Month: March 2015

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

To love God out of desire rather than necessity is one of the greatest goals of the Christian life. We tend to love Him because of what He can do for us rather than for who He is. It is no doubt true that an authentic kind of love can be ascribed to someone who meets our greatest needs and desires, but the most transcendent devotion is that which comes from recognizing that the person in question is worthy of adoration quite apart from any good thing we derive from them.

The closest analogy in human love would be the man who so falls in love with a woman that even if she were forever unattainable by him he would love her still. This is the kind of love that gives thanks that such a woman exists at all, no matter to whom she ultimately belongs in a temporal sense. Such devotion is exceedingly rare among human beings. This is especially true today when the spirit of “what have you done for me lately” so often seems to undergird the rickety foundation of contemporary romance.

Of course this kind of love is also rare among those who profess to love God with all their “heart, soul, mind and strength” as well, so we believers need to think twice before getting on our moral high-horse. Very few saints have reached the place where they can honestly say that they love God for Himself alone. All of us come to God as beggars in need of that which we do not deserve. This is the state of every person who cries out to God for salvation through His Son. Every one of us initially falls in love with our Lord for the same reason: His incredible kindness in loving us enough to save us from ourselves. This is the starting point for every Christian and it is nothing to be ashamed of. We are all profoundly needy and it is on this neediness, and the divine response to it, that our initial love is naturally based.

However this cannot remain the only basis of our adoration. As we truly mature in the faith and grow in the knowledge of God we cannot help but begin to love Him for another, greater reason. In time the devoted child of God begins to see the sublime beauty of the divine character and a new kind of regard for Him grows in our deepest hearts. This is the devotion that comes from realizing that His attributes make Him the proper object of our affection in and of themselves. We start to love God not for what He has done for us but solely for Who He is.

This is not a natural love but a supernatural one. It is not open to those who have not already experienced what C.S. Lewis called the “need-love” we earlier described. It appears that one must have the Holy Spirit dwelling within before any “disinterested” love based on sheer appreciation of the divine nature can be generated. It comes not just with time but with a steady discipline of worship and adoration that puts us in touch with the Being of God on a deeper level than just thanksgiving for His favor in our lives. It ultimately involves the dawning of thankfulness that this God of perfect beauty, of every kind, exists…even if He were not to ever grant us one more blessing.

If this seems difficult to imagine it is simply because we have not yet attained to the level of maturity and knowledge mentioned earlier. Some believers may, in fact, rarely experience it this side of Heaven. It might also be true that it is a love not very often known even by those “ancient Christians” who have been hard after their Lord for a lifetime.

Either way it is still a goal worth pursuing because loving God for who He is, not just what He does, is something He deserves in the deepest sense and for no other reason than who He is.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“No man can do properly what he is called upon to do in this life unless he can learn to forget his ego and act as an instrument of God.”    W. H. Auden

Allowing God to fill the throne in our hearts that our fallen nature screams should be occupied by us is the fundamental battle of both initial salvation and ongoing sanctification. This desire for self-rule is the primary result of Adam and Eve’s decision to eat of the fruit prohibited to them by God. At that moment they, and we, joined the Enemy of our souls in his own rebellion and acquired a nature at times not unlike his. Instead of being perfectly focused on our Creator, and thus transformed more and more into His image, our race instead acquired an all-consuming ego. This obsession with ourselves has causes us to try to find in self-rule what can only be had when God is the One at the very center of our lives. This does not necessarily drop away from us at the point of our conversion. Until He occupies the throne of our hearts we will know the pain and destruction that is caused when love for God is trumped by love for ourselves.

This is particularly true when Christians who are little surrendered to God’s rule try to find and pursue a vocational goal in their lives. We call a divine summons to a life-ministry our “calling.” Hearing and responding to such a calling is impossible when self-generated goals connected to our egos hold center-stage in our hearts. Knowing God’s calling and surrendering to His will for our lives go hand and hand. God may use people who are only partially surrendered to Him in various ways, but He will not bring them to the fullness of His good purpose for their lives, to their full part in His plan, until they progress in giving themselves completely to Him. The Bible tells us that we will find God when we seek Him with all our hearts. This is also true as far as finding his specific calling for our individual lives.

On more than one occasion a believer has found himself pursuing a possible career in “full-time ministry” only to find he is crashing against a vocational brick wall. Beyond that circumstances may almost seem to conspire to destroy a promising new job, whether secular or sacred. This results in a very crestfallen (and oft times depressed) Christian. Then, in retrospect, it becomes apparent that the problem was in choosing to do something the person decided to do rather than God. We may try to put a spiritual spin on self-direction in the vocational realm but if we are not where He wants us to be, in the center of His will, we will remain frustrated and confused about what is our purpose in life.

The surrender of the ego and its replacement with the rule of the Lord through His Spirit must be the greatest priority in our spiritual lives. But how do we facilitate this replacement? There are no easy formulas here. The very heartaches that result from listening to an “Imperial Self’ and acting in the mode of Adam and Eve can bring us to a point of surrender. C.S. Lewis once called pain “God’s megaphone to a deaf world.” and God does use self-inflicted pain to bring us to our senses and give us a strong desire to finally give in to His complete rule over our lives. Coming to better know the goodness of our Lord, over time, is another motivator for relinquishing control of every aspect of our lives. Sincere and consistent prayer for help in surrendering is also a strong tool in pursuing the entire sanctification of our lives to our God.

Ultimately, though, we must allow Him to work His own will within us and bring us to the blessed place of complete submission. We can choose to cooperate or obstruct this process. The ego is strong in us and we must decide whether we will serve ourselves to our own hurt or instead serve the One who loves us perfectly.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Ecumenism has long been a dirty word among conservative Evangelicals in the United States. It brings to mind images of the World Council of Churches telling us that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection never happened, but that we should all be happily united anyway. This kind of “unity” will always be rejected by Bible-believing Christians and rightfully so. However we also have the tendency to throw the spiritual babe out with the bathwater and one place that Evangelicals have been guilty of this is in rejecting unity out of hand. The fact is our Lord prayed that His people would be united. What is needed is ecumenism within orthodoxy. The confessing churches in America should move towards becoming the confessing Church.

Allegedly the biggest issue that prevents this from happening is the inability to corporately determine what is meant by “orthodoxy.” I submit that this is a smoke screen for the real issue. The Bible itself tells us that the basic, unchanging cornerstone of right doctrine is the full divinity and full humanity of Christ, His death on our behalf, His resurrection and the full atonement for our sins that results from that death and resurrection. It might be said that beyond this are only details. Often the real reason behind runaway denominationalism is the pride of men, not the Spirit of God.

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia there are more than 8000 Protestant denominations in existence today. This reality points out perhaps the greatest failure of the Reformation. While the Apostle Paul told us that believers would, indeed must, disagree to determine what actions are right in the eyes of God it is very doubtful that he had the creation of thousands of separate denominations in mind. The Body of Christ in America is rent with division at a time when genuine Christian unity is desperately needed to stand up to the forces of darkness that are on the march in our national life.

Unfortunately we live in a country in which the philosophy of radical individualism has become so deified as to co-opt even the Bride of Christ. Today it is as if the word “Ecumenism” almost carries the same connotation as the word “Communism” once did in some churches. There always seem to be a myriad of very debatable (and often minor) points being used to justify the continued existence of a multitude of Evangelical bodies. Real humility requires us to be very careful that our expressed opinions do not lead to unnecessary division, but how often is that kind of spirit being encouraged from American pulpits at the beginning of the 21^st Century? Is this the kind of Protestantism that the reformers had in mind 500 years ago? Yes, they broke from a corrupt and monolithic brand of Roman Catholicism, but this kind of fragmentation could not have been a result they desired.

I knew a man who told me that he once had prayed against the persecution of the Church in this nation but lately had begun to pray for it. His reasoning was that such tribulation was the only thing that would unify Christians here. This may have been an overstatement but perhaps not much of one. At the very least we need to pray against divisiveness for the sake of divisiveness and begin to challenge conventional wisdom regarding denominationalism. This can only begin with repentance from factionalism across denominational lines and an embrace of Ecumenism within orthodoxy. Only this kind of repentance will reverse the trend towards radical individualism hiding behind the defense of truth. It is a fact that the gates of Hell will never prevail against the true historic Church but if we who make up the Church in America forever reject the call for a desperately needed unity, we may wake up one day to find that the World, the Flesh, and the Devil have won a terrible victory against us. And we will have only ourselves to blame.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Self-Condemnation is no remedy for self-centeredness. In fact self-condemnation is, by definition, self-centered. Some Christians have made the mistake of thinking that by mercilessly condemning themselves they are somehow cooperating with God’s plan for enabling them to die to self. This is a fallacy. Brennan Manning once said that what believers truly need is “self-acceptance without self-concern”. By this he implies that it is only when we accept ourselves in Christ as sons and daughters of God, rather than hate ourselves as sinful failures we think He rejects, that we are ready to forget ourselves and live more fully for God and for others. Condemning ourselves rather than our sins only perpetuates self-obsession and spiritual immaturity.

It is very easy for Christians to mistake unhealthy self-recrimination for healthy repentance. Perhaps the biggest reason this happens is in our tendency to see the God of the Bible as an angry father whose primary mission is to convince us how evil we are. While it is true that the unvarnished condemnation of human evil is a component of God’s plan to bring us back to Himself it is only the initial component. It is true that we cannot realize our need for a Savior until we first realize that we are sinful from birth and justfully separated from our Creator by that sinfulness. Without the dawning of that knowledge we will continue to walk blithely on towards Hell thinking that we are “good persons”. It is absolutely essential to our redemption that we do come to know how black our unredeemed hearts really are.

But that conviction of sin is only for when we remain on the other side of salvation. Once we have been convicted of our wickedness, cried out to Jesus Christ to forgive us and become new in Him we are no longer required to focus primarily on our own evil. Instead we now can and must focus on the One who redeemed us and on what He has turned us into: beloved children of God who have been made righteous in the sight of the Father through the shed blood of His Son. While we still have a sinful part of us that must be progressively put to death we are no longer defined by that dying nature but instead by “Christ in us, the hope of glory”.

We dare not turn the initial awareness of evil that brought us to Christ into an ongoing hatred of all that we are. That was never the purpose of the initial revelation of our fallenness. Its only purpose was to open our eyes to the absolute need for salvation in Christ. After that salvation is secured through sincere faith the only one who wants moral self-awareness to morph into crippling self-condemnation is the Enemy of our souls. He knows that a Christian who is busy hating himself is a Christian who cannot grow in love for God and others. If Satan cannot prevent our salvation his next ploy is to make our lives miserable and unproductive. If he can convince us that we should not accept our acceptance by our loving and saving Lord then has achieved this secondary goal.

Once Jesus Christ has saved us our blessed new purpose is to enjoy and serve Him forever while learning to love others as ourselves. Self-condemnation has no place in the life of God’s “new creatures”.