Friends: Folks look at the Holy Trinity as something that needs to be split and defined rather than understood as a relationship and holy mystery.  Let’s hold it together. Have a great week, and all the best for 2025. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #947

January 7, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Splitting Image

By Bob Walters

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” – Hebrews 1:3

Pam and I are fortunate to have several savvy, sincere, and biblically literate Christian friends and teachers across the various cohorts of the life we lead together.

Feel free to drop an “Amen” if you can say the same thing.

Our New Year’s Eve gathering with some of our so-inclined church pals last week was a party, not vespers, but as invariably happens – amid family updates and chatting about life in general – a faith and scriptural issue popped up that sparked a lively post-dinner doctrinal conversation among a few of us still sitting at the table.

A lady we have known for years who is active in Bible studies, women’s ministry, and local missions lamented how many Bible studiers she encounters who refuse the aspect of the Trinity that names Jesus as God. Yes, I know … basic stuff.  And any of us who have been around “newer” Christians are well-acquainted with the question.

She noted, “They want to know, ‘If Jesus is God, where was God while Jesus was on the earth?’ What do you say?” I have a reputation in our Sunday school class of talking too much, so I took a shot at an answer because I can’t help it. To wit …

The Trinity as One – Father, Son, Spirit – is among my favorite teaching topics. The Trinity, of course, is a mystery of mathematics, physics, and personhood, how three beings can be one and one being can be three.  To me it is easily explained that if indeed “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and if we can agree that “love” requires relationship, then it proceeds logically that God must be a relationship. Voila! God is one…and three.

And if indeed humans were and are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’”) – for all the ways that notion can be considered – it further proceeds that we are created in that love of God’s relationship.

Why three?  This is what works for me. Three is the smallest number of a community (George Bebawi), God himself is a society (G.K. Chesterton), and we, even as fallen sinners, are restored to God’s divine community through our faith in Jesus and acceptance of His gift of salvation. But the math? Yes, 1+1+1=3. But 1x1x1=1. I am content to “multiply” my blessings and figure God “adds up” love however He likes.

To me the issue we were discussing at the table comes down to those who stubbornly demand human definitions of holy things that need to be known in faith.  It is, to me, reasonable to take God at His word.  We can ask of Him all the questions we can conjure, but everything about Jesus is designed to demand our faith, not proof.

I’m afraid the best evidence for Jesus and God’s laws, even beyond scripture, is written on our hearts, ala Hebrews 8:10, Romans 2:15, Psalms 40:8, 2 Corinthians 3:3. And I couldn’t help but think of George’s observation that Western Christianity tends to focus on “Father and Son,” often ignoring the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

We can’t argue faith and the Holy Spirit into anybody. One can witness and lead by example, but the Spirit does the heavy lifting of changing hearts and minds to accept God’s truth and the reality of an eternal realm humans are not yet equipped to fully understand. We glimpse eternity, in faith, all the time … yet it is still outside of time.

So, mysteries abound, but our faith must cohere into oneness with God, oneness with other believers, and not split the divine relationship in which we were created.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) enjoys the mysteries God presents. Praise Jesus.

Friends: Pam’s daughter Lauren married Greg Saturday, blending families and going forward in life.  I officiated the service and wanted to share the homily I wrote on love. Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #936

October 22, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Complete Love

By Bob Walters

“Love … always perseveres.” – The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:7

Lauren and Greg, with her three small children and his one, were married and became a blended family last Saturday.  It was a career first for me, officiating the small, cozy ceremony among their dearest family and closest friends. I thought I’d share the homily:

Not one of us, individually, is “complete.” I believe our singular human incompleteness was and has been part of God’s plan since the Garden of Eden. We need a sure savior. We need trusted friends. We need nurturing family. We need a loving mate. It is a blessing to have loving children.  Hope resides in all these things.

The Bible says, “God is love,” but our earthly, human, temporal understanding of love we have in this life is better experienced in the context of God’s giving, sacrificing, eternal love. It is with God, and with each other, that we discover our completeness.

Consider that God – who we know as the Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – God Himself is a community of three.  Why a community? Because love cannot exist alone, as one. 

A wise man once said that God is three because three is the smallest number of a community. God, therefore, can be – and is – love, and teaches that we are to love those whom he created in His own image … us.

It follows that the great commands of Jesus are to love God, and to love others.

The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4-7:

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres.”

Notice that the things that cast light on ourselves – envy, boasting, pride, self-seeking – are warned against.  While things that express love, patience, kindness to others, and truth are recommended.

Chapter 13 of the Bible’s New Testament book of 1^st Corinthians is a staple of Christian and even not-so-Christian weddings, as we proclaim the strivings of human love. But the chapter is primarily about God’s perfect love.

Back in verse two, Paul says “if I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Love is how we are completed in God’s eyes.  Our ability to see through to the eyes of God is the gift of Jesus Christ, and of those we love.

The passage also says that we must “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). That is because we have grown and learned a greater love – a sacrificial love – for others and humility for ourselves.

Yes, in our earthly life we can have many things, talents, desires, dreams, and intentions.  But in the end, Paul says, faith, hope, and love remain; the greatest of these being love.   Love is the greatest because it invites divine relationship, and is God’s language of community, and completion.  

Greg and Lauren, may your lives and love become complete with God, with each other, and with your children, in heaven’s earthly realm. AMEN.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) obtained one of those “online ordinations” to be “legal” for the ceremony, but prior to the ceremony counseled with several personally known and trusted pastors for their blessing and imprimatur for him to officiate.  

Friends: Christianity is uniquely personal and also uniquely relational. Our faith life and communion are not so very different from the divine love within the Holy Trinity.  Blessings, Bob

BTW, there is a new Rich Jacobs "Finding Genius" podcast! Here is the link: Exploring The Culture Of Christianity With Bob Walters (recorded 7-31-24).

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Spirituality Column #926

August 13, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Team Effort

By Bob Walters

“…I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” – Jesus praying, John 17:20-21
One of the lessons of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, Spirit – and of church gatherings and corporate Christian life in general is that Christianity is not an individual pursuit; it is a team sport. We are all in this together. Yes, with the triune God.

Do we – each one of us, singularly – have a personal and unique faith relationship with God through Jesus? Yes, we do. 

Does the Holy Spirit abide in our lives individually?  Yes, the Spirit does. 

But are we alone in our faith?  No, we are not.

The above cited prayer of Jesus is from the “Priestly Prayer” in John 17, the concluding prayerful words of Jesus to his disciples before His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. To refresh, Jesus and the disciples left the last supper (John 14:31), walked through Jerusalem toward the Garden listening to Jesus’s teaching (John 15-16), and in John 17 Jesus prays for himself (vv1-5), the disciples (vv6-19), and for “all who will believe in me through their message” (vv20-26). That includes us … today.

When Jesus directs us with the two greatest commandments, to love God and to love others (Matthew 22:37-39), and at the last supper reminds the disciples of this “new command … to “love one another” (John 13:35), Jesus is only telling the disciples – and by extension all believers – to do what Jesus himself does in the Holy Trinity … to love God and love others. 

God’s cosmic design is that He Himself is a community, and He created all of us – for His own glory – to be loved and loving, faithful participants in His Kingdom. Our faith in Jesus and reliance on the Holy Spirit bring us into that divine communion.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of our faith is the Holy Trinity – how something can be three in one, one in three, unique, yet together. But don’t get hung up on the math.

For all the different ways the Bible describes God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, when the Bible says in the letters of John that “God is Love,” he is explaining the purpose of the Trinity, and that purpose is relationship, which is what gives communion its meaning.  Love cannot exist without relationship.

God is a community, as we, His faithful, are a community joined with Him and with each other. When we celebrate communion, we are celebrating our relationship not just with God through Jesus and among ourselves as Christians, but celebrating the Father-Son-Spirit relationship that is the abiding and loving truth of our faith. 

Our faith, my faith, your faith, can’t be something we simply “believe.”  Faith is the truth of all being, of how we live our lives.  I don’t merely believe I’m married to my wife Pam; I AM married to Pam.  That’s life and that’s truth … and that is what faith is. 

It is what God calls faith to be: real, the bedrock of our soul.  Faith is not a transient opinion, but life with love, purpose, and direction.  Our communion in faith is the communion into which Jesus invited his disciples, and all who would believe.

The communion we celebrate today as the faithful body of Christ is a communion in faith that is our strength, our hope, and our joy and our oneness in Christ.

To love God and to love each other is a divine team effort, and what Jesus does.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) adapted this from his Aug. 4 communion meditation at church. Regarding the “math” of the Trinity, 1+1+1=3, but 1x1x1=1. Multiply!

Friends: Understanding God’s love is perhaps life’s greatest mystery and humanity’s greatest gift. The Bible tells us so.  See the column below.  Have a great week!  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #909

April 16, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Love is the Greatest

By Bob Walters

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Corinthians 13:13

This verse, 1 Cointhians 13:13, is the one that hooked me my first day in church.

Russ Blowers was preaching – September 2, 2001 – on his 50^th anniversary of tending the flock at East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. I was an unbeliever somehow in church (sitting in the back row), and Russ said, approximately:

“We learn faith from the past, we have hope in the future, but we have love in the present.”  Learning later that C.S. Lewis wrote, “… the present is where eternity touches time” (The Screwtape Letters), the idea, well, the reality, that God is Love, God is eternal, and God stepped into the present in the form of his Son Jesus Christ, solved Russ’s words and put my esteem of love’s stature in theology at the head of the line.

There are dozens of personal, corollary stories (rabbit trails, my wife calls them) that could stretch the above three paragraphs into days of self-reflection, but I recently learned something new – a brilliant perspective – on all that 1 Corinthians 13 says about love with a nearly perfect blending of Paul’s “fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-23.

First Corinthians 13:4-8 says “Love is patient, kind, does not envy, does not boast, is not proud, does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, not easily angered, keeps no records of wrong, does not delight in evil, rejoices in truth, and always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres.”

Galatians 5:22-23 says, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

My friend Craig Streett, at a recent E91 Mustard Seed Bible class, shared the following handwritten card stuffed in his Bible from a lesson long ago.  Its precis was this: Love is the chief and true fruit of the Spirit, and all other fruits flow from love.

Note: this doesn’t divide the fruits, but we must never divide love, because God is love and we mustn’t divide God.  But what about Father, Son, Spirit?”  My advice is to consider the math problem of the Holy Trinity – 3 in 1, 1 in 3 – as multiplication, i.e., 1x1x1=1, that gives us a loving community of one, not a divided crowd of three. 

So, without division, notice how these two “truth” and “fruit” passages of Paul’s sync up pretty well when love takes the lead over all fruits of the Spirit. Here’s the note:

         “The fruit of the Spirit is love …

1.    Joy is love’s strength.

2.    Peace is love’s security.

3.    Longsuffering is love’s patience.

4.    Kindness is love’s conduct.

5.    Goodness is love’s character.

6.    Faithfulness is love’s confidence.

7.    Gentleness is love’s humility.

8.    Self-control is love’s victory.

Against such as these there is no law.”

When we see love’s fruits in our lives, we have love’s gifts in our hearts.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes this list originated with BibleProject.com. And ... next week we'll review Dave Faust's new book "Not Too Old, Turning your Later Years into Greater Years." Available at Amazon and CollegePress. E91 has planned a book signing session with Dave Sunday, April 28, where books will also be available.

Spirituality Column #470
November 17, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“I have made you known to them …” John 17:26, Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane to His Father, God

Jesus’s life and ministry – and crucifixion and resurrection – had one goal: to tell humanity about the love and glory of God.  Funny thing is, Jesus IS the love and glory of God.  That’s His job.  And so is the Creative splendor of heaven and earth.

The Bible is clear on these points from Genesis to Revelation.  It’s tempting to dissect and separate the Father from the Son and the Son from the Holy Spirit, in our own minds, because the concurrent individual distinction and yet relational unity of the three persons of the Holy Trinity doesn’t make ready sense to the human brain.

At least not to the part that demands evidence, proof, and self-sufficiency.  That must be why God included our capacity for faith and creativity, overlaid it with freedom, and sent His son Christ Jesus into the world to show us God’s glory.  It allows us to appreciate God’s real will and purpose, grasp our real identity, share that real truth and point to the exclusive glory of God.  That’s the story Jesus came to tell.

Glory, however, is not what it seems, not to humans anyway.  The glory of God in Jesus was expressed upon the cross, in humility and sacrifice.  Humans more easily relate to God’s glory being expressed with victorious trumpets and white horses.

Come to think of it, it actually IS that, but not here, not in this fallen earthly realm.

We want the victorious white horse Jesus of Revelation 19 – right now! – not the suffering servant Jesus on the Cross in John 19, which is our truth right now.

With that in mind, pay close attention to all that is said in the name of Christianity around us.  Examine the song lyrics, the testimonies, the preaching, the prayers, the heartfelt thanksgivings, the fist-pumps and exuberant fingers gesturing toward heaven, or even the celebrity acceptance speeches at awards shows, and reflect on this:

Who, really, are we crediting with the glory?

Well, too often, it’s us.  It shouldn’t be; but mistakenly, it is.

The angels announce Christ in Luke 2 with “glory to God in the highest,” assigning ““peace and goodwill” – not glory – to man on earth.  The good thief on the cross next to Jesus, by faith got a home in heaven, not release from his earthly suffering.  In John 17:24, Jesus speaks to God of “the glory you have given me.”

Jesus, always, gets the glory, and that glorifies God.

Our job is sharing the story, not sharing the glory.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends thanking God but not thinking we are God.