Month: December 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Even during this season I’m not sure we who call ourselves Christ-followers  give much thought to the profound event that we are about to celebrate, the miracle that exists at the very center of our faith. The Advent on earth of the Universal God in human form is a mystery both blessed and sublime. We are all missing out spiritually if we do not take time now, or at any time of the year for that matter, to ponder the transcendent reality of God becoming a man.

No other religion in the world puts forth the idea of a Supreme Being so willing to identify with His deeply fallen human creation as to literally become one of them. That He would do so out of love because only such an “incarnation” would make possible our rescue from spiritual death becomes for us an incredibly sweet and compelling truth, if we but ponder it for a while. It is mind-boggling, yes, but even though we cannot completely comprehend the full ramifications of our Lord becoming a human being we can apprehend it in such a way as to open a door to one of the deepest blessings we can know in our Christian walk.

Try to meditate for a time on the reality that we belong to a God who so loved us as to become one of us to make that very “belonging” possible. What an indescribable descent must it have been for One who is infinite, eternal and uncaused Being. I once wrote that it is somewhat like a human being becoming a flea to save a world of fleas, but that barely begins to cover the magnitude of the descent we now consider. Along with the Resurrection itself His Advent is the miracle of all earthly ages.

Yet do not only use your intellect in your quest to experience the meaning of Advent, use your heart as well for this is nothing if not “an affair of the heart.” How can our hearts not fall in love with Immanuel, “God with us”? Christmas testifies to the beginning of a new opportunity for human intimacy with God, an intimacy with God as man. How can we remain unmoved by a Holy God, One “Wholly Other” as a German theologian once described his innate separation from us, becoming one of us? Just the fact that the Son of God became also the Son of Man is enough, in my opinion, to make Christianity the most compelling belief system on the planet. No one has a God like ours, no one, and it is Jesus, the God-Man who makes this so.

There is only one thing more compelling than the birth of Christ. That is the reality that the God who arrived on earth as one fully human over two-thousand years ago then proceeded to go to the cross and defeat death for what were now His fellow human beings as well as His creation. Contemplate that as well. He made us but because of Christmas He could also die for us….as one of us.

But then that part of the story is for another holiday (or more accurately another “Holy Day”) a few months from now.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We are far more likely to do wrong when we are keeping both God and others who truly love us at a distance. When we unhealthily isolate ourselves we do unhealthy things. Our relationship with the Lover and lovers of our soul is the very strength that keeps us from destructive and self-destructive actions. As beings that are designed for relationship it is impossible for this to be otherwise.

Why do we isolate to begin with? Often the answer is found in our desire to avoid pain. Relational pain has many guises. Some of this pain is actually God-ordained and part of our sanctification. This is the pain of the encounter with the holy. Other pain is the result of the evil that dwells in both others and us and it gratifies only the Enemy of our souls. An example of the former is the discomfort that comes from encountering a perfect God in the midst of our own imperfection and knowing the correcting rod of His discipline. An example of the latter is the misery of received abuse, be it physical, emotional or sexual.

Whatever the source and nature of this pain the temptation is to withdraw into the perceived fortress of ourselves. We depart from the company of God and the company of human beings in a vain attempt to escape the agents of our hurt. This is the result of our continuing inclination towards evil. No one who has reached heaven and been purified of all sin desires anything but perfect intimacy with God and those who share in His paradise. It is only our ingrained desire for autonomy and safety on our own terms, combined with the continued difficulty of living in a profoundly fallen world that causes us to flee from divine and human company.

When we choose to run from relational pain we cut ourselves off from the very answer to human evil, love. No one can love or be loved in isolation. This may appear obvious since love, of course, implies relationships. However this apparently self-evident reality sometimes eludes us, especially when some of  the love we have experienced in this life seems imperfect at best and damaging at worst. At times we think we’d be better off alone than involved in something that feels less like love and more like rejection or neglect.

Yet real love exists. God’s love for us is perfect. Human love is not but it still exists, is divinely rooted, and is indispensable to our well-being. Without both kinds of love we have no motivation to resist sin and the Devil (a “loner” if there ever was one) takes full advantage of its lack. Temptation is defused by the experiencing of healthy relationships. It is amplified by isolation.

It is imperative that, despite its challenges, we who call ourselves Christians persist in the pursuit of deep connection with God and with fellow human beings. The quest for intimacy in our earthly life is sometimes difficult, but it is not optional. Without it we become increasingly given over to evil, and thereby to death. Since sin thrives in the absence of love, love must be our refuge…and love requires nearness to an object other than ourselves.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Perfect love casts out fear, not perfect doctrine. Today there are some prominent evangelicals who appear to give the impression that having a watertight, systematic theology is the most important task of every true believer. For them security is found in crossing every “t” and dotting every “i” in the interpretation of Scripture. While it is no doubt true that belief in biblical inerrancy requires us to seek and hold onto sound doctrine our creeds do not save us, Jesus Christ does.

Cognitive, propositional approaches to the faith have their place. We are to love the Lord our God with, among other things, our minds. A Christianity that has little regard for the truths of the Bible can hardly be called Christianity at all. The relativism of our age surely has invaded the Church and to ignore this fact is to risk becoming salt that has lost its proverbial saltiness. This having been said right doctrine is still a terrible substitute for right relationship if right doctrine is all you have.

Relationship is at the core of true religion. The Pharisees had the law but they had no relationship with the God of that law. The heart of Christianity is found in the reality that God was willing to go to an incredibly great length to make it possible to once again be in deep communion with His finest creation. Joy at the prospect of the restoration of the human race to God’s family was one of the things that helped Jesus to endure the physical and spiritual trauma of the cross.

There are many hindrances to God’s desire for that restoration to be realized. Sin takes multiple forms; some are obvious, some less so. One of the latter more subtle forms of sin might be called “doctrinolatry”. It can be defined as a focus on doctrine so extreme and dogmatic that knowing right doctrine subtly becomes more important than knowing Christ. People who fall into this error lose the joy of their salvation because they lose their first love. They reject the primacy of knowing and loving God for the false comfort of a system of thought which seeks to put Him in a box they themselves may have designed. In doing so they reject mystery for a presumptuous intellectual mastery and, without even knowing it, thwart the Spirit’s work in their hearts. In some extreme cases it may even prevent someone from truly coming to know Christ at all.

Lovers do not analyze and tabulate one another. They experientially know and deeply enjoy each other. Lovers do not spend too much time reading about the structure of relationships at the expense of actually having one. For true believers this may seem like stating the obvious but when it comes to the ultimate Lover, the Lover of our souls, we often forget that our relationship with Him is the greatest love affair in the universe!

By all means study Scripture and examine what it says in order to understand that which God gives us to understand about ultimate reality. By all means study sound Christian works of theology through the centuries. But in doing so never forget that it is the God behind those Scriptures and that sound theology we need to know and love first and foremost, not our finite intellectual interpretation of that God.