Monday, August 21, 2017
562 - Unity of Purpose
Spirituality
Column No. 562
August 22, 2017
Common
Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Unity of Purpose
By Bob WaltersHate and diversity sure have been in the news a lot lately.
Hate groups. Diversity narratives. The media tacitly cheers this group’s open uncivil violence while haranguing that group’s odious philosophy. News coverage fairly shouts with 360-degree condemnation of America’s past and present while offering neither a plan nor resolute voice of rectifying our future. Dialogue is subordinate to distemper.
But therein, insanely, is ensconced our national political, conversational and media prioritization of the moment. The crazies outnumber the haters. The less sense an opinion makes, it seems, the more news and hyperbolic rhetoric about it we see.
Diversity, not unity, is our battle cry.
And we are doing all of this to ourselves as Americans, without the help of or even especially the interest of existentially dangerous global bedfellows like religious jihadis and nutty dictators with nukes. I doubt there is an Imam or an Un anywhere who gives a flying flip about our Civil War monuments or celebrates gender fluidity.
Yet look at us. Witness today’s academic drivel and celebrity bloviation complicit with purpose-pitch, truth-shredding, secularly purified “news” that stifles freedom, muzzles constructive discourse, and mocks truth: right is wrong, wrong is right, truth is unwelcome, and hate must stop! … unless of course you hate the right people: the Klan, neo-Nazis, and Donald Trump.
Maybe now would be a good time to bring up the love of Jesus? No, wait …
Actually, forget white supremacists; the media levels its sincerest angst and castigation on the current American president who is not Jesus and … news alert … is not Satan, either. Granted we all have a little of both in us – Jesus and Satan, that is – but the divine process that is our personal, individual eternal salvation or everlasting destruction is determined neither by a fire-breathing, context-rigging media that gets the occasional fact right but has lost moral authority and public trust, nor a tweet-seeking missile of a U.S. president. You see, our human purpose is greater than public opinion.
We are, each of us, an accountable, salvational, image-of-God work in progress.
So where is Jesus? Right where he always is: at the right hand of God and, by the Holy Spirit, in the loving hearts of believers. A whole lot of Americans went to church last Sunday, identify as Christians, embrace at least the idea of objective truth if not every jot and tittle of orthodox Christian doctrine, and take the name of Jesus seriously even if they don’t know Him well. Real truth doesn’t die; hope endures.
What our culture misses most today, I think, is a reliance on the Bible as the great expositor of truth. Our salvation is in Jesus the Truth, and our destruction is in Satan the Liar. Taking the Bible seriously is the single most educational, loving and perspective-fixing mindset available to us. The saving words of Jesus harken our human love, freedom, and unity in Him; it is Satan who divides, hates, and conquers.
Choose your own public weapon of reason and faith in these perilous times, but the sword of the spirit – the Bible – is absolutely the best place to start, dwell, and finish.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) sees Jesus as reason and faith … and truth.
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