Friends: Forgiveness from God is a start, but not the finish. What’s the real point? God gives us the perfect answer.  Blessings, Bob

--- --- ---

Spirituality Column #998

December 30, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What’s the Point?

By Bob Walters

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.” – 2 Corinthians 5:18

Each month for the past 16 years or so I’ve printed out my four or five weekly columns and shipped them to my wife Pam’s parents at Platte Lake, Michigan.

Their lake home 30 miles or so west of Traverse City has never housed a computer, smart phone, or internet connection.  But Pam’s dad Richard, who passed away four years ago, was a retired Nazarene pastor and very interested in my writings. He and Pam’s mom Etta were daily breakfast Bible studiers and to my mild surprise, Etta also read my weekly columns. Upon Richard’s passing, I kept sending the columns.

Along with the columns I have always sent a newsy one-page letter about our own home, school, and church activities, plus kids, grandkids, upcoming plans, etc. Richard used to tease me, asking if I just recycled the columns every so often (tacitly admitting he wasn’t above repeating the occasional sermon), so – as I always have – I begin every letter the same way, “Here are this month’s columns. Still no repeats.”

What’s the point? Well, for the price of postage, a #10 envelope, some paper and printer ink, I stay in touch with family, Etta knows the letters are an expression of love, and I hope she knows I enjoy sending them as much as she enjoys reading them. The point really isn’t what I write in the columns and letters; the point is the relationship.

And while I never “recycle” columns, there are some recurring themes I regularly point out, among which are why we do the “religious” things we do, and more importantly, why God does the things He does. We often stop short of the main point.

Ask 100 professing Christians why God sent Jesus into humanity, why Jesus came to earth, or what Jesus does for us, just about all of them are going to answer some version of either “to forgive our sins,” “to save / redeem us,” “so we can go to heaven,” or, for the pessimists, “so we don’t go to hell.”

All that is true enough.  But none answers the superseding, quietly obvious but critical question: “Why?” Forgiveness, salvation / redemption, and heaven-instead-of-hell are valuable, sure. But we need to climb a bit higher on the theological mountain to discover God’s purpose for these graces and to understand the lives we are truly living.

In other words, Why do we want these things? Why does God give them?

As noted above in 2 Corinthians 5:18, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.” While Christians think in terms of our own lives, sins, mistakes, pride, good works, bad works, daily struggles, occasional successes, love and hate, joy and despair, God sent Jesus into the world “to reconcile us to himself through Christ.”

It’s not just for forgiveness, salvation, and heaven; it is our re-joining God’s life.

Jesus brings much to the party, like actual knowledge of God, objective truth, infinite reality, a gateway to God, and eternal life in the Kingdom of God. Forgiveness in Christ is a means to an end, not the end in itself; the end is reconciliation and restored relationship with our Creator. Our goal and end result is eternal participation in God’s love and glory with our inclusion in His Kingdom. In Christ, we become part of that life.

When we express our love for God, or for others – our in-laws, for example – who is the ultimate winner in the equation? Do we do things to please others? Or to please ourselves? Or to discover that whatever life throws at us, we know that the love, righteousness and relationship of Father, Son and Spirit, alive within us, are all true?

That’s the repeat. That’s the joy. That’s life with God. And that’s the point.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) and Pam, who were married in 2009, are visiting Mom up north after Christmas. BTW, Bob’s parents passed in 1991 (John) and 2003 (Ruth), and are buried in Mackinaw City, Michigan, a half mile from their beloved summer sanctuary on the Straits.

 

Friends: Christian faith and knowledge – along with truth, generally – have slipped off the radar screens of most American college and university curriculums. Next week ... seeds of revival. Blessings, Bob

--- --- ---

Spirituality Column #933

October 1, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 1

By Bob Walters

“If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first …” John 15:18, NIV 1984

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” John 16:13, NIV 1984

Our E91 pastor Rick Grover mentioned in a sermon a few years ago that his son had headed off to a Big Ten college that was, Rick offhandedly said – accompanied by a nervous chuckle – “one of the largest Christian mission fields in America.”

What he was saying was, his son’s faith would be challenged. We all understood.

Let’s not reveal or pick on that particular school because the modern university academy – in toto and nationwide, big or small – does indeed comprise arguably the largest, most hostile, unchurched, uncomprehending, unsympathetic, unfaithful, and unknowledgeable Christian environment in our nation. At least, that I can think of.

College USA is now Satan’s favorite playground; Jesus need not apply.

Consider the trajectory. Virtually all early American colleges were formed as seminaries or religiously sponsored schools. After the Civil War, Land Grant colleges popped up across the United States emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and math. Religion and philosophy were supplanted by the empirical sciences.

By the 1920s, smaller Christian schools bloomed as havens of Christian thought, truth, and doctrine. In the 1930s the philosophy of public education began to stray from its Christian grounding, and in the 1960s Christian prayer and the Bible – by act of the U.S. Supreme Court – were expunged from public schools and most public places.

On college campuses in the later 1960s and 1970s – those of us of a certain age well remember – were violent protests over Viet Nam, establishment politics and Watergate, not to mention far-reaching and enduring racial, sexist, and sexual tensions. 

In the past decade we have witnessed a “breathtakingly rapid sprint” (LINK) of identity politics through virtually all our institutions – not just colleges and public schools, but government, business, sports, entertainment … even many churches and ministries.

The Woke virus seemingly traveled faster than Covid.  Colleges whose earlier mission was to teach “expert competence” (LINK) in a recognizable and marketable skill now focus almost entirely on identity politics, victimhood, and the condemning of oppressors.

Engineering? Computer science? Health care? Law? Education? OK, we will educate you, the colleges say, but have your politics right, first. If you don’t? Keep your head down and your mouth shut.  How about a nice degree in Gender Studies?

I don’t think it is possible to overstate the pervasiveness of anti-Christian bias on most of today’s college campuses, who administratively and among the broadest swath of faculty evince an overt hostility against exactly what Christianity provides: the reality of God, the truth of Jesus, the presence of the Spirit, and the authority of the Bible.

Oh … and the correct interpretation of “Love God, and love others.” Love itself is not the God, or rather, god, that the identity-first crowd thinks it is.  Love is the truth of God’s intention and purpose for creating us in the first place: in His image holding us up to His standards.  God’s righteousness flies straight into the face of Woke humanism.

Welcome to college. 

But all is not lost. Next week we will examine some encouraging seeds of revival.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes Rick’s son majored in Law Enforcement, faith intact. P.S. – the LINKs embedded in the column are both to the following article, referenced in previous columns: The Age of Incomplete Religions | Joshua Mitchell | First Things

 

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

-- -- --

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.