Month: April 2014

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Entering into the identity given us by God often requires that we receive His knowledge of our true selves through others. In and of ourselves we are not able to see who God made us to be in Christ. We need the perspective of Godly individuals who He has placed in our lives for this purpose. To a sense those who love us with the love of Jesus are His vessels for bestowing our identities upon us.

Sometimes, maybe most times, the “Shea” perceived by those who both love God and love me is the “Shea” I should see myself as. Like many of us I often tend to be excessively negative in my self-perception. Left to my own devices I sometimes have a propensity to paint myself as a spiritual failure. The tapes that play in my head reinforce this tendency and those tapes all pre-date my conversion to Christ. As a boy I knew the sting of rejection and emotional abuse by both my peers my earthly father. Despite my conscious rebellion against the messages these individuals sent I know I internalized much of what they said about me during the formative years of my life. To this day these messages affect my perception of myself and also, unfortunately, my perception of how my Creator sees me. They sank deep into my heart at a time in my life, childhood and adolescence, when I was very impressionable and when I was looking to others for validation.

Today I believe God has put new people in my life whose purpose in being there is to tell me the truth about who I am, both as a creature made in God’s image and as a being redeemed by the blood of His Son. When these brothers and sisters in the faith praise aspects of my character or encourage me to grow as a child of God they literally help to re-make me into the person God designed me to be. To the extent that I receive this loving praise and encouragement I begin to become the person they are describing.

We often underestimate the ability of another person’s words to affect our lives, either for good or ill. But such words have great influence. This influence is amplified when the person saying them is someone who we care about and whose opinion we value. The nature of this phenomenon is a mystery but perhaps it derives from the significance of the spoken word in God’s economy. We are told that the universe and all it contains was brought into existence by the word of God. He literally spoke it into being. Isn’t it logical that his finest creation might echo that ability, albeit on a radically smaller scale?

In the New Testament book that bears his name the apostle James tells us of the capacity of the tongue to both build up and tear down. He makes it clear that words can have a great deal of power and must be used carefully by those who claim the name of Christ. Again this implies that a person’s very life may be changed by the words he hears from others.

Some might interject here that only the words of the Bible, mediated directly by the Holy Spirit, are meant to have such power in a Christian’s life. It is certainly true that God directly uses our reading of scripture to mold us in this way. But God also uses earthly inter-personal relationships to accomplish His will and if His word is written on our hearts why wouldn’t He also use the truth he has put in us through that word to help each other to become what he wants us to become?

All this points up the awesome responsibility each of us has to bless others. We can bless with our words or we can curse. We can help someone find their identity in Christ or we can hinder them. It is up to us to choose our words carefully, with a loving desire to help one another be all God intends us to be.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Living an intellectual life sometimes seems problematic for the Evangelical believer. Our own loyalty to the truth of Scripture can seem to be a stumbling block. In more than one place the Bible tells us that it pleased God to reveal Himself to the simple rather than the wise, at least the “worldly wise”. The common people flocked to Jesus while many of the learned men of Israel plotted His downfall. It is evident that none of the 12 was scholars.

Earlier, in the Old Testament, we are introduced to Solomon, the wisest man ever to walk the earth up until that time. Yet, with all his wisdom he still ends up so badly compromised by indulgence in the pagan religions of his foreign wives that we are left to wonder about his eternal destiny.

A notable exception to this lack of Godly thinkers is the Apostle Paul. The writer of the lion’s share of the New Testament was a Pharisee and the Pharisees were an intellectually sharp, if spiritually corrupt, group. It is safe to say that Paul’s encounter with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill was a meeting of equals. Apparently Paul was comfortable dealing with the “intelligentsia” on their own level.

In the history of some conservative Christian movements in America we have seen, at times, an almost visceral dislike for any approach to the faith that seems to involve the upper reaches of the human intellect. Some have traced this phenomenon back to the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that took place early in the last century. The Fundamentalist defenders of Creationism were soundly thrashed from a rhetorical perspective during that trial, at least partially because they apparently could not argue on the same level with the more erudite defenders of Darwinism. In the aftermath the Fundamentalists had two paths to choose between. They could educate themselves in an effort to become as intellectually vigorous as their opponents, or they could reject the life of the mind altogether and paint intellectualism as a weapon of the proud and ungodly. They chose the latter and the retreat of Bible-believing Christians from the intellectual marketplace began, a retreat which still influences us today. One of its legacies is the idea in popular culture that biblical Christians “check their brains at the church door”.

The problem here is that God gave some of His children above average minds. Unless we are to believe that He somehow “cursed” them when He did that we must grapple with the fact that being a “Cerebral Christian” is not an oxymoron. We must consider the possibility that some insights into the nature of God can only be revealed to those who have minds God designed to receive those insights. This is not to say that Christians who are less endowed intellectually are somehow inferior. Such individuals are given their own insights, ones that perhaps elude their “smarter” brothers and sisters. Both the learned and the unlearned have their own unique contributions to bring to the Church as a whole.

In recent years some Evangelicals have promoted an effort to bring the academic standards of Christian colleges up to the level of secular institutions. There has been a conscious effort to, among other things, re-inject a respect for the mind into our churches. The hope is that Evangelical scholars can then be produced who will be able to defend orthodoxy with as much intellectual “firepower” as those in the liberal church and the secular world bring to bear against it. There have already been some formidable minds engaged in this battle, men like Ravi Zacharias, R.C. Sproul and the late Chuck Colson. In each case we have seen individuals who employ the intellectual gifts God gave them on the front line of battle in the intellectual world.

This ongoing effort signals the end of the Scopes-inspired rejection of the intellect that unfortunately continues in some Bible-believing churches. From Augustine to C.S. Lewis thinking Christians have contributed sublime insights into the truth and reality of God, helping countless believers to come into deeper fellowship with the Divine. For these men the mind’s contemplation of God was as vital to sanctification as that of the heart. There are many Evangelicals today who recognize this truth and are ready to use their minds to the full in glorifying the Lord. They know it is time for our tradition to add its own insights to the living history of Christian thought.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

In the last installment I shared with you the moment in my life when I came to know the presence of a God who only several weeks earlier I still dogmatically claimed did not exist. By the time this moment arrived my Atheism had effectively crumbled into dust. It was no longer a question even of Agnosticism. I now knew God existed and that He was capable of opening up to me a realm I had never remotely known before, the realm of His Spirit, where the sheer reality of His being overwhelmed everything else I knew or thought I knew.

It is a strange thing to have your eyes opened this way. Once you have gone from not believing in a Deity to being personally touched by that Deity it is not easy for you to return to your former unbelief. Some might become resistant to God as they go forward into this new place of knowing, but pretending He does not exist basically ceases to be an option. Others might even reject His presence in their lives, but I doubt very sincerely that they could simply reject the fact of His reality once that reality has truly touched them. I believe the sheer power of how human hearts are opened to His existence tends to preclude that from happening.

As I mentioned in part III of my story soon after my experience at the window of my psychiatric unit bedroom I was declared healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. I somehow intrinsically knew upon returning home that I needed to find a place where others were who had experienced what I experienced. I knew this meant a church, because by now I had come to identify the God who had revealed Himself to me as the same God I was being drawn towards as I read the Bible, specifically the New Testament.

After going to one building that had a cross on it, but absolutely nothing redolent of the God I had encountered, and another with people who spoke more believingly about Him, but did not seem to be able to understand my journey in the slightest, I found a congregation in which I immediately sensed the same Spirit I’d tasted of in the hospital. So there I stayed (I ended up, in fact, staying there for 17 years). This was in November of 1990.

Christmas was coming.

On the night of December 24 I attended the Christmas Eve service at my new church. It was moving, but it was not until after the service ended and I was in my car on my way to join my family for the holiday that God decided to pull out all the stops, as it were.

As I drove down the dark New Jersey highway I was listening to the U2 album “The Joshua Tree.” The song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” began to play. A little more than half way through it Bono, the Irish band’s lead vocalist, sings this lyric:

“You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains,
Carried the cross of my shame…of my shame,
You know I believe it.”

At that moment I believed it too, for myself. At that moment I accepted what God in human form had done for me two-thousand years before on a cross outside Jerusalem. At that moment I knew I was redeemed from the nature I was born with and had excused for 22 years. I knew I was re-born. I was a Christian. I wept so hard I almost had to pull off the highway. It was, and remains, the greatest night of my life.

He was now more than a presence. He was my Rescuer, the One who had given me a reason to live that I had never known before, the One who in the last four months of 1990 had transformed a suicidal Atheist into a child of God.

No one was more surprised than me at the time.

So for all of you out there who do not believe as I once did not believe I’ll leave you with this: The God you don’t believe in may, Himself, one day change your mind. Call it the divine sense of humor, but I think He especially enjoys shocking Atheists to the core by opening our eyes to His existence. In fact I suspect there may be divine laughter in Heaven every time it happens.