Spirituality Column #320
January 1, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Spirituality Column #319

Shopping for Innocence
By Bob Walters

Two carefree, local elementary school students happily hopped off a Friday afternoon school bus recently and their tearful mother fairly rushed the curb, hugging the bewildered children tightly and kissing them furiously.

Viewing the scene through my windshield and having been listening to the radio, I knew something the startled children didn’t: that their mother’s heart had melted-down with that day’s news of the Sandy Hook K-4 elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The bus’s red flashing stop arms held the moment: the mother’s children were safe; their world is not.  Not even at Christmas.

I caught the mother’s eye, nodded and touched my hand to my heart, a knowing, sincere salute to her fierce love and to the beautiful innocence of her children.  Emotion and tears came easily.  Is there any time of year when a child’s innocence is more valued and celebrated?

If we are selfish and frivolous, we will dwell on the inconvenience of this tragedy so close to “our” Christmas.  If we are circumspect and serious, we will add God’s message of Jesus Christ to our calculus of assessing both this tragedy and the holiday’s true significance.

We want Christmas to be gentle, but for God to be powerful and tough.  We want God to stop the bad guys.  We want him to protect us along with the people and things we love.  If Jesus was sent as God’s servant, then we want Him to serve us … now.

Ironically, our macro-culture is too modern and educated to believe all that religious nonsense, yet privately we are too desperate and confused to entirely discount God.  We shop for God “on sale” – on better terms for us with less at stake.  We eject God from our public midst but blame God for our troubles.  We opine, “God wouldn’t let this happen.”  Then we demand, “Well God, I’m waiting.  Fix this mess.”

We don’t know who is surrendering to Whom.

This Christmas my thoughts go to King Herod (Matthew 2).  He tried to kill Jesus but instead killed every other baby boy in Bethlehem.  Baby Jesus born in that Bethlehem manger is the innocence and righteousness that God truly desires for mankind, once the perfect image of His Creation but now fallen in sin.

Sadly, the innocent and the righteous are not protected from the fallen world’s viciousness and violence; look at what happened to Jesus on the Cross.  We are shocked at Newtown, but evil is nothing new.

It’s no wonder that we hug our innocent children tightly.

Oh, for a world where we hug Jesus even tighter than that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com, www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com) prays along with so many others for peace, mercy, comfort … and truth.  Have a merry and gentle Chistmas.

Spirituality Column #318
December 18, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirituality Column #317
December 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

During the thirty years of my life that I spent religiously not going to church, I don’t recall ever searching for “hope in Christ.”

Spirituality Column #316
December 4, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Rarely when we shop for the perfect Christmas gift are we thinking about the best gift of all – encouragement.

We generally purchase gifts based on what we think will make someone “happy” by meeting a material desire or temporary comfort.  Instead of building people up by providing the stuff of encouragement – peace, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and hope – we shop for the stuff of this world and then beat down doors at midnight to get it cheap.

Anybody see any Bible parallels or problems there?

The gift of encouragement is a much tougher “find.”  Few people put “encouragement” on their Christmas wish list.  I didn’t see a single Black Friday sale featuring a discount on or special shopping hours for “encouragement.”

Christmas gift-giving winds up being about expressing our love – a good thing – by making other people happy, preferably at a righteous discount.  But holiday gift exchanges are mostly semi-redundant expressions of our affection.  We present gifts to, and receive them from, people who already know we care.  I mean, it’s creepy to get a Christmas gift from someone we don’t like, isn’t it?  And who shops for their enemies?

This is all to say that Christmas gift-giving is geared not so much toward mimicking God’s universal encouragement of mankind but toward simple and transitory, worldly expressions of “I didn’t forget you” or “I want you to be happy.”

That’s all fine, but … the entire dynamic is out of sync with the actual story of Christmas and the glorious incarnation of God on earth.  Jesus was God’s ultimate gift of gracious, eternal encouragement to a world that didn’t know Him, would largely ignore Him, would treat Him as an enemy, mock Him, and kill Him.  Mankind never even asked for the gift God so spectacularly provided (John 1:1-14).

This was the gift of all gifts: God’s encouragement in the form of man’s eternal salvation through the humble human life and sin-cleansing death of his Son and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  The entire Old Testament points to this coming gift, but people interpreted scripture and prophecy to mean that God would give them happiness and comfort in exchange for their obedience.

People expected a trade, a transaction, a quid pro quo.  Almost everyone missed the cosmic, life-altering importance of divine encouragement – the love, freedom, grace, and life – God sent in His gift of Jesus.

Be encouraged and think about that while you’re out shopping.

Speaking of Christmas shopping, Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) published  Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary, a book of his first 260 Current columns, available at (click one) Amazon.com, Lulu.com, Barnes&Noble .  He’d be encouraged if you gave somebody one as a gift. 

Spirituality Column #315
November 27, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirituality Column #314
November 20, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I am blessed to be around intelligent, bright-eyed teenagers on a regular basis.

Recently, upon learning that I write Christian commentary, a particularly upbeat eighth-grader sincerely and innocently offered: “I don’t know what religion I am, but I believe in God.”

I responded warmly, “That’s a great start.”

Yes, a great start indeed.  I am so very thankful there is a God we all can know; a God Who has put it in our hearts and heads that He is indeed there, whether we know Him, want Him, love Him, praise Him, pursue Him, fear Him, trust Him, blame Him, or ignore Him.  God is there and anyone can get to know Him.

Each human story for “getting to know God” is unique.  That reflects the truly unique nature of the Christian faith: the personal, relational presence of the Holy Creator and Almighty God in our lives and humanity.  That Presence – the One who God sent amid humanity to restore, adopt, and save us into eternal loving relationship with God – is the Lord Jesus Christ.  And the only way we can know that is through our faith in God, Christ’s grace, and the comforting, illuminating work of the Holy Spirit.

That is the face of the Trinity; the God who Himself works as a loving community to bring us into loving community with Him.  Sometimes it’s gentle love, sometimes it is tough love, and sometimes it is truly inexplicable love.  But we must begin to know God by remembering that love didn’t start with reason and people; love started with the Creator God: “His love endures forever” (Psalm 136:1 and hundreds of other verses).

“Forever” – that’s past, present, and future; beginning, middle and end.

Believing in God – which is common to many faith traditions – is different from knowing God.  The terms on which we “know God” – sacrificial love (Christianity), the Law (Judaism), God’s power (Islam), elimination of self (Buddhism), or whatever – defines our religion.  What God offered to humanity through Jesus Christ is not only the unique physical human presence in time, space, and history of the one and true eternal Creator God, but also the renewed gift of eternal human relationship with God.

Rationally, linguistically, and humanly, “love” implies relationship.  Mercifully and uniquely, God’s love implies His active relationship with humanity and all His Creation.  God reaches deep into our hearts, minds and souls to make us aware He is there.

In His love, God lets us decide freely, seriously, and independently, “what religion we are.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), still reeling from the national election results, is  thankful for this unprecedented opportunity to exercise faith and trust in Christ alone.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.

Spirituality Column #313
November 13, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Finding God, Finding Ourselves
By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #312
November 6, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters

The great platitudinal prayer of our time is “Everything happens for a reason.”

It offers the grandly inclusive and non-specific subject “Everything,” the blanketing verb “happens”, and a twaddling prepositional phrase of modernist intellectual obeisance, “for a reason.”  Strangely – and really for no “reason” whatsoever – the phrase dominates generic, quasi-faith, public attempts to face worldly calamity with a whimsical, faux-spiritual sense of higher, abiding, and comforting peace.

“It’ll be OK.  Everything happens for a reason.”

While the phrase implies “God’s will,” at heart it is a soft bromide vaguely affirming the possibility of God and salvation, but without the encumbrance of admitting faith specifics.  “Specifics” would include intellectually and faithfully proclaiming that there is a serious, real, willful Lord God Creator Almighty in Heaven Who sent His son Jesus Christ to restore the glory of our human relationship with the divine, and Who issued forth the Holy Spirit to illuminate the divine truths of eternal love and salvation.

That, I think, is God’s will.  That endorses powerful faith.  That is truth.  That subordinates reason to the lesser, earthly, fallen realm of “proof.”  

Faith and reason, you see, are both intellectual functions but are not the same things.  Treating them as such constitutes what theologians and philosophers call a “category mistake”, or what the rest of us might call “mixing apples and oranges.”

Christian faith in an abiding, relational God is something God cleverly avoids allowing to be reduced to the merely rational, evidential, empirical, or the seen (2 Corinthians 4:18).

One can prove God only to one’s self, and then only in faith with the help of the Holy Spirit.  Certainly our witness can help others find God, and the witness of others can help us find God.  But it is a fool’s errand to attempt to prove God to the worldly, rational satisfaction of others.  The only sustaining proof of God we’ll know in this life is in the combined mystery and assuredness of faith residing in our minds and hearts.  For evidence we have the Bible, the Church, our faith, and our fellowship with each other.  It is the Holy Spirit’s job to do the heavy lifting of illuminating God’s truth in human hearts.

God sent Jesus into this fallen world to restore us eternally, not to avoid this life’s trying times but to endure them.  Amid confusion, chaos, pain, danger, despair, or even unsettling election results, proclaim God’s truth in Heaven when reason on earth fails.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests reading 1 Peter 3:8-22 on suffering if the election rattles your faith or if you need a refresher course on God’s will.
PS – Congrats to Current’s sixth birthday, and praise God for this weekly space.

Spirituality Column #311
October 30, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I am a Jesus-believing sinner at the foot of the Cross who hesitates when marking the “religious preference” box on personal information questionnaires.

“Roman Catholic,” “Orthodox,” “Protestant,” and maybe a blank beside “Other,” typically are the Christian choices.  Rarely – in fact I think never – have I seen a box that simply says “Christian.”   Since “Christian” is all I really want to be, whenever possible I check “Other” and write in “Christian.”  It’s minor mischief that makes me smile.  Here endeth the rebellion.

This is not to disrespect those who check a different box.  I deeply appreciate Christianity’s rich and diverse doctrinal history – John 1:14, Christ on the Cross, Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and ascension, the Pentecost, the Apostles, the Revelation, the church fathers, the canonization of the Bible, the heresies, Rome, Constantinople, Orthodoxy, the Council of Nicaea, the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Great Awakenings, the Evangelical Movement and on up to Humanae Vitae, the modern Popes, televangelism (for better or worse), and contemporary worship.

It is of great intellectual comfort to my own faith knowing that smart, spiritual humans have been thinking, interpreting, praying and writing about Christian doctrine for 2,000 years.  What I encounter on any given day as a Christian, including any given Sunday at worship, may be refreshing, enlightening, and new.  But I know that Christianity is old, that God is eternal, and that Jesus is more than an idea.  Jesus, the person who is also God, is the perfect and complete image of God’s original plan for a Creation that glorifies.

Fallen humans are errantly prone to heap superfluous constructs – i.e., legalisms – upon otherwise simple faith in Christ; faith that should lift us atop God’s foundational glory of love, grace, mercy, freedom, and joy.  Too often that faith becomes buried beneath worldly systems and suffocated by sin, fear, guilt, works, and sadness.

I mourn for churches that sacrifice the truth of the Bible for the weight of tradition, and lament churches that perilously ignore tradition while over-worshipping expedient scripture paraphrases.  I shake my head when churches promote worldly and off-point dogmas of “Jesus as Homeboy” or the “Prosperity Gospel of Me and My Needs.”  The “living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9) created, loves and pursues humanity.  We are to love God, pursue His truth in Christ, and share that truth, that spirit, in love and service, with others.  Christ should be the center of all.

By believing in Christ, I am not burdened with having to believe in anything else.

All I have to do is mark “Christian.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wanted to avoid the timely and tendentious topics of Halloween tomorrow and the election next week.  “Boo” if you must, but absolutely – for Heaven’s sake – vote.

Spirituality Column #310
October 23, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Polling Data and God’s Truth

Spirituality Column #309
October 16, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Forgive Me for Asking, But …
By Bob Walters

When asked “What’s Jesus done for you?” many Christians quickly answer, “He died on the cross to forgive my sins.”

True enough.

But if we honestly believe that answer – that Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins – why do so many of us still pray daily for God’s forgiveness?  Forgiveness has already happened, and that idea is as plainly and clearly presented as any in the Bible.  Over and over (Romans 6:10, Hebrews 7:27, 10:2, Jude 1:3, etc.) the New Testament instructs us that Jesus died “once for all” – for all mankind, for the forgiveness of all sin, and for the restoration of all creation.

My email pen pal Bob recently opined that asking Jesus for forgiveness again and again is akin to asking Jesus to go to the cross again and again.  Jesus has been there, done that, and is sitting in Heaven with the scars to prove it.  We’re forgiven, already; not by our request but by God’s grace and Jesus on the cross.

In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly offers forgiveness (Matthew 9:2), claims the authority to forgive (Matthew 9:6), and commands us to forgive (Matthew 18:35).  But humanity asking “for forgiveness” is not something Jesus ever mentions.  Nor is it something mankind ever thought of asking for.  The Jews of Jesus’ time believed their divine deliverer would provide spectacular, triumphant, and righteous military power, not humble, servant-hearted, and righteous forgiveness of sinners.

Jesus tells us to pray, repent, be baptized, and to follow him (Mark 1).  For our salvation we are to love God, trust Jesus, rely on the Holy Spirit, and both love and forgive our neighbor.  But from the cross, our forgiveness through Christ is eternal and ongoing – a “done deal.”  Continuing to ask Jesus “for forgiveness” seems ungracious, tantamount to doubting His word, His promise, His authority, His power, His love.

But still … we sin, feel guilty, and reflexively pray for forgiveness.  Isn’t it far better to recognize and repent of sin, and then – with faith and perseverance – strengthen our relationship with the one risen Lord?  We do that by building, growing, learning, nurturing and trusting in Jesus Christ: that He is who He says He is, has done what He says He has done, and will do what He has promised to do.

My teacher George recently remarked that many Christians are addicted to praying for forgiveness.  I’d never heard it put quite like that.  Certainly, prayer is good, but our prayers should reflect our total trust in the grace of Christ Jesus.

For what is grace if not forgiveness?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t pray for God’s forgiveness; he thanks God that His forgiveness is eternal.  Peace and mercy to all.

Spirituality Column #308
October 9, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters


Whither America?  Everybody I know has an opinion on whether America is or should or must or must not be a “Christian” nation.  I think we should be a nation of free individuals loving God and others.  I also think that it is very, very apparent that freedom in Jesus Christ provides the essential, animating moral foundation for democracy.

A global missions team recently told our Sunday school class that Europe has the lowest Christian conversion and baptism rate on the planet.  What could be a better advertisement against “official,” government-taxed religion?

God’s grace, mercy and love are free gifts through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.  That’s freedom, and no government should tax it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays for Europe … and America.

Spirituality Column #307
October 2, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Logic and reason may be the twin towers of worldly intellectual life, but faith and freedom are required to experience and apply the wisdom of God.

We can thank the ancient Greeks for modern mankind’s obsession with physical evidence, reverence for forensic consensus, and stubbornness against accepting the truth of faith.  “Truth” credited to Socrates (469-399 B.C.), Plato (427-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and championed by philosophers through the ages, grips both the highest reaches of contemporary academia and mankind’s simplest common sense.

That “truth” in a nutshell?  Things are only true if one can explain them.

It is among Satan’s cleverest deceptions, convincing humans that ultimate truth a) resides inside each of us and b) is limited to what we can prove to others.  God, desiring love and faith above all, bestows intellectual freedom on us to discover His truth.  Some people do find God through Christ, but many find only themselves, or the world’s pleasures, or despair, or confusion.  Some find only emptiness.

Absent faith in the ultimate goodness of God, the truth of Jesus Christ, and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, countless thinkers have busied themselves trying to make sense of the world by worshipping explanations or devising systems.  They attempt to explain that which is unexplainable without faith in God; we mistakenly think ultimate truth will include a clear explanation.  Not so.

In the world’s realm of evidence, power, and self-examination, the Gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t make sense.

God became human?  Prove it.

Almighty God, in the person of His own sinless son Jesus the Prince of Peace, died a violent sinner’s death on the cross to … free mankind from sin?  Be serious.

Christ’s resurrection assures believers eternal life?  Who have you ever seen “resurrected”?

God did all this to save the weak?  This life favors the strong and powerful; if God exists, He (or She) favors them.

Historical ironies abound.  Greek philosophy flowered in the intertestamental years between the writing of the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi (circa 500 B.C.) and the birth of the ultimate authoritative teacher, Jesus.  From then until the 18^th century A.D., academic and intellectual investigation was overwhelmingly devoted to discovery through the infinite lens of Christ’s wisdom.  Today, the academy satisfies itself – restricts itself, actually – with the pocket magnifying glass of man’s knowledge.

In Greek-educated Paul’s 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, esp. v19, “the learning of the learned I will confound,” God declares the folly of intellectually “going it alone.”

Of course, we are free to think differently.  But it’s not wise.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is studying 1 Corinthians Wednesday nights at E91 church (class open to all) with former Cambridge University lecturer Dr. George Bebawi.

Spirituality Column #306
September 25, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary











Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks E91 pastor Rick Grover for the inspiration and sermon on Mark.