Month: November 2012

What We Still Haven’t Found
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

While we remain here on earth there always seems to be a sense that we have not truly received the thing we desire most. This is the nagging sense that something we desperately want remains just out of reach. We sense its reality, sometimes even its partial presence, but we remain displaced from it. I believe this thing is the final redemption of our souls.

An argument could even be made that those who have not yet experienced a saving encounter with Jesus Christ might still have a sense of the need not only for salvation, but for this “something else” beyond salvation, yet contingent upon it. That “it” is the complete perfecting of our being that is inviolably linked to standing before our Lord and Savior past the veil of death. For our purposes here the question of whether it can be sensed by both the saved and the unsaved is not the most important thing. What is important is the fact that not yet possessing this final state of being is the driver for the fundamental sense of incompleteness, and its resulting pain, that all men know in the here and now, here on earth.

The Irish rock star Bono, of U2 fame, once sang that he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. He penned these lyrics despite the fact that he and two out of three of the remaining members of the group were professed Christians at the time. Some have since used the song to verify their judgment that the members of U2 “aren’t really saved.” but I take a different view. Bono actually speaks of Jesus breaking his bonds and loosing his chains later in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, but something is still missing and he knows it. I believe many thoughtful believers can relate to this knowledge. I know I can.

Maybe what is missing is the one thing that even an authentic Christian cannot fully possess in this life: the experience of both fully knowing God and being fully known by Him. This must wait for the spiritual departure from this world that comes with the end of our present physical existence here. It is absolutely impossible to know this fullness of knowledge as long as we sojourn in the “far country” of a fallen world which is, by its very nature, not only impermanent but profoundly imperfect.

We should not underestimate the pain this causes us. It is sometimes agony to crave this thing that is denied us in the here and now. It does us no good to use a less powerful word. The sense of displacement from both He who we are meant to know fully, as well as from what we will become once we possess that knowledge, is perhaps the most agonizing experience a human being can have.

This hard fact must, of course, be tempered by the reality of what have been called “postcards from Heaven”. These are the sublime experiences of the presence of a loving God that we sometimes know even now. As a follower of Christ becomes more seasoned in the faith such “mountain-top experiences” may become more common or less, but either way I believe all true believers are graced with them periodically through out their earthly lives. Such experiences are drinks of cool water in a land that is more commonly parched and they are moments for which we can be profoundly grateful.

But no matter how good these occasions are they are not the thing itself and we find ourselves needing to accept that the thing itself cannot be had today unless today is the day we are called home. This does not mean that we are to simply lie down and wait for it. Sanctification is a journey that embraces both our lives here and our completion there. We are told to pick up our cross and follow our Lord in this life because He is using that walk to prepare us for our homecoming and the ultimate joy that will follow it. He also uses our time here to help put others on the same path we walk, a great joy in and of itself.

In the meantime it is OK to know that we “still haven’t found what (we’re) looking for.” Likewise it is alright to confess to the pain this reality can bring but, even so, may it also be that at such moments of pain we trust God to once again lift our heads in preparation for finally finding it.

Better than We Could Ever Dream
by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God’s perfect will for us is better than our greatest idea of what that will is. This is important for believers to remember when it seems like the best thing we can imagine for ourselves is insufficient to equal the trials and tribulations we invariably experience in our earthly lives. It can be a great comfort to know that God’s plan for our lives, both here and past the veil of death, will ultimately be beyond our noblest hopes and dreams. The truth is that if we are open to God’s will for our lives He will make us into something so wonderful that our struggles here on earth will someday pale into insignificance by comparison. In fact on that day we will be thankful for Him allowing even the worst of those struggles, for without them His all-surpassing plan for our ultimate good might not have been fulfilled.

It is a common fault, among even the best Christians, to think we can imagine “what God has planned for those who love Him”. We suffer from the conceit that we know what is good for us. This conceit is another facet of our flesh. No one more knows what is best for a creature than its Creator. This statement has the ring of common sense, but it is a great challenge to believe it in its full import. It is our tendency instead to stubbornly cling to the idea that what we want is what is best.

How many children of God have embarked on errant journeys to fulfill their own idea of what God’s will is rather than simply daily waiting for the Lord to show them the latest small steps they can take to fulfill His idea of what His will is? So many of us have had to learn the hard way that God’s ways are not our ways, at least not obviously. The author was once convinced that God wanted him to go to seminary and then enter into a particular kind of ministry. The result of assuming this was the divine will rather than my own culminated in one of the worst “dark nights of the soul” that I have ever experienced. I hit the brick wall my false assumptions brought me to so hard that my seminary career ended with me dropping out in the midst of a deep depression that took not months, but years to climb out of. It was there I learned the hard way that my idea of what is best for me is often anything but. Since then I have been more circumspect about my knowledge of God’s will for my life and more open to Him taking me places I would not expect Him to. As a result my life is now experientially far better than it was during the time of my folly.

As we come to know God better we will realize that He is the Lover of our souls. Beyond that, and because of that, we will begin to deeply believe that our Lord not only knows the absolute best for us but also is absolutely capable of bringing about that best. He is both the Author and the Finisher of our faith and the Author and Finisher of our lives. Our job is to let Him have His way with us rather than put up roadblocks through trying to live out our wrong ideas about what we are destined to become. As with most, perhaps all, of the Christian journey the key to letting God have control of our lives on a day to day basis is faith. Someone once said that we cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend Him. In other words while we cannot know the full plan God has for our lives we can, based on what we know of His character, trust Him and cling to Him for our forward progress in sanctification.

If we do one day we will wake to find ourselves to be what He always planned for us to be. On that blessed day of completion we will be exceedingly thankful to our God for making us more than we ever could have dreamed of in our own dim, human view of our potential.

The Cult of Haste
Copyright 2012, 2023 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The speed of contemporary culture has had a deep influence on the evangelical 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 always 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? The answer is that 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 that 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.

The Hard Question
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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How can a good Being send sinners to Hell?

The apparent severity of the doctrine of eternal punishment has troubled believers since Jesus Christ walked the Earth and fully expounded it. Those who have remained outside the faith have used it as a reason to continue to reject Christianity. It seems impossible to reconcile a loving God with One who would send someone, anyone, to somewhere as horrific as the place Scripture describes as the final destination of the unbelieving. Our minds recoil at the thought of Hell and, by extension, we are tempted to also recoil at the thought of its Author. It just seems far too severe.

We cannot deny, however, that Christ talked more about Hell than Heaven during His earthly ministry, we have no choice but to grapple with the seeming dissonance of a God who is love, yet consigns those who finally reject Him to a terrible place of punishment. One of the best ways to reconcile these two truths is to take a serious look at the nature of God in its totality.

We are living in a time in church history when the holiness of God often gets far less pulpit time than His love. To some degree this imbalance is a correction of the angry fundamentalism that has long infected some wings of the Evangelical Church to the detriment of the essential doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith. We have also lately emphasized our Lord’s love because so many of us had parents who loved us very imperfectly, or not at all, and we desperately need to know that our God is the greatest parent we could ever hope to have. So the contemporary stress on love and grace is understandable. Unfortunately it is still unbalanced and can lead to a perception of God that leaves Him portrayed as One who does not punish the evil we see not only all around us, but within us. Such a portrayal may seem comforting but it is a deception because it does not take into account the ramifications of relating to a Being who is perfectly good.

God truly is perfect love, but He is also perfect holiness and, by holiness, we mean that He is completely separated from evil of any kind. There is no shadow of turning in the nature of divinity. Our Lord dwells in unapproachable light because there is no darkness in Him and there never will be. He is good in an unalloyed and ultimate sense and, because of this, God cannot co-exist with evil of any kind or amount because evil is imperfect in the most profound sense of the word. Evil, in the end, must be permanently cast away from the presence of God and that is exactly what will occur at the Last Judgement. Eventually evil, and those who embody it in any way, must be eternally removed from His presence. To be eternally removed from the presence of God is perhaps the best definition of Hell.

Yet because God is also love, and because He extends that love to the human race, we have been given a period of time to live on Earth, in a sense half-way between Heaven and Hell, and been sent a Rescuer in the form of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The answer to our seemingly hopeless appointment with the wrath of a perfectly good God can only be found at the Cross, through faith in the One who died there on our behalf. When God, the Son, sacrificed Himself for us He truly became “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”.

But apart from this one perfect way that God Himself has made to bring us into an eternal love relationship with Him we remain evil, imperfect people whom He can never be in relationship with. The time must and will come when our Lord will lower the curtain on human history and separate the “wheat from the tares”. At that time we, who have all demonstrated our darkly imperfect natures in countless actions, small and great, will either be made perfect by our faith in Christ and brought into the embrace of God or will be forever removed from God’s presence because we preferred the darkness of our own profoundly imperfect self-rule to the thought of surrendering our lives to Jesus to gain our redemption.

Again, perfect love can never co-exist with evil and so God cannot forever co-exist with us in our unredeemed state.

How can a perfectly good being send unrepentant sinners to Hell? How can He not?