CommonChristianity

Monday, July 25, 2016

506 - What Am I Suppposed To Do?

8:00 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 506
July 26, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What Am I Supposed to Do?

By Bob Walters

“And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on His name.” – Paul recounting his orders from Ananias, Acts 22:16

Too often new Christians worry what they are supposed to do. Veteran Christians frequently worry whether they are following God’s will.

In the Bible’s most dramatic conversion story, Paul’s first lesson was learning that to be in the will of God he had to be in relationship with Jesus Christ. Do that – connect with Jesus, trust Jesus, pursue Jesus, share Jesus – and you can quit worrying about seeking God’s will or what to do with it when you find it.

Jesus takes care of that Himself. Just look at Paul.

Saul the Pharisee had been enthusiastically – and in his mind righteously – killing Christians (Acts 8-9). While traveling to Damascus to kill more Christians, Saul was knocked down, blinded and talked to by the now-ascended Jesus. Why Saul? Consider both his legal position as a Pharisee and demonstrated fervor for obedience to God. He was a natural evangelist, but grossly doing the wrong things.

Jesus gets Saul’s attention, then commands wary Ananias, the Damascus disciple, to go to Saul, restore Saul’s sight and deliver the instructions Jesus has determined for “Paul’s” ministry.

It’s funny how so much of life as we know it, live it and define it is based on our own sense of “doing” something. Often it’s doing something we ourselves see as a high and noble purpose. Notice that Jesus starts His relationship with Paul not by having Paul do something, but by forcing “Saul” to do nothing. He doesn’t want Saul just to obey Him but to fully understand who He is and trust Him. It’s this relationship that fuels history’s greatest evangelical ministry and accounts for nearly half the New Testament.

When we look at the most formative relationships in our earthly lives – those of families, spouses and children – notice they aren’t built with a “to do list” or a system or a rule book. They are built with love. Looking back and aligned now with what I see as God’s proper context, I didn’t have to stop and think, “I am a son to my parents,” or “I am a husband to my wife” or even, “I am a father to my two sons.” I was all those things because of relationship and love. That should be where we start with Jesus.

Paul didn’t have the luxury, at first, of experiencing God’s love. That came with time and understanding. Too many folks today sit in churches wanting relief from turmoil, sickness or sadness without first understanding that it is a relationship with Jesus that builds the peace and relief they seek.

Build that relationship, and the Kingdom is yours. What are you waiting for?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) admires the courage and trust of Ananias.

Labels: Acts 22:16, Acts 8-9, Ananias, God's will, new Christian, Paul, relationship, veteran Christian | 0 comments

Monday, July 18, 2016

505 - What's So Important?

6:37 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 505
July 19, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What’s So Important?

By Bob Walters

It’s easy for Christians to answer the question, “What’s so important?”

Jesus is important. God, Christ, the Spirit, the Bible, the church, salvation, faith and love are all important. Living a humble, servant-hearted, God-honoring and faithful life is important. The moral absolutes of God are important. Loving God and loving others are our divine marching orders from Christ.

May I continue? To paraphrase the ShamWow guy, “I could do this all day.”

Christianity easily brings many important things into focus and informs, moment-by-moment, one’s lifelong moral code. Because all Godly authority resides in Christ (Matthew 28:18-20), priorities are bare-faced and simple to a Christian. Jesus is No. 1.

God-directed obeisance diminishes as one gets closer to self-directed priorities. Honoring God and helping others – obviously in a zillion complicated ways – is the simple Christian answer to “What’s so important?”

It’s that simple because God’s authority is that unimpeachable.

So asking a Christian “What’s so important?” isn’t a stumper. The stumper is asking that question to anybody else. Pick a topic or cause, the more controversial the better, and ask its adherents, supporters, champions, leaders, fans or experts simply: “What’s so important?” You’ll get a million different answers but no real authority.

No response will come close to, “Because God said so.”

I bring this up because I had a nice conversational lunch recently with an erudite pastor friend who is a remarkable educator and preacher of the Word. Touching on contemporary social and political issues, we wandered from the hot-topic specifics of LGBTQ ascendancy, the overreach of governmental control (think “Obamacare”), the underestimation of foreign enemies (think ISIS), the abysmally failing and diminishing landscape of American racial relations and violence, the looming, glooming, oh-my-goodness-gracious presidential race, popular science mocking faith, and education expelling any teaching of God’s moral certitude. Identifying the problem purveyors is easy. The one thing neither of us could really answer is, “What’s so important to them?”

Seeing the other guy’s side of the story is one thing. But when you look at the social, political, academic and economic forces arrayed against the simple and unwavering truth of Christ – in a nation that very much depends on individual Christian morality for its ability to function as a republic – looking for another thing that stands as authority, that is truly “so important,” remains a mystery. The “authority” is merely the vaporous, prideful, Satan-inspired human assumption of righteousness in one’s opinion.

Salvation? Everybody says, “I’m a good person,” except of course Christians who really, truly “get it” that our goodness abides only as far as does our faith in Christ. “Goodness” isn’t thanks to us, it’s thanks to God.

Understanding that is really important.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) picked up the check.

Labels: authority, good person, ISIS, LGBTQ, Matthew 28:18-20, ObamaCare, presidential race, ShamWow | 0 comments

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

504 - Face(book) the Nation

5:30 AM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 504
July 12, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Face(book) the Nation

By Bob Walters

“If we are faithless, He will remain faithful …” – St. Paul on Christ, 2 Timothy 2:13

I believe America is basically good and the Bible is entirely true.

I understand many of America’s problems past and present, and most of the Bible’s seeming contradictions.

I observe science as one of God’s greatest gifts and one of Satan’s favorite playgrounds. Science sheds fascinating light on the workings of God’s Creation while providing human comforts, conveniences and conveyances unavailable in nature. What science cannot do is save us from sin…if you believe in that sort of thing.

I think politics is a great jumble of cross purposes and passions of the moment. Some moments are longer than others, and some passions are more productive than others. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neil famously observed, “All politics is local.” Indeed. My faith is as “local” as it gets, and politics is as local as what makes me secure in my home with food on my table and a job to go to tomorrow. Out in society, politics is a perpetually partisan morass of unsettled arguments.

Then last week happens: Hillary’s email/FBI ruckus, racially charged police shootings, and a black man ambushing police who are protecting blacks protesting the police shootings. Social media subsequently burned with high dudgeon, partisan vitriol and panicked pleas. Facebook posts bled with our national angst, calling for prayers and peace and unity. “Heal our nation” was a popular thread.

Over the weekend: more shootings, riots, arrests and pleas. But no healing.

Ahead still lay the hot weeks of summer including two political conventions with passionately divisive presidential candidates looking to replace a dispassionately divisive current president. Abroad, the frightfully perilous Zika-Pollution-Anarchy summer Olympics start Aug. 5 in Rio de Janeiro. Plus, we haven’t heard from ISIS in a week or so. What’ll happen next? I can’t answer that one.

My Facebook wall fairly screams, “Where is God when we need Him?”

Now that one I can answer. God is in exactly the same place all the time. He’s everywhere, He is righteous and He has already answered every need humanity truly has. The ongoing problem is that humanity keeps ignoring the ultimate, all-comers healing answer God bequeathed to humanity two thousand years ago: Jesus Christ.

Believers know it, but until everyone understands, believes and acts on what Jesus says in John 15:12, “This is my commandment; that you love one another as I have loved you,” we aren’t going to fix anything. Neither will science, politics…or God.

God, you see, is perfectly faithful to His own righteousness.

God bless America? The problem isn’t His faithfulness, it’s ours.

Heal our nation? Heal our faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) understands taking a “Facebook vacation.”

Labels: 2 Timothy 2:13, America, Bible, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, John 15:12, Olympics, police shootings, politics, racial shootings, righteousness, science, social media | 0 comments

Monday, July 4, 2016

503 - Dignity in the Dock

6:24 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 503
July 5, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Dignity in the Dock

By Bob Walters

Dignitary Harm (legal definition): The pain of being told by others that your choices are immoral.

Think of it this way. If I steal your wallet, I have committed “material harm.” If you tell me stealing your wallet is immoral, you have committed “dignitary harm” on me.

Make sense? Yeah I know, not really …

But, it’s a real term: “dignitary harm.” Legal academics have invented it recently – yes here in America – to describe the shocking awfulness of telling someone that right and wrong matter, that this is right and that is wrong, and that I love you enough to rebuke / counsel / correct your behavior.

Never mind that the U.S. Constitution’s “free speech” clause in the Bill of Rights codifies and expresses the endowment by our Creator of our mutual right of oppositional comment. I may not like your actions and you may not like my religion, but whether the topic is politics, entertainment, child rearing, global warming, body piercing, tattoos, gun control, immigration, personal determinism vs. nationalism vs. globalism, or whatever you can come up with to argue about, it’s a free country and we are free by God’s grace and by law to tell each other about it.

Except, of course, in the case of the sex-and-reproduction culture wars where the rights and legal argument run only one way. Here, any perpetrator of moral dissonance against God’s clear biblical plan retains his or her (you pick which) right to ridicule the Creator as morally insufficient while dismissively mocking as intellectually backwards my faith and trust in God, His Son, His Spirit and His Word.

To avoid committing “dignitary harm” for noticing, labeling and defining “sin” as sin, I am free only to express acceptance and encouragement of these obvious transgressions, lest I commit the sin of thinking, er, judgment. The public forum enforces this unholy ban on questioning the morality of gay marriage and all things LGBT. “Caitlyn,” you may recall, got an ESPN courage award.

Abortion of course remains a manufactured but fiercely protected “right” which, oxymoronically, denies the basic right of life. Material harm? Absolutely; but no foul. Say abortion is immoral, thus committing “dignitary harm”? That’s an actionable tort.

If we go to a church that’s worth our time we should all get a good dose of “dignitary harm” every Sunday morning. It actually is a pretty effective way to encounter the sin in our lives – my sin, let’s start there – and gaze for guidance to the moral perfection of Jesus who suffered the ultimate “dignitary harm” on the cross.

Our lives are that precious and God’s plan is that perfect.

Telling others about it is the moral thing to do.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows God created us all. Too bad so many of us think we created Him.

Labels: abortion, academics, Bill of Rights, Caitlyn, Dignitary Harm, free speech, legal, LGBT, Material Harm, morals, my sin, U.S. Constitution | 0 comments

Monday, June 27, 2016

502 - What's the Big Idea?

8:42 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 502
June 28, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What’s the Big Idea?

By Bob Walters

Entertaining as it is to watch the “world order” rattle and roll through social media’s heavy chop of political, cultural and intellectual upheaval, love certainly takes a hit.

When we differ in opinion, we are not a sentient child of God; we are an idiot.

When we prefer familiar community-, state- and nation-sensitive governance to Global political regimens, we are not loved for nurturing coherent values and morals; we are a pick-your-phobic bigot.

When we are in fact mistaken – hey, it happens – we are not gently coaxed and coached to seek the truth more perfectly; we are sworn at and dismissed as ignorant.

Funny thing: “sworn at and dismissed” happens anyway when we tell the truth perfectly and are not mistaken. “Ignorant”, as a pejorative, has become pervasive, relative and meaningless.

So here we are. Social media provides nearly everybody these days with a unique-in-world-history opportunity to broadcast angst, epithets, profanity and insults. It is easy to launch attacks against that which we do not love and to defend horribly the worldly things we do. Naturally we postulate that our own erudite observations supersede anyone else’s power of forensic retort, but then discover the impossibility of constructing a foolproof argument, what with fools being so ingenious and all.

The larger-engine classic media – liberal or conservative; nutty or thoughtful – is no easier to trust for truth than an average citizen’s diet of online posts, tweets, snaps or whatever. Access any social media website or mainline news feed and you’ll quickly find you are looking for love in all the wrong places. Don’t think so? Post an opinion.

This harkens consideration of the message of Jesus – the simplest, most important, most authoritative, most wide-ranging, shocking and consequential message ever presented to mankind: Love God, love others, in Me you are forgiven, God loves you, and Heaven awaits those who hit “like.” For those who don’t … God loves you anyway and will continue to pursue you because you are formed in the image of God. But when you die and hitting “like” is no longer an option, you’re on your own.

And you won’t like it.

In His ministry, Jesus occasionally leveled Facebook-caliber ad hominem shots with observational invectives like “brood of vipers” and “faithless generation.” But His big ideas were love, not ignorance; humility, not humiliation. God’s son proffered the ultimate of ultimate big ideas: God’s glory is the entire purpose of life.

Recognizing our own stumbles – Jesus does – we should know our ultimate way home is paved with love and humility.

Too many of us throw bricks.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is glad Jesus only had to argue with the Pharisees, not some of the folks who post regularly on Bob’s Facebook feed.

Labels: Facebook, God's glory, ignorant, message of Jesus, purpose of life, social media, world order | 0 comments

Monday, June 20, 2016

501 - God's Still Here

5:09 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 501
June 21, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

God’s Still Here
By Bob Walters

“More states have perished by the violation of their moral customs than by the violation of their laws. – Baron Montesquieu, France, 1734

Morality is always a hot topic in the civilized world.

As simple as Jesus Christ and the Bible try to make it, throughout history any number of governments, religions, doctrines, sects, philosophies and, these days, social science, academic despotism and cultural fashion have regularly conspired to define morality away from the eternal absolutes of God. Humanity insists on capturing – redefining, really – a piece of God’s action. It’s a story as old as Adam, Eve and Satan chatting in the garden.

Godly morality might be just simply this: to live one’s life in productive, creative, humble freedom for the overarching purpose of God’s glory; confessing faith with unwavering trust in Jesus Christ; by loving God, our neighbors, our enemies and the poor in coachable fealty to the Holy Spirit’s leading; and by holding reverently fast to confidence in the Bible’s truth.

Morality needn’t be as difficult to pull off as humanity again and again –and still – shows it to be.

Montesquieu, one of the 18^th-century thinkers whose glowing philosophical intellect fueled the cultural firestorm of the Enlightenment, was no Christian moralist. He and many others espoused the Enlightenment theology of Deism, asserting that in the beginning God did indeed institute His own set of physical and natural laws but then receded from earthly involvement leaving the laws of men up to the minds of men.

See what they did there? They paved a humanist avenue defining morality without the encumbrance of, you know, actually worrying God was paying attention. As we are now roughly three centuries into witnessing the behavioral fruits of kicking God’s plainly voiced morality into the subservient intellectual backwaters behind spuriously ascendant philosophical, political and economic systems far-removed from the primacy of God’s love … how would you say that’s going for us these days?

Granted, the United States is unique in that our founding documents avow humanity’s rights and freedoms to be ordained not by government but by God. It says so – their Creator – right there in the first line of the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless today’s public moral discussion fiercely combats the assumption, presence, suggestion or mere mention of God’s uncontested eternal authority in moral truth. The Enlightenment proclaimed that the proper behavioral underpinnings of culture were manmade “moral customs,” not God’s truth and love.

So I agree with Montesquieu’s observation, but say “Huh?” to his truth.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thought a moral discussion was timely. Also, he never before knew how to spell “Montesquieu,” who by the way in the above quote was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire. Feels familiar…

Labels: Deism, Enlightenment, Godly life, Montesquieu, morality, Roman Empire, U.S. Constitution, United States | 0 comments

Monday, June 13, 2016

500 - A Thousand Excuses (Column No. 500)

5:40 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 500
June 14, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Thousand Excuses

By Bob Walters

It’s OK if you miss church once in a while.

I missed it for nearly 30 years and never once remember feeling like I needed an excuse not to go. I just didn’t go and couldn’t imagine why I should. I didn’t need the social structure, figured “higher meaning” could be found lots of places and while I knew the basic “Jesus” story I wasn’t actively believing it, seeking it or living it. Church wasn’t worth the hassle and I spent no energy conjuring excuses.

Over the last 15 years though the opposite is true; it is a rare Sunday I’m not in church and I need a pretty good excuse not to go – the Indianapolis 500 a couple weeks ago, a recent unexpected but welcome overnight family visit. It’s great not feeling a need to explain anything to anybody. God knows where we are.

Neither, I believe, is God the least bit interested in excuses.

And that’s today’s point: our entire modern, Western cultural experience revolves around and is centered on the bargains and excuses through which we negotiate our earthly lives in America’s generally free capitalistic and democratic republic. Faith, at least faith in Jesus Christ, is an ever-diminishing dynamic of our overall social economy even though Jesus is the very foundation of all human freedom.

Capitalism and politics are based on often-less-than-transparent negotiation and self-interested cooperation. You know, “the art of the deal.” Western academia has effectively eliminated the notion of divine authority, preferring private agendas and relational fashion to academic rigor grounded in God’s objective truth. Science may own the academy but offers only a veneer of technical explanation, not a depth of ultimate truth.

Consider how different our moral lives would be if our everyday default behaviors were based in truth and love rather than the prideful, bargain-hunter shallowness of temporal comforts and secular trends.

Look around and tell me if I’m wrong: the predominant American social, political, economic, intellectual and entertainment experience involves a vigorous, excuse-laden negotiation for earthly comforts, not the humble pursuit of a relationship with God.

My long-time aversion to religion, I finally realized, was seated in my unwillingness to surrender not just Sunday mornings to church but my entire life, love, trust and aspirations to the Gospel truth of Jesus Christ. Jesus flies in the face of practically everything else we hold dear; because everything else is about me.

That’s sinful self-centeredness, not an excuse.

The Gospel calls to something as small as any one of us, but points to something as big as God. Earthly aspirations are trifle by comparison.

What’s your excuse for not thinking as big as God?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends trusting God, not negotiating with Him.

Labels: academia, academics, capitalism, comforts, economics, Gospel truth, missing church, politics, science, socialism | 0 comments

506 - What Am I Suppposed To Do?

505 - What's So Important?

504 - Face(book) the Nation

503 - Dignity in the Dock

502 - What's the Big Idea?

501 - God's Still Here

500 - A Thousand Excuses (Column No. 500)

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