Month: July 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We cannot primarily want personal power for ourselves and also have authentic, loving relationships with others. Beyond that, as Christians, whatever power we do have we need to give away in the service of those relationships.

Human beings are relational by nature. This is one of the primary ways we bear God’s image for God Himself is relational within the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate entities yet, paradoxically, are one. This is the essence of the relationship within the Godhead: separateness in unity. Another aspect of the bond between the Three is the sharing of divine power. This unity in separateness, combined with shared power, is part of the blueprint for every healthy human bond as well.

Christ’s earthly mission displayed this principle for us. We know that Christ ceded power in the very act of His incarnation. He voluntarily left His throne in Heaven and humbled Himself to become one of us. This temporal giving up of the Son’s full heavenly power was for the sake of relationship, more specifically to effect a restoration of relationship with a race which had estranged itself from its Creator. He could not have done this without identifying physically with that race and that meant becoming, in a sense, weak. Beyond this the earthly ministry of Jesus was regularly marked by the giving away of His still present divine power in two forms, one direct and one by proxy. The first was in healing. The people who received direct physical healing from Christ often received a restoration to relationship with the God of Israel as well. The other form was in granting His disciples the proxy to command demons to leave those supernaturally afflicted (and more importantly relationally isolated) by them. In both cases those who were on the receiving end of this power had a chance to be restored to relationship with both God and their fellow man.

If this pattern of giving for the sake of relationship was faithfully reproduced by believers today we would be an incredibly potent form of salt and light to a dying world. Unfortunately Christians are still human beings and we suffer from the tendency to gravitate towards seeking power more for ourselves than for others. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, set this curse in motion when they believed the lies of the original “power-grabber”, Satan. Although we are redeemed we still sometimes have the tendency to think, as he did, that power trumps relationship as far as being desirable. Rather than sharing power to establish relationships we hoard it. Our surrounding culture encourages this and we Western Christians are far too open to that encouragement.

Such hoarding always leads to misery in the end for the simple reason that we live primarily through our bonds with others, not through our bond with power. Power is only a good thing when it serves our connection with God and with our fellow human beings. Otherwise is becomes poisonous to us and potentially deadly to our spirit; even as we think we are somehow being enhanced by it.

That said it is important to remember that power, like so many things in the universe, is morally neutral. It is fallen moral agents who use it for evil. With that in mind we can thank God that, in Him, we now have the ability to choose to use it for loving purposes. The greatest joy that power can engender in us happens when we imitate our Lord and give it away for the sake of others. The new and restored relationships that follow this giving are the true blessings of power.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Truly selfless love is a difficult thing for human beings, including Christians, to understand and desire. We live in a world that places a huge premium on personal fulfillment, on the validity of our own wants, especially as they apply to what we perceive as our own good. The kind of love that is considered desirable in our culture is rarely the love that has no other desire besides the absolute good of its object.

We Post-Modern people tend to view love as something that exists primarily to make us feel good as we make someone else feel good. This is why erotic love sometimes seems like the only kind which is depicted on our TV and movie screens today. Eros is often all about the pleasure people can find in each other through the use of each other. It tends to involve a sort of bargain. If you will sexually scratch my back then I will gladly scratch yours. While not all contemporary eroticism is purely about self-gratification much of it is, and even popular concepts of romantic love that go beyond the mere “hook-up” rarely embrace the idea of consistent and long-term sacrifice for the good of the beloved.

It is indeed impossible for fallen individuals, and difficult for redeemed ones, to fully embrace the love C.S. Lewis defined as “Agape”, the kind of love that involves deep personal cost for the ultimate benefit of its object. We crave our own security and sense of well being so much that we may even find ourselves resenting the very idea that the life our professed Lord led on earth is something we need to emulate. We would prefer to have a little bit of Jesus in us, but not so much that we cannot continue to look out for what we consider to be our own best interests.

This is beyond doubt one of the hardest “spiritual nuts” for contemporary Western Christians to crack. We spend a lot of time talking about living like Christ, but little time actually willing ourselves to die to self in order to do it, and that is because perhaps it is something we simply do not want to. What we tragically do not understand is that truly living for others is what we were divinely designed to do. It is only in entering into a “disinterested” love, which truly puts its object’s best interests ahead of our own, that we will ever live and thrive in any true sense. It is in giving that we become our true selves because God is the ultimate true Self and He, in a sense, lives to give. Somehow giving our all, through Christ, for the sake of another in turn gives us a self worth having because that self then becomes progressively identified and unified with the Self-giving God Himself.

Jesus gave His all “for the joy set before Him” a joy that is derived from seeing the redemption of a race His Father originally created in His own image. Part of possessing that image is the potential of becoming involved in the circle of giving and receiving that is manifested in the Trinity. Somehow God the Father, Son and Spirit exist in a perfect give and take of love, the original “Blessed Community.” In constantly giving to each other the Three are One and the result is perfect bliss within the Godhead. Jesus gave up everything to bring us into perfect communion with that God, the Three in One, but in giving up everything He gained something precious, a redeemed race capable of entering in some sublime way into the dance of love and joy embodied in the Trinity of which He is a part.

We persist in seeking the lesser loves with which this world is more comfortable simply because we do not understand how much more desirable it is to be a part of this divine dance. To be in this communion is to experience the blandishments of Eros (or any other partially self-centered love) pale by comparison. Apart from the agape love of God all the other loves are ultimately worthless. We were created to give our all for others so that those others, and in the end we too, might know the ultimate bliss of being like God Himself. In living this out we find ourselves belonging to Him as a mysterious extension of the blessed community He embodies.

Giving ourselves to such a love as this may be difficult, but it is supremely worth the difficulty.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The soul of the believer can enter into the sublimity of God’s ultimate reality in all its forms, in security and love, as long as the Spirit of Christ is truly leading. It is then that we can safely lose our self-consciousness in being caught up in God’s presence in such a way that He, and He alone, is our focus. Such are perhaps the most blessed moments in our lives on earth for they are, in reality, brief “real-time” experiences of the eternal existence that awaits those who love God.

If this sounds a bit mystical it is because it is just that. Some degree of specifically Christian mysticism has been part of the lives of many orthodox believers throughout the centuries. Some great saints have been gifted with more of these experiences than most, but I believe that few who have sincerely followed Jesus Christ for any significant length of time have not known something of what C.S. Lewis once called “birthday cards from Heaven.”

These transcendent moments with God can manifest themselves at any time in any place. While they often occur in corporate worship with other Christians, they just as frequently happen in solitude. They may be directly linked with the reading of Scripture (and, in fact, must not be contrary to Scripture if not to be considered suspect), but not always. They may even come with just a “reading” of nature. The natural world is a sort of portal which the Holy Spirit uses to reach many. Certainly what I like to call “direct Creation” has often been the catalyst for holy flashes of glory that I have myself experienced. Music can also carry us into the ecstasy which God sometimes grants His children. Like nature sound and song can carry the scent of the eternal and be the divinely chosen instrument for initiating such experiences.

The Lord can use these and a seemingly infinite number of other circumstances to make Himself viscerally known to us. A factory worker focusing on the things of God in the midst of his daily work can just as easily be blessed in this way as she who beholds a breathtaking sunset on a solitary mountainside. God is not limited.

He is also not limited in the kind of mystical “postcards” He sends those He loves. The ones I have experienced have often been intensely personal; I suspect this is the case with all of us who have received them. Human beings are, far more than snowflakes, unique individuals; we cannot effectively share these moments with even our closest fellow travelers because they are, in a sense, just between our Redeemer and ourselves. If we cannot share some of the moments of our deepest human intimacy, we certainly should not expect to be able to relate all aspects of such moments with our Creator. In fact some of this intimacy might be so deep that we would not share it with others even if we could.

There have always been those among our more fundamentalist brethren who would take me to task for using the term “Christian” and “mystical” in the same sentence. I have pointed out that any experience that clearly takes us away from the Spirit of the Word of God must be discerningly rejected but, for me, that is warning enough. Anyone who makes a sweepingly negative statement about transcendent visitations from the God of the Cross has probably not yet experienced one. These brethren are, of course, entirely entitled to their own opinions, but I pray that they, too, will at some point know of what I speak…for the moments I have known of mystic experience with my Lord have been the best of my life.