Year: 2017

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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“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

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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

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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

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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.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Our sense of limit, of the finite, needs to go when it comes to our contemplation of the attributes of God. He is limitless and, by definition, so are the qualities of His Being. As finite creatures our unconscious limiting of the attributes of God comes naturally to us. We live in a world of scarcity and so we have trouble apprehending a God who is both eternal and infinite in every aspect of who He is.

Entering into a greater apprehension of the endless deeps of the divine character is a vital call for all His children, and from more than just the standpoint of “head-knowledge”. It is also necessary to our sanity. We live in a world of imperfection. We embodied this imperfection especially in our pre-conversion nature, but also exhibit it even now as believers living on this side of Heaven. This is why coming into contact with the unbounded nature of God is vital to our very spiritual life. We need to know in our hearts that nothing is impossible for our Lord. This is because the transformation we need in order to truly live is totally impossible for us to attain on our own. If we are to grasp the reality of the power of God to redeem and sanctify us we must have a growing belief in certain attributes of His character, and the fact that they are without limit.

What are some of these attributes? They include His faithfulness, goodness, justice, grace, love, wisdom, and sovereignty. There are many more than these (A.W. Tozer, in fact, lists 19 separate divine qualities in his classic little book, The Knowledge of the Holy.) God might even, as Tozer at one point suggests, have attributes we cannot perceive in our current state of existence. However the ones for which we need to have some recognition of limitlessness are those which are vital to us in this life. For instance one prime example of such a crucial knowledge is the true conviction that God is omnipotent, in other words: all-powerful. This is a must if we are to even begin to believe that He, in Christ, is capable of securing our salvation and enabling our sanctification. The sense of the vastness of our own sin alone makes knowledge of the infinitude of our Lord’s power to atone for it essential.

Another example of a “need to know” in our Christian walk is the unlimited nature of God’s love. This is because it is one thing to recognize He has the power to save us and quite another to believe He also has the desire to do so. Infinite love points towards the absolute reality of such a desire because he who loves something inherently wants the highest good for that something, or someone. If God loves us He wants to do us good and because He is God he wants to do us good beyond all limits. Infinite love supplies the desire and infinite power the means.

The other divine attributes also meet some absolute need in us. Because we live in a sometimes unfair world we need to know that our Lord is infinitely just and will eternally remedy that unfairness someday. Because we live in a place of uncertainty and change we need to know our God is immutable and will soon usher in a perfect and permanent place for us to inhabit. In each case we require knowing more than the fact that these qualities exist in our Redeemer; we also must know they exist in such quantity as to forever secure the remedy for the particular thing that ails us.

Like nearly everything else in the life of a believer coming to viscerally know the truth of the eternal infinitude of God’s attributes will only happen over time (and we will not know its likely most profound fruition in us until we meet Him face to face.) In His perfection He has ordained that human beings learn things in this progressive way. For this reason patience with ourselves is an important part of coming into a deeper knowledge of the all-sufficiency of God to remake us in the image of His Son. It does us no good to fruitlessly fret about not having what we would consider to be an adequate knowledge of these things by a certain point in our lives. For this reason we would do well to always be looking to that divine attribute of all-sufficiency to put our minds and hearts at rest in the process. He is more than able to give us whatever degree of such knowledge we need at just the right moment in our existence.

After all, His timing is infinitely perfect too.