Month: February 2016

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Ignoring or suppressing our emotions is not, contrary to the spirit of some teaching today, a sign of Christian maturity. What is a sign of that maturity is controlling where and how we express our feelings. Emotion is a God-given component of our being. God Himself has emotions and it follows that creatures made in His image also possess them. Emotions are morally neutral in the sense that God never condemns a person for feeling them. For instance the Bible warns against the wrong use of anger but nowhere is anger condemned in and of itself. How we respond to strong emotion is where the potentiality for sin exists.

It may be that those who preach against “emotionalism” are reacting to a contemporary culture that encourages people not only to express emotion without restraint, but also to consider the way human beings feel at any given moment to possibly be an accurate guide to reality. Such elevation of emotion to the role of being an arbiter of truth approaches idolatry. The truth is often not what our passions paint it to be.

However the unreliability of feelings does not warrant their demonization. Again we must remember that the word of God reveals Him expressing every kind of emotion we do including jealousy, albeit of a holy nature, for His Church. God is passionate about us. He is not some kind of cosmic “Mr. Spock”. Our Creator is even capable of experiencing anguish. When Cain commits the first murder in Genesis 4:10 Yahweh asks him “What have you done?” and goes on to say “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” “Say” is probably not the best word to describe how God spoke these words to Cain. The use of the exclamatory punctuation after “listen” indicates that it was more likely a cry. This was not what God had intended for the human race and He is anything but stoic about the fate of Abel.

The fully alive child of God will, in the course of a lifetime, feel all kinds of emotions and feel them deeply and God will not censure him for it.

What He will censure is the use of any emotion to justify sin. For instance it is one thing to feel anger against someone’s perceived injustice. It is quite another to use that anger as an excuse to unjustfully judge and sinfully punish the offender in question. Jealousy is also an emotion that can easily lead to sin. In fact, with the exception of a husband or wife who is being confronted with the infidelity of their partner, jealousy is usually unjustified. Actions taken based on jealous feelings have caused great damage, both inside and outside the church, throughout human history.

Generally speaking a truly mature Christian will acknowledge what they are feeling to those who they know are also mature enough to hear it. In this acknowledgment they will express whatever the emotion is without allowing the emotion to rule them at the moment they express it. As an example a mature believer who is angry may allow that anger to be apparent, but he or she will keep it under control. This person will not allow it to spiral into an uncontrollable and destructive rage. In this way the anger can be released in a way that is honest yet not sinful.

Ultimately the key is self-control. Emotions are to be felt but not allowed to rule us. Only the Holy Spirit, the One who grants us the power of self-control, should be allowed to do that. As we grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ over the course of our Christian lives we can learn to be both emotional beings and righteous ones, for our God is both as well.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

God does not owe us anything.

This might seem like an obvious truth, but it is one that many of us have had trouble accepting in our own lives. In our minds we may know that He is not in any way a debtor to us. It is our hearts that are more often the problem.

We live in a world of reciprocity; a place in which it is regularly assumed that clichés like “one good turn deserves another” and “if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” are really are inviolable laws . Human beings do little for others of their own kind that is not predicated on this principle. It is rare to find a truly altruistic person, someone who gives for the sheer joy of giving expecting nothing tangible in return. I suspect the majority of us live out most of our daily interactions with others with the ingrained, unconscious assumption that we give in order to get. This is just the way it is in a fallen world where scarcity determines value and enforces the reality of indebtedness between men. People owe us, we owe them.

Because of the pervasiveness of this aspect of our present existence it is difficult not to at least unconsciously try to apply the Rule of Reciprocity to our relationship with God. Perhaps some blessed souls have been so powerfully impressed with their own depravity apart from Christ, and simultaneously with His supremely loving solution to it, that they never could feel God owes them anything. Many of us, though, cannot honestly say that we have reached that place yet. The truth is we sometimes feel “shortchanged”, as it were, by Him. We have what seem to be overwhelming needs that are not getting met when and/or how we want them to be and we end up blaming the one Person we assume could and should do something about it.

The problem here is that our Lord is, by His very nature, not beholden to us in anyway whatsoever. He does not need anything we can give Him because He is utterly limitless and thus the only truly self-sufficient Being in the Universe. Scarcity does not exist in the economy of God. Moreover God has no intention of furthering our sinful self-centeredness by giving into our absurd demands towards Him. It may well be that Christians must, by necessity, operate within the constraints of a world where we do not get something for nothing. A Christian-run business, for example, expects payment for its services just as any secular business does. But that necessity is a concession to our having to live in this world. It is in no way applicable to our relationship with our Maker.

No matter how badly we want something, whatever the reason may be, that something is never “owed” to us by God. On the contrary, we owe Him for everything we are and possess. Both our natural and spiritual lives are ours only through the sheer gift of God. There are few more important heart lessons we need to grasp than this one. If we do not learn to both accept and appreciate this eternal truth we condemn ourselves to a life of frustration and bitterness, a life that, as children of God, we need not experience. God actually longs to give us all of what we need and even some of what we want, but He will never do so on our terms.

In the light of this eternal fact the best thing we can do is to choose to consciously reject our wrongful sense of entitlement. Then we can humbly ask our good Father for the things we desire and know that He will wisely and lovingly provide them for us, if it is to our benefit for Him do so, in His perfect time and way.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

In the earlier years of my faith I often struggled with whether my decision making was in line with the will of God. As you might expect this was especially true with the bigger choices in life. While I was not too concerned about choosing what color socks to wear in the morning I was very concerned about my vocational life, who I might marry, what to do with my financial resources, etc. In the case of these kinds of “life-changing” decisions I felt that I must have “a peace about” it before taking any action. By that I mean that I had to sense God’s approval in some kind of warm, fuzzy (and nebulous) feeling-state before I would choose that course. If, after praying about a big choice, I had this kind of “peace” then it must be the seal of divine approval on my action. If I did not have it or, worse, had a sense of anxiety about what I was considering I assumed that the Lord was using the anxiety to warn me off of a bad decision.

I suspect that to many, if not most, biblical Christian readers this sounds like an eminently reasonable way to operate. After all, true peace comes from God and anxiety, on the other hand, is not supposed to be of Him. If you feel anxious about doing something then simply do not do it; in fact if you do not feel right about it the reason is probably that the thing in question is either innately sinful or, at least, sinful for you. It seems very cut and dry, this way of making big choices in life. In fact it seems like spiritual common sense.

The difficulty comes when the person doing the decision making has a problem with chronic anxiety that is not necessarily related to the problem at hand.

Some people are afflicted by anxiety no matter what they do or do not do. Theologians might ascribe this tendency to spiritual immaturity and/or lack of faith. Psychologists would more likely call it a disorder brought on by early life experience, or a chemical imbalance, or both. I will not pass judgment here on any of these viewpoints. I suspect they all contain aspects of truth.

In any case chronic anxiety is very real in the lives of many believers and it often manifests itself most strongly in circumstances that require decision making. Perhaps you have met fellow Christians who are seemingly forever looking for a clear sign from Heaven before doing anything of importance in life. It may be that they operate this way because of an obedient spirit that wants God’s will done before their own but, frankly, I suspect more often the reason has to do with an anxious spirit. Such a spirit can be almost paralyzing to those whom are most subject to it. If you tend to be nervous to an extreme potentially every decision you make is problematic. This is only exacerbated by the common teaching that God cares about every decision made (maybe even the one about what color socks you are wearing.)

So, you might be asking, how are such benighted souls ever going to make important choices in their lives? I believe there are two solutions to the problem:

1. The true source of the chronic anxiety must be identified and dealt with.
2. A conscious choice must be made to sometimes disregard feelings in making a decision and trust that God speaks more to us through scripture and the “many counselors” He puts in our lives.

The first solution usually involves either pastoral or clinical counseling; more often the latter. We most often need help identifying where generalized anxiety is coming from. We can then know if it is something that requires repentance, healing, or some combination of the two. In fact sometimes anxiety begins to dissipate as soon as we realize what is truly behind it. (That said it is not unusual for the process of overcoming anxiety to take a long time and we should not necessarily feel badly if it does not yield in a single “ah hah” moment.)

The second answer to the problem is to choose to use the general principles of the Bible in combination with sharing our decision-making challenges with trustworthy, mature, Christians we know. The Bible obviously helps us to avoid innately sinful decisions. It also helps us to see how the great men and women of God in its pages made their own decisions; sometimes without supernatural signs I might add. As for our trusted Christian friends scripture tells us that “there is safety in much counsel.” If most of our believing friends think, for instance, that the person we are dating is a good potential spouse might it just be possible that God is influencing them to tell us so? (This is especially true, by the way, if those friends have prayed for wisdom in sharing their thoughts on the matter at hand.)

I can tell you that I have found both these approaches to work in my own pilgrimage. I spent many years allowing my anxiety about making the perfect choice to rob me of both my joy and of what likely would have been good things I could have possessed earlier in my life. Perhaps the greater regret for me has not been making wrong choices as much as it has been allowing anxiety to keep me from making some of those choices for so long a time. The great lesson for me has been to learn that anxiety, in and of itself, is not necessarily something to which I should listen.