Friends: It’s a reflective time of year as school begins, I count my blessings, and track an important anniversary. Have a great week! Blessings, Bob

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September 2, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

My Favorite Years

By Bob Walters

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

The school year has started back up at Mission Christian Academy here in Fishers where my wife Pam is in her fifth year teaching high school English and I began my third year teaching high school history and civics.

Three weeks in it remains pretty much a dream job for both of us: Pam the career teacher, preacher’s kid, and multi-talented crafter and homemaker, me the late-to-the-faith ex-sportswriter, media relations executive, and – how did that happen? – 11 years in retirement as a school bus driver. Hybrid school MCA meets just three days a week.

Pam and I are cruising into our 70s, we as children of the 1960s and 70s, now greeted daily by nearly a hundred fresh-faced teen-agers in a caring, Christian atmosphere and serious K-12 educational setting. Students are happy to be there, staff is happy to be there, and families express regular thanks for their kids being there.

MCA, in its sixth year, has grown from 38 students and eight teachers in 2020-21 (Covid factored into its creation) to now more than 500 K-12 students and 50 faculty.

Labor Day weekend, for me, annually marks my coming-to-faith “awake date” – Sunday, September 2, 2001 – when a random, middle-aged trip to church at my young son Eric’s urging yielded an irrefutable encounter with the Holy Spirit that led shortly to my baptism in Christ. This column’s publication date, you may notice, is September 2.

Pam has never had a day in her life when she didn’t know Jesus, while I had 47 years not really knowing Him.  I was a dedicated, youthful Episcopal altar boy but then an entirely unserious, in-name-only Christian until that Labor Day Sunday 24 years ago at East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis.

I bring all this up because, like I said, I am highly reflective about this anniversary of the beginning of my faith life.  But a couple of my wonderful current students in two different periods recently asked, in class, what had been the “favorite time of my life.”

Pam and I by far are the oldest teachers in the building, so we get good-natured pot-shots from the kids all the time about our lack of “current” cultural and technical proficiencies. The students are, however, no match (yet) for our combined language, literary, and historical “chops” as well as our deep Christian experience. It’s great duty.

So, students asked earnestly about my “favorite time of life.” And if you read my bio you know I’ve had a good life, a fun and interesting career, and raised two great sons – Eric and John, both baptized – who now have their own families and careers.

Including all the stumbles, sins, and hardships that don’t appear in my bio, parts of my life are less attractive than others. But the students’ questions dug into something Pam and I have often discussed, that this is the favorite time of my life, and our lives. 

That is not a complaint about anything that has come before.  What’s great is that we can track back through lives that have had plentiful “best” times – with more than a few rough patches – and are yet so deeply thankful to have this latter time of purpose, commitment, freedom, love, family, learning, and joy while still avoiding life’s off-ramp.

I lived most of my life not knowing the Lord, not knowing what I had and didn’t have, and not trusting the truth, joy, and purpose present in the magnitude God offers.

I learned to trust God’s character and lean not on my own understanding. Whew.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is thankful for every moment that led to now.

Friends: Jesus sacrificed “once for all.” Did He mean it? God forgets our sins. Really? Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #980

August 26, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What Happened to My Sin?

By Bob Walters

“He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” Hebrews 7:27

“I will forgive … and remember their sins no more.” Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12

Christians spend a lot of time asking for forgiveness for our sins, when what we ought to be doing is acknowledging our sins.  With Jesus – the anchor of our faith and by his death on the cross – the ship of forgiveness has already sailed. His work is “finished.”

Why put Christ back on the cross?  He already sacrificed – perfectly – “once for all.” And why keep that ratty ship of sin moored in our own dock? Is it because we define the quality of our Christian faith against the gauge of our sin?  I think maybe.

If God “remembers our sins no more,” why do we?

The fact is, as long as humans are breathing, we are capable of sinning. And if we are sinning, our own comfort with God is compromised.  Not like God denies our relationship, because what God says and what Jesus did and what the Holy Spirit assures us is that we can trust God’s love, Christ’s work, and the Spirit’s leading.  God’s side doesn’t change; it is our side of the equation that changes. God isn’t seeking our condemnation; the awful weight guilt presses on us – not Him – when we stray.

I believe strongly that it is us/we/me that guilt truly affects.  And it is God we can go to in confession, always, and hopefully confess to a brother or sister we have wronged.  That calms our guilt. If it doesn’t, pray until it does. We all know plenty of our sins – past and current – die a slow death in our own memories.

People may not forgive or forget; in Jesus, we know God has done both.

We must offer great thanks to God’s and scripture’s direction for confession of our sins. The “once for all” sacrifice of Jesus on the cross tells us that Christ was on a rescue mission, not a punitive crusade. God wants our sins erased as much as we do.

Another thing I believe strongly – not to be cynical but to posit what to me appears a plain truth – is that while the presence of guilt ruffles our personal peace of mind, its efficacy dramatically plays into the “powers and principalities” that use guilt to control us.  Satan the accuser plays that card incessantly. My advice? Talk to Jesus, never to Satan. Run and stand in the grace of our Lord. Cling to Him.

Too many Christians love to call each other sinners in an expression of ill-considered self-righteousness.  Too many church hierarchies play sin guilt as a powerful motivator for obedience and financial strong-arming. Satan is always at work.

That plank in my eye? That is what I pray first to be removed so I won’t judge my brother.  I never doubt God’s grace, but we all worry how people respond to our sin. It’s a unique human characteristic: a wildcard variable and “gift” of God – you never know what a human will do. That’s why G.K. Chesterton calls man “the only truly wild animal.”

The greatest relief of my nascent Christian life (I was baptized at 47) was realizing not that I was a sinner, but that God already knew everything I could ever tell Him.  That opened the book to trusting Him with anything I needed to share. I understood that while the work of the cross was forgiveness, the point of the cross was relationship with God.

Are we convicted, chastised, and challenged by God? Yes … but it is for our own good, if we understand our purpose is sharing in God’s glory.  We should thank God when He convicts us and melts our hearts in repentance that restores our peace. 

Never doubt God’s truth, love, or purpose. Forgiveness is already ours.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doubts his own worthiness but never God’s grace. See also Psalm 32:3-5, Proverbs 28:13, Isaiah 43:25, Micah 7:18-19, Hebrews 10:10:12 James 5:16, 1 John 1:8-10.

Friends: Christianity’s great challenge to secular intellect is the truth and reality embodied in the mystery of God. Man wants evidence, Jesus insists on faith. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #979

August 19, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Embracing the Mystery

By Bob Walters

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. … what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” – Hebrews 11:1,3 ESV

Hebrews 11 is the great New Testament catalog of the Old Testament prophets and faithful whose trust in God exemplified and to this day remain object lessons commending the promises of God. Jesus is all the proof we need.

“Proof,” however, looms across the non-theological firmament as that which must be provided in understandable, tangible, empirical, human terms – i.e. evidence – to validate God’s reality. Faith, the non-faithful loudly proclaim, is not proof enough. 

I blame the ancient Greeks for re-casting reality out of the realm of Godly faith and instead funneling God’s presence and purpose as things to be tucked away from true intellect. Not to pick on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – great Greek thinkers and educators who sensed the necessity and logic of the existence of One True God – but their final reality was governed only by that which could be seen, defined, and explained by humans to humans. Divine mystery, evidently, could not be part of reality.

The problem here is so simple that great minds can’t grasp it; God’s mind is different from ours. He says so himself in Isaiah 55:8-9, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as heavens are higher than earth, so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than yours.”

Humanity’s greatest minds, if they be slaves to physical evidence, haven’t thought through that the one who created our minds – granted, in His own image – has a perpetual leg up on what and how a human mind might conceive.  The highest, most logical and legitimate reality a human should expect – should depend on – is that our Creator knows more than we do.  That insults many self-congratulating human minds.

But I believe there is more.  It is not just that God is smarter, eternal, more righteous, more creative, more loving, and more everything than humans.  “Higher,” I submit, truly means “different.” We think how we limitedly think; God is unconstrained.

Humans are stuck in the closed crosshairs of time, space, matter, probability, and aspiration, with only an occasional peak behind the divine curtain of God’s intentions and the mind of Christ. God, on the other hand, is not “stuck.”

As humans our only mental ability to get “unstuck” resides in a mystery that Paul refers to as “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), and to “have the same mind in you that was in Christ.” (1 Timothy 2:5). The first suggests the illuminating indwelling of the Holy Spirit that shifts our perspective to think like Christ, and the second to model His humility, selflessness, obedience … and His trust in God.

These are among the free – and underappreciated – gifts we receive with faith in Christ. If we lack wisdom, James 1:5 invites us to “to ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault.” We are never shy about asking in prayer, in Christ’s name, to fix our problems, heal our wounds, or cleanse our sins, both for ourselves and others.

So why won’t we deeply accept God’s offer of wisdom unlocked by our faith? Because we are thinking in worldly terms of needing an explanation rather than, in faith, accepting the mystery of not being able to entirely explain the gift. It is still real and true.

Western culture loves a good mystery as entertainment, but the very best mystery is when our faith leads us to relationship with God through truth in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is relieved he doesn’t have to explain everything. Btw, the Greeks mentioned lived during the period between the Bible’s Testaments.

Friends: We had just a little more to say on repentance, our doorway to hope. See the column below. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #978

August 12, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Doorway to Hope

By Bob Walters

“Repent, and be baptized.” – Peter to distraught Jews, Acts 2:38

(This is the communion meditation I delivered at church Aug. 3, which includes some thoughts and words from last week’s column. – Bob)

Let’s do everyone’s favorite thing and talk about a Greek word in the Bible. To help add context, I brought along an artifact: an actual, printed 1983 American Heritage English dictionary. This is a nostalgia copy I keep on my desk, though I rarely use it.

The Greek word is “metanoia:” which in English we translate as “repent.” And while the Greek meaning of metanoia is “new and renewed thinking” or “to change one’s mind,” the dictionary – almost any modern dictionary, online or print – has a different, and I submit, a biblically misleading definition.  For example, in my dictionary:

“1. To feel regret for (what one has done or failed to do).  2. To feel contrition for one’s sins and to abjure sinful ways.” Ofr, repentir.” (i.e., Old French, orig. Latin, etc.)

That is accurate for Latin and old French – guilt, regret, shame – and fits our modern culture and understanding.  But it misses the mark of the New Testament’s Greek metanoia, “thinking anew,” and the Old Testament’s teshuva, “turn toward God.”

In church we generally think of repent as meaning “to turn around and go back” and to reject our sin. That’s good; that’s helpful.  But I love the Old Testament Hebrew for “repent,” teshuva, and New Testament Greek metanoia. Both line up better with leveling focus on God and Jesus, not ourselves.

On that night Jesus was betrayed by Judas – the night of the last supper, and what we call the first communion – Jesus didn’t lecture the disciples about their behavior or their sins or call for their repentance.  Jesus washed their feet.  He broke bread and shared wine and told them to remember who He truly is. He promised to send the Holy Spirit.  He told them to remember who they were to each other. 

Why? Because the world would be cruel to them as it was cruel to Him. They would need each other: in communion fellowship remembering His body and blood.

In the bread, we are to remember the body of Jesus’s divine sonship, human fellowship, and sacrificial, redeeming death.  In the cup, we remember the blood of not just the end of one life – the crucifixion – but the beginning of our new life and a new covenant in faith, not law. 

When Peter in Acts 2:38 tells the distraught Jews how to atone for killing Jesus, he says, “Repent, and be baptized.” Repent here isn’t a behavioral direction, it is telling them to stop thinking like Jews, and start thinking like Christians: to recognize Jesus as the Messiah Son of God, the Christ savior of all mankind who fulfills the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17).

Metanoia: renew your thinking. Be baptized: join the Spirit.

The Bible becomes a very different book when we understand “repent” to mean more than addressing our sins and rejecting negative behavior; it means to positively turn toward God, wherever we are.  With this new and renewed and eternal thinking, we are accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Repentance is our doorway to hope, and to new life in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes the word “internet” is not in his 1983 dictionary.

 

Friends: Turning away from sin is good; turning toward God is better, growing in Christ is best. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #977

August 5, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Acts of Repentance, Part 4

By Bob Walters

“… and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.” – Acts 6:7

The book of Acts is Luke’s rock ’em, sock ’em tale of the beginnings of the church, the arrival of the Holy Spirit, early disciples punished for debating Jewish leaders, Stephen’s preaching and execution by stoning, Paul’s conversion and escapades, tales of Jews who believed in Christ, and Jews who did not.

For those Jews who repented – changed their mindset away from the Law and toward the new covenant of relationship with God through Christ – even their growing numbers did not overturn the political and religious persecutions against them.

There are ten specific citations in Acts of the words “repent” and “repentance” where both Jews and gentiles are guided to renew their thinking toward salvation in Jesus and away from Hebrew laws and pagan gods. The above quotation from Acts 6:7 is a good example of where “repentance” is not mentioned but is nonetheless inferred: Jewish priests who changed their minds and became obedient to Christ.

In the Law and Old Testament writings and prophecies, “repentance” had a good Hebrew word, “Teshuva,” which meant approximately, “turning toward God.”  When we sin, human tendency is to run from God when our salvation is in running toward God.

The Greek word “metanoia,” and its dozens of variations for “repent,” appears 57 times in the New Testament and refers more to “changed thinking” than “changed actions.” In that Jewish life required obedience to physical laws of conduct, it is subtly quite different from the mental interpretation of the philosophical Greeks.  

Our purpose with this four-part series on repentance has been to steer Christian intellectual and spiritual life toward a growing and closer relationship with Jesus and within the church. Let’s not merely see the word “repent” as a challenge limited to one’s sinful behaviors and thoughts. True repentance is re-focusing our minds on Christ.

We grow in Christ when we turn to Christ, and that often means turning away from sin.  But since we are all sinners, and since almost everyone admits they are not perfect, there is a human tendency to maybe not sin so much because we see that sin hurts our own lives. This does not automatically transfer into a relationship with Jesus.

Breaking a bad habit is a temporal win for us, but it is not salvation. When we strive to obey the laws of God or directions of Jesus, we have to understand that God’s grace, love, and salvation are already there and don’t change.  Only our own awareness of God changes/improves, and it is with faith in Christ that our eternal prospects grow.

Modern culture isn’t much help with Godly repentance because any secular dictionary of the English language mirrors the basic biblical misunderstanding: that “repent” means only to feel guilt, shame, regret, contrition, or other negative postures about our mistakes. I think it is safe to say that everyone understands “sin,” but not everyone understands embracing faith and mental trust in Jesus as repentance.

Folks on the edges of Christianity or some form of Godly faith – the ones who figure the One True God is likely real but don’t buy into the whole “Jesus” thing – tend to miss the very real fact that our improved behavior and obedience to God is not a gambit to impress God, but a strategy that improves our own lives and grows our own joy.

As I’ve said before, the Bible becomes a very different book when we understand “repent” goes beyond addressing only our negative behavior, but in turning our minds positively toward God.  Repentance is our doorway to hope. And to new life in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) sees God’s renewed mercies every day.