Month: July 2013

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We must find our joy in God’s joy, our happiness in His happiness. Human beings are forever trying to achieve these legitimate states of being through illegitimate means. This is perhaps one of the more profoundly accurate definitions of sin.

We dig our own wells, ignoring the one true Well, and drink deeply of the poisoned water we bring up from its depths. That water kills us if we drink enough of it. These false wells may provide pleasure for a season but the pleasure never lasts. The “happiness” of sin is always temporary (and its following misery potentially long lasting, if we are foolish enough to continue in it.) What the errant “well-digger” needs to realize is that only through sharing in the joy and happiness of the holiness of God does he or she tap into what is real and not an illusion.

Sinful pleasure does not come out of nowhere. It is a counterfeit of the real thing, a twisting of something that is inherently good. Our Lord does not object to pleasure. He invented it. He does not object to joy. He is its source. True happiness is the gift of God. When His children seek and find Him they will also find the kind of pleasure that leaves no regret, a clean and holy pleasure. We who love Him are destined to share in His joy.

It is indeed a tragic thing when Christians join the world in the indulgence of illegitimate pleasure, but it is also tragic when Christians decide that all intense pleasure must somehow be the kind that Satan promotes. When we allow ourselves to enjoy innocent delight we are actually blessing the Lord of delight. Moreover, we are obeying His will for He wills that His children enjoy good things. Whether it is in the celebration of a wedding, the joy of children’s play, or the artistic creation of beauty we are living out part of the abundant life Christ promised us when we enjoy these things, and He is not only happy to give them but also happy to participate with us in them.

The term “holy pleasure” is not an oxymoron. In fact it is descriptive of one of the greatest blessings human beings can receive. It is the only kind of pleasure that satisfies because it bears God’s stamp of approval. The radical ascetic’s total rejection of such pleasure is not of God, but of the Devil. Denying the legitimacy of such a blessing, and the joy and happiness it brings, is a lie. It may sound pious, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The Bible tells us that someday we will fully enter the happiness of our Master. That is a profoundly accurate description of Heaven. Yet even in this fallen world there is the potential for experiencing some of that happiness, if only through a glass darkly. Though we still imperfectly walk in His ways in this place and time He still grants us blessed glimpses of our true home. Such is the generosity of a perfectly loving God.

“Chronological Snobbery” and America
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The great Christian writer and apologist of the last century, C.S. Lewis, spoke of a flawed view of the present and the past which he termed “Chronological Snobbery.” By this Lewis meant a societal assumption that everything new in human thought and custom was automatically better than most, if not all, of the human thought and custom that preceded it. The Oxford don was one of the last of the true classical scholars of the Western tradition (he half-kiddingly referred to himself as a “dinosaur.”) As such Lewis was able to see the Modernist rejection of tradition and natural law that, even then, was going on all around him for what it was; an unreflective rejection of any kind of time-tested way of living. One has to wonder what this man who passed away in the early 1960’s would have thought of America in 2013.

There seems to have been a proliferation of Chronological Snobbery here during the past few years. Our nation is ever more rapidly giving itself over to an attitude that enthusiastically rejects the time-honored worldview of many earlier generations in the name of “progress.” This is reflected in the recent development of laws designed to overturn what is increasingly thought of as the, at best, misguided and, at worst, intentionally oppressive moral imperatives of an earlier time in the country’s history.

Inherent in many of these legislated changes to previously accepted norms is an apparent lack of forethought as to what the new norms might lead to over time. Such a lack is one of the cardinal qualities of Chronological Snobbery. If a people decide that everything their forebears believed in was fatally flawed, based on an evolutionary notion of human progress, then they tend to assume that they are more enlightened beings. Pride is the obvious conscious or unconscious result of this way of thinking, and pride and snobbery are to a large degree synonymous.

Lewis himself was self-admittedly such a snob when he was a young Atheist. With the onset of a greater maturity in thought that immediately preceded and followed his religious conversion he came to realize the flaws of a pat faith in human progress. As an older man with a wide-ranging understanding and appreciation of the history of Western civilization he came to realize that his young pride had blinded him to its more enduring virtues. Would that more of us could come to share Lewis’s mature worldview today.

The reason we do not seems to be rooted in the fact that the last few generations in this nation are inheritors of what might be described as “The Tyranny of the Young and Distrusting.” Since at least the 1960’s there has been an aggressive rejection of both the wisdom of past ages and the older individuals who are perceived as repressively carrying on the convictions of those past ages. Advanced age is no longer seen as producing wisdom as much as in producing a supposed ignorance. This historically novel phenomenon is perhaps most strikingly seen in the now very public rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States by many, a rejection that has become profoundly more prevalent in the last several years.

It appears to be a fact of history that those societies who give up on the idea of an unchanging, transcendent moral order eventually descend into moral anarchy. If this is true then America, after 237 years, seems to be descending at a rate greater than any other society previous to it. This is because our recent widespread embrace of Chronological Snobbery, in the rapid rejection of what was considered an unchanging moral code not many years ago, is possibly unprecedented by any culture in the history of mankind. What is sure to those of us who have decidedly rejected embracing it is that we do not look forward to the future it heralds in the country of our birth.

Human Desire and God’s Timing
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley

If God does not act on our behalf in the way, or at the time, we would expect Him to we might be tempted to think that He does not love us. If God does not immediately give us what we desire we might wonder if He is our champion or our enemy. Sometimes our response is even anger towards our Lord. Such is the reaction of fallen human nature to not getting its own way how and when it wants it.

It is disconcerting to realize that we sometimes react to God the way a small child reacts to its parents when those parents challenge its will. Who has not seen (or been) a frustrated six-year-old screaming “I Hate You!” at a mother who will not buy the candy bar he or she wants? The innate human response to not getting our way with someone is to decide that someone does not have our best interest in mind. Anger usually follows.

In this world even the desires of a child of God are often frustrated. The reason for this is that our flesh (the “old man” who, though dying, still dwells within us) sometimes influences us to want the right thing in the wrong way or at the wrong time. For instance many un-married Christians have a God-given desire for a spouse but choose relationships with people who God knows would not be good for them or for the other person. Or perhaps they desire the right partner, but one or both of them are not yet at the level of maturity required to make a marriage work. The result is frustration, a surrendered believer’s legitimate desire for a good thing thwarted by the sovereign wisdom of God. The pain of such denial is real. When it happens to us we often feel like we cannot help but react.

This is where the temptation to believe a lie about the Lord rears its ugly head. The pain we experience in not receiving something we desperately want, something that makes sense to us to receive and receive right now, can be intense. We begin to wonder if the God we believe in really has our best interests at heart. We begin to wonder if He is against us, and if He is against us who can be for us? Sometimes we lash out at a God we have come to think is a cruel parent, perhaps like the darkly imperfect human parents who raised some of us. For that matter, even the best human parents make mistakes

But the God of the cross is anything but a bad parent.

He is, in fact, the perfect parent. No one knows us better than the One who created us. No one loves us better than the One who died for us and has redeemed us. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ knows and loves us perfectly and wants to bless us more deeply than we could ever imagine. However He also knows what we need, and when we need it, far better than we do. As obvious as this might be to us intellectually our hearts often have a harder time accepting it. It seems to take longer for our hearts to grow in trust than our minds.

The answer is the realization and acceptance that coming to fully trust in our God is a long process. We believe, but we still need to continue to ask Him to help us in our unbelief, to be prepared to grow in faith over the long term. A Giant Redwood tree is not made in a day and neither is our faith. Growth in faith tends to be incremental. Patience does not come overnight. When the Psalmist tells us to “wait on the Lord” he means, among other things, that a patient heart will receive its desire at exactly the right time. God gives us the desires of our heart when the giving will do us the most good. If we wish to be wise, and enjoy life in Christ to the full, we do well to accept that getting the things we want, even desperately want, will not be according to our imperfect schedule but according to His perfect one.

The 21st Century Christian, the Information Age, and “Compassion Fatigue”
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is impossible for the believer to be content with this world as it is, but it is also impossible to change everything our spirit tells us is wrong with it. This can create a conundrum for the sensitive soul who longs for the redemption of all things, knows this must await the return of Christ, but at the same time also knows that we are called to be lights in the darkness in the interval. This dilemma is only compounded by living in an age in which mass communication on a global scale has made us more aware of what is wrong with the human race than any other generation in history.

The vast majority of Christians in 500 A.D. or 1000 A.D. or 1500 A.D. most likely had no idea what the needs were of people outside of a twenty mile radius from their place of birth. The ability to know what was wrong with the world (and to act in any way other than prayer to address how that wrong impacted people) was radically limited by the lack of media technology we take for granted today. This most likely both simplified and focused the lives of our predecessors in the faith. Their immediate community was their only world and, thus, their primary concern.

This kind of existence is nearly impossible for a conscientious believer today, at least in the developed world. Through an endless supply of print media, television programming, websites and other forms of modern communication we citizens of the 21st Century daily come face to face with a myriad of problems that plague both the Church and the world at large. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the immensity of needs on this fallen planet.

This reality contributes in a profound, but perhaps little appreciated, way to the afflictions in the community of faith that we today call “Compassion Fatigue” and “Ministry Burn-Out.” There are saints who deeply and sincerely want to make a difference for the Kingdom of God, but they have become so inundated by what they see and hear and read everyday that they either feel paralyzed by the immensity of it all or they have taken on too many causes at one time. The result is a sense of frustration and failure that can be discouraging to an extreme.

Added to this problem is the wrongheaded assumption in the West that we are all capable of doing far more than the benighted people of the past. Too many in the church have unconsciously adopted the world’s idea of unaided human potential being somehow limitless. Some have justified the taking on of too many challenges by using the Biblical declaration that “with God all things are possible” or “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” They take this to mean that God can give us the strength to do the superhuman things it would take to address most, or even many, of the problems we see everywhere thanks to living in the Information Age. The rub here is this: God will indeed give us the strength to accomplish what He truly has called us to accomplish. What He will not do is give us the strength to accomplish something he never had in mind.

In this truth is the solution to our conundrum as Christians living in the 21st Century West. We must seek God’s will for our ministerial lives while purposefully not listening to the cacophony of needs that are served up by our access to mass information. God expects us to learn to listen to His often “still, small voice”, not to what other people, or we ourselves, may tell us we must do to save the world. We are only responsible to do what He has called us to do with our finite human lives. Yes, our Lord can empower us beyond what we are capable of accomplishing in the flesh alone, but He does not expect us to achieve what He has never asked of us.

Sometimes we truly need to ignore all the voices telling us to “do something” and listen to the Voice which says “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” If we decide to only take on that yoke we will find we accomplish far more than we could ever do, in and of ourselves, at the beck and call of even the Christian voices in mass-media that tell us we must somehow do the impossible.