Category: Christian

A mistake some sensitive Christians make is to try to completely and permanently forsake parts of their lives that are not inherently sinful but which they feel have become too important. Some examples of these not-specifically “Christian” things might include a passion for listening to classical music or painting landscapes or collecting some kind of memorabilia. Believers, especially young believers, sometimes become so alarmed at the power these pastimes and hobbies seem to have over their lives that they treat the object of their passion as something sinful, at least for them, and so they try to “put it down”.

This concern is not always an invalid one. Sometimes pre-conversion passions truly were one way that we tried to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped hole”. As such they were modern day idols in our lives that our new relationship with Christ needed to replace, at least for a time. Often, however, as we grow in our faith-walk we may sense a desire to bring these passions back into our lives, but in a new perspective. We may even sense that the call to pick up these enthusiasms again is coming from God Himself.

I believe this is often the case. Christian singer, song-writer Margaret Becker once shared that she put down her guitar for nine years after her conversion experience. At the end of that near decade of not using her talent for music-making she sensed God telling her to pick-up that guitar again and begin writing songs for His glory. It seems that after a period of “holy reorientation” our Lord will many times bring non-sinful activities back into our lives, this time with a ministry component. When this happens the old interest oftentimes is re-introduced with a sense of joy, fulfillment and “rightness” that was never there during the pre-Christian portion of our lives. When it is subordinated to God the interest in question finally takes its proper role and can be more captivating and satisfying than ever.

The key word here is subordination. The passion has been subordinated or put under God. This is a very different process than what we are to go through with clearly sinful vestiges of our “old” life. Sins are to be mortified or put to death. They can never be brought back into our Christian life because there is nothing in them that can be redeemed. For instance it is one thing to start dancing again, quite another to indulge in our old habit of gossiping.

We often need not permanently put to death an interest or talent that God may want to use as part of our life-ministry. It may well have to be put down for a time and, once the thing is picked back up, properly subordinated to the higher calling of knowing, loving and serving God. It need not, however, be perpetually banished from our lives as if something is inherently wrong with it.

Of course only godly discernment will tell us when and how an old passion should become once more a part of our existence. The development of such discernment takes time too and we should never “rush in where angels fear to tread” in the re-introduction of anything that once served as a God-substitute. But if we trust God, and wait on His perfect timing, we will likely be delighted to once again enjoy something that our heavenly Father never intended to take from us forever

Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley

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It is not unusual to hear messages in our churches exhorting us to give ourselves away to God. The theme of total surrender is perennial in the pulpit, as indeed it should be. One of the categorical imperatives of the Christian walk is to allow our Master to have all of who we are. Sadly it is also not unusual for believers to experience great difficulty in this yielding to the “ownership” of God. Those who have such resistance often berate themselves for what they perceive to be their own stubborn self-centeredness. But this is not always the whole story. Could it be that part of the problem is that we do not realize this total giving of ourselves to Him has been preceded by our Creator’s own total giving of Himself to us?

I do not think it necessarily presumptuous or rash for a child of God to say, “God is mine” in the deepest and most appropriate sense of the phrase. Why wouldn’t we make such a statement when other sermons affirm that God delights in giving and that in giving us Jesus He gave us His all? The Father has not been called “the Lover of our souls” without good reason. In the Person of Christ He has not only loved us fully and perfectly, but given Himself to us in those ways as well. Our union with God is described in the Scripture in terms of marriage. To love your spouse is to give yourself to that spouse and the giving is returned in a healthy union. If it is this way with the human bond between man and wife how much more must it be in the union which both inspires and supercedes it in priority and magnitude?

This does not, of course, mean that we “own” God in the sense of controlling Him. This is why I just referred to the “deepest and most appropriate sense of the phrase” when describing a Christian’s relationship with their Lord. This love between the Creator and His finest creation is indeed a two-way street, however it is not reciprocal in the sense of our having equal power or mastery over God. While it might seem paradoxical, we have “possession” of Him, but in that possession we do not in any way have control over Him. God would not be God if we did.

Perhaps this can best be explained by another human relationship, that between parent and child. A true parent would not think twice about sacrificing his or her life to physically save a son or daughter from death. How much more then does the Parent of parents love us? The bloodstained cross of Calvary provides the answer. Jesus saved us from spiritual death through a sacrifice inconceivably greater than any mortal parent could ever make. At Golgotha the Creator of the Universe gave Himself to us. Think about that for a moment. Through Jesus, God’s love, more, God’s very Self, belongs to those who receive Him! However like a human parent, God still rightfully rules His household. His children possess Him but, at the same time, remain subservient to Him. No human analogy can completely explain this mysterious combination of possessing God while remaining submissive to Him. But to receive it is to know the peace that passes understanding and an enduring joy.

As we are willing to open ourselves to a deeper knowledge of the One who desires to be both Father and Bridegroom to our souls we will begin to find it easier to surrender our lives to Him. The Bible tells us that we love because He first loved us. In the same way we can give ourselves to God once we come to know that he long ago gave Himself so fully to us

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Those who demand rational, scientific proof of the existence of God have made an idol of what their eyes can see and their mind can understand. We live in an age of Post-Modernity which has seen many once more become open to the reality of the “numinous”, but there are still millions of Westerners who adhere to a religion that denies all things supernatural. These are the non-believers who base their atheism on the assumption that only what we can verify through science can actually exist. A primary example of such an individual was the late Carl Sagan. Not long before his death the scientist wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World in which he mourned the fact that a large portion of the Earth’s population still believed in the existence of a spiritual realm beyond our ability to see and understand. To him there was the physical “Cosmos” and nothing more.

Today Christians tend to think of idolatry as being the worship of physical things and/or activities. Very few persons are going up to the high-places and worshipping Baal these days so we have redefined the word to mean an inordinate obsession with money, power, pleasure, etc. It is true that any one of these is a potential idol in our present culture. What some do not realize is that our own faculties, or perhaps more accurately a reliance on our own faculties, can become idolatrous as well.

Who has not, at one time or another, run into someone who says he would gladly believe in God if we could simply produce some rational proof of His existence? Where is He, they ask us? Why is deity in hiding, so to speak? Such people will accept the existence of atoms and the like, which are also invisible, because they know that our science has created an electron microscope that allows them to be seen. If the Hubble Space Telescope snapped a picture of God tomorrow they might believe, but if human instrumentalities cannot detect Him than how could He exist?

What they are unknowingly portraying here is just one more facet of arrogance of our fallen species. We have made our ability to see and understand become the measure of all things and, in doing so, have made gods of ourselves. Many rationalists might deny the implication of hubris in this statement of their philosophy but that is because they have bought into the idea that they are just humbly seeking truth. This is a self-deception.

Those who deny the existence of God based on the Enlightenment’s principle legacy, Scientific Rationalism, have made a personal decision, to exalt an intellectual ability to see and understand all that is needful for humankind. This decision may be conscious or unconscious, but the outcome is the same: a human-centered religion that ultimately destroys its very object.

When we disregard the reality that our survival depends on transcending our flawed and finite minds and seeking, through faith, after the invisible God we put ourselves on the road to that destruction. Such is the final outcome of every form of idolatry and this perhaps lesser-recognized contemporary form is no exception.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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