Spirituality Column #777

October 5, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

All Day Long

By Bob Walters

“Do you sense that Christ is yours all day long?” – Ray Stedman

Several years ago I piped up in a church Bible study group that I thought the key to knowing Christ and living with Jesus was to keep it simple.

The teacher looked horrified.

It’s been long enough ago that I remember barely any specifics of what we were discussing, nor the teacher’s barely audible response.  I only remember the teacher’s look. And it was a look that seemed mainly sad, and I don’t know if that was for my benefit or his.  We had generally, I think, been having one of those “How do we know we are Christian?” and “How do we know we are pleasing Christ?” type conversations.

I said something close to, and no more profound than, “Why worry about it?  The simplest thing is to trust Jesus.”  The teacher’s look and posture suggested, sternly, not only that my solution was inadequate, but a sadness that he knew he couldn’t do it.

Keep it simple, I mean. 

He trusted Jesus … but I sensed it was a great mental, spiritual, and emotional strain to accept whether he was “doing it right.”  He didn’t know, and when we don’t know, our joy in the Lord and comfort of the Holy Spirit grows thin and develops holes.

(As an FYI, for those of you who know me well, the teacher wasn’t George.)

Almost as many years ago (15? 16?) I got into the habit of reading Ray Stedman’s online daily devotional The Power of His Presence (link).  It is short, themed, free, focuses on one Bible book per month and one scripture passage per day.  Last month the book was 2 Corinthians, and the above quote appeared Sept. 24 suggesting we can sense Christ being ours “all day long.”  To me, that’s as simple as it gets.

All day long?  Yeah … you just live with Him.  I sort of liken it to a spouse who you don’t have to really think about to be with them in spirit all the time, because you just are.  Who forgets they are married?  Who doesn’t weigh their daily decisions and actions in consideration of their spouse?  Or their kids?  Or career or commitments?

Christ should be no different, except that Christ should be first.  I recently read a note somewhere that said a great marriage focuses on Christ, a good marriage focuses on your spouse, and a bad marriage focuses on yourself.  Any relationship on any terms can be trying, but Jesus being a part of our intimate, all-day-long daily life eliminates the need to go back to the Lord in prayer, saying, “Now where was I?”

You’re just there, and you live in your faith and in His light and truth.  The point isn’t that one’s life is easy, or without sorrow and challenges.  The point is the abiding bedrock trust in Jesus that leads one through life’s complications.  We may wonder, “What am I going to do?” Or, “What is Jesus going to do?”  Fair questions, but the simplest path to joy is knowing Jesus is right there at our sides all the time.

All we have to do is invite Him in, with love for Him and others.

If you let it, it’s as simple as that … all day long.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) offers this link to the 9/24 Stedman devotional The Simplicity Of Christ (2 Cor 11:3-15).  Also, Bob is now reading “Seeing is Believing” by scientist Michael Guillen (see column #776) and loving it.  Highly recommended!

Spirituality Column #776

September 28, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Welcome Aboard

By Bob Walters

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

Myself being a late-comer to faith in Christ I have perhaps a heightened compassion for those whose faith is bound up in the small and tight space of science.

I was never a scientist – not even close – but I have lots of beloved friends, family, and acquaintances who are.  Some live in faith; some don’t.  They cover the spectrum of having wide open and robust faith, no faith, some faith, seekers, no interest, lifelong believers, and never-in-a-million-years ”nones.” 

There are scientists I attend worship with every week, and some who would never open a Bible or darken a church door.  Some are all-in.  Some are curious, some sneer.  Some are respectful but distant: maybe embarrassed by the practices and optics of what a Sunday morning in church looks like or says about them.

What I accept is that their faith is their own business.  I can explain my faith to them (1 Peter 3:15), but I can’t explain their faith to them.  Sharing faith in Christ – with others – is a special and mysterious bond I never understood the first 47 years of my life.  It is not a bond I can imagine being conjured or forged in a scientific lab.

Scientists are on my mind this week because of a new book by Michael Guillen, “Believing is Seeing, A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith. Name ring a bell?  He has multiple PhDs, taught at Harvard, and was an Emmy winning science editor and reporter for ABC News.

I love Guillen’s story even before reading the book (which I ordered): a Harvard atheist discovers no explanation for the expansive, invisible world other than the very hand of God.  Guillen explains that as an atheist and scientist he was constricted to materially understanding the totality of all things as limited by their physical nature. He was wrong.

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal Houses of Worship editorial feature Why Atheists Need Faith (link), Guillen described, briefly, how his intellect grew beyond science and how among world religions and philosophies, he landed amid Christianity.

I’m one to follow Jesus more than to “follow the science.”  Jesus doesn’t change, and science always does.  Our culture wants to postulate that science, i.e., “seeing is believing,” will somehow, can somehow, replace God.  But that’s nonsense; science helps to reveal God.  I notice the Bible is big on Why, but not How.  And I believe God bequeathed us science to search for Him and discover His “How.”  Believing is seeing. 

G.K. Chesterton noted in his 1908 “Orthodoxy” that “every circle is infinitely round, but there is tyranny in its circumference.”  Translated, any field of study – law, science, philosophy, etc. – defines its size, breadth, reach, and scope by what it allows itself to imagine.  Minus God, human enterprise and purpose shrink to nothingness. 

Guillen observed that while the physical world is limited, the spiritual world is not. “Faith is the foundation of the entire human experience,” he writes.  “Our faith in spiritual reality drives us to seek treatments for diseases, to create works of art, music and architecture, and to see life as divine creation, not an accident of nature.”  Right on.

Polls meant to discourage cultural attitudes toward faith are no match – ever – for a human heart, mind, and soul that grasp Jesus Christ.  Welcome aboard, Dr. Guillen.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will likely have more to say after reading the book.

Spirituality Column #775

September 21, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Where Seldom is Heard …   

By Bob Walters

“… God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:19

Pam and I recently visited family at a favorite old haunt in northern Michigan: Mackinaw City. It was my boyhood summer home and my parents are buried there.

Time was short over the long weekend, but relaxation was bountiful, the weather was perfect, and a schedule was non-existent.  One of my favorite things is to visit small churches when we travel and I thought it might be fun to go to one in town not far from our old lakeside home.  But … I wound up not going.

I looked up the church online to see who the preacher was and discover any info about the congregation, doctrines, etc. This one was promising; it was a traditional Bible-based church with an obviously seasoned and able pastor.  I love those guys! But his sermon series was on “Discouragement,” and my enthusiasm waned.

Everything I read about Jesus in the Bible leads me to believe that my Christian walk is blessed by the encouragement of Jesus, not to be encumbered by the plentiful discouragement of the world, let alone a litany of discouragement from the pulpit.

“But you have to face up to the world, Bob!”  And I say … no, not like that.  Satan dishes out all the discouragement he can toward Christ specifically.  And I don’t agree with why churches (this isn’t the only one) feel the need to catalogue the world’s discouragement as an argument for the love of Jesus and our salvation in Christ. 

Why not just preach the encouraging message of Christ?  I can get a week’s worth of worldly discouragement from five minutes of any show on Fox News … and – trigger warning – I tend to agree with their slant on things. 

The pulpit message of Christ can be uplifting, should be uplifting, is uplifting.  When He faced the “discouragement” leveled at him by the Pharisees, Jesus knew the grace and love of God.  He also possessed the perseverance of His own mission, obedience, and love.  Jesus never lost sight of His purpose, which was to save the world, not gripe about it.  Our purpose is to accept His saving gift and glorify God.

It’s a legitimate if mysterious question to ponder: Was / is God “discouraged” by the sin of the world, the work of Satan, the gross disobedience of Israel, the death of His only Son, broken churches, heresies, or a largely disbelieving world? I won’t guess on that one, but I am sure God never doubts His own righteousness, purpose, or love.

I believe that the body of Christ – His church – should never purpose to scare or depress people enough about the world so that they crowd fearfully into a small space with no choice but Christ.  How much better when we see the glory and purpose of Jesus, fall in love with him, and freely choose to be in faithful relationship with Him?

This side of heaven we will never encounter a world where we seldom hear a discouraging word, but discouragement is no way to tell the story of Jesus.

I’ll never know what the nice preacher at the small church up north was going to say, but I do know that alienation and discouraging words come naturally into our fallen worldly lives.  In any case, my Home on the Range is the encouraging word of Jesus.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes the Good News of Jesus.  That’s true media. 

Spirituality Column #774

September 14, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Can’t Buy Me Bread …    By Bob Walters

“And give us this day our daily bread…” – from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:11)

“I am the bread of life.” – Jesus, John 6:35

The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John has Jesus, at a mountain along the seashore of Galilee, miraculously feeding “the 5,000” not just their “daily bread” but also a generous ration of fish to go with it.

Later in chapter 6 we read Jesus’s critique of what He saw in the people who ate, who then followed Him the next day, and what He was really trying to teach them.  We’ll go into that in a minute, including comparisons with God’s provision of manna in the desert hundreds of years earlier to the Israelites escaping Egypt.  But let’s notice first a few often lost aspects of this miracle meal on the mountainside in John 6.

You may see other minutiae, but I noticed these.

1.    Verse 4, “The Passover Feast was near.”  The Gospels teach that Jesus IS the new Passover, the salvation of life, not just for the Israelites but for all mankind.  Jesus throws His own feast of a kind with the bread and fish.

2.    Verse 5, the disciples ask Jesus, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”  In verses 6 and 7 we see a) Jesus was testing his disciples with that question, and b) Philip responding that it would take “eight months wages,” an exorbitant sum. Jesus is trying to teach them the lesson that some things cannot be bought; His bread is eternal and of faith, not for purchase.

3.    Verse 8 has Andrew, who is always introducing people to Jesus, introducing the young boy who has “five small barley loaves and two small fish.” Andrew’s news is quickly tempered by his own doubt, “but how will we feed so many?”

4.    Funny, we never hear anything more about the boy who donated his lunch.  You’d think somebody would have thanked him.

5.    Perhaps the lesson is akin to that of the tiny mustard seed from which great plants grow.  Jesus turns this small boy’s personal sacrifice into a giant blessing for the entire assemblage.  Never doubt what Jesus can do with the gifts we give, no matter how small.  In His multiplication is our joy.

6.    And, leftovers … verse 13 notes that they “filled twelve baskets … with pieces of the five barley loaves.”  Huh?  Why was no fish left over?  No idea.

Anyway, the people ate, recognized the miracle, and Jesus left before He let them crown him King by force (verse 15).  Notice that not a word of what Jesus said to the crowd – another significant and divine sermon on the mount? – is recorded.  I think that’s because the lesson here isn’t about what Jesus said to them, but what the crowd selfishly, foolishly, merely, expected of Jesus: to fill their stomachs, not their souls.

Note, the people were following the miracle, not the savior.  They liked the free lunch, but missed the eternal point about the bread of life by faith. This is the whole point of John 6:25-59, “I am the bread of life.”  Jesus promises life eternal, every day.

God’s desert manna was a one-day meal deal; the Israelites had to trust God day by day for another provision.  Jesus is teaching that His provision and gift – His bread – is eternal, it won’t rot like manna, and the bread of Jesus is not for sale; it’s for love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) remembers the Beatles’ song, Can’t Buy Me Love.

Spirituality Column #773

September 7, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Oceans and Elephants

By Bob Walters

“The divine religions are like oceans. They have different names, but are all part of the same Sea!” – Facebook meme posted by a doctrinally challenged Christian friend.

It started out innocently enough but, it’s Facebook. Silliness inevitably followed.

So, mea culpa. 

Another friend on Facebook had recently shared an American religious survey that reveals an alarming trend of modern “born again believers”: upwards of 60 percent believe in “many roads” to heaven and the Kingdom of God.  We shake our heads.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” says Jesus in John 14:6, and that’s authority enough for most of us.  We have freedom to swim anywhere we want, and name the ocean anything we want, but salvation in any ocean has but one name, and that name is Jesus Christ.

Religions are not the same … that’s why they are “different.”  It is as uneducated a statement as anyone can make to assert that religions “are all the same.”  They have similar trappings – scripture, altars, priests, buildings, doctrines – but distinctly different promises, demands, and endings.  Jesus Christ crucified, dead, buried, risen Son of God, sitting at the right hand of the Father inviting us to heaven, is Christian.  Period.

When it comes to “religious surveys,” I consider Jesus pretty immune from their assertions.  A survey isn’t going to knock Jesus off His throne, God out of His Kingdom, or the Spirit away from divine truth.  Humans – all of us – make plenty of mistakes with assorted behaviors and opinions, but I never panic about the Godly truth of Christ.

And in trusting God’s truth, it is pointless to panic about man’s errant opinions.

My response – yes, on Facebook – to the survey was to offer a ponderance on why people who deny, disavow, or displace Jesus in this life are nonetheless interested in going to – or assume they deserve to be in – Heaven with Jesus for all eternity.  If you don’t exalt Jesus in this life, why would you want to be with Him in the next?

I pray for all souls to come to Christ, but in freedom, many don’t.  After some further Fb discussion, my dissenting friend popped up with the above meme about the divine religions and oceans.  The reader may here decide which “religions” are included.

I’m reminded of the old story of the elephant and how, depending on which part of the elephant a blindfolded person happens to grab, there will be great disparity of thought on what the overall object is.  Hold the elephant’s trunk?  It must be a snake.  It’s leg?  Maybe it’s a tree.  An ear?  Perhaps it’s a bird’s wing.  If the elephant is sitting on you, one may think it a static though murderous rock.  The essential truth is missed.

The true ocean of salvation is Jesus Christ, and the reality of the whole elephant is far more significant than the divisions and imaginings of its various parts. Let’s not drown in a heretic’s ocean of false religious expectations, or imagine the truth of Christ to be just one tent in a silly circus of elephants and other amusements.

To those who would invent their own heaven, don’t; Jesus already has His and it’s the only one available.  In grace – in the name of Jesus Christ – we are all invited.

It’s all we need, but we mustn’t reject the name.  That’s the elephant in the room.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will post this on Facebook and see what happens.

 Spirituality Column #772

August 31, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Community Effort

By Bob Walters

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.  …  And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” – Acts 2:42, 47

Twenty years ago today I didn’t know Jesus. 

But 20 years ago this week, Sept. 2, 2001 – a Sunday – Jesus found a very surprised me sitting in church in Indianapolis.  It’s an old story I love to tell.

In August of 2001 my then-8^th grade son Eric asked, at the dinner table, “How come we don’t go to church?”  The kids on his junior high school bus in Carmel, Ind., had been talking about which churches they went to, and Eric simply wondered why we didn’t.  I hadn’t been to church on a Sunday by choice since I was an Episcopal altar boy about Eric’s age, fully 30 years earlier.

But … kid wants to go to church?  Let’s take him to church. 

Here I leave out a big chunk of the story, but Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001, we came through the door of East 91^st Street Christian Church, dropped Eric and his younger brother John off in what to me was a surprisingly and unexpectedly welcoming and nice youth area, and then headed to the service.

Let me be clear: I was not looking for Jesus.  I wasn’t looking for anything, except to fulfil my son’s desire to experience “church.”  And here we were; so, mission accomplished.  But when I got into the service, I found something else surprising and unexpected … and it was the people; it was the church. 

Jesus wasn’t sitting up front with a bait box, hooks, trout creel, and tissues  No … I saw hundreds of friendly, polite, happy people, obviously drawn together in a freedom, love, purpose, and joy that was both totally alien to me but strangely, unexpectedly, and immediately recognizable.  I wanted to know more, and the Spirit met me right there, with a peace and a promise in my heart that God would take my faith seriously. 

The Spirit sealed the deal with the gentle, happy tears on my cheeks; assuring deliverance of that holy promise.  It was my “Awake Date” – the day I awoke in the Spirit. I was baptized three months later.  It was the church, not sacrifice, that got me.

My point is that our communion we share as believers is one of love and joy in the purpose and service of glorifying God by sharing the truth of Jesus Christ, together, in fellowship.  The bread and cup of communion, to me, represent fellowship and life, moreso than a broken body of punishment and the shed blood of death.

Our sins are terrible, and Jesus’s sacrifice was terrible.  But Jesus instructed his disciples to break bread in fellowship with Him and each other, and Jesus called the cup “the blood of the New Covenant” … for Jesus is the Covenant of life, love, faith, sacrifice, joy, truth … and eternal hope.

I give thanks to the global body of believers for their fellowship, and thank the Lord for the life to which we are restored by his blood.  It’s a community effort.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) used this church fellowship story as a communion meditation at E91 this past Sunday.  We often meet His church before we meet Jesus. Btw, Sept. 2, 2001, just happened to be the day E91 celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the ministry of Russ Blowers, who became a dear friend as he was to everyone who knew him.  Russ had a way of helping people open up to the Spirit … together.

Spirituality Column #771

August 24, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

My Favorite Place to Be

By Bob Walters

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.” – Ephesians 2:4-5

“God is in control” and “God has a plan” – we hear it all the time – but God also gives us in this life freedom to challenge His control and the autonomy to disrupt His plans. Why would He do that?

What God wants – as He searches for us – is for us to freely find Him.  If love were not so precious, God could coerce us to find Him, gather to Him, and obey Him. But this God of love knows that only love based in our free will that leads us to choose to love others more than ourselves is the true divine love; that’s His love.

We are to give selflessly for God’s glory, rather than take selfishly in our greed.

That’s the part of our human existence we call life.  Need an example?  How about, Jesus came for everyone, but not everyone comes to Jesus?  Whatever God’s control or plans or provision for our well-being, our ignoring them, in the end, only hurts us. God’s righteousness will be true no matter what we do.  Ours depends on His.

God gives us freedom and autonomy, I believe, to seek and find Him, our Creator, in His loving, perfect, glory and life, not to “find ourselves” in our earthbound morass of pride, passions, fear, and death.  We properly fear God in His judgment only when we don’t completely trust the presence of His mercy.  When we do trust God – and I don’t mean a little bit and on our own terms of “God, do something for me,” but on the grand and eternal scale of “I am the Lord thy God” – what we discover is the comfort of His love and mercy, and the trust to let go of our fear of His wrath and judgment.

God abounds in mercy, and His mercy is why we can know peace.

As Paul so accurately frames God’s mercy in the Ephesians verse above, sinful man can often only perceive God’s mercy as an antidote or a “pass” for our behavioral, human transgressions.  A perfect life would be our ability to do exactly as God says, all the time.  It’s like following the directions on a cake mix … follow the directions, and you have a cake.  Follow your feelings … and you’ll have a mess.  Then, if you’re at the mercy of man … good luck.  God’s mercy won’t bake the cake; but it provides one with the good reason and confidence to follow directions, i.e., God’s truth.

A good Christian friend reminded me over that weekend that God “brings some low, and exalts others” (Psalm 75:7), and that we are “at God’s mercy.” And I thought, “Praise God for that!”  Most Bible verses about “mercy” refer to our transgressions in the behavioral realm, not the low moments and seasons of health distress, injustice, abuse, or other calamity traceable to human fallenness but not to our own sin.

Hebrews 4:16 instructs, “Let us then with confidence draw near the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.”  In any case or in any season, if I am at God’s mercy and am blessed to know that God is full of mercy, then “at God’s mercy” is exactly where I want to be.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) trusts God’s love and is thankful for God’s mercy.