Month: May 2015

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

There are some in the Church who hold to what might be called “Negative Confession Theology”. This is the idea that if we talk about our problems or doubts we only open the door to the Enemy of our souls and his intentions for our lives. Such individuals maintain that any verbal expression of  struggles will insure that those struggles will continue. For instance they may counsel that we never confess to having an illness, either physical or emotional, because it is that very confession that keeps us ill.

No doubt there is some truth to the idea that we are as we think and speak. Even the non-believing world recognizes this dynamic has validity and responds today by promoting “the power of positive thinking” as a secular religion in and of itself. People who constantly think and speak worst case scenarios in regards to their lives often do find that such scenarios become self-fulfilling prophecies. Assume the worst and the worst may indeed follow.

There is, however, a problem with always telling those who are suffering from various troubles in this life to not talk about those troubles except to deny them. The problem is that such across the board denial is not reflected in the lives of some of the greatest saints of Scripture. Instead, in both the Old and New Testaments, we encounter men like Job, Jeremiah, David and Paul who pour out their complaints to God, speak freely of their distress and sometimes even voice doubts that relief is coming anytime soon. Many of the greatest heroes of the faith were anything but “positively confessing” Pollyanna’s. Instead they honestly and passionately gave voice to their deepest fears and pain. Moreover they often did so directly to their Lord.

Again, it is true that such outbursts of negativity by these individuals usually were followed by a re-affirmation of faith in God’s ultimate deliverance. But the fact remains that, in their humanity, they were sometimes unable to keep their pain in perspective when that pain became too great. Can we expect that we will do any better than they as we make our own way through this world?

The question must also be asked whether the trials we all endure on this side of Heaven are simply meant to be whisked away. Are we always to refuse to acknowledge they exist, or try to “believe” our way out of them, or does God perhaps sometimes actually use our distress to teach us a deeper kind of faith, the kind that trusts Him even in the darkness? Isn’t this the nature of our Savior’s faith in the Garden of Gethsemane? Jesus did not pretend He was not in great agony. It is true that He asked for His seemingly unbearable cup to pass from Him if that were possible, but ultimately He accepted that cup. Maybe we should expect our own crosses to include some of the very things the “Positive Confession” movement tells us we should simply deny and thus cast off.

It is true that negative thinking for negative thinking’s sake is not Biblical and we are certainly allowed to pray for the healing of our bodies and minds. But we dare not assume that all we need to do in every struggle is super-spiritually shoo these things out of our lives. To do so may be to resist God’s greater will for our earthly walk in the name of our own desire for a painless existence.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is easy to look at the seemingly impossible requirements of the Christian life and then declare something to the effect that only the Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to fulfill those requirements. The real question, though, is do we let Him make it possible? If we do not truly let the Spirit into our lives the impossible remains so and our hope is easily replaced by fear.

Many years into the Christian walk some of us look at certain as yet unmoved mountains in our lives and have to admit that we feel powerless to remove them. When faced with such powerlessness we have to ask ourselves “why?” Is it that God wants them there permanently? This seems unlikely, especially if the mountains in question involve sin. Is it that we secretly love the mountains and are unwilling to part with them? Possibly, but are we really that in love with misery? Could it be that we find it “easier” to try to dig away at the Mt. Everest’s of our soul than really put our faith in Him to do it for us? That indeed is a part of the problem but I think, for some of us, it goes deeper than lack of faith in and of itself. Perhaps the greatest part of the problem is simply this: we do not believe that God loves us enough to help us.

Faith in the idea that someone both can and will come to our aid is dependent on the belief that the person involved really wants to do good to us. Further, it depends on us knowing that this person is helping us because he or she cares about us as people, in short because this person loves us. If we cannot believe that someone loves us we find it difficult, if not impossible, to open ourselves up to the assistance they are offering. We do not put our faith in their help because we do not trust their motives. In short we do not trust them, and so we remain un-helped.

It is distressing, to say the least, to have spent many years singing “Jesus loves me this I know…” when the truth of the matter is that many of us do not really know, at least not fully. Martin Luther, whose Christian life was sometimes plagued by depression and fear, said that his worst times came when he experienced a “loss of faith that God is good and that He is good to me.” He assumedly said this many years into his walk with Christ. It is a sobering thing to realize that time does not necessarily erase doubts about the love God has for us, even if we involve ourselves in a church, pray and read our Bibles regularly, as Luther undoubtedly did more than most of us.

So it’s true that it is only by the Spirit that things change for the better in our spiritual lives, but the operation of the Spirit is to at least some extent dependent upon our faith, and our faith is dependent upon how we really think and feel about what God thinks and feels about us. Could it be that the degree to which we doubt His love for us is the absolutely defining factor in the degree to which His Spirit can help us?

Let us hope not. As in the case of the father of the sick child who confessed to Jesus that “I believe, help my unbelief,” the scripture also speaks of a God who continues to be willing to help us learn that He loves us even despite ourselves. Always remember that because the love of Christ transcended the doubting father’s shaky faith that sick child was healed anyway. This kind of love is not earned by perfect faith. In fact it is not earned at all. Real love, the divine kind, is purely the gift of the One doing the loving, One who loves innately because He is love.

The paradox is that it is this love that ultimately enables us to grow in faith to begin with.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Moral scrupulosity for the sake of moral scrupulosity is one of the hardest things for a believer bound-up in legalism to put aside; yet it must be put aside if real life in Christ is to be realized. Our tendency to try to accomplish our goals through “playing by the rules” is universal, at least in those who do not have the seared conscience of a Sociopath. The attempt to attain to righteousness through moral effort was not only the heart and soul of the Judaism of Christ’s time, but of virtually every other world religion, both then and now. This effort is inextricably bound up in the instinct of fallen men and woman to find a self-centered solution to the problem of intrinsic human evil.

The message at the core of Biblical Christianity is twofold; that human beings will never be able to achieve on their own the perfect righteousness necessary for real relationship with a holy God, and that faith in the Son of God and His death on their behalf does achieve it. This is the essence of the Christian message. It is also the entire basis for the actual living out of the Christian life. Salvation and sanctification are both dependent on the personal appropriation of this truth by grace, through faith. Salvation and sanctification are both the gift of God in Christ.

So why is the abandonment of our old effort to meet the demands of God’s moral law seemingly so difficult for many of us to realize, even after our moment of salvation? There is more than one reason. From a psychological perspective we may have been greatly molded by the worldviews of the people who had the most human influence on our early development, our parents. If, for whatever reason, one or both of our parents were highly moralistic, and they did their best to transmit the idea that moral effort is the core of what makes someone “a good person”, we may have this faulty idea deeply imprinted upon our hearts. Unfortunately some who have this “imprint” are now in teaching positions in the church and communicate the false gospel of works, often unconsciously, to those sitting under them.

Another problem in fully receiving the freedom from meeting the demands of the law that Christ came to grant us is that we do not yet completely understand and receive the fullness of both His identity and His work on the cross. His identity as God in the flesh makes Him absolutely capable, as our substitute, of satisfying God’s just condemnation of human sin. His actual crucifixion and resurrection are, therefore, the absolute solution to our bondage to a law we can never satisfy in our fallen imperfection. In Christ God has Himself absorbed His own punishment for the sins of the human race throughout all human history, past, present and future.

Finally we must grapple with the fact that many of us find some perverse, prideful pleasure in continuing to at least partially live in the cycle of self-effort, failure and self-condemnation that is engendered by “works-righteousness”. Perhaps this is a form of spiritual masochism. It sometimes seems easier to exist this way than to risk fully surrendering our hearts to the lordship of Christ. But it is not easier. To continue in self-empowered moralism is to resist the love of God and to condemn ourselves, at the least, to a life of bondage and frustration that His love would otherwise relieve. Such a life is not true life at all.

In each of the above three cases it is we who, at the end of the day, must grapple with and overcome these barriers to living in the grace of God. Yet, paradoxically, it is God Himself who is the Author and Finisher of our faith and the Source of our very ability to overcome. As He works in us to “work and will according to his good pleasure” we can choose to reject legalism and, at the same time, surrender to the life Jesus Christ has obtained on our behalf. In fact that surrender is, itself, made possible by His saving and sanctifying love, a love that is infinitely more desirable than living in the misery of self-righteousness.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We live in a material world. God ordained matter and called it good. He made us substantive beings, not just spirit but flesh, and called it good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with material things. The wrong comes when human beings assign an inordinate value to those things. The elevation of created things over the Creator is the very definition of idolatry.

Today the average person does not bow before an idol of wood or stone but idolatry lives on nonetheless. One form it takes in our world is materialism. Nowhere on Earth is this materialism more evident than in the 21^st Century West. As the bumper sticker says “He who dies with the most toys wins” and whether we know it or not many of us have bought into that philosophy to one degree or another. An older saying is “money can’t buy happiness” yet so many of us keep trying to do just that. We think just one more car/home/smartphone/etc. will give us the fulfillment and contentment we desire. But this is, as Solomon said, “a chasing after the wind” and an expensive wild goose chase it is.

So how much is enough? The Apostle Paul encouraged us to be content with what we have. He went further to tell us that we should, at least could, be satisfied with our daily bread and the clothes on our back. This is a scary thought to most of us today who have become so defensive about the earthly riches we store up.

God does not condemn wealth but He does condemn the love of wealth over the love of Him who gives it. In 1 Timothy 6:18 the rich are told “to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.” God does not tell everyone to sell everything they have and give it to the poor. There is a place for the wealthy Christian in God’s eyes. There is no place, however, for those who have knowingly or unknowingly made materialism their God.

It falls on Christians in the affluent West to regularly ask ourselves whether or not we are becoming slaves to our desire for things. If “More toys” are getting in the way of our love for and dependence on the Lord then maybe some or all of those toys need to go. The process of letting them go may be painful but what if that is the price of true contentment? Beyond that what is the price of slavery to things that are subject to decay, cannot truly satisfy us even in this life, and will not travel with us beyond the veil of death?