2017 – Page 4 – sheaoakley.com

March 28, 2017shea No Comments

Christianity and the Horizontal

While the primary life-giving relationship in the Christian life is between the believer and God it is not the only relationship the Faith encompasses. Part of the reward of following after Jesus Christ is our adoption into the family of God. The human relationships that follow this adoption have often been a profoundly healing thing for human souls through the centuries and that is perhaps true now more than ever as we make our own way through this relationally dysfunctional age.

However for some reason, in our efforts to introduce secular people to our beliefs, Christians have often forgotten to tell them about this aspect of it. This is tragic because the “vertical” relationship within Christianity cannot be separated from the “horizontal” relationships. The reality of the matter is that the Christian Church Universal is actually, in a sense, the largest family on Earth. For those who come to know Christ the bond of the spirit rivals and often surpasses bonds of blood. This is the reason behind believers often referring to each other as brothers and sisters, for that is indeed what we have become.

This has been manifested in the author’s life. My Christian friends have been in a sense my truest family and they have also been, in a unique way, the “loves of my life.” Without them I’m not sure what kind of existence I’d have today and, frankly, I wouldn’t want to find out. We share a common Father and the sheer spiritual reality of that fact relates us to each other in a category of relationship I knew little or nothing of when I was an atheist. This kind of bond is what so many lonely people are looking for (including the kind of lonely people who feel alone in the middle of a supposedly wonderful secular social gathering.) They may be looking for it consciously or unconsciously, but they are looking nonetheless.

This is not to say that all is interpersonal bliss within the church. Christians do not cease to be human when they embrace the gospel. We disagree and sometimes we hurt each other. We also often do not live out the ramifications of our brotherhood and sisterhood and this is a tragic thing that breaks the heart of God. Some people enter our churches expecting something approximating perfect harmony and what they actually see and feel is a disappointment to them. It behooves every true believer to work, by the grace of our Lord, to change this sad reality.

That said, the communion of sincere followers of Christ is real and more often than not contrasts starkly with the way people in our larger society treat one another. One of our hymns includes the line “they will know we are Christians by our love” and that, by and large, is what you will find in congregations that truly have Christ as their center. Many believers will tell you that it was more a loving encounter with people who bore the name “Christian” than theology that did the most to bring them to faith.

Of course the theology of God coming to Earth to save the human race from itself ultimately explains the love these people found. Christianity is defined by propositional truths that, when accepted, are part of the conduit that allows such affection to flow. You cannot have one without the other. So if such love sounds desirable to Secularists in a sincere sense they are challenged, in the end, to consider the question of whether what Christianity proclaims is true.

March 20, 2017shea 1 Comment

Dream or Nightmare?

Throughout history the Church has been influenced by the cultures with which it has been co-existent. In some cases this influence has been healthy, in some cases not. Human societies have always been of a mixed bag of the good and the bad. American society in the 21^st Century is no exception.

Part of the core of the “American Dream” today is the quest to be upwardly mobile materially. The United States has a strong work ethic which has helped us to become an economic superpower. Americans work hard to gain affluence undreamed of by most of the world. Many succeed. The private enterprise system seems to work well and its triumph over competing ideologies reinforces the belief that the “business of America is business”. The superiority of the system is affirmed by many if not most Americans.

There is, however, a cost.

In order to gain this affluence the typical worker is putting in far more working time today. The 40 hour workweek has become, during the past twenty years, the 60 hour work week. This is especially true in what we call “Corporate America”. Big business asks its employees to sacrifice more and more time in the pursuit of more and more productivity. Nationally a large percentage of these workers, perhaps 15% percent, are conservative Christians. We, too, have bought into the workaholism of the 2017 version of the American Dream…

Christians in this country increasingly have less time to spend pursuing the kind of life ministry modeled in the New Testament. There is less time being devoted today to everything from church services to intentional efforts to invest in the kinds of relationships that build community. When your work and your commute take up 10 to 12 hours a day you do not have much time or energy left. The job becomes the focus of life. Investing in eternal things takes a back seat.

The irony of all this is that many caught up in the corporate lifestyle are too exhausted to even enjoy the fruits of their labor. They make good money but the price, among other things, is lost leisure time. What we have in the U.S. is a Protestant work ethic that has gone out of control. We are not lazy, it’s true, but maybe a little more healthy margin in life would be a good thing.

What seems to be missing is balance. Our lives are weighted too heavily towards getting ahead in the working world. Perhaps the lower standard of living that might result from quitting corporations that demand our souls would be worth it. Trade the new BMW in for a used Chevy, buy a smaller house, forego the annual vacation in the Caribbean; all these things are not as important as forging real relationships with God and with other human beings.

American-born missionaries to places like Africa and South America often do not enjoy their furloughs home. They have grown use to the slower rhythm of life in other countries. What they see upon arrival back in the land of their birth is a manic society that has no time for the more important things in life. These missionaries have learned that relationships are much more highly regarded elsewhere than affluence.

Perhaps Christians here need to re-evaluate the American Dream in light of what the Bible tells us are things that really matter.

March 7, 2017shea No Comments

Through Us, With Us: A Divine Paradox

One of the more profound paradoxes of the Faith is the reality that while everything good within us is ultimately from God and God alone, the gifts we exercise in His service also belong to us. A personal example of this reality comes to me when I pray to the Lord for help in writing one of these meditations. I ask him to both “write through me” and to “write with me”. I trust Him to use the writing gift He has given me by directly providing the words I type on my computer. In that sense I function as a conduit, I hope, of the Holy Spirit. At the same time I feel I am using my own thoughts rendered in my own style for His glory and the edification of my readers. In this aspect of my writing I sense that I am more a partner with God, albeit a very junior one, than “just” a vessel.

Many apologists for Christianity have stressed that believers are neither robots nor puppets of the Being in whom they have put their faith and to whom they are in the process of surrendering our lives. Yet there does seem to be an aspect of our relationship with God in Christ that involves a realization that He is the one empowering and directing every aspect of our existence. Jesus tells us that “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5) and that the practical examples of this truth range from our being enabled to take each breath which keeps us physically alive to using the highest functions of our intellect. We are on some level passive conduits and empty vessels though which His divine will is executed. Knowing and accepting this aspect of my existence as a Christian is what leads me to pray “write through me”. It is a prayer that is all about Him

At the same time, I cannot help but sense that what God has given me in the way of creative gifts is, paradoxically, also truly “mine”. There is a co-operative dynamic that is present and at work in my life and ministry. When I write my best material I believe that it is somehow my words as well as His. He “writes with me”. In some sense we write together. I have no illusions as to where the ultimate inspiration is coming from, it certainly isn’t coming from me, but I still feel at times that I am less a conduit than a “co-creator” of the article in question and the Creator is pleased to let me “co-create” with Him.

To some these assertions might appear more contradictory than paradoxical. I cannot completely explain to you why it strikes me as being the latter rather than the former. I simply believe that these two phenomena are happening not only simultaneously but also in some mysterious harmony with one another. Because it seems to me that what is truly contradictory cannot co-exist in such a fashion I can only maintain that this is a form of divine paradox.

If it is it is only one of many at the heart of our unique faith.

February 28, 2017shea 4 Comments

Is Social Media Anti-Social?

An old pastor of mine once referred to social media as “anti-social media.” At the time I found myself having a mixed reaction to his words. On one hand I understood his point-which was that online venues are poor substitutes for physically-proximate interaction with our fellow human beings. I have written in other places about my own concern that truly biblical community in the Church is being damaged by our national obsession with “virtual relationships.” On the other hand I could not help thinking about how much I have enjoyed meeting new people (my wife among them) over the past 15 years on my “platform” of choice, Facebook. This site has enabled me to share much of myself, including many of these Christian mediations, with hundreds of “friends.”

What social media has not given me, with the obvious major exception of meeting my wife, is the opportunity to develop deep friendships with people who live nearby. The comparatively few friends I have in cyberspace who also live close to me are almost entirely those whom I met in person long before I ever registered a username and password.

As for the 1300 or so people I’ve become connected with on Facebook, I “talk to” only about 3-5% of them regularly, or even semi-regularly. While it is exciting to know that some of these 10 to 15 individuals hail from as far away as Australia, I cannot claim to feel like I am close friends with them in the same sense as those who are physically a part of my life.

Meanwhile I’ve noticed that time which could be spent visiting or even just phoning nearby friends is often completely sucked-up by my weekly online hours. Admittedly not all that time is spent on social media sites, but a great deal of it is and I would estimate that my total time spent in front of a screen for non-work related purposes is close to 15 hours. I can imagine that for many people (especially those who, unlike me, own a “smart phone”) this may not seem to amount to a lot. However, much of that is time is what I used to spend with my best friends.

Why did this happen to me in recent years? Two immediate answers come to mind.

It seems easier to interact socially online than it does to actually get up and physically travel somewhere to visit with someone.
On Facebook I can post all the things I want to share with all my friends at the click of a key. I can express myself to hundreds of people without even getting out of bed (except of course to plug in my laptop!)

Both of these reasons for my own addiction to social media stem from something that is specifically warned against in Scripture, “Sloth”, or as we would call it today, laziness. I would add another character flaw to the list too: “Vanity”, which manifests itself in my deep desire to post things that matter to me and prompt people to click the “like” tab. In a way I am almost like a spoiled child wanting the attention of everybody at once, wanting them all to say, in effect, “good boy!”

Another word for Vanity, by the way, is Pride.

I do want to balance the above with the fact that I believe God has used my presence on social media to help me be a witness for Him to a potentially large number of people through my posts (this one included.) I also would be disingenuous if I did not say that I still greatly enjoy sites like Facebook and have no intention of leaving them in some Luddite attempt to turn back the clock by 25 years. This form of communication is here to stay, and so will I.

I have tried to designate a couple of days a week as Internet-free, or virtually Internet-free days. These “offline” periods, among other things, have allowed me to call and sometimes visit my physically-proximate friends and family members (though this has been made more challenging by a recent move to another part of my state.) Had I not enforced this self-discipline, I suspect my weekly time on line would be closer to 25 hours, and the remaining time to actually see people would shrink even further.

So to get back to the original implied proposition of this article, is social media actually anti-social? I suppose I would answer that is perhaps not so much anti-social in an all-encompassing sense as anti-social in a single very important one: no online relationship can truly replace two people actually getting together somewhere face to face and having a heartfelt talk. To the degree that our time spent on social media takes away from our time physically spent in each other’s company I do think it can be anti-social. I also think that the God who once looked at Adam by himself in the Garden and said “It is not good for the man to be alone” would agree. It is safe to say that He never meant for all the relationships with which we assuage our loneliness to be “virtual” ones.

February 24, 2017shea No Comments

Politics, Charity, and the Church

It has been a very rough few months for civility in America. Recent political events have taken a toll on many interpersonal relationships in general in our increasingly polarized nation. One of the sadder aspects of this reality is the fact that the toll has sometimes included relationships among believers. It is sad because our Lord called us to unity and also because, when it comes to putting earthly politics before fellowship, we should know better. Herman Melville once wrote that the Christian ought to be “a patriot only to heaven” and this should in some way be self-evident to the Spirit-filled child of God. While patriotism for our present homeland is not necessarily a vice, it may become one if our greater allegiance to Heaven and to each other is allowed to be superseded by differences in politics.

I think the problem lies largely in our tendency as believers to get too caught up in the here and now. From the perspective of eternity, the tumult of the nations is of profoundly less importance than the salvation of even one human soul. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that while cultures have a definite lifespan, men and women are eternal. A hundred-thousand years from now every person who ever existed will still exist somewhere. By contrast America, like every other human empire, will be but dust and ashes. For this reason the true Christian strives to live first for the glory of God and for others, not for the glory of any temporal nation, including our own. Temporal, after all, means “temporary.”

This is not to say that we should not care at all about America. We are called to be salt and light in this world and part of being salt and light is working for the benefit of whatever country God has seen fit to have us inhabit. However, the reason we work for the greater good of the United States is ultimately to benefit people, the ones with the aforementioned eternal souls, and while this applies to everyone in our lives it should be especially true in the case of our brethren in the Church. Therefore, when even earnestly held political convictions conflict with charity, true love, towards our brothers and sisters charity should win every time.

I wish I could personally say that such charity has won in me every time, but I cannot. There have been too many moments when I too have looked at the stances some sincere Christians I know have taken politically and found myself getting angry with those Christians. I’ve seen and heard attitudes on both sides of the political spectrum that I find deeply disturbing and have sometimes felt that I could not “spiritually relate” to people who hold to such attitudes. The problem, of course, is that I have had some attitudes of my own during the past several months that are more a credit to my pride and self-interest than to my faith (it does not help that I tend to be a “political animal” and can get caught up in what is happening in Washington during this strange season as much as anyone else).

That “mea culpa” owned, it still behooves me to say to my fellow Christians that we cannot afford to have conflict in the Church over current events jeopardize both the well-being of the body of Christ and our witness to a lost and dying world. We need each other, and God commands us to love each other. He knows the importance of the ties that bind his sons and daughters together, and it no doubt grieves Him to see any of those ties at risk over matters that do not involve fundamental biblical doctrine. (While it is true that we must sometimes break fellowship over doctrinal issues we cannot be too careful to not let political stances which do not clearly involve such doctrine tear us apart).

In the final analysis, it again comes down to the overriding importance of the eternal bonds we share with one another not being put at risk lightly. They are just too precious to lose over the results of an election because, as the Christian singer-songwriter Sara Groves once wrote, “at the end of our lives our relationships are all we’ve got.”

February 16, 2017shea No Comments

Trust, Betrayal and Consecration

What is it that keeps many Christians from being, in contemporary Evangelical parlance, “sold out” to Jesus Christ? Why do believers hold back so much of their lives from consecration to Him? The answer may lie in the thoughts we entertain about who God is. Trusting another for anything truly important is usually difficult for human beings. As adults we do not naturally trust anyone anymore; it always involves some degree of effort. The loss of childlike faith in others comes not only through the betrayals we endure but also through the betrayals we ourselves commit. Our wariness would not exist if we were not still on this side of Heaven. Until the day we arrive safely home there we will continue to be redeemed sinners living among other sinners (redeemed or not.)The tendency is to look at an unsafe world inhabited by unsafe people and infer that no one can possibly be what we need them to be. Unfortunately this inference often gets extended to include God.

Human beings are relational creatures. In fact we are all dependent on relationships for our very lives for apart from them we die in every sense. On a horizontal level this healthy dependency is mutual and is expressed through our vital connections with other people. But the more vital connection is vertical, between man and his Creator. It is this relationship that ultimately demands everything of us and such an all-encompassing bond is impossible apart from deep trust in God. When that trust isn’t there we hold back from giving ourselves fully to Him.

How, then, are Christians to find the courage needed to lose themselves in order to fully gain Christ? The hope we need comes from the prospect of progressively coming to know who He truly is and who He truly is to us. As we seek, however imperfectly, after the knowledge of God He gives us grace to see the reality that He is incapable of the kind of betrayal we experience from our fellows. Betrayal is purely a product of sin. It happens because we are imperfect beings who cannot be perfectly faithful to each other no matter how hard we try. But the Lover of our souls is perfect. Within the Trinity God exists in flawless and eternal communion between Father, Son and Spirit. The bond He purposes to forge with the sons of men is, in some sense, an external manifestation of that internal relational perfection. Such perfection does not have a place for betrayal. We may betray Him, but he will never betray us.

The pulpit in a church I once attended had a small sign declaring the truth that “Jesus never fails”. In God’s relationship with us there is no prospect of failure on His end. In coming to know the absolute reality of this statement something will begin to happen in us. We will find that we are able to progressively give all that we are to God because we have seen that He, in the Person of His Son, has already given all that He is to us.

February 8, 2017shea No Comments

Self-Denial Versus Self-Condemnation

There is a fundamental difference between the actions of self-condemnation and self-denial – one is of God and one isn’t. Some believers tend to equate these actions with each other. It is a sure recipe for a defeated life. This is because, when we exchange one for the other, we live in spiritual deception.

Self-condemnation occurs when Christians judge themselves according to false, damaged personal consciences instead of leaving the prerogative of final judgment to God and God alone. More importantly, as far as that divine judgment is concerned, one verse in the Bible demolishes any justification we might think we have for consigning ourselves to our own Hells or believing we are consigned to the real one. Romans 8:1 tells us “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” If we have received Jesus as Lord and Savior we have passed from existing in a sinful state of true condemnation into the redeemed life of a blood-bought and forgiven child of God. When we despise ourselves as Christians we despise the new clean hearts that God has given us through our faith in His Son. This should never be.

Now this is not to say that there are not aspects of our not-yet fully sanctified being that we should hate. The “old man”, the sinful flesh, which is dying but still all too present in our being, is to be loathed, and rightfully so. But hating the flesh is different than hating who we now are in Christ. It is indeed true that legitimate self-love has to be carefully defined. The secular self-esteem movement tells us that all human beings should exalt themselves as being “good” apart from the need for forgiveness from, transformation by, and surrender to God. This is a satanic lie that keeps the lost from knowing their condition and Christians need to expose it for what it is.

That said it is very important that we do not, in our rejection of purely secular concepts of self-esteem, forget that our Lord Himself ordained appropriate self-love. When He told us to love our neighbor He framed it in the context of loving that neighbor as our self. It is not wrong to love and care for yourself. You are now a son or daughter of God and you have great worth in the eyes of the One who sees you through the lens of Jesus Christ. Appropriate positive self-regard is not a sin in a Christian. We are to love God first, yes, as well as our neighbors but we are to love ourselves too.

A counselor friend of mine who went home to be with the Lord several years ago believed that self-love must precede self-denial. What he meant was that the kind of sacrifices for others that we are encouraged to make as children of God require that we have something healthy in ourselves to give up! People who despise and condemn themselves destroy their very ability to love others from a pure heart, abundant in compassion. If we have no compassion for ourselves how are we to have compassion for others? We may do good things for others but out of the fear that if we do not we will be more condemned! This is a sure recipe for a deep sense of hypocrisy, likely followed sometime thereafter by “burn-out” or what has come to be known in recent years as “Compassion Fatigue”. We quickly run out of love to give to persons in need when we have received little God-given and ordained love in our hearts for ourselves.

The key to joyful self-sacrifice is that it must come from a heart that is overflowing with the love of Christ. Self-loathing of not only our dying flesh, but also our blood-bought, God-loved selves will quite effectively quench that overflow. For this reason it is vital we come to know the blessing of Godly self-denial over the self-inflicted curse of self-condemnation. That begins with consciously rejecting thoughts of self-condemnation, when they come, and beginning the process of instead regularly affirming the truth that we are beloved children of the King. This will take time for the self-condemning soul, but the final result will be the joy and peace of a newly abundant life in Christ.

February 1, 2017shea No Comments

The Human Condition and the Goodness of God

If we sometimes question God’s goodness perhaps it is because everyone we know here on earth, including ourselves, has the capacity to do that which is evil. It is sometimes hard for us to imagine a sentient being that is incapable of it. If so our problem is one of perspective.

Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, once said that his greatest times of struggle in life were when he had trouble believing that God was both good and good to Him. One might be tempted to blame this on Luther’s deep belief in pre-destination, but his question is one that many Christians of every theological stripe have wrestled with at one time or another. We see evil and its effects in the world and in ourselves and we wonder why a perfectly good being would allow it in either place. C.S. Lewis called this conundrum “The Problem of Pain”.

I will not try to tackle the entire issue of the existence of evil; theologians of far greater stature than I have done so in greater length and with more moral sophistication than I could ever hope to achieve. What I want to focus on here is how the influence of human relationships affects how we see God.

Every one of us has known what it is to be hurt. We have also all known what it is to be the one doing the hurting. Human beings wound each other all the time. Whether it happens between parent and child, husband and wife or among friends our pride, insecurity and wrong desires conspire to make us inflictors of unnecessary pain. We are sometimes dangerous to each other as well as to ourselves. Just try looking for a “perfectly safe human relationship.” It does not exist. The very term is an oxymoron.

Some of us carry very deep wounds that have come from the most intimate human connections in our lives. It is, in fact, no cliché to say that those with whom we are most intimate are those who can do us the most harm, as well as those to which we can do the same.

So when we come to God, the One with whom we are to have the most intimate relationship with of all, we may well expect the same kind of experience we have known all our lives with everyone else. The idea that the Lord is intrinsically unwilling to harm someone who has become His child through personal faith in His Son is not easily accepted or believed. Our experience is in danger of trumping our faith.

But God is patient with us. He knows what we have known in the days before we met Him and He also knows that it will take both time and the progressive revelation of His favor in our lives to make us understand that He is different. It is this combination of time and loving grace which can open the eyes of our hearts and enable us to truly understand that God is the one Being in the universe who is utterly without evil, and also the only One who can utterly remove the evil in each one of us.

As we come to know our Lord better our perspective starts to change. We come to realize that the perfect Lover of our souls really does exist, and His name is Jesus Christ.

January 24, 2017shea No Comments

In God’s Time

“How poor are those who have no patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” –Shakespeare

One of the most enduring proverbs in the popular mind is “time heals all wounds”. The problem with this idea is that time is not the primary agent in healing. If that were true there would be no bitter old people and unfortunately quite a few such individuals do exist in the world. In truth it is the grace of God, whether it is the common type given to all human beings or the sanctifying kind given only to His children, which is the agent that binds up emotional wounds. That God most often cures our ills over time is, to some degree, incidental.

However, even when so qualified, healing most often does take time.

No doubt God can and sometimes does heal in a moment. As an omnipotent Being it stands to reason that he must have this ability. If He so willed all resolution of our problems, large and small, could be accomplished by Him instantaneously. However common human experience teaches that this is rarely the case. To our frequent frustration God uses time, sometimes long periods of time, in His healing of our souls.

The obvious reason for this is that He wishes to teach us the virtue of patience. Few particularly want to hear this. Learning patience is one of the harder tasks of the spiritual life, particularly in a day and age when instant gratification is incessantly advertised as our right. We also have trouble figuring out why God so values time when He Himself is not ultimately subject to sequential existence, but the Author of it. Why, we ask, should anything have to wait if He, as Master of time, can simply abrogate it?

There is mystery here. We cannot completely answer the question of why grass can grow in a week, while a Giant Redwood takes hundreds of years. Both grass and Redwood are created by the same God; but the solidity of the tree, its beauty and majesty is obviously not comparable to a blade of grass. Neither is its worth. The worth of things is often connected with time in God’s economy of creation and, for that matter, re-creation. The redemption of Humankind is no exception.

Beyond this the development of patience is simply the way that we bring our fallen and thus imperfect view of time into harmony with God’s view. It is probably safe to say that in their innocence Adam and Eve had no need to learn patience because their perception of time was the same as their Creator’s. It is only the curse of the father and mother of our race which has made us hate waiting for anything. Our first parents may well have had no sense of frustration in waiting because time had not become associated with scarcity. Scarcity of time only means something to creatures that face death and death had not yet visited God’s finest creation.

So time does not heal all wounds, but time does have a role to play in that healing. This is its place in the lives of a redeemed people who have yet to experience their full and final liberation in eternity by Jesus Christ. If it seems imperfect that is a residue of our fallenness and its resulting distortion of God’s purposes.

But that purpose will be made known to us in God’s time, when all things are summed up in our Lord….and time itself ceases to be.

January 19, 2017shea No Comments

Self-Effort, Passivity and Active Faith

The Bible tells us that God works in us, that we cannot do anything without him. Yet, it also declares that we have a role to play, responsibilities to accept and work to do. One of the most difficult challenges of the Christian life is avoiding the extreme versions of “Let go, and let God” and “God helps those who help themselves.” While neither of these terms is found in scripture both contain some truth. On one hand we must not make the mistake of lying back in our easy chairs and waiting for God to bless and heal our lives, but we should also not try to change ourselves into the image of his Son through the effort of the flesh either.

The truth is that sanctification depends on a cooperative, though very uneven, partnership between the Lord and His children. This should not be a surprise. God is intrinsically relational (witness the Trinity) and beings made in His own image are created for relationship as well. It was never the divine will to design totally autonomous, independent creatures. In fact the greatest proponent of such radical self-sufficiency is Satan himself. The fall of the human race was all about the Devil’s attempt to convince us that we were meant to be God, rather than depend on God. Any attempt by a believer to achieve perfection in his or her own strength is a legacy of the Enemy’s devastating success in that attempt.

The flesh cannot reform the flesh. Spiritually speaking the modern term “Self-help” is a tragic oxymoron. It is only through surrender to Christ and to the ultimate power of his shed blood that enables real, positive change to occur in our lives. Apart from Him we can do nothing to effect our growth in godliness. As long as we are consciously or unconsciously trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps we will abjectly fail to become truly Christ-like. In fact if we continue to strive to reform ourselves by ourselves we will only push ourselves away from the real Source of our sanctification and, if anything, become more distant from Him.

The other extreme is to become completely passive and expect God to transform our lives without any input from us at all. This He will not do. God expects all his children to take an active role in their spiritual growth. This role is not so much about effort as about trusting obedience. Our job in such obedience is to take the vital first step of trusting that the power required to do whatever He wants us to do, or be whatever He wants us to be, will be supplied, as we will to obey his call. When we take that step in sincerity of heart we will be find that the strength we need is given to us in abundance. This is how the great saints of church history accomplished such seemingly superhuman tasks, because they literally received superhuman power through trusting that “with God nothing is impossible.”

No one is saved through effort. If salvation comes only through faith in the Savior why would the same not be true in regards to sanctification? We cannot transform ourselves in our own strength. Conversely, inertly waiting for God to remake us without any cooperation in the process on our part doesn’t work either. The real key to spiritual transformation is a kind of faith similar to that which saved us in the first place. When we become willing to trust God for any strength we need in order to do or become something new, and then act on the basis of that trust, He gives us the ability to accomplish whatever his will is for our lives. All we need do is walk it out in His power. This type of “active faith” is the best way to trump both self-effort and spiritual passivity.