Month: May 2017

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The apostle James tells us that we should “count it all joy” when we face many trials in life. He says this because of the good that comes out of persevering in our faith when troubles inevitably make their appearance. This is principally the good of a deepened and more Christlike character. Acquiring such a character is truly a blessing in the long run, both in this life and the next, one which outweighs the temporal pain of earthly trials.

That said, many if not most believers have a hard time figuring out how to be joyful in the midst of difficult times. This begs the question of whether a trial can only have the desired effect of improving us if we somehow are able to “feel the joy.” I would argue that this is not the case.

Let me preface my viewpoint by stating that James is not wrong in his advice to us (He cannot be if we believe the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God) but how exactly to “count it all joy” is another subject worthy of its own study, and I will not address it here.

The issue at hand is whether or not a less than optimal response to a challenge in life completely forfeits the possibility of benefitting from it. To put it simply, if this were the case, the vast majority of Christians would not be growing through trials at all. Almost no one I have ever met in the Church is perfectly happy throughout a period of rough seas in their lives. On the contrary, I have met plenty of believers who have struggled mightily to stay afloat in such seas, even to the point of sometimes feeling anger at God. Yet most still come through the storm to find safe harbor and also to find themselves better for the experience. That this happens despite their decided lack of joy in the midst of their trial, I would ascribe to the grace of God.

Perhaps part of this manifest grace can be found in the fact that these people “toughed it out” rather than doing whatever was necessary to make the problem go away at any cost. They might not have been joyful about their difficulty, but neither did they take the coward’s way out of a difficult moral situation or drug themselves into insensibility to try to escape other painful circumstances through which they needed to go. The fatal thing is to not be willing to accept a time of trouble that God may very well have ordained for them to form a part of their new character in Christ. If this is true, maybe God is more interested in our ability to persevere than He is in whether we have yet become able to become joyful in that perseverance.

Paradoxically, it may also be that as we worry less about our feelings and concentrate more on maintaining our will to endure whatever comes our way, we will then find it easier to have the right attitude encouraged by James. One of the biggest potential “joy-killers” in any particular trial is our fear that we cannot make it through. As we face, endure, and overcome a range of difficulties over time we can begin to lose that fear. When we get to this point, likely over a period of many years, then we may progress to the point of truly counting the next trial “as joy.” I would imagine that getting to that place, as James no doubt knew himself, would be a great gain in our ongoing Christian walk.

I know I would like to be able to say I’ve personally reached that point someday. I’m certainly not yet there myself.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Human beings were originally created to experience obedience to God as pure joy. How great was our fall that today so many of us tend to dislike the very idea of it? How far have we departed from what we were intended to be that “obedience” has become such a dirty word, even in the Church?

The stubborn drive for complete personal autonomy is nothing new to our race as a whole. What does seem new is the tendency for contemporary believers to embrace the idea that it is possible to adopt the trappings of our culture’s radical individualism while at the same time presuming to conform ourselves to the image of Christ. To imagine that we can be good Christians and also abhor being in submission to anyone, much less God, is to indulge in a particularly dangerous form of self-deception. How can we expect to become more like Jesus and have the heart of a servant when we run from the very term “servant”?

It is through a sincere desire to become obedient to God and, to a lesser extent, to those people He has seen fit to put over us in various capacities that we progress in the Christian life. This is a tough nut for many of us to swallow. There are, of course, sometimes reasons for this that go beyond sinful willfulness on our part. If, for instance, we grew up with parents or other authority figures who demanded unquestioning loyalty from us while simultaneously being lovelessly abusive we will find it more difficult to trust God enough to submit to both Him and His proxies. It is not helpful to assume that the wounds of our past have no bearing on answering the call to obedience we are faced with today.

Taking this into consideration the fact remains that too much of the 21^st Century Western Church appears to have been taken captive by the attitude that living in a liberal democracy means never having to bend the knee to anyone, including those in the congregational hierarchy. Ask any number of pastors who have lovingly confronted erring church members only to be angrily rebuked (and often then watch said members walk out the door) and the reality of this trend becomes apparent. A large percentage of “church hoppers” are those who simply will not put themselves under submission to anyone. These people may stand on the idea that they are “responsible only to God” for their actions, but they forget that our Lord has appointed shepherds to watch over His flock during His physical absence. Submission to Godly authority should trump our surrounding secular society’s philosophy of unlimited personal freedom. That it often doesn’t shows that Post-Modern Christians apparently spend more time immersing themselves in the culture than seriously reading their Bibles.

The sad thing is that authentic freedom and real joy only come through trusting in God enough to forsake the false freedom of radical personal autonomy. To become obedient to the One who loves us perfectly, and thus perfectly has our best interests at heart, is the only thing that will give us the abundant life that the world falsely promises to those who are “Captains of their own souls”. If we instead persist in the kind of pride that informs us that no one should ever be in any kind of authority over us, even divinely-assigned authority, then we ultimately condemn ourselves to relational desolation. Unrepentedly willful independence from God and those who He has appointed to guide and love us is, in the end, self-defeating in the worst sense of the term. It leaves us isolated and unable to dwell in the love we need to truly live. Such “freedom” is not freedom at all, but bondage.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We are often counseled to look at the difficult requirements of the Christian life from the perspective of comparing what we are asked to do for God with what God did for us on the cross. This counsel is valid, but the reason for presenting it is sometimes flawed. It is true that what was accomplished at Calvary involved unfathomable action and pain, not only for Jesus but also for the Father who turned away from His Son for the first and only time in all eternity. The problem is that the way this truth is preached often involves a spirit of guilt-manipulation rather than the spirit which accompanies a speaker’s desire to make grace manifest. The fact is that the motivation to live our lives for God should never come out of a sense of guilt about what He went through to save us. Instead that motivation should come from the love we feel towards Jesus for what He did for us, along with an ongoing realization of the sheer power unleashed through His Resurrection. What God in Christ did for us 2000 years ago should be freeing and empowering, not guilt-inducing and self-effort producing.

The enormity of the power released by the Resurrection of Christ is beyond human reckoning, but it is not beyond human-harnessing. The child of God has available all the strength necessary to live out a truly spiritual life and not in some minimalist sense. This power to live is superabundant; it is a supernatural cup running over. That such strength is available should be a supreme comfort for it speaks to us of the provision of deity itself to enable us to fulfill what that deity requires.

It has become a bit of a cliché to state that living the Christian life is not just difficult, but impossible. What this phrase means is that we sooner or later realize trying to be Christlike in the power of the flesh is an exercise in utter futility. For many of us it is only then that we begin to despair of our own resources and actually look to God for what only He can give us. Abandoning spiritualized “self-help” for God’s provision for our victory is often in the form of a crisis followed by acceptance of a process. The process itself is a lifelong one and requires encouragement along the way. One source of this encouragement is the understanding that what God did for us profoundly equips us to do what He calls us to do for Him.

The truth of this is not easily received. In our fallen-ness we often cling to an ingrained tendency to try to measure-up on our own. The original lie of Satan is that we are gods onto ourselves, somehow self-equipped to meet any and all requirements anyone could ever put before us. When this is combined with a common inability to trust in someone else for our wellbeing the result is a stubborn root of “works-righteousness”, an oxymoron if there ever was one. It is a root not easily pulled-up, but the good news is that God even provides the power necessary to accomplish this task once we have decided we no longer want to live in the misery of self-effort. The Bible tells us that it is the power of God that works within us to will and act according to His good pleasure. This means that it is, in a sense, the power of God which allows us to receive the power of God. No part of our spiritual development is accomplished by us alone and this realization can be unspeakably comforting to the tortured soul of a Christian still trying to make it on his or her own.

It is absolutely appropriate to remind ourselves of what God has done for us when we ponder what His loving expectations are for our lives. But this should never be allowed to produce a sense of daunting guilt in the child of God. Rightly received this reminder can instead open us up to rightfully claim the power made available through Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. That power can then set us free to triumphantly live in and through Him as we have never lived before.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

Many thoughtful believers in the First World struggle to various degrees with the connection they feel to their sometimes expensive material possessions. They may repeatedly ask themselves questions like, “Am I enjoying this thing I just purchased for myself more than I enjoy things of the Spirit or “Do I want to spend more time enjoying it than I want to spend time seeking God?” This is particularly true if the material item in question is particularly pleasurable to use or even to contemplate using.

What the object actually is can widely vary. It could be anything from a new car to a beautiful antique to a top-of-the-line home theater system. What all these things have in common is their ability to elicit delight in their use (or even, in the case of the antique, delight just in visually beholding it.)

In the 21^st Century West even those of us of modest means most often have the buying power to acquire at least one of these kinds of things. In doing so, we have moved beyond the need for the kind of pure utilitarianism governing both the purchasing and use of possessions that was prevalent in previous generations not born into the consumer culture we find ourselves living in today. At one time, not so very long ago in terms of history, it was enough to have the very basic necessities of life. In fact for the majority of people it had to be enough. This is no longer the case in the developed world today.

Christians of the past were, in general, not tempted towards feelings of guilt by having a small bed to sleep in or a simple oven in which to cook. These things “perished with use” as the scriptures said. They were not superfluous objects but tools. Today we have all these necessities and quite a bit more that is anything but necessary, at least as far as sustaining our physical lives. Therein lays the problem.

We also know from scripture that we are to love and seek our God above all things. This can become hard to do if our possessions feel like they are drawing us away from Him. I must confess that I can, for instance, spend hours detailing an old classic car I happen to own while the idea of spending the same amount of time at church or reading the Bible simply does not produce the same desire. Of course, I only do this detailing job occasionally. Lately though I’ve noticed that another expensive collectible item I recently purchased is on my mind a lot. I’ve found myself daydreaming about it, even falling asleep at night with images of this thing flashing through my mind. The degree to which it has had a hold on my attention I find troubling.

I do not know if there is a direct correlation between how much time I have recently spent doing this daydreaming and how much time I spend devoted to the things of God. I do not think it has necessarily been taking away from my devotional discipline. What it certainly has not been doing is adding to it, and the very intensity of my desire to enjoy this particular possession disturbs me in contrast to my desire to spend the time I do with Him.

I share this personal example because I suspect that it will resonate with many readers. This is one of the temptations that come with the reality of relative affluence in a consumer society. In one way it is new in that the rise of said society is a very recent and unique development in human history. On the other hand it is merely a new variant of an age-old problem for Christians, namely putting anything before the Lord in our affections. In that sense there is nothing really new under the sun.

Does this mean that we should put away anything that we might find ourselves deeply enjoying? No, for God is not a killjoy. If the thing in question is not inherently sinful it may not be something of which we must divest ourselves. However, if we want to keep that material “love-object” we do need to be intentionally serious about keeping our seeking of the Lord, and His will for our lives, in the forefront. If we find that our possessions are too often short-circuiting that, despite our best efforts, those possessions may need to be put aside.