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?