September 2016 – sheaoakley.com

I have sometimes imagined a hole through which I must pass in order to ultimately arrive in the Kingdom of God. This “passageway to Heaven”, I have discovered, has a tendency to shift in size in my mind’s eye as I live out my days on Earth. As I have walked on in my Christian life of the past 25 years it has sometimes seemed wide-open to me. Far more often, though, the size of this opening that always lies ahead has appeared small, sometimes very small. At times it has given the appearance of being almost completely closed to me. Perhaps you too have sensed such a hole in your own spiritual life. If so you may have wondered, as I have, what causes its inconstancy.

The recurring theme of the Bible is the absolute inability of any human being to attain to Heaven by self-effort. We are told repeatedly in chapter after chapter and verse after verse that any attempt to gain the salvation of our souls through pulling ourselves up by our own proverbial “bootstraps” is the essence of futility. We cannot comply with the law of God. In and of ourselves we always fall short of it. In fact we fall so short of it that Isaiah 64:6 tells us our righteousness “is as filthy rags.” The only hope we have is saving faith in Jesus Christ, itself a gift of God, and a function of His “unmerited favor” better known as grace. The Christian is to enter the kingdom through the atoning blood of Christ only; not by anything we can summon up within ourselves apart from His work on the cross on our behalf.

We know this as biblical Christians….and yet we do not.

It is a constant temptation to try to live the Christian life by our own effort. We pray for grace to become more intimate with Christ and then promptly go to work to achieve that intimacy. It is enough to sometimes make us wonder if we even want what we pray for! The flesh must be crucified, not enlisted in our attempts to “be holy”, but enlist it we do and figuring out exactly how to crucify it instead eludes us and this sometimes many years into our professed Christian walk. At times we may succeed in “letting go and letting God”, hopefully with greater and greater frequency as time goes by. Still the “old man” remains and he is all about “earning salvation”, a term which is perhaps the greatest oxymoron ever conceived by fallen human beings.

This struggle between the flesh and the spirit, between offered works and received grace is, in my opinion, the cause of the perceived ever-changing size of that opening into Heaven. When we are trying to work our way to God the opening seems to shrink, but when we grow blessedly tired of working, and open ourselves to His saving grace in sanctification, it widens and, through that widened portal we bask in the light of Heaven.

Few things are more frustrating to us then working for nothing. Few things are more disturbing to our souls than losing sight of Heaven and the God who dwells there. To avoid both these things we must learn to trust Him and Him alone for our eternal well-being and that is simply not easy for us. Our pride militates against it and so does our insecurity. But if we ever hope to pass through that maddeningly variable opening we must sincerely trust that Christ and Christ alone has propped it open for us and keeps it open for us. It is only the grace made real and available by His shed blood that allows this to happen and we must embrace that grace, and Jesus Himself, as the ultimate gift of God’s love if we are ever to make it through.

There are two worlds that every human being experiences. One is the world of “objective reality,” that which is outside ourselves and independent of us. The other world might be called “subjective reality”. This is what we perceive through the eyes of our own heart. Unlike objective reality subjective reality is internal to us and thus is not always reality in the same ultimate sense (although it can be). But whether this perception is fully true in the sense of that which is subjective it expresses how we feel about ourselves and thus by definition is, if nothing else, deeply and personally meaningful to us.

In our presently fallen world there is, of course, much that is wrong both inside and outside of us. The external world we live in everyday, as well as the internal world of our hearts, has been damaged by the sin that unfortunately continues to exist on this side of Heaven. Beyond this these two worlds affect one another because what we are inside ourselves obviously influences what we do outside of ourselves and vice-versa.

In the context of our existence, then, it is a fearful thing to know that darkness continues to manifest itself in the world both within our hearts and in the world around us. Even as Christians the seeming intractability of the evil we see both within and without can be daunting in the extreme. The only thing that provides hope in this predicament is the redemptive power of God through His Son, but sometimes we tend to forget that this power addresses both the objective and subjective aspects of reality, and thus our hope may not be as complete as we need it to be.

The redemption secured on the cross by Jesus is an all-encompassing thing. The world that exists outside of us is subject to it. Someday, at the consummation of all things which will occur after the return of the Son of God; the Creation, in fact the entire Universe, will be “set right” by the omnipotent hand of the Savior. At that same time the “universe” within each redeemed human heart will also be finally set fully right. In this way absolutely nothing will be left with imperfection in the Kingdom of God. This is the promise He has made to us who are His children: both everything we see and everything we are will be transformed.

It is a wondrous thing to know that God will right every wrong in this complete sense. For some of us it is easier to imagine Him redeeming the world around us then it is to imagine Him redeeming us because we perceive our hearts as being somehow the harder thing to change but, blessedly, this is not true. God almighty can and will change both because, for the believer, everything within and without is destined to ultimately yield to the purpose and power of His love in Christ.

Month: September 2016

An Inconstant Passageway?

God and the Two Worlds