Year: 2017

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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We cannot manipulate God. This might seem like an obvious truth in a meditation written for those who have come to know Him. “Of course God cannot be manipulated, He’s God!” you might declare. But as in so many aspects of the Christian life what we believe intellectually may not have yet taken root in our hearts. It is one thing to affirm this truth in our mind, another to accept it in our souls to the point where we no longer try to maneuver Him into giving us what we want.

Human beings can be masters of manipulation. Whether we do it consciously or unconsciously some of us have learned how to subtly tip the scales in our favor when we deeply desire something from someone. This tendency towards manipulation is so ingrained in our fallen race that it first manifests itself in our childhood. Children often play one parent off against the other. When dealing with one or both parents they learn to use every emotional trick in the book to get what they want. As a little boy I can remember using a very effective method to get two toys when my father offered to buy me one. I would simply feign an inability to decide which of two playthings I really wanted. I’d stand there in the store and look innocently bewildered. “Which one should I get, daddy? I don’t know which one I like better!” Invariably my father (who, by his own admission, could be an “easy mark” at times) would be melted by my innocent look of confusion and end up buying both for me. Mission accomplished!

As we grow up our skill at manipulation can become well-honed. It is often rationalized or shunted into our unconscious because we do not like to think of ourselves as being devious. The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of us can be just that, although this character flaw varies in scope from individual to individual. When it is not easy, or socially acceptable, to get something we very much want; manipulating other people becomes an attractive option in our flesh. That such an action is dishonest, self-serving and possibly destructive to the one being “maneuvered” doesn’t matter; as long as we get the object of our desire.

Quite often this tactic is destructive to us as well. Many times the thing we want to possess at the cost of our integrity is something that will only harm us in the end. Perhaps that is why a roadblock in the form of “no” was put in our path by the other person, or persons, to begin with.

Nowhere is this truer than in areas marked either temporarily or permanently off-limits by our Lord Himself. God knows exactly what will happen to His children if they gain something dangerous that they “must have”. This is why some things elude us when they are things only His intervention can grant. Our response to the divine “no” is often to get angry and pout. Some of us will then try to cajole God into relenting, as if an all-knowing and all-powerful God ever could be moved by such human manipulations, no matter how subtle or effective they might be with other people in our lives.

That our heavenly Father is thus unmoved is actually a very good thing for those of us who tend to be manipulators. What we desperately need is someone who will not give in to our devious machinations, Someone who knows what is truly best for us and will not be tricked into giving us something that might very well be poison to our souls. We also need to be delivered from our desire to be captains of our own destinies. Manipulation is a form of controlling behavior and the only One who should ultimately be in control of our lives, or the lives of others we come in contact with, is the Holy Spirit. The spirit of manipulation is one more aspect of our flesh that must be crucified with Christ; for His glory and our good.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

How do we stay spiritually uncompromised while living in the larger culture? This question has had to be repeatedly asked throughout the two millennia long history of Christianity. It is a question that has always needed to be answered in fresh ways by the contemporary Church of its time and never more so than now when our society is so greatly impacted by a constantly morphing popular culture born of the technological explosion of the past quarter century.

Our technological abilities, especially in the area of mass communication, have rarely advanced as rapidly as they have during this period. The primary example of what we might call the “Information Revolution” is the computer. It wasn’t so long ago that no one had ever heard of the term “personal computer” much less the “Internet”. When I was twelve my father bought our family one of the first home computers. It set us back a thousand dollars in 1980 and was obsolete in 6 months. That machine had perhaps 1/10,000th of the power of the one on which I now type these words (There was much talk at the time about how microcomputers were going to revolutionize our lives but it was painfully obvious to me that my Radio Shack TRS-80 with its “Tape Drive” and 16K of RAM was just not going to do it!)

Fast forward to today. The vast majority of Americans have either owned or at least operated one of these devices and at ever increasing levels of sophistication. What finally made these machines an integral part of our lives? The answer is the advent of the World Wide Web. The internet’s ability to open human beings to a new world of information and, perhaps more importantly, communication, has changed the Western world more profoundly than perhaps any other inventions in human history save perhaps the atomic bomb, airplane and radio.

One of the things the Internet has done is create a new conduit for popular culture to flow into our minds and hearts, a conduit so powerful that it most likely surpasses the influence any other communications media on our daily lives. TV, for instance, is an incredibly powerful medium for communication but its communication is only one-way. By contrast the Internet is interactive, allowing for two-way communication as well as the selection and perusal of perhaps hundreds of billions of bytes of information along with their accompanying images and ideas. Herein is the rub. By so effectively opening up our being to the surrounding culture the Net has made it far more difficult to be in, but not of, this world.

Much has been spoken about the struggles Christian men (and now, sadly, women) are having with internet pornography. The proliferation of sexually explicit material online continues and has created a multi-billion dollar industry. It is an obvious threat to Christian integrity and cannot be minimized as to its impact, but there are less obvious threats inherent in this medium as well.

The line is beginning to blur between our everyday lives and what might be called our “virtual lives.” On the Net we interact not only with other people but, in a larger sense, with our fallen culture as a whole. The Net is the place to find a plethora of artistic, political, sexual, scientific and social crosscurrents. In one sense we have been given an incredible freedom to explore the meaning of our world and our own existence. Unfortunately that freedom can so easily lead to spiritual bondage.

The Internet is not immoral, but amoral. In and of itself it is only an instrumentality; a device no doubt invented by sinful human beings but not an inherently evil one. We need to remember that truth in order to see this technological revolution in its proper context. The Web is morally neutral; it is those who use it who are the moral agents. That said, a huge portion of the internet is controlled by the Enemy of our souls and not just the porn sites. He also uses the medium to influence us in other ways, and often not so obviously. We can easily allow this technology to put us into a sort of “trance of tolerance”. “How wonderful”, we might say, “to be able to sample from so many cultures and ideas”. The problem is that the spirit of moral relativism abounds online and at times it is tempting to take off our spiritual armor and electronically “slip into something a little more comfortable”. Add to this the tendency to surf for hours that many of us have and we soon find ourselves almost living a double-life, one real and one virtual. Often the virtual life ends up not being under the Lordship of Christ.

For many years I had a small wooden cross that hung from my old desk top computer monitor. I put it there to remind me that there are places online I dare not go. The cross also reminds me that my electronic culture cannot be allowed to define or rule me. Only the Man who died on such a cross for me 2000 years ago can and should do that and for this to happen I need to be intentionally prayerful about where I allow myself to go on line (and, to be honest, probably more often than I am now.)

I also sometimes need to just power everything down for a while and re-enter the real world.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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We are far more likely to do wrong when we are keeping both God and human beings who truly love us at a distance. When we unhealthily isolate ourselves we do unhealthy things. Our relationship with the Lover, and lovers, of our soul is the very strength that keeps us from destructive and self-destructive actions. As individuals who are designed for relationship it is impossible for this to be otherwise.

Why do we isolate to begin with? Often the answer is found in our desire to avoid pain. Relational pain has many guises. Some of this pain is actually God-ordained and part of our redemption. An instance of this might be the pain of a non-believer’s first encounter with the holy. Other pain is the result of the evil that dwells in both others and us and it gratifies only the Enemy of our souls. An example of the former is the discomfort that comes from encountering a perfect God in the midst of our own imperfection and knowing that we fall short morally (prior to understanding that Christ is the answer to this problem.) An example of the latter is the misery of abuse, be it physical, emotional or sexual.

Whatever the source and nature of this pain the temptation is to withdraw into the perceived fortress of ourselves in order to avoid it. We depart from the company of God and the company of human beings in a vain attempt to escape the agents of our hurt. This is the result of our continuing inclination towards evil. No one who finally reaches Heaven in death and knows a final purification from all sin desires anything but perfect intimacy with God and those who share in His paradise in blessed community. It is only our ingrained desire for autonomy and safety on our own terms, combined with the continued difficulty of living in a profoundly fallen world, which causes us to want to flee from both divine and human company.

When we choose to run from relational pain we cut ourselves off from the very answer to it, love. No one can love or be loved in isolation. This may appear obvious since love, of course, implies relationships. However this apparently self-evident reality sometimes eludes us, especially when some of the love we have experienced seems imperfect at best and damaging at worst. At times we think we’d be better off alone than involved in something that feels less like love and more like neglect or even rejection

Yet real love exists. God’s love for us is perfect. Human love is not but it still exists, is divinely rooted, and is indispensable to our well-being. Without both kinds of love we have no motivation to resist sin and the Devil, a “loner” if there ever was one, takes full advantage of its lack. Temptation is defused by the experiencing of healthy relationships. It is amplified by isolation.

It is imperative that, despite its challenges, we who call ourselves Christians persist in the pursuit of deep connection with God and with fellow human beings, especially those who also are His children. The quest for intimacy in our earthly life is sometimes difficult, but it is not optional. Without it we become increasingly given over to evil, and thereby to death. Since sin thrives in the absence of love, love must be our refuge.…and love requires an object other than ourselves.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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What do we do when we feel like something necessary to having a full life is missing from our experience and has been for years? I’m not talking about something trivial, something minor like a non-essential material possession or some rarely given talent that we do not happen to possess. What if we are without a spouse or children or a career that seems to have any eternal value? What if the thing we are without appears to us as being an integral part of what God created to make us whole human beings?

Many Christians live lives that seem radically incomplete because one or more of things like this are not present and do not appear likely to be present anytime soon. In their absence what is present is a sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness, and a gnawing feeling of frustration. Millions of people who profess Christ as their Lord and Savior know what it is to exist day in and day out in a state of depression that is directly related to having what they are certain are unmet needs in their lives.

The Bible, of course, does not promise us spouses, children and careers that fulfill us the way we think they ought. What the Bible does promise is that those needs which really are needs will be met in us if we seek first, as Christ taught us to do, “the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness.” The implication in that promise is that God will provide what is truly necessary if we put Him first in our lives.

To be sure, that is difficult for a lonely, childless or unemployed believer to accept because it implies something else, two things actually. One is that we may not be truly putting God first and the other is that, even if we are, the things we think are needs are actually wants, at least for the moment. No serious Christian likes to think either of these is true about them. No one wants to think they are not seeking enough after the Lord and no one wants to think the thing they desire to the point of desperation isn’t a real need. But that is the implication of “seek ye first.” There is no getting around it.

God is not in the habit of making reality fit our idea of what it should be. Accepting hard truths about the difficulty of life in a fallen world is part of what it means to be Christian. The fact that “life is difficult”, as author M. Scott Peck once began one of his more popular books, is something we must either reconcile ourselves to or find ourselves embittered. There is no getting around that too.

I do not write this to be deliberately harsh (at least I hope that’s not the case). I write it because even the absence of what we think we cannot live without is, in fact, something with which we can live. Beyond that we can find in our dilemma the path to repentance from wrong priorities or wrong ideas about what is truly necessary in this life. Like so many other adversities the sense of missing out on something “essential” in our present existence can prove to be a path to wisdom and maybe even contentment, both of which are great blessings.

It is something to think about the next time we are certain we are being unfairly denied by the God we call our Own.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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It is easy for us to believe numerous lies about ourselves, even not very well-crafted ones. In many cases we believe them simply because they were repeated often to us by others. These are the lies we may have constantly heard told about ourselves by our parents, siblings or peers when we were children, lies that often took the form of insults. What we hear in our formative years can “implant” falsehoods that may haunt us well into our adulthood and it is sometimes very difficult to replace them with the truth about who we are in God’s eyes.

Perhaps the worst kind of lie we believe is that God is disgusted by us. It has been said that while Jesus Christ at times spoke in anger towards certain individuals He never spoke to anyone with contempt. No matter how bad we think we are (and may indeed be, at least relative to His perfect holiness) God is not somehow intrinsically disgusted by us. He may be disgusted by the evil we still harbor within our hearts, but He is not disgusted by us. He hates the sin, not the sinner

In fact God loves sinners and He loves them unconditionally. His love is not, for instance, predicated on our physical appearance and social graces, or lack thereof. Far more importantly than that, it is not even based upon our moral performance. The love God bears for us is actually not dependent on us at all, but on His own nature. God is love and because He is love He loves us.

For some readers this may seem like “Theology 101” but its truth cannot be stated enough for those of us who grew up exposed to people who told us in a myriad of ways that we were ultimately “unlovable”. This is because the lies they repeatedly spoke into our young ears found fertile ground in us in which to put down roots and grow. Such is the heart of a child. It is pliable, like fallow ground in the spring, and the furrows that are plowed during those years often run deep.

This may seem like grounds for despair. What can we do with the seeds of self-hatred that were planted decades ago and have taken hold and grown like poisonous weeds? How do we stop believing lies that keep us from receiving the healing and affirming love of Christ?

The answer can be found in a progressive yielding to our Lord Himself, and specifically to the reality of one of His attributes. The same God who loves us is omnipotent. There is no power in the universe that can resist His and that includes the power of the deceptions we have believed about ourselves since childhood. The children of God have access to the overwhelming might of God to transform and put right even the deepest damage to our hearts. This power is inextricably wedded to His love and its aim is always our complete restoration from the harm we have had inflicted upon us.

In the mystery of His will, and our faith, this restoration will take time. It may not even be fully completed in this life, but completed it will be because in the end there will be no “negative self-image” in Heaven, only the truth that, through Christ, we have been made perfect in His sight and thus perfect in every sense. Then even the most incessantly-repeated insults that we bore in our youth will no longer have any hold on us, any reality in our consciousness. God’s truth, and His love, will be all we know. We will be set free from the lies forever.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

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There is a disturbing tendency I have identified more than once in myself. I have noticed that my response to the wrongs of others often has less to do with my wanting to help them be free of whatever the wrong is than it does removing the presence of their wrongdoing because it bothers me personally. By this I mean that my response to evil in others is more self-centered than others-centered. As such, it is not a Godly response and therefore, if I act on it, it may do more harm than good.

When someone is doing something wrong in my presence, whether they are a believer or a skeptic, I become uncomfortable. Some of this discomfort no doubt is related to knowing how God thinks about the sin in question. To a much lesser extent, I may be thinking about how people are hurting themselves as well as those they love by transgressing biblical moral norms. Sadly, though, I have come to believe that the majority of my negative reaction has more to do with my desire to live in a world free of human wrongdoing prior to the final establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

I have always, I think, been a perfectionist by fallen nature. A manifestation of that trait is my desire to “know the rules” and play by them as much as I can through the enabling presence of divine grace in my life. When others around me are not playing by the same rules, it tends to make me ill at ease. Rather than forbearing the faults of another sinner who is saved (or not saved) in the same way and by the same God as myself, I often feel anger rising that I have to be exposed to their faults at all.

Apart from the aforementioned obvious irony of the self-righteous “log” no doubt lodged in my own eye, this tendency of mine makes my daily life tenser that it has or ought to be. It is hard to be happy and/or joyful when the presence of human depravity makes me anxious. This is a problem because that depravity is getting noticeably worse in the human race at large. Even Christians are not free of it due to the enduring presence of the flesh which our spirit is forever fighting against to whatever degree of success or failure. I’m certainly not free of it.

Jesus, on the other hand, was with sinners all the time. He even managed to love them to the point of dying for them. Certainly there were times when he called sin sin and reacted strongly against it, but this did not seem to scare the majority of people away from Him. Jesus also never indicated by his words or actions that he was uncomfortable with people’s wrongdoing simply because He found it personally offensive. He may have reacted against it because it was offensive to His Father and destructive towards the persons involved, but it never seemed to be just because it made Him uncomfortable.

This can be explained, of course, by the fact that there was no sinful self-righteousness in the sinless Son of God. That said His followers are not free to be unlovingly at odds with their fellows just because they are not perfectly sinless in real time the way the Christ is. Part of our progressive sanctification must involve an increasing humility and love for both lost unbelievers and the imperfect believers with whom we walk out the faith.

I suspect it starts with examining why we are so put off by the presence of something of which we ourselves are often guilty. We might also endeavor to remember that sin, whether on our part or that of another, will be a daily reality in our lives until either our Savior returns or we go home to be with Him. In the meantime, the love of Christ calls us to transcend our self-centered need for perfection in those around us by accepting them just as they are while humbly helping them (and by extension ourselves) find a holier way to live.