Year: 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.

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

All rights reserved

“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.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

In recent year Secularists have gotten a lot of mileage in the media out of warning of the threat to the United States of a home grown Christian version of Islamic theocracy. This would  be perpetrated against the nation by those who are politically and theologically conservative. Some of these pundits just muse darkly about the ramifications of too many Bible-believing Christians in government. Others, with less restraint and far less reason, have gone so far as to brand those political activists who believe in biblical principles as the “American Taliban.” What these individuals do not realize is that the vast majority of biblical Christians in this country  have no love for the idea of the church and the state somehow becoming one either. Our reasons for not wanting such a change in the nature of American government are quite different from theirs’ but the fact remains that, outside of a few people on the extreme fringe, we mostly would prefer to leave our political system the way it is.

A strong argument can be made that true Christianity functions better in a pluralistic society with guaranteed religious freedoms and a nominal separation of church and state than in perhaps any other political construct in human history. Such a society took root in America largely as a result of the founding fathers of our nation knowing about the government-backed religious intolerance their immediate ancestors experienced in Europe. Because of this many of them wanted to create a society in which freedom of conscience was safeguarded by the government, not eliminated by it. The Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution was far more likely designed to protect the church from the state than vice-versa; something that is often forgotten by both sides in the current debate.

One of the reasons Christianity remains a vibrant part of the contemporary American scene is because all of its branches have, in a sense, been “watered” by a political system that was not designed to promote one branch at the expense of another. Historically when a government and a particular church become fused into something resembling a theocracy the result is the suppression of all the other churches. This is not desirable for Christians who agree on theological essentials, but not on all particulars (and that represents most of us under the biblical Christian banner).

Beyond that, history also shows that when a particular church becomes a “state church” it usually dies. Look at the official churches of countries all over Western Europe. Truly practicing  Christians are today a very small minority in most of these nations. The Church is inevitably compromised when it becomes too intertwined with the state. This has actually been evident ever since the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the late Roman Empire by Constantine in the Fourth Century. It is not unreasonable to propose that much of the remaining purity of the early church then proceeded to die along with Rome.

Christians in the United States do not want to live under the politically correct thumb of Radical Secularism, but most of us also have no desire to have any one denomination tell us how to live out an authentic religious life; with the sword of government providing that denomination with the power to do so. Such an arrangement would indeed smack of  life under something like Sharia law, a reality Christians want to avoid just as much as Secularists do (though, again, for different reasons.)

Ill-advised pronouncements from the extreme Left about “Christianists” wanting to make America into some kind of religious dictatorship do not hold up under any kind of serious scrutiny of earnest followers of Christ in this country. That such scrutiny of the facts is not a priority for people who have already made up their minds about biblical Christians should not come as a big surprise. Those who have  declared man the measure of all things tend to instinctively dislike those who hold to a biblical worldview, and generally despise the idea of people with such convictions having any kind of political influence whatsoever. We are, by nature, offensive to them.

But perhaps a few Secularists will pursue the truth (with the open mind  they so often accuse Christians of not having) and learn that they have far more to fear today from Radical Islam then from us.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The ultimate focus of every believer must be Jesus Christ. This may seem obvious but the kind of focusing I speak of is a consuming one, one that goes beyond the ‘Christian Norm’ of praying, reading Scripture, and worshipping on Sunday mornings. None of these things fully encompass what the Christian so desperately needs and that is to find Christ, for Christ.

We sometimes pay lip service to the notion that God is all we need. Unfortunately our lives often continue to be built on anything but the true Source of life. Do we really desire the Son of God for Himself alone? Or do we mostly look to Him as the One who can deliver us from all of the worries, all of the troubles of our present existence? The Bible does tell us that if we seek the Kingdom of Heaven all other things will be added on to us. But all the other things are worthless if they do not come about as a by-product of our devotion to the Lord.

To do this, to really look to Jesus constantly, sounds impossible. Every human being has responsibilities that do not directly involve worship or at least worship in the conventional sense of the word. But what we are looking for here is far beyond the conventional, far beyond what we do in church once a week. True worship is constant. We endeavor to focus on Jesus in all aspects of our lives. The ultimate goal is to lose ourselves in Him because we want Him to be everything to us. Only in this way can we expect our lives in the flesh to be transformed and given back to us as lives found in Christ.

As in much of the Christian walk the ability to see only Him as the focal point of our spirits does not come instantaneously. It has become a cliché to talk about how the myriad distractions of contemporary existence have made it so difficult for believers to keep God first in their lives. However, it is true. The modern world has indeed become too complex to easily “practice the presence” of God. Still, Jesus Christ is bigger than the world. Our Lord can still be known deeply if we ask for help in focusing on Him and then dare to step out in faith to do it. It begins with taking time to meditate on Jesus and Jesus alone. As we do this He can gradually become greater in our consciousness and the effects of the time we spend with Him begin to be felt in the rest of our life. Gradually we can become aware of Christ in all we perceive and all we know. Ultimately He can become everything to us and with we will experience the singular glory of being intimately identified with God. Then our cups can only run over with His love and we will light the darkness around us.

It is true that we continue see through a glass darkly, such is the penalty of living in a fallen world. The fact remains, however, that we still can be far closer to our God. Even here on earth it is possible beyond what many of us could hope or imagine. The key is our desire, the passion to pursue the Lover of our souls…as He has pursued us.

.