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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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Not too many years ago the New York area received its first Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) station. At the time I was happy to see it happen. Despite not always being of the highest quality, CCM has, at times in recent years, been the fastest growing segment of popular music in the United States. It’s potential for reaching the millions of un-churched people who live in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut is great. But after listening to the station a few times something began to bother me. The advertising and disc jockeys spoke constantly of how it was “safe for the entire family”. In fact the word “family”, in one context or another, was mentioned literally hundreds of times a day and it soon became apparent to me that single people were off the radar screen, at least as far as station promotion was concerned. This was a bit disconcerting to me considering that 41% of America is single, as I was at the time.

Fast-forward several months. One night I was at a fundraising dinner for the local chapter of a national youth ministry. The keynote speaker turned out to be an employee of the station in question. After the dinner I took the opportunity to speak to him about his employer’s tendency to play a song that might catch the ear of the average urban single, and then follow it with advertising that made that single person, perhaps from a family background just as soon forgotten, feel left out. His answer was to inform me that the target audience was 38 year-old Christian soccer moms! Then he told me to start my own radio station. I was speechless. Here was a broadcaster with a historic opportunity to reach perhaps 15 million people with what, in my opinion, is one of today’s more effective media-based evangelistic tools and they were purposely preaching to the choir!

This is an egregious example of how the Christian population in this country sometimes takes care of itself at the expense of the Great Commission. Now I did not completely write off this station. Apparently the evening broadcasts were less family-oriented. As for the rest of the time undoubtedly some New York area secular adults did not bolt after the song ended and the “Focus on the Family” rhetoric began (In fact a friend of mine once told me about one such man she knew who was a new listener and one whom she felt was being led to faith at least partially by the programming). But as a former New York area secular adult myself I can tell you with some confidence that more did bolt than didn’t. You see; healthy families are scarce here and that breeds a certain cynicism among those of us who survived childhoods molded by divorce, various kinds of abuse, and broken promises. We number in the millions and saccharine odes to the nuclear family are apt to make us twitch…and switch… stations that is.

Much has been written about the so-called “Christian Ghetto”. This is a term used to describe the separatist evangelical subculture that has developed in the United States over the past two-decades. We have a Christianized version of everything here, ranging from Christian dating services to “Christian yoga”. In fact some of our vaunted mega-churches resemble nothing so much as shopping malls, right down to an actual “food-court” in one such behemoth on our West coast. We may not want to be of the world but we apparently have little reluctance about copying and baptizing it. The result is a facsimile of many of the more banal elements of contemporary pop-culture in a supposedly more spiritual setting. This allows American Christians to enjoy the blandishments offered by our consumerist nation while still feeling comfortably set-apart.

I cannot help but wonder if we have ceased being salt and light in pursuit of this comfort.

This brings us back to the radio station ministering to the approximately 500 or so “38-year old Christian soccer moms” who live in its multi-million resident broadcast area. When I happened to run into the person from the fundraiser in a local restaurant a year or so latter I re-introduced myself and brought up the topic again. This time he ruefully commiserated with me about the tiny demographic his station was chasing, his tone of voice having a sort of “resigned to reality” flavor to it. Then he shared with me that he was now in station management! Once again I was speechless.

I can only assume that this man was not willing, or able, to challenge his bosses with what he himself implied to be true in his comments to me on both occasions, that catering to the saved is of higher value than meeting the unsaved where they live. As long as this kind of thinking holds sway, at this organization and at others like it across America, the “Christian Ghetto” will continue to exist and everyone outside that ghetto will be that much more likely to end up being un-reached.

By the way, if anyone out there has the 5 million or so dollars of start-up capital needed to create a new radio station here please let me know….

 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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The greatest aid to our ongoing ability to repent from transgression against God is found in coming to the knowledge that He does not love us less, nor withhold His faithfulness to us, despite the fact that we have not yet repented. It is, as the Bible tells us, His kindness that leads us towards repentance.

It is impossible to sincerely repent of transgression apart from a heart knowledge that God loves us even when we sin. Those who struggle with the idea that divine love is conditional find it difficult, if not impossible, to sincerely and completely turn from any given sin. In fact the faulty belief that our Father only loves us when we are practicing right behavior eventually leads to an anger and frustration that is the very opposite of repentance.

We are most truly sorry for transgressing God’s perfect law when we get some inkling of His true feelings towards us, and those feelings are ones of love. We know this from the testimony of countless verses of Scripture and from the reality of what happened on the cross. In Jesus Christ we see the Lord of the Universe giving up the most precious thing He has, His only Son, for a people who were yet in their sin. In doing so He proved once and for all that His love for humanity does not depend on our moral perfection. In fact it does not depend on us at all. It depends on Him. The love of Christ originates in the very heart of God and is both unconditional and inexhaustible. It depends on the Source of love, not the actions of the objects of that love.

When we are caught up in such a love as this we are in the best place to be as far as real repentance. It is in the gentle touch of a God who loves us despite ourselves that our hearts are most likely to be pricked by a sincere desire to please Him. Doing right thus becomes a function of becoming right which is itself, a function of receiving the transforming love of our Lord. As we embrace and receive more and more of God’s love, grace and faithfulness towards our selves we can begin to “naturally” desire to turn from all known sin.

In the New Testament every instance of apparent individual repentance comes about as a result of Jesus taking the initiative to love the person involved, whether through a miraculous healing, deliverance, or just by not judging them as they expect to be judged. In each case Jesus loves unconditionally first and this is followed by genuine contrition on the part of whoever he is unconditionally loving.

I submit that this is always the pattern of true repentance. It starts with God loving us, in and despite our sin, and ends with us thankfully turning from that sin for the sake of such love.

Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley

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“There is, we have to admit, a line of demarcation between God’s part in us and the enemy’s region. But it is, we hope, a fighting line, not a frontier fixed by agreement.” – C.S. Lewis

Most, if not all, truly honest believers must admit to there being areas in their lives in which some kind of repetitive transgression against the laws of God and man continues. It doesn’t matter, in a sense, what kind of transgression we are talking about. It may be something that seems comparatively minor like texting while driving, or it could be something that would be considered worse by most, like some form of sexual immorality. Whatever the sin in question is, it is something that we are both consciously and actively struggling against, or it is something we have decided is “only a vice” and is self-condoned on an ongoing basis.

The difference between these two attitudes is what Lewis is alluding to here. We will almost certainly not be entirely free of any kind of morally wrong tendency and action as long as we live in this world. The question is what we are going to do with the evil we consciously discover to be present in our lives? Will we do everything we can, by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, to battle against and turn from our wrong actions, or will we decide to let those actions continue in our lives without a fight?

Lewis doesn’t address it explicitly in his quote, but the reason the Christian has to deal with this issue at all is the fact that, while we are “new creatures” inhabited and possessed by the Spirit of God (with our own spirits brought to life at the moment of our conversion) we also still have “the flesh” with which to contend. The flesh is what might be called our “old person”, the dynamic remaining in our hearts that draws us towards self-rule for the purpose of fulfilling our old wrong desires at any cost. This is the part of what somehow remains within us that we are commanded by our Lord to “crucify” each day, to put to death, in favor of a deeper relationship with, and obedience to, Him. That “crucifixion” is the God-empowered effort we make to repent from and forsake all sin on a daily basis. It is not easy to do; it involves a conscious battle in which we are in constant need of the overcoming grace of God in our lives, but it is something we are commanded by our Master to do. It is not optional….on any level.

When Lewis refers to “the enemy’s region” he is acknowledging another aspect of this battle, the reality that we do have an Enemy of our souls, his name is Satan, and he and his minions expend a considerable amount of supernatural effort tempting us to favor our flesh over our spirit. Our Enemy’s forever unchanging goal is to use our continuing ability to give in to selfish, sinful desires to separate us from God and other human beings and thus to utterly destroy us (or, if that is not possible, to make our lives as unproductive for God, and as miserable to ourselves, as he can).

It is with these two realities, the flesh within and the Devil without, with which we must both contend and decide on a response. As Lewis points out, there are really only two options. We must either continuously fight the sin in our lives or we must try to sign some sort of “treaty” with Satan that we will allow certain things we do that we know to be wrong to continue, to whatever degree and frequency, to be a part of our existence.

The unchangeable problem with the latter approach is twofold:

1. We cannot conclude any kind of compromising agreement, which will ever be truly honored, with a being that embodies only evil and whose only goal is to destroy us if he can and greatly harm us if he can’t.

2. The principle of the flesh within us is insatiable when it comes to sin. If we consciously allow “a little bit” of ongoing transgression to remain in our lives it ultimately cannot and will not remain “a little bit.” Whatever the sin in question is it will not stay static. Our indulgence of it will inevitably increase.

This why we must not allow any “frontier” that we believe “is fixed by agreement” to exist in our lives because such a frontier can never remain fixed and will only increase the existence of indulged evil within us. In fact this applies not only to agreements with our outer enemy, the Devil, but also our inner one, the flesh. We should no more make unenforceable “internal treaties” than unenforceable external ones.

As good and faithful soldiers in our King’s army we must only and always be prepared to fight every kind of evil, within and without, until some day we either go to be with Him or He returns to earth to finally destroy all evil in this fallen world, ushering in His eternal kingdom.

Note: I rarely publish my own prayers, and hope you will bear with me for sharing this one rather than my usual meditation. But if there is anything in these words that resonates with you;  please make it your own, and may God truly and richly bless you in this New Year.

Father, Son, Spirit. Please so kindle the fires of grace within me that I burn with that grace entirely for and in You, and may that flame also, in time, remove everything in me that is not of You.

Help me to look steadily at You, to want to look steadily at You, the only true Source. Wrench me from my own futile self-effort, from my continuing self-importance, from all that which is worthless, to gain You, Who are of infinite worth.

Continue to grant me true life.

Thank You that there is nothing in this world, nothing that can happen in this world, that I cannot somehow transcend and benefit from, in and through You.

For you, oh Lord, are the desired end, my desired end.

May my selfishness progressively perish so that I may reach my best destiny in this life: first, the fullest possible knowledge of You, second, a more truly real and sacrificial love for others. Let me suffer the “loss” of self-centeredness all the while knowing that You are infinitely worth losing it, that You are infinitely worth any loss I might be called upon to endure in this life, for in such holy loss is, ultimately, unspeakable blessing.

Show me, oh God, what must be removed from my existence to live my life fully in You.

Help me to know that I have no greater need than to find this out, to find out what must go, and to be willing to give up what I must, so that I become no longer in any sense “my own” but only Yours, and find my true self in the process.

In Your great love please let this be my singular destiny, God. Be my Lord, and cast out my remaining fear of You being my Lord, so I shall not die, but live onto You and You alone.

Please make me perfect with your perfection.

I bless and thank you for Who You are, the God of true and eternal and infinite perfection. Deliver me from my prideful perfectionism, that can never bring perfection, and grant me to know the real perfecting I so desperately need, that is Yours for the giving through the perfect Lamb, the perfect Christ, Who is somehow You, Yourself.

May all glory be to Him, to You….in 2018 and forever….

In Jesus Name….Amen.