Month: July 2014

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Repenting from sin involves suffering. It does not profit us to think that such repentance is going to be easy or not involve a sense of loss. Sin is using the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, to satisfy a real need. The abuse of money or power is wicked but it speaks of our legitimate need for security. Sex outside of marriage is evil, but it addresses our legitimate hunger for intimacy. When we have come to rely on some transgression to meet a very real, deep need in us our turning from that transgression is hard, sometimes very hard.

Christians have been known to take each other to task for some habitual sin with very little thought about the challenge involved in giving it up. We do each other a huge disservice when we say to “just repent”. It is not that the need for repentance is unimportant. On the contrary true repentance is vital if we hope to be in right relationship with God. Ongoing repentance is not an option in the Christian life; it is an absolute necessity. That said it is not often something that comes quickly and painlessly to the child of God.

Let’s take the example of illicit sex. When someone is having their relational needs met by engaging in sexual activity with a romantic partner then they will feel real loss if they stop that activity. It will feel like a death, especially if the result is the end of the relationship. Once the physical and emotional bond that results from sex is broken so is the person’s heart. This is, of course, one of the reasons God tells us to refrain from such activity in the first place. Without the commitment of a permanent marital union the danger is far higher that a romantic relationship will self-destruct and God never intended us to break the “one-flesh” union once it has been entered into. He knew what kind of pain and damage that would cause and so he commanded us to keep our sexual expression exclusive to heterosexual marriage.

That said it is cruel to tell someone caught up in fornication that repenting of it is going to be anything but a heartache. A real bond exists between the involved parties and it has brought a felt benefit to both, not only in the sense of mutual physical gratification but perhaps more importantly as a comforting, if temporary, answer to loneliness. Eventually the sinful aspect of such a relationship between Christians will destroy both benefits, but try telling that to two lonely people that feel fulfilled for the first time in years.

Other sins can also temporarily provide a felt answer to a real hole in our lives. When we decide to value God’s approval and blessing over that answer we must trust that He will provide a truly good and enduring replacement. But that replacement is sometimes long in coming, at least in our own eyes. In the meantime we will feel the pain of real loss when we forsake whatever is the besetting sin is. We must be prepared for that pain and count it as worth it in the long run. Real repentance carries a price. It is one worth paying but it is a price nonetheless and we do ourselves no favor pretending that the cost involved will not feel quite high.

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God cannot be unfaithful.

A perfect, holy and loving God, by definition, is not capable of unfaithfulness any more than He is capable of lying. His character cannot allow unfaithfulness any more than it could allow any other moral flaw common to our self-centered, rebellious race. It is we who are chronically unfaithful to our Lord and our fellow creatures, which we then project onto Him. Attributing disloyalty to our Maker and Redeemer is, at its heart, self-deceptive … a “lie of the soul.” Our Creator is actually the only Being in the universe truly worthy of the title “Faithful One.”

Personally, I know that I have been guilty of this sin of projection … Why else would I not joyfully and trustfully submit myself fully to the perfectly faithful Lover of my soul? What might be called the “Unfaithfulness Projection” is one of the primary reasons I have trouble surrendering my life completely to God.

God’s perfection should not incite fear in His children but inspire confidence and a deep and abiding peace (one that seems to elude many professing Christians in this day and age.) Our sometimes pervasive lack of serenity stems mainly from our not understanding that every characteristic of God, including his faithfulness, embodies such flawlessness.

In a certain sense, divine faithfulness extends even to the ungodly. Every day, God steadfastly sustains the physical world, desiring that the physical life of human beings may come to embody spiritual life as well. For this reason, God continues to offer salvation to the human race until, in the fullness of time (to be perfectly determined by Him), He brings the existence of this planet as we know it today to an end. In the meantime the Lord is, as His word declares, faithful to all generations whom He has ordained to dwell upon the earth.

No, our God is never unfaithful; it is literally not “in Him” to be so. Unfaithfulness, like every other aspect of sinful and fallen humanity, is contrary to the innate, immovable, and immutable nature of divinity. Furthermore it is partially in this knowledge of the Lord’s true nature that human beings can obtain any real hope for the future, be it in either the temporal or eternal sense.

May God help us to learn about His character in such a way as to forever banish any projection of our imperfection onto Him and to trust in His inherent, unwavering, and eternal faithfulness.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Mercy, by definition, is not something we deserve. It is easy for us to begin expecting God to mercifully intervene every time we do something wrong. Oftentimes He does influence those who we have wronged to extend grace in our direction. Those who have been Christians for any length of time have experienced this blessing and probably more than once. God does not treat us as we deserve and He has the power to influence others, even non-believing others, to also treat us better than we deserve.

But sometimes He lets the hammer fall.

When God does let us reap what we have sown the best response we can have is to thank Him for the discipline, no matter how painful, and trust the perfect wisdom in His decision. The temptation is to protest to God that He somehow owes us release from the moral law of cause and effect. No matter how justified it may feel in doing so a person genuinely at fault only compounds the causative sin when he or she makes such an arrogant presumption. We presume to turn grace into something we merit and at the moment we do that we gravely misuse it. Such presumption is prideful and pride deservedly comes before a fall. At such moments of temptation it is a good idea to take a long, hard look at oneself. If we engage in honest self-examination what becomes apparent is that we are still sinners unable to redeem ourselves from our old nature apart from accepting the efficacy of Christ’s death on our behalf. What we are not are beings who have the right to expect the God of the Universe to clean up after our own messes while agreeing to our false sense of innocence.

No one likes to see their own sin. No one likes to have their sin shoved in their faces. But it is sometimes necessary to our redemption and ongoing sanctification. Most converts will tell you that a conviction of personal sin was what caused them to cry out to Christ in the first place. It may be that an ongoing conviction of sin is equally important to keep us on the narrow road our Lord spoke of. True repentance is supposed to be something that marks our Christian lives, and not just when we are first saved.

No matter how painful it seems the most blessed place for us to be after we have done wrong is in the place of contrition and confession. God loves it when His children take real responsibility for their actions and sincerely ask for His forgiveness and the forgiveness of others. Even if human beings or the authorities they constitute, take what seems like harsh action in response to our sins we can be assured that our God will abundantly pardon us even as He disciplines us. We can be assured of this by His very nature, the nature revealed to us most perfectly at the cross.

When God, in His mercy, lets us escape the worst consequences of our actions we should give Him great thanks, but we should do the same when he chooses to let us face those consequences.

Because the God who died for us knows what’s best for us.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Contemporary Western culture does not lend itself to the concept of a transcendent and unchanging God. This is evident in theologies that posit a deity that is “evolving” in the same way the human race supposedly is. Modernity (and to some extent, Post-Modernity) is built on the idea of change being necessary and progress inevitable. Our culture teaches us to believe that the newest is always the best and that there is no end to human potential. With such a worldview people have trouble knowing how to relate to a God who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Our unchanging God is not anti-change in the case of fallen and imperfect beings like us. In fact He expects us to change, with His help. The creation has change “hardwired” into it. This is perhaps best illustrated by the life cycles that all living things undergo. Nothing is born fully-grown. From the Amoeba to the Blue Whale growth and change is clearly God’s plan for his creatures both large and small. However the One who designed change into the creation is not, himself, subject to it. God is the constant in an otherwise fluid universe. Perfection does not evolve.

Beyond this the change that God does allow does not necessarily end in something “new and improved,” particularly when such change is a product of a now imperfect world. Animals grow but they also age. The “center does not hold” in a world like ours and, as author Chenua Achebe told us in the title of his greatest novel, “Things Fall Apart.” All we have to look at is a fallen tree or a rusty old car to tell us that all material creations and instrumentalities deteriorate. As for human nature the Bible is very clear that things on Earth will get worse, not better, as the time of the end draws nearer. This is the trap inherent in all human attempts to re-invent ourselves. We can only truly improve when it is the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit doing the improving. All else is a proverbial “chasing after the wind.”

The One who is effecting the authentic improvement of his people is doing so for one reason: their ongoing transformation into the likeness of Christ. Once this transformation is completed, when we enter in to his immediate presence, we will be like our Lord. It would appear from Scripture that the glorified child of God will be made a perfect creature, and no further change will be necessary for all eternity. This is because we will become mirror images (albeit at a perpetually lower level) of a God who has never had a need to alter himself for any reason.

But if change is the only constant that many people consciously or unconsciously believe in how will they come to know and worship such a God? This is a difficult question and unfortunately may lead to the conclusion that fewer and fewer Moderns and Post-Moderns will be able to enter into right relationship with their Creator as the age we live in winds down.

On the other hand some may be so burned by the empty promises of human progress and change for the sake of change that they will be compelled to seek and find an eternal Anchor for their harried souls. What few understand today, but many instinctively know, is that human beings desperately need an unchanging God to find peace, purpose and, yes, positive transformation in their lives. It is both our challenge and our privilege as believers to lead them to Him.