Month: July 2017

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

One of the amazing things about the Christian experience is how easy it can be to misapprehend the character of the God we profess to worship. Despite the silent testimony of the cross of Christ, the human heart sometimes continues to doubt the goodness of the Father and the desirability of fellowship with the divine versus fellowship with the world. It sometimes seems as if no amount of intimate experience with the Holy Spirit is ever enough to completely erase either resistance to the things of God or a lingering desire to gratify the flesh.

This is not a topic that the Church is generally comfortable discussing, or sometimes even a reality to which it is willing to admit. For one thing there is a “Triumphalist” wing of Evangelical Christianity that is never willing to publicly deal with the remaining treason in our being because to do so would be to give in to “negative confession”. In these circles a sort of sanctified positive thinking is the only thing permitted to be preached and woe betide the person who brings up any stubborn darkness of the soul. To do so is to betray a practical theology that says that admitting to such darkness is tantamount to promoting it.

But even churches that try to be more transparent about the trials and tribulations of the Christian life are generally only willing to wrestle with questions of doubt and temptation to a certain point. A person who consistently admits to “discipleship failure”, as a counselor acquaintance of mine once defined it, tends to eventually be labeled as someone who at best doesn’t quite get it and at worst is “backslidden.”

Of course a Christian who spends far more time questioning the things of God than seeking those things may indeed be backslidden. If the temptation to shy away from holiness and give in to sin becomes a fixed tendency then something truly is wrong deep in such a person’s heart. The disturbing thing about this truth is that it probably describes more of us than we would care to admit. The Scripture speaks of the love of many growing cold in the last days and such a chill seems to have descended on many professing believers already, at least in the Western world.

Yet in all this a divine provision continues to exist which can give perhaps even the most prodigal among us reason for continued hope. The antidote to wavering hearts has always been, and continues to be, the relentless grace extended by a long-suffering God towards even the most wayward of His children. Perhaps part of the reason this grace remains is because our Lord is not without a personal understanding of the myriad temptations the world holds for human beings. After all He knows exactly what it is to be human, albeit without the experience of actually giving in to temptations all humans face.

In the end the ability of unconditional love to finally and completely grant us an abiding desire for God and His kingdom above all else is the only hope we have in the midst of our resistance. We would all do well learn to fight that resistance more than we fight such love. Otherwise we may risk finding that the darkness to which we cling has become the darkness we embody. Whether that embodiment ends up being for the rest of our lives or for all eternity; it is not something worth risking.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It can be difficult to understand why a loving God sometimes allows long seasons of suffering in the lives of His children. When we are in the midst of such a time of trial, we may not understand why He does not immediately intervene to remove our pain.

At these times, it is important to remember that our Lord is not willing that we should endure suffering for one second longer than it takes for us to develop the aspect of His character for which that suffering has been allowed. God does not allow pain in our lives “for pain’s sake” but, rather, for our sake … so that we may become more like Him. This is true for all who are His blood-bought children through Christ.

I believe this is also true whether or not the trial is something for which we are responsible. In the first case, we’re undergoing chastisement with the goal of bringing about repentance which, if realized, always involves a change in character. In the second case, our Lord is using difficulties that arise simply from living in a fallen world to mold us into the image of His Son. In either situation, a perfectly loving God will not prolong redemptive pain unnecessarily for those who trust in Him because to do so would be contrary to His nature.

Of course, we do not often feel loved in such circumstances. There are things we endure in life that seem almost gratuitously long-lasting. Whether a period of unemployment, a time of relational struggle, or an illness, it can sometimes feel like the suffering will never end. This is especially true for those of us who grew up with a sense of entitlement — a generalized sense that life should not be too hard for too long (although, anyone can begin to feel this way while in some seemingly unendurable trial.)

When we start to feel like we can no longer endure the struggle, what we can do is remember that God knows what we are capable of bearing far better than we know ourselves. We also can pray without ceasing for genuine heart knowledge that His grace truly is sufficient. Prayer for endurance in a trial is found often in Scripture for a reason. We can take comfort in knowing that great men and women of the Bible fervently prayed and were ultimately carried through their trials here on earth. Their examples guide us in how we need to petition God while trusting that, like them, we will know deliverance and deeper Christian character.

Some might reasonably protest here that there are circumstances which lead to trials which we must bear until the day we die. This is true. What we must remember is that a trial can end while circumstances remain because the circumstances alone do not create our suffering. To a large extent our response to circumstances leads to our worst suffering. Sometimes the lessons we need to learn we cannot or will not learn in the time we are afforded in this life. Our Creator and Redeemer is well aware of this. Is it unreasonable, then, to propose that for some of us the refining fire must remain to the end because it is only then that the fruit of our endurance will be revealed?

In most of our experience it seems that tough circumstances start being altered as soon as we learn the character-building lesson that our proper response enables. We may not know the exact time the lesson was learned, but most of us eventually realize that things began to change for us on the outside when things began to change for us from within.

Our Father loves us too much to end a difficult circumstance before it fully achieves His sanctifying purpose. But once this happens, He will remove us from the refiner’s fire…and then see His image better reflected in us.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Though we often are not consciously aware of it I believe there is something in us that actually craves the coming of God’s final judgment on the world. We desire to see all things put right that we sense are wrong in our existence. This holds true even when we know that some of those we love have not yet come to the truth. It even holds true as we ponder how that judgment might affect us personally. Despite the disturbing message of 1 Peter 4:17, which tells us “that judgment must begin in the house of God” (at least in the sense of chastisement) we find ourselves looking at the evil in the world and longing for that evil to be cleansed no matter what the cost. This is how deeply the moral imperative has been built into us by our Creator. Such an imperative is inherent to beings created in His image and it remains despite our fallenness.

As the human race as a whole appears to continue to descend into deeper levels of depravity the unchanging righteousness of God comes into even sharper focus for those who, by His grace, have had their spiritual eyes opened. For instance the sensitive Christian in the 21st Century West must sometimes feel as Lot did in while living in Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a righteous, though admittedly imperfect, man who was horrified by what was going on around him. He lived in the midst of a society that was literally hell-bent on rejecting biblical moral boundaries and it grieved his soul to the core. As the way of life of these doomed cities of antiquity continues to become the new norm in our own “progressive” culture we will increasingly feel the same dissonance that Lot did (or at least we will if we do not succumb to the deceptive blandishments that led Sodom and Gomorrah to their destruction, a very real possibility in a Church that today sometimes seems more captive to the world than ever.)

This dissonance is not just felt in perceiving the sexual license that many Christians tend to peg when they think of Post-Modern moral decay. It can manifest itself when we look at runaway self-indulgence of any kind. We behold greed, vanity, social injustice, casual cruelty and a litany of other evils when we look even fleetingly at the world around us. We see it in our fellows and sometimes, terribly, we also see it in ourselves. One response to such awareness is fear. We know that God is not forever mocked and we sense that his wrath truly is being stored up for the Day of Judgment. The fact that it may not be too far away, if we are correctly reading the signs of the times, can amplify this fear.

But in the midst of that apprehension we may also experience a sense of relief that the wickedness which seems so hopelessly pervasive at times is soon to be banished through the righteous hand of God. This is a kind of paradox. The believer can dread the coming of the Day of the Lord while at the same time welcoming it. Perhaps this is analogous to knowing that a doctor is about to decisively cut some diseased tumor out of us. We fear the deep pain such an operation will most likely cause while simultaneously welcoming its effect, the removal of a horrible and deadly thing from our being.

It does not profit us to think of this paradox as somehow strange. Even we who are being sanctified by the blood of Christ are not yet without any trace of darkness in our souls. We may already be perfect from the perspective of eternity, but in “real time” we remain predisposed to fall into the same kind of evil that we often see in the normal behavior of our unbelieving neighbors. The flesh, though dying, remains and the honest Christian knows this to be true. Under such circumstances is it really in any way extraordinary that we long for God to do something about it in a final and comprehensive way, both in ourselves and in the world around us?

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Many of us experienced great personal pain in our lives before coming to Christ. During that time we may have taken on ideas about the nature of who we are as individuals that need to be divinely corrected before we can enter into the true life that Christ has promised we will experience as we follow Him. God’s greater reality sometimes needs to replace our idea of reality, an interpretation of our lives warped by other’s sins against us and our own sinful response. We all have a story that we consider our own, but it may be that our place in God’s redemptive Story needs to replace it. Our very ability to make sense of the past, live in the present and hope for the future can depend on letting our Lord re-interpret our lives for us in this way.

From a theological perspective we are, of course, called to believe that God’s view of us is the most accurate one possible. His Word declares that He created us and, in his omniscience, He knows us better than we know ourselves. As a perfect being God’s understanding of who we are is absolute and thus absolutely accurate.

However the fact that this is what we are called to believe does not mean we actually believe it. All too often our self-image is forged in imperfect relationships with other imperfect human beings. Whether these others are parents, siblings, peers or romantic partners, the common denominator is that they are fallen people just like we are, and fallen people often wound one another. Such wounds, and the resentment to which they often lead, can distort our view of who we ultimately are and keep us from realizing our identity in Christ. The result is a spiritually and emotionally stunted life, one that does not fully glorify God and benefit both ourselves and others.

The answer to such a dilemma can only be found in allowing our Redeemer to literally “re-write” the story of our lives in such a way that his true vision of who we are progressively replaces our untrue one. This occurs as we learn to submit every aspect of our hearts and minds to Him. The replacement of our faulty self-identity with the eternal identity of a child of God is a vital function of sanctification. It comes as we earnestly seek God through the life-changing disciplines of the Christian life, disciplines like prayer, meditation, and worship. As such it does not take place overnight for most of us, but it can and will happen as we enter into deeper intimacy with the Lover of our souls.

In the end we will come to realize that who we thought ourselves to be pales in comparison with who God has made us to be. One of the greatest joys of Heaven will be the full realization that we have been uniquely remade in the perfect image of Christ, and set free to be like Him in every way our supremely loving Father intended from before we were born, in fact from before time itself began.