Month: June 2014

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect.” -C.S. Lewis

Most of us who have been believers for any length of time know the disappointment of having expected the feeling of God’s presence in some seemingly hallowed place or time and, instead, having faced His unanticipated absence. Whether it was at a special worship service or during a holiday like Easter, we hoped to delight in a proverbial “mountaintop experience,” only to come away disheartened by the emotional flatness we ended up feeling.

Many Christian teachers would zero-in on the use of the word “feeling,” chastising anyone who would expect an emotional high from our Lord at all, much less on cue. I am sympathetic to the idea that the Christian walk is much more about our wills than our emotions, but having experienced some amazing and life-altering encounters with the presence of God myself, I’m reluctant to jump on that particular bandwagon. In my opinion the issue is far more about our expectations of God than about whether or not it is “spiritually correct” to desire to know Him in a passionately experiential way. The crux of the matter is found in that term, “on cue.”

No one has the power to make God bless them in any way; deity is not Deity if it can be compelled by anyone or anything. When people allow themselves to be disappointed by God because their desire for an emotional experience with Him has not been fulfilled, they may do so because they simply are frustrated by not being able to manipulate Him. This almost always happens on a subconscious level. Hopefully very few Christians openly believe that they have the ability to influence their Creator to give them something that He has willed not to give them, but what is going on beneath the surface of our conscious mind is another matter.

When making a pilgrimage to Israel as a very young believer, I remember expecting that each holy site would send me into paroxysms of holy ecstasy It seemed like the more I wanted this to happen, the less I felt anything except frustration. My negative emotional response belied my basic spiritual immaturity at that time. I now realize that I was trying to pre-empt God’s will for me on that trip. Perhaps the Holy Spirit wanted to reach out to me quietly, without emotional fireworks; but I missed out on this, having been so busy trying to feel something of my own design. The ironic thing is that a few days after my return home, I found myself on “the mountaintop” emotionally: in New Jersey of all places! It was as if the Lord was showing me that He is everywhere the same, whether in the “Holy Land” or Bergen County, U.S.A, and that the movements of His Spirit are mysterious…by His design and for my own good.

It does seem to be a truism that God often likes to catch us, as C.S. Lewis said, “off our guard” as He did with me all those years ago. It also seems safe to assert that one reason He does this is to teach us that we cannot acquire a spiritual high the way we might a worldly one. Many of God’s prerogatives are just that, His prerogatives. He will sovereignly bless us with His felt presence when He decides to, not when we are trying to work ourselves into that presence with a conscious or unconscious sense of entitlement.

We can put ourselves into a willed position of worship, but we cannot summon the Holy Fire; this must be sent from above. Submission to this truth is just a part of our coming to better know and love our Lord. As that happens, the floodgates of heavenly experience may be thrown open in our lives in ways we never thought possible.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All Rights Reserved

“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest but only turmoil.” Job 3:25-26

What do we do when we have no peace, no quietness, no rest and seemingly no hope? What is a Christian to do when, like Job, he feels that his worst case scenario is coming true before his eyes? Most, if not all, believers will know the “dark night of the soul” at some point in their lives. This is the time when all seems lost, when we no longer sense the presence of God, when we are tempted to despair of ever knowing it again. It is when we have “made our bed in Hell”. The world would label it depression. To us this state is all that and more. Call it “spiritual depression”. Few experiences in the life of a believer are more miserable.

The condition I speak of is sometimes the result of personal sin, but not always. Job, for instance, was a righteous man. God Himself called him “blameless and upright”. David was a “man after God’s own heart” but knew all about the dark night, experiencing it long before his disastrous tryst with Bathsheba. Just read the Psalms and that much is clear. No, spiritual depression is sometimes caused by someone else’s sin or simply by the experience of living in a deeply fallen world. Christ Himself knew such pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So what can save the struggling child of God from complete despair? It is more than a little comforting to know that all of the men mentioned endured their misery and emerged on the other side of it. None of them cursed God and died. Job ended up with twice as much as what he lost. King David, for all his self-inflicted trouble later in life, never fell away from the Lord he loved. As for Jesus Christ, well, suffice it to say that He now sits at the right hand of God the Father glorified forevermore. Hope for deliverance is the only thing that will keep us from giving up and the stories of other’s who suffered in the Word of God will furnish that hope if we only seek it.

We can also find comfort in the knowledge that everything which happens to the believer happens for a reason. We may not know the reason why we have suffered spiritual depression until after we have come through this trial. One hint, though, may have to do with the most profound kind of sanctification. In Timothy Roger’s A Discourse on Troubles of Mind and the Disease of Melancholy, written over 250 years ago, he describes the long trial of one man and its outcome:

“John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs,” gives an account of a certain John Glover, who was worn and consumed with inward trouble for five years, so that he had no comfort in his food, nor in his sleep, or in any enjoyment in life. He was so perplexed, as if he had been in the deepest pit of hell, and yet this good servant of God, after all these horrid temptations and buffetings of Satan, was delivered from all his trouble, and the effect was such a degree of mortification of sin, that he appeared as one already in heaven.”

In Glover’s life, and in our own, the deepest, darkest night of the soul can be the gateway to even deeper blessing.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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“It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy-from lack of character.”

-Dag Hammarskjold

Christians are called to love their enemies. For fallen human beings this is one of the hardest messages Jesus preached. The old man’s desire is to do anything but love those who have caused us pain. For most believers learning to be loving towards enemies is a slow and difficult process that lasts a lifetime. However, for some Christians, this is not the problem at all. For them the problem is the opposite one. Some of us have trouble not being “nice” to individuals who need to be confronted about negative conduct.  When we should be appropriately assertive about wrongs that have been done to us, or others, we instead continue to treat the wrongdoer as if nothing has happened.

There is more than one problem with this kind of behavior. To begin with it is dishonest. When we are angry with someone it is hypocritical to pretend we aren’t. While it is not appropriate to indiscriminately unleash our wrath against another person, it is also wrong to act as if everything is sweetness and light in a relationship that is at risk. God desires truth in the innermost parts. He desires that truth be manifest in the outer parts as well. There are times we must lovingly, but firmly, confront people. If we don’t we are pretending to be at peace with someone with whom we are not. We are living a lie.

Another negative result of always being “nice” to someone with whom we have reason to be angry is that the other person is not given a chance to realize and repent of whatever they have done that is offensive. You cannot repent from what you do not know you are doing. There are many individuals who are not aware that their actions towards others are destructive. There are others who are aware, but think that what they do or say is minor. In both cases being properly confronted could be beneficial to such individuals because the confrontation may lead to their eyes being opened. They then have the opportunity to humble themselves and ask for forgiveness. In the best-case scenario this can build Christian character in that person.

However where the issue of character most comes into play is with the one who is pretending everything is ok. As Hammarskjold said, being accommodating towards one who is offending is often a result of weakness in the one offended. We fear confrontation and conflict. The prospect of both things can be frightening, especially if we are insecure with our self-worth Vis a Vis others. All of us know people who never stand up for themselves or for what is right. They may try to justify their lack of assertiveness by couching it in spiritual language about “dying to self” or “turning the other cheek” but this is a cop-out, a dishonest dodging of personal responsibility and a sure sign of a flaw in character that needs mending.

There are times in the Christian life when we will be called to go the extra mile with a difficult person for the sake of that person’s potential salvation. The Word of God urges us to do this when we are dealing with someone who is not yet a believer. This is not the always the case, however, when the circumstance involves another child of God. The Bible makes it clear that confrontation is required when a Christian sins against others, or us, and refuses to stop. This is actually the first step in all corporate church discipline, and something clearly instructed by Scripture.

In the end both the offender and the one offended lose when the latter takes the path of least resistance. Assertiveness and Christian love are not mutually exclusive. In fact the command to love that all believers are called to obey cannot fully function unless sin is confronted in individuals as well as in the larger Church.  May we all have the courage to give up weakness in the form of a kindness that ultimately is not kind to anyone.

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The Christian believer is someone who has likely come to grasp the importance of knowing that there is something or, more importantly, Someone profoundly greater than themselves. To have at least this level of humility is primary to possessing any real understanding of who God is and what our position as creatures is before Him. However to have such a basic understanding is only one component in coming into right relationship with the Divine. What is still needful is to grasp that what He desires is vastly more important than what we desire for ourselves. Our wants for our lives can never rightfully be allowed to supersede His will for our lives.

It is not enough to accede to the fact that God almighty is the Ruler of all things. We must go beyond that and specifically include our very selves, and all we hope to be or have, as rightfully His. We can intellectually accept that our small lives are dwarfed by the immensity of the divine Being and still not want our desires for ourselves to be the same as His. We often do not realize how badly we need our wants and His to be one and the same.

A great part of sanctification is concerned with coming to the place of surrendering our wants, old and new, to the Lord of our lives. It is not a quick or easy process because, at least in our time and place in history, we have been conditioned to think that no one knows what is better for us than we do. Of course the idea that what someone else wants for us is vastly superior to what we do has always been an alien concept to fallen men and women, but perhaps never more so than in the culture of the 21st century West. “Surely”, we think, “no one knows what is better for me than I do?” yet, the Bible tells us that there is a way that seems right to a man and ends only in death.

The “disconnect” for earnest Christians here can be disturbing in the extreme. We say we want our lives to be in harmony with God’s will. We often declare, in fact, that we want to be at the very center of His will, yet we have trouble wanting what we say we want. We may discipline ourselves to seek to be in harmony with our Lord’s purposes, but it is a difficult realization when we discover that, even years into our walk, we still do not viscerally, voluntarily desire the same things for our lives that we know He does.

What are we to do with this stubborn resistance to harmonizing our desires with God’s? One of the most powerful ways of breaking down such resistance is to spend prolonged periods meditating on the perfect attributes He possesses. It becomes easier to align our wants with God’s as we come to have a deeper understanding of His flawless nature, especially compared to who, and what, we know ourselves to be by comparison. His perfect truthfulness, goodness, faithfulness and love are just a few of the qualities that, once we begin to deeply trust in them, can ease our transition from primarily wanting what we want to wanting what He wants for us.

(In my own experience A.W. Tozer’s book “The Knowledge of the Holy” has been a great help in internalizing a right understanding of why the best thing I can possibly do for my life is to completely surrender it to Christ. I recommend it highly. There are other books written by great saints down through the centuries which can serve the same purpose, although all such works are secondary to the Scriptures as the primary source of such knowledge.)

Once we cross the threshold of truly adopting God’s desires as our own one of the rewards will be a much greater level of peace in our lives. Beyond such blessed peace we can expect our lives to be deeply and positively transformed in other ways as well but all this will happen only as we come to want, first and foremost, what our perfectly loving Lord wants for us. This is the primary goal for Christian growth and, as such, we cannot set too high a priority on its accomplishment.