Month: August 2016

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

What is the greater miracle, creating something good out of nothing, or bringing something beautiful out of ugliness? We know God does both yet we seldom think about which is the more profound act. The Lord creates and the Lord redeems, and we praise Him on both counts, but I wonder if the latter action is not the more profound of the two.

The nothingness out of which God made the universe by sheer creative fiat was apparently morally neutral. In the Genesis account we have no sense of the “darkness upon the face of the deep” being darkness in the evil sense we see applied to the word later in Scripture. Deity chose to will that the void be filled by the wonders of the Heavens and the Earth, but the void apparently had neither positive nor negative value. It simply was.

Spiritual redemption, by contrast with physical creation, entails taking something wicked and making it into something good. Redemption involves the recovery of a fallen soul. “Recovery”, however, does not adequately cover the depth of divine redemption. We must also use the word “re-creation” because this is, in effect, what God does with a sinful soul. He re-creates it into something beautiful, something of eternal value. Through the blood of His Son He somehow transforms darkness, this time truly darkness in the negative definition of the term, into light. The history of the Faith is replete with accounts of men and women whose lives once reflected evil in the extreme, yet became profoundly different people after encountering and embracing the Person of Jesus Christ.

The transformation of a wicked heart may seem to pall by comparison with the establishment of the planets and stars, but I wonder if we see things rightly in this regard. As awesome as the natural creation is (and we dare not trivialize its grandeur in the least) there is something about the alteration of a soul given over to moral depravity, a soul worthy of Hell that is simply astonishing. Salvation may seem to work in the comparatively small physical arena of the human heart, but in the realm of the spirit its operation might just eclipse the creation of the largest galaxy.

We know that the physical universe is amazing, but the grace that turns moral darkness to light may be more amazing still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Sometimes we fear that the very thing we most need from God is something we do not want. Even worse we may feel that either we will never be able to want it or that God will not give it to us even if we were to truly want it.

I felt this myself recently when I came to wonder whether I truly want to be surrendered completely to Him. I also found myself wondering how I could get to the place of wanting such surrender. This coincided with the unpleasant feeling that if I even needed to ask such questions after 25 years as a Christian then I must be in bad shape. After all, if a quarter century of professing to follow Christ has not produced this desire (except perhaps during fleeting moments of devotion) then when can I ever expect to have it?

The byproduct of such thinking is a terrible kind of fear and I’ve known quite a lot of this type of fear during my life. It would be one thing if it felt like it was some kind of divine discipline, designed to bring me to a truer, deeper kind of faith. Unfortunately such moments all too often seem more like some kind of punishment for my lack of faith. It just feels more like rejection then it does conviction.

Why does it have to be this way for some of us? Is it because we have become so used to being rejected by imperfect, fallen human beings in our past? Do we prefer the misery of doubt and fear to taking the chance of giving ourselves fully to a God who we mistakenly think may be the next one to reject us? If so we have yet to realize that God does not turn away those who sincerely seek him though Christ. We are still thinking of God as just another abuser in our lives. This is the lie too many of us sometimes live our lives by.

The bottom line is that God’s persistent grace, mercy and love is the only hope those of us who fear Him in the worst sense of the word have for overcoming that fear. We desperately need to continue to be persistent in praying that God will help us come to realize that our wrong belief is what makes and keeps things so hard for us, not Him. It is our doubts about His character that drives us to work so hard for His acceptance that we cannot live from His acceptance. If we have sincerely asked Jesus Christ to be our Lord and Savior then at some point we have to stop doing what we think or feel necessary to make Him love us and start receiving that love in simple faith. The main thing which produces the desire to surrender the parts of us we hold back from God is the experiencing of a grace, mercy and love that we have never known from others, and have begun to know from Him.

I’d like to say that I have come to this place as I write these words but I know I haven’t. I hope that being honest about this might help some of you who are in the same place I am to at least know that you are not alone. Leave the “super-spirituality” to the “super-spiritual”. Those who consider themselves immune to the kind of struggle I’m describing probably cannot relate to any of what I have just expressed, but I know many of you know exactly what it is of which I speak. It is for you alone that I write these words and offer this one thought:

Let go of your wrong fear of God, but please, please don’t let go of Him and remember that it is His perfect love, not your tortured effort, that makes that possible.

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

To be a slave to love is not to be slave at all because there is no slavery in truly selfless love. When we are possessed by it we are, paradoxically, set free. This truth is important to remember when we read in the scriptures about being “slaves” to Christ. It is only love that authentically compels us to give ourselves totally to Him, and in that self-giving is our liberation.

The word “slavery” has a nearly universal negative connotation in the 21^st Century. When we think of it in America we are naturally drawn to our corporate memory of the enslavement of blacks that existed in our country prior to the Civil War. It is a part of our past as a nation that the vast majority of us find morally repulsive. As a result, when it comes to personal liberty in the worldly sense, we have been consciously at the forefront of securing it for others, both at home and abroad, for much of our history since then; most of the time this has been a good thing.

The problem that stems from our glorification of legitimate civil liberties is that we have a tendency to assume that any giving up of our personal “sovereignty” to another will harm us. We chafe at the idea of belonging to another unless it is on absolutely equal terms, such as in earthly romantic love. This frame of mind and heart is also present among many believers. We have been conditioned by the radical individualism of our culture, often without even being consciously aware of it.

The result is multiple generations of Christians who keep God at a safe distance. There are those of us who sing the hymn “I Surrender All” while simultaneously knowing in our hearts that what we ought to be singing is more like “I Surrender Some”. The idea of voluntarily making Him the true Lord and Master of every aspect of our lives deeply disturbs us. It runs contrary to our desire to not be a slave to any one at any time.

So is there hope for we modern Western Christians? Are we condemned to keep the rightful Owner of our souls at arm’s length and possibly forfeit our relationship with Him altogether? Not necessarily. The answer comes in knowing the attributes of God or, more specifically, one: His infinite love for us.

I would venture to say that most, if not all, true Christians have experienced firsthand the reality of this love. These are the moments when we have viscerally come to know just what our Savior did at Calvary, and why, and for who. Such moments are beyond description. Perhaps the best way to relate these times of exultation is simply to say that we have been touched by the love of God, a love we have never known from anyone else nor ever will. Ten seconds of the received love of Christ is enough to undo us, to make us realize that we have been fools to want anything other than Him, the One who perfectly pursues the best possible outcome for our lives with a singular passion, He is, in short, the Lover of our souls

At such moments “slavery” to such a God does not feel like bondage, it feels like the greatest thing we could possibly imagine, and more than even that. We find ourselves wanting it, desperately. We know that we were made to receive this love and give it in return. We were made to enjoy it, to enjoy Him, forever.

These moments may be fleeting, but they whet our appetite for more and as we learn to seek Christ with all our hearts such moments continue to come, pointing the way towards final consummation on the day we stand before Him. We grow progressively deeper in love with our God and we really do come to surrender all to Him in love. We want to be His “slaves” because that is one of the ways we can love Him in return, by becoming truly His in every way. We surrender our lives to Him, not with reluctance, but with surpassing joy and suddenly slavery doesn’t seem like anything so much as union with our Beloved, our heart’s deepest desire.

The phrase “a slave to Christ” becomes not a curse, but an expression of the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We are now liberated to dwell in the pure light of His love in the deepest sense and in our “slavery” we have become profoundly free of all the things that kept us from that love.

And this is the truest freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

When human beings separate their existence from God, they separate their existence from meaning in any ultimate sense. This is why existential angst is the natural byproduct of secularism.

Apart from God, all of the things that we count on to give our lives meaning are temporal and therefore temporary. None will continue past the end of our physical existence, and many will be taken from us long before that happens. As a race we have always longed for the transcendent permanence of something or someone. This is often true on a conscious level, and I would argue that it is always true on an unconscious one.

Even as an atheist, I knew this longing. The world and all it contained in the 80 some odd years I might be expected to experience it was not enough. For me this fact was mostly unconscious in the earlier years of my life. The longing was present, but I could not define it or even express it very cogently. It mostly manifested itself in a feeling I sometimes knew. Perhaps some piece of music or natural scene caused me to gaze into the distance and feel that there had to be more to existence than what my senses could deliver. It also showed itself in my pursuit of the things of this world looking for some kind of happiness or joy, which eventually proved to be futile.

One of the reasons those worldly quests as a young secular humanist turned out to be futile was that even at the same time I sought and experienced them I had an increasingly debilitating sense of meaninglessness in the “here and now” of my human existence. The lack of something ultimately true and permanent in my life was slowly driving me to despair although, at the time, I could not have expressed the reality of this aspect of my state of being very well either. Today I would say that there existed in me an unasked-for desire for something I could not obtain materially but could no longer truly live without as well. It was a huge part of what led me to nearly self-destruct in my early 20’s.

The answer which came to me before that became my fate was one that I had not considered except in the negative sense of being sure I did not want it. This was a belief in, and relationship with, a transcendent yet personal God. The full story of how that came to be cannot be told here (although I have written at length about it elsewhere). Suffice it to say that I finally consciously came to know what, or actually Who, I was missing. When I asked for this “Who” to help me He made Himself known to me in such a sublime and powerful way that my life was never the same. “He” was the God of the Cross.

I now knew why I existed and for Whom. I knew that the Ultimate Meaning I had unconsciously, and finally consciously, tried to find was undeniably real. It was the self-existent and eternal answer to everything I could possibly conceive and desire (and, as it turned out and continues to turn out, much that I could not yet conceive).What I obtained at that moment, and have had ever since, is an existential “Bottom Line.” I have had a myriad of difficulties and pains in life in the ensuing years, but the agony of meaninglessness has never been one of them.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Beyond this, I would add that that we were also made for the Maker of that other world, our present world, and all worlds. It is only in coming to know this eternal and infinite truth that existential angst can be replaced with the certainty there is an ultimate meaning for our existence as human beings.

 

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

When God’s peace comes into our lives, it can sometimes be difficult for us to accept. For those whose Christian experience has known more times of strife, doubt and fear than of calm, assurance and encouragement, it may be challenging to rest in the blessing and favor of God when it finally becomes real to us. The peace of Christ may actually feel alien to believers who have been perpetually striving to keep their spiritual heads above water.

Only the most Pollyanna among us insist on maintaining the erroneous belief that the lifelong walk of faith does not include, for all of God’s children, times of great personal struggle. Who can deny that even the greatest “heroes” of our faith knew periods of darkness that stretched them to the seeming limits of their endurance? If the Christian life were inherently serene why would the Bible memorialize the details of the deep trials of the saints in both the Old and New Testaments?

Perhaps the most afflicted believers are those who have known severe abuse during their pre-conversion experience and who possess a constitutional tendency towards the melancholy. They are also often among those who take their faith walk with the greatest seriousness. For these individuals it may be that only a lifelong pilgrimage of healing will slowly open them to the deepest blessings of the authentic Christian walk.

One of these deep blessings is the experience of “the peace that passes understanding” (Philippians 4.7) which Jesus promises to those who come to know Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23, 24).This is the peace that comes despite circumstances, not because of them. It is a profound rest from all the anxieties that plague us even though the circumstantial sources of those anxieties may still remain present in our lives. It is not the absence of negative things in our lives, but rather a transcendence of them through the presence of the Spirit of Christ.

Such a transcendent manifestation of God’s peace may not come until many years into our Christian experience. Again, this is especially true if we have deep “grooves” of negativity in our hearts and minds from earlier traumatic experiences, combined with an inherently “heavy nature.” For us, periods of knowing the peace that passes understanding may be few and far between, especially in the early days of our faith.

When, after years of perseverance in belief, we finally begin to more consistently know the serenity of a heart progressively surrendered to Christ, it may initially feel unnatural to us. After all, most of our Christian lives have been marked by long stretches of tumult and pain. It may seem that real, enduring peace is too good to be true! We might even find ourselves resisting it and retreating back into the “unease” to which we are accustomed.

Although we assert that we want to know this new blessing, we also dread that if we give ourselves over to it, it may disappear and leave us more bereft of comfort than ever before. Some of us may go so far as to unconsciously sabotage this increase in our well-being, proactively striking against it before it has a chance to damage us further through its departure.

This fear of accepting God’s renewal of our hearts and minds is spiritually irrational; the Bible clearly states that God longs to give us His peace as part of our inheritance as His children (John 14:27). Of course we are often irrational beings and, beyond that, many of us have been damaged by others from whom we once derived a certain sense of peace. For us, learning to accept the true peace of Christ is a process, and one that may have been impeded up until this day by unhealed wounds deep in our souls.

The best advice for those who can relate to this spiritual state of affairs is to continue steadfastly in holding on to God’s promise of ultimate peace while simultaneously learning to relax when it begins to manifest itself. In time the sovereign grace of God will begin to fill in those grooves of negativity with His healing presence, and enduring peace will start to gain a blessed upper hand in our hearts. In the meantime we need to persevere in the belief that His love always finds a way. Eventually, progressively, the divine peace we desperately crave will dawn in the deepest part of our being….and there it can remain.