Month: September 2012

Letting God Define Us
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We must let nothing in our lives, good or bad, define us. We must let ourselves be defined by God and by our relationship with Him. The world, the flesh and the Devil will all do their worst to prevent us from seeing our heart of hearts through this lens, but it is vital we do so anyway.

It is all too easy to think of our deepest being at any given moment truly being what we at that moment may feel ourselves to be: unbelieving, unloved, unknown, rejected. It is a discouragingly effortless thing to self-define at such times, to decide that our subjective self-perceptions are the only reality about who we are. Then it seems so much easier to believe what may be a lie of the soul than to choose to believe otherwise. Yet, as Christians, this is exactly what we are called upon to do, both for our own good and for that infinitely greater good: the glorification of our God.

Thankfully it is the very essence of the Divine to have absolute sovereignty over determining what is true and what isn’t. In fact God, Himself, is truth. He is the only One Who knows exactly what is in a man, far beyond what the man himself does, and far more accurately. We not only do ourselves a disservice when we try to exhaustively know who we are by our own wits, we also usurp our Lord’s rightful place as the One Who really does know. Comprehensive self-judgment is a sin for both these reasons. It is a sin against our new selves in Christ and, far more importantly, a sin against Christ Himself Who has given us those new selves through His all-surpassing self-sacrifice on our behalf.

Therefore the better way to Christian “self-knowledge” is paradoxically found in knowing Someone else, knowing His loving character and experiencing the love that flows from that character into our hearts. Our deeply desired perfecting is an outcome of our ongoing saving and sanctifying relationship with Jesus Christ. In that relationship we are “re-defined” as beings being transformed into His likeness, gaining His character. Beyond that, in a mysterious sense, we gain this identity at the very moment of conversion. Ours is an enduring identity held for us in Heaven even as we are progressively entering into it during our time on earth.

The great 20th Century Christian teacher and mystic, A. W. Tozer, had this to say, in the form of a prayer, about our identity as believers:

“Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear; and our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared Thyself to be.”

Tozer here highlights that the truly received redeeming love of God, through Christ, enables us to know that we are saved by God’s perfect attributes, one of which happens to be infinite, eternal love. It is His very identity that, in a sense, ultimately saves us, for in giving our lives to His Son we are now found “in Him”; no longer in ourselves. We come to trust in Who He is and what He is doing in our lives rather than in what all the other voices, internal and external, try to tell us about who we are. In the end it is a deepening knowledge of our Lord’s character, being poured into us and transforming us that we must look to for deliverance from every fear, including those that stem from wrong personal ideas about who we really are.

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Beyond Words
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Many have written of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The number of words devoted to this event is probably only surpassed by the number used in the many accounts of His death. This seems unfortunate in a sense. It is not that his Passion is to be trivialized. The story of the cross is the story of the ages and it is certainly true that without Good Friday there would be no Easter. But for all its meaning, the physical death of Christ was not as singular an event as His triumph over that death. All men die. Only one has returned to life, and life eternal…so far.

In some sense it is futile to try to capture the full meaning of the Resurrection in words. No matter how much is written on the subject human beings will always fall short in trying to adequately communicate its implications. What happened outside of Jerusalem in a rich man’s tomb on that long ago morning in some sense defies description. Yet we who find our best expression of devotion in writing continue to try.

So many words come to mind when a believing heart considers Easter morning; strong words like victory, triumph and glory, softer ones like hope, joy and restoration. We find ourselves thinking about a frightened, deeply depressed band of disciples suddenly being delivered from despair by the One who was delivered from death. Their experience reminds us of the moments when we, too, have been rescued from a similar kind of hopelessness by the Spirit given us by Jesus after He went to be with His Father, and ours.

We are also reminded of the hope of our own resurrection some day. The Easter story is one that tells us not only of a happening from the past, but also one yet to come. The rising of the Christ guarantees the rising of His followers when God brings down the curtain on the world as we know it. Easter is, in this sense, the ultimate prophetic event. For those who dwell in a world still fallen it generates a hope so blessed that it, too, is beyond the expressive power of words. This is the hope that flows with the contemplation of the stone being rolled away from a tomb soon to be empty. It is what enables the Christian to go through the deepest of waters and come out on the other shore.

Perhaps it is in starting with the word “hope” that we best find a place to honor Easter to the extent it can be done so in writing. Christians are people of hope. Our Savior has been called “The Blessed Hope” and we who know Him rejoice in the ultimate reality of the phrase. Every spring we are reminded of its meaning. Resurrection Day, and all it implies, speaks to us of why we are who we are and why we follow the One we follow.

The truth is that, whether it is in one word or ten thousand, we are always just scratching the surface when we write about the events of that morning. They were too great to be captured by our faculties, too wonderful to be grasped by the finite efforts of men. What happened that day was for us, but fully describing it remains beyond us.

The Cult of Haste
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The speed of contemporary culture has had a deep influence on the Church. In a profound sense most Westerners are caught in an ever increasing quest to have as much as possible as soon as possible. It is reflected most clearly in our love affair with technology. From the microwave oven to e-mail we have sought to erase the need for time. Everything must be now, everything must be instantaneous. The rhythm of life has become a staccato. Befitting our identity as the original “instant gratification” society we have made a virtue out of impatience.

This cultural ethos has penetrated the Church most obviously in the tendency for Western believers to expect spiritual growth overnight. From a biblical perspective discipling and sanctification do not appear to be processes operating at a high rate of speed. A good argument can be made that salvation is an instantaneous event but nothing in the word of God hints at spiritual maturity being gained that way. No one becomes a perfected saint without grace and truth being moderated by time. Paul knew this; more importantly Jesus knew this. In the haste we Christians share with our secular fellow travelers we have forgotten that the Inventor of time has not, even with the advent of human technological innovation, ceased to use it. There are no “10 Easy Steps to Spiritual Maturity”. God never intended the journey to be easy…or short.

Many believers today are caught in a cycle of frustration. This is because we often hear messages that imply two things. The first is that we are not where we should be. In and of itself this is not necessarily a bad thing to be told. There is always room for growth and change in our walk with God. But it is also true that we cannot arrive at perfection, at least experientially, in this life. That must wait until we are face to face with our Lord. The problem is that, all too often, the tone of the “we are not where we need to be” sermon communicates not only that are we not where we should be, but that we should be approaching panic because of it. Grace to grow at our own pace, which perhaps might be God’s pace, is not part of the message.

The second implication in these messages is that we can accelerate our growth if we take whatever the approach of the teacher happens to be. In fact sometimes the not so subtle inference is that we can reach whatever the spiritual goal of the moment is immediately if we simply repent of our lack of faith. The problem, we are told, is that we do not believe God can do it in a moment if we just confidently expect Him to. This message is very dangerous. Why? Because God does not expect us to grow faster than He designed us to be intrinsically capable of growing. It is analogous to Him expecting a Giant Redwood tree sapling to grow to its mature height of 200 feet overnight rather than over hundreds of years. God does not hold the sapling accountable to do that, in fact it is a safe assumption that the thought never entered His mind. Why would it when He, in divine wisdom, created the tree to grow at a much slower speed?

Both these messages are influenced less by Scripture than by how much we have unconsciously embraced the values of our secular culture. We want spiritual growth and we want it now, just as we want money, pleasure, respect and any number of other things now. The amount of lottery tickets Christians buy is mute testimony to this fact. What we are setting ourselves up for is frustration and disappointment. The sad thing is that people who claim to know God, and I include myself here, should know better.

There is an answer and it involves a different kind of repentance. Western Christians can decide to opt out of the manic pace of a macro-culture that they are supposed to be in but not of. Admittedly we cannot all become Luddites and buy a farm in the country. In fact nowhere in the Bible is their some kind of blanket condemnation of technology. God has gifted the crown of His creation with the ability to invent, to create instrumentalities that can improve the quality of life. But He has also warned us not to depend too greatly on the works of our hands or, for that matter, to let them define the pace of our lives.

We need to intentionally cultivate a counter-cultural resistance to speed for the sake of speed. We can start by giving ourselves the grace to grow at the pace our Lord ordained us to rather than what others tell us it should be. Those in our midst who have baptized and hung a cross around hyperactivity should be actively challenged to rethink their approach to the Christian life. Voices need to be raised in affirmation of God’s sovereignty over time and against attempts to speed up sanctification according to human timetables rather than His. Finally, in prayer, we can to take a surgeon’s knife to our daily lives and cut out that which is wedded to the Cult of Haste. This may result in a lowered standard of living for some as they purposely seek to do less and live more attuned to God’s perspective on time but it can liberate them from a life lived out of step with Jesus Christ. The result of this kind of change will be a blessed collective sigh of relief from a church that has been unnecessarily pressured into ungodly haste. We will lose nothing but the self-inflicted misery that comes from trying to live up to the expectations of men, rather than God.

Caused to Sin?
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“People, circumstances, etc. are never the cause of failure. Self’s reaction to them is the cause and the one problem to be dealt with.” Miles J. Sanford

Others can never “cause” us to sin, even when they have sinned greatly against us. When we respond to being hurt by another by hurting them we sin and are responsible for that sin. The problem is that we tend not to fully rely on God for our solace when wounded by others. Instead we often take matters into our own hands. The major goal when choosing how to react to being sinned against should be to seek understanding for the sinning party and divine strength to bear the wound, not to use that wound as an excuse to do wrong. Then we must trust God for our needed healing.

In a fallen world it is impossible to escape being hurt by other people. Such injuries are sometimes completely unavoidable. Also unavoidable is our own inborn tendency, conscious or otherwise, to injure those people ourselves. It is something we are born with and the spiritual re-birth that makes us Christians does not automatically banish the propensity to hurt back. The popular contemporary term for a believer is “wounded-healer”. Unfortunately sometimes a better description for us might be “wounded-wounder”.

It often seems as if the last thing we want to do at the moment we have been offended is seek God for help in responding. The flesh immediately puts forth its own agenda and it is powerfully tempting to follow its prescription for dealing with the offender. If someone punches me in the nose my first impulse is not likely to be to pray to the Lord for wisdom in understanding why that someone would do such a thing. My first impulse is to punch back. If I follow that impulse the world will likely tell me I am acting in legitimate self-defense. As my newly-bruised nose throbs “legitimate self-defense” sounds pretty good to me! But Jesus might well tell me to turn the other cheek in such a circumstance .My flesh, of course, wants nothing to do with the concept. The call of the Spirit speaks softly and my sense of grievance is screaming. Often I never hear God’s call at all.

But part of the problem may be that I do not really want to hear it.

One aspect of attaining to spiritual maturity is deciding that no matter how urgently the flesh is speaking to me I will choose to listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit before I react. This is by no means easy. Some people never learn to do this and, at best, live in spiritual defeat all their Christian lives. Initially it is far easier to heed the flesh than the Spirit. This is true with any temptation, not just the one to take revenge. Ask any addict. Resisting sin is difficult. However the long-term results of not resisting lead to death and that death is far worse than the pain involved in choosing to flee temptation. Experiencing the short term gratification of giving into sin is never worth the aftermath, never.

Beyond that there is a better reason not to fight fire with fire. Our best motivation for seeking God’s solution to injury is simply that we want to be lovingly obedient to Him. We perhaps love God best when we strive to emulate His beloved Son. This is the call of the Spirit in our lives, to truly do what Jesus would and to do it out of love for Him. This is greatly pleasing to God and, make no mistake, He will make up for whatever loss we sustain in taking the harder road of Christ-likeness. It may be in this life or it may be in the next, but our Lord will surely wipe away our tears and heal every wound we have sustained.

That assurance is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of a Christian who has just been punched in the nose.