Month: August 2017

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

“I am not conceded, Lord, and I don’t waste my time. But I have learned to feel safe and satisfied, just like a young child on its mother’s lap.” Psalm 131:1-2 (CEV)

Every time the Bible speaks of us learning to walk in some new comfort, grace or strength the anxious believer can breathe a sigh of relief. The key word here is learning. Because we live in an instant gratification society many of us have come to expect that things we feel we must have must come to us in an instant. Combine this with the impatient voices that sometimes come from pulpits urging us to seemingly change overnight and you have a recipe for constant frustration and fear among the more sensitive souls in our churches.

Verses like those above need to be sprinkled into sermons amidst exhortations. Otherwise people will not learn a vital truth: that God does not expect them to be radically sanctified overnight. A recent check of a Strong’s Concordance for the King James Version of the Bible found 64 uses of words containing the root “learn” in both the Old and New Testaments. Beyond this it is evident in the very make-up of human beings that our Creator built into us a necessity to learn over time. Very little that we have achieved throughout our history as a race, both individually and corporately, has come without slow progress. While it is true that some important breakthrough in fields like the sciences have come “overnight” it is also true that those who were successful in making them always first spent years first learning about and working in their fields.

No teacher expects his students to take and pass a final exam on the first day of class. Why do we think the ultimate Teacher expects us to become spiritually mature in an instant? Part of the problem is that what might be called the “structural impatience” of our culture has subtly infiltrated the Church. The idea of gradually attaining to some good is becoming a more and more alien concept in Western society. We have become addicted to the spiritual equivalent of the “get rich scheme.” Just go to the altar and “surrender your life” and the unspoken implication is that the Lord will grant you peace, joy, purpose, etc. in a moment, or at least shortly thereafter. But spiritual maturity always comes through a lifetime of doggedly seeking after God and the things of God. No one becomes a seasoned Christian overnight and we should not expect that of anyone.

The agents through whom the modern zeitgeist of instant gratification has unwittingly become spiritualized are, sadly, often the leaders who preside over everything from our Sunday services to our radio broadcasts to the authoring of the books on our Christian websites. Exhortation is communicated to us far more than comfort in too much Evangelical teaching today. Exhortation, in and of itself, is not an evil. What is an evil is exhortation that has more to do with frustrated pastors and speakers who do not see the life of Christ being reproduced in their listeners fast enough for their liking. Why is it that so many of our leaders are “Type A’s” who desire immediate results? Perhaps it is because we unconsciously applaud leaders who ape the world’s idea of success. Unfortunately that means rejecting the bedrock Christian principle that says true love is patient with men and woman who are “but dust.”

It is one thing to call on a sinning child of God to repent without delay. When a Christian is living in blatant sin immediate confrontation is often the most appropriate response. Moral exhortation is not always a bad thing. But in contemporary Evangelicalism there is a tendency to exhort people to change without showing them how and without telling them that real change takes time. The bottom line is that we may be saved in an instant, but sanctification is a lifelong process, a process that is ordained by God. It is never instantaneous. Too many believers, especially those with sensitive spirits, are being stripped of legitimate comfort and confidence in the authenticity of their Christian walk because we have publicly made a virtue of impatience. This should not be.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The classic disciplines of the Christian life, practices like fasting, silence, solitude, and sacrificial giving, continue to get short shrift in contemporary Evangelicalism. This remains true despite the efforts of many to re-introduce into the Church the idea of pursuing such disciplines during the past three decades. This is unfortunate because there is much to commend the idea that a weakness in Christian living has rendered many of us unrecognizable as a people in the world, but not of it, and consequently weakened our witness to that world.

Spiritual laziness (a personal problem, by the way, with which the author is not unfamiliar) has become a problem today due to our tendency to constantly drill into people the idea that any kind of “work” is wrongheaded. The message sometimes appears to be that since it is faith by grace that saves us receiving Christ as Savior is the be-all and end-all of being a Christian. These kinds of statements are theologically true, of course. The problem is that they often become a false justification for living out a feeble and ineffective form of Christianity because they are preached to the exclusion of spiritual discipline. However, it is one thing to be saved and quite another to walk in the fullness of Jesus Christ growing to our full potential as His disciples; to do that we must embrace discipline as an indispensable part of sanctification.

Grace is indeed the motive power in our transformation into the image of God’s Son. Apart from it attempts at discipline truly are worthless because discipline divorced from saving and sustaining grace is not of any value. The Pharisees, for instance, were a highly disciplined bunch, but their pride-driven efforts were offensive to the very God they claimed to serve so much more purely than everyone else. Practicing self-denial in its various forms can also become unhealthy when the motivation for self-denial is tied to compulsion and fear. Rigid asceticism that paints all pleasure as somehow inherently wrong is another false distortion of biblical discipline. Unfortunately bad motivation and flesh-based efforts have sometimes seemed to give the practice of any spiritual discipline an undeserved bad name.

The only right motivation for fasting, silence, solitude, sacrificial giving, et al is a desire to become more like Jesus Christ because we passionately love Him. The Son of Man practiced all of these disciplines and more. He knew that doing so was integral to His relationship with His Father and so it also is with us. While the reproduction of the Savior’s character in his people is enabled by God’s grace it is walked out by their personal application of the disciplines He modeled. If we want to fully realize our faith in the day-in, day-out routine of our lives we cannot simply brush-off biblical discipline by declaring it “legalistic.”

Once it is understood that a life of discipline is necessary to an authentically powerful Christian walk there are a multitude of sources, both ancient and contemporary, that will teach us how to practice it. Because of the availability of such sources today God’s people cannot use a lack of knowledge or example as a reason to shun the mandate to walk in the way of Christ in this aspect of the Faith.

The good news is the fact that this yoke isn’t only not burdensome, but it actually gives us the potential to continue to walk in the joy and peace we first experienced upon our salvation. Its harvest is a pleasing one for those who are trained by it. There is no downside to properly motivated and practiced spiritual discipline. The ability to live in this way is God-enabled and our decision to do so in spirit and in truth is always blessed by Him.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

In seeking to truly live a good life we can only “do the right thing” because God is progressively transforming us into the image of His Son in the process of sanctification. It is in the realization and appropriation of His righteousness, now within us, that we begin to truly do the right thing for the right reason. All good works done apart from His Spirit are not really good works in the truest sense because they originate in the system of works-righteousness that is inherent in our old sin nature. What the Word of God calls “the flesh” taints such actions, no matter how admirable they may seem on the surface.

This is a very hard pill for human beings to swallow. It requires that we consciously abandon the deeply ingrained conceit that, apart from God, we have any goodness in and of ourselves. We desperately want to believe that we are innately good. The alternative is to face the darkness within us as well as the eternal ramifications of that darkness. Coming to grips with the reality of our sinful hearts is the ultimate watershed in our lives. It quite rightfully leads to despair, but it can also lead to salvation.

Yet even after salvation the temptation to work out of our old nature remains. The Pauline books of the New Testament are replete with exhortations to cease doing the right thing for the wrong reason. These epistles are addressed to believers. A primary process in the Christian life is the rooting out of wrong dependencies. One of the most intractable of these dependencies is the tendency to continue trying to do good by the power of our flesh instead of out of the newly forming character of Christ within us.

The solution to the oxymoron of “works-righteousness” is to let the Lord progressively reproduce His character within our deepest hearts. God is love and it is in the nature of love to give. Love works for the benefit of its object solely out of a pure and true desire to bless that object. Such work is absolutely sincere. There is no hidden agenda of self-centeredness present. Jesus has often been described as a “Man for others”. In this the Son of God embodies His Father’s nature. All his works are rooted and enabled by that nature and are therefore good in the ultimate sense of the word.

If we are children of God we have the character of God. The believer gains this character at the moment of salvation. In the ongoing sanctification that should occur from that point onward we practically appropriate and act in the Spirit of Christ that first changed our heart at the time of conversion. In one of the greatest paradoxes of the Christian journey we begin to turn into who we truly are. In this mystery lies the power to die to wrongly-motivated works and become able to do the good things we do solely out of the good new heart that The Father has placed in us through His Son. We work out of who we are, and are becoming, and our motivation progressively becomes sincere love for those we are working for.

The good deeds that come out of a heart of true love are not a burden but a joy. When we are doing them out of the compulsion that comes from trying to work our way into God’s good graces we find the yoke to be hard and the burden heavy. This is because we are not acting in love but in fear; the fear of not being able to earn our way to God. Such a fear is completely legitimate for God seeks those who worship Him in both spirit and truth. That means, among other things, receiving the free gift of salvation “by grace through faith”. Part of that gift is the ability to increase loving as He loves over our lifetimes. When we move in His love, put within us by the presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts, we finally work for the right reasons. In so doing we become a true blessing to both God and others, and are blessed ourselves in the process.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The wind of the Spirit blows through our world, and often through us, but we know not from where the Spirit comes or where He is going. Every turn and weave, every obscure yet intimate passage, every mysterious and sublime movement, and every unknown course between origin and destination is in actuality part of the perfect and ultimate design of God.

We can know this; as the Spirit moves He can move we who believe closer to a consummation beyond our wildest and fondest dreams, to the perfection of God’s plan for the ages and for all eternity. Oh, that we who are the people of God could know more of this truth in our deepest hearts and thus further deepen those hearts, deep calling deep.

All too many of us have lost the wonder and awe we once had for the Divine. We formally knew both these things; first at the beginning of our earthly lives as children of common grace gazing out in perhaps unconscious joy at our creator’s bright handiwork in the world. Then, years later, we knew another kind of wonder and awe as new creatures of saving grace caught up in the early bloom of first love with Jesus Christ, seeing His heart, and His heart for us, for the first time.

The first kind many of us lost when our childhood went dark with abuse and the loss of human security, the second when that which remained unhealed in us led to a narrow legalism that crowded out the love and grace of our newfound Savior.

Yes, many of us have lost both these things but we are no longer content to suffer these losses indefinitely, no longer willing to miss being caught up in the wind of that Spirit. Whatever the cause of the dimness in the eyes of our heart we have once again set them upon our Father through the shed blood of His Son, and we are regaining the vision He always wanted us to have of Him.

Yes, “the world, the flesh and the Devil” would have us stay out of the holy stream of the Spirit, would keep us bound up in the darkness of pain and resentment and the bitter self-righteousness to which they both often lead. But we are too desperate for the God we once knew to let that happen and He, too, is unwilling to let us stay bound. So years into our Christian life we find ourselves beginning to do whatever it takes to let Him free us.

I once wrote that ten seconds of the felt presence of God was better than anything in my life I’d ever known before. What I did not let on at the time was that ten seconds was not nearly enough. It was not enough then and it is not enough now. I want the eyes of my faith to let me see and partake in the awe and wonder of my God for much longer than that, for much longer periods in this life….and forever in the next.

May it be so for all of us who find ourselves yearning, even starving, for a new vision of God. Like a sailing vessel on the sea may we all turn into, and be caught up in, the bracing wind of the Spirit so as to be carried where He wants us to go, into the very heart of the Father through the Son.

Amen.