Year: 2014

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved.

“ ‘Cause love never claims the victory until it finally gives it’s all.”

The above line, from a Ginny Owens song, speaks volumes about the Christian life. We find it so hard to believe that sacrifice is a good thing. In our fallen self-centeredness it seems like we must protect ourselves at all costs, and so we love little because it feels unsafe to do otherwise. By that measure the Lord we worship lived a very unsafe life.

Ever notice that the most truly whole persons in our churches always seem to be those who are the most truly other-centered, the ones who care less about their own interests than those of the people around them? These are the brethren in our congregations whose lives have an authentically deep and enduring joy. They often manifest a kind of well-being, a peace and sense of purpose, that make them seem literally to almost glow in the presence of their fellows. It is easy to be envious of these Christians who appear to have found a secret of joyful life that eludes the rest of us. Some may take only a superficial look and discount them as being “hopelessly perky”. Others wonder if they are living in some kind of dream world.

But what if that dream world is the place of true Christlikeness? Could it be that the giving of all for others really is the path to fully knowing and receiving the love we all so desperately need? Jesus said that we must lose our lives in order to find our true lives. By this perhaps he meant that we must lose our self-focused lives by sacrificially entering into the interests and needs of others. Scripture tells us that the Son of God went to his death confident that it would be worth it for the joy of seeing so many lost sinners saved, restored both to the place of being sons and daughters of His Father and becoming His own new brothers and sisters . So he died to self in the most profound way, by actually giving up the earthly life to which most of us so tightly hold. Then he took up His life anew, a glorified life that fully belongs only to those who, in true love, give their all.

At face value living this way seems impossible, and so it is if attempted in our own strength. It is a sad farce to try to lead a sacrificial life in the power of our flesh. Some may appear to succeed for a time, but the end result of trying to produce such a life this way is always bitterness and the realization that apart from God we can truly do nothing. The good news is that His empowering love can be our own if we sincerely ask for Him to fill us with it. The spirit of love is the Spirit of Christ, the spirit of sacrificial love especially so. Those glowing people in our churches who we see and envy, whose loving nature we covet, we can become ourselves.

The key to a deeper victory of love in us is found in receiving it from He whose cup truly overflows with love. We need only sincerely ask Him to remove our self-centered hearts and give us His own. As we progressively do this over the span of our lives here on earth we will ultimately find our own wellbeing in living for the wellbeing of others, to the glory of our risen Lord.

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There are times in our lives when we must realize that we have done everything we can to resolve a problem and now there are only two remaining things to do. The first is to give the entire circumstance to God. The second is to wait for Him to do what we cannot.

In mythology the Gordian Knot was a knot so large and complicated that it could not be unraveled by mortal effort. We all have had, or will have, such knots in our own existence. These are the problems that we simply do not have the ability to resolve, even with the character God has built into us so far during our years of Christian growth. We have marshaled what seems to be every ounce of will and wisdom we have and applied it to the issue. Based on this we may even have taken decisive action, but still have found no answer, easy or otherwise. The problem remains and we feel at our wit’s end about it.

The term “surrender” has become somewhat of a cliché in the Church. We are often urged to “surrender” our problems and, for that matter, our lives to God. Because we hear this particular exhortation so often it tends to lose a sense of urgency, even of reality, after a while. But the need for such surrender is an absolute necessity for any progress in being conformed to the image of Christ. One of the ways we are led towards it is through facing seemingly impossible problems.

The most effective thing we can do, when we have given what we feel to be our level best to resolve such problems and failed, is to pray (and ask our brothers and sisters in the faith to pray with us) for a divine solution. We then purpose to wait, for however long it takes, on almighty God. Once we have chosen to lay our burden down before Him we can simply continue to live our lives. We have done all we can. We can do no more than hold to the best previously discernible course and trust that our Lord will untangle our personal Gordian Knot through His power without our help or, perhaps more succinctly, without our flesh’s help.

This, it seems to me, is what it means to “cease from striving” in the best sense of the term. It is real surrender to a faithful God Whom we trust will do what we cannot…. and in that surrender is our peace.

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

One of the biggest ways we avoid living out the purpose of God in our lives and the lives of others is through willed ignorance. The Bible tells us that the human heart is deceitful, at least to the degree that it is not yet under the Lordship of Christ. Sadly, few of us can claim to have yet come to a place where that Lordship is absolute. Where our wills remain unbowed to our Redeemer there is room for all kinds of self-willed error and one manifestation of this can be found in choosing to avoid a truth that is obvious. We can know what God wants us to do, but we say we can’t. We protest that something is beyond our capacity to grasp when it really isn’t. We choose ignorance when it is within our ability to know because to know what is expected of us is to be under obligation to do it, no matter how undesirable or difficult it might seem.

Whether this happens on a conscious or subconscious level may seem hard to nail down, but perhaps it really isn’t. We often like to believe that a particular divine command is something we are not consciously aware of but that belief is part of our self-deception. Even if willed ignorance has an unconscious component it might be safely assumed that we are not without some responsibility for how it became unconscious. Things that feel unpleasant to us have a funny way of somehow being pushed from a conscious to a subconscious level. Whatever part of the psyche it is that might hold the denied knowledge of our responsibility the bottom line is that we have no way to permanently justify denying it. As moral agents and, more importantly, as children of God we must seek to know and do His will on every level.

There are, of course, times when a believer genuinely does not know what the best action to take is in any given circumstance. As fallen and finite creatures human beings are probably never going to always know what is required of them in this life, at least not right away. This is no surprise to God and it should not be a surprise to us either. But what might be called “innocent ignorance” is nowhere near as great a problem in a Christian’s life as the not so innocent kind.

So how do we guard against the tendency to pretend we do not know what God’s will is for our lives? One way is to take to heart that Christ’s yoke is easy and His burden is light. I believe that the Enemy of our souls is constantly trying to convince us that whatever our Lord asks of us is either unreasonably hard or even impossible for us to do. The irony in this is that there is a twisted element of truth in this lie he so often tries to make us believe. Many of the things a Christian may be required to do or endure would be impossible apart from the enabling grace of God.

However once that grace is received and applied we experience the power to do the seemingly impossible. Satan desperately wants to keep this knowledge from us because once we have it we have new ability to do great things that further the Kingdom of God on earth. It is also not necessary to pretend we do not know what God is asking of us once we realize just how much He loves us, and that is often a function of how much time we spend at the foot of the cross. It is in what Jesus did there that we come to understand we need not suppress any aspect of the truth in our lives. Willed ignorance of what we must do in obedience to Him will never truly set us free. What will is what He, in perfect obedience to His Father, did for us.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Entering into the identity given us by God often requires that we receive His knowledge of our true selves through others. In and of ourselves we are not able to see who God made us to be in Christ. We need the perspective of Godly individuals who He has placed in our lives for this purpose. To a sense those who love us with the love of Jesus are His vessels for bestowing our identities upon us.

Sometimes, maybe most times, the “Shea” perceived by those who both love God and love me is the “Shea” I should see myself as. Like many of us I often tend to be excessively negative in my self-perception. Left to my own devices I sometimes have a propensity to paint myself as a spiritual failure. The tapes that play in my head reinforce this tendency and those tapes all pre-date my conversion to Christ. As a boy I knew the sting of rejection and emotional abuse by both my peers my earthly father. Despite my conscious rebellion against the messages these individuals sent I know I internalized much of what they said about me during the formative years of my life. To this day these messages affect my perception of myself and also, unfortunately, my perception of how my Creator sees me. They sank deep into my heart at a time in my life, childhood and adolescence, when I was very impressionable and when I was looking to others for validation.

Today I believe God has put new people in my life whose purpose in being there is to tell me the truth about who I am, both as a creature made in God’s image and as a being redeemed by the blood of His Son. When these brothers and sisters in the faith praise aspects of my character or encourage me to grow as a child of God they literally help to re-make me into the person God designed me to be. To the extent that I receive this loving praise and encouragement I begin to become the person they are describing.

We often underestimate the ability of another person’s words to affect our lives, either for good or ill. But such words have great influence. This influence is amplified when the person saying them is someone who we care about and whose opinion we value. The nature of this phenomenon is a mystery but perhaps it derives from the significance of the spoken word in God’s economy. We are told that the universe and all it contains was brought into existence by the word of God. He literally spoke it into being. Isn’t it logical that his finest creation might echo that ability, albeit on a radically smaller scale?

In the New Testament book that bears his name the apostle James tells us of the capacity of the tongue to both build up and tear down. He makes it clear that words can have a great deal of power and must be used carefully by those who claim the name of Christ. Again this implies that a person’s very life may be changed by the words he hears from others.

Some might interject here that only the words of the Bible, mediated directly by the Holy Spirit, are meant to have such power in a Christian’s life. It is certainly true that God directly uses our reading of scripture to mold us in this way. But God also uses earthly inter-personal relationships to accomplish His will and if His word is written on our hearts why wouldn’t He also use the truth he has put in us through that word to help each other to become what he wants us to become?

All this points up the awesome responsibility each of us has to bless others. We can bless with our words or we can curse. We can help someone find their identity in Christ or we can hinder them. It is up to us to choose our words carefully, with a loving desire to help one another be all God intends us to be.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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Living an intellectual life sometimes seems problematic for the Evangelical believer. Our own loyalty to the truth of Scripture can seem to be a stumbling block. In more than one place the Bible tells us that it pleased God to reveal Himself to the simple rather than the wise, at least the “worldly wise”. The common people flocked to Jesus while many of the learned men of Israel plotted His downfall. It is evident that none of the 12 was scholars.

Earlier, in the Old Testament, we are introduced to Solomon, the wisest man ever to walk the earth up until that time. Yet, with all his wisdom he still ends up so badly compromised by indulgence in the pagan religions of his foreign wives that we are left to wonder about his eternal destiny.

A notable exception to this lack of Godly thinkers is the Apostle Paul. The writer of the lion’s share of the New Testament was a Pharisee and the Pharisees were an intellectually sharp, if spiritually corrupt, group. It is safe to say that Paul’s encounter with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill was a meeting of equals. Apparently Paul was comfortable dealing with the “intelligentsia” on their own level.

In the history of some conservative Christian movements in America we have seen, at times, an almost visceral dislike for any approach to the faith that seems to involve the upper reaches of the human intellect. Some have traced this phenomenon back to the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that took place early in the last century. The Fundamentalist defenders of Creationism were soundly thrashed from a rhetorical perspective during that trial, at least partially because they apparently could not argue on the same level with the more erudite defenders of Darwinism. In the aftermath the Fundamentalists had two paths to choose between. They could educate themselves in an effort to become as intellectually vigorous as their opponents, or they could reject the life of the mind altogether and paint intellectualism as a weapon of the proud and ungodly. They chose the latter and the retreat of Bible-believing Christians from the intellectual marketplace began, a retreat which still influences us today. One of its legacies is the idea in popular culture that biblical Christians “check their brains at the church door”.

The problem here is that God gave some of His children above average minds. Unless we are to believe that He somehow “cursed” them when He did that we must grapple with the fact that being a “Cerebral Christian” is not an oxymoron. We must consider the possibility that some insights into the nature of God can only be revealed to those who have minds God designed to receive those insights. This is not to say that Christians who are less endowed intellectually are somehow inferior. Such individuals are given their own insights, ones that perhaps elude their “smarter” brothers and sisters. Both the learned and the unlearned have their own unique contributions to bring to the Church as a whole.

In recent years some Evangelicals have promoted an effort to bring the academic standards of Christian colleges up to the level of secular institutions. There has been a conscious effort to, among other things, re-inject a respect for the mind into our churches. The hope is that Evangelical scholars can then be produced who will be able to defend orthodoxy with as much intellectual “firepower” as those in the liberal church and the secular world bring to bear against it. There have already been some formidable minds engaged in this battle, men like Ravi Zacharias, R.C. Sproul and the late Chuck Colson. In each case we have seen individuals who employ the intellectual gifts God gave them on the front line of battle in the intellectual world.

This ongoing effort signals the end of the Scopes-inspired rejection of the intellect that unfortunately continues in some Bible-believing churches. From Augustine to C.S. Lewis thinking Christians have contributed sublime insights into the truth and reality of God, helping countless believers to come into deeper fellowship with the Divine. For these men the mind’s contemplation of God was as vital to sanctification as that of the heart. There are many Evangelicals today who recognize this truth and are ready to use their minds to the full in glorifying the Lord. They know it is time for our tradition to add its own insights to the living history of Christian thought.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

In the last installment I shared with you the moment in my life when I came to know the presence of a God who only several weeks earlier I still dogmatically claimed did not exist. By the time this moment arrived my Atheism had effectively crumbled into dust. It was no longer a question even of Agnosticism. I now knew God existed and that He was capable of opening up to me a realm I had never remotely known before, the realm of His Spirit, where the sheer reality of His being overwhelmed everything else I knew or thought I knew.

It is a strange thing to have your eyes opened this way. Once you have gone from not believing in a Deity to being personally touched by that Deity it is not easy for you to return to your former unbelief. Some might become resistant to God as they go forward into this new place of knowing, but pretending He does not exist basically ceases to be an option. Others might even reject His presence in their lives, but I doubt very sincerely that they could simply reject the fact of His reality once that reality has truly touched them. I believe the sheer power of how human hearts are opened to His existence tends to preclude that from happening.

As I mentioned in part III of my story soon after my experience at the window of my psychiatric unit bedroom I was declared healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. I somehow intrinsically knew upon returning home that I needed to find a place where others were who had experienced what I experienced. I knew this meant a church, because by now I had come to identify the God who had revealed Himself to me as the same God I was being drawn towards as I read the Bible, specifically the New Testament.

After going to one building that had a cross on it, but absolutely nothing redolent of the God I had encountered, and another with people who spoke more believingly about Him, but did not seem to be able to understand my journey in the slightest, I found a congregation in which I immediately sensed the same Spirit I’d tasted of in the hospital. So there I stayed (I ended up, in fact, staying there for 17 years). This was in November of 1990.

Christmas was coming.

On the night of December 24 I attended the Christmas Eve service at my new church. It was moving, but it was not until after the service ended and I was in my car on my way to join my family for the holiday that God decided to pull out all the stops, as it were.

As I drove down the dark New Jersey highway I was listening to the U2 album “The Joshua Tree.” The song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” began to play. A little more than half way through it Bono, the Irish band’s lead vocalist, sings this lyric:

“You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains,
Carried the cross of my shame…of my shame,
You know I believe it.”

At that moment I believed it too, for myself. At that moment I accepted what God in human form had done for me two-thousand years before on a cross outside Jerusalem. At that moment I knew I was redeemed from the nature I was born with and had excused for 22 years. I knew I was re-born. I was a Christian. I wept so hard I almost had to pull off the highway. It was, and remains, the greatest night of my life.

He was now more than a presence. He was my Rescuer, the One who had given me a reason to live that I had never known before, the One who in the last four months of 1990 had transformed a suicidal Atheist into a child of God.

No one was more surprised than me at the time.

So for all of you out there who do not believe as I once did not believe I’ll leave you with this: The God you don’t believe in may, Himself, one day change your mind. Call it the divine sense of humor, but I think He especially enjoys shocking Atheists to the core by opening our eyes to His existence. In fact I suspect there may be divine laughter in Heaven every time it happens.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

So here I was, a new “former-Atheist” gravitating towards a particular world religion without yet knowing, at least consciously, just why it was happening. With the hindsight of 23 years I now realize that it was because of something deeply compelling in the thought that the same God who made the universe, a Deity that was by definition infinitely greater than His creation, might have once chosen to take on the form of that creation. The wonder of God becoming man is the central proposition of the faith once known as “The Way” and today known as Christianity.

Beyond this, as I read the Gospel of John it became clear to me that the God described there was willing to undertake this unfathomable condescension only because it was somehow the only way He could save people like me from the all-consuming darkness that then possessed and was destroying me.

What kind of love would compel such a being to do this? Moreover what kind of love would compel this being to be willing to then die at the hands of a creation that had decided he was such an imposition on their determination to have their own way at any cost that he must be murdered?

My imagination began to be captivated by this person I was reading about and what he did 2000 years before I was born. I can remember sitting in the hospital’s arts and crafts room and making copper-enamel crosses. Most of them were grey with a sprinkle of bright gold at the center. The grey, I think, was a representation of how my soul remained, for the time being, darkened and lost. The gold sun in the middle symbolized what was about to happen to that soul. It could only have represented hope, something I had not really known for a long, long time.

Around this time my mother, an Atheist herself and my spiritual model since childhood, was called in by my doctor for a one on one counseling session with me. It went down hill just about from the moment it began. Without warning I found myself spiraling into a rage against her unlike any I had ever known. I screamed and cursed at her for what I now knew was a train-wreck of a life caused by my embracing her worldview, a worldview that I now knew ended in hopelessness and despair. It wasn’t necessarily her intention for me to take after her that way, but that is just what had happened. At the end of this horrible tirade I broke down and wept. My mother simply walked over, kissed me tenderly on my forehead, and walked quietly out of the room.

Shortly thereafter I returned to my bedroom in the in-patient psychiatric unit I was living on at the time. My roommate sensed I was upset and graciously slipped out. I knew the reason I had bitterly hurt my mom was to try to make myself feel better at whatever the cost to her. Her response was the true love of a mother for her son and I understood now that I was capable of evil and that this evil was somehow intrinsic. At that moment I found myself acutely aware that I was not quite the wonderful; worthy person secular psychology was every day trying to make me believe I was. What I really was is described by another word I never would have used just a few months before. What I really was, in short, was a sinner.

It was fall.

I walked over to the picture window and looked up towards the autumn sun. From somewhere deep within me I silently cried out for help, for solace, for some answer, maybe for some absolution. At that instant I felt myself being flooded by a light that did not originate from the sun. It was at that moment that I first knew the presence of God. I cannot completely describe it, but I’ll try. It was as if a Love beyond any human love suddenly flowed to me and through me. No earthly high, and I’d known a few by that point, could ever equal it. Ten seconds of this Presence was greater than anything I had ever known. The word “profound” is inadequate to describe what happened to me that day. I have never been the same. I would not want to be.

Soon thereafter I found myself calling my mother, tearfully asking for her forgiveness, and telling her how much I loved her. I felt cleansed of anger and touched by hope. Not very long after that day I was released from the hospital.

But, as you will soon see, my journey to true faith was not yet over.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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In the first part of this story I detailed what it was like to be an Atheist at the end of his rope, a man caught in a “perfect storm of the soul” who was beginning to wonder if his despair would only be made permanent through self-destruction. I also described the process that led me to finally consider if the only one who could save me was not only the God whose existence I had denied, but the God of a specific faith whose more orthodox adherents I had for years delighted in mocking.

As my desperation for a way out of my monstrous depression increased I finally came to the decision that I would suspend my “official disbelief.” At that point my Atheism morphed, almost overnight, into a searching Agnosticism. Now at the time I was a newly minted college graduate. In fact I had been an honor student and one who considered himself well-read and both intellectually and culturally sophisticated. So it might surprise you that at 22 I had yet to crack open a certain piece of literature, a book upon which it might be said that Western civilization was largely built.

I am referring, of course, to the Bible. You see the psychiatric institution I was a “guest” at permitted an old Baptist couple from a local church to hold a modest little Bible study every Thursday night. One evening I dropped in and I was soon the owner of a free copy of the Gospel of John. For those of you who might not know, John is one of the four gospels that begin the New Testament and tell the story of the life of Christ. I’m fairly certain it was that night that I began reading something that only a few months earlier I would not have been caught dead with in public, a biblical text.

Up until this point I had mostly thought of Jesus as a “great teacher”, although I must admit that in earlier years I also had a certain respect for him as a historical figure who seemed somehow unique. But as a “Card-Carrying Atheist” I suppose I held the stock opinion that his story had been hijacked by religious fanatics. These poor, benighted souls had then turned him into something he was not, some kind of All-Powerful Judge, who they then proceeded to use to lay hyper-moral guilt-trips on the rest of us. I associated the religion that now bore his name with arrogant, self-righteous hypocrites whose primary obsession was to keep me from being free to do whatever I rightfully wanted to do.

But as I came to be acquainted with the Christ of scripture I began to realize, albeit slowly, that I had never really had a clue as to what I was talking about. I suppose that was the first manifestation of a new and crucial humility in my consciousness. It also was the start of something that tugged at the deepest part of my so recently cynical heart. Maybe, just maybe, that heart silently told me, I might find out that this Jesus had more to do with the God I was beginning to consider then I had ever imagined.

I think it was at this point that things really started happening to me. You see, all one has to do is slightly crack the door to belief. It only takes that much for someone Very Big to make himself known.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It was while in the midst of a deep clinical depression 23 years ago that I first started to realize my long-held refusal to even consider the possibility that God existed might be a dead-end in the most profound sense of the term. Unsuccessfully battling what had become a life-threatening emotional and psychological crisis, a kind of “perfect storm of the soul”, I began to realize that that all the many and sincere efforts of human beings on my behalf at the time to restore me to mental health were not enough. I had already come to know that I could not simply will myself back to any kind of life that was worth living in my own strength. Now I was discovering that the rest of the world did not have any definitive answers either. To say this was terrifying is an understatement.

Beyond this I had the growing sense that the usual way out for an Atheist in despair, self-destruction, might only make the terrible space I was occupying a permanent address. It was my first inkling that human beings might actually continue to exist beyond physical death and that what we are at the time of our death might determine what kind of an existence that might be. It was the unpleasant opening of my eyes to a spiritual truth that, just weeks earlier, had not been something to which I had ever given any real thought. Spiritual things, in fact, were pretty much not on my radar screen, nor did I want them to be.

So here I was, realizing that maybe the word I had used all my life as a casual curse or as the venue of uncounted bad jokes might actually be a real place, and one I might be heading for if I acted on those thoughts of self-destruction. At that moment Hell became very, very real for me and such a place did not seem like a very desirable place to end up. It began to occur to me that, if there was a God, He might be the only person who could keep me out of there.

When people who cared about me began to catch on to my “spiritual awakening” some of them suggested that I begin to explore my religious options (I had, you see, been raised in about as close to a totally non-religious home as I think can exist). So for a short time that is exactly what I did. I can remember checking books on world religions out of a library and reading about the core beliefs of each one. As I did this something was simultaneously becoming clear to me. My condition needed to be utterly transformed; in fact I needed to be utterly transformed if I was to stay out of a permanent darkness I sensed waited for me on the other side of death. Some self-chosen, a la carte philosophy or religious system was not going to be any more effective in achieving that in me than the psychiatrists and medication and group therapy had already been.

If a God existed I needed one who could do something for and in me that would fundamentally alter the deepest part of who I was. The only religion that offered such a God was the one which said he had once shown up “in the flesh”, so to speak, and had walked the earth telling people like me that he and he alone, was capable of doing just that.

Even a man like I was at the time, one who not long before had gleefully referred to the adherents of this religion as “Bible-Belt Bumpkins” knew who this particular God’s name was.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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The Bible speaks of hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a cardinal virtue in the Christian life, and a defining mark of the true believer. To be a child of God is to share in the righteousness of God through his Son. Jesus died for us so that we might, through Him, have such righteousness.

The problem for many of us who bear His name is that we think the thing we are supposed to be hungering and thirsting after is perfect performance in keeping the law and avoiding sin. Of course the earnest Christian desires to do both. A lifestyle of lawlessness and transgression is part of what we were saved from when we cried out to Jesus and put our faith in Him for our salvation. Striving for moral excellence is a good thing if we strive for it in the strength of our risen Savior. The problem is that a lot of us strive for it in the power of the flesh and have come to believe that perfect ethical performance is what it means to be filled with righteousness. Actually such performance, if it stems mostly from human effort, is inevitably wedded with self-righteousness. Such “righteousness” is a lie and an abomination to God.

That we do this, even as professed Christians, should not come as a surprise to us if we know something about the nature we are all born with. All human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong. This is a function of being created in the image of God and existing in a moral universe. We have a similarly innate sense that we do not measure up to the right and tend inexorably towards the wrong. Be it on a conscious or unconscious level we cannot escape this truth. Our perhaps equally sinful instincts, as fallen, morally compromised beings, are either to try to be “good enough” to rate acceptance by the One who sets the standard or to ignore the standard and hate Him who set it. This instinct does not necessarily disappear at conversion although Christians, of course, tend towards the former sin rather than the latter.

So what, then, does it truly mean for a believer to hunger and thirst after righteousness? It means to deeply desire God and His righteousness and to understand that He gives us a good heart through our faith in His perfectly good Son. We do not have a good heart and we cannot give ourselves one. Christians must give up both of these illusions completely. To do so is only to take God at His word. The Bible makes it clear that only our Lord’s shed blood makes us righteous and then only as we put our faith Him to receive that righteousness.

When a child of God comes to want the righteousness of Jesus Christ above all else he or she will be filled with that righteousness. True moral and ethical excellence will ensue because God will give to His child of His own nature. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of all and it is the fulfillment of the deepest hunger and thirst of the redeemed human heart.