Month: April 2018

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Theologically conservative Christians have often been portrayed in popular Western culture as puritanically humorless, as individuals who have allegedly added laughter to the list of sins about which they are said to be obsessed. Frankly, this is another fallacy put forth by those who do not know what kind of people we really are and who are simply unwilling to put forth much effort in seeing past their own prejudices. (I ought to know; I used to be one of those unwilling people.)

The fact is that most Christians I have met love to both laugh, and laugh long and hard. The Biblical Church is an amalgam of every sort of human personality and we thankfully have our share of natural wits and comedians. The only people in our congregations who bear faces constantly bereft of laughter are perhaps the few sour legalists in our midst along with those who are simply going through a hard patch in life (as all human beings, including Christians, do) and are having a difficult time responding to humor. Other than that, any social time after a Sunday morning service usually echoes with laughter and a lot of it.

For those who think the Bible a humorless book it might be instructive to look at some of the words of Christ contained within. His teachings included illustrations, often metaphorical in nature, which would have caused more then a polite chuckle among his hearers. For instance when he calls religious hypocrites, in their pompous moralizing, people who would “stain out a gnat but swallow a camel” he is using hyperbolic humor that would put to laughter those who lived in a time when their was a need to strain ever-present insects out of food that was being eaten. The truth is both the Old and New Testaments are sprinkled with humor. It is true that the Bible is not brimming over with meaningless comedy, but then the message it is designed to impart is basically a serious one. Never, however, is human laughter put under some kind of anathema within its pages. In fact in the 21st chapter of the Book of Genesis Sarah, mother of Isaac, explicitly credits her Creator for giving her the gift of mirth at the time of the miraculous birth of her son. “God has brought me laughter” she declares.

One of the cardinal characteristics of the true Christian life is joy. Joy manifests itself in many wonderful ways and healthy, innocent humor happens to be one of them. If you ever walk into a church and solemnity is the only thing you sense, even when a service that requires some solemnity is over, I suggest you simply turn around and walk out the door. You probably were not in a truly Christian church at all. Real followers of Christ are, it is true, quietly reverent when the moment calls for it, but the rest of the time we like to laugh at least as much as the next person.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

A fruitful Christian life does not come from working ever harder in the power of the flesh, rather It comes from being in ever more intimate union with Jesus Christ. We are so often tempted by the idea of “redoubling our efforts” when we fall flat on our faces spiritually, but that is the last thing that will put us back on our feet. The “old man” depended exclusively on the flesh and, unknowingly, on common grace to achieve the things the world calls valuable. Once we are redeemed and given the Holy Spirit we experience something new, the power of God producing good things in our lives. We activate and increase that power by purposefully seeking to be with Christ and beginning to surrender all that we are to Him. This is a progressive process that we hasten or slow down by how much time we give to seeking Jesus and how sincere and focused is that seeking.

The Scripture tells us that He is the vine and we the branches. Natural branches cannot be fruitful apart from the greater vine which not only sustains them but causes them to produce the kind of good fruit that is pleasing to the reaper at harvest time. A branch has no power, in and of itself, to make this kind of fruit and neither do we have any power to bring forth spiritual fruit apart from a real and vital union with our Savior.

A sort of sanctified workaholism is rife in the church today. While there is nothing wrong with spending our lives in service to our King, there is something wrong with doing it by relying on self-effort. We may appear to be doing great spiritual tasks, but if it is in the power of the self such works are counterfeit. They may seem impressive but they are not truly of God. While it is true that the believer must cooperate with God in doing His work it is largely a passive cooperation in the sense that God is the one providing the motive power. Too many of us have “burnt-out” spiritually because we have invoked God’s blessing over work that we have done only by the sweat of our own spiritual brow. Some Christians are exhausted because they are wearing a yoke of their own design rather than the perfect yoke of Christ; a yoke that, by the way, is blessedly light and easy.

Being must precede doing. We need to spend time with our Lord first and foremost, and then He will direct us to the works He wants us to perform in His strength. It is vital that believers give the highest priority to staying as close to Jesus as Mary once did (much to Martha’s chagrin) or as John did the night of the last supper. Neither of these persons were busy “doing ministry” at those moments. They were simply near Him, and focused upon Him. When you gaze into the eyes of Jesus, when you come into intimate union with Him through the Holy Spirit, the rest flows naturally. Spend enough time with the Lover of your soul and you will not only intensely desire to do His work but you will find that the time spent with Him filled you with the divine power to accomplish it.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

For years now I have struggled with the biblical writings of the Apostle Paul. For me it isn’t the issues of women’s roles in the church or human sexuality (probably the two most common points of controversy about the Pauline epistles in the 21^st Century) that bothers me. For me it is something else entirely.

I believe that the great Apostle would be characterized today as a “Type-A” personality. You might almost call him the “original Type-A.” Here is a man who endured an unbelievable amount and severity of hardship as he almost, it seems, single-handedly spread Christianity throughout the Roman Empire to the Gentiles. While there are times when he stayed in one area for weeks or even months, it never says anything about his resting during these periods. Examine almost everything else he wrote and you might get the impression that he spent those times in one location constantly preaching or at least working long hours to restore his financial resources before getting back on the road.

Of course Paul does talk about finding rest in Christ and giving one’s burdens over to Him on a spiritual and emotional level. What seems to be missing is the physical respite. Based on his writings it would appear that if he had not ended up martyred by the Romans he would have travelled, preached and planted churches until the day he died, possibly of exhaustion.

Beyond this I think it is fair to say that no other New Testament writer is more “exhortational” in his messages to the Church than Paul. He never minces words about the absolute commitment to Christ required of His true followers. To call his letters challenging is an understatement. In Christian history Paul was perhaps the first true “radical” (a term we hear bandied about quite a bit these days by an influential group of young Christian media personalities as being  a one-word answer to all the woes of the Church in America)

Today in these churches we sometimes speak of “living the life of Paul” in this radical sense. Sometimes this is mentioned in regards to his celibacy, but I believe it often refers to the implied or open message that every real believer is to live a life like his. Of course this also means, for those of us who do not live up to his level of Christian intensity, that there are unhappy prospects for our future on perhaps both a temporal and eternal level. This is a scary thing for many who take the Scriptures literally and seriously and who know we have come nowhere close to living out a “Pauline life.”

I have certainly been one of the people who feel this way, and I suspect many of my readers do too.

For this reason I think it is important to remember that the Apostle Paul was a human being with a very specific mission, directly received from Christ Himself, and that he was to be the leader in taking the Gospel to the Gentiles. I believe it is safe to say that very few Christ-followers today would be given the mission of evangelizing their entire town much less the entire Roman world of the 1^st Century. Likewise I think it must be remembered that the only perfect person to ever walk the earth was our Lord Himself. Type-A’s often end up becoming “workaholics”. I will be so bold as to at least state the question that this might have been one facet of Paul’s unperfected character. Many have noticed that his epistles seem to become a bit less exhortatory as he matured in years. Like any human being, Paul needed to grow as a believer. Could his seeming earlier “toughness” in regards to urging on those in churches he started have been a symptom of an attitude in which he, himself, needed to grow in Christ?

Some will consider me considerably out of line to even suggest such a thing. From all appearances Paul lived an almost unimpeachable life after his dramatic conversion. At least that is the sense we get from the vast majority of the New Testament writings. As a believer in the entire counsel of Scripture, even as I propose that the man might have had his flaws I find myself feeling uneasy. Did David, the “man after God’s own heart” screw up? Absolutely. Did Peter, the man Christ called “the rock,” ever show any flaws? Yes. (In fact, in Galatians 2:12 it is, guess who, Paul who confronts him with one of them — Peter’s refusal to eat with Gentiles when certain Jewish believers were present.)

Yet Paul seems to be nearly unassailable in his moral conduct. Because of that it is easy to almost feel like we are criticizing Christ Himself in even considering the possibility that there were aspects of Paul’s personality which we might not want to emulate.

Personally I feel like I do not come within a million miles of living a life like Paul did, physically, spiritually, or emotionally, and I doubt I ever will. I must also admit I do not really want to live a life like his, and that truly concerns me.

So despite my “conciliating” thoughts above, the problem of Paul remains for me, even as I write these words, just that…a problem.