Month: December 2013

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.” -Rabbi Tarfon

There are divine works that we are called to participate in but not finish. God often does great things over periods of time that exceed the human lifespan. Paul tells us that the great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament could only look forward to the coming of the Messiah. Even though they played important roles in preparing His way none lived to see the Advent. Similarly, David made Jerusalem a great city in preparation for the construction of the Temple of the Lord but it was left to his son to see it built. We who today labor for the Kingdom may not be here on earth for its consummation at the return of Christ.

These examples all relate to major biblical events but this truth can just as accurately be applied to any Christian’s life ministry. Some of the goals God has called us to work towards will be accomplished during our earthly pilgrimage and some will not. The problem for contemporary believers is that we have a tendency to see all things as attainable not only in our lifetime but in a few months or years. This is because many of us have been beguiled by the “instant gratification” culture of the 21st Century. We forget that the Lord of time does not work according to our idea of time. Some trees, after all, do not reach maturity for hundreds of years. He is the God of the Tortoise as well as the Cheetah. It may even be accurate to say that the greatest things in our lives are the things that take the longest for us to attain. We should not be surprised that this is often equally true for ministry.

It is important for believers to be reconciled to the truth of this. If we are easily frustrated by what seems to us to be the glacial pace in the fulfilling of a mission we know we have been called to then we run the risk of losing heart. How many promising ministries have been abandoned in their infancy because results do not fulfill our expectations? It is sobering to ponder the possibility that God has left His human servants with the power not only to advance but also to hinder the gospel. The hindrance can occur in a number of ways for a number of reasons and one of them is impatience with the timing of results. The temptation to impatience typically begins with an unrealistic expectation. An example of such an expectation might be the idea that a new Bible study or small group should draw large numbers of people in a very short period. The fact is that such ministries do not always achieve “respectable” numbers for quite some time. If the organizers do not factor that possibility into their thinking, from the beginning, they will be sorely tempted to give up altogether where a willingness to wait might produce great fruit in season.

It is not for us to know the season when a ministry will produce an abundant crop for the King’s storehouse. What we can know from the Scripture is that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Pe 3:8.) It is imperative that the implication of this verse be allowed to sink into our minds and hearts. Once we realize that God does not operate according to our schedule it will be much easier to do His work while leaving the timing of the harvest to Him. Even if we do not see that harvest here on Earth we will once we get to Heaven and become, ourselves, part of the completed work of our Lord.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Some Christian teachers are frustrated by the apparent lack of success they experience in spurring their people to grow in holiness. They accurately use the words of the Bible in carefully exegeted sermons in which they preach the real need for repentance and change but then watch their people in vain for results. Nothing changes or their flock’s moral behavior becomes even worse. Why?

Perhaps it is because exhortation rarely changes the people it is directed at unless someone who they know loves them is the one doing the exhorting. Whether it is a pastor to his flock or one individual to another, love and acceptance must precede truth telling about personal sinfulness in order for real change to occur. Love is what leads us towards true repentance. Accusation and guilt-manipulation rarely produces the Godly sorrow that leads to new life, they usually only provoke the kind of sorrow that the scripture tells us will ultimately lead to death.

Exclusively employing the fear of punishment to try to make a human being stop indulging in some moral trespass is problematic. Sincere repudiation of sin most often happens when the person committing it comes to realize that the wrongdoing in question is hurting someone they know has their best interests at heart. The someone in question is always God ultimately, but this principle also holds true when the one hurt by the sin is a person who has loved the sinning party well. A child who has done something to offend a truly loving parent will often tearfully breakdown and sincerely ask for forgiveness when that parent gently confronts them in a loving way that shows their own hurt.

To understand the spiritual principle in operation here we might do well to compare the reaction to sin exhibited by the Pharisees with that of Jesus. The Pharisees of the Gospels never accepted a person unless the person was morally pure according to their rules. If you did not live up to those rules you were rejected and looked down upon. Pharisees were never friends with “sinners”. By contrast Jesus welcomed such people into his presence. The Bible tells us the religious elites of his time accused him of being a friend of drunkards and prostitutes. This is because he was. For Jesus acceptance came first because He knew that it was primarily the kindness of his Father, which led people towards repentance, not his wrath, as, justified as it might be. The love of Christ for a man or woman preceded that man or woman’s contrition and, in fact, it was this initiative of unconditional love, which made the contrition possible.

We do not earn the right to tell another human being that they need to turn from a sin until we have shown them we love them in both word and deed. Otherwise they will either ignore us or be spiritually and emotionally damaged by us, or both. Before we presume to exhort we must first embrace and accept the person in question even though we do not embrace and accept their wrongdoing. This is the way to turn someone from their sin and back into right relationship with God and others.

Love precedes repentance.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Many believers in the West today do not rest in the love of Christ. We pay lip service to the notion but we do not deeply receive the love He has for us. The evidence of this is the psychological pathology that afflicts such a large percentage of the body of Christ. The gift of God is, among other things, a sound mind. It is impossible to bask in the fullness of His love and remain chronically emotionally ill. Something is wrong when the children of God are popping Prozac like its going out of style.

Now I do not want to sound like some eternally sour fundamentalist. There are enough voices out there condemning psychology in an arrogant and undiscerning way without adding my own to the chorus. Also, as someone who regularly sees a Christian counselor it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to do so. I also need to make clear that I’m not saying that all those who struggle with feeling the love of Jesus do not truly know Him. That said the fact remains that something is wrong here.

As much as one tries to find it in the early church the first Christians apparently were not a depressed, anxious bunch of people. While Pentecost might not have ushered in perfect mental health for those who received the Spirit the event was not exactly an occasion for group therapy! The love of God in Christ brought delight and purpose to people who existed in a time and place where life was often brutal and short. Something happened that transformed them from individuals who seemingly had every right to be miserable into beacons of enduring joy.

The New Testament talks about trials and tribulations. In fact it promises adversity to those who walk in the footsteps of Jesus. What it does not promise is that the Christian life will cause or perpetuate everything from Obsessive-Compulsiveness to Bi-Polar Disorder. Again, the gift of God is a sound mind. When so many believers are without a sound mind it is, I think, justifiable to ask why.

The cure for what emotionally ails us is the acquisition of heart knowledge that, through Christ, the God of the Universe loves us personally and that we love Him. No one who truly lives in this realization on a daily basis can long be deeply troubled psychologically. Some will call this stance simplistic. Others may say that it is too black and white and that it punishes people for struggling with the reality of still being marooned in a fallen world. Perhaps both objections are valid but they still do not account for the lack of joy and the growing presence of pathology in the Western church today.

I submit that the problem is not so much psychological as theological. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” A cliché? Yes, but profound and life changing truth nonetheless. It is solely in the progressive acceptance of this love that our hearts and minds are put at rest. In the end Jesus Christ Himself is the only deliverance we can count on from emotional disorders and we do well to look to Him directly, even as we continue to take our medication and visit our therapists. Whatever legitimate relief we get from both of these resources ultimately comes from God anyway. The hope is that, some day, we will come to know Him and His love well enough to dispense with them.