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Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

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The story of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke has sometimes been used by those who decree the term “wealthy Christian” to be an oxymoron to justify their belief. But even if you categorically believe this to be the uniform teaching of the New Testament, and from a truly contextual approach I personally do not think that idea is tenable, this is definitely not the best passage to use to buttress it.

The reason is easy to understand if you know a bit about the life of Abraham as it is told in the book of Genesis. In Genesis we read the following:

“The Lord has greatly blessed my master, so that he has become rich; and he has given him flocks and herds, and silver and gold, and servants, and maids and camels and donkeys.” Genesis 24:35

These words were spoken by Abraham’s servant messenger during his journey to find an appropriate wife for his master’s son, Isaac (ultimately Rebekah). There are other references to the patriarch’s great wealth elsewhere in Genesis as well. Yet, at no point in the Bible is his status as one of the greatest “heroes of the Faith” somehow diminished by the mere fact of the material wealth he knew during his lifetime. Moreover, Jesus Himself obviously affirms this in here in Luke when He places Abraham in Heaven speaking with the less fortunate rich man who finds himself in Hell.

The reason the rich man is there has less to do with his wealth than about how he did or, in this case, didn’t use it. We find out earlier in verses 19-21 that:

¹⁹ “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. ²⁰ At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores ²¹ and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

In the next verse we find out that the rich man dies and ends up in “Hades.” Meanwhile the beggar Lazarus, when he dies, finds himself in “Abraham’s bosom”, an Old Testament term clearly used here by Jesus to refer to Heaven.

Why is the rich man in Hell? It is clear enough from the text that he never once lifted a finger to help a poor, sick man who daily laid by the gate to his opulent mansion. One of my study bibles declares that there was a “fatal deficiency in the life” of this man, and I think it is safe to say that this deficiency was his total lack of compassion for Lazarus, not the fact of his wealth. It seems to me that any number of far less affluent Israelites at the time could have shown the same lack of compassion as the rich man…and suffered exactly the same fate.

The dialogue between Abraham and the rich man is that of one once materially rich person to another. For this reason wealth, in and of itself, cannot be the determining factor for the very different places in which the two ended up. The determining factor was character.

Having wealth here on earth carries with it great responsibilities, of that there is no doubt. We see this borne out elsewhere in the counsel of the word of God. We also see that having such wealth can often (though not always) be a dangerous temptation. In fact loving wealth more than the God who allows it is more than a danger. Unless repented of it is a spiritual death sentence. It was, in fact, just that to the man in this parable. Being compassionate, at perhaps considerable cost, to the desperately needy man on his own doorstep apparently never crossed his mind, or his heart.

The reality of that neglect alone showed he loved money more than God because, like himself, Lazarus was a man made in that God’s image and his welfare was infinitely more important to God than anyone’s excessive material comfort. It should have also been far more important for the rich man in this parable. That it wasn’t explains his fate and should be taken as a warning not just to the rich, but to all who may similarly neglect compassion…including those who profess to be followers of Christ.

 

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Luke 22:39-44 is one of the most provocative passages in the Gospels:

^“39 Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. ⁴⁰ On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” ⁴¹ He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, ⁴² “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” ⁴³ An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. ⁴⁴ And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.^{”  –} New International Version (NIV)

This passage, along with its parallel verses in Matthew and Mark, reveal to us the only time in His recorded life when Jesus actually asked that something His Father willed for Him be something He might avoid. In all other things we only see the Son of God, and the Son of Man, working in apparently perfect unity with God the Father. It is here in the Garden of Gethsemane, and here alone, that the human side of our Lord reveals itself in the sense of the intense human desire to avoid agony, be it physical, mental or spiritual. Jesus knows that He will experience all three of those kinds of agony the next day in a way no human being in this earthly life ever had before, or ever will again, and as one fully human He asks His Father of there is any possible other way.

As we know, in the end, Christ decides to follow the way divinely marked out for Him, the way of the cross. Yet it is instructive and, potentially, supremely comforting to learn here that we have a Lord who knows what it is to experience almost overwhelming fear (of something truly worthy of it) and not only not be destroyed by that fear but overcome it.

Virtually all of us deal with anxiety at one time or another in life and some of us (the author included) have known anxiety to such a level, and for so long a time, as to have to seek a cure for the misery and paralysis it brings. Some of us know what it is to experience panic attacks born of this level of anxiety, moments when we thought we would be completely destroyed by its presence.

Anxiety is really just a synonym for fear. For whatever reason we prefer to talk about “anxiety disorders” in this day and age rather than chronic fear, but that is what the disorder really is: the state of being in deep, unyielding, and long-lasting fear. It is one of the most miserable states human beings can know. It also can have its effects multiplied by a sense of isolation, a feeling that no one else could possibly know how bad we feel. In fact that very sense of isolation reinforces the fear with which we may struggle.

This is where the “supremely comforting” part can be applied to our hearts from these verses. If the incarnate Son of God, who also is fully the Son of Man, can live through the near absolute darkness of that night in the Garden of Gethsemane, through submission to the recognized will of God, than so can we who are also children of that same God. We can also avoid adding shame to our sufferings, in the sense of feeling like we are the way we are purely because of cowardice or lack of character. If there were two things (among the many) that Jesus Christ did not in any way lack, they would be courage and character. Yet even the Perfect Man knew what it was to feel the depths of fear, want to avoid its source, and yet somehow persevere in doing the will of a perfect and loving God, even when it meant facing that fear’s unavoidable reality.

Jesus knew He was about to go through the worst experience any human being has ever known, then or now.  He knew that all too well, but by the grace of God and, perhaps more importantly, by the fact of His very identity He still did just that. The result was His resurrection, His and his Father’s glorification, and the fulfillment of His supreme mission: to make possible the salvation of the human race.

We who are followers of Christ have the very nature that allowed the One we follow to go through that night in the garden. We also have the ministering grace of His Father to help us in our own “dark nights of the soul.” Fear does not have to destroy us, no matter how much it may feel, in a moment or moments of time, that it will. Beyond that we will also find like our Savior that on the other side of our worst fears is the joy that will come from facing both them and their sources, and trusting God to act in true obedience to Him until both are just a distant memory.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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1 Timothy 5:17 in the RSV Bible tells us that God “richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy”. It would appear that He approves of pleasure. This makes perfect sense considering that it was He who designed us with the capacity to enjoy pleasure in the first place.

This sometimes seems to have been lost on certain self-appointed guardians of biblical morality. These are the people who will tell you things not specifically prohibited in the Scriptures ought to be.  Four examples might be the practices of smoking of any kind, drinking alcohol and dancing. Each of these activities is frowned upon by many conservative Christians. In fact the author attended a Christian College in the Eastern United States which prohibited all three activities. At the time I was a new believer coming out of a worldly lifestyle and thought the rules very appropriate for Christian higher education. It contrasted strongly with the secular Florida “party school” I had previously attended, and that was just fine with me.

In the 25 years since then my point of view has slowly changed, partially from beginning to learn the difference between legalism and grace, and partially from discerning the difference between license and Christian freedom. I make a conscious effort to no longer automatically judge a person’s spiritual depth based on whether they enjoy a glass of wine at dinner or the occasional cigar after it. Moreover If they then decide to dance the rest of the night away I will not assume they are the dreaded “Carnal Christians” (an oxymoron; or so we are told by fundamentalists) who some of us decide are sliding down “the slippery slope.”

It might surprise many Evangelicals to know that a man who is very highly esteemed among us as a model believer, the late Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis, was a cigarette smoker.  Then too there is Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation. He was a man who had no compunction about drinking a little good German beer and, apparently, more than a little on some occasions. As for dancing we can look to the Bible itself and the person described there as “a man after God’s own heart”, namely King David. In 2^nd Samuel 6:16 he returns from a victorious battle “leaping and dancing before the Lord”.

Now this is not to say that any of these things are without spiritual or physical danger. While the Scripture does not mention anything about smoking specifically it definitely has much to say about taking care of our bodies, God’s temples on Earth (and Lewis, by the way, was not proud of his habit). Alcoholic beverages are not condemned by the Word of God but drinking to get drunk certainly is. As for dancing, Christians need to discern between the legitimate expression of the art form and the overtly sexual bumping and grinding set to music that is so common today.

These, though, are often questions of moderation and self-control, not prohibition. We serve a God whose “good pleasure” it is to give us the things of the Kingdom. Under Christ’s Lordship our minds, bodies and spirits are meant to fully enjoy the many good gifts He has given us while we sojourn in our temporal home on Earth. This is part of the abundant life that is the earthly inheritance of every believer, and no arbitrary man-made law should stand in the way of God’s children receiving that inheritance.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

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In Luke 6:27-36 Jesus tells his disciples what he apparently later said to his wider listeners in other gospel accounts. It is part of His plan for the flourishing of human life and the glorification of His Father. Here is how it reads in Luke in the NIV translation of the Bible:

²⁷ “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.

³² If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. ³³ And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. ³⁴ And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full.³⁵ But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

This entire section has been a tremendous challenge to human, or at least fallen human, sensibilities for the last 2,000 years. It is no less a challenge for we 21^st Century Christ-followers to accept. In fact it might even be harder for us “rights-obsessed” Americans in A.D. 2018 to deal with than it was for the Israelites in A.D. 30.

Here Jesus turns on its head a basic assumption we tend to make about what is fair in this life versus what we think is unfair. He definitively directs his disciples in every age to use this “love your enemies” command to fundamentally re-orient them from self to other-centeredness in one of the most profound ways possible. For Christians today it especially flies in the face of our surrounding culture’s predominant spirit: that we both deserve respectful treatment from other people and we have a right to act against them in one way or another if they do not give us that respect.

I think it is safe to say that everyone reading my words at this moment would admit that the first time they encountered the whole idea of loving one’s enemies, in any of the books of the Gospel, they felt what might be called “the dismay of the impossible.” What I mean by this is that our Lord’s implied command to live in such a way seemed simply beyond our ability to comply. “Who” we may have thought “could possibly do this?”

It is a valid question with a simple answer: no one…in and of themselves. If we try to love our enemies in the power of our flesh using just “will-power” we will either immediately fail, or manage it for some period of time while deep resentment and bitterness grow, and ultimately lead to more hatred in our hearts for that enemy than we felt before.

As with many other aspects of the Christ-following life the only way to walk this principle out is to rest in Christ’s total forgiveness of our own sins against others and, more importantly, against God Himself. In thus resting we acquire the power that comes from accepted grace to die to ourselves, to our flesh, and to live by the Spirit now resident within us. It is then, and only then, that we can sincerely and effectively begin to answer hate with love, evil with good, our enemies with mercy, because we have come to accept the grace already given us and allowed it to overflow through us to others (even others who have hurt us very deeply.)

Then, God willing, our enemies will stop being our enemies in the best way possible, by having their own hearts changed and becoming our friends. Beyond that, even if they remain our enemies, we will know the peace of God in place of our own anger and hatred. As with all the other seemingly “upside down” commands of Jesus in the New Testament the ultimate result of allowing Him to change our hearts by grace, through faith is our own good, and the glorification of our Lord.

 

 

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Many of us who became Christians later in life share this story. In the weeks or months following our conversion we began to think that most, if not all, of the secular music we grew up listening to was “of the Devil.”What followed might be described as “The Cleansing of the Music Collection.” In my case dozens of albums were consigned to the garbage can. Around the same time I attended my first Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) concert and realized that there was more to sacred music than musty old hymns played on decrepit church organs. Soon my racks were full of pop music with Christian lyrics. Surely it was the best of both worlds.

Or was it?

In the 15 or so years that followed my CCM collection grew until about two out of every three CD’s ( I know…dating myself) that were on my shelf were by Christian artists. The problem was that I found myself spending an awful lot of time listening to that other one out of three. I must also admit to buying back a number of the secular albums that were so zealously disposed of many years before. Why?

Maybe it is because, when placed side by side with the CCM, quite a bit of secular music is simply better music.

I remember when a local FM station became the first in the New York area to play Christian music around the clock. At first I was happy to see this happen. We had enough talk radio and the kind of music that appealed to my generation (I was in my thirties) simply could not be found on the Christian dial. So the station got programmed into my car stereo and every day my commute was filled with the latest in “Christian Top 40.” After several days, though, I began to feel like I needed an insulin shot if I was going to keep listening to it. To me the bulk of the songs were what can only be described as sickly sweet, a cross between bubblegum music and bad TV commercial jingles. The lyrics were simplistic and sometimes not even theologically sound. Oh, and one more thing, most of it was so overproduced as to make one wonder if the stuff was made by real musicians or by Disney “Audio-Animatronic” replicas. These days you will almost never find me pushing the button that calls up that particular frequency on my radio.

Some readers are now probably asking what could possibly make “worldly” music a better choice than that which is said to be dedicated to the glory of God. Well, I happen to believe that one of the things God likes to see in people, especially His people, is excellence. I think another is depth. Too much CCM has neither. A song is not necessarily excellent, or thought provoking, or moving just because Jesus’s name shows up every third line. In fact the repetition of “Christianese” cliches mixed with His name can make a believer who loves intrinsically rich and compelling music start to twitch after a while. C.S. Lewis once referred to the Christian music of his day as “fifth rate poems set to sixth rate music.” While I would not go quite that far I frankly do not think the proportion today is all that much better.

Then, too, for me there are those occasional secular songs that, without even mentioning that name, can better communicate the truth and reality of God, and our hunger for Him, than a dozen CCM songs. Think of “Love, Rain O’er Me” by the Who or “Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Are these people Christian? Based on their lifestyle it is fair to say no. Does the Spirit of God use them anyway? I happen to think so. And the music itself usually has so much more character.

Ok, so you may be willing to concede that perhaps some secular music is of better quality than the bulk of what makes up what’s currently on the Christian charts. What can be done about it? For starters we could get some believing music reviewers who are not afraid to call bad music bad music. A local Christian newspaper in my community used to carry regular monthly reviews of the latest releases in CCM. I read them for years and never saw one album get panned. Now, it is true that believers are to encourage and build up one another. This is certainly the case and a vicious review has no place in any Christian publication, but what about constructive criticism? Can’t we call “a spade a spade” if we do so in love? I once belonged to a writer’s group that critiqued some of my material. Sometimes it was hard to accept when a fellow writer was honest about where he or she thought my writing was weak. Without that honesty, though, I might not have grown as a craftsman of words, and neither will a craftsman of music.

I will continue to listen to secular music that is not clearly ungodly. However, it would be nice if someday I could enjoy more of the Christian albums in my possession with as much enthusiasm as those written with just the common grace exhibited by so many secular artists. I suspect that a little less “pop-religiosity” in the Christian music world, along with a lot more intentionality in regards to craft, is the only way that is going to happen.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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“The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known. Then truth which now appears to be in conflict with itself will arise in shining unity and it will be seen that the conflict has not been in the truth but in our sin-damaged minds.”

-A.W. Tozer

I have long had a ready answer when some skeptic claimed that the Bible was full of contradictions. I would simply ask the person to name one for me. I do not think I have ever had anyone then quote chapter and verse to prove his or her point. 90% of the time these individuals are simply repeating what they had heard somewhere else about these alleged contradictions. In each case they were not biblically literate enough to give an example of one.

That said; the thoughtful student of Scripture cannot help but discern passages that at the very least seem to contradict one another. The classic examples are verses that seem to support “Five-Point Calvinist” type pre-destination vs. others that point towards God’s universal love and desire for the redemption of every human being that has ever walked the earth, but there are many more. Is God’s ultimate nature stern and punishing or is it compassionate and forgiving? Is salvation something you can forfeit or is it “once saved always saved?” How can God allow, and even use sin, when He is declared not to be the Author of sin by the Bible?

The truth does sometimes seem “to be in conflict with itself” and a sensitive Christian soul can become disturbingly perplexed when pondering something about his or her God that does not seem to add up rationally.

One way theologians have long addressed these conundrums is by employing the concept of paradox. Webster’s Dictionary defines paradox as “a statement or sentiment that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet perhaps true in fact.” When wrestling with troubling conflicts between Scripture verses that seem to cancel each other out; the explanation provided by this definition can help us to look beyond our conventional understanding of reality to find satisfaction in what is, admittedly, an appeal to mystery. Paradox is not easily explained by conventional human logic but it remains probably the best answer we have to what at first glance appears to be a contradiction that might shake our faith in the inerrancy of the Bible.

Actually it stands to reason that The One who created the universe would have to transcend that very reason. If human thought could explain every aspect of God’s nature He would not be God. Deity exists beyond the grasp of finite creatures, especially fallen finite creatures. In fact the impenetrability of God is part of what helps us to know that He truly is God, and not just a human construct designed to explain how we came to be.

For the sensitive and thinking Christian who longs to understand there remains the prospect of Heaven, a place in which we will come face to face with our Lord and truly know His truth in a way we never could when our residency here played such a role in our “seeing through a glass darkly.” There we might hope to see the unity of truth Tozer speaks of. There that which seemed so untenable to us will become ours to know at last.

And then everything will make perfect sense.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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Once we have tasted of Heaven continuing to live voluntarily in a hell of our own making is no longer an option for most of us. The sins that once captivated us are progressively exposed for what they are every time we are visited by the reality of God’s loving touch in our lives.

Before we crossed the threshold of salvation we thought the sins we committed actually gave us some kind of life. Then we realized that they were killing us and many of us came close enough to the final spiritual death they engendered to deeply understand, perhaps better than most, that drinking the poison of such transgressions had to stop.

Soon, however, most new Christians realize that some sins are more easily shed than others. Often the initial transformative power of conversion allows us to put down one or more of the sins that were present in our lives. Others are not given up so easily. This is most often true with habitual actions that resulted from lifestyle choices we made as non-believers. Habits are not easily broken. Some, if not all, Christians still struggle with saying no to certain wrongdoing  years after Christ entered their lives.

It is dangerous to presume to judge how long someone can fail to have full victory over habitual sin without that failure doing irreparable damage to their relationship with God. The process of sanctification is just that, a process, and the purification of a soul is measured over the span of years, not days or weeks. The key is attitude. There is a world of difference between one who continues to vigorously resist whatever the particular temptation is, confessing when he or she falls, and someone who most of the time gives in to that temptation and is decreasingly concerned about it.

For many of us taking the second path is not one we could easily consider. I often tell people I am witnessing to that the first ten seconds of the compassionate presence of God, which I experienced at my time of conversion from Atheism, surpassed every experience the world had offered me prior to that time. Since then I have been blessed by other moments of unspeakable joy in communion with Him. Even when such moments are widely dispersed in the midst of long periods of great trial they never fail to profoundly encourage me. I think of them as someone once described such visitations; they are “postcards from Heaven.”

All true Christians receive such moments of blessing at various times and to varying degrees. When we are caught up in these moments committing sin is the last thing on our minds and hearts. When our eyes are filled with the surpassing goodness and beauty of God nothing else matters. As the hymn writer tells us “the things of this world grow strangely dim”.

After such experiences end what does not end is the deep heart-awareness that nothing is better than this. The believer is haunted by the memory of times of intimacy with God. Sadly the old temptations often return as we descend into the valley after our time on the mountain-top, but the knowledge that the pleasure of sin does not come close to what we were lifted into during that blessed time I believe never completely leave us. It is hard to return to sin-induced hells of our own making afterwards. We have known something (or, more accurately, Someone) surpassingly greater than whatever pleasure the sin has given us in our life, and this stays with us.

We do well to call to our memory what it was like to dwell in the light of His countenance whenever the struggles of the Christian life tempt us to give up and give in. We also do well to look forward with the eyes of faith to the next time Our Lord will touch us with His love. These times, both remembered and looked forward to, are powerful motivators in our ongoing battle with temptation. They speak to us of the final victory over sin we will someday know in eternity.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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There are some conservative Christians who have made a crusade out of attacking the rapidly growing Christian counseling movement. They particularly target ministries which they believe have succumbed to the wiles of “secular psychology”. For certain Christians who lean towards the fundamentalist end of the spectrum the integration of the Bible and psychology is anathema. They maintain that everything in psychological theory is somehow of the Devil. For them the only answer to any mental or emotional problem sometimes appears to be to read the right Scripture verses and then repent of all known sin.

Much has been written on both sides of this debate, although the anti-counseling faction has written far more to attack the concept of integration than Christian psychologists have written to defend it. This is too bad because much can be said in the defense of psychological truths that dovetail quite clearly with what the Bible teaches about human nature.

That said, this piece is not about making arguments in favor of mainstream Christian counseling from a theological perspective. Instead I would like to suggest a reason why many of those who hold the Bible up as the only source of counseling wisdom are so adamant about staying away from psychotherapy done through the lens of Scripture, but also with the aid of psychological knowledge that does not contradict that scripture.

They are scared to death of it.

What they are so afraid of is what they might find out about themselves if they were to submit to such therapy.

You see, counseling is hard work, more than that it is sometimes scary work. For one thing, contrary to the usual assumptions of the anti-counseling crowd, it is not about finding out who damaged you in your past and then conveniently blaming them for every problem you have today. Nor is Christian counseling about dodging responsibility for your own sinful response to what they may have done to you. In fact honestly dealing with your own sin is one of the primary goals of any Christian counseling methodology worth its own salt.

Beyond that good Christian psychology (and, no, that isn’t an oxymoron) requires the facing of the deep pain that abuse truly does inflict on the mind, heart and soul of the one who has received that abuse. It is about getting past defenses like false-piety and self-condemnation to the point where a client can enter into the grief that accompanies realizing the sometimes permanent losses he or she suffered from people who took away, often during the helplessness of childhood, something precious to them. This grief process is ordained by God, the same God who told us to mourn with those who mourn, not tell them to read a verse and get over it. Grief must precede healing and often that grief can only be drawn out by a spirit-directed psychologist who knows, from divinely-given knowledge of human psychology, how to circumvent the walls we put up because we do not want to experience the sometimes great pain that accompanies facing what has happened to us.

Once we experience that pain we can come to the place where both forgiveness of those who hurt us and repentance from our own sins is finally possible. That is the holy goal of a sincere Christian psychologist. In fact this goal has a very scriptural name: it’s called sanctification.

The whole process is very hard. It is not fun, it is not frivolous, it is the hardest work many of us will ever do and there are some people who are so afraid of facing that prospect, whether consciously or unconsciously, that they create theological justifications to avoid it, and that is what the anti-counseling movement is really about, avoidance.

I have worked in a psych hospital with the sexually abused. The victims of these crimes were the most sick and wounded people in the building. They did not need to be told to read the bible, repent of the sin of depression, and then be sent out into the world without human support or the benefit of what God has granted us to help them through His common grace. They needed counseling, they most likely also needed medication, and they needed people who would walk beside them in the journey of healing. All these things Christian psychologists and psychiatrists are willing to do for them and the fact that they are vilified for it by people who attack them as heretics, out of their own fear and self-righteousness, is a great sin in and of itself. Such people are someday going to have to give an account of their actions to the God who gave us both the Bible and the insights of psychology so that we might bless the walking wounded among us and help restore these children of God to experience the life He always intended for them.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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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

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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.