Year: 2013

Serving for the Right Reason
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“Service” is a dirty word for many of us. We hear it and immediately react in a negative way. This is most often true for two reasons. The first is because, in our past, some of the people we cared about and/or were dependent on granted us love that was conditional. They would love us fully only if we did something that benefited them in some way. “Conditional love” is contingent on us. It is not contingent on the other person. Many of us have been victims of this love that is really not love at all.

The second reason has nothing to do with being a victim. It is a function of our inherent tendency to make self-centered decisions. We are selfish. The one we most want to serve is the one looking back at us in the mirror. Even as Christians the idea of serving others is often either not very present or it is present but tainted by an underlying motivation to serve others in order to obligate them to serve our own interests.

These two motivations to serve others are always present to some degree in our hearts. Both must be largely overcome if we hope to be freed from a caricature of servant-hood in order to embrace the kind of true servant-hood embodied by Jesus Christ.

The Son of God was, and is, the true Servant. He also helps others for two reasons, but for two very different ones. Jesus serves us because He knows and loves His Father and is known and loved by His Father. Both these loves are perfect, and thus real and unconditional. Jesus is one with the Father and the Father is the only being in the universe whose love is inexhaustible. He does not need us to love Him. Unlike human beings He is self-sufficient in every way and therefore He does not love us to gain something He must have from us like those in our past. He also is not self-centered as we are. He is other-centered by divine nature.

Jesus has been described as “a Man for others”. This is because, being one with the Father, He perfectly reflects His Father’s nature. Our Lord loves us because he genuinely has our best interests in heart. He is overflowing with infinite love and desires to serve us because a special part of that affection is reserved for the only creation He has made in His own image. There is no ulterior, self-centered motive. God is not capable of deceit and He is not needy of anything we could possibly give Him. That eliminates “ulterior” and “self-centered”. He loves and serves us because He wants to.

So how do we come to serve like God does? We can only do so by choosing to identify ourselves with the One who embodies Him in human form, His Son. As we choose to draw near to Jesus and sit, like Mary, at His feet. We will begin to reflect His nature. Then, when we look in the mirror, we will begin to see not our old self but the image of Christ. Part of this transformation will include the dawning of a new desire to serve others, a desire that is based on a real love for people and a humble and sincere desire to seek their good, the same motivation that moves the One we are becoming like.

Then the word “service” will take on a new and blessed meaning, one which we will truly desire to embrace and live out.

Of Bugs Bunny and Beethoven
Copyright 2005, 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Pop culture is the “coin of the realm” in America. Our generation’s shared memories often come from television cartoon shows we watched when we were children and the music we listened to when we were teenagers. In the case of the latter it has occurred to the author that much of his pre-Christian world-view was shaped as much by lyrics from pop songs as anything else. The only “Stairway to Heaven” that I knew then was the one the rock group Led Zeppelin sang about.

Much has been written about the effect of popular culture on the church. The usual appraisal is that too many Evangelical Christians have chosen to blithely consume worldly entertainment. It is difficult to argue against that charge, especially when believers gather and the buzz is not about how we have encountered God this week but rather about some new movie with scenes of sex and violence that everyone seems to have seen. The “Rated R Church” continues its perilous journey down the world’s road, pretty much condoning at least the occasional walk on the dark side. In fact some like to think of it as a healthy flouting of Legalism. (No one wants to be known as a Legalist because, in many parts of the Church, socially that’s the Christian equivalent of “the kiss of death”. The problem is that the term has come to negatively refer to anyone who has the gall to suggest that a fellow Christian or Christians might be doing something wrong.)

What has to be reckoned with is that pop culture is here to stay. The world has become one huge electronic hive in which every kind of communication media incessantly broadcasts what is often the lowest common cultural denominator. Americans now frame their lives by what they see and hear on TV, in movies, and on the Internet. For better or worse this is where people are now finding a significant part of their identity and that is why pop culture is increasingly becoming our primary social currency.

In light of this fact individual believers need to grapple with the question of how to interact with this societal trend while keeping their quest for holiness intact. The Bible tells us to focus on that which is excellent, lovely, beautiful, praiseworthy, etc. Unfortunately it is becoming more and more difficult to do that when the high culture that produced a Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare has pretty much been relegated to the past. Some advocate the promotion of a classical education for our children through Christian parochial schools or through the rapidly growing home school movement, but one occasionally has to wonder how they will put such an education to use in a world that seemingly could no longer care less about what the composers, artists and philosophers of antiquity had to say about the human condition.

How then, as Chuck Colson once said, shall we live? First of all not all pop culture is evil just because it wears the label “pop”. There are some excellent TV shows, movies and music out there if we will take the time to watch and listen with some discernment. As in so much of the Christian life part of the answer is to “chew the meat and spit out the bones.” We must take that which is good in contemporary culture and leave the rest. Beyond that perhaps it really is time for some of the 30-50 million Evangelicals purported to live in America to adopt the best and most accessible of classical culture as our own and labor to re-introduce it to the population at large on some level. Of course that would involve what some might call a distraction from preaching the Gospel. What they forget is that the high culture we would be championing often embodied Christ. One thinks of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Pascal’s “Pensees”. We would very often be promoting the Gospel by promoting the works of artists and thinkers such as these.

They say that in the end a people never rise above the level of their culture. As Christian Americans we need to, at the very least, make sure that we do not give ourselves over to the lowest common denominator and follow the rest of our nation into intellectual, artistic and moral suicide. But an even better scenario would see us be truly the salt and light of Christ, as a viable and visible counter-culture, seeking to set a higher bar for all cultural endeavors in America.

The Choice Before American Christians
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Biblically-orthodox Christians in 21st Century America are beginning to feel the cold winds of public rejection in a society that has seemingly reached a real tipping-point in rejecting its Judeo-Christian foundation. While the erosion of freedom of religious conscience is still in its opening stages in this country (and is nowhere near the level of the sometimes murderous prejudice against believers elsewhere in the world) it is becoming clearer by the day that a true persecution of the American church has become a very real possibility in the not too distant future.

It is now when two ugly temptations begin to rear their ugly head. On one hand it is difficult to resist the pull to endanger our loving witness by digging in our collective heels, “circling the wagons” and angrily fighting against the winds of change with all the remaining tools at our disposal as citizens of a constitutional republic. On the other is the even worse choice of accommodating ourselves to the world’s current idea of what is “Progressive” and losing not only our witness but our souls as well.

There is, however, a third option. Bible-believing Christians in the United States can decide to humbly trust in the ultimate victory of Christ and choose to suffer in hope as our oppressed brothers and sisters in other times and places have always done. In this spirit we can also choose to love even our enemies as we continue to hold to the eternal truths of the faith. This might be the most difficult of the three choices, but it is also the truly godly one.

While it is accurate to affirm that the Apostle Paul was not above using the rights of his Roman citizenship when he felt his part in spreading the Gospel would be facilitated by it he also had no illusions about converting the culture of his time through political action. He knew that it was the Holy Spirit that changed individual’s minds and hearts, not an effective lobbying campaign. Many times he chose not to stand on his civil rights and instead endured the persecution his public beliefs brought upon him. I think Paul would tell us to do the same. He might not call us to be completely apolitical, but he would say that our first citizenship is always in the Kingdom of God and commend our willingness to suffer for the sake of making Christ known to the world. In other words he might advise us to be, as someone once said, “a patriot only to Heaven.”

While modifying our theology to fit the deceiving spirits of this age should not be an option for any committed Christ-follower the truth is that this choice strongly appeals to our fallen desire for acceptance and ease at any cost. It has always been relatively easy to be a theologically orthodox believer in this nation. The fact that that this state of affairs appears to be coming to an end is a difficult pill for many of us to swallow, but that does not mean we are not called to swallow it. Anyone who permanently chooses comfort (even a comfort that once almost seemed like a sort of American Christian birthright) over the harder road of authentically self-denying discipleship is not worthy of the name Christian.

The key to not going down either of these wrong roads is found in learning to truly believe that, no matter how bad things look at this point in the history of our earthly nation, God wins in the end. Someday, and it may not be too far away, He will lower the curtain on human history. When He does all the evil that this world which we are in, but not of, now tells us is morally acceptable will be utterly destroyed…as will those who have been willingly taken in by that evil. But we are not to revel in this fact in the sense of looking forward to the judgment of the human race. The word tells us that our Lord takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. No, our job is to obey Him and love people in such a way as to be vessels of true salvation in their lives, even if it costs us everything. This is not only the best choice for the authentic believer, it is the only choice.

May God help us.

Promises, Promises
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God does not ever break His promises, but He does allow circumstances in the lives of His children that tempt us to think he does. We mistake experiences of loss and unfulfilled desire for evidence God is not trustworthy. However the promises we sometimes feel He has broken were not promises He ever made in the first place.

Some believers remain under the illusion that God has pledged that life here is meant to be free of significant and lasting pain. We somehow get the idea that the “trials and tribulations” the Bible talks about are for someone else; or if they really are to be a part of our experience they should be minor and short-lived. Both of these self-deceptions can come back to haunt us when we inevitably feel the full-force of the adversity that cannot be avoided if we live very long in this profoundly fallen world. If we hold on to them after that adversity enters our lives we are on a certain road to bitterness because we cannot accept the good that God may cause to come out of our pain if we persist in thinking we should be exempt from that pain.

Within the rubric of the “little or no pain” idea is any number of more specific “promises” that God has never made to Christians. He has not promised us material wealth, for instance, or that we will have a spouse. God also does not vow that we will be perfectly healthy physically throughout our time here or completely fulfilled in all our interpersonal relationships. We may have some of these things if they are part of His will for our lives, but His will and our will are not always the same. Those who try to interpret Scripture to defend the notion that these things are somehow the birthright of every truly faithful believer are not reading their “proof texts” in the context of other passages in the Bible that say something different. They are leaving out very explicit verses about the experience of pain and loss being the lot of all human beings in this life, including Christians.

Actually truly faithful and favored children of God are likely to experience more discomfort in their sojourn here on Earth, not less. If we are uncompromising witnesses of Christ in everyday life we will suffer the angry retribution of both Satan and those under his sway. The suffering of holy men is well documented in the Bible. Some, in fact lost, the very things some say God permanently promises us (like possessions and loved-ones) because of their commitment to the Lord…and many lost their physical lives

The real and precious promise that God has made to His children is that He will see them through their affliction, use that affliction to make them more Christlike, and eventually deliver them from all affliction in the World that is to come. We are often on theologically thin ice when we assume He has made promises unrelated to this core promise. We are on even thinner ice when we let unfulfilled expectations based on faulty assumptions sway us into thinking God is not worthy of our complete trust.

God absolutely keeps His promises. He does not, however, keep promises He never made to begin with.

Entitlement and Lost Blessings
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

When we are filled with bitterness from a perception that we have been treated unfairly and have not received what we deserve from God it becomes impossible to fully accept whatever it is that He might truly want to give us. The harboring of resentment against God is an effective block to His blessing our lives in other ways.

On the surface the very idea that any of us has not received “what we deserve” from God is, to say the least, problematic. What rebellious, fallen human beings deserve, apart from the received grace of God in Christ, is destruction. But for Christians more often the feeling is connected with the idea that we have not been the recipient of what we think other believers have been. Beyond that we might have an idea that, as children of God, we are now entitled to attain on our terms the abundant life Jesus promised us.

What we would like on those terms might be any number of things: a mate or better health or more money or more obedient children. Whatever the desire the common denominator is that we want it our way and we want it now. This seems to be a particularly widespread problem among Western Christians. We live in a society that believes in the concept of entitlement. “You deserve the best” is the message behind every advertisement for the myriad material things available to us in the First World, and far too many of us who claim the name of Christ have unconsciously bought into this lie.

The hard truth of the matter, however, is that we are individually responsible to repent from the spirit of entitlement. If we do not the result will be bitterness towards a God Who we have duped ourselves into believing will not give us what we “need”. More accurately He will not give us what we want when we want it.

This is not to say that human beings do not have legitimate needs that God Himself has built into us. It is also sometimes difficult for us to determine the difference between a deeply-felt want and a need. It is amazing how much a certain want can feel like something we can no more do without than we could do without breathing (ask any lonely single Christian who has yet to find a mate). Beyond that what seems like a want might actually be a need but one that God, in His perfect timing, will meet in us at a later date than we would like.

Whatever the nature of the thing in question; it is easy, particularly after waiting for something for a long time and not receiving it, to be tempted towards bitterness at the One from Whom we know all blessings ultimately flow. The tragic thing is that if we harbor that bitterness for long we will close ourselves off to other blessings He may want to give us right now, blessings that might even assuage our sense of loss at not getting whatever the thing is we so want at the moment.

As in so many aspects of the Christian life the antidote for bitterness is a renewed sense of trust in a God who is not only all-giving, but all-wise. No one wants to give us the abundant life more than our Lord, but He knows far better than we the perfect time and the perfect way to give it to us. We must learn to truly believe this if we want to be at peace with our circumstances and have some measure of contentment in this life. As we are willing to believe the truth about the wisdom of His Lordship over both our wants and our needs we will find the strength to give up our frustrated bitterness and wait patiently for God to give us all good things.

Bitterness Kills
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There is a certain cold logic to bitterness. Bitterness appeals most strongly to our sense of right and wrong, to our sense of fairness. Bitterness says that we have a permanent right to hate those who have hurt us or allowed us to be hurt by others. It is more interested in past losses than present and future gains. It forfeits hope and doesn’t care. When we are caught up in the self-indulgent throes of bitterness we would rather lash out at a loving God who would “restore the years the locust has eaten” than allow Him to restore those years to us.

Unrepentant bitterness is the biggest barrier to our healing. To be bitter is to, by definition, remain unhealed. We cannot heal from what that which we refuse to give up. Much of the cure of the soul is caught up in surrender, the surrender of what ails us to God. We cannot be healed of physical infection unless we are willing to let the doctor touch and cleanse the wound. Bitterness is a sort of spiritual infection. If we are not truly willing to let God put His hands on this angry, hateful contamination of our soul He cannot and will not heal us.

In fact the wound analogy can be taken a step further. Imagine having a cut and purposely rubbing dirt and filth into it. The result of such an action is to make the infection worse and potentially spread it throughout the body. Every time we choose to entertain bitterness we are making the infection stronger within us. This is the patent insanity of holding on to angry unforgiveness. How many of us nurse a grudge? Every time we do we are, in effect, sickening ourselves.

In fact this same spiritual illness will eventually spread even if we do not actively make it worse by dwelling on it. Ignoring an infected injury ultimately has the same effect as feeding it. Acting as if it isn’t there just draws out the period of time in which it does potentially irreparable damage to our lives. Bitter resentment is just as destructive when left to itself as it is when consciously indulged; it just takes longer to do the same damage. In the end bitterness simply cannot be allowed to be present in our lives at all if it is not to destroy us. It must go!

But it cannot go if we are not finally willing to let it go. The problem is we get something out of bitterness, a certain perverse satisfaction in clinging to our hurts. On some level those who remain bitter want to be bitter. Perhaps it is the stubborn tendency to want to judge others. We do not want to release them to the one true Judge so we hold onto what they have done to us and blame them for it in perpetuity. We would rather hate them than give in to a forgiveness that takes their punishment out of our hands. Such a state of heart only destroys us, but we do not care. We get some terrible false gratification from letting it define us. This is a particularly evil form of insanity.

The self-inflicted curse of bitterness spits in the face of both the healing and the Healer. It perpetuates wrong relationship with God, others and ourselves. It is idolatry because the “right” to be bitter is elevated above our absolute imperative to be obedient to God and forgive as He forgives. It is deeply wicked and incredibly destructive to our very souls.

Bitterness kills.

Control, Insecurity, and the Human Condition
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

All human beings are “control freaks” to one degree or another. It is a function of the insecurity that came into our race’s existence after the catastrophe we call the Fall. In our fallen state we somehow feel like we will die inside if we are not in control of our own lives, and often also with much of what comes into contact with our lives. Actually the very opposite is true. It is only in surrendering control of our lives back into the hands of our Creator and Redeemer God that we are saved from the insecurity that stems from the very real prospective of both physical and spiritual death.

Insecurity is woven into the very fabric of the existence of sentient creatures that have corporately and willingly cut themselves off from the only Source of any real and enduring security. In every human heart there exists, whether consciously or unconsciously, a dread of loss, pain and, ultimately, of permanent retribution for our wrongs. One of the primary ways we try to ward off this rightful dread is through convincing ourselves that we are somehow the “masters of our own destiny.” This effort manifests itself in the drive to control our environment, ourselves, and others.

We can fool ourselves fairly easily into the illusion of control over our environment living in the 21st Century West. Comparatively few other generations in the history of humankind have had the daily experience of flipping a switch on a wall and instantaneously turning night into day or getting into a car and travelling many miles from the place of their birth. Only the last generation has had the astonishing ability to call up what seems like nearly the sum total of all human knowledge by plugging words into a search engine.

The spirit of our age also implies that, with the right amount of self control, we can become virtually whoever and whatever we want to be. “If we can dream it we can do it” is one of the most accepted illusions of democratic capitalism in an age of upward mobility and choice virtually unknown at any other time in history. The fact that an aspiring Olympic athlete can shatter a bone and be forever unable to compete or that an idolized actor can die in the same kind of car wreck as one of his or her fans always seems to be left out of the “human potential” equation. All the self-control and self-effort in the world cannot prevent an accident, or any other number of unfortunate circumstances, that can end a worldly dream in an instant.

Then there is the one kind of control that even our modern society generally disapproves of, but can also be part and parcel of warding off personal insecurity: the control of other human beings. This kind of control can range from the subtle power of emotional manipulation to the actual physical enslavement of another. Yet this kind of control is at least as problematic as the others because the controlled often break the bonds of the controlling, many times with disastrous results for the latter. It is not a permanent answer to insecurity either; only a good way to end up being hated or worse.

All of these types of control have some fatal flaws. They are derivative; meaning they are contingent on power that is not intrinsic, but given to us by dint of living in an affluent and technologically advanced culture. They are temporary; being liable to sudden and irrevocable loss through unforeseen circumstances. And they are often unethical; at least when achieved through the illegitimate possession of others.

But above all else they are all forms of idolatry that fallen human beings use to banish insecurity through the assumption of godlike powers; powers that we were never meant to have apart from being in right relationship with the one true God of the universe. We were not made to control anything apart from our role as regents over God’s creation, and that role is only legitimately reacquired through submitting our lives to Him through surrender to, and faith in, His Son Jesus Christ. It is in the salvation only He offers that we are truly set free from the insecurity we bequeathed ourselves through corporate and individual disobedience to our Maker.

There is no other way.

When Relationship is Not Enough
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There is a tendency in the church today to put a great premium on the concept of “having a relationship with God”. In fact the phrase is so overused that it has become a cliché. It is true that Christianity is all about relationship, but a less popular word needs to be placed before that one before we can assume that the phrase is describing something real. That less popular word is “obedience”.

What does it mean to really be in communion with Christ? Christ Himself indicated that the proof of our love for Him was that we would obey His teachings in very practical and obvious ways in our lives. He did not say that we would do so perfectly, but He made it very clear that following Him would result in altered behavior. When we look at the way professed believers act in comparison with non-believers today it is clear that we are often not so different from the world in our actions. We expose ourselves to entertainment that fifty years ago would have been anathema to people who called themselves Christian, we sleep with our “serious” dating partners as if the bible sanctions it, we bow before the god of materialism in our consumer choices and, in our hyper-individualism, we steadfastly refuse to submit to even legitimate spiritual authority. All the while we talk about having a “relationship with God” as if just saying the words and singing in church make it true.

Much is said about legalism these days, but far less is said about license and the result is an American church that is spiritually anemic at best and slowly dying at worst. It is no doubt true that rules-based Christianity leads to phariseeism. Exterior adherence to rules that may not reflect truly biblical morality is a dead-end. Arrogant and narrow interpretations of God’s loving guidelines for ethical living certainly are not a fruit of the Spirit. But we have too often used repressive religious systems as an excuse to act in ways that do not honor Christ. Holiness is a word that many contemporary Christians do not understand and do not wish to understand because it implies that we might actually have to give something up to be in right relationship with God.

Strictly speaking even the demons “have a relationship with God”. In the Gospels they know who Jesus is and they speak to Him (and He speaks back, though not in a way any of us would want to hear directed at us). It is not enough to claim to know God. Our lives have to back up our words. No doubt we will sin. While perfect behavior is not a possibility this side of the Resurrection we had better stop kidding ourselves that we can operate like the average 21st century man or woman on the street and then justify it on the basis of being “free from legalism”.

Both the legalist and the libertine will have to give an account of their lives before God one day. It is imperative that we realize the pendulum too often swings towards the latter error in the present day American Church and then both corporately and individually seek the Lord’s face on how best to reverse the trend. The alternative is some form of judgment and, whether we believe it is temporal or eternal, such judgment is something to very seriously avoid.

Surfing into Danger: the Internet and Moral Relativism
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved

How do we stay spiritually uncompromised while living in the larger culture? This question has had to be repeatedly asked throughout the two millennia history of Christianity. It is a question that has always needed to be answered in fresh ways by the contemporary Church of its time. This has never been more true than now when our society is being so greatly impacted by a constantly morphing popular culture born of the technological explosion of the past quarter century.

Our communicative technological abilities have never advanced as rapidly as they have during this period. The primary example of what we call the “Information Revolution” is the computer. It wasn’t so long ago that no one had ever heard of the term “personal computer” much less the “Internet”. When I was twelve my father bought our family one of the first home computers. It set us back about a thousand dollars in 1980 and was obsolete within six months. That machine had a tiny fraction of the power of the one I typed these words on. There was much talk at the time about how microcomputers were going to revolutionize our lives but it was painfully obvious that our Radio Shack TRS-80 with its “Tape Drive” and 16K of RAM was just not going to do it.

Fast forward to today. The vast majority of Americans have either owned or at least operated one of these devices. They have become as common as the telephone or the TV. Computers of all sizes are now fixtures in America. What finally made these machines an integral part of our lives? The answer is the advent of the Web. The internet’s ability to open human beings to a new world of information and, perhaps more importantly, communication, has changed the Western World more profoundly than perhaps any other invention in recent human history save the airplane, radio and the atomic bomb.

One of the things the Internet has done is to create a new conduit for popular culture to flow into our hearts and minds, a conduit so powerful that it will most likely one day surpass the influence of television on our daily lives. Perhaps it already has. The TV is an incredibly powerful medium for communication but its communication is only one-way. By contrast the Internet is interactive, allowing for two-way communication as well as the selection and perusal of literally billions of bytes of information along with their accompanying images and ideas and here lies the rub. By so effectively opening up our homes to the surrounding culture the Net has made it far more difficult to be in, but not of, this world.

Much has been spoken about the struggles Christian men are having with internet pornography. The proliferation of sexually explicit material online continues and has created a multi-billion dollar industry. It is an obvious threat to Christian integrity and cannot be minimized as to its impact. But there are less obvious threats inherent in this medium as well.

The line is beginning to blur between our everyday lives and what might be called our virtual lives. On the net we interact not only with other people but, in a larger sense, with our fallen culture as a whole. The Net is the place to find a plethora of artistic, political, sexual, scientific and social crosscurrents. In one sense we have been given an incredible freedom to explore the meaning of our world and our own existence. Unfortunately that freedom can so easily lead to bondage.

The Internet is not immoral but amoral. In and of itself it is only an instrumentality; a device no doubt invented by sinful men but not an inherently evil one. We need to remember that truth in order to see this technological revolution in its proper context. The Web is morally neutral; it is those who use it who are the moral agents. That said; a huge portion of the internet is controlled by the enemy of our souls and not just the porn sites. He also uses the medium to influence us in other ways and not so obviously. We can easily allow this technology to put us into a sort of “trance of tolerance”. “How wonderful”, we might say, “to be able to sample from so many cultures and ideas”. The problem is that the spirit of moral relativism abounds online and at times it is tempting to take off our spiritual armor and electronically “slip into something a little more comfortable”. Add to this the tendency to surf for hours that many of us have and we soon find ourselves almost living a double-life, one real and one virtual. Often the virtual life ends up not being under the Lordship of Christ.

I have a small wooden cross that hangs from my old-style computer monitor. I put it there to remind me that there are places online I dare not go. The cross also reminds me that my electronic culture cannot be allowed to define or rule me. Only the Man who died on such a cross 2000 years ago can and should do that.

When Christians Despair
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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“Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair…When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out, he will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God, consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for Himself.”

-Oswald Chambers
Baffled to Fight Better

Certain strains of contemporary Christianity encourage people to never be anything but positive. Some very popular preachers and teachers who are media personalities have taken the New Testament, mixed in some currents of positive thinking, and come up with the idea that a true believer need never be depressed. Other voices go so far as to condemn those who have yielded to downheartedness for any length of time as being guilty of basic un-belief.

But a certain amount of despair, or at least the feeling of despair, is unavoidable in the life of many believers whose perception of this world is not completely shallow. We live in a veil of tears and the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives does not somehow render us impervious to sorrow.

Read the book of Job, Jeremiah, or any number of the Davidic Psalms and it becomes quite clear that some of the giants of the faith have experienced feelings of despair during their journey through a radically fallen world. For those who would counter that New Testament believers are somehow immune to such “dark night of the soul” experiences it might be instructive to read 2 Corinthians 1:8 in which the Apostle Paul writes of he and his companions being “so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself”. No, the coming of Pentecost did not erase the potential of even the redeemed heart to experience times of anguish.

Life in the here and now can be tragic. A believer may go through ordeals that are not capable of being overcome overnight by positive confession of out-of-context Scriptures, Spiritualized self-help bromides or any other pop-Christianity cure-alls. Neither will anything we can come up with on our own suffice. Some things in life must simply be endured and endured without immediate promise of relief. That endurance is only made possible by the sustaining presence of God’s grace in our lives. It is not that relief will never come but it will be in God’s timing and by His terms. This was one of the messages Job learned during his exceptional trial.

I say none of this to minimize the pain someone reading these words may be experiencing even now. I have known great pain and sorrow in my own life and no one has wanted instant relief like I have, at times, wanted it. But God’s sometimes painful redemptive purposes often do not contain an immediate escape clause no matter how much we beg and plead for it. What must be remembered is that He truly does know what He is doing with us and some day we will thank Him with tears of joy that he did not let us escape what was ultimately for His glorification and our true good. What He is working in us through times of terrible pain is achieving for us the very redemption of our souls.