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 #488
March 22, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

If Jesus wasn’t “really” dead on the cross, didn’t arise from a real grave, and isn’t alive and real today, then there’s no point going to church this Sunday.

Never mind what the Bible says, the church says, your pastor/priest/minister says, your family says, the media says, or popular culture says.  Either Easter is exactly what it is purported to be – a celebration of the resurrected Jesus Christ, God’s own son revealing the truth of salvation not only and importantly for mankind but for the entire created cosmos – or it’s a big waste of time and the world’s greatest lie to boot.

Thing is … I don’t know exactly who’s time it would be that we are wasting.  Without a loving God, a redeeming Savior and a Holy Spirit informing and animating our hearts, minds and strength, it doesn’t matter much what we do with our time, intellect, industry or efforts.  It’d be simply every man, woman and child uselessly for themselves.

The guy who titled the rock ‘n roll album, “Nothin’ Matters and What if it Did?” would actually be entirely right instead of entirely wrong.

It takes Godly – and God-inspired – courage to trust without reservation the truth that life matters only because God matters.  That’s the only reason why our time in this life is precious.  Get any of that wrong – God, time, truth, life, precious – and existence is diminished quickly, dreadfully, toward self-serving survivalism and hopelessness.   Years, minutes and seconds are reduced to irreconcilable dead-ends; our enthusiasms stripped of purpose.  Joy is vaporous and thin; life is restricted, short and just ends.

Include God in the equation – not because we’ve made Him up out of desperation but because He’s already there and it’s our job not to ignore Him – time becomes something that suddenly and ironically both stretches into eternity and makes this particular moment something not to waste.  God has given us much more than a story; He has bestowed upon us an aggregate, eternal gift in Jesus Christ – life, truth, hope, forgiveness, time, purpose and love.

That’s why it doesn’t matter so much what any one person or any one thing says about Easter; what matters is who Jesus really is, what His death and resurrection really accomplished, and how this unprecedented and unique act of God’s faithfulness to mankind really changed everything about humanity, history and hope.

Every Easter, and every day, my prayer is that the faint, flickering faith of hopeful doubters who have heard the Easter story would grow from wishful, wondering wistfulness into confident, compassionate Christian witness.

Easter, God, Jesus, resurrection, salvation, faith, hope, love … all true.

Seriously?  Really.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates John Mellencamp’s music if not his album titles.

Spirituality Column #487
March 15, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“I feared the anger and wrath of the Lord …” – Deuteronomy 9:19

Moses fasted and laid prostrate before the Lord for 40 days and nights – twice – just trying to get God’s Ten Commandments down the mountain once and into the hearts and minds of the nation of Israel.

Both times this divine delivery was met by a stiff-necked, sinning, idol-forging nation.  The first time, Moses himself hurled and broke the tablets of God’s covenant in disgust with Israel’s sin.  The second time, Moses begged God’s mercy not to destroy His chosen yet rebellious people.

Deuteronomy 9 is a concise, instructive snapshot of God’s righteousness, generosity, faithfulness, anger, wrath and mercy, not to mention Israel’s utter rebellion, Moses’s unfailing faithfulness to God and Israel, and Old Testament intercessory prayer at its finest.

Moses talked God into a mulligan.  Deuteronomy 10 opens with another set of tablets, another chance for Israel, and continues in copious repetition (from Exodus and Numbers) of God’s laws and stern reminders to fear God’s wrath and anger.  Telling Israel once was not enough; “Deuteronomy,” after all, means “repetition of the law.”  Even the Ten Commandments took two tries to be delivered.

Deuteronomy is great instruction about a great God, great faith and a greatly sinful humanity.  But as Christians we must always be vigilant of what’s missing in these Mosaic stories, and that’s the New Covenant of Jesus Christ.  It’s a spirit-rending mistake of the first order when Christians seek out the wrathful God of the Old Testament without taking along our relational, sin-covering Jesus to understand the unsolvable, condemnational problems humanity had prior to the coming of Christ.

The Old Testament tells us about an unchanging yet somehow relational God, His Creation, our humanity, and the problems that arise from God’s love having righteously provided man with virtually unlimited freedom.  God’s plan is for humanity to use its freedom to discover God’s love and glory so that it may freely love Him back. Satan urges us to use that freedom to shame and humiliate God by venerating, loving, and promoting our self-interests.  Satan smiles when human anger is directed at God.

The lesson God has shown to mankind through Jesus is divine love that sacrifices for others, finds peace in humility, pride in God’s glory, strength in God’s truth and courage in everlasting salvation.

Anger and fear, ever-present in our fallen, worldly existence, are central themes of the Old Testament.  Love and peace – the love of God and others, and the peace of Christ – are eternal truths of the New Testament.

Learn from the Old, yes, but please, live in the New.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that people don’t change without Christ, and God doesn’t change, period.

Spirituality Column #486
March 8, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” – 1 John 4:18

Everybody preaches it, but nobody believes it.

Or if they do believe it – that John is right when he says “God is love” and that Jesus is speaking truth when He says, “for God so loved the world …” – they’ll still sit perfectly still and listen to a Sunday sermon blasting forth on the wrath of God, the guilt and punishment of sinners, the shame of the unrighteous, the condemnation of all mankind and the fear of God that must be the foundation of one’s Christian life.

Because the Bible says we must “Fear God,” right?

Whew.  That is some kind of screwed up marketing plan.

It is scripture’s seemingly perfect contradiction – God’s love vs. God’s wrath – and the most common stumbling block and joy-stealing paradox in Christianity.  How can both be true?  God loves you – “be humble;” but God is furiously angry with you – “beware.”  Where in that spiritual eddy is there room for our joy becoming complete in Christ?  Where is there opportunity for anything but relational wrong-footedness, behavioral confusion and doctrinal misunderstanding?

Mankind has built the bride of Christ, the church, into an institution quite often focused more on man’s sins than on God’s love.  Sermons preach the “straight and narrow” – and oh, brothers and sisters, the road is straight and the gate is narrow – but we complicate the GPS (God’s Pro-active Salvation) coordinates with the chains of our earthbound journey.  Applications and challenges abound promoting works and legalism rather than the grace of God’s love, Christ’s work, and the Spirit’s presence.  The glorious, true freedom of a loving God and a saving Christ is muddled amid fear-mongering, transactional pulpit language of payment, punishment and purchase.

It’s mystifying to outsiders:

“This is a free gift but it comes at a cost!  Any questions?”

“Um, yeah:  Which is it?”

The answer appears in the opening verses of each of Paul’s 13 letters in the New Testament.  “Grace and peace” is his signatory greeting, not “payment and fear.”

God has created each of us in His own image, endowed us with spiritual freedom, instilled in us a will to live, and implanted in our hearts and minds a basic knowledge of right and wrong, of good and evil.  Jesus is God’s proof that He loves us, because Jesus cleans up the mess our imperfect fears create.

Our joy is complete when our worldly fear turns to trust in God’s perfect love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) considers “Fear not” to be the most valuable yet underutilized advice in the Bible.

Spirituality Column #485
March 1, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“We are gathered here because of one man …” – Fr. Paul Scalia, eulogizing his father Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

I love that line: “…here because of one man.”

I hope someone remembers to say that at my funeral.

Scalia talks of a man well-loved and widely hated; exceedingly brilliant but culturally controversial; legally without peer and religiously without precedent.

“That man,” Fr. Scalia continued, “of course, is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Think about what that means next time you are sitting at a funeral.  Unless Jesus Christ was, is and always will be what He claimed to be, a funeral is no more than a remembrance of the past and a compassion for the day.  Without the hope that Jesus Christ is in heaven, and without faith in His work on earth, a funeral stops when the grave is closed; ahead lays only grief, loss and fading love.

Death without Jesus has no future.

On the other hand, living and professing an abiding love in Jesus means a funeral is not the end.  The truth of Jesus is that grief is real but finite; that loss is painful but will be healed, and that love ultimately, eternally wins.  Jesus provides a future beyond the stain of our sins and the pain of earthly death.

Sadly, in all likelihood only a minority of folks really “got” what Father Scalia was saying about his dad the U.S. Supreme Court justice.  Sitting on the Supreme Court is a job designed to be apolitical but performed in an arena that draws almost nothing nowadays but politically-motivated criticism.  Scalia defended the U.S. Constitution as it was written, and those who would liberally repurpose that foundational document to accommodate modern appetites and passions found no sterner, wiser, well-spoken nor more affable opponent than “Nino” Scalia.

Predictably, many liberal media and politicians mocked Scalia’s passing, fully unappreciative of his perspicacious patriotism, legal acuity, and dedication to the proposition that truth and good do in fact objectively exist.  Conservatives immediately fumbled themselves into a panic about his replacement.  Political America, consumed with its partisan agendas and low-minded maneuvers, shamefully overlooked Justice Scalia’s tacit life’s-witness for Christ.

How bad is Political America? The U.S. President did not attend the funeral.

But back to eulogy, which more properly would be termed a “homily” because it spoke to the spiritual truths of sin and Jesus rather merely listing or “eulogizing” the good works of the deceased.  Father Scalia, the son, eloquently insisted the funeral for his own father would carry the spirit of Jesus, the Son of our Father in Heaven.

Politics was not invited.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates his favorite magazine, First Things, providing this link to the Scalia homily text.

Spirituality Column #484
February 23, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

OK, Christians, let’s accept the obvious: it’s going to be a long, excruciating, polemical grind in these United States until November when we elect a new president.

Notwithstanding the guy in the job now, the strongest major party candidates currently are the two scariest options among, frankly, several scary options.  Take a deep breath; this is a good time to remind our Christian selves about our citizenship in heaven.  It’ll help us to keep our sanity, not to despair, and to trust our eternal home.

Rest easy; God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit will get through this just fine.  They are steady, they are truth, and they don’t have to worry about voting.  For the rest of us – we spectators, respondents, sinners and patriots – it’s an annoying slog.  Freedom doesn’t have to be this difficult, but we make it that way.  Entertaining and irony-filled as the political debate and histrionics may be, this political season is now and will continue to be a daily test of our intellectual patience, spiritual endurance and civil wherewithal.

Instead of freedom in Christ being a simple, divine gift for all mankind to enjoy, even the mention of Jesus begets political fireworks.  One top candidate believes in Marxism, not God. We have an Argentinian Pope (like God, a non-voter) assailing a nominally Presbyterian candidate as being non-Christian for intending to enforce legal immigration and mitigate the terrorism threat of open Muslim asylum.

In response to all this we have the secular public commentariat, plus our religious and non-religious Facebook friends, posting occasionally accurate but more often than not the craziest, misinformed, factually bereft, doctrinally ignorant and maddening religious “commentary” imaginable … about politics.

How are we to survive all this, we Christians who would first vote for Jesus?

Here’s a thought: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness …” That’s Jesus instructing the masses (Matthew 6:33) about living for God’s Kingdom by first living for Him who died for us – Jesus.  Then, enjoy the blessing of being able to recognize, embrace and taste these signs of the Kingdom, even in times like these.

- Joy (John 15:11): “…[let] my joy be in you [so] your joy may be complete.”

- Peace (Ephesians 2:14): “…he himself is our peace…”

- Reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:19): “God reconciles the world to himself through Christ, not counting sins…”

- Illumination (Revelation 21:23): “The glory of God gives [the city] light.”

- Forgiveness (Colossians 3:13): “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

Even in an election year, the kingdom of God can sneak up on us with joy, peace, reconciliation, illumination and forgiveness.

And I vote for that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Dr. George Bebawi for listing these very obvious Kingdom indicators.

Spirituality Column #483
February 16, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Why God? Why?
By Bob Walters

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”–God to Isaiah, Isaiah 55:9

“Everybody’s ignorant, only on different subjects.” – Will Rogers

“Sometimes I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.” – Forrest Gump

One can survey contemporary cultural, political, academic, philosophical and social norms and with some justification ask, literally, “What the hell is going on?”

It takes a Christian worldview to ask that question properly.  I believe in a loving God above, Jesus Christ in our hearts, the Holy Spirit glowing in our souls, and Satan everywhere in our midst confusing, conniving, condemning, conspiring and often confounding the heavenly salvation that the Father, Son and Spirit have in store for us.

Satan meanwhile aggressively and consistently proffers hell – salvation’s opposite, the fiery death below instead of the glorious life above.  Here on earth Satan runs rampant with his vicious lordship, hell routinely breaking out all over.  History records and society continues to champion and dubiously reflect Satan’s agenda.

Not to ruin the ending, but Satan’s demise and the final victory of Christ and heaven are clearly described in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

That’s fine for the macrocosmic “otherness” of all Creation moaning amid man’s fallenness, awaiting God’s eternal destiny and unimaginable glory.  But microcosmically, personally and urgently we implore: “What about NOW, Lord?  What about ME???”  The Cosmos truly is too big for most of us to meld into a cogent, personal, compartmentalized concern.  But “My Life” problems are personally felt and comprehended.  We ask God, most sincerely, “Why?”

And we wait.

It’s sad, but in a way funny, how folks just naturally seem to have a more coherent, patient, conversational and less condemning relationship with Satan than with God.  Satan gets a pass while we shout at God for answers, plea for deliverance and demand immediate, personal evidence of His goodness.  God plainly is telling Isaiah that when we earnestly ask “Why?” God says, “You wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Boy, do humans hate that.

Fact is, humanity needs a bigger question than “Why?” and one is not forthcoming.  No matter how smart or ignorant we are on any given topic, humanity can’t seem to come up with a question that beats “Why?”  But even as that question falls short, God nonetheless provides scriptural truth that we are wise to find sufficient:

“Trust me; love my Son Jesus, love one another, forgive your enemies.”

We either find peace, comfort and satisfaction in that, or pick up another rock to hurl at what we perceive to be God’s injustice.

Careful, though.  Satan is never more than a stone’s throw away.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) avoids inhabiting glass houses.