Spirituality Column #372
December 31, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #371
December 24, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

A Christmas Series - Part 4 of 4
Giftwrapping God’s Grace
By Bob Walters

 

It’s an emotion wrapped in the most profound and holy theme of Christmas, the loving grace of Almighty God that bequeaths to fallen mankind a death-defeating, sin-forgiving and divine-relationship-restoring savior: the incarnate God Jesus Christ.

 

Grace.  God’s grace.  Our loving grace to each other.  The grace of family.  The grace of Mary and Joseph, shepherds and wise men.  The grace of a simple gift under the tree.  The grace of transcendent peace, eternal rest, and glorious, heavenly expectation.  Grace that bestows unmerited favor; favor without a counterbalance.  Grace that preserves, cheers, and enlightens a soul and insists on its freedom.  Grace that is the eternal promise and present proof of everlasting joy.

 

This magnificent Godly grace is mysteriously devoid of worldly, observable “transaction.”  Divine grace is willfully and unselfishly doing something for somebody else out of love, not calculated return.  God’s grace fuels the warmth, peace, love, and giving of “that Christmas feeling.”

So with gift-giving, peace and love rooted in our modern Christmas activities, it seems that grace, worthily, should be the central conversational point and cosmic theme of celebrating Christmas.  But it’s a point often missed and a theme rarely mentioned.  For example, have you ever heard the word “grace” in a Christmas carol?

 

Shockingly, I don’t think you have, at least not in the common carols we sing in church and hear on the radio (in between Jingle Bells and Santa Baby).  I went looking for “grace” and couldn’t find it.

 

I found other words: truth, light, peace, hope, joy, glory, holy, triumphant, wondrous, power, gift, rejoice, praise, blessing, love, faithful, king, mortals, angels, salvation, savior, sweetly, glowing, glorious, tidings, comfort, cheer, Lord, baby, manger, God, brave, cradle, jubilee, heavenly, and divine.

 

Even the words Satan, oppression, fear, error, lowly and sin.

 

But not grace.  And trust me on this … I looked.  Google, Internet, time, creative searching … all expended without result.   If it’s there, I missed it.  In our prosaic musical lexicon celebrating the incarnation of Christ, “grace” seems to be missing.

 

The apostle Paul starts all 13 of his letters in the Bible with the greeting “grace and peace.”  It’s not an insignificant, rote salutation.  It bespeaks Paul’s bedrock grounding in the grace of Jesus Christ and the peace of man’s salvation.

 

The word “grace” is MIA in Christmas carols?  That’s OK.

 

As long as we know that God’s grace through Jesus Christ surpasses any earthly celebration or gift we can imagine, let’s not get wrapped up in a word.

 

Have a merry – and gracious – Christmas!

 

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) always had “that Christmas feeling” but never knew what it was until he found faith in Christ.

 

Spirituality Column #370
December 17, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Giftwrapping God’s Glory
By Bob Walters

A helpless newborn baby in swaddling clothes lying in a borrowed manger isn’t exactly the expected image of ultimate, cosmic, all-powerful, Godly glory.

But then, you can’t always tell a gift by how it’s wrapped.

Isn’t the biggest surprise and rarest pleasure under the tree the gift you completely didn’t expect?  The gift someone picked out because they love you and had a better grasp of what you needed than your own idea of what you wanted?

And it was perfect?

That is the glory of Jesus Christ – the full glory of God (John 1:14; 13:3, Hebrews 1:1-4, Revelation 5:13) – who came not to punish man’s earthly appetites and prideful vices but to reveal God’s glory in unselfish, loving relationship and divine freedom.

That is a gift mankind, prior to Jesus, could not even imagine.

Nor is it a gift that fallen humanity, for the most part, has ever greeted easily, cheerfully, thankfully, and with the appropriate species-wide sense of relief.  No, our Satan-delivered fallenness leads us to think we already know what we need.  We expect God to deliver something in line with our own narrow, worldly expectations.

Everything mankind needs to know about the coming of Jesus Christ and the revelation of God’s glory is in the Old Testament.  Today, with an actual printed and annotated Old Testament as a reference, the prophecy can be plainly understood.  But in Biblical times even pious Jews deeply versed in Hebrew law, history and prophecy deemed God’s glorious, ultimate plan of graceful salvation in humble Jesus too fantastic, too counter-intuitive, too “out-there” to be believed.

Almighty God was power and glory and wrath and laws.  A savior coming in weakness (a baby!) and humility (a manger!) to deliver divine love (not wrath!) and freedom (not laws!), to defeat death (after being crucified!) and erase our sins (covered by His blood), while demanding only faith (not legal obeisance!) and faithful works (not rituals!) was not only opposite everything the Jews believed, it was flat-out unthinkable.

Of course the prophets, because they were getting their information from God, were dead-on accurate about God’s plan.  But it was a hard life being a Hebrew prophet.  No one understood God’s radical gift of salvation – i.e., eternal life – by the divine love, selfless service, and mysterious forgiveness embodied in the coming Christ.

Contemplating baby Jesus and the crucified Christ, mankind often asks the wrong question: “How could this weak God solve mankind’s earthly problems?”

Truth is, our biggest problems are eternal, not earthly, and the unexpected gift of God’s glory found in Jesus Christ – boldly unwrapped – is the only solution.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) spent most of his life leaving the gift of Christ unwrapped, under the tree.

Spirituality Column #369
December 10, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Giftwrapping God’s Authority
By Bob Walters

The very-bright, 30-something atheist father of three young church-going children was explaining his revulsion for all things God to his life-long-Christian parents.

In his mind his views have nothing to do with confusion – moral, intellectual, cosmic, or otherwise.  They have everything to do with logic, reason, lack of “God” proof, what he sees as the empty crutch of faith and the hypocrisy of anything called “church.”   To his continually prayerful, loving, patient parents, he offers a distressing, emptily resolute, self-centered and unimaginatively standard litany of non-belief.

Its authority adds up to, “What has God done for me lately?”

The young atheist’s militantly lapsed-Catholic wife doesn’t think too hard about such issues.  They both love their three aforementioned children with all their hearts, and allow the aforementioned Christian grandparents to take the kids to church regularly.  Somehow, it works for everybody, sweetened by the kids’ Saturday night sleepovers with the grandparents.  Reflecting on her father’s conviction of there “not being a God,” the middle daughter said out loud on the ride home from church one Sunday, “Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t lie to us about Jesus.”

Thank God for little children who see truth by the light of Christ.

Upon hearing this story, it occurred to me that the son neither sees nor appreciates the prayerful love of his parents, nor comprehends the gift God is giving to his children.  To boot, he has the bold manners to belittle and insult his parents’ faith.  Many parents can relate, as can faithful young adults with non-believing parents. 

But there is one thing lacking in the son’s appraisal of God, faith, and religion; one thing lacking in his vacant atheism: Authority.  There can be no authority in atheism because atheism is defined by there not being objective, righteous, cosmic, this-is-the-final-answer authority in anything.  The only thing with that kind of authority is God.  So: no God, no authority, no truth.  What’s left are strong personal opinions.

The believing Christian is assured by the authority of God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Bible, tradition and the fellowship of all believers, not to mention baptism, prayer, communion, spiritual gifts, faith, hope, love, peace that exceeds understanding, and every breath and moment of life that are great, mysterious, and entirely valid gifts from God Almighty.

In the Bible’s “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:19) Jesus directs believers to “make disciples of all nations.”  But for the authority-claiming atheist, there is a “Great Omission” one verse before where Jesus says, “All authority … is given to me.”

Atheism offers functional worldly logic, but the Bible giftwraps God’s authority.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) embraces mystery, noting that the great fun of Christmas is the mystery of what’s under the tree.

Spirituality Column #368
December 3, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

A Christmas Series - 1 of 4
By Bob Walters
 
Upon perusing one’s cosmic, Christian, Christmas shopping list, which of the following would you rather gift wrap for any random human:

- a loving, productive and rock-solid faith in Jesus Christ, or







I’ve often written in this space of my disdain for salvation fear-mongering; of the draconian “Christian” tracts distributed on street corners attempting to scare the lost into salvation by threatening Hell.  And I’m repulsed when I learn of Sunday school curriculums designed to scare children about sin and Satan rather than to teach the love of Jesus Christ.  I believe these are examples of awful, if occasionally useful, witness.

There is a certain utility in owning a healthy fear and understanding of Hell if it helps to turn one’s mind, heart, and discipline away from sin and toward the glory of a saving God.  A properly functioning, mature Christian can be both aware of sin and wary of Hell but still have a joyous, productive and glorifying faith in Christ. 

The Bible tells me so.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) urges a Hell check: visit Brent Riggs - What the Bible Says About Hell.  Read the outline that appears below the “listen” button.