Monday, November 20, 2017
575 - Excellent Advice
Spirituality Column #575
November 21, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon
Commentary
Excellent Advice
By Bob Walters
It takes some discipline, I’m discovering, to disconnect the
lies of this world from the truth of Jesus Christ.
Look at the
news, any poll, culture, politics, education, science … shoot, look at religion
… and the heyday of boorishness, deceit, incivility, disingenuousness,
misinformation, overreach, and miscreance is surely upon us.
Satan has to be doing a happy
dance. There’s an old saying, “No news
is good news.” Today it’s, “Bad news is
the only news.” Everywhere we turn, the
merchants of panic ply their trade. Love
your neighbor? No! Tell him he’s wrong! And not safe!
Pick your
persuasion – liberal, conservative, leftist, elitist, gender fluid, binary, American,
first world, third world, Christian world, Muslim world, rest-of-the-world, ad infinitum – and I cannot imagine
there is a person in a corner of this earth’s human race who surveys the publicly
visible horizons of society who says, “Golly, this is going well.”
The Bible says in Philippians 4:8, “Whatever is … excellent … think about such
things.” Instead, today’s world hands us a steady diet of whatever
initiates anxiety with Satan as its cheerleader. We have wandered so far afield from the
Creator in whose bosom our own nation
was founded that our national narrative is consumed not with excellence but with
overwrought, overthought resentments and under-taught simple civics and
kindness. It does not have to be this
bad. Here’s how I know.
Jesus, you see, is impervious to
polls. What “73 percent” of scholars or
millennials or senior citizens or whoever think, just isn’t news to Jesus; He
already knows. Satan’s best day is when
he can shake a Christian’s faith, scoring a supposed victory against God’s
glory by robbing Him of a human soul.
But of course the one thing Satan knows that most of the world seems to
refuse to know is the final score: that
God wins, that Jesus is God’s son the Christ Who is the perfection, truth,
creativity, and glorious final victor of all eternity. None of that changes no matter what a poll
says.
Satan hates that, I’m sure, but he
also knows we are free to pick a side … of which there are only two: God,
Jesus, and the Holy Spirit … or not. And
guess who is semi-permanently waiting next to “not”? Trust me … it’s not a third-party write-in,
it’s not evolution, it’s not some man-conjured philosophy, and no, it’s not
“nothing.
Satan’s best lie is that “man
should be and can be God.” A close
second is, “if the world is this bad, there is no God.” We swallow Satan’s hate-mongering and God-robbing
poison in this life with ignorant enthusiasm; and he loves the polling numbers
going his way. But there is an antidote
that we already possess: God’s love, Christ’s sacrifice, and the Spirit’s
knowledge. Humanity can counter Satan’s
poison with its faithful consumption of and confidence in the goodness of
Jesus.
He’s got this.
Satan will continue to surround us
with awful, “How dare you!,” love-killing outrage, but there exists sufficient grace,
truth, and peace to forgive, love, overcome, and settle our hearts to pursue,
strive for and connect with God’s excellent things.
And Jesus is the most excellent
thing God gives us.
Nurture the discipline to call on
Him first. It’s excellent advice.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) is thankful for the truth of Jesus. Amen.
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