Shea Oakley

Human Desire and God’s Timing
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved.

When God does not act on our behalf in the way, or at the time, we would expect Him to we might be tempted to think that He does not love us. If God does not immediately give us what we desire we might wonder if He is our champion or our enemy. Sometimes our response is even anger towards our Lord. Such is the reaction of fallen human nature to not getting its way when and how it wants it.

It is disconcerting to realize that we sometimes react to God the way a small child reacts to its parents when those parents challenge its will. Who has not seen (or been) a frustrated six-year-old screaming “I Hate You!” at a mother who will not buy the candy bar he or she wants? The innate human response to not getting our way with someone is to decide that someone does not have our best interest in mind. Anger usually follows.

In this world even the desires of a child of God are often frustrated. The reason for this is that our flesh, the “old man” who, though dying, still dwells within us, sometimes influences us to want the right thing in the wrong way or at the wrong time. For instance many un-married Christians have a God-given desire for a spouse but choose relationships with people who God knows would not be good for them or the other person. Or perhaps they desire the right partner, but one or both of them are not yet at the level of maturity required to make a marriage work. The result is frustration, a believer’s legitimate desire for a good thing thwarted by the sovereign wisdom of God. The pain of such denial is real. When it happens to us it often seems like we cannot help but react.

This is where the temptation to believe a lie about the Lord rears its ugly head. The pain we experience in not receiving something we desperately want, something that makes sense to us to receive, and receive right now, can be intense. We begin to wonder if the God we believe in really has our best interests at heart. We begin to wonder if He is against us, and if He is against us who can be for us? Sometimes we lash out at a God we have come to think is a cruel parent, perhaps like the darkly imperfect human parents who raised some of us. For that matter, even the best human parents make mistakes.

But the God of the cross is anything but a bad parent.

He is, in fact, the perfect parent. No one knows us better than the One who created us. No one loves us better than the One who died for us and has redeemed us. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ knows and loves us perfectly and wants to bless us more deeply than we could ever imagine. However He also knows what we need, and when we need it, far better than we do. As obvious as this might be to us intellectually our hearts often have a harder time accepting it. It takes longer for our hearts to grow in trust than our minds.

The answer is the acceptance that coming to fully trust in our God is a long process. We believe but we still need to continue to ask Him to help us in our unbelief, to be prepared to grow in faith over the long term. A Giant Redwood tree is not made in a day and neither is our faith. Growth in faith tends to be incremental. Patience does not come overnight. When the Psalmist tells us to “wait on the Lord” he means, among other things, that a patient heart will receive its desire at exactly the right time. God gives us the desires of our heart when the giving will do us the most good. If we wish to be wise, and enjoy life in Christ to the full, we do well to accept that getting the things we want, even desperately want, will not be according to our imperfect schedule but according to His perfect one.

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Wanting What We Need
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
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We do not need the “God” we want or the “God” we do not want. We only need God as He truly is, irrespective of either our positive or negative desires.

An overabundance of subjectivity is part of our fallenness as a race. Being emotional beings is not a problem in and of itself (God Himself has strong emotions.) The problem comes when our passions become more of a driver in our spiritual lives than they should be. Feelings are not intrinsically sinful. What we do with them can be.

At any given time our emotions can be leading us closer to our Lord or farther away from Him. This is a function of how accurately those emotions are painting spiritual reality. It does not so much matter if they seem to us positive or negative; most of us tend to know both poles of feeling on a regular basis. This is part of our nature as bearers of the image of a passionate God. What is far more important is how much credence we are giving to them as far as what they may seem to tell us about His nature. It is in allowing either extreme to define our perception of God that we often get into trouble.

Emotions and desires are intimately intertwined in the human heart. We tend to want what we feel is good and not want what we feel is bad. This may be an obvious point, but it bears repeating because how we deal with desires that are mediated by our emotions has profound ramifications for our spiritual lives. It can be argued that nothing is more important for us than who we ultimately decide God is because that is the greatest determinant in whether we decide for or against Him. We dare not make that decision based solely, or even wholly, on whom we want Him to be or not be; to paraphrase the discovery of Moses God “is Who He is”, nothing more and nothing less.

Whether we like it or not Who we desire Him to be is irrelevant to Who He is. It, however, is very relevant to who and where we will be eternally. It is vital that we come to know God as He really is. How to best get there is the problem we all face (and it should be stated here that the answer to this problem is not necessarily to elevate human reason at the expense of human emotion. Both our cognitive and emotive perceptions are equally fallen.)

This is where both God and His word come to the fore. The best way we can arrive at a true knowledge of Him, in defiance of what may be a faulty system that amounts to wish-fulfillment, is through a Holy-Spirit inspired knowledge of the Bible. We can learn to apprehend God’s revelation of Himself in the pages of scripture, but the only way this happens is through both immersing ourselves in meditation on that scripture and praying that it will be made real to us by His Spirit. We must also ask that this true knowledge of the Divine will become the one thing we most deeply desire. As this prayer is answered both the Bible and the Spirit behind it will become our “avenues” to Objective Reality. Our subjective desires must yield to this reality if we are ever to come to know the Lord we profess to serve. Only then we will recognize Him not as who we want or do not want Him to be, but as who He really is.

This may not be what we initially want, but it is what we finally need.

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Thanking God for the Wrong Thing
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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We are to give thanks in all things, not for all things. It is a mistake to thank God for intrinsically evil happenings in our lives. God can bring good out of such events, and for that we can and should be thankful, but He does not expect His children to pretend that the events themselves are good. Furthermore he does not expect us to subtly imply that He is involved in any way with evil that others have brought upon us or that we have brought upon ourselves.

Many years ago there was a film that depicted the “hazing” ceremony involved in pledging for a certain college fraternity. In one scene a pledge is literally being lashed repeatedly as a part of this ritual. Each time he is struck he is required to say, “Thank you sir, may I have another.” Some Christians feel that they should say something similar to their Lord when someone does something bad to them. They wrongly believe that He has somehow endorsed, or even caused, the pain that comes as a result of someone else’s sin. This is never true. God is not the author of the sin in our lives, no matter how it got there.

It is true that He allows evil to exist in our world today. God created a moral universe populated by higher beings designed to be moral “free agents”. When some of His creatures took advantage of that freedom by rebelling against their creator, evil came into existence and we have been affected by that evil ever since. We are the benighted descendents of two of those free agents, Adam and Eve. We, like they, are sinners.

We live in a fallen world in which catastrophe can befall us due to our own transgression, the transgression of others, or as a result of the fall of nature which accompanied the Fall of man. All of these catalysts are ultimately our own corporate fault as we belong to a race, which has been justly cursed by a holy God.

All this is to say that when bad things happen to us we should not imply that our Lord has any personal responsibility for them. We should not curse Him for the evil which comes into our lives and, by the same token, we should not thank Him either. The reason some believers do thank Him is because they think that it is somehow an act of deep humility to give thanks for the hurricane that destroyed their house. But hurricanes and tornados were not a part of the original creation; they came about when human sin entered the picture. It is foolish, not humble, to thank God for something that ultimately results from human transgression. What we can thank Him for is His promise to bring spiritual good in our lives out of our losses.

God does not gain any pleasure from seeing the misery we often go through in this life. He redeems our trials because, as His children, He desires us to ultimately be transformed partially through those trials. We need to be thankful for the blessed ability our Lord has to bring good out of evil and for the fact that His love for us compels Him to do so whenever we are afflicted.

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Removing the Log
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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The only way to effectively confront sin in others is to admit to the sin we have been guilty of ourselves. People do not enjoy being lectured by someone who sets themselves up as morally superior to them, but if the one doing the confronting first confesses to their own faults those people may listen. This truth is crystallized in the words of our Lord about the log in our eyes versus the mote (or small particle) in another’s. It is very easy to find sin in others and ignore our own. Such is the nature of human pride.

Most of us have had the experience of being on the receiving end of a sermon in which the preacher exhorts his listeners to identify and repent of a particular sin. Sometimes the speaker does not give any indication that the transgression in question is one that he also struggles with. The overall effect of such messages is to make the listener feel morally inferior to the speaker. However I have also heard sermons in which the pastor/teacher confesses to personally fighting the same thing. When the one talking is publicly honest in this way I immediately feel a respect for and identification with them that makes me more open to examining myself in the area in question. By confessing their own struggle with sin they gain the right to be truly heard. They have removed the log.

In God’s eyes the only person who is truly morally superior to everyone else is Jesus Christ. All others are self-deluded if they think otherwise. Yet often we succumb to the illusion of moral superiority. In addition we find another dark principle at work in our flesh. When we are losing the battle against a particular wrong in our own lives we can become that much more strident about attacking that wrong in the lives of others. During the 1980’s a certain American televangelist was known for the ferocity of his on-air attacks on the sexual immorality that was, and is, so rife in this country. Later it came out that the man was soliciting prostitutes. Such hypocrisy was a tool that Satan readily and effectively used to turn many Americans away from giving the claims of the Gospel a fair hearing at that time.

It is not that confronting sin in another is inherently wrong. The Bible tells us that we are to do so for the benefit of both the individual and the church of which that individual is a part. But if that person detects the slightest trace of self-righteousness in the one doing the confronting the confrontation is likely to end in both anger and defiance on their part. Because of this the sin can be compounded and the condition of the person ends up being worse than had nothing been said at all. Thus God’s loving redemptive purposes are thwarted, at least for the moment, and that is a terrible thing. Humble self-examination is the only way to prevent these tendencies from destroying what might be a legitimate God-given opportunity to help turn another from their sin. We must be open to confessing before confronting.

Sometimes the best way to start such a conversation is to immediately admit that we are no better than the other person in that particular area of sin or, alternatively, in some other kind of sin of which we have recently been guilty. This usually disarms the defensiveness that is so often the product of an exhortation that is without humility on the part of the one doing the exhorting.

Love alone must be what ultimately compels us to confront evil in others. Part of loving someone is identifying with them. In admitting we are not qualified to be anyone else’s judge we love the person in question and we earn the right to be heard. Then the Holy Spirit moves and blessed repentance can become a reality for them, and us.

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Reconsidering Our Past
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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There is a tendency among Christians to link spiritual growth with forsaking the past. We desire profound change to happen; the kind of change that allows us to rapidly leave behind the parts of our old life we now consider unnecessary or useless in the eyes of God. The parts I speak of are not the inherently sinful ones. The sins of our past must not be allowed any place in our Christian life onward from the time of conversion. No, the things we address here are the morally neutral aspects of our past. These take many forms. They may be the enthusiasms, friendships, career goals or even the deep emotions and transcendent experiences we had before Christ came into our lives. New believers often try to reject everything that made them who they were before their spiritual rebirth.

Such rejection seemed wise in the dramatic days of that rebirth. This is especially true for those of us who came to the end of ourselves only after running our lives into the ground. In the deep desire to put our self-directed lives behind us we attempted to throw out everything that we felt was not “spiritual”. After all, weren’t we new creations? The cross was before us and the world behind us. Everything old had to go. Or so we thought.

But years later we may begin to feel that we are not progressing in the faith, that we are not where we should be by this time. Accompanying that is a feeling that there is unfinished business in our lives. More disturbingly, we may have a sense of not knowing who we are. The Christian life does not seem to make sense anymore because all we assumed God would have accomplished in our lives “by now” has not come to pass.

When this happens the immediate temptation is to believe that some terrible sin harbored in our hearts is behind the spiritual malaise we experience. Sometimes this is true. A besetting sin can poison our relationship with God and remove us from His will. The result is always a terrible sense of being in the wrong place. Life cannot make sense when we are in the far country of the Prodigal.

There is, however, another possibility. Could it be that, all those years before, we discarded part of who God made us to be? Our new faith led us to try to erase nearly everything we once were in our pre-conversion life. Did we throw the proverbial babe out with the bathwater?

I have known of more than one believer who made the decision to go into “full-time ministry” only to find out after years of blood, sweat and tears that they make terrible pastors, evangelists, missionaries, etc. Sometimes the shock of failure has been enough to deeply shake their faith, putting them into a spiritual tailspin. Why would God “radically save” them if it was not His intention that they would be the next Billy Graham?

Yet, perhaps, these vocational shipwrecks are blessings in disguise. God is not above using the severe mercy of letting us bang our heads against the wall to show us the truth about who we are really meant to be in Him. Perhaps that childhood enthusiasm for becoming an artist, pilot or veterinarian when we grew up was God-given, even though we did not yet know Him personally as a Christian.

By the same token maybe some of the joyous or happy feelings we once knew as unbelievers were not sinful counterfeits but blessed results of God’s common grace being shed upon our lives. The wonders of childhood, for instance, can be experienced by all human beings, though they come in a time before many of us are even consciously aware of the concept of a transcendent God.

It could be that some of us need to stop fearing every aspect of our early lives and instead begin to selectively re-embrace those things that once brought us some health and happiness during that time. It might even be that this is a necessary pre-cursor to God moving us on in our Christian pilgrimage. His loving plan for our future could involve re-integrating some of our old loves into the new ones we have as believers. Then, through this “holy re-integration”, we may well come to better know and embrace who our Lord always meant us to be

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When Good Works Aren’t Really Good
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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“For it is by grace you have been saved, through-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9

Our truest good works are a function of the authenticity and intensity of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Any human being can perform such acts, whether they are a believer or not. In fact, by common grace, there are individuals who appear to out-give many Christians. But for the child of God loving acts of kindness towards others must be grounded in passionate communion with our Lord. Unfortunately this is sometimes not the case. Often we try to love because we fear temporal and spiritual consequences if we do not. The result of trying to do the work of God apart from the power of God is compulsion and effort grounded in our flesh. It may be a blessing to the recipient for a time, but ultimately it isn’t good for us because it isn’t fully genuine.

The Bible tells us that Jesus is the vine and we are His branches. The power to bless others in Spirit and in truth comes only from this “organic” relationship. The overflow of God’s love for us, appropriated, is what we are to give to others. We’re told that “apart from Him we can do nothing” and this is uniquely true in the area of good works.

We hear a lot about “burn-out” in the Church today. It is described as a condition in which believers have toiled so hard in ministry that they have worked themselves into physical and emotional exhaustion. If we can “do all things in Christ”, some say, then why does this happen? The answer may be as simple as this: these individuals were trying to do the work of God in the power of the flesh.

When a Christian deeply connects with his or her Savior the result is a supernatural outflow of His love. When we are caught up in the love of Christ we find our cup full to brimming over and it is an easy thing to bless others with that love. We find the strength to do even the most difficult and sacrificial acts of charity and it is not burdensome to us to do so. We become loving because God first loved us.

When believers try to do good works for bad reasons, such as from a fearful compulsion that comes from seeing God’s love as conditioned by obedience, truly good works become impossible. If love is not sincere then it isn’t love. Helping another out of fear of the consequences that might result if we don’t is not love. Love involves truly caring about the wellbeing of another and acting out of that care. Human beings do not naturally love this way, at least not to the degree that God wants us to. Only a Christian can have the superabundance of affection and devotion needed to sincerely, sacrificially give themselves away as Christ did. This potential can only be fulfilled if we fall passionately in love with Him and then stay near Him and with Him.

As in so many aspects of the Christian life it is only through intimate relationship with the Lord that we can become who He wants us to be, but the decision to seek after such intimacy is ours alone to make.

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Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Every believer is called upon to resist temptation and avoid sin. Our sanctification depends on a progressive rooting out of sin that continues throughout our earthly lives. The problem is how to successfully overcome the temptations we face on a daily basis. It is one thing to will ourselves not to give in to these temptations and another to actually not do so. Today, unfortunately, many believers locked in this great struggle do not seem to be making much headway towards living a more holy life. The same sins keep enticing us and we continue to give in to them. Why?

The answer may lie in where believers go for the power to live above sin. Whether most Christians realize it or not there is a human tendency to try to fight the flesh with the flesh. By this I mean the use of willpower alone to combat sin. The catch in this approach is simply this: it ultimately does not work. This is not to say that our wills have no place in resisting temptation. Obviously a determination not to sin has to be present before a person will make the attempt to resist temptation. However such determination is not particular to Christians or even to religious people in general. Even atheists have, unbeknownst to themselves, a God-given conscience. With the possible exception of socio- and psychopathic individuals most persons have moral scruples of some kind. Even Hitler was kind to his dogs.

It also is true that certain sinful tendencies can be restricted, to a point, by self-effort. Most of us know someone whose ethical conduct surpasses that of some believers we know. These “people of goodwill”, as I heard a pastor once call them, can make us wonder what is wrong with our Christianity that we cannot be at least as morally upright as a person who has not yet come to the saving knowledge of Christ. Truthfully, human beings do have a degree of intrinsic goodness in them that originates in our race being created in the image of God. Beyond this is the additional reality of God’s common grace that is given, in varying degrees, to all of us. If it were not true that human sinfulness was tempered in these ways we would have a form of Hell on Earth in a literal sense. As it is evil is restrained until the age of grace ends and we enter the Tribulation period the Scriptures speak of.

The fact remains that natural man cannot progress past a certain point in forsaking sin, no matter how hard he tries. It is only the true Christian who can hope to go further and even that is impossible apart from effectively appropriating the sanctifying grace of God that can be given to the believer alone. Without this appropriation even we who do believe are doomed to remain in a state that precludes the kind of radical change God wills for His children.

The key to having ultimate victory over sin is found in identifying ourselves, in the deepest sense, with the complete triumph of our Savior at Calvary. It is only in the resurrection power of Jesus Christ that we can progressively stop sinning. No effort at self-reformation will work, even if it is a method passed off as “Christian”. Our righteousness truly is as “filthy rags” and it is only in the loving gift of His righteousness that we are made clean.

The practical question posed here is how we are supposed to actually accomplish this? The answer may be less complex than we suspect. Many of us who have been believers for some years have noticed something. The closer we stay to Jesus, the less we sin. It is as simple as that. Remember, though, that simple does not equate with easy. It is OK to admit that it is often difficult for us to pray, meditate on Scripture, fellowship with other Christians, witness, etc. In short it is not easy to walk out the faith in, and love for, Jesus that we claim to have. But difficult does not mean impossible. Over time the persevering Christian is perfected in the love of God and becomes ever more intimately bonded with His Son. In this intimacy there slowly comes the appropriation of His resurrection power and, with it, the ability to progressively root out the remaining sin in our lives. An even more blessed truth is that our very ability to persevere in this way does not depend only on ourselves. God Himself makes it possible through the love of Christ applied in our lives, a love that originates in Him, not in us. His perfect love does more than just cast out our fear, as important as that is, it also casts out our sin. We need not try to achieve this love but only to accept and abide in it.

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Forbearing Love and the Christian Life
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
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We tend to try to change others by showing them the error of their ways. This is especially true when the error in question is one that hurts us in some way. When someone’s behavior has a negative impact on our sense of well being our first impulse is often to let that someone know, in no uncertain terms, just what they are doing wrong. This seems quite justifiable, particularly at the moment we are irritated by whatever they have done.

It is true that sometimes we are called on to be honest about our feelings when we are sinned against. This is mainly the case when another believer is the one doing the sinning (although sometimes we may even be justified in telling the truth, in love, to a non-believer if we sense that this will do more good for them at that moment than turning the other cheek.)

However sometimes, maybe more often than we think, the best thing we can do both for the “transgressor” and ourselves is to be forbearing. While being silent in the face of bad behavior is difficult, sometimes very difficult, it may be the most loving course of action if we really want to help the person change and become more Christlike ourselves at the same time.

We are living in a culture that constantly tells us, or at least implies, that we must never allow ourselves to become someone’s “doormat.” We are told that we must always be assertive and make sure that someone who hurts us is strongly made aware of that fact. Otherwise we might lose our “self-esteem.” While it is true that allowing ourselves to be constantly abused by another may not be God’s will for us we also must consider the example of Christ. Our Lord was crucified though He was the most innocent person ever to walk the earth. In forbearing the actions of those who nailed Him to the cross, even asking His Father to forgive them, he left a powerful testimony to the transforming power of suffering evil out of love for the evildoer. It is no co-incidence that one of the thieves being executed next to Him repented in His presence, nor that the ranking Roman Centurion declared in the shadow of the cross that “Surely, this was the Son of God.” One has to wonder if either man would have been so moved if Jesus had not borne the enormous wrong being perpetrated against Him without the slightest hint of a retaliatory spirit.

In my own experience I have found that when I am willing to absorb a wrong and continue to be actively loving towards the one who caused me pain that person more often than not apologizes, and even admits that they need to change in this area of their lives. If I really care about the person in question it is very gratifying to see this happen. Beyond that it has the added benefit of quite possibly making them less likely to hurt me in this way in the future.

Perhaps most importantly it also helps in conforming me to Christ.

Of course this forbearing is not an easy thing to do for even a redeemed child of God. We are often sorely tempted to “give the person a piece of our mind.” It feels easier to strike back. But the Word of God never equates what is easy with what is right, no matter how right it feels at the moment. The flesh does not give up its supposed right to retaliation in any and every situation without putting up a great deal of resistance. In fact the kind of restraint we are talking about is an example of authentically dying to self and cannot be truly accomplished without the enabling power of the blood of Christ.

The question, ultimately, is whether we are willing to absorb pain for a redemptive purpose. In a profound way how we answer that question has great bearing on the question of whether or not we are living a fully authentic Christian life.

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Spiritual Amnesia
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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The world can look like freedom when our spiritual life is largely bound up in fear and compulsion, when spiritual discipline seems mostly like duty and not blessing. At such times we are in danger of believing the lie that the life we left behind was somehow more enriching than the life of a disciple of Christ. The grass appears to be greener in the lives of those who have not given themselves to God. We forget the times of blessing when we knew His touch and the things of this world grew “strangely dim”, when being in His presence convinced us that nothing was greater than staying there.

This spiritual amnesia weakens our resistance to transgression. Staying in such a place is dangerous because temptation is never more powerful than when a believer starts to envy those who live in sin and seem to enjoy their condition. Temptation’s voice tells us that we should do as the society around us does and seek whatever gives us pleasure. The idols of the world masquerade as roads to fulfillment and doubting Christians are far more likely to make a wrong turn down one of those roads if they become disgusted with their spiritual walk.

The Apostle Paul spoke of the true freedom that comes from living the kind of life which seems an unbearable bondage to fallen man, a life controlled by God. Life led by the Spirit is a life abundant with meaning, purpose and liberty from all that might destroy us. To reach our full potential in Christ is to, among other things, fully know the freedom from fear that His perfect love makes possible. This is the best conceivable state for any human being. It is the state of right relationship with our Creator.

The problem is that many of us are still trying to earn our way with God. We mistake fleshly effort for sanctification. The result is slavery to legalism so miserable as to tempt us to see the fallen, Hell-bound existence we once led as superior to it. When much of what we do in the spiritual life is done in the wrong spirit for the wrong reasons the world’s idea of freedom appears attractive. But this is an illusion and a perilous one at that. Sin is crouching at the door and we are ready to open that door, self-deluded into thinking it a liberator rather than the cruel captor it is. We have become blind to reality and once again tarry in the self-deception that we lived in before our conversion.

The answer to spiritual amnesia is not to pretend that a rule-bound Christian walk is the real thing. Instead the believer who has been looking at the world through rose-colored glasses needs to seek the true freedom that is given to us through the unconditional grace of God. We desperately seek pleasure in wrong ways because we do not experience enough of the joy of knowing Him in spirit and in truth. When we turn our sanctification over to the power of God we can glory in the freedom of being a deeply beloved child, a child who does not have to worry about being disowned. From that realization comes blessed relief from fear and the ability to live and thrive through the perfect love of our Savior.

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Grace in the Gray Areas
Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Some believers seem to hate ambiguity of any kind, especially as it relates to God. The idea that there are areas of mystery in knowing and relating to Him is intolerable for many. All too often the fear that results from coming face to face with this mystery drive them to attempt to find in the Word of God a clear cut answer to every question. The problem is that our Lord has left some things for us to decide about our lives without a specific directive from Scripture.

We are told that the Spirit of the law gives life while the letter of the law brings death. It is important to realize that there is no New Testament equivalent of the book of Leviticus. Jesus did not come to micro-manage our lives by giving us a new set of rules, He came to fulfill the law and, in so doing, set us free.

A compulsive, fearful quest to spiritually dot every “i” and cross every “t” in even our smallest actions each day is a sure sign of a heart still in bondage to the law. It needs to be stated here that we are not talking about obvious sin. Sin surely exists and must be avoided. We are also not talking about simply ignoring the counsel of the Spirit in our lives. The question here is this: can we live with the gray areas, with the times in life when bits of Scripture, often taken out of context, simply do not tell us exactly what to do no matter how much we want them to?

A noted Christian once said this: “Love God and do what you please”. His point was that if you know Christ is in your heart and that you love Him above all things you can trust Him to lead you through the mysteries of life. Believers do not have to be bound by fear of the unknown. We can make choices in the gray areas knowing that God is guiding us each day to the extent we have surrendered to His Lordship in our lives. We can trust that overarching biblical principles, put within us by the Holy Spirit, will help us to not get bogged down in legalism but rather lead lives of purpose and decisiveness. It is true that we will make some mistakes but we need not fear this for, ultimately, our faithful God will enable us to learn from those mistakes as we continue to surrender every aspect of our lives to Him.

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