Month: October 2014

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Some people are not so much turned off by Christianity as intimidated by it. They know enough about the life of Jesus and the lives of those who sincerely love and follow him to know that the religion he founded involves great personal sacrifice. This is summed up in the idea that as Christ laid down his life for us we should be willing to lay down our own lives for others. For human beings who have an intrinsic and overriding tendency towards self-protection as well as self-aggrandizement, and that includes all of us, this idea does not come across as particularly attractive. We know, somewhere in our hearts, that to love others is a wonderful thing, but the suggestion that we do this to a degree that puts our own self-perceived wellbeing at risk seems impossible.

The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible, at least in and of ourselves. When Christ asks his followers to do things like love their enemies, as he does on the Sermon on the Mount, he is asking human beings to do the naturally impossible. It does us no good to look at what Jesus asked us to do and then try to do it in our own strength. You might as well ask something to fall up instead of down.

The problem is that many who know just enough of the tenets of this belief system to know that radical self-sacrifice is innate to it have missed another equally important truth of the Christian proposition. The reason Christians can love in a way that goes beyond what is possible for others is because they have been on the receiving end of the inexhaustible love of God in Christ. It is this supernatural love which so changes and fills the human heart that those who are given it not only can, but truly want to lay down their lives for others. What is finite cannot conceive of emptying itself for the sake of another unless, and only unless, it has been filled with the infinite. We are profoundly finite apart from the vital connection with God that comes through faith in the Son of God, but once that connection is there we become partakers of a love so abundant and pure that the intense blessing inherent in receiving it actually makes us want to give it away.

What is humanly impossible ceases to be humanly impossible once the love of God is present and the love of God becomes present in everyone who truly receives Jesus Christ. It is in the sure and certain knowledge that we have tapped into this affection, and will never lose it, that we become able to love as we are commanded to in the pages of the New Testament. Self-sacrifice no longer seems like such a sacrifice when we know that whatever we give up for the sake of another is more than equaled by the unspeakable blessing of being in an eternal love relationship with the one who both created and redeemed us.

This is why we need not feel intimidated by what he requests of his children. His incredible love for us, in and of itself, makes what Jesus asks not only possible but deeply desirable as well. In relationship with the God of Christianity self-sacrifice actually becomes synonymous with joy.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We live in an age in which the entire concept of personal responsibility has become suspect in the popular mind. This is especially true in the West where secular psychology has encouraged the idea that we are victims of anyone and everyone but ourselves. While psychology is not necessarily evil in and of itself what is evil is the tendency to use its legitimate observations on the effects of abuse as an excuse for moral license. This has led to a “Pop Psychology” that reacts to individual misconduct as something perhaps justifiable because the person involved in the misconduct was mistreated by someone earlier in life.

Of course this kind of assignment of blame for our wrongs to someone else is nothing new. Human beings have been blaming each other for the entirety of human history. It always appears far easier to put the onus for my bad behavior on someone else. What has changed is that our society is far more open to endorsing that kind of responsibility-shifting. It has been said that in contemporary Western culture “sin has gone mainstream”, but that only covers one aspect of the change in the ethical landscape. Beyond that behavior which is still considered morally repugnant is increasingly being excused by resorting to the proposition that someone else’s abuse of the perpetrator made it almost impossible for him or her not to do the perpetrating.

The problem is that by not holding people responsible for their actions we are weakening, perhaps fatally weakening, the ability for a civil society to continue. Two principles must be adhered to for a civilization to avoid self-destruction. The first is belief in a transcendent morality that is universal and applies to every person. The other is a corporate willingness to punish violation of that morality for the common good; to set an example for those who might otherwise reject it. When a people discard these principles the historical result is moral anarchy and the breakdown of civilization.

Of course there has to be an ultimate arbiter of the transcendent morality we speak of. In Judeo-Christian culture that Arbiter has been the God of the Bible. As we move towards what appears to be a “Post Judeo-Christian” culture it behooves us to ask a question vital to the survival of our society. That question is this: who or what do we expect to replace that God? Who or what do we expect to become the ultimate referential authority required to ensure that the rule of law, as it relates to personal responsibility, is enforced? The answer to that question will determine whether Western Civilization survives.

As a believer in the aforementioned God, and someone who is personally familiar with the pervasive influence and ultimately disastrous effects of blame-shifting, I hope the replacement we come up with isn’t the god of Pop Psychology.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

What is the most compelling attraction of Biblical Christianity? For me it is simply this: the thought of a God who so loves us that He is willing to become one of us. Such an unfathomably condescending God, for me, is the only one worth knowing and loving above anything else in my life.

Christians believe that Jesus is neither God alone, nor man alone but someone who is both fully God and fully Man. Nothing in the scriptural description of Christ takes away from either His divinity or His humanity. Jesus performed miracles only someone with ultimate power over nature, in short, God, could perform. This same Jesus also was born and grew, ate and drank, worked and loved, lost and suffered, and finally died as one of us. The only difference between His essential humanity and ours is that he never did anything wrong. In that singular fact, His innocence from evil, is perhaps the greatest evidence that He was, and is, also God but a God who willed to become like us in every other way.

I find such a God to be incredibly compelling. If He was willing to become like me then I can relate to Him as something other than what one theologian called the “totally other”, a being so distant from His creation as to be alien to it. Such a distant God is found in the other two monotheistic world religions, but not in Christianity. You may level any number of accusations against this faith, but calling its God remote and uninvolved with human beings is one that is ultimately untenable. It is untenable because Christians worship a God who became a human being, admittedly one unique in all the history of our race, but still a human being.

Think about such a God. Any being rating the Name is, by definition, infinite, eternal and all-powerful and yet this Divinity so wanted to be known by us that He reduced Himself to taking on our form and living among us. It is as if we so cared for the fellowship of ants that we somehow made ourselves an ant and joined the colony.

I don’t know about you but because of this willingness on His part to so identify with me as to become like me, this God is the only One who touches my deepest heart. The God of Jesus Christ, who also is Jesus Christ, is not someone I can ignore, nor do I want to because He was willing to draw close to me to enable me to desire to draw close to Him. This is one of the most profound reasons, though certainly not the only one, why I have come to believe that He loves me and why I love Him, however imperfectly, in return.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Romantic love often seems to be this age’s cure-all for loneliness and lack of fulfillment. It has become almost an article of faith in Western society that the answer to many of the chronic problems of human existence is to be found in a man and a women (or these days any combination of genders) coming together. Whether it takes the form of a long term “friendship with benefits”, co-habitation or a potentially lifelong marital bond we are told that we find our all in all when we become one with another human being physically and emotionally.

While the Bible has an opinion on the subject of sexual activity outside of marriage I’ll spare you the moralistic scolding that many of you have no doubt heard Christians are famous (or infamous) for. My intention is to propose that the regular carnage we see today in romantic relationships that function as the be-all and end-all of life happens for a reason. It happens because the greatest relationship a human being can be in is not one with another human being at all; it is one with the Creator of human beings. Our troubled romantic lives are a direct consequence of “putting the cart before the horse” in a fundamental way. We seek in other people that which only God can provide us.

The great French scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal put it succinctly when he spoke of a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart. This is the hole that exists because we are not born in a real relationship with God. Again, I will not focus on why that is true. This is not an article about sin and the fall of our race. It is enough to say that if we have any self-awareness at all we have a sense that something is missing from our lives. This void exists and we try to fill it with any number of things, some good in their proper context and some bad in every context. One of the things we often try to fill it with is another person.

When we are head over heels in love with someone, and they with us, we do not feel that void for a period of time. In fact we may well feel absolutely contented, full of all we want and could ever imagine wanting. Such is the false transcendence of human love in and of itself. It does not last. At some point the intoxication of “being in love” wears off. We begin to see the other person’s flaws where once we saw perfection. The relationship that once seemed like the “happily ever after” answer we had been hoping for shows its inability to keep us in a state of perpetual bliss. Many romances (and, for that matter, marriages) do not make it far past this point.

The problem is not with men and woman falling in love. The problem is with expecting another person to fill the void that only the divine can fill. Christians fall in love too. Such love can be a great blessing, but only if it is secondary to being in a deeper love relationship with God. It is in seeking that deeper bond with Him that romantic love can be put in its proper place in our lives and fully enjoyed for what it is, a gift from God; not a god itself.

Seek first the Maker of Heaven and Earth (and also the Maker, by the way, of human love) and you will fill a hole in your heart that no one else ever can. Seek a man or women to do that and all you will know in the end is a heart with a hole in it that is now a broken heart as well.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There is much talk today about father’s and their impact on the lives of sons and daughters. Some of us were fortunate enough to have had wonderful men as dads; men who, by and large, were healthily loving towards us and present for us during the times it counted most. But, in this day and age, the sad fact of the matter is that fewer and fewer of us can testify to having such a father. For many of us our childhood and early adult memories are stained by dads who either physically or emotionally abandoned us or, worse, were present but abusive.

Today an entire therapeutic culture has grown up around helping people cope with the results of bad parenting. Some of these psychological support systems are good but some are not, because the flip side of the coin is that many individuals have built their entire lives on bitterness and un-forgiveness towards fathers who were themselves abused and perhaps did the best they could under their own circumstances. Any therapeutic system that perpetuates blame does neither the victim nor the victimizer any good.

The purpose of this piece, however, is not primarily to examine how to deal psychologically with the pain and sense of loss involved with having a bad father. Instead I’d like to use this widely experienced reality to point out another reason for those who have written off Christianity to give it another look.

The Bible speaks to those who have been abandoned and abused by the men who helped bring them into the world when it tells us that God “is a Father to the fatherless”. No other global belief-system calls God “Father”, but the Judeo-Christian faith. The Deity revealed in scripture is one who clearly longs to be a father to those he created in his image. In fact the New Testament tells us that for those who receive God through his son the right is given to call their new Lord “Abba”, a Hebrew word used by Jewish children that roughly translates as “Daddy”.

One of the attributes of true deity, even from a purely logical perspective, is perfection. What that means for the sons and daughters of God is that their perhaps deeply flawed earthly fathers have been replaced by a perfect Father. It is on this basis that real healing can begin from the wounds so many of us received as children, healing that the best secular psychology cannot work within us. When a bad dad gets replaced by an “Abba” the love we so needed, and did not have, becomes available to us right now.

So if you live with the insecurity, pain and relational devastation that is the terrible legacy of abandonment or abuse by one of those “bad dads” here is one more reason to consider the Christian faith. What you may need is to be re-parented by the best parent that ever was, is, or will be and that parent is the Father of Jesus Christ.