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.