Month: April 2017

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

What do we do when we feel like something necessary to having a full life is missing from our experience and has been for years? I’m not talking about something trivial, something minor like a non-essential material possession or some rarely given talent that we do not happen to possess. What if we are without a spouse or children or a career that seems to have any eternal value? What if the thing we are without appears to us as being an integral part of what God created to make us whole human beings?

Many Christians live lives that seem radically incomplete because one or more of things like this are not present and do not appear likely to be present anytime soon. In their absence what is present is a sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness, and a gnawing feeling of frustration. Millions of people who profess Christ as their Lord and Savior know what it is to exist day in and day out in a state of depression that is directly related to having what they are certain are unmet needs in their lives.

The Bible, of course, does not promise us spouses, children and careers that fulfill us the way we think they ought. What the Bible does promise is that those needs which really are needs will be met in us if we seek first, as Christ taught us to do, “the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness.” The implication in that promise is that God will provide what is truly necessary if we put Him first in our lives.

To be sure, that is difficult for a lonely, childless or unemployed believer to accept because it implies something else, two things actually. One is that we may not be truly putting God first and the other is that, even if we are, the things we think are needs are actually wants, at least for the moment. No serious Christian likes to think either of these is true about them. No one wants to think they are not seeking enough after the Lord and no one wants to think the thing they desire to the point of desperation isn’t a real need. But that is the implication of “seek ye first.” There is no getting around it.

God is not in the habit of making reality fit our idea of what it should be. Accepting hard truths about the difficulty of life in a fallen world is part of what it means to be Christian. The fact that “life is difficult”, as author M. Scott Peck once began one of his more popular books, is something we must either reconcile ourselves to or find ourselves embittered. There is no getting around that too.

I do not write this to be deliberately harsh (at least I hope that’s not the case). I write it because even the absence of what we think we cannot live without is, in fact, something with which we can live. Beyond that we can find in our dilemma the path to repentance from wrong priorities or wrong ideas about what is truly necessary in this life. Like so many other adversities the sense of missing out on something “essential” in our present existence can prove to be a path to wisdom and maybe even contentment, both of which are great blessings.

It is something to think about the next time we are certain we are being unfairly denied by the God we call our Own.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is easy for us to believe numerous lies about ourselves, even not very well-crafted ones. In many cases we believe them simply because they were repeated often to us by others. These are the lies we may have constantly heard told about ourselves by our parents, siblings or peers when we were children, lies that often took the form of insults. What we hear in our formative years can “implant” falsehoods that may haunt us well into our adulthood and it is sometimes very difficult to replace them with the truth about who we are in God’s eyes.

Perhaps the worst kind of lie we believe is that God is disgusted by us. It has been said that while Jesus Christ at times spoke in anger towards certain individuals He never spoke to anyone with contempt. No matter how bad we think we are (and may indeed be, at least relative to His perfect holiness) God is not somehow intrinsically disgusted by us. He may be disgusted by the evil we still harbor within our hearts, but He is not disgusted by us. He hates the sin, not the sinner

In fact God loves sinners and He loves them unconditionally. His love is not, for instance, predicated on our physical appearance and social graces, or lack thereof. Far more importantly than that, it is not even based upon our moral performance. The love God bears for us is actually not dependent on us at all, but on His own nature. God is love and because He is love He loves us.

For some readers this may seem like “Theology 101” but its truth cannot be stated enough for those of us who grew up exposed to people who told us in a myriad of ways that we were ultimately “unlovable”. This is because the lies they repeatedly spoke into our young ears found fertile ground in us in which to put down roots and grow. Such is the heart of a child. It is pliable, like fallow ground in the spring, and the furrows that are plowed during those years often run deep.

This may seem like grounds for despair. What can we do with the seeds of self-hatred that were planted decades ago and have taken hold and grown like poisonous weeds? How do we stop believing lies that keep us from receiving the healing and affirming love of Christ?

The answer can be found in a progressive yielding to our Lord Himself, and specifically to the reality of one of His attributes. The same God who loves us is omnipotent. There is no power in the universe that can resist His and that includes the power of the deceptions we have believed about ourselves since childhood. The children of God have access to the overwhelming might of God to transform and put right even the deepest damage to our hearts. This power is inextricably wedded to His love and its aim is always our complete restoration from the harm we have had inflicted upon us.

In the mystery of His will, and our faith, this restoration will take time. It may not even be fully completed in this life, but completed it will be because in the end there will be no “negative self-image” in Heaven, only the truth that, through Christ, we have been made perfect in His sight and thus perfect in every sense. Then even the most incessantly-repeated insults that we bore in our youth will no longer have any hold on us, any reality in our consciousness. God’s truth, and His love, will be all we know. We will be set free from the lies forever.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

There is a disturbing tendency I have identified more than once in myself. I have noticed that my response to the wrongs of others often has less to do with my wanting to help them be free of whatever the wrong is than it does removing the presence of their wrongdoing because it bothers me personally. By this I mean that my response to evil in others is more self-centered than others-centered. As such, it is not a Godly response and therefore, if I act on it, it may do more harm than good.

When someone is doing something wrong in my presence, whether they are a believer or a skeptic, I become uncomfortable. Some of this discomfort no doubt is related to knowing how God thinks about the sin in question. To a much lesser extent, I may be thinking about how people are hurting themselves as well as those they love by transgressing biblical moral norms. Sadly, though, I have come to believe that the majority of my negative reaction has more to do with my desire to live in a world free of human wrongdoing prior to the final establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

I have always, I think, been a perfectionist by fallen nature. A manifestation of that trait is my desire to “know the rules” and play by them as much as I can through the enabling presence of divine grace in my life. When others around me are not playing by the same rules, it tends to make me ill at ease. Rather than forbearing the faults of another sinner who is saved (or not saved) in the same way and by the same God as myself, I often feel anger rising that I have to be exposed to their faults at all.

Apart from the aforementioned obvious irony of the self-righteous “log” no doubt lodged in my own eye, this tendency of mine makes my daily life tenser that it has or ought to be. It is hard to be happy and/or joyful when the presence of human depravity makes me anxious. This is a problem because that depravity is getting noticeably worse in the human race at large. Even Christians are not free of it due to the enduring presence of the flesh which our spirit is forever fighting against to whatever degree of success or failure. I’m certainly not free of it.

Jesus, on the other hand, was with sinners all the time. He even managed to love them to the point of dying for them. Certainly there were times when he called sin sin and reacted strongly against it, but this did not seem to scare the majority of people away from Him. Jesus also never indicated by his words or actions that he was uncomfortable with people’s wrongdoing simply because He found it personally offensive. He may have reacted against it because it was offensive to His Father and destructive towards the persons involved, but it never seemed to be just because it made Him uncomfortable.

This can be explained, of course, by the fact that there was no sinful self-righteousness in the sinless Son of God. That said His followers are not free to be unlovingly at odds with their fellows just because they are not perfectly sinless in real time the way the Christ is. Part of our progressive sanctification must involve an increasing humility and love for both lost unbelievers and the imperfect believers with whom we walk out the faith.

I suspect it starts with examining why we are so put off by the presence of something of which we ourselves are often guilty. We might also endeavor to remember that sin, whether on our part or that of another, will be a daily reality in our lives until either our Savior returns or we go home to be with Him. In the meantime, the love of Christ calls us to transcend our self-centered need for perfection in those around us by accepting them just as they are while humbly helping them (and by extension ourselves) find a holier way to live.