Month: June 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

There are times in the lives of every one of us when we must seek to be alone with God. Solitude is not an option for the serious Christian, it is a necessity.

This need for solitude is in no way contradictory to the urgent drive for more genuine community in the contemporary church. Human beings need both meaningful time with, and periods of seclusion from, one other. Solitude is not synonymous with isolation. The latter is the bane of modern existence. A constant and pathological estrangement from our fellows is symptomatic of the deeper alienation to which modernity lends itself regarding the human heart. Isolation is usually not voluntary; it is far more often a state which individuals find themselves in, at least to some degree, contrary to their own will. The remedy to isolation is likely a return to the communal values of early Christianity that are so lacking in the hyper-individualistic West today.

The often unmentioned flip side of unhealthy isolation is an equally unhealthy need for constant social interaction. Some people feel they can only endure the absolute minimum amount of time apart from others that is necessary for propriety, even if that means invading the legitimate boundaries of other’s privacy. These are the men and women in our congregations who push so hard for constant “fellowship” that they ultimately alienate others. Such individuals cannot stand the thought of time spent only in their own company or potentially in the singular company of God. They almost make an idolatry of human relationship for its own sake, and in the end that obsession leads only to their own harm.

No spiritually and psychologically healthy man or is “an island,” but neither is he always compelled to be with other people. Instead such a person is one who understands the need for both human and divine companionship, and not always at the same time. Balanced Christians seek “alone-time” with the Lord to recharge their spiritual batteries and to rest from the sometimes incessant demands of human society. Such alone-time can also be described as solitude − the voluntary removal of oneself from others in order to seek repose and restoration in the presence of God.

Solitude requires more than just being absent from the physical presence of others. It involves being removed from their “tele-presence” as well. It means turning off the television, silencing the cell phone and logging off the Net. We live in an era when we can choose to be continually connected to communications media (some individuals even go so far as to install a TV in their bathroom.) Real solitude cannot exist in the presence of a constant audio/visual stream. It requires the complete, if temporary, removal of all the trappings of our electronically “plugged-in” culture. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is simply venture outdoors. Nature lends itself to solitude. A hike up a mountain or a long float on a lake can facilitate the kind of quiet that allows us to clearly hear from God.

Whether it is achieved through the great outdoors or simply a purposely silenced home, the balm of solitude is vital to the believer. It reminds us that the vertical element of Christianity must come before the horizontal one. We are to love God above and beyond our fellow man (though, paradoxically, loving Him first enables us to love others best). We are to seek Him and Him alone, as our greatest priority. This is simply impossible without separating ourselves from others for a time.

Once we recognize solitude for the great good it is, we can pursue it both without guilt and with anticipatory joy− for in pursuing solitude we pursue and find our Lord. Then, after we commune with Him in the quiet place, we can return to the company of our fellow human beings as men and women refreshed and transformed, ready once more to commune with one other.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The experience of fear appears to be an unavoidable reality in this life, even for the Christian. While some may claim they have never feared anything since their salvation this is a bit difficult to believe. Such individuals may have been permanently freed from certain apprehensions at conversion, but it is highly unlikely that they’ve been relieved of all such apprehensions for all of their earthly existence. Freedom from experiencing any and every fear this world holds (or even appears to hold) seems like an impossibility on this side of Heaven. Even the Lord Himself felt its grip in the Garden of Gethsemane. How could we not?

Of course the paradox here is that we are told by that very same Lord not to fear (Luke 12:17). How can this be? Why would Jesus seemingly imply we need not experience something that He, in His humanity, felt Himself?

Perhaps the answer lies in the difference between feeling fear and giving in to it. What the Son of God felt on the night before His crucifixion did not turn Him from the cross. Beyond that, it appears from the biblical record that, at some point, the fear of Thursday became the unmovable resolve of Good Friday. Yes, Jesus knew fear, but with the help of His Father He overcame it. So, too, can all those who have saving faith in Him.

The questions some might ask at this point are: “Exactly how is this feeling of fear overcome? What practical action I can take to fight and win against my dreads? It is all well and good to talk about conquering that which frightens me, but what does it actually look like in my daily life?” The solution to such questions is found in understanding what it means to be a child of God. It is our mind and heart recognition of our position in Christ that makes all the difference.

By divine definition nothing in Heaven or on Earth can be stronger than the Maker of both. God is greater than all and that all includes whatever it is that scares us. As we come to viscerally know that we belong to a sovereign God, we can also come to know eventual freedom from each and every fear that confronts us. The Scripture tells us, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) It is in believing this truth that any accosting dread can be cast out of our lives.

This does not mean that everything about which a Christian feels fear will not come to pass. Returning to the Garden of Gethsemane, we need to understand that our Lord felt real fear about a real proposition- the fulfillment of His saving mission in the world. What He dreaded as He sweat “great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44, KJV) did happen the next morning. But that reality did not destroy Him. Neither do we need to be destroyed by our own “worst case scenarios” if they actually come true (which, in most cases, they do not). The grave could not hold Jesus Christ. He suffered death, but He transcended and defeated it. Because this is true, nothing we face is unendurable. We have the promise of the ultimate “Overcomer” that whatever does happen to us will finally be worked out for our good (Romans 8:28), to be realized either in this world or the next.

We will feel fear during our time on earth, and sometimes what we fear may come true. The fact that this will be our experience is almost certainly unavoidable. It is what we do in response that counts. No fear, or circumstance that causes that fear, is greater than the God to whom we belong. It is on the basis of the knowledge of this ultimate truth that we can respond to fear with faith and send it away. Such knowledge may not come overnight, but it will come if we consciously seek it in and through Jesus Christ.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

There are some Christians who will tell you to forget the past and whatever negative events you experienced during that past. An attempt to therapeutically work through what happened is, they say, a waste of time better spent living in the present and pressing on towards the future in Christ. In fact these spiritual advisors (who, by the way, are sometimes presenting unsolicited advice) often go beyond calling such work a waste of time and tell us that it is actually a sin. Dealing with issues from our past is, to them, just another aspect of the “psycho-heresy” that has invaded the American Church in recent years.

The verses of the Bible they point to as a proof-text for this view are almost always Philippians 3:13-14 which read as follows:

“Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize of God’s heavenly calling in Christ Jesus.”

This, of course, sounds very convincing of their point. “There it is in black and white,” they say. “How do you refute that? It is the word of God.” True, it is the inerrant word of God. What it is not is a truly contextual interpretation of that word and because of this it is, in fact, not an accurate interpretation.

In the first chapters of Philippians, the Apostle Paul has just finished telling his readers about how he tried to earn God’s favor through ritualistic and ethical works before he came to Christ. When he talks about forgetting what is behind he is referring to forgetting that effort, to not resting on it as any kind of way to be justified before God. He is not using it to tell people that emotional wounds from their past are something that should be ignored.

The fact of the matter is that we cannot ignore those injuries without jeopardizing our growth as Christians and our flourishing as human beings. Untreated and unhealed physical wounds can eventually become septic, and when they do they threaten the body that has sustained them. The same is true of the invisible wounds that come from trauma and/or abuse. Without some kind of cleansing of those wounds we become increasingly soul-sick , even warped of heart.

If you examine the degree of depression, anxiety and other psychopathologies that manifest themselves in the Church today, you will find evidence everywhere of these untreated maladies that are anchored in our pasts. These are the illnesses that often defy the best efforts at increased Bible study and formulaic prayer, which tend to be the prescriptions the wounded in our midst are given by those who consider examining one’s earlier life a sinful waste of time. Many hurting people spend years trying traditional spiritual disciplines as a remedy for their pain and end up no better for the effort. It is not that such disciplines are somehow bad. They are not. The problem is that it is hard to get the benefit of them when what you really need is to heal now from what you never healed from then.

The author knew deep depression and anxiety as nearly constant companions during the first 15 years of his Christian walk, a walk that was both serious and sincere. It was not until I discovered that beneath my depression was anger and beneath anger there was a crushing sense of loss from very troubled formative years. Fortunately I was able to enter a period of intentional grief work in Christian counseling and truly let go of a past that had finally had to be squarely faced, mourned and released. All of this was accompanied by much prayer for a dependence on God to be with me in my grief. Based on how my life has improved over the past decade since embarking on this course I can only believe that He heard my prayer. Another verse in scripture tells us to “Mourn with those who mourn.” I believe that God mourned with me over what had happened so many years before.

When that grief over un-mourned losses was consciously allowed to come, the tears I cried were in the here and now, not the past. In fact it was as if I were reliving the past and finally grieving its losses now in the way I needed to back then. The fact that I did not go through this process then had been a huge reason for my own emotional sickness, a sickness that robbed me of some of what should have been the best years of my life.

So, in a sense, what we are talking about in this context isn’t even about the past. It is about what is happening right now as a result of that past, what is holding back our healing and growth right now. It does us no good to pretend that we are not being affected in the present by our history if that history included being deeply wounded by whatever it was we went through. If the past is ever truly to be “left behind” it must be reckoned with, grieved and healed in the present. It is in this present work that we lay the foundation for a future worth living, both in this world and the next.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Many of us have a tendency to feel that we know what the limits of divine grace should be for ourselves and others. This is usually based on human ideas of fairness and justice that we have embraced as normative after observing how things work between people in the world we live in. But when it comes to the grace of God we nearly always fall short in recognizing the depth of His love for our fallen race, both collectively and individually.

Sometimes we may feel tempted to rail against the seeming “unfairness” of the unmerited favor He shows towards people who we feel do not deserve it. An example might be the apparently real conversion of a man like David Berkowitz. During the long summer of 1977 Berkowitz serially murdered several people in New York City while sending notes to police signed “the Son of Sam.” He was eventually captured and subsequently sentenced to life in prison without parole. Years later this one-time serial killer cried out to God for forgiveness and found it in Jesus Christ. Since that time he has shown the fruits of real repentance and even become the head chaplain of prisoners in the correctional facility that will be his home for the rest of his earthly life.

Some Christians do know “from whence they came” and can identify enough with even a man like Berkowitz that they rejoice at his salvation. Others wonder, secretly or otherwise, why a serial killer should ever be the object of saving grace. Some crimes seem so heinous to us that we feel like they should be included under the heading of unpardonable sins, and so we either doubt the sincerity of such conversions or, worse, resent them.

The core of this issue lies in our understanding of the nature of the God we worship. We know that He is “not mocked”; the Bible tells us so. Vengeance most definitely is His. However the Scripture also says that “He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked” and while He does take vengeance He does not do so in the fashion of sinful human beings. We, truth be told, are often inclined to enjoy seeing those we consider to be especially bad people get what we think they deserve. One needs look no further than the local theater to see evidence of this. There are scores of Hollywood movies that feature the bad guys “getting theirs” in violent scene after violent scene. We like revenge. It makes us feel better about ourselves. It makes us feel superior to those who we consider to be the really wicked people of the world.

God, however, has no such spurious need to feel morally superior to others because He is the only One who truly is morally superior. Paradoxically the one Being in the universe who has the right to condemn the wicked (and that, by the way, includes every one of us if the Bible and our own deepest consciences are to be believed) would prefer not to. He would rather shed His loving grace on us first, in the hope that we might repent and return to Him.

Sometimes the depth of that loving grace astounds and discomfits us. We are like the older brother in the prodigal son story. We are good and do not feel that we are getting the reward for that studied goodness which we deserve. Meanwhile, God is letting the likes of “the Son of Sam” into the Kingdom. It all seems patently unfair.

Well love, divine love anyway, is unfair and unapologetically so. If God’s generosity compels Him to pay all the day laborers the same amount no matter when they started working, then so be it. If His perfect love leads Him to embrace a person who we think deserves nothing but death and lead him or her towards repentance what is that to us? We might do well to remember the grace we ourselves were shown when we were hell-bound worshippers of anything and everything but the one true God, grace that He continues to lavish on us every day of our lives.

Rather than trying to set some kind of personal limit on the grace of God it is far better for us to look up to Heaven and thank that God for the unbelievably “unfair” generosity of His love.