Spirituality Column #476
December 29, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“No one comes to the Father except through me.”  – Jesus, John 14:6

As we cruise on into the other side of life past Christmas – when the sentimental swirl of the season morphs into pedantic pursuits like cleaning up, packing up and paying up – what is the most important thing we keep with us as the holiday lights dim?

Why, our Savior Jesus Christ, of course.

“Reason for this season”?  C’mon, He’s the reason for every season.

Yet upon heading into the New Year most people find Jesus easier to put away than take along.  He’s a holiday decoration.  After Christmas, they’d rather see Jesus packed up than the Gospel picked up.  Folks move on from the holidays thinking Christmas was great and Jesus is OK but in their heart-of-hearts figure, “Hey, enough is enough; I have a real life to live.  The season is over; Christmas was what I hoped it would be … I’m good ‘til next year.”

There is a flicker of faith even in harder hearts – not all, certainly, but a lot of them – that senses the truth of the Christmas story beating well beyond the considerable cacophony of Yuletide’s clanging commercial largesse.  These faithful sparks are earnest in intent but unfueled in practice.  Starving, the heart’s flame of the Christmas season retreats.  The “want” of truth and “need” of peace smolder and eventually cool into the uninspiring, unsatisfying ashes of spiritually “getting by.”  We can always meet Jesus again next Christmas.  He’ll be there, right?  Until then … where’s the necessity?

Our information is wrong and our priorities are catastrophically inverted when we seasonalize, marginalize or otherwise compartmentalize Christ.  Correct information is written in the Gospels, well-represented above in John 14:6: Jesus is the only way to God, not just “a” way.  The catastrophe is misunderstanding what’s at stake when we prioritize ourselves or anything else ahead of God.

Satan’s entire playbook hinges on man’s priorities of “Me.”  Hell is fed continually by man’s fears, guilt, shame and eventual death.  Satan’s temptations may make us feel good for a while, but in him our sins and fears endure forever.

Joy, you see, is a function of forever with God.  What God promises, what Jesus delivers, and what the Holy Spirit assures is that our eternity will reside in the presence of our Creator God Almighty, who loved us enough to make us and then set us free to find Him anew.

It is that part about finding God “anew” that makes Jesus indispensable all the time.  We cheat ourselves horribly if we see our Savior only at Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that God’s gift to us is our best gift to God - Love.

Spirituality Column #475
December 22, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“If anyone loves God, he is known by God.” – 1 Corinthians 8:3

The gift of Jesus Christ – the gift we celebrate at Christmas – is this “knowing” relationship humanity has with God.

It’s unique.  Period.

“Say it ain’t so” if you want to.  Say that every religion seeks knowledge and love of God, Christianity is just another of those religions, blah, blah, blah.  But a dismissive statement like that only serves to prove one’s desperate lack of scholarship, understanding and investigation.  Christmas celebrates our opportunity to love God and be known by God.  It’s a relationship no one else is selling.

"I am the way and the truth and the life; nobody comes to the father except through me,” says Jesus in John 14:6.  He must mean it, because no other religion claims anything remotely close.

The arrival of God as man in the Christ child, the baby Jesus – incarnate, “and the Word became flesh,” John 1:14 – is unique in history and well deserves the biggest party and commemoration of any year.  The party goes just fine, but the commemoration of what we’re actually celebrating tends to get lost amid the egg nog, gift wrapping, lawn Santas and politically correct brutality against showing or mentioning God’s own symbol, sign and seal of our salvation, Jesus Christ.  Happy holidays.

Which is to say: as a culture we are quite good at knowing Christmas and quite bad at knowing Christ.  We don’t discern and embrace what Christ means and how one-of-a-kind special He is.  The “baby Jesus in a manger” narrative is quaint and cozy, and our holiday decorations and gift giving are beautiful and joyous.  But we have peacefully, self-righteously, and stupidly forfeited the understanding of the uniqueness of not only the best gift at Christmas but the best gift of all time – the gift of knowing God’s love.

What’s so important about God’s love?  “Love” is who and what God is: “God is love” says the Bible over and over again.  It was God’s love in the beginning that was “His Word” that then became earthly flesh so that mankind, in Jesus, could see God’s face, hear God’s voice, love God’s presence and then dwell with Him for all eternity.

All that was demanded of us – graciously, compassionately and miraculously – wasn’t our own Godly perfection, but faith in God’s perfection.  God endows that faith to all, along with our complete freedom to accept it or reject it.

Rejection?  That looks like Jesus on the cross.

Acceptance?  Its beauty and glory exceeds anything we can imagine: we get to be known by God.  And the only thing necessary is love.

Merry Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays for your peace and rest in Christ.

Spirituality Column #474
December 15, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“We have this hope as an anchor …” – Hebrews 6:19

“Hope” the verb indirectly suggests fear and doubt about pending outcomes.

“Hope” the noun is the forthright acceptance of God’s truth.

As action, hope the verb generally designates worldly reservation, akin to wishing, supposing, wanting, desiring, or even coveting.  We hope our ball team wins the game, we’d like to think the best of people, it’d be nice to get that raise, “Why can’t we all just get along?” and “Wow, that sure is a nice car!”   Even praying for healing – for ourselves or others – probably expresses more of a temporal wish (relief from pain and inconvenience) than assured, faith-filled forfeiture to God’s eternal will.

That hope, the noun identifying man’s faithful, intellectual, God-ordained understanding of the fact of God’s glory, love, eternity and Creation, is necessary hope.  It is far larger than merely wishing to dodge the discomforts, disappointments and dismay of this fallen world.

The word “hope” appears more times in the book of Job than anywhere else in the Bible except for Psalms.  Ironically, “hope” goes unmentioned in the Gospels.

Job, the Old Testament book depicting Satan’s mischief, worldly misery, man’s doubt, interpersonal frustration and God’s confident righteousness, exposes temporal human hope – the verb – as inadequate in this fallen world.  Divine hope – the noun – creates a personal, peace-bestowing glow when shared with the eternal being of God.

The Psalms offer great hymns and prayers of the faithful, the scared, the downtrodden, the exultant, the penitent, and most especially – overarchingly – the hopeful who desire to see God’s face, know God’s presence, and share God’s love.  The psalmists pray – they hope – for a day when God’s righteousness will be apparent.

Turns out, that day of hope wasn’t what anyone was expecting.

Certainly, hope arrives in the Gospels as God’s supreme gift to mankind, but in the humble, loving, shrewd, unwavering, truth-teaching, parable-spouting, miracle-working person of Jesus Christ.  Fully God and fully man, Christ is our hope.  Many souls miss that Godly message because Jesus isn’t the “fixer” we hoped for, humility isn’t what we wanted, and loving our enemies isn’t what we had in mind.

Fallen man’s typical expression of hope is focused desperation; a plea for favor. Godly, broadband hope anchors itself in the gift of Jesus Christ: eternity with God.

While the Gospels reveal the perfect image of God’s glory in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:3), Paul describes God’s gift of hope to the faithful human intellect, a gift that facilitates and illuminates God’s eternal plan: the Glory-to-come of faithful believers.

In the here and now, we fear, we doubt.

Life in Christ, that’s what hope’s really about.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t “hope it’s true;” he’s thankful for truth.

Spirituality Column #473
December 8, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“… if we are faithless, he will remain faithful …” – 2 Timothy 2:13

Have you ever noticed that most of what the Bible says about faith is about God’s faith, not ours?

Obviously faith is a major theme in scripture.  Derivative words – faith, faithful, faithfulness, faithless, etc. – appear hundreds of times.  Only a few nouns (God, Lord, Love, Heaven and maybe a few others, whatever, not the point) appear more often.

Out here in the fallen world, amid humanity’s mixed bag of kindness, strife, beauty, disaster, comfort, horror and generally things that work out and things that don’t work out, faith often is regarded as a conjured, vaporous, wishful crutch for man’s existential helplessness.

Wrong.

Faith is the Almighty Creator God’s unyielding truth, power and relational promise.  Faith, the Bible unrelentingly tells us, is a God thing, not a mankind thing.

Throughout the Old Testament “faith” most often appears – dozens and dozens of times – directly referencing “God’s faithfulness” (Genesis 24:27) or humans praising God’s faithfulness (see the Psalms).  Most direct references to human faith are in the context of “broken faith” or “faithlessness.”  I’m serious.  Look it up.

In the New Testament, Hebrews 11 famously catalogues great examples of Old Testament holy lives – Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses and others – who trusted God “by faith” they themselves did not create and could not see.  Faith, we can discern from the New Testament, comes to tactile fruition in the person of Jesus Christ, who bore history’s only gift of God’s faith mankind could see and touch.

So …you have faith?  Great, it’s a gift from God.  It’s the light God provided our souls at Creation.  It’s a light illuminating divine things outside our experience.  It’s a light for discerning the mysterious, often-hidden-in-plain-sight reality of God, of His Creation and of our own relationship within God’s belovedness and Creation’s majesty.  It’s a light God bestows along with the freedom to stoke it with the fuel of God’s own faith so it burns brightly, or asphyxiate it with our own self-centeredness, fear and pride.

The light, by the way, is Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

G.K. Chesterton warned elegantly (in “Orthodoxy”) against “Inner Light” theology: that God exists within and is controlled by the human soul.  Problematically, if the “self” is where we believe God exists, we wind up worshiping the self instead of God.

A bad idea.

Faith isn’t so much something we possess; it’s a fundamental, necessary piece of God’s character that He shares with us through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

That makes faith the ultimate team effort.  And with it, we are never alone.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is more thankful than faithful, but he’s working on it.