Author: Shea Oakley

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.

 

 

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Many Christians have written of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The number of words devoted to this event is likely only surpassed by the many accounts of His death. In a sense this seems unfortunate. It is not that His Passion is to be trivialized. The story of the cross is the story of the ages and it is certainly true that without Good Friday there would be no Easter. But for all its meaning the physical death of Christ was not as singular an event as His triumph over that death. All men die. Only one has returned to life…so far

In some sense it is futile to try to capture the full meaning of the Resurrection in words. No matter how much is written on the subject human beings will always fall short in trying to adequately communicate its implications. What happened outside of Jerusalem in a rich man’s tomb on that long ago morning in some sense defies description. Yet we who find our best expression of devotion in writing continue to try.

So many words come to mind when a believing heart considers Easter morning; strong words like victory, triumph and glory, softer ones like hope, joy and restoration. We find ourselves thinking about a frightened, deeply depressed band of disciples suddenly being delivered from despair by the One who was delivered from death. Their experience reminds us of the moments when we, too, have been rescued from the same kind of hopelessness by the Spirit given us by Jesus after He went to be with His Father…and ours.

We are also reminded of the hope of our own resurrection some day. The Easter story is one that tells us not only of a happening from the past but also one yet to come. The raising of Christ guarantees the raising of His followers when God brings down the curtain on the history of the world as we now know it. Easter is, in this sense, the ultimate prophetic event. For those who dwell in a world still fallen it generates a hope so blessed that it, too, is beyond the expressive power of words. This is the hope that flows with the contemplation of the stone being rolled away someday from our own empty tombs. It is what enables the Christian to go through the deepest of waters and come out on the other shore.

Perhaps it is in starting with the word “hope” that we best find a place to honor Easter to the extent it can be done so in writing. Christians are people of hope. Our Savior has been called “The Blessed Hope” and we who know Him rejoice in the ultimate reality of the phrase. It is at this time of year we are reminded of its meaning. Resurrection Day, and all it implies, speaks to us of why we are who we are and why we follow the One we follow.

The truth is that, whether it is in one word or ten thousand, we are always just scratching the surface when we write about the events of that morning. It was too great to be captured by our faculties, too wonderful to be grasped by the finite efforts of men. What happened was for us, but fully describing it remains beyond us.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

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The God who created the Universe is a determining Being with a determinate character. It is from this fixed, eternal, and perfect character that He decides what is and what is not, what will be and what will never be, the existence or non-existence of all things everywhere. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, there is not a single inch of the universe, and all that may lie beyond it, for which Jesus Christ cannot and does not, with utter authority and finality declare, “Mine.”

However your theology deals with the issue of determinism versus free will one thing is certain; the God of the Bible cannot, by virtue of His very nature, be called anything but ultimately sovereign over all there was, is, and ever will be in time. He is also, by that same nature, Master of all eternity, for He is the only truly infinite and eternal Being.

So how, you may ask, could free will ever exist if this is true? I would argue that either free will only appears to be free will (the Calvinist view) or God, in his sovereignty, also has the sovereign power to limit that sovereignty in some secondary way. By this I mean that, while He never gives up ultimate control over all things, He is able to choose to limit that control enough to create conscious beings who can decide to either do His will or rebel against it. If true this is something that God allows, but with a determinate purpose with a specific outcome in mind. What have been called His “active will” and His “passive will” both will lead, in a way that the fallen human mind will never be able to completely understand, to his purposes being achieved in the end.

Based on the brevity of my description of the Calvinist view as opposed to the one that allows for a kind of restricted, but actual free will, you might deduce that I am Arminian in my own theology. I would not go that far. There are elements of paradox (the ability of two seemingly opposite propositions to both be true simultaneously) in the idea of an absolute Ruler of all things who chooses sometimes to self-limit that absolute rule. In my opinion paradox is something that is apparent in many aspects of the Word of God. This is often true with things in the Scriptures that non-believers would call “contradictions.” Many of these can be shown to be non-contradictory simply by reading the entire Bible in its proper context. As for the rest I have found that the vast majority of these things are paradoxical, not contradictory (for the few things I have not yet found to be that way I trust that my limited, and sometimes warped, human reason is not to be trusted when dealing with a God who must, by definition, embody infinite perfection and absolute truth in order to be worthy of the title “God.”)

So, in the spirit of a view of the Word that embraces paradox I have, for many years now, described myself as a “Cal-minian.” What that, I’d like to think clever; conflation of the two great Christian streams of thought means is that I simply believe that our Lord may sovereignly choose to limit his sovereignty in the above-described secondary and specifically purposeful way. This strikes me as being the best answer to the conundrum that has plagued theologians for several millennia now. I think this is especially true when considering the ability of our First Parents, Adam and Eve, to make the choice they unfortunately made.

Of course I am not a trained theologian (or philosopher, for that matter) but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. I just happen to think it makes the most sense of things, both temporal and eternal. Also I must say that I have always found a strange and subtle comfort in embracing it. The existence of that comfort is not sufficient evidence of its truth but I’d like to think my, hopefully Holy Spirit, inspired reason adds much more “sufficiency” to the proposition.

 Copyright by Shea Oakley

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When a culture separates human existence from God it ultimately separates human existence from meaning. Today’s wide-spread existential angst is the natural byproduct of the ascendant secularism of the past half-century.

Meaninglessness is a peculiarly Western affliction. Cultures that hold to religious meta-narratives, even non-theistic ones, generally do not produce huge numbers of people who can relate to something like Munch’s painting, “The Scream”. To relate to that that you have to grow up in the part of the world that has embraced the idea that God either is, or may be, dead.

To say the West is reaping the whirlwind from our newfound and widespread Agnostic/Atheistic tendencies is a sort of cosmic understatement. The fruit of unbelief is flowering in all sorts of ways in Europe and North America today. Some of these “flowers” are obvious like school-shootings, sky rocketing suicide rates, and human beings being aborted by the millions each year. Others are less quantifiable, such as our alienating loss of a sense of community. But whether culturally-promoted unbelief produces bloody statistics or a just vague feeling of general malaise, the touchstone for all is the removal of transcendent meaning in life, a meaning that can only be found in humankind’s relation to its Creator.

Many people, some Evangelicals among them, decry the idea of “civil religion”, a particular society’s generalized, and often theologically fuzzy, corporate ethical system. Until fairly recently the civil religion of the West, particularly of America, was firmly based on the Judeo-Christian worldview, a worldview put forth perhaps most succinctly in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It was the influence of these cornerstones of Judaism and Christianity that led, for instance, to the assumption of the “inalienable rights” of man that we see in the U.S. Constitution.

While it is true that this corporate ethic did not often lead to widespread Christian conversion in the biblical sense of the term it did enforce on Western society a generalized respect for God, His place in the Universe and our accountability to Him as creatures made in His image. In short it promoted the idea of ultimate meaning, a meaning that encompassed, justified and, to some degree, explained human existence. Beyond that it encouraged the ongoing development of human community based on values derived from this ultimate meaning.

I submit that this Judeo-Christian-inspired civic religion, while in no way perfect, served the Western world well for centuries and that we, as a culture, are profoundly the less for its passing.

This religion has been replaced by another religion, though one that hates to go by that name because it associates the term “religion” with the God it consciously seeks to reject. Secularism, if it deifies anything, deifies human egocentrism. “human beings are the measure of all things” is its motto and, as such, it at least officially claims to put human beings” welfare at its center. The problem is that our real welfare is utterly untenable apart from our relationship with God. Take away the value conferred on human beings by their Creator and you ultimately take away all value whatsoever. The result is the meaninglessness onto death that Western culture is seemingly fatally wedded to today.

It is in my view no presumption to place the blame for modern angst on the advent of this new “anti-religion religion”. The idea of God may inspire fear in the human heart but it cannot inspire meaninglessness. The Secularist can trumpet his philosophy’s supposed liberation from unnecessary fear of moral accountability to a transcendent Being all he wants, but with this “liberation” from fear comes a “liberation” from life-sustaining meaning. This is as true as night following day.

And make no mistake about it; unless something changes night is coming upon the Western world.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

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I am beginning to truly believe in something that has, in actuality, been unfailingly present in my 27 years as a follower of Christ.  I am beginning to realize that it is one of the very deepest truths of my life. It is the actual outworking in my life of something that is a basic doctrinal truth of the Faith I have always known in my head, but which seems finally to be making its way into my heart. What I speak of is the known grace of God present and active in my entire adult life since my conversion in 1990.

What I’m finally coming to know in a visceral as well as an intellectual way is that His grace, His “unmerited favor” has always been there for me in the end no matter what I’ve felt, thought, and done in all those years, all of them. It’s been there when I’ve been at my lowest points. It’s been there through my worst acted out sins. It’s been there in my times of deepest joy and/or happiness in this life. No matter where I have found myself to be physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, etc. the grace of God in Christ has saved me innumerable times from the “worst case scenarios” that I am so liable to find afflicting my mind and heart.

It has even been there when I have abused it through my own transgressions against a holy God. So many times, especially in years past, I have felt the fear that some sin has permanently separated me from my Lord. It is His grace remaining active in my life that has, blessedly, proved me wrong in every case. I know that without grace my life would have ended many times over, starting from the suicidal depression that first brought me to Christ and continuing through more than a quarter-century of deep trials. Without it, I believe being alive and active in my existence, I would have been destroyed in every sense of the word long before now.

That God’s grace has continued unbroken and saved me through those years of trouble both self-created and created by living in a fallen world under the thrall of the Enemy of my soul is to me a great miracle. In fact it is perhaps the most profound miracle in which I have participated, certainly not the only one, but maybe the greatest one….at least to me.

What it really comes down to is that my Lord’s grace truly has been sufficient for me. What the Apostle Paul was told by God in 2^nd Corinthians 12:9, and what hundreds of millions of my brothers and sisters in Christ have experienced over the past 2,000 years, really has applied to my life too. If it seems a little odd to the reader that something known and accepted by so many others took so long for me to begin to really believe for myself, I understand. I spent many years living in a certain kind of fear for nothing and I do sometimes ask myself why it has taken me so long to get to this point.

I could write another entire essay on what I think those reasons were, but that is not the point of this one. Instead, it is a kind of personal declaration that what has happened to me is more important, at least at the moment I write these words, than why it has taken so much time to happen. This personal acceptance of grace having always been present in my Christian life (and maybe even before it in some sense) is a new and great blessing for me. It is something I wanted to declare in writing. It is something I wanted to make known to everyone.

Finally knowing the power of unending divine grace is great gain for me and, just by sharing it, perhaps it will help someone else to come to that same knowledge a bit faster than I did. I pray that will be the case because knowing God’s grace, “is sufficient”; really and truly knowing it, is something that at this moment I feel cannot happen too soon in the lives of so many who are struggling children of God, people who are still where I was for so many, most likely too many, years.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Our transgressions are deeper than we know. It remains a temptation, even as believers, to minimize personal disobedience to our Lord. We may acknowledge our trespasses and even ask forgiveness for them, but most of us rarely spend a lot of time thinking about just how much they grieve the heart of God. Beyond that some go so far as to say that there is a huge difference between what they consider to be major and minor wrongs as far as God is concerned. Surely our Father does not put murder on the same level as, say, speeding?

It may well be that He doesn’t but because He is absolutely holy all our wrongs are deeply repugnant to Him, be they large or small in our own eyes. Attempting to quantify relative levels of offense in the light of that holiness is not something we should enter into lightly. In fact it may well be that we are not capable of making such “value judgments” at all. Who can put a value on the offensiveness of one evil over another but the divine One who is the most offended Party? That even a single sin is enough to condemn us to Hell apart from the saving power of Christ should more than give us pause. It should make us shudder. What we euphemistically refer to as our “mistakes” and “failures” are all a stench in the nostrils of a righteous God. We take the ramifications of all sin far too lightly in much of the 21^st Century Western Church.

However when, with the Spirit’s help, we do pause to seriously consider our trespasses, we may find ourselves mired in the opposite error. Remorse over our wrongs is something that we are encouraged to pursue in Scripture. Make no mistake about it, deep repentance requires deep contrition, the depth of which we frankly find difficult to enter without the true conviction of the Spirit to help us. Such contrition is a very good thing. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, especially those whose hearts are broken by pondering how they have offended the God of their salvation. It is not this kind of remorse I refer to, but the state of fear that may come with a new awareness of just how bad our “badness” truly is. Such a fear can shake our confidence in our very salvation if we let it. This is not a fruit of the Spirit so much as the fruit of our perceived guilt and it is not of God. It was one thing to feel condemned by God, the Father, when we were existing outside the saving grace of His Son, it is quite another to feel it as His blood-bought children.

It is now when one of the most glorious facts of the faith can save us from the despair and resulting paralysis in our lives which is brought on by reckoning with still present sin. That fact is this; our sin is, indeed, worse than we think, but God’s answer to it is greater than we think. It is all summed up in one of the most blessed verses in all the Bible, Romans 5:20 tells us that “Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more.” The unfathomable love of God in Christ is the agent of supra-abounding grace. Our transgressions, whatever they may be, are powerful in their offense, this is true; however the unmerited favor of God in the lives of His children is far more deeply powerful in cleansing us from those transgressions when we confess them and sincerely ask for forgiveness. If we continue to confess Christ in our lives we will always have access to this grace that goes deeper than our sin. The Word of God tells us this is so, and the Word of God is trustworthy.

So our wrongs should never be taken lightly, but they also need never lead to despair if we begin to reckon with their true depth. Our sin is great, but the effect of the shed blood of Christ is greater still. Because of that blood His grace is sufficient, both to bring us to the place of reckoning and to lovingly lead us beyond that place to real repentance.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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God’s love for us is not only unconditional; it is also not proportional. He does not love us only as much as we love Him. His love for us is not dependent on, or measured by, our love for Him. This is a vital truth for the struggling Christian to know.

It is easy to look into our hearts and not see “enough” love. There are two primary reasons for this. One is that we are self-centered by fallen nature, and this nature is not suddenly and completely eradicated by our coming to saving faith in Christ. Our flesh continues to war against the new spirit within us and the flesh is all about concern for itself at the expense of our fellow human beings. Such concern limits our ability to truly care about others and caring about others is one of the principle definitions of love. As long as the flesh has a significant hold on our hearts love is crowded out by self-interest.

The other reason we may not find much love within is because we have not known much love from the most important people in our lives, or the love we once knew from them has been lost somehow along the way. The absence or loss of love directed at us during the time before we came to know God may have shriveled our own capacity to give and receive love. Love cannot be easily given from a heart that has been wracked by sorrow and rejection. Without the ongoing healing of our souls we can find ourselves loving only grudgingly, under protest of spirit, and this is not love at all.

So between our selfish tendencies and our wounds in this life we may feel like we have very little love to offer to God, and this can frighten us because we know we are commanded to love Him “with all our heart, soul, mind and strength”. When we sense we are doing a terrible job of that we tend to fear. Our assumption can be that he must not feel very loving towards us, considering how little love we are able to muster up towards Him.

But the nature of God is not like our nature. Our Lord is love, perfect love. He embodies it and He has an inexhaustible supply of it. This love is shed upon the entire human race, even on those whose problem isn’t too little love for God, but no love for Him at all. This immeasurable affection has been aimed at the whole world, but only those who have opened themselves up to Jesus have truly opened themselves up to the love of God, and are able to receive it.

However if we have received even a little of it we have the potentiality to receive far more divine love, and that potentiality is not limited by our own heart not being able to fully reciprocate. In fact full reciprocation is impossible because we are finite, and God knows this. His love for us is thus not directly yoked to our love for Him. We love Him because He first loved us and proportionality is not a condition of that love. We will always start as candles compared to the Sun that is our God and candles that can only be lit by Him. In time we may become blazing fires in His hands, but we will never be “the Sun” and “the Sun” doesn’t expect us to be so.

In this life we cannot ever match God’s love for us. We can only receive it to the degree God enables us as we become willing to open our hearts to Him. We then can give it back to Him and to others, but likely always on a smaller scale than it was received. This is the true difference between the finite and the infinite, the imperfect and the perfect, and the reality of this difference can set us free from fear, because our Lord’s infinite and perfect love ultimately casts that fear out of us.