Month: May 2016

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Sometimes we need a refuge from our own lives. We may become so overwhelmed by the distractions of this world, and so troubled by the darkness of our own response to those distractions, that we need to have a place to go that somehow transcends everything for a while. It is then when a visceral experience of the highest reality, God’s presence, can become that desperately needed sanctuary, a retreat during times of deep stress in our pilgrimage through this life.

All of us tend to get caught up in situations that appear to be all-important and permanent when in actuality they are unimportant (or at least less important) and temporal. We may experience oppressive fits of anxiety, or obsession, or dark desire that seem for a while to be all we know or ever will know. These are internal conditions of the soul but they are often, perhaps always, triggered by the external condition of our present earthly home. Environmental stimuli are always vying for our attention and, in this fallen place, that stimuli can fill our vision with things we know in our hearts we must ultimately transcend. However, beyond that, we also know that in the meantime we often must find some safe harbor to enter for a while where they cannot come. The only place such a harbor is to be found is in the Lord and the things of the Lord. We most often seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness when the insanity of the world becomes too much for us to bear. We need some relief.

This relief manifests itself in many ways, but all are connected with an awareness of Christ. We may enter into this awareness through reading Scripture or through prayer, through worship or meditation or fellowship. We may come to know a sweet release without even consciously looking for it, such as when the Holy Spirit simply makes Himself known at some random, unexpected moment when we are doing nothing “spiritual” at all. However it occurs we know it is of Him in a moment because we come to a place of peace that we never knew before we knew the Prince of Peace.

Nothing is as much to be desired as entering into this condition, in getting to this location. Nothing is more fulfilling and refreshing than being recaptured by His love in real time and brought to what U2’s Bono has called “that other place”. Sometimes what we experience is as familiar as the spiritual equivalent of slipping on an old, warm garment that has comforted us many times in the past. At other moments our encounter with the ultimate reality of the Spirit is something new and exciting, a revelation of His goodness that we have never known before. In either case the things of this world really do become “strangely dim”. The eyes of our hearts have been refocused on what really matters and we are released from whatever it was that held our attention to our own hurt.

Such times are the spiritual birthright of every child of God. While we cannot make them permanent on this side of Heaven we can remember them when we find ourselves once again caught up in the distractions and troubles of this life. The “lesser realities” that compete for our earthly attention need not dominate our souls. Moreover, as we grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord, we can experience His reality in ever deeper ways and for longer periods as well. That, too, is our birthright, the fruit of our continuing sanctification.

How unspeakably blessed we are to have available to us this ultimate refuge, one that is as real and enduring as the very heartbeat of our risen and eternal Savior.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Because the only recorded words of Jesus Christ are found in the words of scripture we have a natural tendency to develop our idea of who He is based solely on those words. If we desire to get a more complete picture of the Son of Man we may also do well to look at the context of His close relationships with his disciples, relationships that are also clearly evident in the Gospels.

Many, if not most, of the known words of Christ are related to His profound teachings. The inspired writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are greatly interested in setting forth an accurate picture of the Man in relation to His mission. This is because the most important things that we need to know are found in what Jesus said when He was acting in the role of Preacher, Prophet and coming King. All of those roles involved communicating sublime truth to a human race desperately in need of both that truth and, more importantly, the One who embodied it.

But there had to be another side of Jesus.

He could not have spent his three years with the Twelve speaking only magnificent and glorious words to their awed ears. These men were the traveling companions of their Teacher. Beyond that they were also His friends. It seems safe to conclude that Jesus also spoke to His apostles as any man would to his friends. That would appear to mean that sometimes, perhaps even the majority of the time, their conversations were casual. Whether they were discussing the routine events of the day or where to eat or the prevailing weather they must have spoken to each other with the informal banter characteristic of people who are close to one another. Perhaps they shared in the laughter of impromptu humor. Could it even be that the Lord and Savior of humankind occasionally entertained his disciples with a good joke?

After years steeped in the New Testament, with its frequent admonitions and exhortations, devout Christians can be forgiven if they find themselves a bit uncomfortable with the idea of “the casual Jesus”. After all we are called to reverence the Son of God above all things, and well we should, but that said the One we worship was and is both fully God and fully human and part of being fully human is the simple warmth and intimacy of friendship. We do not always speak to our friends in formal language suffused with deep meaning, far from it. In fact we rarely communicate this way and maybe that is what enables such language to have such a profound impact when we do use it. Is it unreasonable to think that it was the same with the human Jesus?

If this is true than it is also logical to assume that the Gospel writers knew that the most important words to record from Christ’s earthly ministry were the words He used when He was making a greatly important point. The fact that they did not try to convey three years of casual banter on the road stems from the need to distill the words of Christ which would have that most “profound impact” on the fallen race He came to save. However this does not mean that casual banter was not part and parcel of the experience of following Jesus in the flesh.

Today some believers may believe that we have somehow cheapened the value of the One we worship by making Him more “accessible” as a human being. I submit that this is only the case if we forget that the One who truly is our friend is simultaneously also our Master, the Ruler of the universe. If we know Him first and foremost in a spirit of reverence for His Deity we can then also safely know Him as a human being, not a pious caricature of one. It may actually enhance our knowledge of, and love for, the God-Man to think of him walking with His twelve friends along a dusty Judean road telling a humorous tale and joining in the laughter His Father designed all men to enjoy. The only thing such a thought “cheapens” is our false piety and, if that is the case, let it be so. What really matters is strengthening our true connection to the One who became one of us. Pondering the full-breadth of the humanity of Jesus Christ might do just that.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Proverbs 14:12 (NIV)

There are sometimes voices and impulses within us that speak with such seeming truth that we are unable to see them for what they really are-poison to the soul. These voices and impulses can take many forms and usually are deeply tied with desires we have, which may be conscious or subconscious and either good or bad. These desires sometimes call on us to heed them with a deeply compelling urgency, yet we may not be fully aware of the sway they hold over us nor the fact that our hearts and minds react to them by coming up with unhealthy ideas on how they may be quenched.

These ideas do not always register with us as being unhealthy. The fallen human heart is deceitful, we are told by the prophet Jeremiah, and more than capable of fooling us into thinking good evil and, more importantly for our purpose here, evil good. This has been true throughout human history and perhaps at no time so prevalent as today. We live in a society that says if it feels right, do it. Perhaps more significantly contemporary culture increasingly tells us that if it seems right it usually is right. This tendency should not be too surprising in an age which has come to largely reject the idea of an objective and absolute code of moral behavior, one that has been revealed to us by a transcendent God, in favor of making self-centered man the measure of all things.

The result of this rejection should be increasingly obvious to believers in that God, but this is not always the case. We (the author included) are only as likely to recognize it as we are able to stay close to the truth through disciplines such as consistent Bible study, sincere prayer and real Christian fellowship. All of these can be conduits for the direction of the Holy Spirit. Our own discernment of right and wrong is inviolably linked to such practices and without such discernment we find ourselves more likely to rationalize illicit ideas about how to avoid pain and/or seek pleasure. Part of this rationalization is a result of tapping into the deceit of the flesh without knowing (and often not wanting to know) that we have done so. As a result, we come up with notions on how we should live that seem right but put us on a course of self-deception that can distance us from God without our knowing it until the damage is done.

One example of this self-deception that is particularly prevalent in the Church today is the increasing tendency of believers to come to the conclusion that, at any cost, “God wants me to be happy.” This sounds good to people who are not very conversant with the biblical truth that in a fallen world we may have to endure pain, even long periods of pain, for an ultimate good that will not be realized in this life but the next. This creates a sort of spiritual Myopia which leads to thinking that we must be happy now because the now is all there is. This might seem like an error that could be easily corrected by hearing any number of Sunday sermons but the aforementioned tendency of our flesh to rationalize sin, in order to meet a consciously or unconsciously felt need, is powerfully present.

If you doubt this “happiness now” spirit is growing in the Church today you only need to look at one glaring example, the increase in our divorce, and re-marriage statistics in the last half-century. It is amazing how many today will break a covenant they made before God and their spouse and wreak destruction upon their children, because they have decided they have made a “mistake” in marrying the husband or wife of their youth (This is often helped along by adulterous “true love” for someone new that promises the renewal of the intrinsically transitory romantic bliss they once knew with their first partner during the dating period and early in the union.)

The state of marriage in the Church is obvious evidence for feel-good solutions that end in misery, but it is surely not the only one. We also see it in our materialism, our entertainment choices, our politics, and our treatment of people both inside and outside the Christian community, among other things.

The question then obviously begged is how we avoid self-deceptions that feel and, thus, seem right? The answer is largely found in pursuing the spiritual disciplines mentioned earlier, namely Bible study, prayer and fellowship. The last of these is a discipline that is increasingly ignored in our hyper-busy and self-centered age. We cannot meet with each other for two hours on a Sunday morning and think this is being in authentic biblical community. We must consciously endeavor to live as much of lives out in common with our fellow believers as possible. Within that mandate we also need to be intentional about pursuing good advice from more than one person for “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14, KJV) It is also desirable to find an older, more experienced Christian, with an obvious level of holiness in living, to be a primary spiritual advisor. This often is found in the person of a pastor or Christian counselor.

If we pursue the disciplines, including these relational ones, we will be better armed against the lies that come out of the flesh (that part of us that remains which leads us into error and self-destructive action even after we have truly come to Christ, and which will remain a present challenge until the day we go to be with Him.) For all this to work we must remain vigilant in our own pursuit of sanctification while consciously depending on the Holy Spirit and His power. It is in this dependence that sinful error masquerading as truth will no longer be able to fool us into seeking the “way that appears to be right” but ends in death.