Month: August 2014

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Once we have tasted of Heaven continuing to live voluntarily in a hell of our own making is no longer an option for most of us. The sins that once captivated us are progressively exposed for what they are every time we are visited by the reality of God’s loving touch in our lives.

Before we crossed the threshold of salvation we thought the sins we committed actually gave us some kind of life. Then we realized that they were killing us and many of us had come close enough to the final spiritual death they engendered to deeply understand, perhaps better than most that drinking the poison of transgression had to stop.

Soon, however, most new Christians realize that some sins are more easily shed than others. Often the initial transformative power of conversion allows us to put down one or more of the sins that were present in our lives. Others are not given up so easily. This is most often true with habitual transgressions that resulted from lifestyle choices we made as non-believers. Habits are not easily broken. Some Christian still struggle with saying no to certain actions even years after Christ entered their lives.

I will not presume to judge how long someone can fail to have full victory over habitual sin without that failure doing irreparable damage to their relationship with God. The process of sanctification is just that, a process, and the purification of a soul is measured over a span of years, not days or weeks. The key, it seems to me, is attitude. There is a world of difference between one who continues to vigorously resist whatever the particular temptation is, confessing when he or she falls, and someone who most of the time gives in to that temptation and is decreasingly concerned about it.

For many of us taking the second path is not one we could easily consider. I often tell people I am witnessing to that the first ten seconds of the compassionate presence of God, which I experienced at my time of conversion from Atheism, surpassed every experience the world had offered me prior to that time. Since then I have been blessed by other moments of unspeakable joy in communion with Him. Even when such moments are widely dispersed in the midst of long periods of great trial they never fail to profoundly encourage me. I think of them as “postcards from Heaven”.

All Christians receive such moments of blessing at various times to varying degrees. When we are caught up in these moments committing sin is the last thing on our minds and hearts. When our eyes are filled with the surpassing goodness and beauty of God nothing else matters. As the hymn writer tells us “the things of this world grow strangely dim”.

After such experiences end what does not end is the deep heart-awareness that nothing is better than this. The believer is haunted by the memory of times of intimacy with God. Sadly the old temptations return as we descend into the valley after our time on the mountain-top. But the knowledge that the pleasure of sin does not come close to what we were lifted into during that blessed time does not completely leave us. It is that much harder to return to the sin-induced hells of our own making afterwards. We have known something (or, more accurately, Someone) surpassingly greater than whatever pleasure the sin has given us in our life and this stays with us.

We do well to call to our memory what it was like to dwell in “the light of His countenance” whenever the struggles of the Christian life tempt us to give up and give in. We also do well to look forward with the eyes of faith to the next time Our Lord will touch us with His love. These times, both remembered and looked forward to, are powerful motivators in our ongoing battle with temptation as they speak to us of the final victory over sin which is God’s will for every one of His children.

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We live in the era of the term “coping mechanism.” By this we mean the thoughts and behaviors that we have adopted to deal with the struggles and pressures of life. Such mechanisms often began to be formed within us at an early age, perhaps during childhood, adolescence or young adulthood. Once a part of our lives they may remain with us for a long while. Sometimes our coping mechanisms are with us to the day we die. This is unfortunate because they are often emotionally or physically harmful to both ourselves and those who are nearest and dearest to us. As such it might be said that they are almost always part of an understandable, but destructive, way in which we respond badly to real pain. As Christians hopefully we also come to realize that coping and healing are two very different responses to that pain because one is man-centered and the other God centered.

A coping mechanism may be a seemingly innocuous “nervous habit” such as nail biting. At the other extreme it might reveal itself in a full blown addiction to something like alcohol. Another manifestation is found in various forms of psychopathology. For instance people who struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorders often began to exhibit symptoms at a time of great stress in early life. Truthfully there are quite a wide range of unhealthy human behaviors that come about because of initial mishandling of our responses to abuse of one kind or another.

For many years coping mechanisms may seem to be an effective way of dealing with early trauma and/or abuse. It is only when they begin to interfere with our lives more than did the original cause that we may realize that we have “created a monster.” By that time, often in later adulthood, our coping mechanisms can have become so entrenched in our personality that ridding ourselves of them may seem impossible.

For the believer, however, this need never be the case. The power of Christ working in us is more than able to remove old and destructive ways of coping. Many times God allows us to come to a place of despair in which we realize at a deep level that our unconscious ways of dealing with past hurts are damaging us and those close to us. Sometimes a major life crisis like the loss of a major relationship or a job is enough to cause us to cry out to God for deliverance from coping mechanisms that now threaten to destroy us.

It is at this point that we can be introduced to His prescription for finally dealing with our past. This often involves asking the Spirit to help us face and work through memories of what we have lost by entering into  a time of conscious grieving. In the midst of such grieving we may come to understand that we desperately need to forgive those who wronged us so many years before. In grieving memories, and forgiving those who caused us harm, the child of God will begin to heal. Part of this healing is the shedding of destructive coping mechanisms no longer needed to deal with issues in life that are being resolved God’s way. Real healing of our hearts and minds makes coping mechanisms unnecessary.

As with almost every aspect of our sanctification the replacement of coping with healing is often a process that takes some time, but its results are entirely worth it. Coping mechanisms are ultimately a form of bondage. Healing brings true freedom and new life. It also greatly pleases the God who sent His Son to die to secure us that healing and life, not only for our time on this world but for all eternity.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

All things in Heaven and Earth, even ostensibly good things, are valueless if they are perceived as proceeding from anything or anyone other than God. Ultimately no blessings are good apart from Him. It is in the recognition that they are from God that such gifts gain any meaning or worth and, even then, is must be recognized that having the Giver is always greater than having the gifts. Any other attitude can turn even the most wholesome thing into an idol.

Our Lord is not utilitarian. He does not provide human beings the minimum that they need to live and nothing more. Our God is a God of abundance and He richly blesses all people with good things, even those living outside His will. As the Irish rock group U2 sings, “Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel”. We call this blessing of those who do not know or love God “common grace” and we see it everyday in the pleasures, large and small, that he grants to us all. It is in God’s nature to give and to give generously. That said, while God’s gifts can bless all temporally they will only bless some eternally. The ones who will end up eternally blessed are those who both recognized and thanked the Giver and ultimately made the leap to accepting the greatest gift of all, His Son.

The built-in danger of any good thing is that, rather than reminding us of God’s generosity, the thing will become an end in itself. The deification of an object occurs when we look to it to fulfill the deep needs in us that can only be met by God Himself. The French Scientist and philosopher Pascal talked of a “God-shaped Hole”, a space in our hearts that only the shape of our Creator can fill, and a place only He should be allowed to fill. Anytime something other than Him is placed in that hole it becomes an idol. This is because the object in question has usurped the role of God and He cannot and will not share the space in our hearts that He designed for Himself.

We Post-Moderns, of course, do not worship idols of wood, clay and iron anymore. Our contemporary idols tend to be things like money, sex, drugs, power and possessions. Today all these things, and more, are frequently being forced into Pascal’s hole. But while some of these substitutes for God are inherently sinful not all are. Possessions, for example, are not evil in and of themselves, but they become evil when we attempt to find existential meaning in our lives, and/or a sense of personal worth, from owning ever more of them. Both of these basic human needs can only find their answer in God. Materialism, a misplaced faith in things, is a form of idolatry and it is one that affluent Westerners can easily fall into.

The truth is that common grace provides many morally neutral gifts. The ability to achieve is one such gift. Others include, but are not limited to, the capability to enjoy simple things like relationships, beauty, good food and laughter. All humankind potentially shares in these blessings that God has ordained for the entire race. Ultimately, though, they are all meaningless outside of a relationship with the One who gives them. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes learned this when he tried to find complete happiness solely through these and other pleasures. He came to realize that all were meaningless vanities when sought only for themselves. They were bankrupt when it came to meeting the real needs of his heart.

There is, however, a solution to the dilemma of how to find true joy in our lives. We must realize that the God of Jesus Christ is our answer and seek Him above all else. When this happens, when knowing God through Christ is recognized as the real solution for our deepest longings and we seek Him for Himself and not just for His gifts, two wonderful changes occur in us. First we come to enjoy God in a deeply fulfilling way with the result being that our existence itself becomes better than we could “ever ask or imagine.” At the same time we find that the good things our Lord continues to give us become much more satisfying now that they are no longer usurping His rightful place in our lives. The result of these two things happening is a deep and abiding joy. Going forward we can begin to enjoy both God and His gifts in an eternal sense because the gifts we enjoy in our time on Earth become rightly related to the One with Whom we will spend our eternity.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The world we dwell in is sublime. It is beautiful. As C.S. Lewis wrote there is a “deep magic” to the works of God manifested through the material landscape. Even in its fallenness the creation acts as a conduit through which He calls forth both joy and longing in the human heart. This is a truth too often unknown or ignored by 21st century conservative Christians. Some of us hear the word “mystical” and we automatically think ‘occult” and “demonic” and shut the doors of our hearts to what Lewis called the “Numinous”, the sheer reality of divine transcendence in everyday life. In this often fearful renunciation of every aspect of the supernatural world present in the natural one we are profoundly impoverished, for we ourselves are supernatural beings as well as natural ones.

It seems apparent that among the healthiest people are those who live with a regularly recurring sense of wonder at what they encounter in the physical world each day. Perhap the healthiest Christians are those who identify that wonder with something that goes profoundly beyond the physical and specifically points us towards the one true God. If we are fortunate we have all experienced moments when some vision of nature, or even of man’s creative output, has transported us towards “that other place” spoken of in the U2 song. We suddenly, and usually surprisingly, experience a sublime longing for something near us, but just out of full grasp. It is as if the Far Country of Heaven has reached into our present existence for a short time and this can inspire a deep joy that points towards the eternal and clears our hearts of every other lesser desire.

What we want at such moments goes beyond nature, beyond the purely physical realm at all. It is true that the physical is not, as some religions teach, somehow evil or even inferior to the spiritual but it is incomplete in and of itself apart from the spiritual. We still live in an era of materialism, particularly where science still restrains the imaginations of human beings to the merely imminent. Scientific Naturalism tells us that the material world is all there is and that should be enough, but we intrinsically know that isn’t enough because we are intrinsically spiritual as well as natural beings. The natural and material worlds are not ends in themselves. They are, rather, pathways beyond themselves.

More than one philosopher has said that the entire created world is a metaphor for ultimate reality, that beyond what we can presently see, hear and touch is the true world where every one of those things is made real in some ultimately meaningful way. This is not necessarily to say that the present Earth we inhabit is an illusion, but rather that it is, for now, imperfect and fallen and can best serve as a fragrant reminder of what our existence will be when Heaven and Earth are finally joined at the culmination of history.

Beyond this the achingly sublime moments we now sometimes know are made possible by the actuality that even our presently imperfect world is still vitally linked to the perfect one where our God dwells. The divine is still present in nature as well as beyond it and His Spirit is the link between the two.

As Christians we need not be afraid of the mystic depth of our future existence manifesting itself by spiritual light that shines through the material world we live in today. This is a blessedly recurring gift from Heaven that keeps our hearts burning for the final consummation of our relationship with our Lord and Savior. It is designed to be experienced without fear and is best received with thanksgiving to Him who gave it.