Month: November 2013

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“Our spiritual growth and emotional maturity occur in opposition to instinct-against the grain of our natural inclinations.” Barry Grosskopf

The author of this quote is not a Christian but he succinctly defines the essence of the sanctification process. The battle between the flesh and the spirit that every believer experiences is captured here using non-biblical language. Our sinful tendencies and Grosskopf’s “natural inclinations” are one and the same. He touches on an important point that many Christians have trouble truly accepting; that becoming more Christ-like is never easy and often comes through trial. Growing in maturity is a matter of daily overcoming the powerful fallen human instincts to take the path of least resistance and to avoid pain at all costs.

As long as we think that a life of continuing trial is somehow an atypical thing in the walk of faith we set ourselves up for bitterness and despair. The book of Job tells us “man is born to trouble” and this is a truism for all of us as long as we remain on Earth. All human beings suffer. It is universal. No one is exempt be they believers or non-believers. The difference is that for the faithful child of God suffering is ultimately redemptive and a part of the divine plan for our ongoing sanctification. It is almost a cliché in the Church for people who have gone through such redemptive pain to testify, usually after the fact, that they are thankful for that pain because it brought them closer to God…but this is exactly the case.

A few years ago a friend of mine went through the horrors of breast cancer. She endured chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She underwent a mastectomy and, in order to limit the disease’s spread, my friend had most of her reproductive system surgically removed. Her life was forever altered by the illness and there is no guarantee that it will not return and end her life. Shortly after the cancer went into remission I heard her say at a prayer meeting that she would have gone through the whole ordeal again rather than forfeit the spiritual growth that it resulted in. I was absolutely floored by her testimony and suddenly I did not feel as sorry for her anymore. This woman had been through the crucible of great trial and had apparently gained an intimacy with God which was profound. This was so precious to her that she accepted the suffering it took to attain it.

While it is true that my sister in Christ could not avoid the pain that befell her she might have looked at it as nothing but a curse and allowed it to destroy her faith. That this did not happen is mute testimony to her pre-existing faith in her Lord and to the resilience that the Holy Spirit can give us in even the worst-case scenario. I suspect she knew beforehand that trial is a part of this life and trusted God in the darkest moments because of that knowing. The natural inclination would be to “curse God and die” but she did neither because there was more in her heart than that inclination.

We cannot grow without adversity. Struggle is part of God’s will for the redemption of a fallen race. We can fight this reality or we can accept and profit by it.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Maybe accomplishing all our spiritual goals successfully isn’t as important as continuing to trust God when we fail to accomplish them. Performance based spirituality is rife among some in the American church. Many have taken the hard driving, Type-A perfectionism of the surrounding culture and baptized it. Exhortation to “excellence” is heard every Sunday from pulpits across the land and it has become all too easy for Christians to feel like they are never doing enough, well enough. Sometimes it appears as if we Evangelicals have decided to exalt Martha over Mary, rather than the other way around.

We will all fail…repeatedly. Every saint in the pages of scripture failed at something in their lives and usually more than once. What counted was the fact that they did not give up and walk away from God in the midst of that failure. When we fail our best option is to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and pray for the strength to do better next time. Perseverance is precious in God’s economy and far more important than an unbroken string of successes. Trusting the Lord in our failures is vital to spiritual growth and this is something that all of us need to grasp if we are to progress in our sanctification.

Some will say that such an acceptance of ongoing failure in the Christian life is a form of permissiveness, even a manifestation of the sin of sloth. This is only true for the person whose heart is far from God to begin with. The sincere lover of God is not looking for excuses to shirk the responsibility to do what God would have them do. It is akin to the parable of the talents. The problem with the wicked servant was not just that he did a lousy job with the gifts his master gave him; the problem was that he wrongly judged that master, calling him “a hard man”. In fearfully burying the talent in the ground rather than at least putting it in the bank so it might, at minimum, earn interest this man showed that he held contempt for his master’s character. This was his sin, not necessarily the failure to perfectly multiply his talent’s value.

We do others and ourselves a disservice when we mercilessly carp on failure. Failure is part and parcel of the fallen human condition. This is true both before and after conversion. If it weren’t there would be no provision in the New Testament for the confession and forgiveness of sins committed by believers, which there clearly is. Perfection will come only when we someday stand face to face with Jesus Christ and become fully like Him.

Because of this promise of eventual perfection we can continue to put our faith in God for ultimate victory when we fall short in any endeavor. With that in mind it is vital that modern American Christians who have bought into the relentless perfectionism of a large segment of our society (and hung a cross around it) cut themselves some slack. Constantly excoriating ourselves for failures God fully expects us to experience is a form of ungodly self-condemnation. It might even be perceived as pride, a “goddish” attempt to see ourselves as more than the fallible, finite human beings that we remain, even after we have come to faith.

Jesus never fails it is true but, for now, His followers’ will…and that is ok.

Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“Personal Empowerment” is the mantra of this age. We in the West are constantly being told that the power to get what we want for ourselves is somehow our birthright. It is being taught through advertising, through popular entertainment and, perhaps more subtly, through our educational system. From childhood we are being sold the idea that the key to life is to put ourselves at the center of our own personal universes and cultivate a mindset that there is no limit to what we can ultimately make our own. This will all come about if we just empower ourselves. How we get that power is by believing, first, that we are “worth it” and than doing whatever it takes to acquire the means to fulfill our dreams. These dreams are most often of our own design.

The reality of inherent and intrinsic human limitation is not a part of this self-powered self-fulfillment ideal. Many times also missing is any idea of service to others being part of the true route to real life. Most importantly the concept of our dependence on, and moral obligation to, a Creator and Sustainer of life is not included in the human empowerment equation. This should not too surprising since the original fall of our race was about buying into the proposition of “becoming as God” instead of knowing, loving and serving the true God.

However the 21st Century West has enshrined this core aspect of original sin and raised it to a level of acceptance, and actual celebration, perhaps unknown in all of human history thus far.

The sad thing is that it isn’t just the secular West that has willingly been hoodwinked by an idea as old as the Serpent; too often it is the Western church as well. While blatant self-empowerment rhetoric may not be as evident in our Christian subculture it has been unconsciously adopted by many Christians. The reason for this is simple: we are reading the same ads, watching the same TV shows and often going to the same schools and colleges as our secular neighbors. Spend enough time immersed in the world and it becomes impossible not to be more influenced by the culture around us than by the Holy Spirit.

One of the hardest things for fallen human beings to embrace, even those who profess to follow Christ, is personal weakness. It does not feel good to deeply recognize our absolute powerlessness to attain to anything of truly eternal worth, starting with salvation itself. Power for its own sake or for the purpose of achieving self-centered goals can feel good for a time. All sin is pleasurable for a season, the Bible tells us, and the seeming possession of great personal power is certainly no exception. In the end, however, it destroys us. We may well “achieve our dreams” living in the First World, but if we do so apart from the will of the One who created us for his perfect and loving purposes we will eventually end up with nothing but ashes and despair…whether in this life or the next.

For we who call ourselves followers of Christ it is imperative to wake up to the societal deception we have allowed to influence our lives and the life of the Church. We must divest ourselves of any power that our Lord has not given us for His purpose. Otherwise we will progressively forget Him as we pursue our own path through the use of illegitimate power, and all use of power for selfish goals is illegitimate by Biblical definition. Personal weakness is not an easy thing to accept, no, but it is only in such accepted weakness that we may find the strength to truly live as on to God…and so truly live.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is easy to hate another’s sin just because it makes us feel uncomfortable by reminding us of our own moral failures. Often the result is that we either do not want to be around the person in question or we feel an almost compulsive need to criticize them. Both responses to other’s sin are selfish and unloving. The only legitimate reasons for hating another person’s sin are love for that person and love for the God they are sinning against. Only when these are the motives is it possible to approach the sinning person and rebuke them lovingly and with a sincere heart. Until we have such a heart perhaps we should never presume to open our mouths.

Sin is, of course, the universal experience of all mankind with the single exception of Christ. As believers we are each called not just to reckon with our own sins but to also appropriately reckon with the sins of others. Dealing with a sinning brother or sister is one of the most difficult challenges of the Christian life. The temptation in these situations is always to either accuse or excuse. Both these reactions come from the flesh and not the Spirit. When we angrily point the finger at someone we are acting out of a prideful arrogance that conveniently glosses over our own evils and when we, alternatively, give them the impression that sin is no big deal we act out of a permissive laxity that does the same thing. Either approach is equally wrong and sinful in and of itself.

It is vitally important to take the time to recognize our own impulses in reacting to transgression in others. Otherwise we may multiply their transgression by our own and lose a precious opportunity to be agents of reconciliation and healing. The key is found in not immediately reacting to whatever the person has done. On many occasions wisdom dictates thinking before we speak and certainly this is one of them. Our immediate passion for either accusing or excusing must not be allowed to possess us; rather we must control our initial urges and remain silent for the moment. This gives us the opportunity to determine whether we are ready to truly “speak the truth in love” or whether we need to be silent for the time being and check our own spirit.

It has been said that motive is everything and this is clearly the case in how we react to someone else’s moral lapses. We must search our motives before we presume to say one word of correction to another human being. We must also ask the Holy Spirit to help us enter into this self-examination, while at the same time granting us a spirit of sincere love. Then we can deal with the sinning person, as God would have us, not as we would have us. This is the only way to insure that we do not compound another’s sin with our own.