Spirituality Column #776

September 28, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Welcome Aboard

By Bob Walters

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

Myself being a late-comer to faith in Christ I have perhaps a heightened compassion for those whose faith is bound up in the small and tight space of science.

I was never a scientist – not even close – but I have lots of beloved friends, family, and acquaintances who are.  Some live in faith; some don’t.  They cover the spectrum of having wide open and robust faith, no faith, some faith, seekers, no interest, lifelong believers, and never-in-a-million-years ”nones.” 

There are scientists I attend worship with every week, and some who would never open a Bible or darken a church door.  Some are all-in.  Some are curious, some sneer.  Some are respectful but distant: maybe embarrassed by the practices and optics of what a Sunday morning in church looks like or says about them.

What I accept is that their faith is their own business.  I can explain my faith to them (1 Peter 3:15), but I can’t explain their faith to them.  Sharing faith in Christ – with others – is a special and mysterious bond I never understood the first 47 years of my life.  It is not a bond I can imagine being conjured or forged in a scientific lab.

Scientists are on my mind this week because of a new book by Michael Guillen, “Believing is Seeing, A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith. Name ring a bell?  He has multiple PhDs, taught at Harvard, and was an Emmy winning science editor and reporter for ABC News.

I love Guillen’s story even before reading the book (which I ordered): a Harvard atheist discovers no explanation for the expansive, invisible world other than the very hand of God.  Guillen explains that as an atheist and scientist he was constricted to materially understanding the totality of all things as limited by their physical nature. He was wrong.

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal Houses of Worship editorial feature Why Atheists Need Faith (link), Guillen described, briefly, how his intellect grew beyond science and how among world religions and philosophies, he landed amid Christianity.

I’m one to follow Jesus more than to “follow the science.”  Jesus doesn’t change, and science always does.  Our culture wants to postulate that science, i.e., “seeing is believing,” will somehow, can somehow, replace God.  But that’s nonsense; science helps to reveal God.  I notice the Bible is big on Why, but not How.  And I believe God bequeathed us science to search for Him and discover His “How.”  Believing is seeing. 

G.K. Chesterton noted in his 1908 “Orthodoxy” that “every circle is infinitely round, but there is tyranny in its circumference.”  Translated, any field of study – law, science, philosophy, etc. – defines its size, breadth, reach, and scope by what it allows itself to imagine.  Minus God, human enterprise and purpose shrink to nothingness. 

Guillen observed that while the physical world is limited, the spiritual world is not. “Faith is the foundation of the entire human experience,” he writes.  “Our faith in spiritual reality drives us to seek treatments for diseases, to create works of art, music and architecture, and to see life as divine creation, not an accident of nature.”  Right on.

Polls meant to discourage cultural attitudes toward faith are no match – ever – for a human heart, mind, and soul that grasp Jesus Christ.  Welcome aboard, Dr. Guillen.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will likely have more to say after reading the book.

Spirituality Column #775

September 21, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Where Seldom is Heard …   

By Bob Walters

“… God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:19

Pam and I recently visited family at a favorite old haunt in northern Michigan: Mackinaw City. It was my boyhood summer home and my parents are buried there.

Time was short over the long weekend, but relaxation was bountiful, the weather was perfect, and a schedule was non-existent.  One of my favorite things is to visit small churches when we travel and I thought it might be fun to go to one in town not far from our old lakeside home.  But … I wound up not going.

I looked up the church online to see who the preacher was and discover any info about the congregation, doctrines, etc. This one was promising; it was a traditional Bible-based church with an obviously seasoned and able pastor.  I love those guys! But his sermon series was on “Discouragement,” and my enthusiasm waned.

Everything I read about Jesus in the Bible leads me to believe that my Christian walk is blessed by the encouragement of Jesus, not to be encumbered by the plentiful discouragement of the world, let alone a litany of discouragement from the pulpit.

“But you have to face up to the world, Bob!”  And I say … no, not like that.  Satan dishes out all the discouragement he can toward Christ specifically.  And I don’t agree with why churches (this isn’t the only one) feel the need to catalogue the world’s discouragement as an argument for the love of Jesus and our salvation in Christ. 

Why not just preach the encouraging message of Christ?  I can get a week’s worth of worldly discouragement from five minutes of any show on Fox News … and – trigger warning – I tend to agree with their slant on things. 

The pulpit message of Christ can be uplifting, should be uplifting, is uplifting.  When He faced the “discouragement” leveled at him by the Pharisees, Jesus knew the grace and love of God.  He also possessed the perseverance of His own mission, obedience, and love.  Jesus never lost sight of His purpose, which was to save the world, not gripe about it.  Our purpose is to accept His saving gift and glorify God.

It’s a legitimate if mysterious question to ponder: Was / is God “discouraged” by the sin of the world, the work of Satan, the gross disobedience of Israel, the death of His only Son, broken churches, heresies, or a largely disbelieving world? I won’t guess on that one, but I am sure God never doubts His own righteousness, purpose, or love.

I believe that the body of Christ – His church – should never purpose to scare or depress people enough about the world so that they crowd fearfully into a small space with no choice but Christ.  How much better when we see the glory and purpose of Jesus, fall in love with him, and freely choose to be in faithful relationship with Him?

This side of heaven we will never encounter a world where we seldom hear a discouraging word, but discouragement is no way to tell the story of Jesus.

I’ll never know what the nice preacher at the small church up north was going to say, but I do know that alienation and discouraging words come naturally into our fallen worldly lives.  In any case, my Home on the Range is the encouraging word of Jesus.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes the Good News of Jesus.  That’s true media. 

Spirituality Column #774

September 14, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Can’t Buy Me Bread …    By Bob Walters

“And give us this day our daily bread…” – from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:11)

“I am the bread of life.” – Jesus, John 6:35

The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John has Jesus, at a mountain along the seashore of Galilee, miraculously feeding “the 5,000” not just their “daily bread” but also a generous ration of fish to go with it.

Later in chapter 6 we read Jesus’s critique of what He saw in the people who ate, who then followed Him the next day, and what He was really trying to teach them.  We’ll go into that in a minute, including comparisons with God’s provision of manna in the desert hundreds of years earlier to the Israelites escaping Egypt.  But let’s notice first a few often lost aspects of this miracle meal on the mountainside in John 6.

You may see other minutiae, but I noticed these.

1.    Verse 4, “The Passover Feast was near.”  The Gospels teach that Jesus IS the new Passover, the salvation of life, not just for the Israelites but for all mankind.  Jesus throws His own feast of a kind with the bread and fish.

2.    Verse 5, the disciples ask Jesus, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”  In verses 6 and 7 we see a) Jesus was testing his disciples with that question, and b) Philip responding that it would take “eight months wages,” an exorbitant sum. Jesus is trying to teach them the lesson that some things cannot be bought; His bread is eternal and of faith, not for purchase.

3.    Verse 8 has Andrew, who is always introducing people to Jesus, introducing the young boy who has “five small barley loaves and two small fish.” Andrew’s news is quickly tempered by his own doubt, “but how will we feed so many?”

4.    Funny, we never hear anything more about the boy who donated his lunch.  You’d think somebody would have thanked him.

5.    Perhaps the lesson is akin to that of the tiny mustard seed from which great plants grow.  Jesus turns this small boy’s personal sacrifice into a giant blessing for the entire assemblage.  Never doubt what Jesus can do with the gifts we give, no matter how small.  In His multiplication is our joy.

6.    And, leftovers … verse 13 notes that they “filled twelve baskets … with pieces of the five barley loaves.”  Huh?  Why was no fish left over?  No idea.

Anyway, the people ate, recognized the miracle, and Jesus left before He let them crown him King by force (verse 15).  Notice that not a word of what Jesus said to the crowd – another significant and divine sermon on the mount? – is recorded.  I think that’s because the lesson here isn’t about what Jesus said to them, but what the crowd selfishly, foolishly, merely, expected of Jesus: to fill their stomachs, not their souls.

Note, the people were following the miracle, not the savior.  They liked the free lunch, but missed the eternal point about the bread of life by faith. This is the whole point of John 6:25-59, “I am the bread of life.”  Jesus promises life eternal, every day.

God’s desert manna was a one-day meal deal; the Israelites had to trust God day by day for another provision.  Jesus is teaching that His provision and gift – His bread – is eternal, it won’t rot like manna, and the bread of Jesus is not for sale; it’s for love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) remembers the Beatles’ song, Can’t Buy Me Love.

Spirituality Column #773

September 7, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Oceans and Elephants

By Bob Walters

“The divine religions are like oceans. They have different names, but are all part of the same Sea!” – Facebook meme posted by a doctrinally challenged Christian friend.

It started out innocently enough but, it’s Facebook. Silliness inevitably followed.

So, mea culpa. 

Another friend on Facebook had recently shared an American religious survey that reveals an alarming trend of modern “born again believers”: upwards of 60 percent believe in “many roads” to heaven and the Kingdom of God.  We shake our heads.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” says Jesus in John 14:6, and that’s authority enough for most of us.  We have freedom to swim anywhere we want, and name the ocean anything we want, but salvation in any ocean has but one name, and that name is Jesus Christ.

Religions are not the same … that’s why they are “different.”  It is as uneducated a statement as anyone can make to assert that religions “are all the same.”  They have similar trappings – scripture, altars, priests, buildings, doctrines – but distinctly different promises, demands, and endings.  Jesus Christ crucified, dead, buried, risen Son of God, sitting at the right hand of the Father inviting us to heaven, is Christian.  Period.

When it comes to “religious surveys,” I consider Jesus pretty immune from their assertions.  A survey isn’t going to knock Jesus off His throne, God out of His Kingdom, or the Spirit away from divine truth.  Humans – all of us – make plenty of mistakes with assorted behaviors and opinions, but I never panic about the Godly truth of Christ.

And in trusting God’s truth, it is pointless to panic about man’s errant opinions.

My response – yes, on Facebook – to the survey was to offer a ponderance on why people who deny, disavow, or displace Jesus in this life are nonetheless interested in going to – or assume they deserve to be in – Heaven with Jesus for all eternity.  If you don’t exalt Jesus in this life, why would you want to be with Him in the next?

I pray for all souls to come to Christ, but in freedom, many don’t.  After some further Fb discussion, my dissenting friend popped up with the above meme about the divine religions and oceans.  The reader may here decide which “religions” are included.

I’m reminded of the old story of the elephant and how, depending on which part of the elephant a blindfolded person happens to grab, there will be great disparity of thought on what the overall object is.  Hold the elephant’s trunk?  It must be a snake.  It’s leg?  Maybe it’s a tree.  An ear?  Perhaps it’s a bird’s wing.  If the elephant is sitting on you, one may think it a static though murderous rock.  The essential truth is missed.

The true ocean of salvation is Jesus Christ, and the reality of the whole elephant is far more significant than the divisions and imaginings of its various parts. Let’s not drown in a heretic’s ocean of false religious expectations, or imagine the truth of Christ to be just one tent in a silly circus of elephants and other amusements.

To those who would invent their own heaven, don’t; Jesus already has His and it’s the only one available.  In grace – in the name of Jesus Christ – we are all invited.

It’s all we need, but we mustn’t reject the name.  That’s the elephant in the room.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will post this on Facebook and see what happens.