Month: March 2013

The Son of Compassion
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is impossible to know Jesus Christ without knowing His compassion. One of the most profound truths of conversion is the realization that, though we are justly condemned, the One who would rightfully condemn us does not desire to do so. As we viscerally come to know this truth, that Jesus deeply desires us to be redeemed and healed, we become willing to let Him do it.

It is easy to read about Jesus having compassion on someone in Scripture and miss the profound depth of what that means. God incarnate sees our misery and His reaction is not “they are getting what they so richly deserve” but instead a passionate desire to help. The Lord of the Universe is moved by humankind’s pain. God not only weeps over our lostness but in Christ He extends Himself to find us. This is the definition of compassion, not only being affected by someone’s suffering but actually acting to relieve that suffering. All the healings in Christ’s ministry are examples of this love in action, this willingness to enter into our place of pain and do something about it.

One of the hardest tasks in the believer’s life is to trust that when they hurt, God hurts. In the world we see so much indifference towards, often even pleasure in, the sufferings of others. We even see it in people that call themselves Christians but who seem to glory in judging others for the sake of judging others. These Christians get some sort of high from making others feel guilty rather than convicted. It seems impossible to believe that the kind of radical compassion we so desperately need could exist in such a world especially when it cannot be found in some of our churches! The bottom line is that the misery of this fallen place we dwell in seems overwhelming; and so it is apart from the reality of Christ.

But in the Son of God there dwells a transcendent love for us, one that is unaffected by the darkness of this time and place. It is the compassion of the cross. The love that brought Jesus to Golgotha was also the love that ultimately raised Him from the dead and it is this same power that enables us to be brought to and changed by our risen Lord today. When we are touched from above by God, when we are freed from some pain, healed of some wound, we need to remember that the Lord is not doing this reluctantly or begrudgingly. He is simply revealing the depth of His compassionate nature. He knows our anguish and he shares in it. Our Savior has not been called the “Son of Compassion” without glorious reason. Our pain truly is His pain and, because of His very nature, Jesus Christ will not let that pain go forever unremoved.

The Most Blessed Attribute
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God is love. 2nd John 4 declares this twice and we so deeply need to believe, to know, the truth of this statement. For some reason Evangelicals today seem to shy away from declaring it. Maybe it is because the term was misused during the 1960’s and 70’s by those who mistook love for license. Perhaps it stems from our strong repudiation of the spirit of Universalism which has infected so many churches that call themselves Christian, but do not understand the magnitude of sin. The problem is that in counterbalancing this error we have sometimes forgotten that the love of God springs from the His very nature. God doesn’t love begrudgingly, God loves because He is love itself.

We also know the Lord has the capacity to hate. He hates what is evil, that which is contrary to His good and perfect will, that which destroys the human race which He created in His image. We know that He is capable of justifiable wrath. Yet, at the same time, scripture never describes God as hate. He hates but, if we believe John, it is not the core of His nature. If God’s anger was greater than His love none of us would have any hope at all. The essence of love is grace and it is only grace that makes possible the redemption of sinful human beings. The redemption found in the cross of Christ provides the triumph of love in fulfilling the divine mandate for justice.

It is so easy to fear God in the worst sense of the word. Our consciences tell us not only that we are capable of terrible things but that we have done terrible things. The enemy of our souls sees an opening to torment us and constantly whispers in our ears (or shouts) that we are too evil to hope for true repentance and reconciliation with our Creator. At such times a believer is tempted to despair. The Christian starts to doubt whether a holy God can love him or her. It seems that divine anger is greater than divine love. We fear the God of justifiable wrath and lose sight of the God of gratuitous love.

He, however, has not stopped loving us. It is the nature of God, and thus the nature of love, to be steadfast. It is the nature of God, and thus the nature of love, not to give up on its object. Our feelings, subjective and influenced by so many things which are not real, may tell us that God does not love us anymore. Our feelings may even tell us that He never did. Our feelings are not to be trusted. Sometimes emotions are in harmony with the truth, but very often they are not. In and of themselves they may lead us to believe in what seems to be ultimate reality, but is actually the spirit of error.

When, through deceptive emotions, the believer has come to fear God in the wrong sense and for the wrong reasons he or she is in desperate need of recalling the foundational truth communicated in 1st John 4. As we will to believe, to know, that our Lord is love we will be able, with the help of the Spirit, to put our fear away. 1st John 4:18 go’s on to tell us that “perfect love casts out fear”. God is perfect thus His love is as well. Love will triumph because He is the Lover. Love is greater than fear because it is grounded in the character of almighty God.

Do Not Lose Heart
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Those of us who are followers of Christ in America are beginning to see the first stirrings of a widespread antipathy towards Biblical Christianity that will most likely lead to real persecution at some point in the perhaps not too distant future. If and when this happens we will simply be joining our brothers and sisters in the persecuted church throughout the last two millennia as well as with tens of millions of God’s people living in many other parts of the world today. Moreover it should not be a shock to us that our nation is rapidly abandoning its Judeo-Christian heritage. Without going into a history of secularization during the past half-century the fact is that the writing has been on the wall for at least that long a time.

What is more important for Christians here is to realize that, apart from a genuinely supernatural and wide-spread revival, this trend is unlikely to be arrested. The news today appears full of evidence that “the tipping point” has already been reached. We must prepare ourselves to live in a “Post-Christian” society that will increasingly view those individuals who espouse biblical convictions as being anathema to the new social order (the order in question being based on a particularly aggressive brand of Secular Humanism masquerading behind feel-good terms like “tolerance” and “diversity”, the kind of tolerance and diversity that leads its adherants to openly hate those they consider to be intolerant) This will be more obvious in some parts of the nation than others, at least at first, but may well gain momentum throughout the U.S. given enough time and the increasing centralization of power in the hands of a more and more wholeheartedly secular federal government.

For those of us who increasingly sense we are fighting a rearguard action against a national rejection of the God of the Bible it is becoming more important to remind ourselves regularly that He is still ultimately in charge of the affairs of man. One of the most effective ways of preparing for the apparent dismantling of “American Christendom” as we once knew it is to affirm to ourselves, and to our brethren in the faith, that our Lord knows exactly what is going on and is ultimately using it to further His redemptive ends. He is supremely capable of glorifying His Name in the midst of the moral decline of this nation while working good in our lives, even in the face of real persecution. He is also capable of bringing many new truly committed believers into the fold even, and especially, in times like these.

What we are beginning to see on our own shores is but a variation of the kind of systematic repression of true religious freedom that we have already faced for many years in places like the Islamic nations and what’s left of the Communist world (Mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, et al.) In these areas true Christian faith can be a ticket to imprisonment, torture and death. It seems a bit incongruous to expect that those of us here should expect that we would forever avoid this kind of reality. Also, as mentioned earlier, in addition to present day oppression multitudes of Christians in various other parts of the globe have known severe persecution since the days of the Apostles.

Beyond this we see in the Scriptures multiple prophecies concerning the times preceding the return of Christ, prophecies that confirm what we are seeing happen before our eyes, widespread apostasy and moral decay among them. Perhaps never before have so many human beings taken “the way that seems right to a man but in the end leads to (spiritual) death.” So it is not as if the faithful student of the Word of God can claim that something strange is going on. These are signs of the times.

Again it comes back to fighting any fear this may engender by believing the promises of God towards His hard-pressed children in any age. We are assured over and over in the Bible that He will uphold us with the power of His love and that, whatever we face in this life, He will make us “more than conquerors” as we stay true to His Son. Beyond this our Lord will vindicate His people in the end and judge those who unrepentedly persecute them.

In the meantime our job is to steadfastly hold true to Biblical truth while loving our enemies as Jesus called us to do. In places of persecution, both past and present, many of those who hated us were won over to Christ by our willingness to love them in sincere and practical ways, even as they were taking us to prison…or to our deaths at their hands. May we who bear the name of Christ in America trust the same God those martyrs of the faith have and may we not love our own lives in this fallen and dying world so much that we spiritually falter if those lives are threatened. After all, this world, including this country, is passing away and our eternal homeland is not far away. Remember that truth always, put your life in the hands of God…and do not lose heart.

Blessed are the Frustrated
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Frustration is the pain that comes from the thwarting of our will. It is a frequent experience in the lives of all human beings and believers are by no means immune. Frustration is one of the potentially negative byproducts inherent in being imperfect creatures living in a fallen world. We want what would seem to make us happy, and we want it now. The world, however, does not cooperate.

Neither does God.

There are degrees of frustration. Daily events bring us the smaller kind; the traffic jams up, the computer goes down, a seemingly simple business call turns into a marathon session of “Muzak” initiated by recorded voices. But the thwarting of our will takes on a more disturbing aspect when it is attached to the larger issues of life. Someone waits for endless and seemingly futile years to meet a potential spouse, an illness lingers despite the best efforts to heal body or mind, an aspiring writer experiences rejection letter after rejection letter; these are frustrations with a capital “F”. With these change happens at what seems like a glacial pace and the pain of them is far worse than that of being hung-up at a railroad crossing in a car.

The primary temptation the Christian faces here is to give up. Perseverance is a biblical virtue but it never comes easily to the instantly gratified children of the 21st Century Western Church. In trying to develop a right attitude towards such “long-suffering” we are, today, especially prone to lose heart.

In dealing with this reality it might help us to know that God is both sovereign and sovereignly good to us. He knows the difference between what we need and what we want. He knows that some things are kept from us for our own protection. There is truth to the hoary old evangelical cliché, “rejection is often God’s protection”. Even if something deeply desired will ultimately be good in our lives the Lord may make us wait for it for the sake of building character in us. He, Himself, is long-suffering and if we would follow Christ, longing to be made like Him, we too must bear the cross of delayed gratification. Frustrations, big and small, are part of the crucible of pain which we must all endure for the character of God to be forged in us.

The truth is that it is better to be frustrated in the short term than to be immediately gratified to our soul’s hurt in the long term. This is a hard lesson to learn but, as with all the others our Lord wills to teach us, it is we who will be blessed at lesson’s end.