Month: December 2012

Accepting the Unfinished
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.”
-Rabbi Tarfon

There are divine works that we are called to participate in but not finish. God often does great things over periods of time that exceed the human lifespan. The Apostle Paul tells us that the great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament could only look forward to the coming of the Messiah. Even though they played important roles in preparing His way none lived to see the Advent. Similarly, David made Jerusalem a great city in preparation for the construction of the Temple of the Lord but it was left to his son to see it built. We who today labor for the Kingdom may not be here on Earth for its consummation at the return of Christ.

These examples all relate to major biblical events but this truth can just as accurately be applied to any Christian’s life ministry. Some of the goals God has called us to work towards will be accomplished during our earthly pilgrimage and some will not. The problem for contemporary believers is that we have a tendency to see all things as attainable not only in our lifetime but in a few months or years. This is because many of us have been beguiled by the “instant gratification” culture of the 21st Century. We forget that the Lord of time does not work according to our idea of time. Some trees, after all, do not reach maturity for hundreds of years. He is the God of the Tortoise as well as the Hare. It may even be accurate to say that the greatest things in our lives are the things that take the longest for us to attain. We should not be surprised that this is at least as equally true for ministry.

It is important for believers to be reconciled to the truth of this. If we are easily frustrated by what seems to be a glacial pace in the fulfilling of a mission we know we have been called to then we run the risk of losing heart. How many promising ministries have been abandoned in their infancy because results do not fulfill our expectations? It is sobering to ponder the possibility that God has left His human servants with the power not only to advance but also to hinder the gospel. The hindrance can occur in a number of ways for a number of reasons and one of them is impatience with the timing of results. The temptation to impatience typically begins with an unrealistic expectation. An example of such an expectation might be the idea that a new Bible study or small group should draw large numbers of people in a very short period. The fact is that such ministries do not always achieve “respectable” numbers for quite some time. If the organizers do not factor that possibility into their thinking from the beginning they will be sorely tempted to give up altogether where a willingness to wait might produce great fruit in season.

It is not for us to know the time when a ministry will produce an abundant crop for the King’s storehouse. What we can know from the Scripture is that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Pe 3:8.) It is imperative that the implication of this verse be allowed to sink into our minds and hearts. Once we realize that God does not operate according to our schedule it will be much easier to do His work while leaving the timing of the harvest to Him. Even if we do not see that harvest here on Earth we will once we get to Heaven and become, ourselves, part of the completed work of our Lord.

Sins of Escape
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

One of the times we are most likely to indulge in sins that provide illicit pleasure and distraction is when we are suffering. Psychologists use the term “self-medicating” to describe the tendency of those in significant emotional distress to seek relief from its pain in the unhealthy indulgence of agents like drugs, alcohol, sex or overeating. The result of such indulgence is the lessening of whatever the suffering is for a short time. In short, we choose sin over suffering in an attempt to escape it.

Unfortunately it does not take long to realize that what we have done to temporarily escape whatever the pain in our lives happens to be has actually exacerbated it. The usual result of giving into the temptation to act out these “sins of escape” is the addition of feelings of guilt and alienation from God to whatever the pain is we are trying to relieve. It is, quite literally, a Devil’s bargain. We exchange our suffering for more suffering.

Yet, despite the seemingly obvious logic of avoiding such a dark equation, believers today seem to be more and more falling victim to the allure of the quick, sinful fix. Why? The answer lies in the wholesale embrace of the spirit of the culture that we are supposed to be in, but not of.

The philosophical heart of contemporary secular culture is the avoidance of pain at any cost. It is re-enforced by two attractive lies. The first one is that human beings are naturally good and therefore deserve to feel good all of the time. The second is the idea that we can have perfect fulfillment in this world. We are bombarded by these two deceptions every time we tune into any kind of mass media in the West today. Christians have been seduced by both of them and the result is the disturbing increase in addictive behavior within the church.

The only real answer to the destructive practice of sinning to escape pain is one that sounds counter-intuitive at best and impossible at worst. We must embrace our suffering. By this I do not mean some kind of masochistic “cult of pain”. Suffering is not a good thing in and of itself. We should no more go looking for discomfort for its own sake than we should go looking for sinful relief from suffering we cannot avoid. The key is in the last four words of the preceding sentence, “suffering we cannot avoid”.

Much of our pain cannot in any way be circumvented. The fact of the matter is that we live in a terribly fallen world of our own making. Our corporate and individual pain is the deserved result of our race’s rebellion against our Creator and His perfect order. This is a hard reality and human beings have a tendency, sinful in itself, to avoid reckoning with it at any cost. But it is only in reckoning with it that we can both live in the truth and find a loving God’s way of deliverance from the results of our disobedience to Him.

When Jesus Christ came to redeem us He fully entered into human suffering, He did not avoid it. The Bible tells us that He learned obedience to His Father through suffering and those who follow after Him are called to do the same. The pain of this world serves two purposes in the child of God, to create in us the character of Christ and to bring us into the deep dependence on His Father that is our ultimate good.

We must choose to suffer without sinning so that, in the fullness of God’s time, we may be fully delivered from that suffering forever. Making this choice is one of the hardest requirements of the Christian walk. It can only be done if we come to want God’s presence and purpose in our lives more than we want relief from the pain that is the unavoidable result of living in a sin-cursed world.

Learning to seek our Lord in moments of suffering, rather than seeking illicit relief in sinful actions, will most likely not happen overnight. It will take a lot of empowerment from the grace of God. The habit of indulging in moral transgression to find temporary release from whatever is hurting us is difficult to break but it is only in breaking it, with divine help, that we will begin to know the eternal release that is ultimately to come.

Sanctification and Surrender
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved.

Sometimes we wonder why the heart-change we know we so desperately need never seems to happen. We pray, we fellowship, we read the Bible and still the old negative patterns re-assert themselves. In time frustration takes its toll and the temptation comes to blame God for not saving us from the things that are so destructive in our lives. On some level, though, we know that He cannot be at fault. If the spiritual life has hit what seems to be a dead-end it is fruitless to blame God. Beyond that, it is also dishonest and deep-down we know this too. There has to be another cause.

That cause might be this: we may be trying to do God’s work on the soul. Sanctification is not brought about by the flesh. The fact that a human being cannot accomplish the transformation implied by that term apart from God is one that most Christians will give intellectual assent. However applying it in our hearts is another matter. It is part of fallen human nature for some of us to try to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. People who have not had grace modeled for them by the most significant people in their lives are most prone to this particular sin. If you grow up being told you never measure up to some human standard you will be more afflicted by a tendency towards self-effort (Unfortunately, this tendency usually carries over into the Christian life and continues until we are able to forgive these significant people).

The results of pure self-effort can be disastrous. Instead of receiving the loving grace that the Lord intends to use to free human beings from perfectionism individuals prone to relying on their own works resist it. This may be a conscious or unconscious rejection of His help. Either way it sets up a person for failure as long as he or she continues to believe the lie that we cannot trust God to do what we cannot. At this point the reader may protest that surely we must all play a role in our spiritual growth. Yes, but there is a vast distance between “playing a role” and trying to purify ourselves, by ourselves. When we do the latter we make an idol of an innate, personal ability to change that we simply do not have. John 15:5 says that apart from God we can do nothing, nothing good that is.

So how does a person escape this condition? Surrender is key. We must give up on self-improvement and begin to allow “God-improvement” to take over in the construction site that is our heart. This will most likely take time. True surrender to God is rarely accomplished in some one-time flash of insight. Salvation may happen in a moment but sanctification is a process. This is true no matter how hard it is to swallow for those of us raised in an “everything now” culture. It is a process that cannot become what our Lord wills it to be until we relinquish to Him the reigns of our sanctification. It is only in this yielding that we can escape the bondage of self-effort. It is only then that we will begin to reap the blessings that come from the kind of change only God Himself can accomplish in us.

The Lie of Self-Redemption
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

Understanding and accepting that we do not deserve salvation is one of the most important factors in making our salvation possible. It is impossible to fully come to this place as long as we harbor the idea, either consciously or unconsciously, that we have any worthiness in and of ourselves.

Today many human beings think themselves worthy of Heaven. Many others think that they are on their way to being worthy. To some degree we are all born with this lie embedded in our souls. It is part of the inordinate pride inherent in our fallen condition. Some might even say that this belief is the essence of the curse we have lived under since the garden. Its only antidote is the hard remedy that comes with the conviction of our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We are confronted by a new knowledge of ourselves, the awareness that we are not “good people” and never have been. Accepting the truth of this is one of the most difficult experiences a person can go through but, paradoxically, it is also one of the greatest for in this terrible new understanding is the potential bloom of certain knowledge that they need a Savior. Salvation often follows soon after an individual’s eyes are opened in this way.

But our initial salvation experience often does not completely erase our tendency to try to earn our way to the God we have entered into relationship with. We still have a sinful nature to crucify, and part of this nature is made manifest in the voice that tries to burden us with an ongoing sense that we have to measure up to God if we hope to stay in His love. All too many Christians are still listening to this old deception, often without conscious awareness that they are doing so. The result is burnt-out, spiritual workaholics who fear they can easily “lose” their salvation. Obviously this is a prescription for despair.

As long as we are working in any way for God’s acceptance we will not be able to rest in the fact that we already have it through Jesus Christ. It was ours from the time we asked Him to forgive our sins and become our Lord and Savior. Only a progressive abandoning of the notion that we must earn our own way will usher us into the peace and joy we long to possess in our relationship with our Redeemer.

But often we must first bring our spiritual compulsivity into conscious awareness. Many times our innate sinfulness in this area has been compounded by having parents and/or other people in our lives who withheld love from us if we displeased them. Because of this we may have emotional wounds that we do not deserve blame for. These wounds are often sublimated, with the result that they become deeply rooted in our subconscious. When this happens our entire view of reality can be affected without our knowing it. This may be why some believers have a much harder time surrendering their lives to the grace of God than others.

God Himself is the answer. Sometimes the Spirit directly enables us to see what is driving our impulse to try to earn the Father’s love. Other times He uses counselors, pastors or close friends to help bring these subconscious tendencies to light in us. As this takes place (most often progressively, rather than instantly) we can use this new awareness to enable us to surrender this part of who we are to the cleansing, healing and transforming power of God. Then our increasing knowledge of His character, as opposed to our own, begins to free us from the impossible burden of “self-redemption.” We then find ourselves on the way to a new destination, a blessed place where we deeply drink from the ocean of acceptance and belonging that we were made for and desperately need, an ocean that can only be found in the One who loves us beyond our fondest dreams.