it is not that we are unaware that our previous lives often led us into the very dark depths our Lord had to rescue us from in the first place. We knew immediately that some of what constituted those lives had to go and we forsook some aspects of them right away. We also came to know later that other things had to go as well, and we did what we felt we could to cleanse ourselves, often crying out to God in prayer on a quite regular basis for help.

Now, in mid-life, some of us are becoming more and more concerned that certain behavior patterns show no signs of going away. At the same time we are haunted by the idea of “modern day idols”, possessions or activities that somehow approximate worshipping the ancient ones made of wood and stone. This tends to be re-enforced by frequent preaching on the subject that communicates to us that anything can become an idol in our lives. At times we might actually catch ourselves longing to live in a time in history when what constituted an idol was as clear as they were to the ancient Israelites. Now it seems like so many more “idolatry options” exist!

Of course, not everything from our past lives is something God is sternly demanding we get rid of. Some things, for instance, only need to be put in their proper perspective under the Lordship of Christ and become less important to us but not be wholly banished. Others can actually become part of our ministry like a hobby that we now use to spread the gospel in some way, as well as entertain us. It does take, however, a great deal of Spirit-given discernment to know what is “modifiable” and what is “non-negotiable”. I’m not talking here about the obviously sinful activities. It is easy, if we have any grasp of the Scriptures at all, to discern that things like pornography, drunkenness and cheating are never to be part of our lives after conversion. It is the “grayer” areas that most often trouble us. Should we own that car, should we collect those baseball cards, should we listen to secular music that isn’t obviously wicked?

When we do come to the incontrovertible conviction that something in one of those areas must be cut out of our lives it is then that we are faced with removing a habit, interest or possession that, truth be told, we really do enjoy. This is the hard thing to do. Perhaps the greatest help we can ask for from our Lord at such moments of decision (and during the time of actually putting the thing down) is for Him to simply show us that He has far more wonderful things in Mind to send us to fill the spaces left by those things we truly are being called to give up forever. What He intends is a deeply beneficial kind of exchange for the child He loves, an exchange that is actually part of our transformation into His likeness. Sometimes I think we may need a foretaste of the benefits that come to us as we allow holy sanctification to do its work. Certainly it is within God’s power to show us that what we truly give up for Him we give up, among other reasons, to make room for pearls of great price, things that will be pivotal in the blessed transformation of our character. We can pray for that foretaste.

Knowing that what we give up is going to make us more Christlike may not fully remove the sting of loss that comes from finally forsaking what has seemed like a comforting old friend in our lives. But, on the other hand, maybe it will and even if it doesn’t such knowledge can certainly make what is ultimately going to be a very good trade for us much less painful to bear.

Despite the sentiment once expressed by the polymath and theologian, Leibniz, we most certainly do not currently live in the “best of all possible worlds”. Christians surely know this to be true but so, for that matter, do most un-believing people. Even among Secular Humanists and nominally religious people only the most Pollyanna optimists, deliberately looking through rose-tinted glasses, have managed to convince themselves that things are “as they should be” on this planet. Such apparently self-deceived individuals are rare and getting rarer, and for good reason. The realities of these times insure that, sooner or latter, those glasses have to shatter.

For believers the knowledge that things are bad on Earth and getting worse can be a formidable challenge to spiritual formation. While joy and peace are both birthrights of the children of God, and are not supposed to be dependent on either personal or societal “circumstances”, deep discouragement over our living in such a deeply flawed world does sometimes clutch at us. When it does such discouragement can and often does rob us of the real-time experience of those birthrights, if we let it.

How, you may ask, do we not let it? Things are bad here you say and, you are right, they are. We live in a place and time when the Enemy of our souls often does seem to be the primary ruler of this particular plane of existence. At our worst moments we can find it all too easy to assume that if the perfect God of the universe is even present in this profoundly imperfect world He is not really running it. We feel at times that he has ceded most, if not all, power over planet Earth to the Evil One.

This is, however, not the case and only the Devil wants us to continue to believe that it is.

There is a wonderful old hymn entitled “This is my Father’s World”. It is in reckoning with the truth of these five words that we can escape from the lie that wickedness has somehow completely taken over, even in these dark times. The truth is it hasn’t and it can’t; not as long as a sovereign God exists, and that is forever.

Whatever power the creature Satan wields on Earth is limited by the overarching power of his Creator. We are often told in our church’s today that we live in “enemy territory”. On one hand this is true. When Lucifer fell from Heaven he apparently was allowed to “set up shop” here, but only for a limited time with limited power. Moreover our Enemy was given this time and power only to serve the perfect redemptive plan of God in Christ. The Devil, in his self-delusion, will not admit this, but we know it to be true. We know it to be true primarily because we have become personally acquainted with the cross and what transpired there.

God has always held ultimate dominion over all things everywhere. He can no more have the world wrested from His rule in the deepest sense than he can cease to exist. God is Lord even over Satan and God has given Satan the influence he has today only to work out God’s perfect plan to ultimately reveal His glory and save us. As for the Devil’s “rule” on Earth that kingdom began to die with the resurrection of the One we call Savior and the beginnings of His Church. Someday both the Devil and his realm will be gone altogether.

Moreover, while this may not be the best of all possible worlds at the moment it is still a place of great beauty and meaning. Since our Father created it it could not be otherwise. It is difficult, for instance, to look at a dazzling sunset or an azure sea and not realize that God is still very much present here. Our lives this side of Heaven are difficult but they can also be abundant because our Savior promised abundance to those He loves and who love him. We can know His love and the love of others right now and right here, and we can love in return. Earth is not Heaven to be sure, but it is not Hell either.

And it must also be remembered that the New Heavens and Earth are not that far off in our future. Then we will finally know the best of all possible worlds…and world without end.

Some of us find it all too easy to feel that God enjoys forsaking people. I think we have this perception partially because we have found some pleasure, or at least a sense of self-righteous satisfaction, in forsaking others ourselves.

When someone of our acquaintance does something negative to us enough times, or is simply someone we find it difficult to like, our fallen human tendency is to want to put such individuals out of our lives. Oftentimes that is exactly what we do if we think we can do it without censure from other people whom we want to keep in our lives.

When we decide to forsake a relationship with another human being who has hurt us, or simply become a burden to us, we may well feel a sense of “justice” being done. This often involves a subtle (or not so subtle) sense of getting back at someone who we openly or secretly think deserves it. We experience the pleasure of vengeance, if sometimes only on a small scale. We may justify it by saying to ourselves that we are simply setting legitimate boundaries and not being a “door mat”, but the truth is we get a little charge out of writing that person out of our lives.

Now it may be true that sometimes we really have been “casting our pearls before swine” and allowing someone who is unrepentantly abusive to have too big a place in our existence. When we have truly exhausted efforts at reconciliation and take action to avoid needless continuing harm to ourselves this is not necessarily wrong. Neither is realizing our limits and cutting back on a social connection that does not benefit either side of that connection. I am not talking about what might be legitimate action to at least temporarily end relationships that are truly harmful to us and which God may not have called us to continue in. I believe such circumstances can exist, especially when the person in question shows no sign of repentance towards either God or us over a long period of time.

What I am addressing is rather the wrong pleasure we may get out of ridding ourselves of people who simply bother us or, for that matter, feeling that way even towards those who we may have a valid reason to distance ourselves from. Either way we allow ourselves to feel good about cutting someone off. The truth is that, as Christians, we are not within our rights even to revel in completely forsaking a connection with a harmful person. It may be alright to feel relief in such an instance, but not pleasure.

This is because our God and our model is not one who desires to finally “write off” any human being. We are told in Scripture that He “will never leave us or forsake us” once we have truly become His children through Christ. We may push Him away, but He will not take the initiative to push us away. We might make a theological argument that once we leave Him He has no choice but to leave us, but He will never be the one to initiate that leaving because it is not in His perfectly loving nature to do so.

As for forsaking the unrepentedly wicked in the sense of allowing them to go all the way down the wide road that leads to destruction, the Bible tells us that God “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. We might do well to remember that our Lord wept over the people of Jerusalem who did not recognize and welcome the day of his visitation, those who would not come to Him for salvation.

God is all about loving and permanent relationships (even within Himself, witness the Trinity) While it is true that His relationship with us is contingent upon our acceptance of His Son’s sacrifice for our sins He does not ever take pleasure in broken or unrealized relationships between Himself and those He created in His image. Neither should we take pleasure in the breaking of bonds between us and our fellow human beings, whether justified or not.

Perhaps we who wrongly fear a God who would take satisfaction in forsaking us would lose that fear if we were more repentant about our own wrong satisfaction in forsaking others.

The Devil is nothing if not an excellent psychologist. He has had the whole of human history to apply himself to the study of our fallen nature. When we take into consideration the fact that he possesses an enormous, if perverted, intelligence we must soberly realize that Satan has an all too astute understanding of “what makes us tick” behaviorally.

This is critically important for Christians to fully recognize, for if we do not we will gravely underestimate our enemy’s power to wreak havoc on our lives in one of our most vulnerable areas, that of our psyche.

C.S. Lewis tells us that there are two equal and opposite mistakes we make about the Devil. One is to assume that he does not exist and ignore him and the other is to see Satan under every rock and become unhealthily obsessed with him. Depending on the wing of the church you belong to you will most likely lean towards one or the other mistake. Oftentimes the more “cerebral” denominations tend to dismiss spiritual warfare while the more emotionally-driven ones become obsessed with it. Conservative Episcopalians and Charismatic Pentecostals are, for instance, not likely to see eye to eye on how to best handle the reality of Personal Evil in our world.

But for the thoughtful and biblical believer in any denominational camp the spiritual obligation remains the same. We must know our enemy if we are to overcome him in Christ. As the Scripture tells us we need be aware of the Devil’s schemes and that means also being aware of his capabilities. This includes having some understanding of how He works in the psychological realm.

A capable Christian counselor, who has been well-trained in perceiving the environmental and genetic factors that have melded a particular human personality, can have a great deal of positive influence on a client’s walk with God (especially if that counselor looks at the many findings of psychological study through a truly biblical lens.) After a long period of therapy, and with the Holy Spirit’s help, such a counselor can come to sense much of what his or her subject’s state of mind and even soul are during any particular session. This is an impressive ability that comes into the possession of a good therapist after many years of prayer, training and field work.

The problem for us is that our spiritual enemy has had thousands of years of such “training and field work” and has, we can safely assume, applied his diabolical intelligence to his own knowledge of the human mind and soul. Today he uses his vast knowledge in this area to wage war on us, seeking only our harm. We dare not underestimate the implications of this aspect of spiritual warfare. While the Devil may not be able to read our minds he can perceive much about us and our weaknesses by simply observing our lives, or having his demonic underlings observe our lives in his stead. It is safe to state that such a supernatural being knows at least as much about our psychological weaknesses as does the best human counselor.

I say this not to give believers another reason to dread spiritual warfare, but rather to further equip “Christian soldiers” with vital knowledge of their enemy. With such knowledge we will not be blindsided by Satan’s attempts to attack our psyche and can apply the strong spiritual armor our Lord equips us with specifically to such attacks. With God’s help we can learn to recognize when a bout of depression, anxiety, or other emotional affliction is the result of satanic or demonic attack and how to defend ourselves against such attacks in the future.

The fundamental thing to remember is that when we are called “more than conquerors” through the unsurpassed power of the Lord Jesus Christ this as much applies to overcoming the Devil’s psychological assaults on our minds and souls as it does any other kind of assault. Once we know our enemy’s “schemes” we can come to know how to pray and act to defeat those schemes and if we, in faith, rely on the power of our Lord to do so defeat them we will.

So Satan may indeed be a great psychologist. He may, in fact, be many seemingly impressive things but because of the cross he still remains an ultimately conquered enemy for we who are the sons and daughters of God.

 “Don’t let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become.”

This bit of pre-marital advice from the brother of the bride in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” holds a great deal of common grace wisdom that can be applied to the Christian life. All of us have pasts, some good, some bad, and most a mixture of both. Despite the church’s frequent out of context reading of Paul’s admonition to “forget what lies behind” (one expressly related to rejecting the works-righteousness of his Pharisee days) we have no choice but to grapple with our past. Those who think they can forget it often find themselves being unconsciously and negatively defined by it for the rest of their lives.

Where we do have a choice is in how we deal with our past. I believe there is a biblically-congruent and divinely-blessed way of resolving even the worst aspects of our personal history, especially those aspects that have caused us continued pain and have stymied our spiritual growth. This is found in purposely remembering, purposely grieving and purposely forgiving, all with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Our Lord calls us to childlike trust if we want to grow in the grace and knowledge of Him. But for all too many of us our childhoods were problematic at best and nightmarish at worst and the coping mechanisms we adopted to help us survive have robbed us of the very childlikeness we desperately need to truly follow our Lord and experience the abundant life He promises His children. We became hardened, cynical and bitter and we limited our range of emotion to survive. Distrust of anyone but ourselves was often the result.

I wish I could say that such aspects of our pre-Christian character are miraculously and completely removed from us at the time of our conversion. Perhaps for a few people God does perform such a miracle, but I’ve yet to meet someone who appears to have been genuinely delivered in such an immediate and permanent way. For most of us salvation grants us the power we need to begin to change and heal and then, with Christ’s help, we must spend the rest of our earthly lives consciously and progressively working out this aspect of our sanctification.

Let me make a bold statement: the best parts of childhood, even prior to Christian conversion, need to be set free in our memory to be cherished and relived, not forgotten. By this I mean that whatever went wrong in our distant past must not be allowed to rob us of whatever good memories we can recover and re-integrate into our adult lives today. The seemingly innate closeness to God, the innocence, the vividness and sublimity of life as children, all these things can and should be allowed to be a part of who we are now.

Our deep past re-integrated into our present lives can be a sacred and God-ordained part of our future.

How do we do this? How do we recapture the joy of our childhood when concurrent or subsequent events seemed to kill the entirety of what we once happily knew and took for granted? The answer involves a very intentional journey into a place that might seem like the very opposite of our goal, the place of deeply expressed grief.

Grieving our past is, when bathed in prayer and submitted to God, a pathway to healing and restoration. Despite those stoic believers who tell you to just “trust Jesus and move on” (whatever that means) deep and even long periods of intentional grief over our very real losses in life is part of God’s prescription for granting us abundant life even here on Earth. Our Lord wept over Lazarus and Jerusalem. He is described as “a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief.” If we take these and other verses at face value, and I believe we should, we can be assured that our Lord’s humanity included many tears shed during his 33 years in the world.

If this is true we are in no way sinning when we sit down with photographs or our childhood, put on some emotionally moving music, stare at those pictures of a time seemingly lost forever…and cry our eyes out. This is especially true when we begin the process by praying that Jesus will draw near to us, stay with us through those tears and use them to achieve his perfectly loving will for our lives.

Over time these periods of intentional grieving can cleanse us from all kinds of spiritual and emotional garbage from our past, garbage that continues to hold us down and hold us back from the abundant adult life God always intended for us.

A huge part of that cleansing comes from a beautiful byproduct of God-ordained and directed grieving, true forgiveness towards those who robbed us of our childhood joy so long ago. As we work through anger to sadness and emotional catharsis we may find ourselves remembering those who hurt us, often those we loved most, and beginning to see them in a new light. While we may not forget what they did to us we also remember how much we loved them (or even wanted to love them) and as we weep a strange and often unexpected thing happens; our hearts soften towards them. This is because grief can run even deeper in us than anger, if we let it, and it is anger that ultimately keeps us locked in un-forgiveness.

As we intentionally grieve the good part of our past is somehow restored to us in our memory, never to be lost to us again the way it once was. Beyond that the childlike trust of childhood begins to flow, if only slowly, back into our consciousness and we become more able to find the faith we need to follow Jesus Christ in a profoundly deeper way.

This kind of “soul-work” is sometimes hard. It is not easy to remember something precious that was taken from us, especially during the initial phases of grief, and we do well to enter the process slowly and with a great deal of prayer. It is also important to remember that real change comes over time, as Shakespeare wrote “what wound did ever heal but by degrees?”

Yes, it is hard, but what we achieve through the process of intentional grieving ultimately becomes a precious and irreplaceable part of our sanctification. It is something we will never regret doing, either in this life or the next.

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Real love can be a difficult thing to both give and receive. This is especially true for those of us for whom human affection has been an inconstant, conditional thing. It is also true of we who, for that and other reasons, have a terrible tendency towards “self-preservation” at the cost of relationship. As with many aspects of our flawed nature we can be loveless partially because of what has been done to us and partially because of how we have wrongly reacted to what has been done to us. Because of this we need both healing and repentance to happen in our lives if we ever want to be filled with the truest love of all, the love of Christ. The process by which we come to know more of God’s love in our hearts, in all it forms, is frankly a hard path to walk. The journey we take to learn to allow healing in our lives, and to sincerely give up that within us which frustrates such healing, can be long and difficult. In fact to get rid of the impediments that keep us from receiving and giving love we must become reconciled to much pain. As one secular band accurately sings, “…love is not the easy thing.”

It is, however, the only thing that is worth having in the end. As 1st Corinthians 13 teaches us, “without love we are nothing”. A completely loveless person does not possess true life at all, either here or in eternity. To be forever loveless is the ultimate tragedy that can befall a human being.

For over twenty years I have tried to walk the path of love in Christ. Sometimes I am amazed at how little progress I have made down that path. My relationships with both God and the most important people in my life remain full of self-centeredness, the antithesis of love. It is very hard to truly care about another when everything within me at times seems directed only at preserving my idea of how things ought to be. Most often “how things ought to be” means whatever will give me the most comfort. As long as I operate in this spirit I cheat myself of many things that are vastly more important than my comfort, all of which have to do with loving God with everything that is within me and also loving those He loves.

In my selfishness I grieve the Spirit of God in me and can harm the very people I claim to care about. I also shoot myself in the proverbial foot for when I hurt God or another I hurt myself. When self-centeredness trumps love it damages the self-centered person as well as others. Jesus meant what He said when He said that “those who try to keep their lives will lose them”. This is the absolute truth coming from He Who is absolute truth. Somehow I must transcend my self-interest realizing that I must in fact die to it and live instead unto and for the God of love.

This very notion would be an absolute impossibility were it not for a literal “saving grace”, one also expressed in the Scriptures, and it is this: “We love because God first loved us.” God is thankfully not only absolute truth but absolute love. If I am not to leave my readers (and myself) with a profound sense of hopelessness I must declare this particular truth to the skies. We cannot summon up love in any way in and of ourselves. Our only hope to know real love for others is found in the Lord giving it to us out of the infinite overflow of His own love. It is divine love and divine love alone, whether received directly from Him or through others, that enables us to love anyone. The long, difficult process of becoming someone who truly loves is only made possible by God taking the initiative to love us despite our self-centeredness. Only He can fill us with what we so desperately need to overcome the tyranny of the self.

I wish I could tell you at this moment how to make sure that we are so filled. I suspect it has to do with personal desire. Do we ultimately desire our own way or His? Do we really want to go through the real pain of dying to self in order to find God and His love? Do we truly think it worth it? As much as I’d like to I cannot tell you how much of that desire is our responsibility and how much is His. There has always been mystery in these eternally vital questions and after 2000 years of theological debate by those more holy than me I have little to add to the subject.

I can only say this: for whatever reason I have not given up on love, despite sometimes being sorely tempted to do just that. This is, in itself, a not so small miracle. It is a tremendous part of what keeps me confessing the Name of a loving God’s loving Son. It is also a tremendous part of what keeps me both sane and moving, I hope forwards, in love…and in loving.

Copyright 2011, 2023 by Shea Oakley

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Grace is more powerful than our worst moments.This can be an incredibly comforting truth for the struggling believer to meditate upon. Many of us have an unfortunate tendency to believe that God’s sovereign grace is not sufficient to deliver us out of any trial or tribulation that comes our way. Even more than that, we doubt that it can deliver us when the trials and tribulations in question are ones we have brought upon ourselves. It is in the throes of such self-inflicted difficulties, often severe difficulties, that we are most likely to forget that one of the best practical definitions of grace is “unmerited favor.” When a child of God cries out to Him for mercy, with a spirit that at least desires the desire for repentance, He responds with that favor. We often do not get what we deserve and even if we do the grace of our Lord carries us through.

If I had a dollar for every time I thought myself “beyond the pale”, guilty of some action or thought or mood that would forever destroy my relationship with God, I think I would be a millionaire. My 30+ years of faith have seen great turmoil of mind and spirit. At times, particularly in my early years, I have looked at the sin that remains in my life and felt that only divine justice could be left for me. During such seasons the harder passages of scripture seemed to leap off the page and into my desperate heart, while those promising mercy and compassion from the One I call my Lord disappeared as if written in vanishing invisible ink. These have been the worst moments of my existence. More than once I have nearly despaired of my spiritual life in Christ, the only life worth possessing. Many times all I could weakly pray was this: “God have mercy on my soul”.

Now this is what you must know, reader. Every time I have prayed this prayer of desperation, or one like it, God has eventually restored me to my right mind and to a place of comfort and hope. He has done this for me over and over and over again during these past two decades. When this happens to you on enough occasions you finally begin to believe in both the power of the grace of God and the fact that this grace applies even to you.

Some Christians seem to believe that if you sneeze you can lose your salvation. There are two primary reasons to hold to such hyper-Arminianism. One is because you are a legalistic Pharisee who gets some kind of pleasure out of inciting fear in those you think spiritually inferior to yourself. The other is because you are a person who is constitutionally fearful, often with some “help” from people who have done great wrong to you in this life. This is usually compounded with difficulty in forgiving those people. Because of this latter problem you who have known what it is to be an innocent victim of abuse may even, frankly, find yourself being a bit pharisaical towards others at times. Misery loves to make company and un-forgiveness seems to lead all too easily to self-righteousness.

The reason I spent the last paragraph describing this spiritual condition is because it is a state that breeds resistance to, and disbelief in, grace. If it sounds autobiographical that is because it is. I have been all these things, a hyper-Arminian, pharisaical, unforgiving victim of abuse; so coming to believe that grace can embrace, sustain and transform even such a person as this is, of course, very precious to me. Since I’ve met more than a few people who share my character flaws I write this now because I hope it can be a similarly precious reality in their own lives.

Now this is the thing to remember and it is not something most biblical Christians aren’t familiar with either because this thing is right out of the Word of God and it is this: God’s grace is sufficient. It is sufficient for far more than our fearful, disbelieving hearts can sometimes grasp. Its sufficiency, I believe, even extends to that fear and disbelief. As long as we are humble enough to sincerely ask for both grace to save and grace to change that grace will be provided us in superabundance, grace not only sufficient to deliver us from death, but more than that grace sufficient to put us back on the right track in this Christian life.

And, yes, even fear and disbelief can be finally destroyed by this gift of a supremely loving God. Over time this has been my own blessed experience. I pray it will be yours as well.

“…none has ever returned to the divine favor except through the sheer goodness of God.”

This quote from A.W. Tozer’s classic little book, The Knowledge of the Holy, was a deep comfort to me recently. It reminded me in no uncertain terms that my salvation comes only from the very nature of my Savior and in no way from my own “flesh-righteousness” (an oxymoron, by the way, if there ever was one!) I was especially captivated by “the sheer goodness” part of this 20th century Christian mystic’s statement of the truth.

The word “sheer” is often used in conjunction with another word, “strength.” When so used it conjures up an image of a strength that is both singular and perhaps even unlimited. The term “sheer strength” can certainly be applied to God as well but there is something about the idea of His sheer goodness that somehow is a far greater boon to my sense of well being. That God has unlimited power is one thing, but for Him to also possess unlimited goodness is wonderful beyond words. The fact that our Lord has both is a blessed source of joy to those who love Him, mostly because we know deep inside ourselves that we would not be able to love Him if he had not first loved us and that this love is a function of His goodness. It is good to love and no one is more good and, thus loving, than Jesus Christ.

For me sheer goodness also signifies a particular attribute of the divine and, by definition, all attributes of God are linked with all others. In this case that goodness is most linked in my mind with two in particular, the infinite and the eternal attributes of deity. As such God’s goodness neither runs out nor ends in the lives of His children, not ever. This is good to know when we find ourselves frightened by our own seemingly endless reservoir of darkness and wrong belief. We were initially saved from both by our saving encounter with our Lord’s sheer goodness and we continue to be delivered from the tenacious but dying remnants of both by that same sheer goodness, if we let Him.

Sound Theology 101 tells us that it is God who makes us acceptable to God, not us. Salvation by grace through faith in the Son of God is the cardinal distinctive of Christianity and we spiritual workaholics need to be constantly reminded of this fact. Otherwise we continue to get caught up in “works-righteousness” and forget who we are in Christ in the most tragic way. Every so often (and perhaps more often than that) we need this truth to be communicated to us in some fresh new way in words we have not heard before. The Tozer quote I shared at the beginning of this essay was such a new word. Somehow the idea of God’s “sheer goodness” seemed to transcend and dissipate some of the spiritual anxiety I happened to be feeling yesterday in a way which, for instance, the theological declaration that “salvation is by faith alone” would not have.

This is why I rejoice in many extra-biblical writings that are biblically faithful but express the truths of scripture in different ways. The Bible is the only book I read every day, and may it never be otherwise, but I am also so thankful for men like A.W. Tozer and C.S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers who help me to see the singular truths of the Word of God from new angles. I am indebted to them for the many times some insight they have shared in a fresh way has lessened the burden of my fearful heart.

So perhaps that is why I am repeating this particular quote of Tozer’s so freely and often in this piece; because just maybe it will free you in a difficult moment the way it freed me. If so let us both presume that it was the sheer goodness of God acting on my heart that made me want to share it with you.

There is something that comes to me after spending some quiet time just contemplating the woods and sky outside my living room window. I can be in a state of anxiety or negativity and just staring out the window at the direct creation of God can transport me to a different state of mind and heart. As I watch the branches newly budded with spring leaves sway in the wind the circumstantial fears I may be struggling with at the moment begin to fade as I am caught up in the profound sublimity of a natural world that is so much larger than I.

It is important to sometimes look at things that dwarf our individual perspectives.

Some Christians, the author included, have looked down their noses at people who call being out in nature their way of “going to church”. It is certainly true that going fishing on Sunday mornings is not a good habit for believers to get into. We need to be in church corporately worshipping our Lord, hearing His word, and ministering to his people. But the truth is that sometimes we can effectively come into contact with the God of the Bible by entering into meditation on the natural realm He has created and called good. This is not the contemplation of the Pantheist I speak of but the contemplation of a God both in nature and beyond nature. This seems to me a bit of a paradox. He is separate from nature but it is still redolent of Him. It carries the fragrance of His eternality.

For me the trees, sky, wind and sunlight point me towards the divine because they have been created by the divine, and somehow impregnated by the divine as well. When I gaze in wonder at a certain kind of natural scene (like the one outside my window) I know that the comfort I begin to feel is from knowing that God has created the scene, sustains the scene and in some sense reveals the mystery of Himself and my own existence in the scene. At moments the profoundness of it all calls up a yearning in me that is one of the best things I have ever known in my earthly life. I believe this is because it points me beyond my earthly life. I feel as if I have touched, or been touched by, the transcendent.

I have gotten the impression that some of the more radical Puritans of centuries ago actually disliked nature. They seemed to consider the wilderness to be a place of spiritual darkness and danger that needed to be quickly razed and turned into city or farmland, something under the control of mankind. Their idea of nature was that it was a place of disorder that only existed to be subjugated and tamed by us. You can still see this, I believe, in those contemporary believers who warn us about the dangers of loving nature. They believe we are always on the edge of some kind of Pantheistic idolatry when we are seeking spiritual succor in forests and seas and mountains.

I disagree.

I know that God created nature and that nature is separate and subservient to Him. I know also that some day nature as we know it will burn-up along with the rest of the present heavens and earth. It is not literally eternal in its present form. It is temporal and subject to imperfection and decay. I do not expect to worship it or any other created thing. But I refuse to assume that it is not a kind of portal to God. It is most certainly not the bridge to God that Jesus Christ is, God forbid such a terrible heresy, but in it we catch sublime glimpses of Him. His handiwork points us towards His mind and heart. How could it not since God’s mind and heart are where His natural creation ultimately originates from. In looking intently at the creation we gain deep insight, although perhaps on a non-verbal level, into the ultimate beauty and wisdom and goodness of the Creator.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay one of the most tonic results of fixing my eyes and my heart on natural things is simply to find perspective on my problems and on my smallness in relation to both the created universe and, perhaps more importantly, to the One who made it. It helps me find some semblance of humility, which is no small trick for a 21st century, affluent Western male.

Just for that effect alone I am thankful for Christ, through Whom we know “all things were made that have been made”; so deep contemplation of that view outside my window brings me into a state of mind and heart that is pleasing to my Lord and Savior. Could it be He willed me to find both that state and Himself in the contemplating? I believe it is so.