April 2016 – sheaoakley.com

April 26, 2016shea No Comments

Our Enemy’s Days are Numbered

There are times in the life of a believer when everything seems wrong. God seems lost to us and we fear for our souls. These are the moments when we may cry, as both David and the Son of David did, “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?” These are also the moments when our Adversary is close by, repeatedly telling us that we have forever cut ourselves off from the love and mercy of our Creator and Redeemer. There is no better liar than the “Father of lies” and it is easy in this world, his temporary domain, to believe what he so incessantly tells us about ourselves. There is perhaps no mission that the Enemy of the human race undertakes with more relish and energy than accusing Christians of not really being sons and daughters of the most high God.

Sometimes, though not always, believers truly have given Satan something to use against them during these times. We all continue to sin in thought and deed and this is the source of his most effective ammunition against us. Scripture tells us that if we confess our sin and forsake it God will forgive us through the shed blood of Christ. The enemy counters either by saying our sin is unforgivable or, alternatively, that it has been committed just one too many times. He wants us to believe that, beyond being guilty of sinning, we have also been permanently given over to sin. Because we know that God hates sin He tries to make us believe that God now hates us and all too often many of us believe him.

One of the best defenses against these accusations is to remind ourselves that the Devil is a deceiver. While he does use the truths of the word of God he does so in an ultimately untruthful way. No one can distort the Scriptures like him and no one is so effective at using them out of context. Every slick human propagandist throughout the centuries who has twisted the truth with evil intent is but a pale imitation of the Father of lies.

The good news is that we do not have to believe this ultimate liar. Lies are dependent on truth. They have no existence except in contrast to it and when a deeper revelation of truth is brought to our consciousness by the Spirit even the most subtle and convincing of them can be disarmed. God is truth and truth came first. It always prevails in the end because He always prevails in the end. If we choose, with God’s help, to consistently believe this the Devil will ultimately lose every battle against our souls fought in the realm of accusation. The truth embodied by the Lord’s continuing grace, love and forgiveness in the lives of His struggling children can counter the intent of Satan’s lies every time.

It is also vitally important that we remember that our enemy’s days are numbered. It may be that, in these end times, he is throwing everything he possibly can into his war against our souls because he senses that his own moment of destruction is coming. For this reason the Devil, for all his wiles and derived strength, is desperate. Even his greatest displays of power in this increasingly depraved world belie the inevitable and rapid approach of his fate. In the meantime our call is to stand on the truth of our Father’s Word. That Word assures us that the day is coming when the conquering Son of God will free us from Satan’s accusations forever by freeing us from Satan’s presence forever.

We need only to trust and hold on to this promise. Our all-conquering Lord will do the rest.

April 20, 2016shea No Comments

The Blessing of Contemplating Our Mortality

Mortality is a dirty word for citizens of the 21^st century West. We do not like to think about the fact that death comes to all human beings. In fact we usually do everything in our power to push this reality out of our minds. Our entire culture at times seems to be living in willful ignorance of the brevity of our time in this world. The cult of youth that assails us every time we pick up a magazine or turn on the television reminds us that we are ever trying to look backwards and avoid thinking about the inevitability of death.

This is not much less true in our Christian subculture either. How many sermon series are preached these days about preparing for the inevitable end of our physical lives? I’d venture that many Western believers would consider such a series morbid. It might well be seen as an uncomfortable and unwanted intrusion into the incessant search for complete spiritual fulfillment on this side of Heaven that sometimes passes for authentic spirituality today.

This attitude of avoidance is not present in scripture or, for that matter, in the writings of faithful believers for the majority of Christian history. For most of the Church’s existence the Christian was encouraged to contemplate his or her death and contemplate it regularly. More than one respected saint in the past two thousand years counseled the faithful to put aside a period of time each day to think about dying. This is another idea that brings an immediate sense of discomfort to many of us moderns. Think about dying everyday? How depressing!

The fact is that wrestling with (and ultimately coming to terms with) our mortality is a healthy part of living in reality and understanding our position as fallen creatures, redeemed though we are. Death entered the world through our sin and the truth is we now exist in bodies that are going to die. Barring the imminent return of the Lord we will all breathe our last some day and leave behind everyone and everything we have known during our time here. Reconciling ourselves to this fact is not only a requirement of living in truth; it is also a potentially positive way to further re-orient our lives towards God.

First and foremost it is vital to remember that the One we profess to follow Himself tasted physical death. We are destined to share in that part of His experience whether we like it or not. The hope of resurrection is a wonderful thing, but resurrection requires something to be resurrected from. We are blessed beyond measure to be spared from the spiritual death Jesus tasted on our behalf, but our bodies will know the temporal penalty of our sin. We will all die. It is an aspect of true wisdom to be prepared for the day that happens and part of being prepared for that day is contemplating it.

Secondly we need perspective on what our real priorities should be in our present temporal existence. Such perspective can be provided by meditating on mortality. It is amazing how rapidly people who discover they are terminally ill (and aren’t we all?) find out what really matters to them. Suddenly all their worldly concerns just seem to evaporate. And what invariably is left? Only two things, relationship and legacy; their relationships with God and others and their legacy in the sense of finishing whatever work God gave them to do in this life. Nothing else much matters anymore.

The truth is that, as biblical Christians, we should be able to have much of that perspective now, whether we have 70 years of life ahead of us or 7 months. But this cannot happen without keeping our transience here on Earth consciously in mind, at least from time to time. Such consciousness is not morbid, it is blessed. It is blessed because God always honors our willingness to see things as they are in the light of Who He is. What we physically are is mortal. Who He is is the Redeemer of that part of us which, praise His Name, is not mortal, our eternal souls.

April 12, 2016shea No Comments

Betrayal’s End

Trust comes hard. We do not naturally trust God. To put our lives in His hands is a decision we must make, and it often is not the easiest of decisions.

The result of the Fall is a dangerous world inhabited by sometimes dangerous people. One danger that every human being faces is the possibility of betrayal. At one time or another most, if not all, of us have been betrayed by someone we once trusted. We have known the pain that comes when someone we loved and looked up to has sinned against us, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Beyond that we have been betrayers ourselves, hurting those whom we should never hurt because it is in our fallen nature to do so.

These betrayals we suffer, or make others to suffer, cloud our view of life. Human beings learn to distrust. With age idealism often gives way to cynicism. Whatever degree of innocence we had as children is progressively lost as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil teach us that people are just not safe, not trustworthy.

Then we meet Jesus. If we truly come to know Him our perception begins to change. Over time, as He proves Himself faithful to us, some of the cynicism starts to fade. New Christians slowly come to realize that, even if people remain unfaithful, one Person will never betray them. This often does not happen overnight, especially if we have been deeply betrayed by someone very close to us. It is a sometimes slow moving process, this learning how to trust again, slow and not always steady. Others continue to betray us in big and small ways and we do the same to them, though hopefully not with the regularity we did before becoming believers. It often seems like two steps up and one step back as we daily seek to put our trust in God.

Every day trust issues arise. Every day we must make the decision to put those issues in His hands. It isn’t easy at first, but His ongoing faithfulness makes it easier as we learn to rely on that faithfulness. Thank God that He is willing to help us increasingly trust Him over a lifetime, knowing that it often takes that long for old wounds to heal. Thank God that His love helps us to make the right decision each time we are called to trust Him.

Thank God that He is trustworthy.

April 6, 2016shea No Comments

Escaping the “Should Be” Trap

Some advice for the perennially frustrated Christian: learn to depend on Who God is, not on who you think you “should be”. This is one of the traps that most easily ensnare us. The essence of a defeated Christian life is seeing our salvation and sanctification as dependent on who we perceive ourselves to be instead of Who we know Jesus Christ to be.

It is doubtful that many of us wake up in the morning thinking “today I’m going to try to build my faith on my self-perception rather than on my Lord”. The curse of too great a focus on who we feel we should be instead of who Christ has already made us is rarely a conscious one. Most of us have at least the head-knowledge that it is only the grace of a loving God that has saved us. The problem is the proverbial “18 inches between our heads and our hearts”. It is our hearts that stubbornly refuse to believe that God accepts us in all our continuing imperfection, even as He works within us to perfect what we absolutely cannot make perfect on our own.

It is imperative to our spiritual wellbeing that we learn to really trust our Redeemer for our redemption. That statement may sound a bit obvious, but it reflects the need to confront the disconnect too many of us experience between what we claim to believe and what we too often really believe. For millions of professed Christians today the “peace that passes understanding” is a profoundly elusive thing. Perhaps this is so because we spend our time looking at our own sin instead of looking to the One who is the bearer of our sin.

No living human being is behaviorally who he or she “should be”. What every human being should be is perfectly obedient to God. That is the standard required to make us acceptable to Him and it is a standard that is patently impossible for any member of our fallen race to attain to through self-effort. As long as we are focused on our condition in the flesh we will exist in anxiety, fear and, finally, despair. We cannot find our way to God in this way, not before we become believers and certainly not after.

The only solution for the aching reality of our “should be’s” is the deeper reality of what real faith in Jesus has made us to be, persons who have been once and for all reconciled to our Creator by the blood atonement of His Christ. Once we enter into saving faith in Jesus God sees us through the prism of His son’s absolute perfection. We are already perfect in our father’s eyes. Because he stands outside of time He sees us as the perfect beings we will be in eternity. As for now God is working out our temporal imperfections in the process of sanctification, a process that we take part in but for which He is the source. As we learn to look only to Him, to our Source, and not to ourselves, we will be set free of the curse of self-centered effort and finally find the peace of heart that we so desperately need.