Month: May 2013

Thanking God for the Wrong Thing
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We are to give thanks in all things, not for all things. It is a mistake to thank God for intrinsically evil happenings in our lives. God can bring good out of such events, and for that we can and should be thankful, but He does not expect His children to pretend that the events themselves are good. Furthermore he does not expect us to subtly imply that He is involved in any way with evil that others have brought upon us or that we have brought upon ourselves.

Many years ago there was a film that depicted the “hazing” ceremony involved in pledging for a certain college fraternity. In one scene a pledge is literally being lashed repeatedly as a part of this ritual. Each time he is struck he is required to say, “Thank you sir, may I have another.” Some Christians feel that they should say something similar to their Lord when someone does something bad to them. They wrongly believe that He has somehow endorsed, or even caused, the pain that comes as a result of someone else’s sin. This is never true. God is not the author of the sin in our lives, no matter how it got there.

It is true that He allows evil to exist in our world today. God created a moral universe populated by higher beings designed to be moral “free agents”. When some of His creatures took advantage of that freedom by rebelling against their creator, evil came into existence and we have been affected by that evil ever since. We are the benighted descendents of two of those free agents, Adam and Eve. We, like they, are sinners.

We live in a fallen world in which catastrophe can befall us due to our own transgression, the transgression of others, or as a result of the fall of nature which accompanied the Fall of man. All of these catalysts are ultimately our own corporate fault as we belong to a race, which has been justly cursed by a holy God.

All this is to say that when bad things happen to us we should not imply that our Lord has any personal responsibility for them. We should not curse Him for the evil which comes into our lives and, by the same token, we should not thank Him either. The reason some believers do thank Him is because they think that it is somehow an act of deep humility to give thanks for the hurricane that destroyed their house. But hurricanes and tornados were not a part of the original creation; they came about when human sin entered the picture. It is foolish, not humble, to thank God for something that ultimately results from human transgression. What we can thank Him for is His promise to bring spiritual good in our lives out of our losses.

God does not gain any pleasure from seeing the misery we often go through in this life. He redeems our trials because, as His children, He desires us to ultimately be transformed partially through those trials. We need to be thankful for the blessed ability our Lord has to bring good out of evil and for the fact that His love for us compels Him to do so whenever we are afflicted.

Removing the Log
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The only way to effectively confront sin in others is to admit to the sin we have been guilty of ourselves. People do not enjoy being lectured by someone who sets themselves up as morally superior to them, but if the one doing the confronting first confesses to their own faults those people may listen. This truth is crystallized in the words of our Lord about the log in our eyes versus the mote (or small particle) in another’s. It is very easy to find sin in others and ignore our own. Such is the nature of human pride.

Most of us have had the experience of being on the receiving end of a sermon in which the preacher exhorts his listeners to identify and repent of a particular sin. Sometimes the speaker does not give any indication that the transgression in question is one that he also struggles with. The overall effect of such messages is to make the listener feel morally inferior to the speaker. However I have also heard sermons in which the pastor/teacher confesses to personally fighting the same thing. When the one talking is publicly honest in this way I immediately feel a respect for and identification with them that makes me more open to examining myself in the area in question. By confessing their own struggle with sin they gain the right to be truly heard. They have removed the log.

In God’s eyes the only person who is truly morally superior to everyone else is Jesus Christ. All others are self-deluded if they think otherwise. Yet often we succumb to the illusion of moral superiority. In addition we find another dark principle at work in our flesh. When we are losing the battle against a particular wrong in our own lives we can become that much more strident about attacking that wrong in the lives of others. During the 1980’s a certain American televangelist was known for the ferocity of his on-air attacks on the sexual immorality that was, and is, so rife in this country. Later it came out that the man was soliciting prostitutes. Such hypocrisy was a tool that Satan readily and effectively used to turn many Americans away from giving the claims of the Gospel a fair hearing at that time.

It is not that confronting sin in another is inherently wrong. The Bible tells us that we are to do so for the benefit of both the individual and the church of which that individual is a part. But if that person detects the slightest trace of self-righteousness in the one doing the confronting the confrontation is likely to end in both anger and defiance on their part. Because of this the sin can be compounded and the condition of the person ends up being worse than had nothing been said at all. Thus God’s loving redemptive purposes are thwarted, at least for the moment, and that is a terrible thing. Humble self-examination is the only way to prevent these tendencies from destroying what might be a legitimate God-given opportunity to help turn another from their sin. We must be open to confessing before confronting.

Sometimes the best way to start such a conversation is to immediately admit that we are no better than the other person in that particular area of sin or, alternatively, in some other kind of sin of which we have recently been guilty. This usually disarms the defensiveness that is so often the product of an exhortation that is without humility on the part of the one doing the exhorting.

Love alone must be what ultimately compels us to confront evil in others. Part of loving someone is identifying with them. In admitting we are not qualified to be anyone else’s judge we love the person in question and we earn the right to be heard. Then the Holy Spirit moves and blessed repentance can become a reality for them, and us.

Reconsidering Our Past
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There is a tendency among Christians to link spiritual growth with forsaking the past. We desire profound change to happen; the kind of change that allows us to rapidly leave behind the parts of our old life we now consider unnecessary or useless in the eyes of God. The parts I speak of are not the inherently sinful ones. The sins of our past must not be allowed any place in our Christian life onward from the time of conversion. No, the things we address here are the morally neutral aspects of our past. These take many forms. They may be the enthusiasms, friendships, career goals or even the deep emotions and transcendent experiences we had before Christ came into our lives. New believers often try to reject everything that made them who they were before their spiritual rebirth.

Such rejection seemed wise in the dramatic days of that rebirth. This is especially true for those of us who came to the end of ourselves only after running our lives into the ground. In the deep desire to put our self-directed lives behind us we attempted to throw out everything that we felt was not “spiritual”. After all, weren’t we new creations? The cross was before us and the world behind us. Everything old had to go. Or so we thought.

But years later we may begin to feel that we are not progressing in the faith, that we are not where we should be by this time. Accompanying that is a feeling that there is unfinished business in our lives. More disturbingly, we may have a sense of not knowing who we are. The Christian life does not seem to make sense anymore because all we assumed God would have accomplished in our lives “by now” has not come to pass.

When this happens the immediate temptation is to believe that some terrible sin harbored in our hearts is behind the spiritual malaise we experience. Sometimes this is true. A besetting sin can poison our relationship with God and remove us from His will. The result is always a terrible sense of being in the wrong place. Life cannot make sense when we are in the far country of the Prodigal.

There is, however, another possibility. Could it be that, all those years before, we discarded part of who God made us to be? Our new faith led us to try to erase nearly everything we once were in our pre-conversion life. Did we throw the proverbial babe out with the bathwater?

I have known of more than one believer who made the decision to go into “full-time ministry” only to find out after years of blood, sweat and tears that they make terrible pastors, evangelists, missionaries, etc. Sometimes the shock of failure has been enough to deeply shake their faith, putting them into a spiritual tailspin. Why would God “radically save” them if it was not His intention that they would be the next Billy Graham?

Yet, perhaps, these vocational shipwrecks are blessings in disguise. God is not above using the severe mercy of letting us bang our heads against the wall to show us the truth about who we are really meant to be in Him. Perhaps that childhood enthusiasm for becoming an artist, pilot or veterinarian when we grew up was God-given, even though we did not yet know Him personally as a Christian.

By the same token maybe some of the joyous or happy feelings we once knew as unbelievers were not sinful counterfeits but blessed results of God’s common grace being shed upon our lives. The wonders of childhood, for instance, can be experienced by all human beings, though they come in a time before many of us are even consciously aware of the concept of a transcendent God.

It could be that some of us need to stop fearing every aspect of our early lives and instead begin to selectively re-embrace those things that once brought us some health and happiness during that time. It might even be that this is a necessary pre-cursor to God moving us on in our Christian pilgrimage. His loving plan for our future could involve re-integrating some of our old loves into the new ones we have as believers. Then, through this “holy re-integration”, we may well come to better know and embrace who our Lord always meant us to be

When Good Works Aren’t Really Good
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9

Our truest good works are a function of the authenticity and intensity of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Any human being can perform such acts, whether they are a believer or not. In fact, by common grace, there are individuals who appear to out-give many Christians. But for the child of God loving acts of kindness towards others must be grounded in passionate communion with our Lord. Unfortunately this is sometimes not the case. Often we try to love because we fear temporal and spiritual consequences if we do not. The result of trying to do the work of God apart from the power of God is compulsion and effort grounded in our flesh. It may be a blessing to the recipient for a time, but ultimately it isn’t good for us because it isn’t fully genuine.

The Bible tells us that Jesus is the vine and we are His branches. The power to bless others in Spirit and in truth comes only from this “organic” relationship. The overflow of God’s love for us, appropriated, is what we are to give to others. We’re told that “apart from Him we can do nothing” and this is uniquely true in the area of good works.

We hear a lot about “burn-out” in the Church today. It is described as a condition in which believers have toiled so hard in ministry that they have worked themselves into physical and emotional exhaustion. If we can “do all things in Christ”, some say, then why does this happen? The answer may be as simple as this: these individuals were trying to do the work of God in the power of the flesh.

When a Christian deeply connects with his or her Savior the result is a supernatural outflow of His love. When we are caught up in the love of Christ we find our cup full to brimming over and it is an easy thing to bless others with that love. We find the strength to do even the most difficult and sacrificial acts of charity and it is not burdensome to us to do so. We become loving because God first loved us.

When believers try to do good works for bad reasons, such as from a fearful compulsion that comes from seeing God’s love as conditioned by obedience, truly good works become impossible. If love is not sincere then it isn’t love. Helping another out of fear of the consequences that might result if we don’t is not love. Love involves truly caring about the wellbeing of another and acting out of that care. Human beings do not naturally love this way, at least not to the degree that God wants us to. Only a Christian can have the superabundance of affection and devotion needed to sincerely, sacrificially give themselves away as Christ did. This potential can only be fulfilled if we fall passionately in love with Him and then stay near Him and with Him.

As in so many aspects of the Christian life it is only through intimate relationship with the Lord that we can become who He wants us to be, but the decision to seek after such intimacy is ours alone to make.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Every believer is called upon to resist temptation and avoid sin. Our sanctification depends on a progressive rooting out of sin that continues throughout our earthly lives. The problem is how to successfully overcome the temptations we face on a daily basis. It is one thing to will ourselves not to give in to these temptations and another to actually not do so. Today, unfortunately, many believers locked in this great struggle do not seem to be making much headway towards living a more holy life. The same sins keep enticing us and we continue to give in to them. Why?

The answer may lie in where believers go for the power to live above sin. Whether most Christians realize it or not there is a human tendency to try to fight the flesh with the flesh. By this I mean the use of willpower alone to combat sin. The catch in this approach is simply this: it ultimately does not work. This is not to say that our wills have no place in resisting temptation. Obviously a determination not to sin has to be present before a person will make the attempt to resist temptation. However such determination is not particular to Christians or even to religious people in general. Even atheists have, unbeknownst to themselves, a God-given conscience. With the possible exception of socio- and psychopathic individuals most persons have moral scruples of some kind. Even Hitler was kind to his dogs.

It also is true that certain sinful tendencies can be restricted, to a point, by self-effort. Most of us know someone whose ethical conduct surpasses that of some believers we know. These “people of goodwill”, as I heard a pastor once call them, can make us wonder what is wrong with our Christianity that we cannot be at least as morally upright as a person who has not yet come to the saving knowledge of Christ. Truthfully, human beings do have a degree of intrinsic goodness in them that originates in our race being created in the image of God. Beyond this is the additional reality of God’s common grace that is given, in varying degrees, to all of us. If it were not true that human sinfulness was tempered in these ways we would have a form of Hell on Earth in a literal sense. As it is evil is restrained until the age of grace ends and we enter the Tribulation period the Scriptures speak of.

The fact remains that natural man cannot progress past a certain point in forsaking sin, no matter how hard he tries. It is only the true Christian who can hope to go further and even that is impossible apart from effectively appropriating the sanctifying grace of God that can be given to the believer alone. Without this appropriation even we who do believe are doomed to remain in a state that precludes the kind of radical change God wills for His children.

The key to having ultimate victory over sin is found in identifying ourselves, in the deepest sense, with the complete triumph of our Savior at Calvary. It is only in the resurrection power of Jesus Christ that we can progressively stop sinning. No effort at self-reformation will work, even if it is a method passed off as “Christian”. Our righteousness truly is as “filthy rags” and it is only in the loving gift of His righteousness that we are made clean.

The practical question posed here is how we are supposed to actually accomplish this? The answer may be less complex than we suspect. Many of us who have been believers for some years have noticed something. The closer we stay to Jesus, the less we sin. It is as simple as that. Remember, though, that simple does not equate with easy. It is OK to admit that it is often difficult for us to pray, meditate on Scripture, fellowship with other Christians, witness, etc. In short it is not easy to walk out the faith in, and love for, Jesus that we claim to have. But difficult does not mean impossible. Over time the persevering Christian is perfected in the love of God and becomes ever more intimately bonded with His Son. In this intimacy there slowly comes the appropriation of His resurrection power and, with it, the ability to progressively root out the remaining sin in our lives. An even more blessed truth is that our very ability to persevere in this way does not depend only on ourselves. God Himself makes it possible through the love of Christ applied in our lives, a love that originates in Him, not in us. His perfect love does more than just cast out our fear, as important as that is, it also casts out our sin. We need not try to achieve this love but only to accept and abide in it.