Spirituality Column #489
March 29, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

I read the Bible and believe it.

I’ve developed a relationship with Christ and know it.

Truth exists and I tell it.

Most folks I run into Sundays at church, and thankfully many more through the week – sinners, all of us – would cop the same plea: we get it, we know it, we tell it.  And we pray to be better at spreading the word, telling the story, forgiving our enemies, loving our neighbors, changing the world, honoring Christ and glorifying God.

These are the simple truths of a life with Jesus.

Lots and lots of folks dispute, dismiss or detest the Christian life basics of scriptural belief, divine relationship and exclusive, objective, Godly truth.  Modern secular inquiry sounds less like civil curiosity, “Why do you believe it?” and more like, “You must be an idiot to believe it!”  Not, “How do you know it?” but, “You can’t prove it!”  Not, “What is truth?” but a growling, hysterical, “That’s just your opinion!”

Society, academia, news media, the entertainment industry, political entities, unbelieving friends and relatives all may afford occasional lip service to Jesus, scripture, the church, and Christian faith.  Yet society-wide acceptance of unchanging truth before God is absent.  Instead we hear, “I don’t need church, or the Bible, or these myths about Jesus.  I’ll do it my own way, thank you.  I’m a good person and I’ll be just fine without messing it up with ‘religion.’  Don’t judge me.  Don’t tell me what to do.  Don’t think there is only one truth.”

I think that covers roughly half of what I see regularly on Facebook.

Actual “Christian life” truth requires a generally unwelcome and potentially destabilizing break with today’s post-modern intellectual status quo.   And I’m continually struck by how many Christian antagonists nonetheless expect Christian things – the perks – like blessings now and heaven later.

Christian heaven is certainly attractive; nothing else is remotely like it.  Read about it in the Bible and you will likely understand it less but believe it more.  Honestly, I’ve no concrete idea what heaven will be, but I do know it will be about God’s glory, not mine.  I also know that everyone has a shot at heaven – “…whoever believes in him shall not perish… (John 3:16)  – and that there is only one way in – “…no one comes to the Father except through me…” (John 14:6).  “Him” and “me,” by the way, are Jesus.

Folks challenge every bit of the Bible, and I believe every bit of it.

“Even the part about Jesus dying and coming back to life?” they mock.

“Especially that part,” I assert.

Why else would the rest of it matter?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) worries less about specifics and more about truth.

Spirituality Column #274
February 7, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

He’s Got the Whole World …
By Bob Walters

Is there anything anywhere that is not – somehow – attached to God?

For believers, the answer is easy: “No.” Everything was created by God, is attached to God, is finally answerable to God, and ultimately (if only in eternity) glorifies God. God is in and around everything, whether we understand it or not.

Believers’ identifying quote: “Praise God!”

For modernists, the answer is complex. Modernists – the philosopher modernists, we mean; the existentialists (“thought begins with man”) and secular humanists (rights of man) – generally allow for the existence of God but draw subjective lines of opinion and confinement around what is and is not in God’s purview.

Modernism presumes mankind and creation are capable of generating thought and things independently from God, making mankind responsible for truth, justice, and judging right and wrong. Modernists – the Enlightenment crowd, Darwinists, Evolutionists, etc. – cast a wary, often intellectually pitying eye on those poor dumb annoying believers. For man to be big, modernism insists God be made small.

Identifying quote: “God is a matter of opinion.”

For postmodernists, the answer is irrelevant because the question is invalid: God is merely an indefinable myth for the weak minded. Everyone worships something, and postmodernists seem to worship experiential, demonstrable, situational expedience filtered through power and money yielding an unprovable version of operable truth and reality in the here and now. There is no “good” or “right or wrong” or even “proof,” there is only “what is” and “whatever.” That’s it. Absent a more appropriate subspecies identifier, most of these folks typically are identified – hailed, really – as “intellectuals.”

Identifying quote: “Don’t tell me what to think.”

I’m comfortable that all intelligence, wisdom, truth, morality, judgment, the good, the bad, the ugly – all of it – goes back to God. This is not to knock human intelligence or intellectuals, but to recognize and celebrate God’s uniquely prospering and challenging gift to man – the brain in our head.

An old theological joke recounts how God, playing hide and seek with man, hid in the human heart figuring it would be the last place man would look. People the world over yearn to worship something, but use their “wisdom” to keep the real God at bay.

Jesus says we are to seek God (Matthew 6:33, “But first seek His Kingdom”), and that the greatest commandment is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). We may first feel God - sense Him - in our hearts, but it takes an engaged mind to appreciate that God is attached to every part of our lives.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com, www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com ) knows lots of smart people but doesn’t pray for their wisdom, he prays for God’s … with mixed results.