Month: January 2017

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“How poor are those who have no patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” –Shakespeare

One of the most enduring proverbs in the popular mind is “time heals all wounds”. The problem with this idea is that time is not the primary agent in healing. If that were true there would be no bitter old people and unfortunately quite a few such individuals do exist in the world. In truth it is the grace of God, whether it is the common type given to all human beings or the sanctifying kind given only to His children, which is the agent that binds up emotional wounds. That God most often cures our ills over time is, to some degree, incidental.

However, even when so qualified, healing most often does take time.

No doubt God can and sometimes does heal in a moment. As an omnipotent Being it stands to reason that he must have this ability. If He so willed all resolution of our problems, large and small, could be accomplished by Him instantaneously. However common human experience teaches that this is rarely the case. To our frequent frustration God uses time, sometimes long periods of time, in His healing of our souls.

The obvious reason for this is that He wishes to teach us the virtue of patience. Few particularly want to hear this. Learning patience is one of the harder tasks of the spiritual life, particularly in a day and age when instant gratification is incessantly advertised as our right. We also have trouble figuring out why God so values time when He Himself is not ultimately subject to sequential existence, but the Author of it. Why, we ask, should anything have to wait if He, as Master of time, can simply abrogate it?

There is mystery here. We cannot completely answer the question of why grass can grow in a week, while a Giant Redwood takes hundreds of years. Both grass and Redwood are created by the same God; but the solidity of the tree, its beauty and majesty is obviously not comparable to a blade of grass. Neither is its worth. The worth of things is often connected with time in God’s economy of creation and, for that matter, re-creation. The redemption of Humankind is no exception.

Beyond this the development of patience is simply the way that we bring our fallen and thus imperfect view of time into harmony with God’s view. It is probably safe to say that in their innocence Adam and Eve had no need to learn patience because their perception of time was the same as their Creator’s. It is only the curse of the father and mother of our race which has made us hate waiting for anything. Our first parents may well have had no sense of frustration in waiting because time had not become associated with scarcity. Scarcity of time only means something to creatures that face death and death had not yet visited God’s finest creation.

So time does not heal all wounds, but time does have a role to play in that healing. This is its place in the lives of a redeemed people who have yet to experience their full and final liberation in eternity by Jesus Christ. If it seems imperfect that is a residue of our fallenness and its resulting distortion of God’s purposes.

But that purpose will be made known to us in God’s time, when all things are summed up in our Lord….and time itself ceases to be.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The Bible tells us that God works in us, that we cannot do anything without him. Yet, it also declares that we have a role to play, responsibilities to accept and work to do. One of the most difficult challenges of the Christian life is avoiding the extreme versions of “Let go, and let God” and “God helps those who help themselves.” While neither of these terms is found in scripture both contain some truth. On one hand we must not make the mistake of lying back in our easy chairs and waiting for God to bless and heal our lives, but we should also not try to change ourselves into the image of his Son through the effort of the flesh either.

The truth is that sanctification depends on a cooperative, though very uneven, partnership between the Lord and His children. This should not be a surprise. God is intrinsically relational (witness the Trinity) and beings made in His own image are created for relationship as well. It was never the divine will to design totally autonomous, independent creatures. In fact the greatest proponent of such radical self-sufficiency is Satan himself. The fall of the human race was all about the Devil’s attempt to convince us that we were meant to be God, rather than depend on God. Any attempt by a believer to achieve perfection in his or her own strength is a legacy of the Enemy’s devastating success in that attempt.

The flesh cannot reform the flesh. Spiritually speaking the modern term “Self-help” is a tragic oxymoron. It is only through surrender to Christ and to the ultimate power of his shed blood that enables real, positive change to occur in our lives. Apart from Him we can do nothing to effect our growth in godliness. As long as we are consciously or unconsciously trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps we will abjectly fail to become truly Christ-like. In fact if we continue to strive to reform ourselves by ourselves we will only push ourselves away from the real Source of our sanctification and, if anything, become more distant from Him.

The other extreme is to become completely passive and expect God to transform our lives without any input from us at all. This He will not do. God expects all his children to take an active role in their spiritual growth. This role is not so much about effort as about trusting obedience. Our job in such obedience is to take the vital first step of trusting that the power required to do whatever He wants us to do, or be whatever He wants us to be, will be supplied, as we will to obey his call. When we take that step in sincerity of heart we will be find that the strength we need is given to us in abundance. This is how the great saints of church history accomplished such seemingly superhuman tasks, because they literally received superhuman power through trusting that “with God nothing is impossible.”

No one is saved through effort. If salvation comes only through faith in the Savior why would the same not be true in regards to sanctification? We cannot transform ourselves in our own strength. Conversely, inertly waiting for God to remake us without any cooperation in the process on our part doesn’t work either. The real key to spiritual transformation is a kind of faith similar to that which saved us in the first place. When we become willing to trust God for any strength we need in order to do or become something new, and then act on the basis of that trust, He gives us the ability to accomplish whatever his will is for our lives. All we need do is walk it out in His power. This type of “active faith” is the best way to trump both self-effort and spiritual passivity.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Our healing may not come about in the way we think it should, but as God knows it must. Chronic pain, whether it is physical or emotional, cries out for relief and we are sure that the time for it to be relieved is now. We often also presume to know just how that healing should come about. Neither of these things is completely under our control. Any true healing we receive in this life must ultimately be sanctioned by God’s sovereign will. In the deepest sense we are not the final authors of our cure, He is.

It is true that we can sometimes lessen felt pain through our own devices, most often by the use of behaviors or chemicals of one kind or another. However this usually does not effect the deep and permanent relief we want (A psychiatrist I know once told me that tranquilizers, for example, are a cover for emotional pain, not a cure.) This is actually somewhat self-evident and certainly true for all the temporary pain relievers we use today. Whether it be alcohol, drugs, illicit sex or any other high-inducing substance or activity what we obtain is temporary relief and in the case of those catalysts which are clearly at variance with Scripture the near certainty of more pain in the end.

True healing is usually something that takes time. There is also often pain exclusive to the process itself and that process may require significant changes in our habits of mind or heart. Most of all, for the Christian, healing is a matter of prayer. This is especially true when it comes to emotional pain. Real healing requires real intimacy with the Healer and surrender of control over our lives is a foundational requirement for that intimacy to happen. Emotional pain is often connected to our resistance to humble ourselves in some way before God, such as when we refuse to forgive someone who hurt us.

Related to this truth is the fact that complete relief may never be ours on this side of Heaven. To call this reality an uncomfortable one for human beings to accept is an understatement, especially in a day and age when a pain-free existence has somehow come to be considered a “right”. This self-induced and culturally-prevalent delusion has been unknowingly spiritualized by some Christians who hold to the doctrine that if we have enough faith we can be completely free of any illness in this life, either physical or emotional.

When divinely-caused relief does come we are sometimes surprised by how it happens. God may use a person to confront us, or a circumstance to humble us, that we never would have suspected or desired. Beyond that how many of us have repented of some destructive attitude in our lives and then found out that, in the repenting, a “thorn in our side” we thought completely unrelated to the sin in question has been removed? As befits the mysterious, but benevolent, ways of our God, the nature of cause and effect in the healing process is sometimes quite different than what we expect it to be.

As in all areas of the Christian life the key is in trusting that God knows what He is doing even when we feel otherwise. He understands our longing for healing and it is in His nature to heal, but our relief must come on His terms, not our own. Accepting God’s wisdom over ours and patiently waiting for His touch will lead to the peace of mind and heart we need to endure our pain and, ultimately, to the relief for which we have trusted Him.

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is difficult for some of us to transition from the bad conscience that may have originally led us to seek redemption in Christ to a dependence on the conviction of the Holy Spirit as our new “moral compass.” One of the drawbacks of a now faulty self-condemnatory conscience masquerading as the reproving voice of God in a believer’s life is that conscience’s power to promote the condemnation of others. It is impossible to internally punish yourself at its prompting without finding yourself almost simultaneously internally punishing people in your life who have their own moral failings. Sometimes that “internal punishing” goes on to manifest itself in an external verbal censure of individuals who we have no right to judge, at least in the ultimate sense of judgment that is the prerogative of God alone.

Orthodox Christians usually have at least the intellectual understanding required to know that we have the right to judge wrong actions but not the people who are doing the acting. Very few of us are long in the faith before someone invariably shares with us the extra-biblical yet true statement that we are to “hate the sin but love the sinner” (in fact many of us knew this saying long before we came to Christ).This principle seems reasonable, in fact so reasonable that we may assume that it is an easy thing to practice in our daily lives and, for many, it is not difficult to do so. This is not, however, the case with those of us who have mistaken the voice of a punitive conscience for the genuine conviction of the Holy Spirit.

It is almost impossible, in fact, to harshly judge ourselves without also harshly judging our fellow human beings, whether they be believers or non-believers. Whether it is moral debauchery outside the Church or hypocrisy (unfortunately sometimes accompanied by debauchery) within we who have internalized a self-condemnatory spirit find it so very easy to self-righteously criticize all men.

It is this reality that I think explains many of the criticisms the world has for Biblical Christianity today. Too many who claim the name of Christ have a practical theology that stems from a fearful need to try to continue to atone for the many sins, perceived or real,  with which an overly strict conscience has saddled us. We have forgotten, or never truly understood, that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Rather than knowing a loving heavenly Father who corrects us in love for our own eternal good, we only know the voice of the accuser inside us (sometimes aided and abetted, I suspect, by the accuser outside, the Enemy of our souls). We accept the hard judgments of ourselves that accompany the moral accusations and then we unconsciously transfer those judgments to everyone around us.

Today there are enough Christians who do this to make many people outside the Faith want nothing to do with a belief system that we have distorted through accepting a moral compass driven by fear and efforts at self-atonement rather than by the saving grace of God. It is only in finally learning to accept that grace and repenting of ultimately self-atoning self-condemnation that will free us from both wrongly judging ourselves and, just as importantly, judging everyone else. This is a process that begins with the conscious owning of our previously unconscious slavery to our still fallen human conscience. It continues as we begin to reject the direction of that faulty conscience in favor of the gentle guidance of the Spirit. We are told in Scripture that it is the kindness of God that leads us towards repentance. When we come to know this is true for ourselves, we will be able to realize that it is true for everyone else as well and stop doing more spiritual harm than good.