Monday, July 18, 2016
505 - What's So Important?
Spirituality Column No. 505
July 19, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
July 19, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
What’s So Important?
By Bob Walters
It’s easy for Christians to answer the question, “What’s so
important?”
Jesus is important. God, Christ, the Spirit, the Bible, the
church, salvation, faith and love are all important. Living a humble, servant-hearted, God-honoring
and faithful life is important. The
moral absolutes of God are important.
Loving God and loving others are our divine marching orders from Christ.
May I continue? To paraphrase the ShamWow guy, “I could do
this all day.”
Christianity easily brings many
important things into focus and informs, moment-by-moment, one’s lifelong moral
code. Because all Godly authority
resides in Christ (Matthew 28:18-20), priorities are bare-faced and simple to a
Christian. Jesus is No. 1.
God-directed obeisance diminishes
as one gets closer to self-directed priorities.
Honoring God and helping others – obviously in a zillion complicated
ways – is the simple Christian answer to “What’s so important?”
It’s that simple because God’s
authority is that unimpeachable.
So asking a Christian “What’s so important?”
isn’t a stumper. The stumper is asking that
question to anybody else. Pick a topic
or cause, the more controversial the better, and ask its adherents, supporters,
champions, leaders, fans or experts simply: “What’s so important?” You’ll get a million different answers but no
real authority.
No response will come close to,
“Because God said so.”
I bring this up because I had a
nice conversational lunch recently with an erudite pastor friend who is a remarkable
educator and preacher of the Word. Touching
on contemporary social and political issues, we wandered from the hot-topic
specifics of LGBTQ ascendancy, the overreach of governmental control (think
“Obamacare”), the underestimation of foreign enemies (think ISIS), the abysmally
failing and diminishing landscape of American racial relations and violence, the
looming, glooming, oh-my-goodness-gracious presidential race, popular science
mocking faith, and education expelling any teaching of God’s moral certitude. Identifying the problem purveyors is
easy. The one thing neither of us could
really answer is, “What’s so important to them?”
Seeing the other guy’s side of the
story is one thing. But when you look
at the social, political, academic and economic forces arrayed against the
simple and unwavering truth of Christ – in a nation that very much depends on
individual Christian morality for its ability to function as a republic –
looking for another thing that stands
as authority, that is truly “so important,” remains a mystery. The “authority” is merely the vaporous,
prideful, Satan-inspired human assumption of righteousness in one’s opinion.
Salvation? Everybody says, “I’m a good person,” except
of course Christians who really, truly “get it” that our goodness abides only as
far as does our faith in Christ. “Goodness”
isn’t thanks to us, it’s thanks to God.
Understanding that is really important.
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