Monday, February 19, 2018
588 - A Birthright to Share
Spirituality Column #588
February 20, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
A Birthright to Share
By Bob Walters
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” U.S. President
John Adams, 1798
I started
out my career as a newspaper sportswriter and still reflexively keep a
score book of sorts in my head as the events of life and society ebb and flow.
More
interested these days in Jesus, Christian faith, theology, and human salvation than
in sports statistics, conference standings, or win-loss records, I watch
closely as religion and culture play offense and defense against each other,
sometimes musing about sports' simpler days when a game ended, a result was had,
the players shook hands, and after a quick shower and a bus ride home, life went
on.
My mental
score sheet today tracks things like the wonderful, surprising and
impossible-to-ignore prayer life and Christian witness of the Philadelphia Eagles
Super Bowl champion football team, unequivocally noted in the major media. Then, I juxtapose that with one of our
nation’s Olympic athletes publicly mocking the Christian morality of one of our
nation’s highest elected officials, along with a hostile, major television
network talk show host loudly equating Christianity with mental illness.
Last
weekend the Wall Street Journal’s lead book review was an author’s essay adaptation
of The Enlightenment Now, atheist
Harvard professor Steven Pinker’s just-published treatise on human flourishing
since the 18th century Enlightenment which, he says, kick-started
true freedom by defeating religious dogmas.
The book is positive; refuting doomsayers who think the world is ending,
but unbelievably negative because it leaves the world entirely without
purpose. God, it seems, has been
corralled.
This weekend’s
WSJ featured review –a pertinent essay adapted from a speech by University of
Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax – was titled, “The Closing of the Academic Mind.”
Ms. Wax has been castigated by colleagues far and wide for publicly pointing
out politically incorrect but nonetheless entirely orthodox and common sense
Christian-American moral truths about marriage, families, patriotism,
immigration, education, etc. Freedom of
expression be damned, her countless critics insist. But notice: without God, my score sheet leads
me to believe “damn” has no meaning.
Anyway, I reflexively
keep this mental “box score” noting if Christian witness is getting ahead or
falling behind, and I notice that people just as reflexively blame God or doubt
Jesus when awful things happen, like the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. What is true is that God is the same – and
Jesus is Lord – all the time. When
massive, multi-level human failures like Parkland occur, it’s because they are
human failures, not God failures.
Satan’s specific evil isn’t that he hates man but that he hates God and
is infinitely jealous of God’s glory, of which mankind is God’s highest created
expression.
Our
nation’s biggest problem is that we ignore our most precious asset, the love of
God we are constitutionally free to express through the love of Jesus
Christ. We shun Christ at our own
national peril, forfeiting divine glory it is our birthright to share.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes, trusts, hopes, and prays that God’s grace through Christ
supersedes close divine attention to Bob’s score book errors column.
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