Month: September 2017

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is not easy to be a pilgrim. The sons and daughters of God live in a world which we have come to realize can no longer completely fulfill us and, truthfully, never could. We long to be in the place our Father is, the only place that we can truly call home now that we have come to know His Son, but we are not there, not yet. The pain of the Christian sojourner is the perception of being so long in transit from the temporal to the eternal. We yearn for the redemption of our bodies and the time when we will enter the life that truly is life. But for now we must wait and none of us knows how long that wait might be.

It would be one thing if we were fully reconciled to living the life of a pilgrim, the life led by our Savior while He walked the Earth. The truth is that few of us can claim to have never attempted to futilely sink permanent roots into the troubled soil of this world. Most if not all human beings want to have a home. While some may enjoy a certain degree of wanderlust the vast majority of us desire, like the birds of the air, to nest. We long for a safe haven, a place of comfort and solidity, where we can live with those whom we love and who love us, forever. But nothing is forever which is wedded to the world as it now exists.

This is not to say that the believer has to be a complete vagabond. Christ did not command us all to wander aimlessly through life without any kind of “safe harbor.” Throughout our lives we will know the comforts of temporal dwelling places, homes for a season. Not every one of us is a Paul, a man who seemingly was always in motion throughout his lifetime. While it is true that some believers are called to that kind of life many of us will not venture far from the place of our birth. But even if we live in only a few dwellings and never are more than a handful of miles from our hometown the sense of not being able to find true permanence in our lives here will haunt us. It can be no other way for the Christian.

The abode of God is our only ultimately real dwelling place. It is strange to think of home being a location we have never physically visited. The human tendency is to romanticize the place we knew as a child as our truest home, but the new Heavens and the new Earth come at the end of our journey through this fallen world, not at its beginning. Our hearts will never be at rest until we enter the gates of the New Jerusalem and see the One whose very presence makes it the destination of all who love Him.

In the meantime we must learn to endure being where our greatest longings for home cannot yet be fully realized. It is difficult to live here, but we can trust that the God of all places had our best interests in mind when He decided that our being born from above would not immediately bring us above. In fact feeling like this world is not our true home is one of the things that tell us we are children of God; that we cannot fully be at rest this side of Heaven is actually a sign of spiritual health. All that remains for us is to endure and know that, whether by death or our Lord’s return, our final homecoming is not that far away.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights Reserved

“God hates sin like the parent of a Leukemia victim hates cancer.” -Frederica Mathewes-Green

God hates our wrongdoing primarily because of what is does to us. This is entirely consistent with a God who embodies sacrificial love for others. We use the Greek term, “agape” to describe a love that is completely self-giving and supremely concerned with the welfare of its object. It is the kind of devotion that rejoices in the eternal wellbeing of the person, or persons, it embraces. This is the love of Jesus Christ for the human race; it is the love He made manifest in its purest form at Calvary. Moral transgression destroys the lives of God’s finest creation and He hates it as any parents would hate a sickness that leads to the death of their beloved child if left uncured.

This is not to say that God does not also hate sin because it is the embodiment of our rebellion against His rightful rule. Make no mistake; sin incites His ire as well as His concern and rightfully so. But there is sometimes a tendency for people to only see this one facet of God’s attitude towards human transgression. When we think of our Creator mostly as an offended Being who angrily judges our offenses we end up with a very distorted understanding of His total motivation. We forget that He hates the sin in us because He loves us and is deeply grieved by the destruction that we, beings made in His own image, have brought upon ourselves.

In our daily battle with the flesh it is vital to remember why we are fighting. It is a temptation to try to turn away from sin only because we are afraid of the consequences. We sometimes believe that God is angered by our wrongdoing solely because it offends His righteousness. If we just try to shun sin in order to avoid His wrath we will ultimately fail in the effort. The Word of God tells us that it is His kindness which should make us desire to permanently turn from sin.

We need to understand and embrace the truth that part of the reason God hates the evil in us because He loves us and watching what it does to us breaks His heart.

A good deal of preaching in the Church today tends to be in the form of exhortation. There is, no doubt, a legitimate place for these kinds of sermons. The problem is that they are sometimes spoken in a spirit that leaves out the loving motivation of the God in whose name they are given. Whether consciously or unconsciously, some preachers and teachers often convey the message that God, in His holy wrath, will deal with us in our sin mostly out of a hatred of rebellion that challenges His authority. When we only see this facet of His passion against human transgression we do not grasp the entire truth as to why our Lord is so passionate.

It is vitally important for the children of God to know that He also abhors sin because He loves us and desires only the best for us. We have a Father who knows exactly what we need to become in order to know the deepest, most joyful, communion with Him. There is no higher good for human beings than to exist in perfect love with the One who so perfectly loves them. God passionately loves His children and our sin gets in the way of our fully receiving that love.

If there is enough un-repented sin in us we begin to sicken spiritually. Our souls, by our own will, start to wilt and the “cancer” of sin grows into a potentially fatal disease. Like a human parent watching a child die of Leukemia God knows the terrible pain of seeing one of His beloved children waste away. This is why he hates sin and it is also why we should hate it. Part of a dying child’s pain is seeing what it does to his or her parents. In such cases children feel this despite the fact that the illness is not their fault. How much more should we feel the pain of the One who loves us most when we also know we are largely to blame for being sick in the first place?

Blessedly, sinning Christians can, by knowing God’s true heart towards them, find the right motivation for turning from sin. This is a cancer that, thanks be to God, is curable.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It is so easy to take God and His blessings for granted. More than that, it is easy to care more about a myriad of earthly things than to keep His Son as the deepest focus of our hearts and minds. The capacity, even of the believer, to put Him to one side and care mostly about self is a truly remarkable thing.

How often do we choose to avoid the required disciplines to know, love, and obey the One who made us and died for us? How much different are we sometimes than the person who openly rejects Christ? Perhaps not as much as we would like to think. The soul, even the redeemed soul, is capable of amazing feats of rationalization. We employ such mental gymnastics to justify putting God on a shelf in our lives. To put Him there is to sin grievously against a Savior who loves us more deeply than any other person in our lives, and who deserves our steadfast love in return.

With all the contemporary emphasis on self-esteem and the avoidance of reckoning with guilt feelings even Christ-followers sometimes forget that mourning over sin is a godly practice. It is James who forthrightly tells his readers that the right reaction to sin is to “Grieve, mourn and wail”. He then goes on to tell us to “Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (Js 4:9, NIV.) How many of us can say that we have cried recently over how much we have pushed Jesus to the side in our day to day lives? Have we wept lately over grieving the Spirit of the One who died, who suffered such anguish with our sin the cause, and our redemption the goal? Or do we give Jesus lip service in our morning devotions and then pretty much forget Him during the course of our day? (I know this has been a persistent problem for this writer, and I am sure I am not alone.)

This is not an occasion for self-condemning shame, however, for mourning as the world does. At least it need not be. It is better that Christians allow the hard truth of their unloving hearts to render them more willing to marvel at the patient, inexorable love of the Savior. The best way to reckon with the sin of neglecting our Lord is to realize its depth inside us without forgetting that it is He, Himself, who is the answer to such sin. If we let our hearts melt with the realization that the love of Christ is greater than even our disregard of Him then we can know the joy of restoration.

However it must begin with a willingness to gaze at the wounds, to hear the cries, to sense the anguish our Lord endured outside the gates of Jerusalem 2000 years ago. It is largely in this way that we are convicted of our own callousness towards Him in favor of our self-obsessions. It is also largely in this way that we can come to know that the very love that led Jesus to the cross is sufficient to put Him back in His rightful place at the center of our heart’s affections.