Friends: I’ve developed a fond attachment to the month of November over these later years of my life. It’s when Jesus arrived. Blessings!  Bob

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Spirituality Column #940

November 19, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sentimental Journey

By Bob Walters

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30

It is November, a gloomy weather time of year here in the American Midwest, punctuated by Thanksgiving as we circle in a fitful holding pattern for Christmas.

Fall has mostly fallen, clouds hang heavy, the school year grinds on, it’s “off season” for just about everything except sports, and maybe, just maybe, in our weariness we hang on until hope blooms afresh in the new year, scant weeks away.

In my life up until 2001, when I was 47, that was my attitude toward November. Although in truth, I probably never gave November much thought. But I was baptized into Christ November 18, 2001, and ever since, November has accumulated a special, treasured, and personal fill-up of purpose and sentimentality.  I have a new birthday.

There is a sharp delineation in my life before baptism, and my life since.  As I mentioned in my longer than usual epigram last week, November 2007 was when my dearest Christian friend Russ Blowers, a retired pastor who mentored my first six years as a Christian, died at age 83,

It was at Russ’s funeral, November 15, 2007, that I met my new, dearest Christian friend, my wife Pam. Just a few days after Russ’s funeral, on the 19^th, we went out for coffee. We’ve been together ever since, and married in the summer of 2009.

Which is all to say that I, now and for some time, have harbored a profoundly sentimental attachment to November.  It was the month when I learned about resting from burdens, trusting the gentle, liberating, and loving yoke of Jesus, and about trusting a humble heart. I learned the sweet grief of watching a saint go to heaven, and grasped the deepest thanks for God revealing His truth to sinful man in the loving life and sacrifice of Jesus.  Pam and I, and so many others, share this blessing.

We don’t have to live up to the demands of Jesus; we get to live with his promises and love.  The “rest” Jesus promises is both a rest from the law which brings death and countless demands, and the rest we have in the new covenant of faith, salvation, and life of the new Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus Christ. 

We have to remember that Jesus promises persecution and pain, a seeming logical disconnect. But it is the demons of this world who tempt us with the burdens of this world, which come gift-wrapped as candy but are poison to the soul. We choose the love of the world or the love of Jesus, and that is a choice that will delineate one’s life.

My life, for example.

I now know life with Jesus, but once lived life far from Him. Then He invited me in, and weariness faded. November is now special.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was born May 23, 1954, reborn Nov. 18, 2001, and writes a thank you letter on that date each year to Dave Faust, who baptized him.

Friends: Do we want a humorless society that is rife with condemnation and hate? Elon Musk asked that question back in 2021, bought Twitter in 2022, and may have changed the country in 2024. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #939

November 12, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Prayers, and $44 Billion in Free Speech

By Bob Walters

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus, John 8:32

It sure has been a newsy week.

Happy, thankful Republicans have been spreading around credit and glee for a decisive, multi-level victory.  Saddened and shell-shocked Democrats are variously assigning blame and steeping themselves in angry denial over a repudiating loss. 

The wise on the left are engaging in introspection; the wise on the right are hoping for peace, sanity, and truth. We all should pray for unifying our nation.

It is fine if you view things differently, but rage one way or gloating the other helps no one. Love God, love thy neighbor, love thy enemy, help the nation heal … and pray. And do something nice for someone.  It is amazing how that lifts one’s own spirits.

That is all I want to say today about politics.  Sure, I have many thoughts – as do we all – but I’ve said this much politically only in order to look back at something I wrote nearly three years ago, and an unexpected election-game-changing event from 2022.

It is a story centered on Elon Musk, free speech, and my favorite Christian and political/cultural satire site, the Babylon Bee, “Fake news you can trust,” hilarious daily.

If, like me, you long ago lost your trust in the media, generally – especially the legacy and narrative-controlling media who non-stop purvey and champion seemingly every toxic idea in America (wokeness, anti-racism, gender fluidity, open borders, “Trump is Hitler” and his supporters are garbage) – here’s a perspective I had missed.

Back in December 2021, Elon Musk, notably apolitical but leaning left, appeared on the Babylon Bee podcast with owner Seth Dillon and editor Kyle Mann. One hundred minutes of great conversation (LINK: Elon Musk Sits With The Babylon Bee) concluded with Dillon and Mann, Christians, seriously asking Musk if he would accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. Musk, then recently named the richest man in the world and who during the podcast had expressed his surprise that “anyone had actually read the entire Bible,” responded to the Jesus question by asking if they meant, “the God of Spinoza?” Uh, no.

Here’s what I wrote about the Bee and Musk then (LINK: “The God of Spinoza”).  I ended the column encouraging prayer for Musk’s faith; he would make a great Christian.

Scant weeks later in the spring of 2022, Twitter suspended the Babylon Bee’s account because of a joke it posted about trans-female (i.e., biological man) U.S. health official Rachel Levine, naming her “Man of the Year.” Sticking to its free speech guns, the Bee refused to retract the joke and was de-platformed by Twitter in April 2022.

Some months later Musk, righteously outraged at Twitter’s suspension of the Bee and suspicious of Twitter’s truth-stifling censorship, in October 2022 bought Twitter for $44 billion (with a B) and fired 85 percent of its staff. It turns out that to empower free speech, Twitter – renamed “X” – didn’t need all those “fact checkers,” i.e., censors. Truth wins.

To understand Twitter’s deleterious influence and sway on American opinion in recent U.S. elections and, really, all American culture, watch this brief, four-minute, post-election opinion video by Peter Heck (LINK: How The Babylon Bee helped shape election history). It explains much about what happened last week, and how truth was recovered.

Free speech doesn’t always yield truth, but censorship always protects lies.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Heck, and continues to pray for Musk’s faith.

P.S. The Babylon Bee has a companion daily “news” site, LINK NottheBee.com, with sarcastic spin on actual news.  Also highly recommended.

P.S.S. Sunday, Nov. 10, was the 17^th anniversary of Russ Blowers’s death in 2007.  He was a great preacher and friend to us all, and continues to be an inspiration. My wife Pam and I met at his funeral, Thursday, November 15, 2007, at East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. See Common Christianity columns Nos. 763, 764, and 765 for the story.

P.S.S.S. I missed an anniversary.  Last week’s column began the 19^th year of Common Christianity, published now 939 weeks in a row dating back to Nov. 6, 2006 when it first appeared in the Current in Carmel weekly newspaper (through 2015). During that first year, my editor each week was Russ Blowers until he got sick in the late summer.  Early on I didn’t publish anything Russ hadn’t seen. Now, I don’t publish anything Pam hasn’t seen.

P.S.S.S.S. – Since this is going out on Veterans Day, Vets, thank you for your service! Especially my brother Joe (Coast Guard 1979-2000) and my Gold Star Uncle Bob McKinney, RIP (WWII Navy aviator, 1941-1943).

Friends: Why did God bring His Word to humanity in the flesh, rather than in the Spirit? Maybe because flesh is common to everyone? Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #938

November 5, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

All Systems Go, er, God

By Bob Walters

“And the Word became flesh.” (John 1:14)

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, John 4:24

Listening to Moody Radio’s Christian programming while running errands late Friday morning, a message about marriage being a covenant with God (agreed) sent my mind in another direction.

The preacher noted that we often sort and prioritize our jobs, faith, marriage and many other things in different “compartments” of our lives. His point was that faith in God should never be separated from other parts of our existence.  Agree, and agree.

What got me was when, speaking of Jesus, he said this: “God didn’t come as spirit; he came as flesh,” i.e., a human being. I caught on right away. “God is spirit,” but Christ came as a human. Hmm. I thought about how many people I’ve heard in my own life, declare, “I am a very spiritual person, and/but I don’t need Jesus to be spiritual.”

Those are the words of a secular person whose God-given soul may well strive beyond mere flesh, but has not yet discovered that statement’s dead-end emptiness.  There are many spirits out there, and it is only in and through Jesus that we find the life-giving and eternal Spirit of God. We are wise to be very picky about the spirit we seek.

I searched the word “demon” in the BibleGateway.com ESV app. The word appears just three times in the Old Testament, but 73 times in the New Testament including 64 times in the four Gospels. Point: Jesus encounters and deals with demons – bad spirits, Satan’s spirits – a lot. Early in my Christian life I heard pastor Dave Faust preach, “The reason you don’t mess with the occult (demons, witches, Satan worship, and the like), isn’t because there is nothing to it, but because there is something to it.”

I suppose this is timely since we are just coming out of Halloween “celebrations” (not a fan), but let’s be sure we are pursuing the proper spirit, the Holy Spirit, in Jesus.

Given how often evil spirits are mentioned in the Bible, I’m convinced they are real, and have known people who have journeyed into and out of occult practices. Even famed news commentator Tucker Carlson last week released a video about his “very intense desire to read the Bible” after being attacked by demons in his sleep [LINK].

My late mentor George Bebawi’s advice when we feel the presence of demons is to pray Psalm 91, cling closely to Jesus, and don’t talk to the demons (or Satan).

The Moody Radio pastor’s core point was God’s presence in, and the Bible’s comments about, marriage (all good stuff).  But he recited a good chunk of John 1:1-14 to make the point that Jesus is the Word of God (the Logos), and that “the Word became flesh” (v14).  “It doesn’t say, the Word became Spirit,” the radio voice intoned,

Wow, I thought. “The flesh.” That’s every bodily system, organ, and structure, and every physical action and interaction we experience. God is Spirit, and Jesus is us.

Some may brag about being a “spiritual person,” but God coming as the human Jesus tells us God is part of our entire life and not just one mental “faith and spirit” compartment of it.  He’s in every spiritual, physical, and mental aspect of our existence.

Jesus tells us to worship “in spirit and truth.” That’s the system of God’s love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows there is an election today. Here’s a warning.

Friends: With the U.S. election on our doorstep, what role in government should Christians assume to be our own? What about the politicians? May our nation be saved. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #937

October 29, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Shepherd, Hireling, or Wolf?

By Bob Walters

“He who is a hired hand (hireling) and not a shepherd … sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. I am the good shepherd. I know my own … and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Jesus, John 10:12,15 (ESV)

This presidential election next week, combined with a random comment I heard in church on Sunday, got me to thinking.

For President of the United States, will our nation be better off electing a shepherd, or a hired hand? While I am set in my preference of the candidates, it also is obvious that nobody wants to elect a disinterested hired hand. A shepherd is better.

So, later I was thinking about the shepherd/hireling dichotomy vis-à-vis the election and realized I was asking the completely wrong question.  Christians often say that we are electing “a president not a pastor,” supposedly removing religion from the docket.  And for darn sure, we had better not be mistaking – or imagining – that either “shepherd” elected is Jesus Christ. My point: is it a “shepherd” we should even seek?

I suppose there are many folks who do indeed view, errantly, that they are voting for some sort of civic or cultural shepherd or “savior.”  Huh uh, no.  It is not Jesus the electorate imagines it is voting for; it is Satan the electorate imagines it is voting against.

But back to my continuing thoughts on the shepherd/hireling thing.  Driving home it occurred to me – and I teach high school American Government – that I don’t want to elect a shepherd at all.  As an American citizen – you, me, all of us – are not sheep, not where our government is concerned. The government is supposed to be our servant.

Is that currently an accurate reflection of the state of American government on almost any level?  No … the government is a wolf. But you know what else? As an American citizen, I am supposed to be a wolf. A hungry, free, independent, responsible, purposeful, creative, and aspirational wolf. That should be my civic identity, not a sheep.

The Lord, not the government, is my shepherd. Let me be a citizen wolf.

Now, am I a sheep in the kingdom of God? Oh yeah. And on all matters divine, Jesus is my Shepherd, Savior, Lord, Way, Truth, Life, and Body and Blood of all my faith, hope, and love.  That is who Jesus is, but it is not who I’m voting for. Jesus has no “term in office” and is not up for election.  Christ is permanent, forever, just, and good.

Jesus was and is the Son of God, maker of all that was made, savior of mankind, and our only mediator with God. But his first and greatest duty was and is as a servant.

So, let’s not confuse the government of the heavenly realms with earthly politics. That “pay grade” thing our American leaders often joke about when faced with a task larger than their office, should never be confused with Jesus, or fanciful about the extent of what an American leader needs to be: a servant. Like Jesus? Sure. But not Jesus.

Most nation/tribal leaders in all history have been wolves.  The U.S. Constitution, written with a close and sacred understanding of the Bible, works only with a just, moral, and Christian people. Obedience? Yes … but not sheep. Love God, love others, be just.

Romans 13:1-7 tells us government is to provide order, protect citizens, and help the citizens protect their persons and their aspirations.  Where God is concerned, I’m part of the flock. Where this election is concerned, I’m howling against false shepherds.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: wolves are loyal mates and protect the pack.

Friends: Pam’s daughter Lauren married Greg Saturday, blending families and going forward in life.  I officiated the service and wanted to share the homily I wrote on love. Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #936

October 22, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Complete Love

By Bob Walters

“Love … always perseveres.” – The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:7

Lauren and Greg, with her three small children and his one, were married and became a blended family last Saturday.  It was a career first for me, officiating the small, cozy ceremony among their dearest family and closest friends. I thought I’d share the homily:

Not one of us, individually, is “complete.” I believe our singular human incompleteness was and has been part of God’s plan since the Garden of Eden. We need a sure savior. We need trusted friends. We need nurturing family. We need a loving mate. It is a blessing to have loving children.  Hope resides in all these things.

The Bible says, “God is love,” but our earthly, human, temporal understanding of love we have in this life is better experienced in the context of God’s giving, sacrificing, eternal love. It is with God, and with each other, that we discover our completeness.

Consider that God – who we know as the Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – God Himself is a community of three.  Why a community? Because love cannot exist alone, as one. 

A wise man once said that God is three because three is the smallest number of a community. God, therefore, can be – and is – love, and teaches that we are to love those whom he created in His own image … us.

It follows that the great commands of Jesus are to love God, and to love others.

The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4-7:

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres.”

Notice that the things that cast light on ourselves – envy, boasting, pride, self-seeking – are warned against.  While things that express love, patience, kindness to others, and truth are recommended.

Chapter 13 of the Bible’s New Testament book of 1^st Corinthians is a staple of Christian and even not-so-Christian weddings, as we proclaim the strivings of human love. But the chapter is primarily about God’s perfect love.

Back in verse two, Paul says “if I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Love is how we are completed in God’s eyes.  Our ability to see through to the eyes of God is the gift of Jesus Christ, and of those we love.

The passage also says that we must “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). That is because we have grown and learned a greater love – a sacrificial love – for others and humility for ourselves.

Yes, in our earthly life we can have many things, talents, desires, dreams, and intentions.  But in the end, Paul says, faith, hope, and love remain; the greatest of these being love.   Love is the greatest because it invites divine relationship, and is God’s language of community, and completion.  

Greg and Lauren, may your lives and love become complete with God, with each other, and with your children, in heaven’s earthly realm. AMEN.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) obtained one of those “online ordinations” to be “legal” for the ceremony, but prior to the ceremony counseled with several personally known and trusted pastors for their blessing and imprimatur for him to officiate.  

Friends: Meet Cliff.  Cliff’s awesome.  If you haven’t run into him on the internet, you might run into him on an American college campus explaining Jesus. Posting early this week due to MCA Fall Break. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #935

October 15, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 3 – True Religion

By Bob Walters

“But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. Do this with gentleness and respect.” – 1 Peter 3:15

“What I am saying is true and reasonable.” Paul to Festus and King Agrippa, Acts 26:25

Over the past couple years Cliffe Knechtle has become something of a YouTube, internet, and college campus sensation with brief videos airing all over social media.

Ask Cliffe a hard question about Christ, the Bible, or religion in general, and right there, whether amid Christians or – quite frequently – a skeptical crowd on the campus square, he’s always prepared to provide true, reasoned, gentle, and respectful answers.

Whether it is a Christian school or even the lion’s den of the Ivy League, dialogues range from reassuring explanations to rebuttals of challenges.  My favorites are the arrogant, cynical, know-it-all undergrad philosophy majors who take the tone of patronizing this poor sap who actually thinks Jesus, salvation, eternity, the Bible, God, and the Holy Spirit are true. And, for questioners from other faiths, that God is the One True God. Cliffe immediately says things in reasoned ways I wish I could think to say.

Cliffe is fun to listen to. But an overnight sensation?  He has pursued his “Give Me an Answer” college ministry for 40-plus years, including television in the 1990s.

A gifted street preacher and apologist, Cliffe is also senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was actually organized in 2001 around his Bible teaching talents. His books include Give Me an Answer (1986), Help Me Believe (2002), and Heaven Can't Wait (2005).

Turns out Cliffe and I are the same age, born days apart in May 1954. And, the church he pastors first met on Sept. 2, 2001, the exact date I first attended church as an adult … any church.  It’s what I call my “Awake Date.”  Maybe that’s why I like him.

Age 70, then, and Cliffe isn’t slowing down. Three weeks ago at the invitation of the Yale Christian Union, Cliffe (and son Stuart, a minister) spent six hours sharing with and being challenged by Yale students in Beinecke Plaza. Here is a five-minute clip of a discussion with a Jewish student about the Bible, morality, and modern values (LINK).

Video snippets of Cliffe’s encounters pop up regularly on social media.  His ministry has 719,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Instagram.

Cliffe won’t solve the entire problem of the Christian deserts that American colleges have worked so hard to become – officially and administratively – but ministries like his prove the Spirit moves in places where Christ’s truth is attacked.

And one more thing about the event at Yale … it was not a “school sponsored” event by an approved student body club.  ChristianUnion.org (LINK) is a ministry based in Princeton, N.J., that has a dozen chapters around the Ivy League and other schools. My guess is that “Christian Union” is on the more liberal side of the Christian doctrinal ledger: its website talks a lot about “transforming society” but not much about Jesus.

That’s a warning light, to me, but as long as Christian Union is willing to put Cliffe unmuted on the college green, the seeds of Christian truth are sown.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays the soil is fertile, not fallow. Come, Lord Jesus.

Friends: American academia may have kicked Christian clubs off campus or out of school, but Jesus isn’t that easy to get rid of.  The faithful persevere, spirits are revived.  See the column...   Blessings, Bob

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Labels: Christian campus ministry, Ephesians 2:2, father of lies, Isaiah 57:15, John 8:44, religious studies, revival, truth

Spirituality Column #934

October 8, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 2 – Seeds of Revival

By Bob Walters

“For this is what the high and exalted One says – he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’” Isaiah 57:15

Last week I took the spiritual status of American university academia to the woodshed.  It has been an ugly thing the past 150 years as bedrock Christian theology classes have been largely replaced in colleges by soft-core “religious studies,” and detuned as the central fabric of society. “Higher” education? Higher than God?   

Yet … there is a glimmering light.  Christianity tends to be hard to get rid of. While universities have expunged Jesus from their curriculums – I mean the real, Son of God, Lord and Savior, Jesus, the way and the truth and the life of the Kingdom of God Jesus – no shortage of Christians and Christian missions are alive and well on campus.

Of all the ironies of Christianity – the King of Creation arrives as the humble, helpless child Jesus; His death brings our freedom; His resurrection assures our restoration, God’s Spirit animates our hearts for God’s Kingdom, God’s mysteries somehow seal our faith in love and truth – Church history teaches us that it is during persecution when Christian light burns hottest. From darkness comes revival.

As in: after Jewish leaders conspired to have Jesus murdered on the cross, His resurrected body and life lit the fire of faith in thousands … then millions.  After Romans persecuted Christians for two centuries, Emperor Constantine became a Christian.

Today, doctrinally true Christian clubs and ministries are largely banned on campuses whose administrations – and student bodies generally – place a higher value on individualism of identity, freedom for sins, and group-think than discovery of truth.

While we might wonder what is better than forgiveness of sins, or more individual than a personal relationship with Christ, academia frets that its secular, homogenized, “truth” will be challenged. Yet it is not truth; it is a false gospel of false uniqueness. 

God’s Truth, the truth that governs reality, is eternal. But Satan – as the “Lord of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and “the father of lies” (John 8:44), - creates perennial temporal havoc.  Humanist philosophies and pagan gods/worship go back thousands of years across all cultures. Satan’s greatest enemy is the truth of Jesus Christ.

Campus ministries organized as “approved student activities or clubs,” have been mostly defenestrated by university administrators under their “anti-discrimination” policies (speaking of ironies).  But plenty of students have their “swords” – Bibles – with them, share in Christian fellowship with their sisters and brothers in the faith, and evangelize on campus not with argument, apologetics, and protest, but with “the hand and heart’ of service and kindness. That was the social model of the earliest Christians.

University sponsored/approved Christian clubs may be nearly extinct, but outside churches, ministries, and missions either amid or near college campuses love, support, and encourage faithful students. Among the most effective campus ministries nationally are the hundreds of Catholic parishes adjacent to colleges but controlled by the church and “energized by its theology of the body.” (LINK: The Campus Ministry Boom).

Jesus hasn’t left campus, even as campuses try to leave Him. More next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) repents, having once thought Christians were weirdos.