CommonChristianity

Monday, July 21, 2014

401 - Some People Don't Get It

5:11 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #401
July 22, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Some People Don’t Get It

By Bob Walters

To me it is the most confounding of divine mysteries.

I can make lists all day long about what blocks people from faith in Christ, but I cannot come up with one convincing answer explaining the apparent randomness of who accepts Christ and who doesn’t.

For years I did not “get it.” Then one Sunday when I was 47 years old, sitting in a random church service, tears of awakening and conviction unexpectedly pooled in my eyes. I was awakened to how special Christ is, and convicted of how un-special I am. It’s trite, but true. I had been one smart, self-sufficient, well-traveled, intellectual and philosophical non-Jesus, non-church tour-de-force since my teen years. Those tears and their sincerity were as mysteriously random as it gets.

Other holy mysteries have more accessible explanations. Ask any priest, minister, pastor, elder or Sunday school teacher to define and defend the mystery of the Holy Trinity – one Almighty God in three distinct persons in eternal, unchanging yet somehow caring, creative community and love – and they can probably do it.

Ask why Jesus had to die on the cross to forgive our sins for the glory of God, and they can probably do it.

Ask why man and woman – Adam and Eve – stumbled so horribly in the Garden at the temptation of Satan to dishonor God and make the entire world – God’s entire Creation – fall into corruption, and they can probably do it.

Ask why we can believe the Bible, or why we should trust the Church, and they can probably do it.

It’s their job to explain that stuff.

But ask why some people come to Christ and some don’t, and sincere preachers will scratch their heads and say, “I wish I knew.”

John 3:16 says God sent Jesus, in love, to save us all, yet few find faith (Matthew 7:14) and, mysteriously, few are chosen (Matthew 22:14). So some get it, most don’t.

There are answers, of course, but they are as mysterious as the question. One is, “The Holy Spirit awakened in their soul.” Another is, “Because this soul is of the elect.” Yeah, but … why this soul, and not that soul?

Christians pray for family, friends, neighbors, the downtrodden and even our enemies to accept Christ, to share in the selfless love and unending faith of the Spirit of the New Covenant, joining the remembrance and communion of Christ in the family of God. Pleading for the unsaved – especially loved ones – can be the hardest part of Christian faith. With perseverance, we keep trying.

But still – why, and who, and when … ?

That’s a mystery.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes a big key to faith is trusting God with the mysteries.

Labels: Adam and Eve, Creation, fall, getting faith, Holy Spirit, John 3:16, Matthew 22:14, new covenant | 0 comments

Monday, July 14, 2014

400 - Some Things Don't Change

5:20 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #400
July 15, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Some Things Don’t Change

By Bob Walters

Change is a desired and celebrated component of Christian life.

“Things that don’t change are dead,” the saying goes. A rich, consequential Christian life necessarily will be filled with change – new challenges, new opportunities, new understandings, new missions, new people and often new places. Some changes are desperately hard, challenging our faith and shaking our trust. Some are so easy they undercut our faith by overwriting and obscuring our “need” for God.

A life of dull sameness, empty yearnings, or even recurring nightmares – but absent change – signals a hollow spot in the spirit. Conversely, there is a sense of newness, mystery and adventure that accompanies one’s daily life trusting in Christ and growing in faith. Change is hard to avoid; perseverance fills in the hollow spots.

Every time a believer goes to the Bible – the same old, unchanging Bible – he or she expects to see something new: a perspective previously not entertained, a phrase that comes alive, a connection formerly not noticed. That’s growth, that’s change, that’s good … and that’s dependable.

“Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds, because … testing of your faith develops perseverance,” says James 1:2-4. Perseverance develops maturity, and in maturity, James adds, we know the joy of the Lord “not lacking anything.”

Change can be soothing or unnerving … often the latter. Regardless, faith will help us find joy in the change, though joy is different from comfort and happiness. “Not lacking anything” doesn’t mean “I get everything I want.” We are to know and define joy in the completeness of our ability to focus on Christ and in our yearning to reflect and magnify the glory of God.

And that’s the point of the whole exercise: the unchanging glory, immensity, truth, love and completeness of God Almighty. From the beginning, the actions of God’s Kingdom were assigned to God’s Light and Word, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit’s job is to shine the light of God’s glory on Jesus Christ. Our job as humans – if we allow ourselves to invite and listen to the Holy Spirit – is to change our fallen-world attitudes and worldly wicked hearts into divine-light homing beacons. We also have a bigger job than that: understanding that it is our faith in Jesus Christ that glorifies God.

Fine and dandy that we are loved, saved, adopted, forgiven, welcomed into the Kingdom, seated on the throne, and will live forever amid the majesty of the One God Creator Almighty. Amen! But what we get, finally, isn’t the point.

God’s glory is the point.

And that does not change.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows “change” is a popular sermon subject. Once you understand God’s glory is supreme … don’t change that.

Labels: adventure, change, Christian life, God's glory, James 1:2-4 | 0 comments

Monday, July 7, 2014

399 - About those Unalienable Rights

6:30 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #399

July 8, 2014

Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

About those Unalienable Rights

By Bob Walters

“…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …” – Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, July 1776

“Rights” sure have been in the news a lot lately.

“Rights” are steadfast and assumed. “Rights” are what I deserve. “Rights” are American and not to be messed with. “Rights,” by golly, are endowed by our Creator.

So as society’s collective head explodes over competing ideas of rights – gay rights, marriage rights, gun rights, athlete rights, free speech rights, the Bill of Rights, my rights, your rights, civil rights – we are hearing a whole lot more about all these “rights” than about the Creator who endowed them.

When a Federal judge recently and singlehandedly struck down Indiana’s long-standing ban on gay marriage, one erudite fellow I know called it a victory – finally! – for “rights.” In looking at the media, he definitely is not alone in that sentiment. But it made me stop and ask: If rights are that big a deal, where do they really come from? And if rights do indeed come from the Creator – i.e., God – then what mechanisms allow us to invoke His supreme authority and eternal approval on these rights?

The answers are out there, obvious to discern and easy to find if we sincerely want them. They are Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and Church. But lately American secular “rights” have liberally and falsely assumed the authoritative weight of divine empowerment. Man increasingly skips over the part where the divine Creator actually IS the divine empowerment. What I’m hearing is, “I have rights! I don’t care what God says.” How twisted is that?

Thomas Jefferson enumerated the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While not exactly in the Bible, it is nonetheless remarkable. For men to then design a political system that guarantees, for the most part, the rights of the individual person over the whims and caprices of government is history’s greatest political achievement.

Argue all you want about who the Christian believers were and weren’t among the Founding Fathers. But to invoke “rights” endowed by a Creator they had to embrace the moral authority of the Bible as God’s word, and appreciate their personal obligation to honor the Creator. Responsibility to God and others is both the foundation and animating core of our freedom and rights.

Lately, mankind’s whims and caprices have become “rights.” The Bible is capriciously reinterpreted, rewritten, redacted, maligned or ignored to enable man’s worldly, temporal happiness to supersede the Creator God’s eternal glory.

“Rights” have divine authority only when they glorify God’s creation. That’s a truly unalienable rule.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that humans have done anti-Creator things since the beginning. That’s why mankind needs Jesus.

Labels: American, civil rights, Creator, Declaration of Independence, gay rights, media, rights, Thomas Jefferson, unalienable rights | 0 comments

Monday, June 30, 2014

398 - Thinking Like a Christian

8:22 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #398
July 1, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Thinking Like a Christian

By Bob Walters

The Bible tells us – plainly – that the New Covenant of Jesus Christ is founded in love, grace and faith.

That’s the New Testament. That’s Christianity. We are to focus on God and others in servant-hearted love. We are forgiven and freed from sin thanks to divine grace. Christianity has only one requirement: faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, Risen Christ, and Savior of Mankind. Believe that, and your life changes.

It couldn’t be simpler.

So why do churches routinely complicate Christianity with the Old Covenant, whose Law forces one to focus on the self by constantly asking, “Am I following the rules?” In the Law sin wasn’t forgiven; it was atoned for by sacrifices and works. A person’s faith was naked before God. God favored some, cursed others, confused many, chose a nation, provided commandments, laws, judges and kings, and, depending on which part of the Law a person happened to believe, implied salvation based on an unspecified formula of obedient righteousness.

The Old Testament is joyous to read once one understands that the whole point of the whole story is not the rules, but the coming Lordship and supremacy of Jesus Christ. The mistake made in modern Christian sermons is in cross-breeding the transactional, fearsome nature of the Old Testament with the grace-focused, sin-covering promise of the New Testament.

People try to explain the New Testament with the Old Law, and that’s exactly backwards: the New Testament reveals what God was up to in the Old Testament.

We learn that the Cross of Jesus Christ changed everything, except God. We discover what God intended for mankind the whole time, and what man needed to understand about himself before he could enter eternal relationship with God. Proper biblical teaching affirms that Christianity is about Christ, not about me.

The Law in the Old Testament was about what I do, who I am, and how I act in this life: i.e., entirely about “me.” Anyone carefully reading the Old Testament has to notice that if there is one, overriding lesson of the Old Covenant, it is that man is truly, truly terrible at following directions. Hence - God knows – the need for grace.

I love the Old Testament because it tells me about the character, faithfulness and person of God, the fallen nature of human beings, the glory of Creation, and the evil of Satan. It teaches that God is always faithful to his Word, not to man’s worldly desires.

Want wisdom, courage, strength, freedom and peace? Jesus Christ is our wisdom, courage, strength, freedom and peace. Always. The Holy Spirit tells us so.

Learn from the Old, but believe in the New.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thinks, and believes.

Labels: fallen nature, Grace, Holy Spirit, knowledge, Law, new covenant, Old Covenant, Satan, wisdom | 0 comments

Monday, June 23, 2014

397 - Lost Without a Compass

5:28 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #397
June 24, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Lost Without a Compass

By Bob Walters

Our society tends to worry about the wrong things because it no longer is very good at diagnosing humanity’s most basic problems.

For 50 years America has systematically thrown public money at private problems and can’t understand why inner cities can’t educate their children, and places like Detroit have all but shut down. We are afraid to notice that Great Society giveaways initiated in the 1960s coincide precisely with the takeaway of school prayer. More money and less prayer led to an implosion of moral misdirection.

As the Bible has further disappeared from public life and education, the bedrock notion of the existence of right and wrong, of good and evil, of truth and lies, has dwindled into a sniveling cultural narrative that starts and stops with “Don’t judge.”

It’s secularism’s favorite Bible quote. Only a small bit of society any longer accurately comprehends where, how and why Jesus said, “don’t judge.” I like Brent Riggs’ explanation: “Luke 6:37 (“judge not lest you be judged”) tells us not to be hypocrites, not to judge without compassion or understanding, and not to judge based on our own standards rather than God’s.”

Did you catch that? “God’s standards.”

We think “don’t judge” means “invent your own standards.” No. It means God’s standards are real, authoritative, and supreme so don’t invent your own standards. God’s standards are in the Bible, not in government programs or humanist intellectual inclination. Morality is not about “going to church” and doing “the Christian thing.” It’s reading, knowing and acting on the Bible.

Society currently, bafflingly, assigns top moral priority to homosexuality, sexual freedom, gay marriage, and every non-traditional family structure. Christians are tricked into equivocating on “sexual sin.” Non-believers ignore “sin” entirely. Lacking biblical knowledge, our family foundations and civic morality are disintegrating in sin we can’t recognize.

Since 9/11 we’ve worried about Islam and its dramatically different religious and cultural order. My biblical mentor George Bebawi points out that Western culture is threatened less by Islam than its own biblical ignorance and rampant secularism.

“The Bible” TV miniseries (which morphed into this year’s movie “Son of God”) was birthed because its producers recognized the dearth of Bible education in schools. My wife Pam recently retired from 34 years of teaching public school English and noted the change in basic Bible knowledge students brought to class. In the 1970s, most had some idea of Noah and the flood. In recent years, most students had none.

The Bible is a moral compass pointing to the love and truth of Jesus Christ. Without Jesus, we are morally lost. Without a compass, we will stay lost.

That is society’s most basic problem.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) invites comment, and encourages good judgment.

Labels: Don't Judge, Great Society, Islam, Luke 6:37. Judge Not, moral compass, moral nation, morality, school prayer, society | 0 comments

Monday, June 16, 2014

396 - The Only Thing Jesus Ever Was

8:20 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #396
June 17, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

The Only Thing Jesus Ever Was

By Bob Walters

We Christians believe Jesus is everything: life, love, joy, truth, knowledge and good. He is trustworthy, challenging and unchangeable. He is yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever.

Jesus is fully God and fully man. He is eternally present in the Kingdom, and eternally present tense when spoken of. Jesus is today’s news, whatever day it is.

A sermon on the radio recently offered an interesting point. Of all the things Jesus is, present tense, there is only one thing that Jesus ever was, past tense:

He was dead.

That struck me as a great thing to remember, containing great perspective, and a great way to explain our Christian faith.

We often hear in our churches that the thing that makes Jesus Christ different from every other philosopher, theologian, priest, king, poet, pastor, hero or religious leader in history – and “in history” means they lived as a human being – is that all the rest of them are dead.

Are dead. Still dead. Gonna’ stay dead. When we humans who are alive today pass on – and that’s all of us – we too will stay dead to this human realm.

That’s the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. He didn’t stay dead. Jesus died for our sins. He died to defeat death. He died to assure the eventual and eternal fellowship of all believers in Him to join Him in Heaven – alive – with God Almighty. Jesus died and was resurrected so we could share, trust, and have firm hope in God’s promise of our eternal relationship with Him and our adoption into His Kingdom. Jesus Christ is the way and the reason – “the way, and the truth, and the life” says John 14:6 – that God’s glorious Creation, now fallen, can return to God in glory forever.

When someone, perhaps our child or our neighbor, asks why we believe in Jesus, we can say with full confidence, “Because He died, but now is alive.”

When the world urges us to believe that “all gods are the same,” we can assert truthfully, “No, Jesus Christ – God and man – did what no one else has done: died and returned to life. He lives forever with authority over all things.”

When the libertine insists he must “believe in Himself,” with gracious tact we must affirm that when he, the libertine, dies, he will stay dead.

Only in Jesus Christ will man find life eternal, because Jesus is the only man with eternal life. Yes, Jesus was dead. That He is alive is the best news of all time.

Be sure to tell a friend, and to forgive an enemy. Jesus is alive and watching.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that our faith can die, but Jesus cannot. He’s been there, done that.

Labels: dead, eternal, Jesus is alive, John 14:6, Kingdom, staying dead | 0 comments

Monday, June 9, 2014

395 - Worthy Opposition

4:50 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #395
June 10, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Worthy Opposition

By Bob Walters

We all wonder if we are “worthy.”

That’s easy … we’re not.

But still, consider for a moment the space “worthiness” occupies in Christian teaching.

We encounter “worthiness” in sermons, scripture and hymns. “Are you worthy?” “Worthy is the Lamb.” “Jesus alone is worthy.” We are fascinated by what’s worthy and what’s not.

In this context, “worthy” means living up to God’s standards. It means worthy of being saved into eternal heavenly fellowship with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and all the saints. It means worthy of God’s love and grace, and worthy of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Worthy means we’ve attained the perfection with which God created us. Worthy means equal in stature to the absolute truth of God’s Creation. The Bible, authoritatively, is a treatise on what’s worthy and what’s not.

Final Jeopardy answer: “Jesus is; we aren’t.” Question: “What is ‘worthy’?”

Modern culture, having jumped largely outside biblical authority, is addicted to asserting “I’m worth it!” having convinced itself that worth is a human commodity. Fallen man rarely contemplates his worthiness in God’s eyes because he is tricked by the mirage of worldly worthiness in his own eyes.

That’s what Satan did to Adam and Eve. He convinced them they were worthy of God’s knowledge. Turns out God’s knowledge, in the hands of mankind, leads to death (Genesis 3). Satan knew it, and reveled in his trickery. He’s reveled in it ever since.

We have a special problem with all this today because over the last couple hundred years individual freedom and human worth have been codified into the articles of civil organization (e.g., the U.S. Constitution). For thousands of years prior, any individual life just wasn’t worth that much to society at large. Our culture – ostensibly, anyway – finally has it right that there exists divinely Created, intrinsic worth in each individual. But we have it wrong, thinking that true worth resides anywhere but in God, or that we have worth in any way but through Christ.

Secular man errantly celebrates “self-esteem,” not worthiness. Plenty of popular preaching promotes the narcissistic theology of “God created me to be great!” That ignores biblical truth that God created us to praise Him, not the other way around. Other divisive preaching invokes guilt, digging out Old Testament this-for-that legalism which undercuts simple faith and problematically ignores the grace of Jesus Christ.

Grace isn’t a trade. It’s a gift, not a transaction. Our worthiness isn’t in our work or self-centered illusions; it resides exclusively in the grace, truth and sacrifice of Christ.

And it’s worth an eternity.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that man generally prefers rules because he can judge rules, but not grace. Grace is God’s business.

Labels: Adam and Eve, Grace, legalism, Satan, self-esteem, U.S. Constitution, worthiness, worthy | 0 comments

401 - Some People Don't Get It

400 - Some Things Don't Change

399 - About those Unalienable Rights

398 - Thinking Like a Christian

397 - Lost Without a Compass

396 - The Only Thing Jesus Ever Was

395 - Worthy Opposition

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