Friends ... Christians hope the promise of Christmas adds up to year-round joy.  See new column below ... and we’ll be back next year! Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #841

December 27, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Summing Up Christmas

By Bob Walters

“Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” – Jesus, Mathew 6:18

I suppose I put up too many Christmas lights, and my wife Pam possibly bakes too many Christmas cookies … not that we plan to make any changes going forward.

Our neighbors, family, and friends – and co-workers, many of whom have become close friends – notice and appreciate our yearly Christmas holiday behaviors.  We have great fun expressing our joy in the season; it is a joy in Christ and an easy outpouring of our faithful love for Him … and Christian love for others.

I think there is plenty of evidence that our Christmas celebrating is not a matter of Pam and me coming out of a slumbering closet, awakening to our mission with Jesus only at the commercially and culturally “acceptable” Yuletide season.  We are thankful for the life we share, together, in Christ, and it’s a 24/7/365/Eternal fact of our existence.

Stumbles?  Yes (mainly me).  Perfection?  No (again, mainly me).  We don’t keep count, and living our lives in the forgiveness of Christ and forgiving with Christ provide peace, joy, and a divine closeness of relationship other Christians understand.  It’s a joy the secular Christmas crowd glimpses faintly but largely can’t fathom.  Thankfulness is one thing; thankfulness for a life in Christ is an entirely different ballgame, one where you don’t need to keep score and couldn’t quantify or count points if you tried.

The “true meaning of Christmas” is closer to that, i.e., not keeping score or seeing, empirically, “what it all adds up to.”  Giving with joy is its own reward.

Last month on a warmish central Indiana Thanksgiving weekend afternoon (funny how Christmas weekend arrived with sub-zero temperatures, blowing snow, and whoo-boy windchills in the minus 30s), several of us, including our very pleasant new neighbor lady across the street, were outside hanging Christmas lights.  When her husband arrived back from wherever he had been, he surveyed his house and then ours and in a friendly way shouted across the street, “Ah … competition!”

I shouted back, cheerfully, “It’s not competition, it’s Christmas!”  The lady agreed.

When I delivered Pam’s customary, generous cache of assorted, hand-decorated Christmas cookies to my many workmates, a kind lady sensing the enormity of effort Pam put into baking them, asked me, “How much time does she spend on these?”

I replied, with a broad smile, “It’s not time; it’s love.”  What a satisfying answer.

As we move past this “most wonderful time of the year” into our 2023 trip around the sun, I want to remember this and every Christmas not in terms of “how much time” or “how much money” or who gets the neighborhood Griswold Award for excessive Christmas lights.  Let’s store away our Christmas gear, not the Christmas in our hearts.

Jesus Christ – God coming to live among humanity to restore our relationship with the good, loving, unsurprisable, and unerringly righteous God of Creation – is truth for all time and love beyond all measurement.  As an expression of God’s love, Jesus is our sure hope.  He isn’t here to “beat Satan,” He’s here to show us how to love God and each other. Christmas isn’t the sum of an equation, it’s a divine mystery of God’s love.

Whatever we do at Christmas, it should be an unbridled expression of our love and God’s love, not judgement of human effort or measurement of worldly transaction.

Believe it when I say we are well aware – as are you – of the prideful, non-faith world that cynically takes great commercial advantage of the Christmas season.

My goal – our goal – is to take loving advantage of Jesus Christ all year long.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests focusing on God’s love, not God’s rewards.

Christmas isn’t so much about “when” as it is about “why.”  Here are three good questions (and answers) to help understand the “true meaning of Christmas.”  Merry Christmas!  Bob

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Spirituality Column #840

December 20, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Timing Isn’t Everything, Part 2

By Bob Walters

And it came to pass …Joseph went up to Bethlehem … with Mary his espoused wife who was great with child. And … the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. – Luke 2:1-6

Rather than expend forensic effort on the logistical specifics of Jesus’s birth – what date, who was there, was it a stable or a cave, etc. – here are three questions we must ask ourselves … in faith … to understand the true meaning of Christmas:

1. Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary?

2. Was Jesus who He and the Bible say He was and is?

3. Why did Jesus come?

First, “Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary?”

For this one we’ll go word by word. 

Was – Did this event happen in history?  Yes.

Jesus – Did a man named Jesus exist?  Yes.

Born – Was Jesus a fact/creation of human biology? Yes.

Of the virgin – Biologically, naturally impossible, but “nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37).

Mary – Yes, Mary existed, and was a human woman.

So … Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary? Yes.  That establishes the miracle.

Second, “Was Jesus who he said he was?”

Throughout the Gospels Jesus calls God His Father.  That makes Jesus God’s son.  Was Jesus fully God and fully human?  Jesus says he will go back to the father, in heaven, and prepare a “room” for all who believe.  He has to be God to do that.  Jesus says he will send the spirit to comfort and educate believers.  He has to be God to do that.  Jesus lived, worked, spoke, bled, and died.  He had to be human to do that.

But was Jesus truly part of the Godhead, the Trinity?  Jesus spoke of God the Father and of the Holy Spirit in terms that included He, himself, Jesus.  Yes, Jesus was part of the Trinity (by the way, the word “trinity” does not appear in the Bible; Tertullian invented it in the second century).  

“Yes” here establishes Jesus’s identity: God/Man.

Now … third.  “Why did Jesus come?”

It is the biggest question of all.  The easy answer of course is that Jesus came for our forgiveness and our salvation.  But what was God’s purpose in miraculously sending His Son into humanity? Why Jesus?  Why not just a flick of God’s divine fingers to say, “Snap!  It’s all fixed.”?  Answer: Because there is neither faith nor glory in that snap.

Nor is there reciprocating love, truth, education, or obedience.  There is nothing about ourselves becoming the humble and selfless sacrifice that Jesus presents to the world.  We could never understand the glory of our relationship with God.  We may not feel very glorious in our earthly, broken, sinful, aching bodies, but our relationship with God’s glory and righteousness that we have through our faith in Christ and with the urging of the Holy Spirit … that’s what the Law on those tablets could never provide.

Jesus Christ was a canvas of God’s life humans could understand.  Jesus didn’t tell us how to act; He told us to love.  He told us who we could be – who we were, who we are – in God’s creation, God’s eternity … and God’s love.

That’s the true meaning of Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) celebrates the savior and loves the celebration.

Friends,  The Bible is full of great information but sometimes withholds details to give us pause … and rely on faith.  Christmas has a lot of that.  See the column below.  Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #839

December 13, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Timing Isn’t Everything, Part I  

By Bob Walters

And it came to pass …Joseph went up to Bethlehem … with Mary his espoused wife who was great with child. And … the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. – Luke 2:1-6

In the past century Christmas has erupted – with the enthusiastic cooperation of modern culture and commerce – into a target date on the calendar like none other.

December 25^th, the Day Jesus was Born!  Silent night, the shunned Mary and Joseph, a cold lonely stable, shepherds, wise men, and a baby born to save the world.

Most of the Christmas-observing world celebrates the tightly scripted story of “the most wonderful time of the year” based not so much on scriptural truth and God’s incarnation, but on “holiday spirit,” comforting traditions, gifts, and a wildly misunderstood narrative of what actually happened 2,000 years ago.

Truth is … nobody exactly knows when Jesus was born.  Summer, fall, or spring?  Maybe … but definitely not the middle of winter.  Roman taxation, census taking – and often, accompanying military conscription – were not winter activities.  Folks didn’t travel much, and shepherds would not have had their sheep in the cold, nighttime Palestinian hills.

Various long-established pagan celebrations of the lengthening of days after the winter solstice – i.e., more daylight – made for a logical Christian usurpation of a festival for the “light of the world,” Jesus Christ.  So … Christmas was born as a “church thing.”

Funny thing is … there is nothing at all in the Gospels – or anywhere in the entire New Testament – about establishing festivals or feasts for Jesus.  He Himself, the Christ, God the person, is the enduring and perpetual Sabbath.  There is no special date or temple required; Jesus is the date and temple.  He elicits perpetual, abiding, comforting, obedient love and faith, not requiring periodic, specific legal observances.

Neither is a new sacrifice required, like the Christmas gifts we exchange.  Jesus was the perfect sacrifice, once for all.  The only new sacrifice is us, dying to self to live our lives for Christ and others.  And it’s not confined to December 25; it’s not a time and date thing; it’s an always thing.  Our gift from Christ and to each other is grace.

Gifts are not a sacrifice of our possessions; they are an expression of our love.

Yet … folks full of Yuletide cheer merrily celebrate Christmas who nonetheless withhold love, faith, and trust in the truth of Jesus citing “insufficient evidence” – like maybe newspaper clippings (kidding) or a real-life statue or painting – of humanity’s single most history-changing, life-changing, and eternity-confirming person.  

These are the folks who miss the “true meaning of Christmas,” i.e., God’s truth. Christmas celebrating is great, though for some not great even though it is all around them.  Many folks have fun with Christmas without believing.  The ancient Greek philosophers, Enlightenment humanists, and modern scientists want “hard facts” and “physical evidence” to “believe” anything.  But that’s not how faith’s mystery works.

It is, however, why Jesus was an obscure baby born on an unnamed date to peasant parents in civilization’s hinterlands.  Faith is the only way to know Him.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t worry about “when” Jesus was born because there are far better questions, which will be discussed next week.  Merry Christmas!

 Friends,

It’s funny how often those posing cosmic-sized questions ignore God’s answer key: the Bible.  See the column below.

And a special gift … our K-group (church small group) went surprise caroling at John Samples’ house late Saturday afternoon, Dec. 3.  See the great video John W. produced, here: A Needed Christmas Gift - YouTube, or on my public Facebook page (on Fb search Bob Walters, news feed posts), just below this column post.  It’s also on John W’s Facebook page: lots of Fb likes and comments!

Blessings, Bob

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Labels: atheist, Big Bang, Bill Mahar, Club Random podcast, creation, Genesis 1:1, John 1:1-2, science, Star Trek, truth, William Shatner

Spirituality Column #838

December 6, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Bigger Bang

By Bob Walters

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” – Genesis 1:1 KJV

“In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God…the Word was God. All things were made by him, and without him, nothing was made that was made.” John 1:1-3 KJV

“Why is there anything? Why is there a universe at all?” – Political talk host / atheist / comedian Bill Maher discussing the “Big Bang” with Star Trek actor William Shatner.    

It’s so simple, really.

Rather than pointless, endless, and raging speculation, debates, scientific theory, intellectual prognostication, philosophical constructs, talk show ponderings, and prideful humanist assumptions …  truth is, the world and life exist because God wanted them to.

And made them so.

How did God do it?  Well, the Bible is far bigger on “why” than “how,” but the uncomplicated answers are right there in the Bible … if we’ll believe and pursue them.

Why a universe? Because Creation and life were God’s will and, as we further learn throughout scripture, the expression of God’s love.

“How?”  Simply put: With His Word, the Logos, the one we know as Jesus Christ.

“His will and His love” generally work for a shorthand philosophical answer to “Why?”  If, that is, one believes in God the Creator, and the existence of His divine purpose which He imprinted on man.  Those are huge “ifs,” but simple and true,

The “Big Bang” Creation chattering communities find as utterly unsatisfying – in their own limited way, even heretical – to answer a Creation query of “How?” with a crazy referral to the simplicity of God’s truth: His Word did it.  Really, it’s a bigger bang.

God, you see, is the answer to the universe. Christ, we discover, is how He did it.

Observation suggests science craves to be the thing to figure it all out: to take credit for its own brilliance while pridefully obviating God.  God’s truth, to science’s chagrin, diminishes the popular, outside-of-faith assumption of science’s omnipotence. Science pridefully seeks to hand to humanity the answers of the universe, sans God. 

Thanks, huzzahs, and hosannas to follow!  Yet, what’s missing?  Purpose.  Science cannot replace God’s purpose … or love; it can only reveal God’s workings.

This brings us to Bill Maher, William Shatner, and a stunning array of like-minded secular but cosmic “truth” seekers who fervently demand answers to “Why is there a universe?” but want the truth to be anything other than what it actually is, i.e., God.

In Maher’s “Club Random” podcast conversation with Shatner earlier this year (Link - YouTube), Shatner excitedly brought up the Big Bang theory and science while Maher – highly political and dependably, virulently anti-religious – expressed his lack of scientific knowledge except to say, “If you really want to make your brain hurt, you would ask the question, ‘Why is there anything? …  Why a universe at all?’”  And later that “… at least science can be disproved, which is why it is better than religion.”

In a small nutshell, that is the sideways philosophy and “truth” of secular science: it is the favored, unthreatening “truth” because it can be disproved. Huh?  Shatner then mused, ‘Is the Big Bang even science because it can’t be repeated?”  I rolled my eyes.       

Talk about making your brain hurt.  God’s the easiest answer because He’s true.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays for smart people who chase the wrong truth.