Month: July 2015

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

One of the causes of anxiety in life is the erroneous belief that we must do everything that is required of us on our own, without outside help. We find ourselves feeling overwhelmed when this conscious or unconscious mindset possesses us. Whenever a mountain must be climbed, but the face of it appears too shear to do so, anxiety is ready to make its presence known. This is a universal human experience and few believers are automatically delivered from it as an immediate result of conversion.

The tendency to feel like we must face our challenges alone is particularly common in the present-day West. This is because our culture’s emphasis on personal autonomy and power has created a zeitgeist that not only says we can overcome all obstacles in our own strength, but expects us to. The myth of the rugged individualist is very much operative today, especially in America, and those our society holds up as heroes are usually those who have bought into this myth. The result is a lack of understanding about human limitations and a tendency to look down on those who acknowledge these limitations. We are expected to succeed in this life as if we can do this without help. This expectation has undoubtedly added to what has literally been called “The Age of Anxiety.”

But human beings are dependent creatures. This is explicit not only in the pages of the Bible, but also in the realm of natural reason. Just as we know that our physical existence is sustainable only by the intake of food and water that comes from outside of us so, also, it stands to reason that our emotional and spiritual health is dependent on that which comes from outside. Angry hermits may well be able to physically endure their self-chosen isolation, but they pay a terrible price for it. Their spirits die. Ted Kaczynski, the notorious “Unabomber” of recent American history was an effective hermit for decades. What he was not was sane. In cutting himself off from people he began the long descent into madness and, ultimately, to behavior not only destructive to himself but to others.

No man is an island, or at least no man can be an island and avoid dire consequences for his soul. Christians are called to acknowledge this reality, a reality that reveals to us just how desperately we need help to climb the mountains of life and, at the same time, directs us where to look for that help.

The categorical imperative of the Christian life is that we must seek help from two places: directly from God Himself and through His people; very much in that order. To live as a Christian is to daily depend on both sources to give true life and to enable the meeting of the myriad challenges of existence in a terribly fallen world. Our spirits only thrive when we embrace our absolute need for relationship with our Lord and with our brothers and sisters in Him.

As we progressively accept this need, surrendering both our false sense of independence and our confidence in any ability to overcome purely on our own, we can begin to lose our anxieties and replace them with real peace in the face of adversity. The level of anxiety we continue to feel informs us to what degree we have grown in our recognition and acceptance of our requirement for the support of God and our brethren. It is a bellwether for our progress in both spiritual wholeness and health because, in the end, we are called to live not only for others, but from others.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Discipline enables us to enter into and be abandoned to legitimate pleasure at the appropriate time. Lack of discipline leads to wrong forms of pleasure being indulged in at the wrong time. A mistake Christians sometimes make is to reject the willful enjoyment of even that which is not inherently evil. The problem is not found in drinking deeply of earthly delights that God Himself has created and ordained for us to experience, rather it is brought into being by indulging in a distorted version of those delights. Such distortion usually comes when we decide to seek pleasure apart from any rules and when we alone decide how and when we should have that pleasure. This is the definition of license, the undisciplined, wholly self-centered attempt to satisfy a God-given desire in a way that He forbids.

In contemporary American culture probably the most obvious example of this principle is in the area of human sexuality. The spirit of times tells us that sexual gratification is a need rather than a want and that the freedom to engage in casual sex is our right. Yet not so long ago, before the vaunted “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s and 70’s, it was generally recognized by our society that reserving sex for marriage was the best, if not the only, way to express this aspect of our personhood. As our culture has abandoned the pursuit of sexual self-discipline and become enamored with the principle of immediate gratification what we do with our bodies has become a matter of personal choice. Every kind of sexual distortion that the Bible prohibits, from adultery to “hooking-up”, is at best winked at and at worst openly encouraged.

Unfortunately some in the American Church have reacted to the world’s embrace of unfettered promiscuity with an equally wrongheaded sexual asceticism. There are some fundamentalist Christians, for instance, who have published websites that go so far as to warn husbands and wives to abstain, even in the marriage bed, from indulging in what they consider to be ungodly sexual practices (one has to wonder whether such self-proclaimed guardians of sexual propriety have ever seriously read the Song of Solomon). The impression given is that they believe couples should not have too much fun enjoying their conjugal rights. These extremists appear to regard all forms of sexual expression as some sort of necessary evil. But heterosexual marital sexuality, in its many forms, is in no way evil if it is not coercive or abusive to either partner. As the title of a recent American Christian sex manual for married people rightly proclaims this gift from God is “Intended for Pleasure.” Joyful abandonment to loving mutual gratification in the marriage bed is as much the will of God for us as is our abandonment to loving Him in the act of worship.

A pleasurable activity ordained by God only becomes a bad activity when, through lack of self-control, a believer seeks that pleasure at the wrong time or in the wrong way; in short, apart from God. It is the Lord’s own desire for us to deeply enjoy the good things He has given us. In fact the constraints He puts on us as to the timing and circumstance of that enjoyment are for our own good. Our God knows far better than we when His children are ready to receive the legitimate experiences of ecstasy that he longs to give us.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We do not just need to know God loves us; we also need the purposes of His love to be satisfied within us. His love must find complete purchase in our souls if we are to be transformed by it, and that transformation is the very substance of our ongoing Christian life. Today the church does a passable job of communicating the message that our Creator loves us unconditionally. What is sometimes harder to discern from pulpits is that the love of Christ must be progressively actualized in our hearts. It must penetrate to our very core and have its way.

We in the Western church seem to know all there is to know about the mechanics of conversion. Evangelistic efforts never seem to be in short supply. Where we fall short is in getting past the honeymoon period of our rebirth and onto the deeper paths of sanctification. Spiritual milk remains the primary staple in some Evangelical congregations today. The meat is too often missing for those who need to move beyond the basics of conversion.

Sanctification is, at its core, the progressive appropriation of God’s love in our lives. His love must enter into the dark and secret places of our souls and take possession of those places. Then we will become what being the object of our Lord’s passion is designed to make us become: beings both filled with, and consumed by, divine love. This is the one of the primary goals of the Savior of our souls, to re-create us as vessels of His great affection.

This “vessel” analogy often puts sensitive people off. Perhaps it is because they identify a vessel as simply a tool, something that never benefits itself from the love coursing through it. But we are destined to be more than vessels. Becoming a conduit of God’s love can only happen if we first receive that divine affection into the very core of who we are and are healed. We must receive before we can give and for that reason I believe the receiving is just as important in God’s economy as the giving. One enables the other.

Jesus Christ is the Lover of our souls. He wants us to be fruitful, yes, but He also wants us both healed and joined with Him in the greatest love affair the universe has ever known. The fruitfulness of our Christian lives will naturally flow from that primary union between His heart and ours.

True love must be satisfied and the satisfaction in question is ultimately all encompassing. The God Scripture tells us is love will not be satisfied until we are completely His, until we know the glory that is the result of being fully possessed by the greatest Lover in the Universe. It is not enough to know He loves us. The knowledge that He loves us must give way to the actual experience of being loved by Him, and we must let Him have His way with us to the deepest level of union possible in this world. That is our first, best destiny as the beloved of God on Earth and it is our eternal destiny when our time on earth is through.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Those of us who are biblically orthodox followers of Christ in America are seeing the first stirrings of a popular antipathy towards historic Christianity that will most likely lead to real persecution at some point in the not too distant future. When this happens we will be joining our sisters and brothers who have known such persecution throughout the last two millennia as well as joining with tens of millions of believers living in many other parts of the world today who have it far worse than we do. Moreover it should not be a shock to us that our nation is rapidly abandoning its Judeo-Christian heritage. Without going into a history of secularization during the past half-century the fact is that the writing has been on the wall for at least that long a time.

What is more important for Christians here is to realize that, apart from a genuinely supernatural and wide-spread revival, this trend is unlikely to be arrested. The news in the summer of 2015 is full of evidence that “the tipping point” has already been reached. We must prepare ourselves to live in a Post-Christian society that will increasingly view those individuals who espouse biblical convictions as being anathema to a new social order (one based on a particularly aggressive brand of Secular Humanism masquerading behind feel-good terms like “tolerance” and “diversity”, unfortunately the kind of tolerance and diversity that leads people to openly hate those who they consider to be intolerant) This will be more obvious in some parts of the nation than others, at least at first, but is likely to gain momentum throughout the U.S. given enough time and the ongoing centralization of power in the hands of an increasingly secular federal government.

For those of us who sense we are fighting a rearguard action against a national rejection of the God of the Bible it is becoming more and more important to remind ourselves regularly that He is still ultimately in charge of the affairs of men. One of the most effective ways of preparing for the apparent death of “American Christendom” as we once knew it is to affirm to ourselves, and our brothers and sisters in the faith, that our Lord knows exactly what is going on and is ultimately using it to further His redemptive ends. He is supremely capable of glorifying His Name in the midst of the moral decline of this nation while working good in our lives, even in the face of real persecution. He is also capable of bringing many new truly committed believers into the fold, even and especially in times like these.

What we are beginning to see on our own shores is simply a variation of the kind of systematic repression of true religious freedom that our brethren have already faced for many years in places like the Islamic nations and what’s left of the Communist world (Mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, et al.) In these areas true Christian faith can be a ticket to imprisonment, torture and death. It seems a bit incongruous to expect that those of us here should expect that we would forever avoid this kind of reality. Also, as mentioned earlier, in addition to present day oppression multitudes of Christians in various other parts of the globe have known severe persecution since the days of the Apostles.

Beyond this we see in the Scriptures multiple prophecies concerning the times preceding the return of Christ, prophecies that confirm what we are seeing happen before our eyes, widespread apostasy and moral decay among them. Perhaps never before have so many human beings taken “the way that seems right to a man but in the end leads to (spiritual) death.” So it is not as if the faithful student of the Word of God can claim that something strange is going on. These are signs of the times.

Again it comes back to fighting any fear this may engender by believing the promises of God towards His hard-pressed children in any age. We are assured over and over in the Bible that He will uphold us with the power of His love and that, whatever we face in this life; He will make us “more than conquerors” as we stay true to His Son. Beyond this our Lord will vindicate His people in the end and judge those who unrepentantly persecute them.

In the meantime our job is to steadfastly hold true to Biblical truth while loving our enemies as Jesus called us to do. In places of persecution, both past and present, many of those who hated us were won over to Christ by our willingness to love them in sincere and practical ways even as they were taking us to prison, or even to our deaths. May we who bear the name of Christ in America trust the same God those martyrs of the faith have and may we not love our own lives in this fallen and dying world so much that we spiritually falter if those lives are threatened. After all, this world, including this country, is passing away and our eternal homeland is not far away. Remember that truth always, put your life in the hands of God, and do not lose heart.