July 4, 2012 – sheaoakley.com

God’s Touch and Sin’s End
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Once we have tasted of Heaven continuing to live voluntarily in a hell of our own making is no longer an option for most of us. The sins that once captivated us are progressively exposed for what they are every time we are visited by the reality of God’s loving touch in our lives.

Before we crossed the threshold of salvation we thought the sins we committed actually gave us some kind of life. Then we realized that they were killing us and many of us came close enough to the final spiritual death they engendered to deeply understand, perhaps better than most, that drinking the poison of transgression had to stop.

Soon, however, most new Christians realize that some sins are more easily shed than others. Often the initial transformative power of conversion allows us to put down one or more of the sins that were present in our lives. Others are not given up so easily. This is most often true with habitual transgressions that resulted from lifestyle choices we made as non-believers. Habits are not easily broken. Some Christians still struggle with saying no to certain actions even years after Christ entered their lives.

It is dangerous to presume to judge how long someone can fail to have full victory over habitual sin without that failure doing irreparable damage to their relationship with God. The process of sanctification is just that, a process, and the purification of a soul is measured over the span of years, not days or weeks. The key is attitude. There is a world of difference between one who continues to vigorously resist whatever the particular temptation is, confessing when he or she falls, and someone who most of the time gives in to that temptation and is decreasingly concerned about it.

For many of us taking the second path is not one we could easily consider. I often tell people I am witnessing to that the first ten seconds of the compassionate presence of God, which I experienced at my time of conversion from Atheism, surpassed every experience the world had offered me prior to that time. Since then I have been blessed by other moments of unspeakable joy in communion with Him. Even when such moments are widely dispersed in the midst of long periods of great trial they never fail to profoundly encourage me. I think of them as “postcards from Heaven”.

All Christians receive such moments of blessing at various times and to varying degrees. When we are caught up in these moments committing sin is the last thing on our minds and hearts. When our eyes are filled with the surpassing goodness and beauty of God nothing else matters. As the hymn writer tells us “the things of this world grow strangely dim”.

After such experiences end what does not end is the deep heart-awareness that nothing is better than this. The believer is haunted by the memory of times of intimacy with God. Sadly the old temptations often return as we descend into the valley after our time on the mountain-top, but the knowledge that the pleasure of sin does not come close to what we were lifted into during that blessed time does not completely leave us. It is hard to return to sin-induced hells of our own making afterwards. We have known something (or, more accurately, Someone) surpassingly greater than whatever pleasure the sin has given us in our life and this stays with us.

We do well to call to our memory what it was like to dwell in the light of His countenance whenever the struggles of the Christian life tempt us to give up and give in. We also do well to look forward with the eyes of faith to the next time Our Lord will touch us with His love. These times, both remembered and looked forward to, are powerful motivators in our ongoing battle with temptation. They speak to us of the final victory over sin which is God’s will for every one of His children.

Repentance, Healing and Three Attributes of God
Copyright 2010 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is vital that we come to know in our hearts that God is greater than anything we have ever experienced and therefore capable of changing that which we may have known for most of our time on earth. There are so many things in our lives that we have seen and felt, been and done, possessed and lost. All too often these things have crippled us spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, and may continue to do so long years into our Christian lives.

It is easy to forget, or simply to not fully believe in, some of the attributes of God that can give us the most hope for real personal transformation. For instance we forget that He is omnipotent, all-powerful. There is nothing in our damaged and sin-wracked hearts that His power cannot heal once we have repented in spirit and in truth. Even the very ability to give ourselves over to such repentance comes from His omnipotent kindness leading us there. We fail to remember that His capacity to transform is absolute. His arm is never too short to save no matter how bad we think our lives have been or how terrible and repetitive have been our sins. It is a matter of recognizing that God is not “almighty” in the abstract. He is almighty in our most intimate and guarded selves. He is almighty to us as individuals.

God is also omniscient. By this we mean that He is all-knowing. Sometimes, many times if those of us who struggle are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we do not really feel “known” by the One we call Lord. This is because we do not feel the intimacy with God that we assume would come with being so known. But God never promises that we will always sense His presence in the “knowing”. We must take it on faith that His very nature as God insures that nothing which continues to hurt and cripple us is not fully and intimately known and understood by Him. We must trust that the power He can wield in our lives for good is always guided by a personal knowledge of who we are that goes far beyond our own often flawed self-knowledge.

These two attributes, omnipotence and omniscience, are vital for us to apprehend and accept as absolute truth if we are to find the faith to believe in the potential of God’s transformative power for our lives. But they are not enough for us. We must also accept another eternal attribute of our Creator and Redeemer in Christ if we are to have real hope. That attribute is His absolute goodness. Our God is un-utterably good. There is nothing of the wicked to be found in Him….ever. Wickedness is a characteristic only of created beings that were given the divine gift of free-will and then used it to rebel against God. God Himself is purely good and therefore, by blessed extension, good to us. The aspect of this goodness that is most needful for we who struggle so hard in the Christian life to know is that it favorably disposes God towards us. He desires our good because He is good.

So these three aspects of God’s unchanging nature together can give us the hope we need for real and blessed change in who we are this very moment. His omnipotence supplies the power greater than any external power blocking our repentance and healing. His omniscience enables Him to know completely what inside of us is in desperate need of change. Finally God’s pure and infinite goodness motivates Him to use both of the other attributes to transform us according to what we most deeply need, and what He most deeply wants for us.

If you have found it difficult to believe that real and positive change is still possible in your life try meditating regularly on these three aspects of God’s perfect character. Beyond that, meditate on all the aspects of who God is. You may find yourself beginning to believe that since “nothing is impossible” for such a God maybe, just maybe, He can and will deliver you from the things you have felt helpless to change by yourself.