Month: April 2015

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

God, I’ve found, is not in the habit of giving me exactly what I want in life. I think all Christians have had the same experience. We know that what we want and what He gives us often does not appear to be in synch. A perhaps lesser recognized truism about how our Lord deals with our desires is the opposite experience. He rarely gives us the thing we want least. By this I mean that what we most dread happening to us usually does not happen.

While it is true that God sometimes asks us to do things we desperately do not want to do this is not what I’m speaking of. Rather, I’m referring to what might be called “the worst case scenario;” many of us live our lives haunted by it. We have a tendency, in the language of the counseling office, to “awful-lize:” to assume the worst in any given challenging circumstance.

A recent two-part poll discovered an interesting truth about anxiety and reality. People in the test group were asked to name the things they worried about the most. They were then re-polled months later to find out how many of these anxiety-producing fears actually came to pass. The figure turned out to be 8%. This is a testimony to God’s grace being operative even among non-believers, at least in the sense of temporal concerns. Things just do not tend to turn out as badly as they, or we, think…92% of the time.

This is perhaps part of why Jesus told us not to be anxious. He knew that the fallen human tendency to worry is often not justified by actual experience. His grace, even His common grace, is operative in the lives of all men and that alone means that we are wasting time and energy by worrying. Anxiety is one of the most effective robbers of our joy and far too many people (myself among them) are caught up in it with no justification to be found in actual experience.

This being the case it might be salutary to pray that God would open our eyes to the reality of the 92%. By his Spirit we have the ability to apply this new “head knowledge” to our hearts, even though our head and our hearts are separated by possibly the longest 18 inches in human experience. May our Lord bridge that gap as we trust in Him to help us banish unnecessary fear from our lives.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It has become almost a cliché in Evangelical circles to say that most individuals under about the age of 45 cannot be effectively brought to faith through rational argument alone. That said the statement is largely an accurate one. Many of us who make up the generations born since the late 1960’s do tend to see the world through the prism of visceral experience. The emotive aspect of our being is often given more credence in interpreting reality for us than the cognitive aspect. Some say this is because we have been heavily influenced by the sensuality that our generations are often accused of embracing. Such an explanation is certainly debatable but let us assume, for the moment, that it is for the most part true. Is this automatically a bad thing?

When most conservative Christians hear the word “sensuality” they think of illicit sexual activity but this is, at best, a limited definition of the term. It can actually be applied to any experience that comes from and is connected to the five senses (“sense” being the root of the word.) Use this better meaning and sensuality becomes a morally neutral thing for the obvious reason that our Creator built it into us before the Fall of the human race. It is a part of the design God Himself called “very good” when he made us in His image. We were intended to know feelings by a Being who, it can be assumed from Scripture, also feels and feels deeply. Passion is part and parcel of the biblical narrative. There are no “Mr. Spocks” in the Bible, only emotive people relating to an emotive God.

But during the Enlightenment of the 18^th Century Western civilization started to believe reason was the best, perhaps even the only, way to know God or anything else. Rationalism became the spirit of the age in both the secular and the religious worlds and remained so for three hundred years. Modernism was the ultimate embodiment of the scientific approach to existence and has remained a powerful philosophy in the West. However it is not the only or perhaps even the dominant philosophy anymore. In the Post-Modern Age other ways of knowing reality have re-asserted themselves. The Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to Rationalism is becoming less a guide today than the Hebraic culture that existed before and in opposition to it. The Hebraic culture does not marginalize feelings. Read the Old Testament and you will see this is true.

The Church does not exist in a cultural vacuum. For better or worse the Bride of Christ has always been heavily influenced by the secular world around her. Our society is changing because we Westerners are coming to realize that the rational gods of Modernism are cold deities. The H.G. Wells and B.F. Skinners of the world have bequeathed to us nothing but an arid technological and deterministic interpretation of existence. Such an interpretation takes away the very richness of life God originally intended human beings to experience (and I use the word “experience” very intentionally). To the extent that this worldview has influenced Christianity it has taught us to assume that the mind is far more important than the heart.

“Never trust your feelings” has become almost a mantra in some of the more reactionary circles of contemporary Evangelicalism. Fair enough, however I would like to add “never trust your intellect” to that mantra and at the same time suggest a better one: “Trust God”. Truly trusting Him means we will ultimately allow our Creator to manifest Himself to us through both heart and mind. The younger generations do need to be open to both manifestations of the Divine but, for a time, as we are trying to find a balance it may be OK to be more interested in rediscovering the God our fathers often lost sight of in the pursuit of purely cognitive knowledge. We want to feel, to sense His presence and for this we need not apologize. For now, at least, this is the side of God many of us find most compelling.

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We do not need the “God” we want or the “God” we do not want. We only need God as He truly is, irrespective of either our positive or negative desire.

An overabundance of subjectivity is part of our fallenness as a race. Being emotional beings is not a problem in and of itself (God Himself has emotions.) The problem comes when our passions become more of a driver in our spiritual lives than they should be. Feelings are not intrinsically sinful. What we do with them can be.

At any given time our emotions can be leading us closer to our Lord or farther away from Him. This is a function of how accurately those emotions are painting reality. It does not so much matter if they seem to us positive or negative. Most of us tend to know both poles of feeling on a regular basis and this is part of our nature as bearers of the image of a passionate, though perfect, God. What is far more important is how much credence we are giving to them as far as what they seem to tell us about His nature. It is in allowing either extreme to mediate our perception of God that we often get into trouble.

Emotions and desires are intimately intertwined in the human heart. We tend to want what we feel is good and not want what we feel is bad. This may be an obvious point, but it bears repeating because how we deal with desires that are mediated by our emotions has profound ramifications for our spiritual lives. It can be argued that nothing is more important than who we ultimately decide God is because that is the greatest determinant as to whether we decide for or against Him. We dare not make that decision based solely, or even wholly, on whom we want Him to be or not be; to paraphrase the discovery of Moses: God “is Who He is”, nothing more and nothing less.

Whether we like it or not who we desire Him to be is irrelevant to whom He is, but it is very relevant to who and where we will be eternally. It is vital that we come to know God as He really is. How best to get there is the problem we all face (and it should be stated here that the answer to this problem is not to elevate human reason at the expense of human emotion. Both our cognitive and emotive perceptions are equally fallen.)

This is where both God and His word come to the fore.

The answer to this conundrum is easier than we might expect it to be. The best way we can arrive at a true knowledge of Him, in defiance of what may be a faulty system that amounts to wish-fulfillment, is through a truly Holy-Spirit inspired knowledge of the Bible. We can learn to apprehend God’s self-revelation of Himself in the pages of scripture, but the only way this happens is through both immersing ourselves in meditation on that scripture and praying that it will be made real to us by His Spirit. We must also ask that this true knowledge of the Divine will become the one thing we most deeply desire. As this prayer is answered both the Bible and the Spirit behind it will become reliable “avenues” to Objective Reality. Our subjective desires must yield to this reality if we are ever to come to know the Lord we profess to serve. Only then will we know Him not as we want or do not want Him to be, but as He really is.

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The answer to this question depends on with what we are content. It is one thing to be content with our circumstances; it is quite another to be content with our character. The first type of contentment is encouraged by scripture, the second warned against. One of the vital keys to an authentic and flourishing Christian life is learning to differentiate between the two and deal with the fallen human tendency to reverse them.

Most honest believers, if pressed, will admit that they have a propensity to be comfortable with their faults and distinctly uncomfortable with the difficult things they must face in life. This is part and parcel of the “old man” within us. Our flesh constantly seeks to excuse our character flaws while simultaneously complaining about every seemingly unfavorable condition in our day to day existence. In a distinct irony many of the latter are a result of the former. We are naturally self-indulgent and comfort-seeking and when we give in to these two temptations the result is often bad circumstances that stem directly from doing so. This, among other things, is the reason why there is a clear biblical imperative not to make an idol out of either indulgence or comfort.

The reverse irony in this state of affairs is that the by-product of seeking both to improve our Christian character and learn to live with our circumstances is the reality of one helping the other. As we grow in the discipline of virtues like kindness, faithfulness and self-control we may start to resolve some of the bad situations that came about before we possessed these things in increasing measure. For instance, if our lack of kindness made us some enemies in this life becoming more sincerely kind to those enemies might win them over as friends.

Something else to remember about the “circumstantial” side of the equation is that difficult problems in life can, themselves, be character builders if we approach them with the right attitude. Patience is one of the most vital qualities of godliness. We learn patience by bearing, through the grace of God, unpleasant situations. The truth is that even the best application of other aspects of a maturing character will not remove every hard circumstance we must endure on this side of Heaven. When we cannot change an external condition (or, in the case of something like illness, an internal one) we have no good choice but to use it as a springboard to becoming more patient in long-suffering, in imitation of our Lord. At the same time the advent of patience in our character is a primary way, along with learning to share our burdens with Christ, in which we learn to be truly content with whatever difficulties we face in life.

It might be said that the primary reason, God does not  always remove the thorns in His children’s sides in this world is for the purpose of making us all better, more Christ-like people in every sense. It is in the crucible of our difficult circumstances that He does much of the sanctifying work in us, work that is absolutely essential in both preparing us for eternity with Him and helping others to know Him that they might be with us in that eternity. So in the quest to be content with our circumstances, but not our character, we are properly ordering our lives not only for ourselves but ultimately also for the benefit of those around us.

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Recently I have become more aware of how much of my discretionary time is being spent wrapped up in the man-made instrumentality we call the Internet. Simultaneously I’ve noticed that my time spent doing things like getting outdoors has been shrinking. While there is not exactly an inverse proportion here I have little doubt that a major contributor to my spending less time experiencing God’s direct creation, the natural world, has been my deepening involvement with virtual “reality”.

The real world has a beauty and a sublimity with which the virtual electronic world of the 21st Century cannot even begin to compete. Why is it, then, that so many Westerners, including those who call themselves followers of Christ, seem to be abandoning that real world to hunch in front of smart phone screens? The answer may well be that we in the West have inquired an insatiable appetite for what is immediately gratifying over what is truly gratifying. At the same time our felt need to be in control of all things may be rearing its ugly head.

Over the years I have written much about the culture of instant gratification and I do not want to beat the proverbial dead horse. That said, the trend away from finding our satisfaction in the ways that most of the human race throughout history has found it has a direct bearing on the question at hand. Pre-moderns had to learn to enjoy the world they were given, to “suck the marrow” out of human experience by patiently mining the world as it actually was rather than the world they might, like us, have wanted it to be. There were also fewer distractions in years past and those distractions were not nearly as glittery as today’s computer screens. The diversions of an earlier era were seen for what they were, diversions. I believe that most people knew the kinds of activities that really counted; a face to face conversation with a friend, an outing on a glorious autumn day, the learning of a skill that involved something more physically involving than punching keys on a keyboard. All these things: building a physically proximate friendship, being fully attuned to nature, or becoming a craftsman were all activities that required time, patience, and effort. Neither these things themselves or the benefits of full involvement in them came quickly and easily.

By contrast pale virtual imitations of these things are all readily available today at the click of a “mouse”. Social media provides the one-step removed relationships, computer “Wallpaper” with images of the natural world outside are plentiful, and we can vicariously experience a plethora of creative human enterprise on literally millions of uploaded videos.

Besides the seemingly perfect, if unhealthy, melding of the fallen human desire for immediate electronic gratification with what is instantly available online there is also our lust for control to take into consideration. We feel like we have the power to experience life in any way and at any time we want to when we are “surfing” the Net. At the least it is an apparently harmless way to escape the vigor’s of living in the real world for a few minutes or, for many of us, a few hours. What we see and how we see it is something we think we control in virtual reality whereas real reality isn’t quite so subject to our willful manipulation (It also isn’t nearly as likely to lead us into a sort of “virtual reality addiction”, which too much time online can do.)

As believers we know we are called to reject the ethos of both instant gratification and self-centered control over our lives. This knowledge, however, does not seem to be translating into a Christian counterculture that rejects the world’s growing obsession with the Internet. As with our television viewing habits I suspect the amount of time many believers spend online (as well as what we view there) probably does not greatly differ from our neighbors. I must admit that this has too often been the case in my own life.

So what is the answer?

It may be as simple as praying for the will to turn the laptop, tablet or smartphone off as a spiritual discipline. There are days when most of us do not have a real need to be online for any reason. At the very least one weekend day each week can be cleared of all interaction with virtual reality. Sunday seems like an obvious choice for a “Sabbath-rest” from the Net. We might find it refreshing (though perhaps not immediately so) to spend that time being in the same room with our friends or taking a hike through a nearby forest, or learning any one of a hundred useful skills. Being that it is Sunday we might also consider spending a bit more time worshipping, corporately or individually, the God of True Reality (capitalization very intentional.)

This one-day a week fasting from our online obsessions is, however, only a start if we really want to become reacquainted with what is actually important in life. It is likely that further “self-deprivation” will be required to make virtual reality secondary to True Reality. Once we go on in this endeavor, though, I think the seeming self-deprivation will pay-off in much more satisfying lives, ones that intentionally honor the God of our lives. Certainly this is a holy goal. It is also a necessary one if we do not want to spend our days in less than worthy electronic pursuits which will never truly satisfy the requirements of what it means to be both Christian and human.