Year: 2012

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.

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.