Year: 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Sometimes we need a refuge from our own lives. We may become so overwhelmed by the distractions of this world, and so troubled by the darkness of our own response to those distractions, that we need to have a place to go that somehow transcends everything for a while. It is then when a visceral experience of the highest reality, God’s presence, can become that desperately needed sanctuary, a retreat during times of deep stress in our pilgrimage through this life.

All of us tend to get caught up in situations that appear to be all-important and permanent when in actuality they are unimportant (or at least less important) and temporal. We may experience oppressive fits of anxiety, or obsession, or dark desire that seem for a while to be all we know or ever will know. These are internal conditions of the soul but they are often, perhaps always, triggered by the external condition of our present earthly home. Environmental stimuli are always vying for our attention and, in this fallen place, that stimuli can fill our vision with things we know in our hearts we must ultimately transcend. However, beyond that, we also know that in the meantime we often must find some safe harbor to enter for a while where they cannot come. The only place such a harbor is to be found is in the Lord and the things of the Lord. We most often seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness when the insanity of the world becomes too much for us to bear. We need some relief.

This relief manifests itself in many ways, but all are connected with an awareness of Christ. We may enter into this awareness through reading Scripture or through prayer, through worship or meditation or fellowship. We may come to know a sweet release without even consciously looking for it, such as when the Holy Spirit simply makes Himself known at some random, unexpected moment when we are doing nothing “spiritual” at all. However it occurs we know it is of Him in a moment because we come to a place of peace that we never knew before we knew the Prince of Peace.

Nothing is as much to be desired as entering into this condition, in getting to this location. Nothing is more fulfilling and refreshing than being recaptured by His love in real time and brought to what U2’s Bono has called “that other place”. Sometimes what we experience is as familiar as the spiritual equivalent of slipping on an old, warm garment that has comforted us many times in the past. At other moments our encounter with the ultimate reality of the Spirit is something new and exciting, a revelation of His goodness that we have never known before. In either case the things of this world really do become “strangely dim”. The eyes of our hearts have been refocused on what really matters and we are released from whatever it was that held our attention to our own hurt.

Such times are the spiritual birthright of every child of God. While we cannot make them permanent on this side of Heaven we can remember them when we find ourselves once again caught up in the distractions and troubles of this life. The “lesser realities” that compete for our earthly attention need not dominate our souls. Moreover, as we grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord, we can experience His reality in ever deeper ways and for longer periods as well. That, too, is our birthright, the fruit of our continuing sanctification.

How unspeakably blessed we are to have available to us this ultimate refuge, one that is as real and enduring as the very heartbeat of our risen and eternal Savior.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Because the only recorded words of Jesus Christ are found in the words of scripture we have a natural tendency to develop our idea of who He is based solely on those words. If we desire to get a more complete picture of the Son of Man we may also do well to look at the context of His close relationships with his disciples, relationships that are also clearly evident in the Gospels.

Many, if not most, of the known words of Christ are related to His profound teachings. The inspired writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are greatly interested in setting forth an accurate picture of the Man in relation to His mission. This is because the most important things that we need to know are found in what Jesus said when He was acting in the role of Preacher, Prophet and coming King. All of those roles involved communicating sublime truth to a human race desperately in need of both that truth and, more importantly, the One who embodied it.

But there had to be another side of Jesus.

He could not have spent his three years with the Twelve speaking only magnificent and glorious words to their awed ears. These men were the traveling companions of their Teacher. Beyond that they were also His friends. It seems safe to conclude that Jesus also spoke to His apostles as any man would to his friends. That would appear to mean that sometimes, perhaps even the majority of the time, their conversations were casual. Whether they were discussing the routine events of the day or where to eat or the prevailing weather they must have spoken to each other with the informal banter characteristic of people who are close to one another. Perhaps they shared in the laughter of impromptu humor. Could it even be that the Lord and Savior of humankind occasionally entertained his disciples with a good joke?

After years steeped in the New Testament, with its frequent admonitions and exhortations, devout Christians can be forgiven if they find themselves a bit uncomfortable with the idea of “the casual Jesus”. After all we are called to reverence the Son of God above all things, and well we should, but that said the One we worship was and is both fully God and fully human and part of being fully human is the simple warmth and intimacy of friendship. We do not always speak to our friends in formal language suffused with deep meaning, far from it. In fact we rarely communicate this way and maybe that is what enables such language to have such a profound impact when we do use it. Is it unreasonable to think that it was the same with the human Jesus?

If this is true than it is also logical to assume that the Gospel writers knew that the most important words to record from Christ’s earthly ministry were the words He used when He was making a greatly important point. The fact that they did not try to convey three years of casual banter on the road stems from the need to distill the words of Christ which would have that most “profound impact” on the fallen race He came to save. However this does not mean that casual banter was not part and parcel of the experience of following Jesus in the flesh.

Today some believers may believe that we have somehow cheapened the value of the One we worship by making Him more “accessible” as a human being. I submit that this is only the case if we forget that the One who truly is our friend is simultaneously also our Master, the Ruler of the universe. If we know Him first and foremost in a spirit of reverence for His Deity we can then also safely know Him as a human being, not a pious caricature of one. It may actually enhance our knowledge of, and love for, the God-Man to think of him walking with His twelve friends along a dusty Judean road telling a humorous tale and joining in the laughter His Father designed all men to enjoy. The only thing such a thought “cheapens” is our false piety and, if that is the case, let it be so. What really matters is strengthening our true connection to the One who became one of us. Pondering the full-breadth of the humanity of Jesus Christ might do just that.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Proverbs 14:12 (NIV)

There are sometimes voices and impulses within us that speak with such seeming truth that we are unable to see them for what they really are-poison to the soul. These voices and impulses can take many forms and usually are deeply tied with desires we have, which may be conscious or subconscious and either good or bad. These desires sometimes call on us to heed them with a deeply compelling urgency, yet we may not be fully aware of the sway they hold over us nor the fact that our hearts and minds react to them by coming up with unhealthy ideas on how they may be quenched.

These ideas do not always register with us as being unhealthy. The fallen human heart is deceitful, we are told by the prophet Jeremiah, and more than capable of fooling us into thinking good evil and, more importantly for our purpose here, evil good. This has been true throughout human history and perhaps at no time so prevalent as today. We live in a society that says if it feels right, do it. Perhaps more significantly contemporary culture increasingly tells us that if it seems right it usually is right. This tendency should not be too surprising in an age which has come to largely reject the idea of an objective and absolute code of moral behavior, one that has been revealed to us by a transcendent God, in favor of making self-centered man the measure of all things.

The result of this rejection should be increasingly obvious to believers in that God, but this is not always the case. We (the author included) are only as likely to recognize it as we are able to stay close to the truth through disciplines such as consistent Bible study, sincere prayer and real Christian fellowship. All of these can be conduits for the direction of the Holy Spirit. Our own discernment of right and wrong is inviolably linked to such practices and without such discernment we find ourselves more likely to rationalize illicit ideas about how to avoid pain and/or seek pleasure. Part of this rationalization is a result of tapping into the deceit of the flesh without knowing (and often not wanting to know) that we have done so. As a result, we come up with notions on how we should live that seem right but put us on a course of self-deception that can distance us from God without our knowing it until the damage is done.

One example of this self-deception that is particularly prevalent in the Church today is the increasing tendency of believers to come to the conclusion that, at any cost, “God wants me to be happy.” This sounds good to people who are not very conversant with the biblical truth that in a fallen world we may have to endure pain, even long periods of pain, for an ultimate good that will not be realized in this life but the next. This creates a sort of spiritual Myopia which leads to thinking that we must be happy now because the now is all there is. This might seem like an error that could be easily corrected by hearing any number of Sunday sermons but the aforementioned tendency of our flesh to rationalize sin, in order to meet a consciously or unconsciously felt need, is powerfully present.

If you doubt this “happiness now” spirit is growing in the Church today you only need to look at one glaring example, the increase in our divorce, and re-marriage statistics in the last half-century. It is amazing how many today will break a covenant they made before God and their spouse and wreak destruction upon their children, because they have decided they have made a “mistake” in marrying the husband or wife of their youth (This is often helped along by adulterous “true love” for someone new that promises the renewal of the intrinsically transitory romantic bliss they once knew with their first partner during the dating period and early in the union.)

The state of marriage in the Church is obvious evidence for feel-good solutions that end in misery, but it is surely not the only one. We also see it in our materialism, our entertainment choices, our politics, and our treatment of people both inside and outside the Christian community, among other things.

The question then obviously begged is how we avoid self-deceptions that feel and, thus, seem right? The answer is largely found in pursuing the spiritual disciplines mentioned earlier, namely Bible study, prayer and fellowship. The last of these is a discipline that is increasingly ignored in our hyper-busy and self-centered age. We cannot meet with each other for two hours on a Sunday morning and think this is being in authentic biblical community. We must consciously endeavor to live as much of lives out in common with our fellow believers as possible. Within that mandate we also need to be intentional about pursuing good advice from more than one person for “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14, KJV) It is also desirable to find an older, more experienced Christian, with an obvious level of holiness in living, to be a primary spiritual advisor. This often is found in the person of a pastor or Christian counselor.

If we pursue the disciplines, including these relational ones, we will be better armed against the lies that come out of the flesh (that part of us that remains which leads us into error and self-destructive action even after we have truly come to Christ, and which will remain a present challenge until the day we go to be with Him.) For all this to work we must remain vigilant in our own pursuit of sanctification while consciously depending on the Holy Spirit and His power. It is in this dependence that sinful error masquerading as truth will no longer be able to fool us into seeking the “way that appears to be right” but ends in death.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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There are times in the life of a believer when everything seems wrong. God seems lost to us and we fear for our souls. These are the moments when we may cry, as both David and the Son of David did, “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?” These are also the moments when our Adversary is close by, repeatedly telling us that we have forever cut ourselves off from the love and mercy of our Creator and Redeemer. There is no better liar than the “Father of lies” and it is easy in this world, his temporary domain, to believe what he so incessantly tells us about ourselves. There is perhaps no mission that the Enemy of the human race undertakes with more relish and energy than accusing Christians of not really being sons and daughters of the most high God.

Sometimes, though not always, believers truly have given Satan something to use against them during these times. We all continue to sin in thought and deed and this is the source of his most effective ammunition against us. Scripture tells us that if we confess our sin and forsake it God will forgive us through the shed blood of Christ. The enemy counters either by saying our sin is unforgivable or, alternatively, that it has been committed just one too many times. He wants us to believe that, beyond being guilty of sinning, we have also been permanently given over to sin. Because we know that God hates sin He tries to make us believe that God now hates us and all too often many of us believe him.

One of the best defenses against these accusations is to remind ourselves that the Devil is a deceiver. While he does use the truths of the word of God he does so in an ultimately untruthful way. No one can distort the Scriptures like him and no one is so effective at using them out of context. Every slick human propagandist throughout the centuries who has twisted the truth with evil intent is but a pale imitation of the Father of lies.

The good news is that we do not have to believe this ultimate liar. Lies are dependent on truth. They have no existence except in contrast to it and when a deeper revelation of truth is brought to our consciousness by the Spirit even the most subtle and convincing of them can be disarmed. God is truth and truth came first. It always prevails in the end because He always prevails in the end. If we choose, with God’s help, to consistently believe this the Devil will ultimately lose every battle against our souls fought in the realm of accusation. The truth embodied by the Lord’s continuing grace, love and forgiveness in the lives of His struggling children can counter the intent of Satan’s lies every time.

It is also vitally important that we remember that our enemy’s days are numbered. It may be that, in these end times, he is throwing everything he possibly can into his war against our souls because he senses that his own moment of destruction is coming. For this reason the Devil, for all his wiles and derived strength, is desperate. Even his greatest displays of power in this increasingly depraved world belie the inevitable and rapid approach of his fate. In the meantime our call is to stand on the truth of our Father’s Word. That Word assures us that the day is coming when the conquering Son of God will free us from Satan’s accusations forever by freeing us from Satan’s presence forever.

We need only to trust and hold on to this promise. Our all-conquering Lord will do the rest.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Mortality is a dirty word for citizens of the 21^st century West. We do not like to think about the fact that death comes to all human beings. In fact we usually do everything in our power to push this reality out of our minds. Our entire culture at times seems to be living in willful ignorance of the brevity of our time in this world. The cult of youth that assails us every time we pick up a magazine or turn on the television reminds us that we are ever trying to look backwards and avoid thinking about the inevitability of death.

This is not much less true in our Christian subculture either. How many sermon series are preached these days about preparing for the inevitable end of our physical lives? I’d venture that many Western believers would consider such a series morbid. It might well be seen as an uncomfortable and unwanted intrusion into the incessant search for complete spiritual fulfillment on this side of Heaven that sometimes passes for authentic spirituality today.

This attitude of avoidance is not present in scripture or, for that matter, in the writings of faithful believers for the majority of Christian history. For most of the Church’s existence the Christian was encouraged to contemplate his or her death and contemplate it regularly. More than one respected saint in the past two thousand years counseled the faithful to put aside a period of time each day to think about dying. This is another idea that brings an immediate sense of discomfort to many of us moderns. Think about dying everyday? How depressing!

The fact is that wrestling with (and ultimately coming to terms with) our mortality is a healthy part of living in reality and understanding our position as fallen creatures, redeemed though we are. Death entered the world through our sin and the truth is we now exist in bodies that are going to die. Barring the imminent return of the Lord we will all breathe our last some day and leave behind everyone and everything we have known during our time here. Reconciling ourselves to this fact is not only a requirement of living in truth; it is also a potentially positive way to further re-orient our lives towards God.

First and foremost it is vital to remember that the One we profess to follow Himself tasted physical death. We are destined to share in that part of His experience whether we like it or not. The hope of resurrection is a wonderful thing, but resurrection requires something to be resurrected from. We are blessed beyond measure to be spared from the spiritual death Jesus tasted on our behalf, but our bodies will know the temporal penalty of our sin. We will all die. It is an aspect of true wisdom to be prepared for the day that happens and part of being prepared for that day is contemplating it.

Secondly we need perspective on what our real priorities should be in our present temporal existence. Such perspective can be provided by meditating on mortality. It is amazing how rapidly people who discover they are terminally ill (and aren’t we all?) find out what really matters to them. Suddenly all their worldly concerns just seem to evaporate. And what invariably is left? Only two things, relationship and legacy; their relationships with God and others and their legacy in the sense of finishing whatever work God gave them to do in this life. Nothing else much matters anymore.

The truth is that, as biblical Christians, we should be able to have much of that perspective now, whether we have 70 years of life ahead of us or 7 months. But this cannot happen without keeping our transience here on Earth consciously in mind, at least from time to time. Such consciousness is not morbid, it is blessed. It is blessed because God always honors our willingness to see things as they are in the light of Who He is. What we physically are is mortal. Who He is is the Redeemer of that part of us which, praise His Name, is not mortal, our eternal souls.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Trust comes hard. We do not naturally trust God. To put our lives in His hands is a decision we must make, and it often is not the easiest of decisions.

The result of the Fall is a dangerous world inhabited by sometimes dangerous people. One danger that every human being faces is the possibility of betrayal. At one time or another most, if not all, of us have been betrayed by someone we once trusted. We have known the pain that comes when someone we loved and looked up to has sinned against us, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Beyond that we have been betrayers ourselves, hurting those whom we should never hurt because it is in our fallen nature to do so.

These betrayals we suffer, or make others to suffer, cloud our view of life. Human beings learn to distrust. With age idealism often gives way to cynicism. Whatever degree of innocence we had as children is progressively lost as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil teach us that people are just not safe, not trustworthy.

Then we meet Jesus. If we truly come to know Him our perception begins to change.   Over time, as He proves Himself faithful to us, some of the cynicism starts to fade. New Christians slowly come to realize that, even if people remain unfaithful, one Person will never betray them. This often does not happen overnight, especially if we have been deeply betrayed by someone very close to us. It is a sometimes slow moving process, this learning how to trust again, slow and not always steady. Others continue to betray us in big and small ways and we do the same to them, though hopefully not with the regularity we did before becoming believers. It often seems like two steps up and one step back as we daily seek to put our trust in God.

Every day trust issues arise. Every day we must make the decision to put those issues in His hands. It isn’t easy at first, but His ongoing faithfulness makes it easier as we learn to rely on that faithfulness. Thank God that He is willing to help us increasingly trust Him over a lifetime, knowing that it often takes that long for old wounds to heal. Thank God that His love helps us to make the right decision each time we are called to trust Him.

Thank God that He is trustworthy.