Author: shea

What is the greatest desire that can be harbored in the heart of a Christian? Is it not this: that the deepest part of us be defined by God….and owned by Him?

Twenty years ago I knew nothing of this desire, only a monstrous depression and the sense of living death. I felt alienated from all things and indeed was, insofar as I yet knew nothing of the Ground of all being, including my own. The consolations that, unknown to me, common grace had afforded in earlier years were utterly gone. Both my childhood share of natural happiness and my adolescent inklings of transcendence had been banished by an existential alienation that thoroughly lodged itself in my soul as I entered young adulthood. I was desperate for life, yet lost in a horror of despair.

In the admittedly hard struggles that have defined much of my Christian walk since my conversion in 1990 it has sometimes been all too easy to forget just how terrible my existence as an Atheist had become; or how nothing was the same the moment belief began.

Then, as the title of the biography of another converted Atheist, Joy Davidman Lewis put it, “God Came In”. God and Christ and light and life that I had never before known “came in”. It was, for me, fleeting as experienced in real time (in fact, to what seems to me too large an extent, it continues to be that way in my experiences of God even today), but it was real. The Lord of all did become a part of my being, I hope the core of my being, and nothing has ever been the same. The cross became my bottom-line, the One who once hung there my new and all-powerful reason to carry on.

Perhaps the very drama of that change two decades ago is what haunts my Christian life now and brings me back to the question I began this essay with; the question of what the deepest desire should be for a person who professes to be a follower of Christ.

You see the greatest sin I feel in myself these days is the same one I have felt consistently for my entire time as a believer. It is the deep resistance to God that haunts my days and nights, the unbelief, the fear of real surrender and absolute commitment. It seems to me that I almost always keep Him at wretched arm’s length rarely, oh so rarely, letting down my self-centered guard. What am I guarding against exactly, you ask? It is God’s claim as Lord above all else in my life, as Lord not only of that “all”, but of me.

Maybe this is what accounts for the continued fleetingness of my times of sensed communion with God.

Of course I suppose all of us who are believers, but who remain in this world, have felt this resistance to some degree. We are told in the Scriptures that, even now, we must struggle against our, hopefully dying, flesh. The new nature is ours, but the old nature in some form remains and competes for our attention. At times we even hug this unquiet spiritual corpse, this cadaverous “old man” who still masquerades as our deepest identity and has no intention of allowing himself to be quietly crucified. We do this even as we remain aware that the old man was the core of our once hopeless condition, and even though we know that Christ has given us new life.

But deep down hopefully we also know that to be defined and owned by the perfect God of love is the thing we truly want the most. At the least let us, let me, in Jesus name “desire the desire” and wait for He who died for us all to supply the thing itself. Then we can all make that leap of surrender and commitment, though perhaps having to make it over and over again, until our union with our Lord and Savior is well and truly on the road to being experientially absolute.

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Real love can be a difficult thing to both give and receive. This is especially true for those of us for whom human affection has been an inconstant, conditional thing. It is also true of we who, for that and other reasons, have a terrible tendency towards “self-preservation” at the cost of relationship. As with many aspects of our flawed nature we can be loveless partially because of what has been done to us and partially because of how we have wrongly reacted to what has been done to us. Because of this we need both healing and repentance to happen in our lives if we ever want to be filled with the truest love of all, the love of Christ. The process by which we come to know more of God’s love in our hearts, in all it forms, is frankly a hard path to walk. The journey we take to learn to allow healing in our lives, and to sincerely give up that within us which frustrates such healing, can be long and difficult. In fact to get rid of the impediments that keep us from receiving and giving love we must become reconciled to much pain. As one secular band accurately sings, “…love is not the easy thing.”

It is, however, the only thing that is worth having in the end. As 1st Corinthians 13 teaches us, “without love we are nothing”. A completely loveless person does not possess true life at all, either here or in eternity. To be forever loveless is the ultimate tragedy that can befall a human being.

For over twenty years I have tried to walk the path of love in Christ. Sometimes I am amazed at how little progress I have made down that path. My relationships with both God and the most important people in my life remain full of self-centeredness, the antithesis of love. It is very hard to truly care about another when everything within me at times seems directed only at preserving my idea of how things ought to be. Most often “how things ought to be” means whatever will give me the most comfort. As long as I operate in this spirit I cheat myself of many things that are vastly more important than my comfort, all of which have to do with loving God with everything that is within me and also loving those He loves.

In my selfishness I grieve the Spirit of God in me and can harm the very people I claim to care about. I also shoot myself in the proverbial foot for when I hurt God or another I hurt myself. When self-centeredness trumps love it damages the self-centered person as well as others. Jesus meant what He said when He said that “those who try to keep their lives will lose them”. This is the absolute truth coming from He Who is absolute truth. Somehow I must transcend my self-interest realizing that I must in fact die to it and live instead unto and for the God of love.

This very notion would be an absolute impossibility were it not for a literal “saving grace”, one also expressed in the Scriptures, and it is this: “We love because God first loved us.” God is thankfully not only absolute truth but absolute love. If I am not to leave my readers (and myself) with a profound sense of hopelessness I must declare this particular truth to the skies. We cannot summon up love in any way in and of ourselves. Our only hope to know real love for others is found in the Lord giving it to us out of the infinite overflow of His own love. It is divine love and divine love alone, whether received directly from Him or through others, that enables us to love anyone. The long, difficult process of becoming someone who truly loves is only made possible by God taking the initiative to love us despite our self-centeredness. Only He can fill us with what we so desperately need to overcome the tyranny of the self.

I wish I could tell you at this moment how to make sure that we are so filled. I suspect it has to do with personal desire. Do we ultimately desire our own way or His? Do we really want to go through the real pain of dying to self in order to find God and His love? Do we truly think it worth it? As much as I’d like to I cannot tell you how much of that desire is our responsibility and how much is His. There has always been mystery in these eternally vital questions and after 2000 years of theological debate by those more holy than me I have little to add to the subject.

I can only say this: for whatever reason I have not given up on love, despite sometimes being sorely tempted to do just that. This is, in itself, a not so small miracle. It is a tremendous part of what keeps me confessing the Name of a loving God’s loving Son. It is also a tremendous part of what keeps me both sane and moving, I hope forwards, in love…and in loving.

Copyright 2011, 2023 by Shea Oakley

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Grace is more powerful than our worst moments.This can be an incredibly comforting truth for the struggling believer to meditate upon. Many of us have an unfortunate tendency to believe that God’s sovereign grace is not sufficient to deliver us out of any trial or tribulation that comes our way. Even more than that, we doubt that it can deliver us when the trials and tribulations in question are ones we have brought upon ourselves. It is in the throes of such self-inflicted difficulties, often severe difficulties, that we are most likely to forget that one of the best practical definitions of grace is “unmerited favor.” When a child of God cries out to Him for mercy, with a spirit that at least desires the desire for repentance, He responds with that favor. We often do not get what we deserve and even if we do the grace of our Lord carries us through.

If I had a dollar for every time I thought myself “beyond the pale”, guilty of some action or thought or mood that would forever destroy my relationship with God, I think I would be a millionaire. My 30+ years of faith have seen great turmoil of mind and spirit. At times, particularly in my early years, I have looked at the sin that remains in my life and felt that only divine justice could be left for me. During such seasons the harder passages of scripture seemed to leap off the page and into my desperate heart, while those promising mercy and compassion from the One I call my Lord disappeared as if written in vanishing invisible ink. These have been the worst moments of my existence. More than once I have nearly despaired of my spiritual life in Christ, the only life worth possessing. Many times all I could weakly pray was this: “God have mercy on my soul”.

Now this is what you must know, reader. Every time I have prayed this prayer of desperation, or one like it, God has eventually restored me to my right mind and to a place of comfort and hope. He has done this for me over and over and over again during these past two decades. When this happens to you on enough occasions you finally begin to believe in both the power of the grace of God and the fact that this grace applies even to you.

Some Christians seem to believe that if you sneeze you can lose your salvation. There are two primary reasons to hold to such hyper-Arminianism. One is because you are a legalistic Pharisee who gets some kind of pleasure out of inciting fear in those you think spiritually inferior to yourself. The other is because you are a person who is constitutionally fearful, often with some “help” from people who have done great wrong to you in this life. This is usually compounded with difficulty in forgiving those people. Because of this latter problem you who have known what it is to be an innocent victim of abuse may even, frankly, find yourself being a bit pharisaical towards others at times. Misery loves to make company and un-forgiveness seems to lead all too easily to self-righteousness.

The reason I spent the last paragraph describing this spiritual condition is because it is a state that breeds resistance to, and disbelief in, grace. If it sounds autobiographical that is because it is. I have been all these things, a hyper-Arminian, pharisaical, unforgiving victim of abuse; so coming to believe that grace can embrace, sustain and transform even such a person as this is, of course, very precious to me. Since I’ve met more than a few people who share my character flaws I write this now because I hope it can be a similarly precious reality in their own lives.

Now this is the thing to remember and it is not something most biblical Christians aren’t familiar with either because this thing is right out of the Word of God and it is this: God’s grace is sufficient. It is sufficient for far more than our fearful, disbelieving hearts can sometimes grasp. Its sufficiency, I believe, even extends to that fear and disbelief. As long as we are humble enough to sincerely ask for both grace to save and grace to change that grace will be provided us in superabundance, grace not only sufficient to deliver us from death, but more than that grace sufficient to put us back on the right track in this Christian life.

And, yes, even fear and disbelief can be finally destroyed by this gift of a supremely loving God. Over time this has been my own blessed experience. I pray it will be yours as well.

Christianity is, of all religions, the most paradoxical. Its truths often seem to be at tension with each other. This is one of the primary reasons why those who do not read the Bible in context (and who do not yet have the eyes of the Spirit to help them apprehend it) sometimes dismiss scripture as self-contradictory. What they do not realize is that it is impossible for flawed and limited beings such as we to ever completely grasp the nature of the God of Israel. Because of this some of what may at first seem contradictory is only understandable, to the degree it can be understood at all, as divine paradox and then only to the point needful for our salvation and sanctification. Whether the subject is free will vs. pre-destination, mercy vs. justice, or any number of other conundrums posed by the Word of God, the acceptance of paradox is the only way to get past certain things we simply cannot get our human intellect around.

Of all these paradoxes perhaps the most difficult one to accept and apply to our own lives is the concept of being saved by grace through faith. In a “can’t get something for nothing” world populated by self-seeking human beings the idea of our sins being paid for by Someone other than ourselves is nearly impossible to believe. In fact it is only by the grace of God that any of us are put into the position to believe at all.

But however difficult it is to grasp the paradox of our Lord’s unconditional love making our incredibly costly salvation absolutely free to us; this paradox is the sweetest we will ever know. It really is at the Heart of Christianity, the Heart found hanging on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago.

The ironic thing is that, when it comes right down to it, all true love is gift-love. Real love is, by definition, giving. This is recognized even by people who are otherwise still caught up in the marketplace mentality of fallen human life. Further, beyond real love is perfect love. This is the kind that only God has and it is perfectly giving. Not needing anything or anyone God’s love is self-caused, infinite and free. As such it must be a love that, again by definition, we do not have to earn, that in fact we cannot earn.

Yet as free as this divine love is it still was, again in some paradoxical way, an incredibly costly love in the case of our redemption. It did cost God something to send His Son to the cross. In fact the cost to Him to make His Son, to make Himself, the payment for our sins is beyond our comprehension. For at the moment the world’s sin was put upon Christ the up to that point unbroken fellowship within the Trinity was somehow broken, if only for a ghastly moment in time. The God who loved His only begotten Son beyond what we can ever know was forced to turn away from Him. This was the incomprehensible cost to God to restore the human race to Himself. As it has often been said, in many words, our salvation was unfathomably expensive to Him, yet totally free to us.

Whenever we meditate on what happened on Good Friday we must grapple with this riddle of divine love. Hopefully we will come away unspeakably thankful to the God of paradox for the greatest paradox of all time, the gift of our eternal redemption.

An appropriate caveat must be made before we travel further along this line of thought. Serving Jesus Christ with right motivation is truly a wonderful thing and an incredible privilege. It is also a mandate from our Father. One of the reasons we were created was to act as servants of the most high God. We are not living in His will if we are forever idle, “unprofitable” workers in the spiritual and physical vineyards God has left us to tend until His Son returns. That said we must still address an imbalance in much of the contemporary church between doing and being. Yes, believers have a high calling to do the work of the Lord, however the cart should not be put before the proverbial horse. Our highest calling is not working for God but knowing Him.

At times teachers and preachers in the Western church seem to have missed the meaning of the story of Mary and Martha. When Mary did nothing but sit at the feet of Jesus we are told she was being more obedient to God than her apparently virtuous, hard working sister. His approval of a woman who simply sat before Him, drinking in both His presence and His wisdom, is instructive. Perhaps Martha was sincerely trying to serve Jesus in her busyness. She certainly felt she was being more “spiritual” then her sister in doing so. But when she tried pressing the point with her Lord and criticized her sister she received a rebuke, albeit a light and loving one. Jesus was more concerned about Martha knowing Him than her working for Him.

God’s greatest purpose in creating the human race was to give us the opportunity to be in intimate contact with Him. Relationship is bound up in the very nature of God. Within the Godhead the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect relationship with one another. When we were created we were designed to live in deep communion with the One who created us. Deep calls to deep between our Lord and ourselves because we were made for Him, to be with Him in the deepest, most profound way possible. As it has been written “to know God, and enjoy Him forever”, is our highest calling as Christians. It is the primary reason we exist and it is the fount of our greatest joy.

When we come to know and love Jesus Christ we then naturally want to do His will on Earth. All true servanthood flows out of a pre-existing love relationship with the One who loved us first. Such love is the right motivation for any labor we do in His name (and in work so motivated we truly can then come to know our Lord better) but the authenticity and effectiveness of our work in the Kingdom is proportional to how close our communion is with its King. When that communion is paramount the labor we are truly called to in this life becomes a labor of love.