February 2017 – sheaoakley.com

February 28, 2017shea 4 Comments

Is Social Media Anti-Social?

An old pastor of mine once referred to social media as “anti-social media.” At the time I found myself having a mixed reaction to his words. On one hand I understood his point-which was that online venues are poor substitutes for physically-proximate interaction with our fellow human beings. I have written in other places about my own concern that truly biblical community in the Church is being damaged by our national obsession with “virtual relationships.” On the other hand I could not help thinking about how much I have enjoyed meeting new people (my wife among them) over the past 15 years on my “platform” of choice, Facebook. This site has enabled me to share much of myself, including many of these Christian mediations, with hundreds of “friends.”

What social media has not given me, with the obvious major exception of meeting my wife, is the opportunity to develop deep friendships with people who live nearby. The comparatively few friends I have in cyberspace who also live close to me are almost entirely those whom I met in person long before I ever registered a username and password.

As for the 1300 or so people I’ve become connected with on Facebook, I “talk to” only about 3-5% of them regularly, or even semi-regularly. While it is exciting to know that some of these 10 to 15 individuals hail from as far away as Australia, I cannot claim to feel like I am close friends with them in the same sense as those who are physically a part of my life.

Meanwhile I’ve noticed that time which could be spent visiting or even just phoning nearby friends is often completely sucked-up by my weekly online hours. Admittedly not all that time is spent on social media sites, but a great deal of it is and I would estimate that my total time spent in front of a screen for non-work related purposes is close to 15 hours. I can imagine that for many people (especially those who, unlike me, own a “smart phone”) this may not seem to amount to a lot. However, much of that is time is what I used to spend with my best friends.

Why did this happen to me in recent years? Two immediate answers come to mind.

It seems easier to interact socially online than it does to actually get up and physically travel somewhere to visit with someone.
On Facebook I can post all the things I want to share with all my friends at the click of a key. I can express myself to hundreds of people without even getting out of bed (except of course to plug in my laptop!)

Both of these reasons for my own addiction to social media stem from something that is specifically warned against in Scripture, “Sloth”, or as we would call it today, laziness. I would add another character flaw to the list too: “Vanity”, which manifests itself in my deep desire to post things that matter to me and prompt people to click the “like” tab. In a way I am almost like a spoiled child wanting the attention of everybody at once, wanting them all to say, in effect, “good boy!”

Another word for Vanity, by the way, is Pride.

I do want to balance the above with the fact that I believe God has used my presence on social media to help me be a witness for Him to a potentially large number of people through my posts (this one included.) I also would be disingenuous if I did not say that I still greatly enjoy sites like Facebook and have no intention of leaving them in some Luddite attempt to turn back the clock by 25 years. This form of communication is here to stay, and so will I.

I have tried to designate a couple of days a week as Internet-free, or virtually Internet-free days. These “offline” periods, among other things, have allowed me to call and sometimes visit my physically-proximate friends and family members (though this has been made more challenging by a recent move to another part of my state.) Had I not enforced this self-discipline, I suspect my weekly time on line would be closer to 25 hours, and the remaining time to actually see people would shrink even further.

So to get back to the original implied proposition of this article, is social media actually anti-social? I suppose I would answer that is perhaps not so much anti-social in an all-encompassing sense as anti-social in a single very important one: no online relationship can truly replace two people actually getting together somewhere face to face and having a heartfelt talk. To the degree that our time spent on social media takes away from our time physically spent in each other’s company I do think it can be anti-social. I also think that the God who once looked at Adam by himself in the Garden and said “It is not good for the man to be alone” would agree. It is safe to say that He never meant for all the relationships with which we assuage our loneliness to be “virtual” ones.

February 24, 2017shea No Comments

Politics, Charity, and the Church

It has been a very rough few months for civility in America. Recent political events have taken a toll on many interpersonal relationships in general in our increasingly polarized nation. One of the sadder aspects of this reality is the fact that the toll has sometimes included relationships among believers. It is sad because our Lord called us to unity and also because, when it comes to putting earthly politics before fellowship, we should know better. Herman Melville once wrote that the Christian ought to be “a patriot only to heaven” and this should in some way be self-evident to the Spirit-filled child of God. While patriotism for our present homeland is not necessarily a vice, it may become one if our greater allegiance to Heaven and to each other is allowed to be superseded by differences in politics.

I think the problem lies largely in our tendency as believers to get too caught up in the here and now. From the perspective of eternity, the tumult of the nations is of profoundly less importance than the salvation of even one human soul. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that while cultures have a definite lifespan, men and women are eternal. A hundred-thousand years from now every person who ever existed will still exist somewhere. By contrast America, like every other human empire, will be but dust and ashes. For this reason the true Christian strives to live first for the glory of God and for others, not for the glory of any temporal nation, including our own. Temporal, after all, means “temporary.”

This is not to say that we should not care at all about America. We are called to be salt and light in this world and part of being salt and light is working for the benefit of whatever country God has seen fit to have us inhabit. However, the reason we work for the greater good of the United States is ultimately to benefit people, the ones with the aforementioned eternal souls, and while this applies to everyone in our lives it should be especially true in the case of our brethren in the Church. Therefore, when even earnestly held political convictions conflict with charity, true love, towards our brothers and sisters charity should win every time.

I wish I could personally say that such charity has won in me every time, but I cannot. There have been too many moments when I too have looked at the stances some sincere Christians I know have taken politically and found myself getting angry with those Christians. I’ve seen and heard attitudes on both sides of the political spectrum that I find deeply disturbing and have sometimes felt that I could not “spiritually relate” to people who hold to such attitudes. The problem, of course, is that I have had some attitudes of my own during the past several months that are more a credit to my pride and self-interest than to my faith (it does not help that I tend to be a “political animal” and can get caught up in what is happening in Washington during this strange season as much as anyone else).

That “mea culpa” owned, it still behooves me to say to my fellow Christians that we cannot afford to have conflict in the Church over current events jeopardize both the well-being of the body of Christ and our witness to a lost and dying world. We need each other, and God commands us to love each other. He knows the importance of the ties that bind his sons and daughters together, and it no doubt grieves Him to see any of those ties at risk over matters that do not involve fundamental biblical doctrine. (While it is true that we must sometimes break fellowship over doctrinal issues we cannot be too careful to not let political stances which do not clearly involve such doctrine tear us apart).

In the final analysis, it again comes down to the overriding importance of the eternal bonds we share with one another not being put at risk lightly. They are just too precious to lose over the results of an election because, as the Christian singer-songwriter Sara Groves once wrote, “at the end of our lives our relationships are all we’ve got.”

February 16, 2017shea No Comments

Trust, Betrayal and Consecration

What is it that keeps many Christians from being, in contemporary Evangelical parlance, “sold out” to Jesus Christ? Why do believers hold back so much of their lives from consecration to Him? The answer may lie in the thoughts we entertain about who God is. Trusting another for anything truly important is usually difficult for human beings. As adults we do not naturally trust anyone anymore; it always involves some degree of effort. The loss of childlike faith in others comes not only through the betrayals we endure but also through the betrayals we ourselves commit. Our wariness would not exist if we were not still on this side of Heaven. Until the day we arrive safely home there we will continue to be redeemed sinners living among other sinners (redeemed or not.)The tendency is to look at an unsafe world inhabited by unsafe people and infer that no one can possibly be what we need them to be. Unfortunately this inference often gets extended to include God.

Human beings are relational creatures. In fact we are all dependent on relationships for our very lives for apart from them we die in every sense. On a horizontal level this healthy dependency is mutual and is expressed through our vital connections with other people. But the more vital connection is vertical, between man and his Creator. It is this relationship that ultimately demands everything of us and such an all-encompassing bond is impossible apart from deep trust in God. When that trust isn’t there we hold back from giving ourselves fully to Him.

How, then, are Christians to find the courage needed to lose themselves in order to fully gain Christ? The hope we need comes from the prospect of progressively coming to know who He truly is and who He truly is to us. As we seek, however imperfectly, after the knowledge of God He gives us grace to see the reality that He is incapable of the kind of betrayal we experience from our fellows. Betrayal is purely a product of sin. It happens because we are imperfect beings who cannot be perfectly faithful to each other no matter how hard we try. But the Lover of our souls is perfect. Within the Trinity God exists in flawless and eternal communion between Father, Son and Spirit. The bond He purposes to forge with the sons of men is, in some sense, an external manifestation of that internal relational perfection. Such perfection does not have a place for betrayal. We may betray Him, but he will never betray us.

The pulpit in a church I once attended had a small sign declaring the truth that “Jesus never fails”. In God’s relationship with us there is no prospect of failure on His end. In coming to know the absolute reality of this statement something will begin to happen in us. We will find that we are able to progressively give all that we are to God because we have seen that He, in the Person of His Son, has already given all that He is to us.

February 8, 2017shea No Comments

Self-Denial Versus Self-Condemnation

There is a fundamental difference between the actions of self-condemnation and self-denial – one is of God and one isn’t. Some believers tend to equate these actions with each other. It is a sure recipe for a defeated life. This is because, when we exchange one for the other, we live in spiritual deception.

Self-condemnation occurs when Christians judge themselves according to false, damaged personal consciences instead of leaving the prerogative of final judgment to God and God alone. More importantly, as far as that divine judgment is concerned, one verse in the Bible demolishes any justification we might think we have for consigning ourselves to our own Hells or believing we are consigned to the real one. Romans 8:1 tells us “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” If we have received Jesus as Lord and Savior we have passed from existing in a sinful state of true condemnation into the redeemed life of a blood-bought and forgiven child of God. When we despise ourselves as Christians we despise the new clean hearts that God has given us through our faith in His Son. This should never be.

Now this is not to say that there are not aspects of our not-yet fully sanctified being that we should hate. The “old man”, the sinful flesh, which is dying but still all too present in our being, is to be loathed, and rightfully so. But hating the flesh is different than hating who we now are in Christ. It is indeed true that legitimate self-love has to be carefully defined. The secular self-esteem movement tells us that all human beings should exalt themselves as being “good” apart from the need for forgiveness from, transformation by, and surrender to God. This is a satanic lie that keeps the lost from knowing their condition and Christians need to expose it for what it is.

That said it is very important that we do not, in our rejection of purely secular concepts of self-esteem, forget that our Lord Himself ordained appropriate self-love. When He told us to love our neighbor He framed it in the context of loving that neighbor as our self. It is not wrong to love and care for yourself. You are now a son or daughter of God and you have great worth in the eyes of the One who sees you through the lens of Jesus Christ. Appropriate positive self-regard is not a sin in a Christian. We are to love God first, yes, as well as our neighbors but we are to love ourselves too.

A counselor friend of mine who went home to be with the Lord several years ago believed that self-love must precede self-denial. What he meant was that the kind of sacrifices for others that we are encouraged to make as children of God require that we have something healthy in ourselves to give up! People who despise and condemn themselves destroy their very ability to love others from a pure heart, abundant in compassion. If we have no compassion for ourselves how are we to have compassion for others? We may do good things for others but out of the fear that if we do not we will be more condemned! This is a sure recipe for a deep sense of hypocrisy, likely followed sometime thereafter by “burn-out” or what has come to be known in recent years as “Compassion Fatigue”. We quickly run out of love to give to persons in need when we have received little God-given and ordained love in our hearts for ourselves.

The key to joyful self-sacrifice is that it must come from a heart that is overflowing with the love of Christ. Self-loathing of not only our dying flesh, but also our blood-bought, God-loved selves will quite effectively quench that overflow. For this reason it is vital we come to know the blessing of Godly self-denial over the self-inflicted curse of self-condemnation. That begins with consciously rejecting thoughts of self-condemnation, when they come, and beginning the process of instead regularly affirming the truth that we are beloved children of the King. This will take time for the self-condemning soul, but the final result will be the joy and peace of a newly abundant life in Christ.

February 1, 2017shea No Comments

The Human Condition and the Goodness of God

If we sometimes question God’s goodness perhaps it is because everyone we know here on earth, including ourselves, has the capacity to do that which is evil. It is sometimes hard for us to imagine a sentient being that is incapable of it. If so our problem is one of perspective.

Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, once said that his greatest times of struggle in life were when he had trouble believing that God was both good and good to Him. One might be tempted to blame this on Luther’s deep belief in pre-destination, but his question is one that many Christians of every theological stripe have wrestled with at one time or another. We see evil and its effects in the world and in ourselves and we wonder why a perfectly good being would allow it in either place. C.S. Lewis called this conundrum “The Problem of Pain”.

I will not try to tackle the entire issue of the existence of evil; theologians of far greater stature than I have done so in greater length and with more moral sophistication than I could ever hope to achieve. What I want to focus on here is how the influence of human relationships affects how we see God.

Every one of us has known what it is to be hurt. We have also all known what it is to be the one doing the hurting. Human beings wound each other all the time. Whether it happens between parent and child, husband and wife or among friends our pride, insecurity and wrong desires conspire to make us inflictors of unnecessary pain. We are sometimes dangerous to each other as well as to ourselves. Just try looking for a “perfectly safe human relationship.” It does not exist. The very term is an oxymoron.

Some of us carry very deep wounds that have come from the most intimate human connections in our lives. It is, in fact, no cliché to say that those with whom we are most intimate are those who can do us the most harm, as well as those to which we can do the same.

So when we come to God, the One with whom we are to have the most intimate relationship with of all, we may well expect the same kind of experience we have known all our lives with everyone else. The idea that the Lord is intrinsically unwilling to harm someone who has become His child through personal faith in His Son is not easily accepted or believed. Our experience is in danger of trumping our faith.

But God is patient with us. He knows what we have known in the days before we met Him and He also knows that it will take both time and the progressive revelation of His favor in our lives to make us understand that He is different. It is this combination of time and loving grace which can open the eyes of our hearts and enable us to truly understand that God is the one Being in the universe who is utterly without evil, and also the only One who can utterly remove the evil in each one of us.

As we come to know our Lord better our perspective starts to change. We come to realize that the perfect Lover of our souls really does exist, and His name is Jesus Christ.