Spirituality Column #293
June 26, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A few years ago I had a short-term business acquaintance who had grown up in the evangelical church, had experienced both financial success and failure in secular endeavors, and was a confessing believer in Christ.

As we were parting company – our business models plainly not matching up – he assured me that I was too serious about my faith; that my life needed “balance.”  My heart was buoyed as I went out the door realizing “He could tell. I am serious about it.”

People who know me well know I am not the in-your-face, street-corner shouting, judgment spouting, Holy-Roller type.  But people who know me really, really well know that I no longer try to balance my life between God and Caesar.

I try to balance my life in the Gospel, which is challenge enough.

Everyone knows of the brilliant but vexing answer Jesus gave to the Pharisees who were trying to trick Him into committing blasphemy or treason regarding Roman tax: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

Jesus isn’t telling the Pharisees, or us, to balance life between the Gospel truth and secular expediency; He’s saying it is critical to know the difference.

God’s spoken commission to Jesus was “all things” (Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22), not “some things.”  The Gospel is the totality of God’s truth, not the balance of man’s opinions.  A faithful life in Christ cannot be a fraction or a ratio; it must be a whole.

Pastor Matt Chandler in his recent book The Explicit Gospel makes point after excellent point about the existence of both completeness and balance within the Gospel.  Too often, he charges, preachers preach an imbalanced Gospel of all works, all missions, all study, or all whatever.  Chandler says that approach is all wrong.

The Gospel is something at once totally personal and totally universal.  That’s what must be balanced.  Chandler crafts a clever, clear, coherent, and compelling – what we call in church, convicting – case for learning and living the whole Gospel.

What is the Gospel?  Well, if you look closely, it’s the entire Bible and the complex truth of God’s love.  It is the unique person of Jesus Christ, divine and human, who authors and restores our eternal relationship with God the Father.  It is the Holy Spirit, who lights our path to God with mercy, knowledge, comfort, and peace.

On balance, the Gospel is the most important thing we can know.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), who publishes an old (he calls it a “classic”) column free every Friday at www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com, muses: When faith feels like a high-wire act, we’re balancing the wrong things.

Note: Bob's book Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary is available at Amazon.com, Lulu.com, Barnes&Noble

Spirituality Column #292
June 19, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters

The Gospel, if we will let it, tells us what is eternal and soul satisfying.

It tells us the truth of who we are, who we were meant to be, who we’ve become, and who we can still be someday.  The Gospel – the truth of God, the saving resurrection of Jesus Christ, the illumination and comfort of the Holy Spirit – is at once personal and specific, and concentrically as big as the entirety of the divinely created cosmos.

The Gospel, the ‘Good News,” is news about a person and an event upon which the history of the planet – and every person on it – turns.  We were made in the image of God, we were designed to be His glory, we fell in sin from that exalted place, and Jesus Christ came in human flesh to restore our communion with Father God Almighty.

And as sin fractured God’s creation (Romans 1:23) and caused not only the fallenness of man but the perpetual groaning of the entire universe, the Gospel is God’s plenipotentiary message of promise that man is saved, death is crushed, and the universe will be restored to the good glory that is the Lord’s alone.

Wow … that’s big.  That’s the “my-cup-runneth-over” fullness of the Gospel and unimaginable bigness of a faithful relationship with Jesus Christ.  That’s what God wants for us.  That’s what the Bible says.  That’s what Jesus says.  That’s what the Gospel is all about: God’s eternal, enormous, glorious, loving intention for us.

But, we are so satisfied with less.

In fact, generally, we are thrilled with less.  Blessed with God-ordained freedom either to participate in the cosmic restoration of all things by following Christ in faith, or to engage merely in the pursuit of fleeting physical fancy – of eternal vs. temporary – c’mon, temporary is so much less complicated.  We can see the temporary, and nobody thinks we’re weird.   Small is just fine.  We don’t have to explain faith in “bigness” that others may detect in our actions but most likely won’t understand.

Unless, of course, they have the same faith.

Matt Chandler’s new book, The Explicit Gospel, does Christian faith a stellar service by describing the real Gospel amid the spurious here-and-now of modern social religion.  Just as God is often reduced to “god” when religious worship is more about  human comforts than God’s glory, so too does the Gospel shrink to the “gospel” when it is fractured and divided to accommodate contemporary political/cultural agendas.

In Chandler’s hands, the Gospel isn’t political or temporary; it’s big and eternal.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) attended The Village, Chandler’s church in Dallas, a couple years ago.  His son Eric (Carmel ’06) is a member there.

Spirituality Column #291

By Bob Walters

If one clearly hears the facts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, one’s heart will be changed by it – for better or worse.


That can be a dangerous thing, Chandler notes, because upon hearing the Gospel a person’s soul will either soften or harden toward God’s grace.  Softening leads toward heaven and the danger of being rejected by the world; hardening leads toward hell and hell is as dangerous as it gets.

But hell isn’t the point (ok, it’s a point, but not the point).  Preaching the truth of Christ is the point, and that’s Chandler’s point.  He presents a thorough, biblically buttressed dialectic of how the Bible itself supports the truth of the Gospel if only we will read it entirely and preachers will preach what it says explicitly.

Chandler cites John chapter 6 as an example.  Everyone loves the story of Jesus miraculously feeding the 5,000 (verses 1-15).  But read on (verses 25-71) and discover that Jesus says He is the bread of life, and that for us to be truly fed God requires us “to believe in the One he has sent.”  And Jesus really, really means it.  You can’t preach the miraculous receiving if you won’t preach the serious believing.  That is called “subtracting” from the Gospels and, sorry; half a loaf won’t get anyone into heaven.

Our hearts and minds must be strong enough to hear the truth of the explicit Gospel (e.g. John 3:16-17; 14:6-7).  Chandler is telling us to be sure to hear it all.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates that while our only true peace is in Christ, His Gospel truth can be horrifying to a hardened heart. Pray boldly to hear.

Spirituality Column #290
June 5, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters


The Apostle Paul had this problem in the first century, and we have it today.

Paul battled pagans, Judaizers, and others who “just didn’t get” the Gospel truth of Christ.  Paul of course didn’t have New Testament scripture on hand or even an organized church.  He did however have Damascus Road, profound faith, a towering intellect, and live eyewitnesses to the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Today we have the Bible available in thousands of languages, 2,000 years of scholarship and tradition, well-documented and time-tested philosophical development, thoughtful and well-organized churches everywhere … and plenty of congregations being taught something other than the explicit message of the Gospel.

Thankfully, savvy Dallas preacher Matt Chandler has written The Explicit Gospel, a book I’ve begun reading that is scratching a particular itch I’ve long suffered. 

Chandler opens by describing the all-too-common absence of the preaching and teaching of the real, accurate, Biblical, “explicit” Gospel of Jesus Christ.  In some cases, Chandler charitably suggests this might be because ministers assume their congregants already know the Gospels so they preach on other subjects.  But Chandler also very accurately nails the self-help, culturally sensitive, and PC obeisant preaching of those who think the Gospel is too controversial or unbelievable to draw a crowd, hold its attention, or hasten a tithe.  Chandler’s point is: Teach the real Gospel.  Do it now.

My “itch” is seeing people everywhere “substitute worshipping” something other than Christ.  In the secular world it may be money, power, fame, education, family, sports, sex, or many other things.  Among believers we see all that, plus Christians making the mistake of worshipping a specific church, a pastor, a style of worship, a ministry, or a hundred other things that are peripheral to the center of Christian worship.

As we all know, that center is Jesus Christ, and His message is in the Gospels.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wonders if you happened to hear the pre-race prayer at this year’s Indy 500.  “Can I get an Amen?”  Um … me neither.  We’ll have more on Chandler’s “The Explicit Gospel” in upcoming columns.