Spirituality Column No. 528
December 27, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters


The angels of God deal only in divine truth while the minions of Satan deal only in unholy falsehoods.

Be sure that those awestruck, reverent, simple shepherds on that hill near Bethlehem two thousand years ago knew the truth when they heard it just as surely as, ever since, so many people haven’t, don’t and won’t.

Recognize the truth, I mean.  The good tidings. The Good News.

God’s truth is simple and direct and has but one purpose: to glorify God.  Satan’s lies are complex and clandestine, also possessing but one goal: stealing God’s glory.  Across the great spectrum between these extremes and absolutes lay the temptations, aspirations, frustrations, hopes, fears, wiles, faith, deceits, desperation, pride, sins and love of mankind.  It is so very, very difficult to peel back all those layers of our own humanity and find the core truth; the real, true good news of all existence, which is this:

Jesus Christ is Savior and Lord; the incarnate deity sent into the human world by a loving God to restore humanity’s lost divine image and heavenly relationship in the Kingdom of the Creator God Almighty, for His glory, forever. Amen.

God’s good news comes with a one-question final exam: “Do you believe?”

It is not a question asking for an opinion, because in the face of the supreme truth our opinions are just like our lives: fallen, lost, hopeless and as the poet put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”  It is not our opinion or works or even our faith that saves us; it is the truth of Jesus that saves us.  After all, we can have faith in the wrong things and our opinions generally reveal our pride and cosmic smallness.  We see an exception to this in Luke 2:15, when the shepherds in faith venture the opinion that they should go to Bethlehem and “see this thing which has come to pass.”

The shepherds trusted the truth without knowing what “this thing” actually was.

As we shake the snowflakes off of this year’s Christmas celebration, it rings loudly in my ears how much I heard publicly about “faith” and “belief” with no mention of Jesus.  Due to recent celebrity conversation, whether or not we have “hope” – again, no Jesus – is media fodder.  And the over-riding media theme of the moment is “fake news” amid the dearth of coverage of the Christmas story’s real and truly Good News.

That’s not to categorically condemn modern day secular journalists, politicians, academicians and other culture warriors intent on manufacturing and distributing “truth” – opinions bent to their own un-angelic social, economic and educational agendas. They are sinners like the rest of us whom Jesus came to save like the rest of us.

Satan always puts human opinion squarely in the way of God’s Good News.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) read a Christmas Eve day newspaper editorial about “the magic of Christmas” that, in 800 words, never once mentioned Jesus.  Sigh.

Spirituality Column No. 527
December 20, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The Cross, Christmas and Freedom
By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column No. 526
December 13, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters


            A. Shackled to Jesus by your sin?
            B. Spiritually free from your sin through Jesus?
            C. Free to do whatever you want because Jesus loves you anyway?
            D. Expecting a physical, material, monetary or social status reward?

The correct answer here – I hope it’s obvious – is “B.”

Christians go to church for a lot of different reasons.  Some go (A) because of their sin, shame and guilt, which makes church a hospital or jail; something most people want to get out of.  Some (C) take a chunk of scripture about “love” – e.g. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world,” etc., and mistake their own worldly appetites for God’s divine word and build a church full of popular culture but absent biblical responsibility.  The (D) self-directed prosperity Gospel says “Get a blessing” vs. “Be a blessing.”

Most people have some idea that “God exists.”  It takes some prayer, Bible reading, coaching, diligence and discernment to truly understand what God said, what Jesus promised and what the Holy Spirit offers.  It also takes some time, patience and being challenged to discover what it all means.  Freedom is the result of getting it right; bondage is the result of getting it wrong.

When I think back on the times in my adult life when I have cried – I mean really let loose – the only ones I remember were from sadness, fear or relief.  My parents died, my dog was hit by a car.  I lost a job, a career, a home.  My cancer surgery (long before I knew Jesus) was successful.  Nowadays when I pray out loud, especially a prayer of thanks or love, tears easily flow and my voice not infrequently collapses.  All the while I feel the great relief of witnessing God’s work, love and presence.

And I feel entirely free.

Satan is the great deceiver, liar and tempter, and there is no truth in him.  Yet his best trick is convincing humans that their own freedom is in creating a distance from God and in blurring God’s holy word into unholy, prideful blobs of false promises, false hopes, false doctrine and false, temporal “truth,” all adding up to false freedom.

Bondage is believing a truth that God didn’t ordain.

Satan makes real-deal truth hard to find, but Christ’s real-deal freedom is hard to beat.  Satan stands in front of both truth and freedom with camouflage, argument, enticements, accusations and condemnation; fiercely shooting false but deadly arrows of cultural preferences, popular opinion, political dogmas and self-glorifying religion.  The errant, freedom-killing focus, always is “me.”  Freedom’s true focus, always, is God’s love.

Kingdom freedom (B) is God’s glory; hell’s bondage is Satan’s only promise.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the relief – the freedom – of knowing Jesus is being able to ignore Satan’s lies.

Spirituality Column No. 525
December 6, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters


Christianity properly lived is a divine cycle of gifts, giving, grace, mercy, humility and gratitude that multiply into mankind’s complete freedom and God’s ultimate glory.

When Christianity is improperly lived, humanity enslaves itself in guilt, shame, fear, prejudice and want pridefully dividing Christ into “good” obedience, “bad” habits, “suspect” religion and “earthly” burdens that dilute joy and divert hope into self-centered appetites and theological confusion.  Condemnation is not what Jesus had in mind.

The difference in the scenarios above emanates from man’s intention either to unflinchingly love and fully trust God’s will, or to merely allow for the possibility of God, conditionally tolerate others and subordinate God’s will to one’s own personal, worldly, rooting interest in a given situation.  These various intentions are formed, I think, in the way we understand the debt we have in Jesus, and whether we understand that in Christ “debt” enforces freedom rather than slavery.

It’s just the craziest thing.

Godly freedom, impossibly, is entirely a convoluted gift of giving; a joyous debt.  But then Jesus, impossibly, is a savior no human could have expected.  God Himself showed up – “the Word became flesh,” (John 1:14) – solving a problem mankind didn’t know it had by offering to us the Godly gift we never knew we wanted: eternal life through His own horrendous earthly death.  The problem to which mankind was blind was our inability to match God’s righteousness after the fall of Adam and Eve.  Israel mistakenly thought it could bridge that distance with works and piety within the law, further not understanding that God’s intention all along was to bequeath all humanity with the love and trust of freedom, not the shackles of perpetual debt and obedience.

What Aquinas is saying, I think, is that our only “debt” is not to wish to be free from God’s love or to abandon the joy-giving gratitude of sharing it.  Our “debt” is to love and give, and it’s in loving and giving that we express our freedom.  That’s how we tell God, “Thank you.”  It’s not possible to pay Him back, and silly to imagine we could.

Freedom’s proper expression is loving God and others. Hence, we err grievously when we think human freedom is about, “I can do what I want.”  That’s pride, and pride is the flip side of a giving and gracious spirit which actually is our freedom in Christ.

Like Paul said: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.” (Galatians 5:13).

God indebted us with the gift of freedom so we could freely give it to others.

Isn’t that wild?

Spirituality Column No. 524
November 29, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters


Alexis de Tocqueville, that great, perceptive French social observer of mid-1800s America, noticed and admired America’s citizen-by-citizen freedom of association.

Citizens in America, de Tocqueville marveled, were free to form affiliations in pursuit of common goals.  This freedom from royal government rules, power, edicts, ownership and interference – a novel fundamental of the U.S. Constitution – fueled the engine of young America’s exploding-in-all-directions prosperity, power, discovery, manufacturing, technology and Christian faith.

These U.S. citizens were not serfs or colonists or mere inhabitant caretakers unattached to their land but for whatever meager sustenance it provided; they were unshackled owners who freely and fiercely defended property and provenance.   America was resource-rich, providentially indulged and intellectually unleashed.

That’s how de Tocqueville saw America’s 1830s present.  Here is how he assessed her future:

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers – and it was not there … in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there … in her rich mines and her vast world commerce – and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution – and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” – Democracy in America

Those “pulpits aflame with righteousness” were the rolling thunder of the early nineteenth century’s Second Great Awakening, the miracle of Christian revivalism and biblical blanketing of the expanding American frontier.  We were not then a nation of theologians nor are we now, but Jesus Christ was the unrivaled moral compass of the age and culture.  The civil and political freedoms de Tocqueville so eloquently lauded could only be preserved, he forewarned, by the moral resolve of a faithful citizenry.

Freedom is a specifically divine gift when first we insist that freedom be of benefit and comfort to others.  It is your insistence on my freedom, and vice versa, that describes and assigns a free community’s love for each other and exemplifies our trust in God’s goodness.  It requires the humility, resolve and strength exemplified by Jesus.

Exceptions abound in our national morality play – we are an imperfect nation of imperfect people.  We are at our best when we use our freedom to come together and attach our liberty to Christ.  Goodness grounded in righteousness never goes wrong.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) cites de Tocqueville’s observation that the “secret weapon” of America’s greatness lay in the superiority of her women.

Spirituality Column No. 523
November 22, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

In a season of loud opinions measured against this annual week of humble thanksgiving, I am thankful for truth.

Real truth.  Objective truth.  Divine truth.  The truth of Jesus Christ.

Identifying truth in the world is always done at a human handicap – people in all times, places and cultures have little more than opinions to work with from whence they unapologetically extrapolate intractable but regularly flawed moral judgments.  At this American moment in history, identifying truth is all the more confusing, perhaps impossible, amid a boisterous, rancorous, apparently endless and thoroughly polarized political season.  Do I have hope for our nation?  Yes I do.  Is “hope” a “truth?”  No, in this context it’s merely a contentious point of view.

So in this chattering national conversational climate of crossed purposes and obstinate opinions, why does truth seem so elusive?

Because, I would suggest, we are looking for truth in all the wrong places.

The real deal capital-T truth only exists where the majority of people don’t want to look: in the person of Jesus Christ.  Legal truth, political truth, academic truth, social truth and virtually any other human-generated worldly truth may lead us to pleasant or unpleasant situational and physical realities, but the worst place to look for capital T truth is in a human heart and maybe, especially our own. Let me explain.

“Be true to your heart” can be good or bad or terrible advice.  Although Jesus may well be alive in your heart, never forget Satan is too.  Pride, fear, power, reprisal, greed, faction and many other sins are all heart temptations that make “my truth” vs. “your opinion” an incendiary, love-throttling cocktail.  Arrogance, you see, is unaffiliated with truth because arrogance lacks love.  Jesus, one notices, was pretty humble.

Don’t panic or be offended that Satan is hanging near; he sidled up to Jesus, too.  Just know that truth isn’t the invasive bodily and spiritual temptations of Satan; truth is the person of Jesus Christ: His mercy, compassion, patience, love and glory.

We fumble the ball when we mistake our own opinion for the will of God, and I hate when I do that.  God may reveal His will to us, but we must be aware he reveals it to others as well.  That’s why the holy person of Jesus factors heavily in the truth equation because He is the only truth.  In His own words: “I am the way and the truth and the life…” (John 14:6), and He meant it.  Most likely you know the rest.

Our discernment of truth does not rely on our clever and energetic arguments but on our faith, trust and love of Jesus.

When one possesses all that, thankfully, opinions don’t matter.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays that only the grateful, charitable love and truth of Jesus converge at your Thanksgiving table.  (I know… good luck with that.)

Spirituality Column No. 522
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) today, Nov. 15, marks the nine-year anniversary of the funeral of dear friend and preacher of the Gospel Russ Blowers, loved by many. 

Spirituality Column No. 521
November 8, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters


With these resources, with this truth – our lives of faith should be easy and joyous.  Instead we opt for contention and confusion both inside and outside the faith.

Christians will ball up a fist and hit you repeatedly in the face reminding you of your sin and shame.  Then they’ll ball up the other first and hit you repeatedly with guilt because of Jesus having to “pay a price” for your salvation with a hideous death on the cross.  They’ll then insist this is evidence of God’s tender love and represents a solid foundation on which to enter into a divine, loving, eternal relationship with Jesus to the glory of God.  The themes may be biblically defensible, but the “pitch” is relationally warped.  Love – true love – never comes from accusation or transaction.  It comes from freedom, compassion, mercy and grace; the things that make life easier.

Meanwhile, Jesus-mocking Western-world secularists accuse Christians of arrogance and hypocrisy on one hand and taunt them for a lack of reason, intelligence and sophistication on the other.  Secularists are humans who might give God and Christ a chance if only someone could “prove it” to them.  Two things in the Bible they believe: they’ll go to heaven, and “Don’t judge.”

Though these secular (non-religious) folks are deaf to the Holy Spirit’s call for Christ and the infinite, eternal love or God, they still are able to love others and do good works; and they’ll defend to the death what they love. Privately they may wonder if God exists, but publicly know it’s easier to go along to get along within the ever-diminishing piety of political, social, academic, scientific and cultural norms not having to explain Jesus in their lives.  Odd though how they believe they belong in heaven, the eternal Kingdom home of Jesus in whom they neither believe nor place their trust and love.

Atheists, whom I perceive in actuality to be few in number, militantly reject any notion of a supreme being, though I sense that many public displays of atheism are more fashion than substance.  We are all wired to believe something, and believing in no God is still a belief.  Atheists will argue no, they don’t believe in anything, and some Christians will argue back, yes, they do.  But one divinely important thing I notice is that atheists are perfectly and demonstrably capable of loving others and doing good deeds.

Satan, interestingly enough, is not an atheist.  Satan absolutely knows God exists and what God is all about.  Satan simply does not love and does no good deeds.

So remember, as a Christian, that anywhere you see selfless, self-sacrificing love, you are seeing God.  God is always where the love is.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) reminds all that 1) God loves and judges on His terms, not ours; and 2) Showing love works better than arguing faith.

Spirituality Column No. 520
November 1, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

It is Satan’s favorite question.

It is post-modern society’s perpetual challenge.

It is, sneakily, the intellectual antithesis of open-mindedness.

When a believer preaches Godly good, Christian love, Spiritual wholeness and biblical truth; or maybe asserts that “this is right and this is wrong according to God’s word,” the secular world’s default, go-to response of dismissiveness, derision, and, sadly, despair is, “How do you know?”

Doubt is the world’s prevailing response to Godly faith.  Why?  Because Satan is lord of the world, is God’s enemy and his mission is the removal of faith, hope and love.  Satan makes stumbling blocks for humans out of these “image of God” components built into our humanity.  That we know, trust and love God, and love each other, honors God.  Our doubts amuse Satan because he works against God’s glory and our love.

This is Satan’s game, and he’s skilled at it.  Consider the Garden of Eden.  Satan insulted God’s sovereignty; tricked mankind into disobedience; set Adam against Eve; shamed both of them before God and each other; and did it by using against Adam and Eve humanity’s best Godly attribute: freedom.  Not a bad day’s “worldly” work.

Satan’s game in the Garden was, essentially, “How do you know?”

In our post-modern world broad swaths of society deride the very notion of God as being illusion, folly or a sign of feeble-mindedness.  Since God plainly tells mankind throughout the Bible that we will not see or understand much of what He does, Satan has taught us to ridicule faith and demand proof, tickling our doubts with the inadequacy of worldly evidence. By challenging our trust, Satan encourages us to reject God.

“How do you know?”  Game and set to Satan.

You may have noticed that open-mindedness is the intellectual coin and relativistic moral true north of the post-modern realm.  But open-mindedness that believes the absolute truth of God?  Never!  What a conundrum.  God’s greatest gift to humanity is freedom because only in freedom can we discover the divine love that glorifies God, and glorifying God is the entire point of life.  Whatever you may be feeling, if is coerced, self-centered and not free, it is not love.  So the world – Satan – declares morality to be relative thus requiring the Christian be open-minded about secular ways when in truth, doubting secularists would be better off being open-minded about God.

I, personally, don’t see any future in being open-minded about Satan.

And the world says: “How do you know?”  I’m glad they asked.

Because I don’t doubt Christ.

Game, set and match to God.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), who did in fact (long ago) play small college varsity tennis, here marks 10 years – 520 consecutive weeks – publishing this column. His next book, Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary, Volume II, is in the works.

Spirituality Column No. 519
October 25, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column No. 518
October 18, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

The multiple, halting, emotional speeches hung so very, very thickly over Baby Willow’s funeral Saturday.

Born at home healthy, vibrant and hungry early October 6, Willow stopped breathing some four hours later.  No warning, no explanation … and no amount of emergency care could bring her back.  Willow’s ashes rested in a polished wooden box as parents, family and friends gathered to say we love you and good-bye.

Praise God, Willow insisted we do much more.  She insisted that we in our heartbreak encounter Jesus in all His power, promise, trust and truth.  Willow allowed no other gaze than for us to fix our eyes on the healing love of Jesus Christ.

In this season of crushing grief, Willow’s parents Michael and Maggie and all four grandparents courageously, tearfully spoke words of healing and encouragement and witnessed profoundly to the unlimited faithfulness and tender mercy of Jesus.  When so many might wonder, errantly, “How could God do such a thing?” as take young Willow, Willow’s family stood faithfully and said, “How could we survive such a thing without Jesus?”

Maggie told the funeral gathering that the day following Willow’s death she experienced a vision of Jesus.  He stepped between her and Michael, comforted them and in a voice Maggie clearly discerned said of Willow, “I have to take her now.”  Numerous other signs, works of Christian love and even rainbows appeared through the week.  When one is in the faith, such signs are unmistakable evidence of God’s nearness, relationship and compassion.  Jesus is there.

Pastor Dave Rodriguez at Grace Church (Westfield, IN) looked at the funeral gathering and noted, gently, that he understood there likely were people there who didn’t “get” the Jesus thing and more likely would be on the page of, “How could God …etc.”  Dave noted that the hurt and the love and the healing and the faith permeating that particular room, not to mention the faith witness of Maggie and Michael’s entire lives, would appear to some unbelievable; certainly not real.

Dave spoke a measured, earnest, caring truth: “This is as real as it gets.”

Willow didn’t let anyone out of the church without facing the reality that is the truth of Jesus Christ.  These are the times, the pastor noted, that God shows up and is not subtle.  Times like these are why we were created in the image of God, or else where is our comfort?  In times like these words may fail us but God doesn’t.

Like Dave, I pray someone curious about Jesus asks Michael and Maggie about this God they know.

They know Him very well.

Walters’ (rlwcom@aol.com) son Eric was roommates with Michael in college.  They grew up in faith together at East 91^st Street Christian Church, Indianapolis.  By the way, Michael and Maggie have a son Rhett whom they adopted a few months before learning of her pregnancy. 

Spirituality Column No. 517
October 11, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column No. 516

Spirituality Column No. 515
September 27, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

I spent an immensely, intellectually profitable Saturday recently listening to the Crescent Project’s Fouad Masri discuss Christianity and Islam.

Indianapolis-based Crescent is a global Christian organization targeted at helping Muslims learn about Jesus and helping Christians learn to talk to Muslims about Jesus.  Some quarters of both religions would find this effort heresy, anathema, certainly dangerous, and maybe even just plain pointless.  I found it fascinating.

Fouad is Lebanese and an evangelical pastor passionate about bridging the cultural and theological chasm between these two vastly different expressions of mankind’s place in this world and God’s lordship in Heaven.

Fouad founded the Crescent Project (www.crescentproject.org) in the 1990s.  The organization provides a wealth of tools, information, and mission work bringing the light of Christ to the faith of Muhammad. No single instrument at Crescent is more effective or engaging than Fouad’s own deep knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, Islamic theology, and Qur’anic scripture combined with his love for Jesus, for humanity, his grasp of the Bible, and energy for spreading God’s Word.

As Christians we are challenged to defend our faith, not attack someone else’s.  The Apostle Paul in Athens didn’t attack the gods that were worshipped there; He introduced the Greeks to the "unknown" God of Jesus Christ.  Fouad mentioned that we are always better off simply sharing the truth of Jesus Christ than trying to argue theology.  Other gentle observations about religious differences and similarities included …

- The Qur’an is a very, very different book from the Bible.  Muhammad records declarations from Allah that have been passed through the angel Gabriel.  Hence, the Qur’an has little or none of the tete-a-tete “story” aspects that make the Bible, for me, so fun, satisfying, relatable, peaceful,and believable to read.  It also occurs to me that Allah as a singular God does not afford personal relationship and therefore none of the humanly relational stories or divine love of the Father-Son-Spirit Trinity of Christianity.  Absent those dynamics, that’s probably why I have so much difficulty reading the Qur’an.

-There are Five Pillars of Islam (Recitation, Prayer, Alms, Fasting, and Pilgrimage), but no such construct in Christianity.  That makes it semantically difficult to describe Christianity to a Muslim.  As a parallel answer to “What do Christians believe?”  Fouad suggests these five Christian “pillars”: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, the Bible and One Family.  You tell me about your five pillars, I’ll tell you about mine, especially my Jesus.

- Fouad noted that many Muslims lack knowledge of the Qur’an the same way many Christians lack knowledge of the Bible.  His advice to Christians is to know Jesus, know the Bible, and build relationships based on Christ’s love, not worldly argument.

A lamp of understanding can be lit.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) learned that Jesus in the Qur’an (Sura 3:55) is perfect, sinless, alive and expected to return.  Fouad’s line: "Maybe Muslims should read His book." (i.e. The Bible)

Spirituality Column No. 514