Year: 2015

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.

Copyright 2015 by Shea Oakley

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During my nearly 25 years as a believer I have observed in some church’s a tendency for preachers and teachers to consistently favor exhortational sermons over encouraging ones. By “exhortational” I mean those messages that are, at their core, about telling Christians they are not committed enough to the Faith, not doing enough for the Kingdom, not fully “sold out” to Christ, etc. Such messages are often consciously or subconsciously designed to trigger the consciences of listeners in the congregation who, in the eyes of the speaker, do not take the call to costly Christian discipleship seriously enough.

No doubt this is often a true judgment in the 21st Century American church, but one might argue whether this approach is effective considering that a huge part of real repentance happening in any human soul is the applied kindness of God. Since we are also told to “gently restore” the fallen it would seem apparent that our Lord uses “the carrot” as least as much as “the stick” in convicting His people of sin.

But whether there is a place for hard sermons in bringing people to a place of repentance is not the point of this piece. The point I would like to make is that many pastors do not understand that they are not only talking to lazy or licentious Christians when they decide to major on warning exhortations; they are also being heard by believers who struggle mightily with self-condemnation and obsessive fears about their spiritual standing. For these listeners such guilt-inducing messages only re-enforce an often false sense of “not making the grade” as a child of God. All such a sermon does for them is reinforce wrong patterns of belief that, many times, stem from abuse they suffered in their formative years…often before they even came to know Jesus Christ.

I was such a Christian for many years. More than once I approached a Pastor who had just finished an exhortational message asking him what to do about my obvious lack of faith and/or discipline. Invariably what I heard back was “Shea, I wasn’t talking to you”.

If he wasn’t talking to me I suspect he “wasn’t talking” to quite a few other dedicated, but fearful, believers as well. The problem is that we didn’t know this and most were probably not approaching the pastor with the same concerns I was. They just left the service with an even greater load of unjustified guilt and unjustified guilt is a great tool for the Enemy of our souls to use against us.

With this in mind I would encourage shepherds in the church to include a sort of “disclaimer” in their harder sermons. Such a disclaimer would clearly state that they are by no means talking to everyone in the pews, especially those with possibly damaged consciences, consciences that cannot be fully trusted. In this way they may be able to “comfort the afflicted” in their congregations at the same time they attempt to more effectively “afflict the comfortable.”

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“A tree cannot taste its own fruit.”  -Wayne Scott Farley

There are times in the Christian life when we are called to bless others whether we feel like it or not. Sometimes the actual giving of the blessing is enough to engage our feelings in a positive way; however other times we feel no better after giving of our self.

Occasionally we may even feel worse.

Nowhere in the Bible does God promise His children that doing good will always feel good. Perhaps the ultimate example is the cross of Christ itself. Jesus did not enjoy the cross; He endured it. Undoubtedly Jesus foresaw “the joy set before Him” and this helped Him to bear the horrific experience of Good Friday, yet what He felt in the actual giving of Himself was unspeakable torment.

Our own blessing of others often requires us to carry a cross. It may be the cross of helping someone we do not particularly like or it might be the cross of giving to others what we feel we do not have enough of ourselves. Sometimes we may wrongly fear that our motives are too mixed, so we do not allow ourselves to know the joy of the blessing. Whatever the cross is we bear the result is that we do not take pleasure in giving what we give.

In more than one place the Bible refers to us as trees. A growing Christian is like a healthy tree whose branches produce much good fruit. If we are abiding in Christ then He is the motive power for our fruitfulness. In daily life this fruitfulness is largely manifested in how we physically, psychologically, or spiritually help others. Again, however, the Bible does not indicate that we will always get some kind of positive emotional charge out of this. We may indeed feel better after blessing others, but it is not something we can or should always count on. In fact to do a good deed purely for the chance to feel good renders the deed selfish. Such giving is not a true fruit of the Spirit.

In the end we must remember that some true giving to those in need may not feel good or even real. Self-judgment in this area is tricky because often we do not know ourselves well enough to come to an accurate conclusion about motives. Perhaps only our Lord can ultimately perceive if our fruit is authentic or false. At the very least only He can know all of the time. The bottom line is that, as Farley tells us, “A tree cannot taste its own fruit.” It may be that some of us will be in for a surprise when, after a lifetime of sometimes agonizing over whether our giving was sincere, we get to Heaven and receive a “well-done” we did not think we deserved.

In that spirit let us remember what the Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians 6: 9-10:

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people…”

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is not unusual to hear individual prayer along the following lines in our church’s today:

“Oh Lord, make yourself known to me and move in power in my life. Come into my life in a radical new way and change my heart. Make me completely yours and use me for your glory. In Jesus name, amen.”

Such a prayer is orthodox enough and certainly sounds like the petition of a person who totally seeks to be surrendered to Christ. In fact it is a good thing to ask the Lord to do what this prayer asks Him to do in our lives. The problem is that when we request such a thing of Him many, perhaps most, of us are terrified that God will actually answer the prayer and show up!

Human beings are not very comfortable with change. This is because change, even change for the good, is often painful. It is amazing how often we choose the misery we know over the possible solution we do not. This is especially true if our lives have been marked with more loss than most. The tendency is to try to hold on to what we have left, sometimes at any cost. The popular phrase “Let go and let God” applies here in the negative sense that far too often we do just the opposite. “Grip tightly and keep God at a distance” might be a better description of our practical theology. What we have trouble understanding is that anything we try to hold on to above holding on to God eventually slips through our fingers anyway.

The other thing is that the idea of an infinite and omnipotent God truly manifesting Himself to us is a potentially terrifying prospect. One is reminded of the character in C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” who, upon asking one of the denizens of Narnia if the Christ-figure Aslan the Lion is “safe” is informed that he is not safe, but he is good. When we ask our Lord to come into our lives in power we can expect some things to happen that will make us feel anything but comfortable. Just the presence of a holy God is something that would destroy us if it were not for the fact that we are made acceptable to Him by our appropriation of the shed blood of Jesus Christ. While God’s presence can be a comforting thing it might also sometimes be profoundly disturbing to beings that are still quite capable of sin.

The fact is that the Father intends to change all of us who claim the name of Christ into the likeness of His Son and a prayer that asks Him to truly change our hearts will be answered by Him doing just that. The life of Christ was painful and if we open ourselves to being made like Him we can expect plenty of pain too. The issue is not whether such pain is worth it, it is, but we are still not thrilled at the prospect of enduring it.

Someone once said that if we all must come to God with pure motives none of us would be able to come at all. I believe this is true not only at the time of our salvation but during our ongoing sanctification as well. The truth is that sometimes our prayers are not 100% pure. We desire God’s will in our lives, yet we also fear it. We believe, yet we need help with our unbelief. This is where our Lord’s understanding of, and patience with, our humanity comes in. His grace covers our faltering hearts if we have indeed come to love His Son in spirit and in truth. Beyond that, God’s perfect love for us can progressively cast out our fears about Him answering so audacious a prayer as the one that began this essay.

Prayers for God to fully possess our lives should not be entered into lightly it is true. But God does desire us to pray in such a way because He longs to possess us as only the true Lover of our souls can and should. We do well to pray such prayers. What is important to know is that, while the answer may be hard to bear for a time, the final result will be our entering into the bliss of God’s perfect love.

Copyright by Shea Oakley.

All rights reserved.

“In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry”  Ephesians 4:26

It has been said that those who anger us control us. Having such control may not be the conscious goal of the person our anger is directed towards, in fact oftentimes they may not even know we feel this way, but whatever the knowledge and attitude of the person in question we have given them a power in our lives they should not have. The Bible tells us that anger is not inherently wrong. But scripture also tells us not to let the sun go down with it still present in our hearts. To let resentment towards another continue in our lives unresolved is to cede control of our lives to someone other than the only One who should rightfully have such control.

Anger is often spurred by insecurity. Someone has attacked our fragile sense of self-worth. The circumstances may vary but the bottom line is that another human being has somehow made us feel disrespected or disregarded as a person. We may also feel the sting of rejection that is implicit in any negative comment or action against us. As a counselor friend of mine once said, rejection is the worst experience a relational being can have. It is that painful.

Anger is the natural response to being hurt un-justfully. It seems completely reasonable for us to hold on to that anger until the person involved repents of his or her actions. Unfortunately that repentance sometimes, perhaps most times, does not come. It is then we may decide that it is our “right” to continue to be offended. In time our anger turns into bitterness. The problem with being bitter is that it poisons our ability to live life to its fullest. This is particularly true spiritually. Anger which has been allowed to go deep into our hearts and become bitterness is a very effective block to sharing in the life of the Christ in whom there is no bitterness. We have allowed a person to have a power over us that is destructive to the most needful relationship we have.

How then can a believer escape from something to which is so easy for our still unperfected nature to fall prey? The key may be in asking God to enable us to see things from His perspective, the only perspective that shows us what is ultimately real. From this point of view a few things become clear to us. One is that, as Charles Stanley once said “You are no better than your worst neighbor.” Yes, we have been wounded, but we also wound. Another truth is that God happens to love our antagonist just as much as He loves us. Most importantly we can come to know that our security and worth are found in almighty God alone, and because He is the source for our right standing it is not necessary to pay attention to criticism not given in love. Grasping these realities can help us to move towards resolution of anger and bitterness as we allow God’s love to enable us to love those with whom we have been angry. Then we begin to be set free from the negative influence these people have on our lives. We release both them and ourselves when we forgive and put the Lord alone on the throne of our hearts. Real freedom and a newfound capacity for joy will then follow….just as surely as day follows night.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The “spirit of the law” spoken of in the New Testament is revealed to and in a believer through the Holy Spirit, not through self-indulgence, not through self-righteousness, not, in fact, through “self”-anything but through God Himself. Knowledge of the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is at the very core of the new life granted to the children of God through Christ. It is part and parcel of the freedom bought for us at the cross and is absolutely essential to fully experiencing that freedom. The opposite errors of legalism and license that have plagued so many Christians through the centuries are both derived from a functional ignorance of what Jesus came to deliver His people from, and both lead to back to spiritual bondage.

In the case of legalism this ignorance manifests itself in a futile attempt to earn our way to God through self-righteous moral scrupulosity. Such scrupulosity may be based on codes of conduct obvious or implicit in either the Old or New Testaments, but in each case it is manifested by works that originate in the self rather than in the enabling power of God. Furthermore the motivation behind legalism is often found in a combination of pride and fear of punishment, rather than love of Christ. Because of this faulty motivation those caught up in it cannot please God no matter how holy their conduct may appear. They are out of touch with the grace and kindness of God, the only things that lead to true repentance in humility of spirit. People who are bound up in legalism have bypassed the cross to their own harm and the harm of those under their sway. To be completely given over to legalism is to exhibit the same alienation from the Son of God for which the Pharisees were condemned.

Licentiousness, meanwhile, shows an ignorance of the continued destructive power of sin. This is the error that says that Jesus came to abolish the law rather than fulfill it. To be licentious is to be morally self-indulgent, to commit obvious or subtle sins in the mistaken belief that one can somehow avoid sin’s wages because one has been released to do so by grace. But as Paul said in his letter to the Romans “Are we to sin so that grace shall abound? God forbid!” License does not prove freedom from the law of God, but only defiance of that law. Its end is the same slavery to sin that held us before we came to know Christ and, like unrepented legalism; licentiousness begs the question of whether we ever really came to know Him at all.

Standing over and against both these potentially deadly errors is living in a state of harmony with the “spirit of the law”. This is the hallmark of the truly surrendered and Spirit-filled Christian. Such a person is no longer ruled by the opposite poles of self-centeredness apparent in legalism and license, but by the Spirit of Christ Himself. This kind of believer is not sinless, no Christian this side of Heaven is, but the true law of God is in the process of being written on his or her heart. This can only happen when the Holy Spirit has so shifted our attention off ourselves that Jesus is before our spiritual eyes more than we are. He then progressively fulfills the law in us and makes us truly holy as He is holy. We come to embody the fulfillment of the law that our Lord and Savior achieved on Calvary. True freedom from the sins of legalism and license is the lasting fruit of this vicarious fulfillment. The “spirit of the law” now becomes resident in our deepest hearts and we are set free to live the truly moral life we once tried to either simulate or reject.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.