Monday, September 3, 2018
616 - A Common Problem
Spirituality Column #616
September 4, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
A Common Problem
By Bob Walters
“The first effect of
not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.” – G.K. Chesterton
Surveying
the current-day Christian church landscape one might well argue that common
sense appears to be equally optional for believers and non-believers alike.
Like Peter
who lost his nerve but not his faith, Christians to this day can be fearfully
reluctant to engage the secular onslaught that confronts our relationship with
Jesus Christ. Christians see the
surrounding world going mad; the surrounding world madly criticizes
Christianity. It’s a seeming standoff of
irreconcilable hypocrisies.
Except …
the lone hypocrisy inherent in the global church is not Christ or Christianity;
it’s us, the Christians. We’re the ones
who make a mess of things. Jesus Christ
is just fine and Christianity is the single most enduring truth mankind will
ever encounter. The Bible is true. God and the Holy Spirit know exactly what
they are doing. They have made eternity
on the truth and authority of Jesus Christ in all things.
All we have
to do is trust it: the reliable truth “that the world is real; that our actions
have consequences; that truth itself is something solid and absolute; that we
didn’t just make it up. This common
sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.” But Satan the Lord of Lies is the secular
team captain and a master of manipulating our many human weaknesses: we doubt
what is real, lurk in our greed, treat morality as situational, and make up our
own rules. Satan and secularism always
seem to be on offense, while Christians always seem be on defense.
The “world is real” quote in the previous
paragraph is an apt Chesterton paraphrase written by world-renowned Chesterton
scholar Dale Ahlquist in his 2006 book, Common
Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton’s 1908 classic Orthodoxy,
an intellectual precursor to C.S. Lewis’s later work, is a book I read every
couple of years to help me stay sane in my faith amid a world of secular
insanity.
With Jesus
as my divine guiding light, I believe life’s common-sense basics include men,
women, marriage, children (boys and girls), education, morals, industry,
community, helping one another, that gender isn’t fluid, that unborn babies are
in fact humans created in God’s image, and, you know, being honest. Oh … and in faith telling others about Jesus
with love and compassion. Plus, I like
and appreciate America.
At this time in history, that makes
me a bigoted, binary, judgmental homophobe and worse, a Christian. I’m perceived not
as a defender of proven organizing traditions of viable society, but an enemy
of the socialist, globalist, and LGBTQ cultural zeitgeist which in ridding itself entirely of God has rid itself
entirely of common sense.
That’s why so many things seem to
be so backwards … because they are.
As I survey the church landscape – an
evangelical scandal here, Catholics in glaring crises there, secularists
chortling ”hypocrites!” and “haters!” everywhere – I know that Jesus Christ, Almighty God, and
the Holy Spirit are right where they always are: blocking Satan’s goal line and
encouraging me to love my enemies.
It doesn’t seem to make much sense,
but it sure enough is the common truth.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) encourages you to look up Chesterton and
Ahlquist, especially this excerpt from Common Sense 101: The
Lost Art of Common Sense
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