Month: October 2012

A Unique Joy
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Some of the truest, most powerful experiences of joy can only be felt as we are enabled by God to transcend difficult circumstances our lives. This is not to say that joy cannot be felt in favorable circumstances like a wedding or the birth of a child, these certainly are occasions when it can be known, but perhaps not in so unique a way as it can in the midst of hard experiences.

Sorrows and misery are a part of every human life. It is a basic truth of our present existence that no one is immune from the effects of the Fall of our race. While some might know pain more often and to a deeper level than others it is always only a matter of time and degree that differentiates one life from another. We all suffer. As Job 5:7 tells us “man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards.” The way such trouble comes into our lives is through the negative circumstances that haunt every one of us.

The believer, however, has an option for dealing with adversity which others do not. This option is found in the power of the Holy Spirit that comes from our identification with Christ, and the cross He bore. We can choose to seek this power to enable us to transcend pain even as we are experiencing it. While no one can escape bad circumstances the Christian can know the joy of Christ in the midst of them, and it is a special kind of joy.

I have tasted of it many times along the road of my own faith journey.

There have been moments when I have been able to truly focus on God while enduring some of the worst periods in my life. At such times I have been amazed to find myself suddenly knowing a kind of sublime elation where even a moment before I knew only misery and deep struggle. It is an incredible thing when one’s heart truly finds solace in the reality of the love of God. I am given to the belief that this is perhaps better than any other experience we can know on Earth. At the least it is, for me, an incredibly powerful sort of joy; this moment when the Lord invades my darkness and lightens my spirit in a way that is to some degree indescribable.

It is important to remember that entering into this state is not permanent as long as we continue to sojourn as pilgrims here. Some seasoned Christians seem to experience it far more often than others. I, myself, wish I could know it to the degree that these brothers and sisters do. Perhaps, with enough time and grace I will. I pray that you will too.

The final and eternally enduring triumph over our circumstances must wait, of course, until we enter the gates of Heaven. In the meantime this unique joy of the Lord can be our strength whenever we truly require it to be. All that is necessary is the willingness to seek Him in real time, no matter what may be afflicting our lives, and the faith to trust Him and Him alone for solace when we truly need it most.

It is sometimes difficult to see the truth in a given situation. It is even more difficult to see the truth if we are reeling from some pain connected with that situation. All human beings, Christians included, are plagued by the curse of a negative subjectivity that can be overwhelming at times. We may find it very hard to “see the forest for the trees” at such moments, especially when it feels like the tree in question is a Giant Redwood someone has chopped down in our heart.

We are told that the gift of God is a sound mind and part of having a sound mind is possessing a certain degree of objectivity in any circumstance we find ourselves facing. When we are thinking rightly, meaning from a truly biblical perspective, we have the ability to rise above the problems that confront us, even potentially very painful ones. Seeing things in spirit and in truth gives us the wisdom to react as Christ would, at least in principle. The problem is that many believers have not yet come to such a place of maturity, at least not many whom I have known and, truth be told I myself cannot number myself among them.

Moreover some of us often feel unduly oppressed, insulted or merely misunderstood because of both abusive trauma we have experienced during our formative years and our own bitter response to that trauma. For some of us the results of both this injury and response to injury have blended with genetic factors and coalesced into what the world calls “psycho-pathology”. These days we can give a name to feeling like our glass is half-empty. Depression and anxiety are two that the author is personally acquainted with.

For people like us regular transcendence of negative circumstances in our lives is more problematic than for most. Indeed we may come across as overly sensitive to some because adversities in life that are generally accepted as normal and manageable by others are magnified into deep crisis in our damaged hearts and minds. When this happens it is absolutely right to admit that we are not in our “right minds”. When we are in the throes of an attack of anxiety or a depressive episode we are almost never accurately “painting” reality. It is at times like these that people with a different, perhaps more objective perspective are desperately needed to speak into our lives. Whether such persons are loyal friends, pastors or counselors they are a Godsend because they can help restore to us the objectivity we need to avoid making a bad situation worse.

Compounding the challenges to people like us is the surrounding society’s increasing emphasis on feeling over reason in determining what is real. We are incessantly being told by our culture to “follow our hearts”. Well, that is all fine and good if our hearts can be trusted as safe and effective guides. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the biblical Christian knows that the human heart is not the most trustworthy guide, rather Holy-Spirit inspired reason is. This is not to completely discount feelings, but feelings are subjective for all of us and especially so for those of us afflicted with emotional problems that we are still learning to handle in a responsible, Godly way.

In my own life I have taken comfort in realizing that when I’m not accurately seeing things as they really are I can seek help from Godly human beings and, for that matter directly from my merciful God Himself, to help me see the truth. Because of these divine resources I am slowly learning not to make bad decisions during times of circumstantial turmoil. As the grace of God continues to flow into my life I am learning that for every trouble I encounter the old adage, “this too will pass”, really does apply. I can trust that real emotional healing lies in my future at the hands of a Savior who always knows what is really going on in my life, and how to use it for His glory and my good.

The One Who Cannot Fail Us
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The deepest human needs are answered by God. This statement seems pretty simple and straightforward. Why, then, do so many believers still try to dig their own wells? Why do we endlessly seem to be trying to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped hole” with anything and everything but God?

The obvious answer is that we feel God will somehow fail us if we count on Him alone. The world offers answers that seem so tangible: the money, the romantic partner, the drug, the fame. All these things and many more are visible panaceas for what ails us. But panaceas are all they are and not very good ones at that. The cure and its Source lie elsewhere. As followers of Jesus Christ we are supposed to know this and act accordingly yet, so often, we do not.

Part of the problem is the control issue. We mistakenly think we can find our fulfillment through something we can control and all the visible idols lure us into thinking that we can control them and have our needs met on our terms. But as any alcoholic, sexaholic or compulsive gambler can tell you, being in control of false gods is a cruel illusion. In time every idol we continue to worship ends up controlling us. There are no exceptions.

Being controlled is not inherently wrong. In fact we who call ourselves Christians are to be voluntarily under the control of the Holy Spirit. It is here that we uncover the core problem and that is simply this; we do not trust our God to be better than the false ones to whom we have bowed. It is not just that we are afraid what He wants to do with us might run contrary to what we feel is necessary to meet those deeply felt needs. More than that Christians fear that God will fail them like all the other people and things they tried did. We think God will not come through.

But He will.

If we are abandoned to Him He will not, indeed, cannot fail us. It is not in the nature of divinity to fail. Our Lord is the only perfect being. We will let Him down but He will never let us down because we are dealing with One whose nature is such that He is incapable of failure. If we truly submit our needs to Him over time He will meet them just as surely as day follows night. This “divine reliability” is a theologically self-evident truth that we can and must apply to our hearts if we are to have our legitimate needs met in a legitimate way. The word “reliability” is not one we often ascribe to God but it applies here in the ultimate sense of the term. We can count on God because His faithfulness to fill, sustain and heal us is grounded in the very reality of who He is.

There is something about the natural world that seems to convey the contemplative Christian towards Him who is beyond it. As we gaze on that which might be called “direct creation”, that is objects that can be said to come directly from the hands of our Lord we may find ourselves feeling an imminence to the divine that is lacking when standing in even the most beautiful cathedral. One does not need to be a Pantheist to find God in nature. As Theists we simply realize that the sublimity of the natural world comes from God without being God.

In a First World landscape that, “green thinking” or not, is increasingly blighted by the hands of man the balm of nature becomes more precious to many Christians in the West. The sight of puffy white clouds against a cerulean sky or the sun shimmering off a lake on a perfect morning can, for the truly biblically-informed believer, become legitimate channels to intimacy with the God who made both. Lately some of the most profound experiences I have had with the presence and mystery of the Spirit have been during deliberate times of concentration on the landscape visible outside of my home in a semi-rural region of my home state of New Jersey.

In fact I’ve recently taken to listening to the requiems of the Anglican composer, Herbert Howells while looking intently at the trees that make up a large part of the view outside of my living room windows. To that I’ve added readings from A.W. Tozer’s “Knowledge of the Holy”, the American mystic’s profound reflections on the attributes of God. The combination of the swaying trees with the soaring voices of English choirs and the written insights of a keen and pious mind have, at times, transported me to a kind of deep worship I have perhaps never known before.

At such moments, however, the music and the book feel more like powerful aids to seeing God in nature than equal partners in the experience. Both are beautiful in their own right, and specifically Christian in content, but they are man-made and the trees I behold are not. There is just something about “direct creation” that facilitates the sensed presence of God for me.

Some might feel the need to remind me that nature is fallen, imperfect and yet unredeemed during these shadowy days preceding the Eschaton. I know all this to be true. I know the natural world longs for the same transformation promised in the return of the Son of God that we do. But nature, even imperfect nature, is nonetheless glorious and remains deeply redolent of its perfect Maker. As I go on in my Christian walk I find myself only coming to love it more as I come to love Him more. In fact I believe my Lord has ultimately used his creation to deepen my first love for Him. If the work of His hands are beautiful how much more is it impressed upon me that He is?

We indeed must go beyond the natural to the supernatural, from the creation to the Creator, but who is to say that the natural was not specifically created to facilitate that journey?

Not I.

Sin may still be active in our lives, but we must consider it dead, or at least dying. We need to consciously stand against it considering ourselves to be, first and foremost, who we are “positionally” in Christ.

The redeemed child of God is still capable of wrongdoing. If this weren’t true the Bible would not tell us of our need to confess our sins to one another. In fact there are many New Testament verses that are quite clear about the fact that fully initiated Christians do continue to transgress against God. Through the centuries some teachers have dealt with this dichotomy by declaring that we remain only “sinners saved by grace”, the implication being that our central nature continues to be somehow sinful in its essence despite our receiving that saving grace.
As Luther purportedly said, the believer is somehow simultaneously 100% saint and 100% sinner and will be until death frees him of his enduring sin nature.

The problem with this kind of theology is that it ignores the fact that Christians are called “new creatures”. While the Scripture testifies to our continuing ability to choose to do wrong, it also testifies in several places that we now possess the nature of Christ Himself, and Jesus was and is sinless. If we believe this than we cannot believe that our deepest nature continues to be a slave to evil.

Now we somehow still have a dying old nature, it is true. The Bible tells us that we must contend with something called the “flesh”, an element of our previous selves that does remain, but remains only to be progressively “crucified” and overcome. Apparently as long as we dwell on Earth we have at least the ability to choose to sin even though we are no longer slaves to sin, and this is the crucial distinction. When we were dominated by our flesh, with a spiritual nature that remained untouched by the redeeming work of Christ, we were dead to God and alive to sin. Once we availed ourselves of the redemption offered through the shed blood of Christ we became the opposite, dead to sin and alive to God. Positionally we became seated in the heavenlies with Him and since God sees us there as sinless, through saving faith in His Son, we are sinless indeed in the eternal sense.

Temporally though, in this life, we have to overcome our remaining sinful tendencies through the work of sanctification, a work that, like salvation, also finds its efficacy in the received power of our Lord. Our task is to so focus on Him that the remaining power of temptation is progressively rooted out of our being. This is a lifelong task and one that likely will not be completely finished until we stand before our Savior in Glory. In the meantime we must continue to rely on His grace to fill in the gap between whom we are today and who we will be in eternity.

An accurate reading of the Bible, in context, will show that we are no longer “sinners” in the sense that sin is our only identity. We are still capable of falling, but we are no longer defined by the wickedness that we strive to avoid. We are now children of God, and thus children of light. The darkness is being put to flight within us because it is no longer a permanent part of our essential nature.

Mystery, the Holy, and Joy
Copyright Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The Christian mystic Rudolf Otto once coined the word “numinous” to describe that part of reality which both overarches and transcends the more mundane daily reality of our lives on this earth. The numinous is the sense that most, if not all, human beings possess that something mysterious and of ultimate value and meaning is present in the universe, but beyond the full reach of our highest sensory or intellectual powers. One might call this “something” both the wellspring and the object of the basic spirituality that every man and woman possesses.

Of course, being Christian, Otto identified the something as a Someone. In fact it was in his study of the holy attributes of God that he first used the term “numinous”. For the contemplative believer the mysterious yearning to enter into the ultimate meaning of our existence, that we may have known since childhood, can only be satisfied in the God of the Bible. It is in the Holy One of Israel that our inherent spiritual longing will someday find its fulfillment, if it is to be fulfilled at all.

Many Christians shrink away from that word “holy”. To some it means the part of God that is incomprehensibly different from us. For fearful believers it often comes with a terrible foreboding that springs from the contrast of His holiness with our own imperfections which we know are all too many. I will not endeavor to completely banish the sense of dread that our Lord’s holiness may cause our hearts to manifest. It some ways God is indeed the “Totaliter Aliter”, the “Totally Other” that the 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth professed Him to be. His holiness does embody a purity of perfection that causes God, the Father to dwell “in unapproachable light”, a light that is blinding and deadly to the fallen and finally unredeemed human being.

But, as another Christian mystic, A.W. Tozer tells us another attribute of the holy is that which is whole and healthy. As he put it “The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, ‘well, whole.’” Holiness, it seems can touch us and leave us healed. We therefore can find ourselves craving holiness as well as fearing it.

Beyond this it is possibly in God’s holiness that we discover the resolution of a generic numinous spirituality with the reality of Jesus Christ. In some sense we are looking to Him when we look to the distant sky and feel the touch of the ultimate and the aching desire to wholly possess it, or perhaps more appropriately be wholly possessed by it. The farther I travel in my own Christian walk the more I sense that the wonder I possessed as a child finds its answer (and its recapturing) in seeing Jesus both in and beyond the natural world. Maybe this is what happens when the merely numinous becomes specifically identified with divine holiness. If that is the case then I really do ache for this aspect of God’s being to possess me completely, if not in this life then in the next.

So far I have felt no fear in my own recent contemplation of the trees of the forest framing the sky outside my window, even though I have more fully identified the experience it gives me with the God who created these things. If part of knowing God’s holiness is having some simultaneous feeling of fear I cannot say I have yet reached that point, at least not in my appreciation of the super-nature that I sense just beyond the nature I now take such pleasure in losing myself. If such a “healthy dread” is truly necessary to properly apprehend the awesome import of His holiness then so be it. I hope I will come to know such dread.

But right now it feels so good just to be able to see God in the earth and sky that I can only feel like a child again, looking off in the distance and knowing only wonder….and joy.

“Love Will Have Its Day”
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We are bombarded by bad news every time we turn on the TV or log on to the Internet in the 21st Century. There is no escaping the torrential flood of negativity that permeates our media. Spend enough time watching CNN and I defy anyone not to at least flirt with despair. Every hour, all over the world, the fall of man manifests itself and we now have the technology to see every atrocity in high-definition streaming video. One might be forgiven for struggling with a sense that all is lost and that the nature of the universe is misery.

But, as the Irish rock group U2 once sang, “Love will have its day”.

If God is love there can be no doubt that this is true. We forget that God is, by definition, greater than the darkness of our present existence. We also forget that He has no intention of letting evil exist indefinitely. In the end He will win over evil and so will we who are identified with His Son. For us there are no permanent shadows in eternity, only the light of divine love.

Some say the church has neglected preaching about Heaven. There is so much focus on the “here and now” that we have lost sight of the “There and Then.” While it is important to deal with the practical demands of Christian discipleship in the temporal world we cannot and must not lose sight of our final destination beyond this place and time. If we do we can only lose heart and be consumed by the darkness that seemingly encompasses us. Eschatological hope is not optional for the believer, it is essential.

The triumph of love is the destiny of the new Heavens and Earth. It cannot be otherwise because God has made His intentions clear. He will finally destroy evil utterly and when that evil is gone the space it took up will be filled with Him and Him alone.

Again, if God is love than love must and will reign just as He does.

At this point the biblical believer cannot help bringing up the subject of Hell. It is true that Hell will not be a place of love, though it will be a place of righteousness in the sense that righteous punishment will reign over both it and its inhabitants. But it must be remembered that Hell is not evil but rather it is a place where evil, and unfortunately those who embody it, are eternally destroyed. It is also utterly separate from the Kingdom of God. For the inhabitants of that Kingdom every trace of the malevolent will be forever gone. Love cannot co-exist with any hatred save the hatred of that which wickedly opposes the Author of love, and since such wickedness will be purged both from us and our new home there will no longer be anything to hate.

So when we are tempted to think that the world of CNN and its ilk are all there is we desperately need to remember what the Scriptures tell us Heaven will be. We must meditate on the place the blood of Christ has opened up for us to enter at the appointed time, a place where love will have its day for all eternity.