Spirituality Column #428
January 27, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“…when you walk with God, every day is an adventure.” – Ray Stedmen, preacher

We are pretty much stuck here in the world.

Not stuck in the same perpetual place, mind you, but stuck in the realm of the world.  We can work hard and change our circumstances for the better.  We can falter and experience hardship.  We can succeed or fail and, quite possibly, not know why.

“Luck of the draw,” we might surmise.  Que sera, sera.  Whatever will be, will be.

The radically different perspective of living a life in Christ is how “unstuck” we can become if we stop keeping score of this life’s ups and downs.  A worldly life is life with a scorecard, a personal scorecard that tells “me” how “I’m” doing.  Whether one measures faith, family, friends, career, education, citizenship, service, honors, fame or – of course – money, we remain stuck in the metrics of worldly results.

Whether we’re talking about a billionaire on a yacht or a tribesman in a hut, that’s still a mighty tight, insignificant range of “different” on the infinite, eternal, cosmic, divine scale of God’s measuring stick, because God doesn’t have a measuring stick.  God has glory, and love, and it’s our joy and really our purpose to participate in that on God’s great big terms, not our finite earthly terms.  When it comes to our relationship with God, we have to re-imagine the whole idea of “growth.”

Growth is especially crippled when we prioritize “measuring” our faith.  Measurement as the goal itself takes the fun, sincerity, freedom and love out of a relationship with Jesus because one’s relationship here is with the measurement, not with Jesus.  If we think we are more holy, or have grown, because we can check off more things we’ve done – went to church twice in one week, spent time reading the Bible three times in a week instead of two, worked in a soup kitchen two nights instead of one, etc. – that’s not a sign of growth; that’s a sign that we are measuring the wrong things.

The radically transformed, changed-heart Christian life – a life focused on deep relationship with the One True Almighty God through the love of His Son Jesus Christ animated by the wisdom, security and peace of the Holy Spirit – frees us from worldly scorecards.

Jesus’s own disciples wanted to “grow” in stature by being the “greatest” disciple (Luke 9:46).  They wanted a metric for how they could know they were greatest.  Jesus corrected them.  His radical message was that to be the greatest, you have to love “being the least.”

Growing in Christ means becoming less in – and more unstuck on – yourself.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) enjoys Ray Stedman’s daily Bible study. 

Spirituality Column #427
January 20, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“And so we will be with the Lord forever.” – Paul, 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

It’s easy to lose perspective.

In modern humanity’s daily drumbeat madness of schedules, responsibilities, trials, distractions, temptations, opportunities, intrusions, chores, mistakes, disasters, secular invective, political correctness, endless social media and the 24-hour news cycle, how in the world are we supposed to do what Paul clearly instructs a few verses later, in 1 Thessalonians 5:17: “Pray continually”?

Some folks are lucky if they can remember to breathe continually.

It’s easy to default to the errant “Back Then” viewpoint, as in, “Back Then in biblical times they were less busy and had more time to pray.”  Nonsense.  “Back then,” they were plenty busy just trying to survive.  But mankind’s daily busyness, in any era, isn’t what Paul is talking about.  Paul is talking about the eternity of our relationship with God in Jesus Christ. He is talking about our personal, ongoing, perpetual identity in Jesus.  He is talking about unceasing prayer as accepting God’s unceasing invitation to share in His eternal life.

We manage our time wrong, and cheat our hearts, if we look at prayer as a “start and stop” enterprise.  Prayer is an eternal relationship builder, not a temporal checklist item.  It’s an expander, not a limiter.  Sure, a functioning Christian finds great joy in the quietness of dedicated prayer time.  Most of us crave the fellowship and communion of praising God together in a worship service.  Carving out time enough to study the Bible, share the faith, serve others, and actively participate in the body of Christ – the Church – is a priority.

But greater still is the joy – actually the completeness of our joy (John 16:22) – of living in the unceasing continuity of Jesus; of identifying and aligning each breath we take with the truth of Christ.

The Lord’s Prayer, for example, is God’s invitation to do just that.  It’s not a request list, a fix-it inventory, an apology, or a mere plea for here-and-gone forgiveness.   It is Jesus’s way, God’s way, of inviting the disciples and then all mankind into God’s divine life.  N.T. Wright calls the Lord’s Prayer the “true Exodus” prayer of God’s people, opening up God’s long promised new world and summoning people to share it.

It is incorrect to think we have to be idle to be “praying.”  Our Christian identity is a prayer.  The very name of Jesus is a prayer, because “you will have life by the power of His name.” (John 20:31).

Don’t just say your prayers.  Be your prayers.

In Christ.

All the time. 

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  Short, sweet, and often.

Spirituality Column #426
January 13, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life …” – Jesus, John 10:27

“Be still, and know that I am God.” – Psalm 46:10

Our great mistake in prayer often is our own big mouth; or even in silence, the propagation of our own personal agenda.

Has your prayer ever sounded like this? – “God, here’s what I need.  Here’s what I want.  Here’s what I’m thankful for.  Here’s what I’m sorry for.  Here’s what I think is great about You.  Now, let’s review that stuff I want You to do regarding my needs and the stuff I think You should fix.  Got it?  Great.  In your name I pray.  Amen.”

That’s not a proper conversation with God.  That’s not supplication to a Lord and Savior.  That’s not getting out of our own way long enough to allow the holy grace of Jesus to calm us, transform us, lead us, and help us.  That’s not anywhere close to the sheep/shepherd dynamic Jesus suggests.  That’s not listening.

John chapter 10 lays out the importance of listening for the voice of the shepherd.  There are plenty of “I’ll do whatever you ask”-type verses in the Bible – Mark 11:24, Luke 11:9, John 14:13, etc. – toward which we gravitate when we want God to scratch one of our fallen-world itches.  Nothing wrong with that … Jesus invites it.

But what God wants – what the existence of the Father-Son-Holy Spirit Godhead tells us – is relationship.  That’s the source of His glory.  That’s the importance and primacy of love.  That’s why “God is Love” occupies the entirety of 1 John.  Love isn’t filling out a divine order form on a prayer pad; it’s building a relationship through the give and take of communication, action, trust, and faith.  When God invites prayer, whether through the Psalms, through Jesus, the Holy Spirit or however it may come about, God is not saying, “How can I help?”  He already knows that.

God is saying, “How can we be closer?”

Listening is the core not only of great prayer but of the joy and peace we experience in the presence of and relationship with Jesus Christ.  The fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden broke our relationship with God, but it didn’t break God’s love.  The proof of that is Christ on the Cross, enduring death to save us from death; covering our sin to restore humanity’s glory as God’s image.

How should we listen?  With enthusiasm, quietness, love, and faith.

Be still, and hear the simple sincerity of the Shepherd’s voice.  Start prayer there.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays for the discipline to just shut up once in a while … and listen.

Spirituality Column #425
January 6, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“Quaeramus inventium” … let us search after Him who has been found. – St. Augustine, Tractate 63, commentary on John 13:33

The rhetorically gifted country pastor told a hilarious joke about a Saturday night drunk who, Sunday morning, was trying to find his way home and instead stumbled into the middle of a rural creek-side baptism ceremony.  The hapless sot nearly drowned as he was repeatedly dunked and asked, each time, “Have you found Jesus?”

Finally, the drenched, bewildered tippler spit and wheezed, “I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for him!”

The dynamic pastor’s presentation was probably funnier than the joke itself.  But let’s consider this poor lush as an apt metaphor for the sin, fallenness, problems, pride, inconsistencies, strivings, shortfalls and even physical ailments that any one of us … actually, probably, every one of us … has encountered somewhere along the line.  Whether a life-long Christian, late-to-the-party believer (that’s me) or the possessor of a faith experience somewhere in-between, undoubtedly, the fact that we’re supposed to be looking for Jesus is on our radar.

But do we understand the much larger truth that we are supposed to keep looking for Jesus?  And the one truth larger than that: That Jesus is looking for us?

Psalm 69:32 coaches us, “… seek ye God, and your soul shall live.”  In Christ, God has come among us.  The infinite, eternal mystery has stepped into humanity and brought us a glimpse of the totality of God’s truth.  But we don’t see the totality of Christ, the Truth, or God’s glory all at once; we won’t see them completely in this life no matter how long we keep searching.  That’s because it is in the seeking, not the knowledge, that divine relationship is built.

We may be granted a momentary vision of the Christ, a revelatory experience that invites us to go forward in faith.  Yet if we fix our eyes and hearts on that fleeting vision, it limits Christ’s reign in our lives.

The Bible repeatedly describes Jesus not giving straight answers as to his identity.  Nathaniel, who famously asked if “anything good could come out of Nazareth,” met Jesus who said He had already seen him under a fig tree.  Nathaniel was dazzled.  Jesus had seen him, sought him, first.  But Jesus said to Nathaniel, “greater things than this thou shalt see.” (John 1:50)

The joy of the one-time vision must stimulate, not interrupt, the vision, truth, love, faith, hope and relationship growing in our lives.

Have you found Jesus?  Great.  Keep looking.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is reading “Jesus: A Dialogue with the Savior,” which quotes Augustine.  Brilliant book.  Btw, Bob used that baptism joke before but can’t remember when.

Spirituality Column #424
December 30, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

"The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost," Luke 19:10

Jesus arrived in time, space and humanity with a clear mission.  He came as fulfillment, truth, light, goodness, salvation and the only way to God.  He’s also the ultimate answer to the ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?

Take a good look.  HE is.

Jesus Christ, life’s author, presents humanity with the perfect answer in a complete package.  Jesus isn’t just an idea to make us go to church.  He’s not a myth to make us behave. He’s certainly not merely a “teacher” with good ideas and 2,000 years of mystically effective PR.  He’s the perfect image of God because He is God, in whose image man was created in freedom and love.

As we privately diddle with New Year’s resolutions aimed at fixing some small corner of our human experience (lose a few pounds, drop a bad habit, pick up a good book, etc.), there is a better, great big way forward into the New Year found in accepting and reaffirming our adoption in and relationship with Christ.

Don’t imagine it’s divinely glorifying to divide the enormity of God’s grace into bite-sized bits of self-improvement.  Don’t buy into the backwards, omnipresent, secular message that happiness is found within, and Jesus is something we can do without.  Jesus is the human example of what glorifies God.

We forget that our goal is to be human because we ourselves are so busy trying to be God.  We conclude Jesus isn’t God because He doesn’t always do what we want.  There is great competition for temporal glory among fallen mankind’s appetites and insecurities.  We know there is something bigger out there, and culture relentlessly suggests it is us.  No, it’s bigger than that.

In Christ I can endeavor to be fully human, because Jesus is fully human.  He’s also fully perfect because He is fully God.  I’ll fall short of perfection in this life because I’m a lost sinner, weakened by the vagaries of this fallen world and beset on all sides by a cultural message that holds secularism – faith’s opposite – to be profanely, mundanely and inanely “sacred.”  Large swaths of society consider sincere Christian sacredness – which is actually, truly and exclusively the province of the holiness, glory and love of God – to be naïve nonsense.

That’s backwards.  God’s sacredness is as real as secularism’s hollowness.  His glory is immensely and exactly the reverse of mankind’s fallenness.

In Christ, in humanity, in the New Year, go forward.

That’s our mission.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that respect for the individual resides in the humanity of Jesus, not the mechanisms of society.  Jesus seeks and saves.

Spirituality Column #423
December 23, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #422
December 16, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.” – Luke 2:9 (King James Version)

This familiar passage from the Christmas story in Luke 2 describes an angel appearing to shepherds the night Jesus was born.

Where our modern, sentimental Christmas observance imbued with today’s lightness and irreverence of commerce and non-religious pop culture mostly overwrites the infinite gravitas and universal significance of the incarnation of God, these shepherds were “terrified.”

That’s what “sore afraid” means.

Note closely that the shepherds’ reaction to the angel was not one of warm sentimentality, but of awestruck solemnity.  As the angel bade them “fear not” and announced the “good tidings of great joy” that “Christ the Lord” had been born, and “the heavenly host” suddenly showed up and praised the newborn king, these lowly shepherds immediately grasped the truth – with confidence and obedience – of what they had been told.  They didn’t doubt, or argue, or recoil in sustained terror.

They went “in haste” to see the baby Jesus, and then told “everyone what they had seen.”

The biggest event in the history of man – God becomes human to save us from our fallenness and reinstate our place in God’s eternal Kingdom – is announced at night on a remote hillside to a bunch of illiterate shepherds.  Of all the presumably more logical forums, venues and hierarchies where a divine declaration of this magnitude might be pronounced, it was to obscure, humble shepherds that the humble arrival of God’s son was made known.

The appearance of the “glory of the Lord” – whatever that actually looks like – evidently is what terrified the shepherds.  As the contemporary song lyric goes, “I can only imagine.”  But it’s instructive to note that the news of Jesus’ birth gave the shepherds comfort, curiosity, wonder and the confidence to go seek the Lord “in haste.”

With the news of the baby Jesus, the shepherds were told, essentially, of what we know today as Christmas.  Gospel writer Luke’s description is the only place in scripture that we see a celebration of the birth of Jesus: when the heavenly host – a multitude of angels – sings “Glory to God in the highest.”

We’ve made Christmas into a modern festival of sentimentality.  It’s nice.  We gather with family and friends.  We revel in our memories and traditions.  We exchange gifts and, hopefully, experience an extraordinary peace that mysteriously, wonderfully, permeates the season.  Much too often, we don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because the Bible doesn’t prescribe sentimentality.  It teaches us – implores us – to confidently seek Jesus Christ.  That’s the real lesson of Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is a lifelong sentimental sap.