Spirituality Column #689

January 28, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The Race

By Bob Walters

“Let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.” – Hebrews 12:1

This week, a short poem …

Sacrifice and price

          Do not suffice.

Pain must not reign

          For our loss is gain.

Through Christ alive

Joyous truth fills our eyes.

As I walk God’s way

          I am renewed every day.

Everlasting life

          Eases temporary strife.

Love and grace

          Will win the race.

          Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wrote this a few weeks back and

Pam insisted it was worth sharing …

Spirituality Column #688

January 21, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Over Priced

By Bob Walters

“A cynic … knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s words are a wise assessment of mankind’s common conflation of price and value: knowing one does not mean one knows the other.

And just here I’d like to explore the value of our salvation in Christ without a theological reliance on its price.  I’ve always thought it a point of rudeness to ask how much a gift cost, and considered it a mark of grace to simply appreciate a gift’s value as an expression of the giver’s esteem.  You know … it’s the thought that counts.

When accepting and believing the deliverance of our eternal salvation in all that Christ did, it looks to me that it is a gift from a God who wants us to have it as badly as we – may or may not realize – need it ourselves. God surely sees salvation’s value as grace and peace in His book of life, not a price-driven ledger entry of pending doom.

Yet that’s modern Christianity’s brand: “Jesus paid a price, so you gotta’ believe.”

I roll my eyes at “paid a price,” but it’s not surprising that humanity’s greatest-ever bestowed gift – salvation in Christ – is pervasively dumbed down to an exercise in market economics:  Jesus paid a price for our sins!  What do we owe Him in return?!?!

With all my heart I think the answer is … we don’t “owe” Him a thing, any more than He owed us His obedience and faithfulness on the cross.  It’s what Jesus did because that is what a loving God does.  It was a divine “get to,” not a “have to.” 

Same with us … faith in Christ is a “get to” because He came and taught us and the Bible supports it and explains it.  We “get to” participate with Christ and be restored to Godly relationship.  My faith never feels like I’m paying somebody back for a price that was exacted.  I’m thankful, not “debt-ful.”  I ring up the love, not the cash register.

If Jesus’s point and God’s plan were to forever put us in bondage to a price rather than provide an avenue of grace, peace, love, and free acceptance of the eternal gift of sharing divine glory … I guess I’m thinking the story the Bible tells would be quite different.  Love would not have been so central.  Salvation would have quoted a price.

With faith in Christ, we participate in God’s glory; the glory that I believe is life’s profound purpose and the locus of life’s ultimate value.  That’s not something one buys.

We are supposed to teach the world truth, not barter our forgiveness.  There’s nothing more we can or need to do.  Faith and obedience take care of the rest.

That’s the example of Jesus; that’s what He did.  He had faith in the Father, love for mankind, and was obedient unto death.  It was a gift nobody imagined or thought they needed.  Only God knew its value, and we still today see it as conditional: focusing on Jesus having to “pay a price” for our salvation, not providing a gracious gift.  Such a swap-sacrifice would not harken love; it would harken guilt, shame, and negotiation.

Sacrifice as price is a worldly and culturally commercial construct that devalues the grace of “giving something away” for love.  Divine sacrifice doesn’t come with a price tag; it comes with the very highest of Godly value: love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is aware almost no one agrees with this assessment of faith but doesn’t understand why anyone thinks price is a better sales pitch than love.

Spirituality Column #687

January 14, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sure-Footed in Christ

By Bob Walters

“He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the son does not have the life.” 1 John 5:12

If we are fortunate enough to have a life in Christ – and I mean A Life In Christ we know and that has long since passed “I wonder if it is true?” – my oh my, aren’t we encouraged daily – by other Christians – to fret over whether we are “doing it right”?

Sure, the “world” challenges much: our faith, God’s existence, Jesus’s goodness, and the Holy Spirit’s truth.  The “world” will ask, “How do you know?”  The “world” will blame Satan’s mischief on a faithful God.  The “world’s” calling card is stamped with doubt, derision, distrust, and dissension.  Not everyone “gets it” when it comes to Jesus, and isn’t it funny/sad how many of those “D” word issues exist within the church, too?

But let’s focus Christian-to-Christian on the holy life that many of us would call our “personal relationship with Christ.”  It is a life’s reality we can probably explain to our own satisfaction, and maybe to other Christians.  To non-believers?  Not so much. 

We try!  Lord, that’s our “Job #1”.  We are to be witnesses to the truth of Christ and make Him known to all the world.  Happy to do it!  But it’s a “sale” only the Holy Spirit truly makes.  Our best play as Christian witnesses is to discern our gifts and share them with love.  Jesus is known to all, but the faith, trust, and life thing still eludes many.

Which is why I lament among shared Christian lives that we find fault, not grace.

It might be in a sermon, a book, a Sunday school class, a fellowship ministry, on the radio, or really anywhere one encounters Christian thought.  Here we have this wonderful and nearly unimaginable gift through Jesus Christ of the ongoing spiritual sharing of God’s eternal life, truth, and love.  And the in-house message often is, “Are you challenged enough!?”  “Are you doing it right?”  “Let’s focus on your problems!!!”

Fine, but I do not see faith or church or fellowship or even Christian theology as an exercise in negotiation.  Truth is truth, mystery is mystery, and hope is both a present and eternal quality.  I do not view life in Christ from the standpoint of problems, challenges, failures, conflicts, or barriers.  Instead I see joy, love, and opportunity; and view Jesus as a welcome and complete Cosmic truth.   I am as sure I am a sinner as I am sure that Jesus is Lord, God is in Heaven, the Holy Spirit is real … and I am saved.

Personally I intend – and believe we are encouraged by scripture – to live our Christianity in the joy of knowing God’s truth and love, not in perpetual fear of either our own shortcomings or the Christian “world’s” self-focusing assessments, criticisms, claims, and judgments for how we could be doing it better.  It keeps us wrong-footed and un-free if we focus on the shifting sands of sin, shame, guilt, debts, and penalties.  No, I’ll stand sure-footed in the unwavering freedom of the solid rock of Jesus Christ.

My life in Christ is not based on what Satan did to me, it is based on what Jesus did for me.  Not on what Satan did to humanity, but on what Jesus did for humanity.  Not upon Satan’s hate for and the world’s opposition to God, but on Jesus’s love of God.

The world presents challenges enough.  Life in Christ overcomes … if we let it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) has lived with and without faith.  Faith is better.

Spirituality Column #686

January 7, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Hope that Assures

By Bob Walters

“We have this hope [Jesus] as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” – Hebrews 6:19

Coulda, shoulda, woulda, maybe, might, perhaps, someday, if only … sigh …

Alas … whither hope?  And oh, by the way … prove it.

Is hope a wish or a fact?  Is it faith to come, or faith in action?  And how in the world do we prove it?  Is hope something we already have or something we “hope” to attain?  Or is hope, in fact, the living presence of Jesus?  I’d say, let’s go with that.

I can’t think of a less appealing and less useful way to describe one’s trust in God – “the hope we have,” etc. (1 Peter 3:15) –  than to think the fruits of our relationship with the eternal God through Christ are something indeterminate and far off in the future: a big, subjunctive “maybe” of expectation someday later rather than the active, inspiring, and assuring truth of God’s presence, grace, and relationship today.  In Christ.

Jesus can’t be much of an anchor if His truth is still bouncing along the ocean bottom, dragged uncertainly by its tether to the boat above being tossed by the winds, currents, and vagaries of life’s – and the fallen world’s – temptations, untruths, dangers, and deceptions.   A “set” anchor is a sure and present truth to a voyager in a storm:

We are the voyagers, the world is the storm, and Jesus is the set anchor we trust.

Hope is neither subjective nor subjunctive nor far off; it is the truth we know now.  It is the Jesus truth of mankind.  It is Christ resurrected and the Holy Spirit in our hearts, today.  Hope that hasn’t happened yet is the longing of unmet truth; the patient waiting we see throughout the Old Testament.  The arrival of Jesus brings human life’s greatest gift: humanity’s restoration of relationship to God and participation in His glory.

For Abraham, hope meant patiently waiting.

For us, hope – the baptism by the Holy Spirit – arrived in the person of Jesus.  Our joy is not in the faith and patience of something still to come; we have it right now in our love for Christ and love for each other.  It occurs to me that to love God and to love others are the two great commandments because love is the gearbox of putting our hope in motion in our lives.  We miss out horribly if we think the Kingdom is relegated to some unknown time years hence and defined by that which we cannot know.

“Hope” infused with “maybe” inspires no one; unanchored expectations are the bane of good will.  “I hope so!” is unpersuasive, like when one “hopes” all that stuff in the Bible about salvation and heaven and forgiveness is true.  Instead of being anchored assuredly – now – to the greatest truth of existence, Jesus, one’s modern tires are spinning in the muck of the current, ill-defined culture of self-interest, satisfaction of personal appetites, and transmission of Satan’s soul-killing sacrilege.

Our redemption in Christ is now … and forever.  Be thankful.  Use the hope of Jesus – the anchor of our soul – to live in His kingdom, in His hope, in the here and now.  “Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done …”  is Jesus teaching us to pray for, attain, and internalize the assurance of who He really is.  He, Jesus, is our rest and our peace.

Our joy in knowing through Jesus that God is real, God is truth, God is eternal, and God wants us with Him, is the Kingdom that has come in Christ’s holy relationship.

Hope is assured today; firm and secure.  No waiting required.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) hopes you’ll believe him that he just noticed, halfway through writing this, that his coffee cup has an anchor and Hebrews 6:19 on the side.