Okey Dokey

A Sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on July 6, 2008 at St. Mary's Medical Center Convent Chapel, based on Romans 7:21-8:6

My father in law, Paul Arbogast tells a story about an elderly woman who went to the same Pilgrim Holiness Church that he attended as a boy. As you may know, the Holiness tradition is very much about what you may and may not do. This church expected the women to wear their hair long and to avoid makeup. All their members were to wear long sleeves, to be teetotalers, and to be tobacco free. But this particular woman picked up the habit of rubbing snuff along the way, and was very dedicated to her habit.

One day, her pastor confronted her about her habit. In response, she assured him that she would make it a matter of earnest prayer. Several days later, when the pastor saw the woman again, he asked her, “So what did the Lord tell you about your snuff habit?”

Obviously on the spot, she was quiet for a moment and then blurted out emphatically, “He said “Okey Dokey!” - and as far as she was concerned, that was the last word on the subject!

This lady manifested exactly the opposite attitude towards her behavior compared to the Apostle Paul. Paul looked at the Law of God and agreed with it. He agreed that he should Love God above all else, that he shouldn’t lie, steal, cheat or covet his neighbor’s stuff – and yet in practical application, when he tried to live it out, he found that he just could not do it in his own power.

He found that there was a force, an evil that dwelt within him that pulled him towards the wrong thing. This he identified as ‘the flesh’ or ‘Sarks’ in Greek. The flesh was what bound Paul to the law of sin and death, setting his mind (Nous) against his flesh. As a result he found himself engaged in a terrible struggle. Unlike the snuff -rubbing woman who simply put words of contrived approval in God’s mouth, Paul realized that there is no escape from his dilemma and he cried out with the most pitiful lament, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death!?

John Wesley Angst
Some 1700 years later, JohnWesley echoed these same sentiments when he wrote in his journal: “I see that the whole law of God is holy, just, and good. I know every thought, every temper of my soul ought to bear God’s image and superscription. But how am I fallen from the glory of God! I feel that ’I am sold under sin’. I know that I, too, deserve nothing but wrath, being full of all abominations, and having no good thing in me to atone for them or to remove the wrath of God. All my works, my righteousness, my prayers, need an atonement for themselves. So that my mouth is stopped. I have nothing to plead. God is holy; I am unholy. God is a consuming fire; I am altogether a sinner, meet to be consumed.” (John Wesley, in a letter to a friend, May 24, 1738).

Contrast this with today’s cult of self-esteem and the desire to be free of all constraints. Instead of recognizing that God is holy and unbending - that He lays claim upon our lives, modern people demand an unbending right to live out their every whim - and be congratulated for it to boot! As Jonah Greenberg points out: “The underlying…dogma of [today’s culture] is that social and gender roles are not fixed, that tradition, religion and natural law have no binding power of authority over the individual’s will to power,..” (Quoted in Liberal Fascism, pg. 361.

A Matter of Worldview
The Judeo-Christian worldview starts with God as the Creator, who speaks His Word to His creature, Man – who in turn conforms his experience to God’s Word – leading to Salvation, transformation into Christ’s likeness and even dare we say it, ‘divinization’ – partaking of the very nature of God itself.

The Humanist, on the other hand, starts with himself as the measure of all things, bringing his experience to the Word, and all Tradition. Rejecting all authority, he will brook no limits on his own freedom, and simply replaces God with himself. A variation on this would be to retain a form of religion, but to then look at God’s Word through the lens of one’s own experience, finding support for these experiences – no matter how foreign they are to traditional morality or ethics. The result is a ‘sanctified lifestyle of Choice” in which God loves me and supports me in whatever I wish to do. He always says ‘Okey Dokey’ because after all, He wants me to be happy and don’t all paths lead to God anyway?”

This is how we get to the place where a bishop of the church of God can divorce his wife of thirty years, renounce his God-ordained role as husband and father, and then remarry a male ‘partner’ in plain violation of the clear, written ordinance of God.

No one who has read Paul or John Wesley could possibly have gotten this one mixed up, except that they simply don’t want to believe the testimony of the Word of God and they don’t want to be told what to do. Bottom line: That’s not Christianity; it’s the religion of “Okey Dokey, Do Whatever”.

God does not sanctify our sin, he punishes it in Christ and then finds us Not Guilty by way of substitution. That’s the Gospel. Left to your own devices, even the good we do is worthy of condemnation, just as Wesley laments. But thanks be to God, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus!

An Important Caveat
Here we want to give an important disclaimer: you must be focused on the Spirit, not the flesh.

John Wesley experienced this directly. He recorded these famous words in his journal:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street,”… Notice he said unwillingly. His flesh did not want to go.
GK Chesterton once said, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” Wesley’s flesh was finding this process difficult. Nevertheless, he went to the meeting, “… where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation: and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

The next morning he wrote: “The moment I awaked ‘Jesus, Master’ was in my heart and in my mouth”.

You see, Wesley had gone from trying to be good in himself to being righteous ‘in Christ’ - from having his mind set on the flesh, to being focused on the Spirit. Of course, it was a work of God’s grace that set him free from the law of sin and death. He went from feeling inner turmoil to feeling ‘strangely warmed’ – not exactly the way one would describe the successful culmination of a self-directed spiritual quest!

Going back to the letter he had written his friend, Wesley pointedly asked, “Do we already feel ‘peace with God’ and ‘joy in the Holy Ghost?” Does His Spirit bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God” Alas! Mine does not….

He did not have an assurance of Salvation. He could not definitely say he was a Christian, despite extensive tutoring in the faith as a child at his mother’s knee –and even despite being a priest in the Church of England! As Wesley and millions of others have come to know, being a Christian is not simply about endorsing the right ideas about God, it is a living relationship – one that God himself validates by giving the believer a witness, or experience of Himself. Not a human-based, flesh-focused experience, but one that conforms to the Word of God and that functions to help us conform our lives to the Lordship of Christ.

Friends, we cannot live the Christian life in our own strength, in our flesh. We must focus our minds on the Spirit. We must be like Stephen - men and women ‘full of the Spirit”. Only then can we discern God’s will for us and have the motive power we need to walk daily with God and do righteous works for God. Only then can we find true freedom.


I close with this prayer from Wesley’s letter: “O Thou Saviour of men, save us from trusting in anything but Thee! Let us be emptied of ourselves, and then fill us with all peace and joy in believing; and let nothing separate us from Thy love, in time or in eternity.”

If you are like John Wesley and have never experienced that internal witness of the Holy Spirit that assures you that you are a child of God, please speak with Fr. Mark or myself. Don’t let the appearance of difficulty stand in your way. Throw yourself on His mercy and you will find grace to help and life in the Spirit.

Amen