Month: June 2012

I have recently found myself very grateful for something or, more accurately, for Someone Who is finally becoming larger than my daily fears, bigger than my most personally daunting responsibilities. Lately I have been able to truly focus on God, and the things of God, in a way in which, somehow, that which so often looms darkly in my “circumstantial life” becomes muted. Could this finally be what it means to enter “the shadow of His wings”, to be brought to a place where that which seems so overwhelming at times fades blessedly away, at least for a needed respite? While I’m not sure exactly what transpires at such moments when they happen I am that much freer as a child of God.

Though it is explicitly biblical, today it can seem almost a spiritual cliché to encourage people to “seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” We are promised that in doing so all other things in our lives that are truly needful will be taken care of by the One Whose kingdom we seek. But what exactly does that mean? What does it look like to have a heart, mind, soul and spirit truly looking to God first and foremost. I cannot give an answer for the totality of this way of living simply because I am very far from achieving it for myself. But I have found that there is a way to meditate on the Divine that is beginning to fulfill this promise in my own life, at least in the sense of the “other things” being put in their proper perspective.

I am leery of formulas and so I hesitate to share the exact details of my devotional exercises. I assume that different approaches work for different people. That said I will state that a combination of music, visual splendor and the written word most effectively serve this purpose for me. It is my habit to make Sundays a Sabbath day. I try not to be legalistic about it but this day of the week is, for me, a time to avoid work, commerce, and media that isn’t specifically Christian in nature. It is also a time to lie on my couch, look out my living room window at the “direct creation” that is nature, put a requiem on my stereo and read something that is fairly deep spiritually (most recently this has been The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer.) I also journal during this time. As for how long a period it is, my Sunday afternoon devotional usually lasts for about an hour and twenty minutes, the time it takes to listen to the entire CD of sacred music.

During this period of meditation on God and His attributes I often sense the world, as the old Hymn Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus puts it, growing “strangely dim”. By this I do not mean the physical world, but the world of my earthly concerns, the things that cause me anxiety and all too much of the time make me at least consciously forget my Maker.

I should tell you that it has taken me years to get to the point where I could even concentrate on spiritual reality for this long a duration. The modern world does not lend itself to the kind of focused meditation I suppose those in cloistered communities have enjoyed through the centuries. Certainly my life doesn’t and I do not even bear some of the responsibilities that my friends do. However as long as it has taken me to get to this point in my Christian life I cannot adequately express how important it has been to me for it to happen.

Another cliché that gets bandied about in the evangelical world is “too busy not to pray”. As with most clichés it contains a kernel of truth that cannot be denied. Some who read this will blanch at the idea of a day given over to the things of God. Others will find it difficult to imagine concentrating on anything for 80 minutes. Trust me when I say I empathize. Also let me state that some Sabbaths are more uninterrupted and spiritually productive for me than others. But the fact remains that my life in Christ cannot prosper unless I put significant time aside to seek Him and I think this is true of all of us. We all desperately need the world to grow strangely dim, for His light to wax strong in our vision and for this to happen more and more often.

Otherwise, at best, we miss out on the abundant life in our Lord that we could all be living and at worst we may lose sight of Him altogether.

Copyright 2011 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is vital that we who call ourselves the children of God understand what the Fatherhood of God in our lives really means. Every one of us has had an imperfect earthly father. Because of this many of us seem to be always fighting the temptation to think that our Father above is somehow as imperfect as was our father “below.”

One of the best ways to combat such wrong conceptions about our heavenly Father is, of course, to realize that His character is perfectly reflected in His Son. One of the cardinal characteristics of Christ was and is His desire to help every hurting soul who comes to Him for help. It is clear from the Scriptures that Jesus wanted to heal, help, and save those who were lost, broken and desperate. If the Son deeply desired “to seek and save that which is lost.” We can safely assume His Father feels the same way. In fact our Lord feels this way even though those He desires to help are still people who sin.

If we have truly become blood-bought sons and daughters of our Maker then we have become the children of a Father whose every inclination towards us is purely benevolent. Most of us, though not all, have had earthly fathers who we can at least sense did not wake up in the morning with the conscious intent to hurt us. Even bad fathers often have some sense of love for their children, though it may be partially or even mostly buried under the effects of sin in their own lives. However God never has anything less than a perfectly loving intent towards us. You see, He can’t because His love, like Him, is perfect.

This does not mean that the love of our Father in Heaven will always feel like love in our sin-damaged hearts. Sometimes true love has to hurt or allow hurt in its object in order to help it. Perhaps you have heard the apocryphal story of the human father who had to hold down his toddler son while a doctor was forced to work on a deep wound without the benefit of anesthetic. The child cried out in pain and could not understand why his human daddy would not let him wiggle away from his “tormentor”. But it was love that caused the man to hold his son still, probably with tears in his own eyes, while the Doctor cleansed and stitched the wound. He knew that this kind of pain experienced then would prevent infection and possible death later. He also knew that his child would understand someday why he had to do it.

As long as we live in a fallen world, as people who still have bad things dwelling in us, our loving Father will sometimes have no recourse but to heal us with some pain involved. It is here we must understand that God may use such pain in our lives only as part of the process of preparing us to be with Him forever after we leave this life. God will never harm we who are His beloved children. There is a world of difference between harming and hurting. One can be curative, the other only malevolent and the Father of Jesus Christ is incapable of malevolence.

Our earthly fathers, for the most part, at least tried to love and help us. Yes, sadly some did not even try. This is the unavoidable legacy of being sinners born to sinners. In order to overcome the damage we have sustained, and the bitterness that so often accompanies that damage, we must come to know our new Father as He truly is. One of the primary ways we can do this is by looking to the truth of His word. The Bible again and again reveals to the earnest reader the benevolent and merciful character of the Son of God, the Son of the Father. In Scripture we are shown that, in His earthly pilgrimage, Jesus personally and deeply wanted to heal all those He met who were sick or oppressed, and heal them for good.

So, too, does His Father…and ours.

We cannot love others in order to win God’s love towards us. To the Biblically literate Christian this may seem like an obvious statement, one so integral to the message of the New Testament that it hardly needs to be stated. But, unfortunately, like other apparently basic realities revealed by the Word of God, this truth is hard for many a struggling believer in Jesus Christ to live out.

The Bible makes it clear that “We love because He first loved us” and that apart from Him we can do nothing. The implication is clear. We love others because we are loved by God and have received that love, not so we can obtain His love in the first place.

This is, of course, a variation on the theme of the futility of working for our salvation. It is a theme central to true Christianity. Our good works are only real, and only pleasing to God, if they come as a result of a saving relationship in Christ, a relationship that only His work on the cross makes possible. We do not work to become saved or stay saved. We work because we are saved, because the result of our being grafted into the true vine that is the resurrected Son of God is the fruit of good works.

This “fruit of the Spirit” is largely made manifest in the form of sincere love towards other human beings, the kind of love that often results in helping others in a personally costly way. Yet, despite the cost, this kind of helping is something we want to do. There is little or no sense of compulsion in doing it. If anything it is a joy. This is because the love of Christ inhabits us and fills us with love like His own. In some sense it then “overflows” out of us and onto others.

This seems so simple a concept. Our Lord and Savior is the vine and we are the branches. Branches do not toil to produce leaves and fruit; they do so because the vine to which they are attached provides the power for them to do so. So when a child of God truly loves he or she is acting as a vessel of the Supreme Lover. We love because we receive Christ’s love for ourselves, and that love is naturally extended to those around us, at least if we co-operate with God in being personally willing to love others.

It seems simple but actually living it out appears difficult if not impossible for many a professing Christian. Why? We must return to the unpleasant reality that our fallen nature, our “flesh”, is all about earning everything we need to survive and what is more needful to every human being than love, both received and given? Often added to our intrinsic tendency towards trying to “earn love” (which is a profound oxymoron, by the way) is damage we have received from other fallen beings who only loved us when we did something for their benefit.

The blessed hope for the person who has tried, and invariably failed, to love people in order to “make” God love them is the persistence of divine grace. Over time the genuine love of Christ can break through to gently convict the heart of one caught up in the futility of insincere, flesh-driven “love”. This may take time, even a long time but God has a way of bringing us to the end of our rope of self-effort. It is only then that we can become open to the love Christ freely gives. At that point we have a choice to allow this kind of love into our hearts of hearts or continue in the bondage of a truly loveless existence. By the mercy of our God may we all finally make the choice to receive the perfect and unconditional love made manifest on the cross of His only begotten Son….and then give it away.

“When our feelings are turned off or insulated by layers of protective defense, life loses something precious. We trudge on, accomplishing plenty but appreciating little.”

This quote by the writer Michael McGowan captures the dilemma of killing our emotions in order to “survive” repeated trauma in our lives. Christians are just as likely as non-Christians to fall into this trap. In fact Christians may actually be more likely to because of conservative evangelicalism’s tendency to warn about the dangers of trusting in feelings rather than in “pure” theological rationality. Some of our teachers and preachers even make it a point to admonish us about “emotionalism”, as if human emotions are somehow more corrupted by the Fall than human reason. The truth is that both are equally fallen, though in different ways.

Sometimes believers who have “turned off” or “insulated” their feelings to try to defend their hearts from further pain are exactly the ones who are preaching in an unbalanced way against emotionalism. Such individuals are not even aware that what is driving sermons that elevate intellectual cognition above passionate experience is an unconscious fear of what might happen if their own emotions were ever to be faced and experienced.

Without giving an apologetic for the opposite extreme, the pursuit of emotional highs in God’s presence that certainly do have the potential to foster an “idolatry of feelings”, I will state that a life largely free from spiritual emotion is, in actuality, more like a living death. If that sounds extreme I must plead guilty. It is extreme and I know this from my own unfortunate personal experience. I have known this kind of daily deadening of my life that has resulted from “feelings turned off” for far too much of my Christian experience.

As McGowan intimates, living with constantly repressed emotions does not necessarily keep one from achievement in the world’s or even the church’s eyes. The problem is that your achieving does you no good because you cannot even enjoy your success. Many of us even appear to have a certain spiritual maturity because of the emotional stoicism we have embraced as a defense from pain. We may seem more self-controlled and coolly competent than others in our congregations. But it is all a façade to keep ourselves safe from feelings which we are afraid will overwhelm us and even somehow cause us to sin in some spectacular manner. This is perhaps most often true when one of the primary emotions we are squelching is long held anger and un-forgiveness.

Thankfully in my own life I have gradually come to be able to open myself up to the experience of healthy emotion. This change has manifested itself in everything from becoming enraptured by the divine sublimity of nature to allowing myself to cry over losses I have experienced in life. Today I know not only that deep emotion is a desirable thing to have but also that, by God’s grace, I can have it. I can tear down the walls that have kept me locked up inside for far too long.

Both reason and emotion have important roles to play in our sanctification. It is in realizing a balance between cold rationality and reckless emotionalism that we come to enjoy the benefits of both mind and heart in right relation to God. It was Him, after all, Who has given us both and called it good and why would this not be, considering that our Lord Himself is both a rational and emotional Being? We are, after all, made (and being re-made) in His perfect image.

For many years, too many, I have sought refuge in sleep. I am one of those people who, if left to their own devices, will sleep far too late into the day and wake up not refreshed but, more often, anxious. Perhaps that anxiety comes from a deep sense that I am wasting too much of my life in the fitful darkness of un-needed slumber.

It is well known that people who are depressed either sleep too much or too little, and during previous periods in that condition mine was the first problem. Now I find that, even though no longer clinically depressed, I often continue to nap when I do not really need one, to “sleep in” when I could and most likely should be “redeeming the time.”

Lately I’ve also wondered about missing the sublime beauty of the morning. I could say that I’ve always been a “night person” however that would be dishonest. I have been one for most of my life, but not all. The fact is I remember the distant past of my early childhood when I could not wait to get out of bed and into a day filled with good things. These were the things I took for granted in the innocence of that time, wonderful things I thought would always last but didn’t. Yet childhood seemed to me then a sort of world without end, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. In Louis Armstrong’s words I loved both “the bright, blessed day” and “the dark, sacred night”. In fact I believe that I loved both equally.

Now the beginning of the day is a time to drag myself out of a warm bed and face my adult responsibilities and anxieties. I hardly notice the glory of the morning any more and haven’t for many, many years. But recently some of my spiritual meditations have become focused, almost without conscious thought, on light. My mother once told me that the first intelligible word I ever uttered was “light”. I guess I was fascinated by it, as many infants and toddlers are. Now I find myself becoming fascinated by it, in all its forms, once more and perhaps the most beautiful natural light there is is morning light. But that would mean waking up extra-early to sit by a window facing East. That would mean getting less than the absolute maximum amount of sleep I can get away with and, for now, I just do not want to make the effort.

For now….

I suppose I have made a kind of idolatry of sleep. Because of this uncomfortable thought, I do not think it strange that my sleep hasn’t been deeply restful in a very long time, that my dreams are far more often disturbing than not, that the enemy of my soul has always attacked me most horribly and effectively in some of those dreams….and yet I continue to sleep whenever I can.

Perhaps it is high time that I ask my believing friends and loved ones to pray for this literal “sleeper” to “arise” and feel more of the warmth and light of Christ shining upon him. I say this because, left to my own devices, to my own spiritual “strength” I believe I will continue to use unconsciousness as a refuge from the difficulties of my life rather than a time to be recharged to meet and overcome them…and this is not good.

The dawn was once magical to me, a long, long time ago. I suspect it could be again and this time with the added grace of perceiving the sunrise as a believer in the One Who arose from His own deeper slumber one bright morning two-thousand years ago…and exceeded even its light with His own.