Monday, March 25, 2019

645- Helpful Spirit

6:22 PM | Posted by Common Christianity | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #645
March 26, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Helpful Spirit
By Bob Walters

“… The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” – Jesus to the disciples at the Last Supper, John 14:17

Quick … who is “him” in this verse?

Jesus himself?  No, “him” is a third-person pronoun.  Jesus is talking about somebody else, a person not there, and someone quite obviously – like Jesus – at odds with “the world.”

 Who is this nefarious accomplice?  This “other”?  This fellow outsider “him” who Jesus invokes and is so obviously in league with a God who is love, a savior who is grace, and from the same kingdom of eternal glory that nobody at this early hearing yet understands?

The answer opens this verse – Jesus is talking about “the Spirit of Truth.”

That would be the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the great comforter, companion, and divine intellectual illuminator to all who believe in Jesus Christ.  This Spirit is the oft-cited but frequently lesser-appreciated colleague of the original, uncreated, divine executive team of One called the Holy Trinity.   God is true and Jesus is with us, Amen.  But we know this only because of the Spirit of Truth, who resides in this world not to bring glory to Himself but to shine God’s bright light of truth on the glory of Jesus through whom all glory is directed to God.

To a world with bad eyes and inattentive ears, it doesn’t make much sense.

Individual sinners tend to resist accepting a divine template of God’s truth.  We instead embrace an impossible and illogical man-made aggregation of self-affirming personal opinions that we errantly and arrogantly ordain as “truth” that are still no more than opinions.  The track record of this small kind of truth is poor – it creates temporal systems, slaves, and fear rather than the Kingdom’s eternal love, freedom, and peace.

Culture nonetheless trumpets the vacant, meretricious claim, “My own truth!”  This means both “Don’t judge” – non-believer shorthand for “shut up” – and also that real, objective, divine, right-wrong, one-size-fits-all truth – you know, Godly truth as it resides in Jesus Christ – is demoted to the vagaries of random human brain waves.

Let me affirm; I think those brain waves are important because I think they, like all creation – like each individual person – were created for God’s glory.  But our brains – my brain – are tainted with our sin, our fear of death, our pursuit of appetites, and our need for social acceptance.  Jesus showed us a true, better way: God’s way.

What truth should be – what I believe it is – is sharing the burning desire of Jesus to glorify God.  How? Through faith in Jesus (knowing He is God’s Son with all authority in heaven and on earth), loving God (His creation and plan), loving others (in peace and freedom), and obeying creation’s shared purpose to participate in the eternal creativity, joy, and fellowship of God’s own community, the Holy Trinity, if we can see and hear it.

That’s what the Spirit of Truth is here to help us with.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes the Holy Spirit talks Kingdom truth to everyone, just as surely as Satan lies to us about the world. It is people who win or lose.

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Monday, March 18, 2019

644 - Uniquely Inconceivable

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Spirituality Column #644
March 19, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Uniquely Inconceivable
By Bob Walters

“I don’t think it means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya to Vizzini regarding the word “inconceivable” in the movie, The Princess Bride.

Competing Christian and global cultural narratives are pretty much at lock-horned, seemingly irreconcilable odds these days, but I can’t believe it is the most radical community, philosophical, and political dissertative discord on record.

Think how outrageous the words of Jesus must have sounded in the Jewish culture of 2,000 years ago.  He brought a message different from anything the world had heard to that point, wanted to hear then, or has heard since.  Jesus was presenting the plain truth of God.  To the Jews, Romans, Greeks, Asians, and anyone else who happened to be listening, what Jesus was saying was inconceivable.

Some things aren’t that much different between now and then.  The truth of Christ hasn’t changed, of course, though obviously there is much more widespread “knowledge” of God and belief in Jesus and understanding of scripture now than there was then.  But we have great swaths of dangerously influential leadership in the realms of pious, civic discourse today – media, politics, academics, cultural trendsetters and commentators – who are every bit as filled with self-righteousness and secular sanctimony as were the religiously show-boating and judgmental Pharisees of ancient Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders, unbeknownst to them, had grown far from God even as Jesus, divine God incarnate – in truth, righteousness, and love – stood before them.

Our cultural leaders today – also far from God – have fashioned new and inflexible religions of abortion as a health and privacy choice, gender as fluid, patriotism as racism, family values as homophobic, morality as mere opinion, truth defined by and existing only in their opinion, human identity validated by victimhood, social science as actual science, climate science as a control weapon, history as a vapid display of perceived immorality, and Christian reality as a danger and threat to their social fictions.

In Vizzini’s lexicon: “Inconceivable!”   Yet here we are.

Jesus brought into the world the one and only unique revelation of God: Christ His son, the Holy Spirit, sacrificial love, forgiveness, grace, adoption into the Kingdom of Heaven, hope, peace, and imparted onto humankind the divine, free restlessness of  curiosity, wisdom, and discovery.  No more was man a slave with his fate unknown and Hell around every corner.  The Trinity of heaven was the template of divine intent: the shared nature, love, delegation, and teamwork from which humanity was conceived.  Jesus died and returned to show us that our fate was eternal life, not temporal despair.

Society works overtime to generate differences where none should exist, just as the Pharisees created dissension against God’s truth to protect their self-interests.  Those who cannot rule in virtue must plant doubt, sow fear, and foment anger.  In all  history only Jesus revealed Heaven’s freedom and God’s sacrificial love to the world.

Inconceivable as it may seem, it is truly unique and absolutely true.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) can’t imagine how the modern news media would have covered Jesus … likely denied or missed the story as badly as did the Pharisees. Oh wait … that’s mostly what they do now.  Praise God for all who can see the truth anyway.

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Monday, March 11, 2019

643 - Mean to Me

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Spirituality Column #643
March 12, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Mean to Me
By Bob Walters

“Apostolic succession” is one of those ancient church phrases that tends to make independent Bible Christians head for the ecclesial exits, their eyes rolling.

On the seminary glossary test, “apostolic succession” describes the specific Roman Catholic doctrine of the Pope’s unbroken “succession” or “transmission” of the received authority of Christ in the line of the Apostle Peter – Jesus to Peter to the ongoing history of the Church and through all its Popes up to today.  Most Protestants don’t buy into it, the same way most independent Bible types don’t buy into church authority superseding that of the Bible.

But there is something about the phrase itself, “apostolic succession,” that I like and it is this: any Christian (or really anybody) – with a little effort – can track back in time along a direct line of history anchored in the era when Jesus walked the earth: when He taught and ministered, was crucified and resurrected, and lifted to Glory.  I’m not saying that studying the timeline makes one an apostle, but it should give one great peace that the evidence, thought, scholarship, and ministry of Christ has a continuous (and continuing) two-thousand year track record of durability, uniqueness, and truth.

That history has been protected and transmitted not just by the Roman Catholic Church but by the various Eastern and Orthodox churches originating in the Middle East.  Whether or not one agrees with specific points of doctrine or church organization, or perhaps would criticize this or that corruption in this or that church over history, all Christians are beholden to the faith and tenacity of those who carried the light of the Word of Christ through the Dark Ages and into modernity.

My friend and mentor George Bebawi pointed out in a recent conversation that perhaps the greatest mistake of the modern church and modern Christians is neglecting the rich, rich historical roots of the faith.  Christianity didn’t begin with Luther or Calvin, with the Anglicans or Puritans, or Jonathan Edwards, or the Wesley brothers, or the exploding Gospel revival of 1800s America, or with C.S. Lewis or Billy Graham.

Lewis often made the point that it was more important to actually read the ancient commentators (Athanasius, Augustine, others) than to simply “read about them.”  And while Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell may be far easier to ingest intellectually (and for sure, they are), it is a great lesson to look at their research and how it underscores the back-to-the-beginning train of Christian faith and worship.  Many, many smart folks have been thinking about, writing about, and preaching about Christ for a long time. I take great solace in knowing that we do not have to re-invent Jesus every generation.

In my view the very worst modern-day theological aberration of knowing Christ and understanding the Bible is embodied in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along, self-focused question: “What does this mean to me?”

Our question should be, “What does this mean to God?”

It is not a mean thing to put the focus where it belongs.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows Christ points to the future, but we can learn much from our shared Christian past.

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Monday, March 4, 2019

642 - Eat Some Chocolate

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Spirituality Column #642
March 5, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity

Eat Some Chocolate
By Bob Walters

“But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” – Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:44
            Ash Wednesday tomorrow kicks off the 40-day stretch of quadragesima pasche lead-in to Easter, and the question of the moment is, “What are you giving up for Lent?”
            Yes, ‘tis the spring season of Christian fasting, sacrifice, self-denial, self-examination, and repentance – what fun.  No wonder Christmas season is so much cheerier than Easter season.  At Christmas here in the northern latitudes we are entering the harshest, darkest, dreariest weather season of the year and yet we sing cheerily of snow, family, and presents. Lent is the light at the other end of that winter tunnel: spring awaits, days will warm (eventually), flowers will bloom, and the life-affirming resurrection of our Lord Jesus will be celebrated on Easter. 
Instead of touting joy in holy expectations, Lenten traditions instruct us to focus on the ascetic misery of self-denial and sin which amounts – crushingly – to focus on the self.  I so deeply pray that Lent were more about doubling down on Jesus than on purposely withholding our human joy in His lordship, love, and freedom.
So the question is, “What are you giving up?”  Most Bible and evangelical churches, like the one I attend, don’t observe the ecclesial calendar.  But the Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Orthodox most certainly do, and the pull is enormous for all Christians familiar with the practice to consider Lenten forfeiture of something they like.  This will show God – and others (don’t judge) – that we care.
Popular “give ups” include chocolates, sweets, or abating some easily identifiable vice (gambling, drinking, smoking, swearing, etc.) we probably should stop anyway.  We mark Lenten days in want, suffering, and self-immersive righteousness until Easter morning bursts those shackles free.  And then, since you’ve shown God how much you care, go back to whatever it was you were doing that you already thought was probably a bad idea.  That, um, isn’t quite the spirit of repentant rest and peace in Jesus. 
In the past I’ve encouraged folks to observe the season of Lent by investing this six-week period in reading – really reading – the four Gospels of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Meditate on them, study, find out their meaning, write down your thoughts, discuss them with a pastor, elder, or mature Christian friend.  Learning more about Jesus helps you focus less on yourself.  Serve others if you can.
Another great Lenten “give up” is, or rather are, grudges and fearful impatience.  Use Lent to work on your trust in the Lord.  Forgive enemies large and small.  Live in the moment-to-moment peace and righteousness of Jesus; in the studied courage of a spirit that embraces loving truth and strength, and deflects fearful hostility and pique.
Forgiveness, like spring, makes everything new.  As for Lent?  By all means, eat some chocolate; but love and forgive your enemies and never, ever give up on Jesus.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the 40 days of Lent lasts for 46 calendar days because Sundays don’t count … they are already holy but your “give up” applies.
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Monday, February 25, 2019

641 - Cake Walk

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Spirituality Column #641
February 26, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity

Cake Walk
By Bob Walters
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus, John 8:32

The instructions on a box of Betty Crocker cake mix are there to tell you how to make a cake, not to tell you how not to.

Sure … you take that box into your own kitchen and are free to do anything with those instructions you want – you can add stuff, delete stuff, change stuff, ignore stuff, even try to outguess or improve what the instructions say.  But if you want a cake as it is advertised on the packaging, those directions will tell you all you need to know; just pay attention and do what it says.  You have reliable truth not only for baking success, but, without saying so, how to avoid having a bad cake.

This analogy – a parable almost – may lack Jesus’ brilliance but  provides some  understanding not just of what the Bible is but how to use it and how to pursue our human life and our Christian walk.  Look at the Bible as a helpful list of things that are (a.) meant to be and (b.) we should do, not a draconian list of impossible demands and behavioral prohibitions.  The Bible read properly leads to the right kind of cake, not an indigestible mess; to frosting, not fondant; to love, not heartburn; to Jesus, not Satan.

Generally I believe it is more vibrant to look at the Bible as God’s relationship book than His instruction manual, but this cake analogy popped into my head as a way to explain the presence of the many rules and instructions that the Bible contains.

For example, consider the Ten Commandments.  Their purpose isn’t God telling Moses, or us, “These are the only 10 things in existence to do or not to do,” but are true guidelines for how to have things go well: for how to bake a cake.  While they are great human rules for all time, they were specifically aimed at the Jewish nation in the wilderness.  As for the other hundreds of Levitical laws, those were God’s code by which the Jews going forward were to honor and relate to the God who had chosen them as His people.  All those laws and rites and festivals – the Old Covenant – weren’t for Greeks, Romans, Gentiles, or … ahem … Christians.  They were for the Jews.

So along comes Jesus as the fulfillment of all Godly instruction and relationship.  He presents to all humanity a New Covenant of faith and the “Two” commandments: to love God and love others.  Simple?  Yes.  But humanity constantly burns the cake.

As surely as the truth of Jesus will set us free in joy and eternity, it is the lies of Satan that bind us – all humanity – in misery and death.  Jesus speaks of truth and freedom in John 8:32 (cited above), but shortly thereafter (8:44), speaking to non-believing Jews who refuse to hear the truth, points to Satan: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, and there is no truth in him … he is the father of lies.”  Perhaps Satan’s greatest lie is that we needn’t honor God’s instructions, because if God made us in His own image, surely, we can make up our own rules.

Humanity buys it – always has – thereby ignoring God’s instructions, snubbing Jesus, and grieving the Holy Spirit.  In our perpetual arrogance and in a specific fashion of our times, we invent, claim righteousness in, and pledge obeisance to “my own truth.”

That’s code for “bad cake, no frosting.”  And truth is, it’s a recipe for destruction.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) looked at a cake mix box and saw just this one “Thou Shalt Not”-type instruction: “Do not eat raw cake batter.”  That’s good advice.
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Monday, February 18, 2019

640 - Cross Purposes

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Spirituality Column #640
February 19, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity

Cross Purposes
By Bob Walters

“For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline.” – 2 Timothy 1:7

When I look at the cross of Jesus Christ I see righteousness, commitment, love, courage, God’s grace, sin’s ugliness, and fallen man’s meanness and helplessness.

What I don’t see, because it so diminishes Christ’s saving mission and accomplishment – and please hear me out on this – is punishment, payment, shame, or even humiliation.  None of those are functions of love, of resolve, of resilience, or of righteousness.  I look humbly at the cross with thanks and admiration, not guilt and fear.

The grace and purpose of Christ were, first and foremost, fulfillment of God’s plan for the divine restoration of mankind which had vacated its claim to God’s kingdom with the fall of Adam and Eve.  Jesus on the cross is an awful scene, but sufficient to cover over the sins of the world, reveal God’s Kingdom, defeat death, provide eternal life, seat us forever in God’s heavenly glory, and endow us with the love and grace necessary to love each other and boldly love God while still mired amid this daily, earthly shadow of death.  Because of the cross, we have knowledge of God, Christ in our lives, baptism by the Holy Spirit, and prayerful, divine relationship of faith, hope, and love.  How often we boil-down the cross to a mere trade for forgiveness.

Christians sing endless hymns of payment and cost and price and purchase, though the Apostle Paul famously conflates “loss” and “gain” (Philippians 3:8) and Christ repeatedly muddles the worldly commerce of human compensation: “the first shall be last” (Mark 9:35), etc. The cross of Christ, truly, is not “all about the Benjamins.”

Whether due to logic, greed, or pride, humans vigorously compartmentalize God’s intentions and Christ’s work – profound mysteries of grace and forgiveness – into the “give and take,” “punish or reward,” “shame or pride” constructs of measurement and comparison.  How severely they limit our view of God’s love at work in our lives.

That’s because none of these are functions of love, of resolve, of resilience, or of righteousness.  They instead divert our attention from God's command to love Him and love others and re-interpret it as a demand for legalistic obedience and metrics. These “either-or” propositions are not indicative of God's higher thoughts and ways, but only our mistaken, fallen, and narrow human perception of quid pro quo transactions.

If the Old Covenant taught us anything, it is that mankind is terrible at following Godly rules.  Hence the joy and the glory of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, which demands our love, faith, repentance, and forgiveness of others, not a scorecard.

The reason the cross of Jesus is so hard – whether the “washed clean” cross of the Protestants or the starkly graphic crucifix of the Catholics and Anglicans – is that when we contemplate the cross, encountering the suffering of Christ is unavoidable.  It is a miserable truth, this suffering of Christ; and the world’s poorest possible sales pitch.

But our lesson is this: guilt and payment will never help us love others with grace and compassion.  That is why love, not guilt or cost, defines the cross of Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows it is far harder to love than to accuse, which he sees as a simple lesson in the difference between Christ and Satan.
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Monday, February 11, 2019

639 - What's in a Name?

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Spirituality Column #639
February 12, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity

What’s in a Name?
By Bob Walters

“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name that is above every name …” – Philippians 2:9

Paul here of course is talking about Jesus, the “name above every name” in Philippians 2:6-11.  Paul is not only describing how we are to imitate Christ in humility, but this section is a hymn describing Christ’s attitude toward His own humility among humanity in the full knowledge that He is God.

Often when we encounter people who think they are God, their humility isn’t the first thing we notice.  Jesus certainly offered an unusual and different image from what humanity expected in an all-powerful God, and gave rise to one of New Testament theology’s biggest questions: Jesus was human and alive, but was He really God?

Last week, referencing Josh McDowell’s updated opus of apologetics, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (2017), we talked about the increasing historical and archaeological proof that Jesus really was a man in history and the New Testament really is an accurate historical record of that era, as far as it goes.  But we have to be OK with the fact that salvation arises from our faith and our love, not our knowledge of history.

Nonetheless and despite the nay-saying hysteria of agnostic and atheistic academics and cultural anti-religion types, Jesus was demonstrably real and the Bible is trustworthy; it verges on academic dishonesty or secular silliness to think otherwise.   But that “as far as it goes” sentiment is the element that makes faith critical and makes our hearts and our love the linchpins of assuredness that Jesus was in fact God.

There are some blindingly ill-informed clichés people claim about religion in general, things like “Religions are all the same.”  That is an automatic “tell” that the person expressing that opinion has never actually studied religion sincerely.  Another oft-stated, enormously ill-informed proclamation more specifically regarding Christ and the New Testament is that “Jesus, in the Bible, never actually says He is God.”

Oh dear.  Jesus is expressing almost everywhere in scripture – by His words, His actions, His love, His resurrection, His very presence – that He is JHWH, the Holy God of Israel incarnate among humanity to reveal the salvation of all mankind.  You just have to know how to read it and pay attention to what the Bible is saying.  McDowell’s book (Ch. 7) thoroughly logs the many self- and scriptural expressions of Jesus’s divinity.

I believe it is a great attribute of the Bible and of the mysteries of Christ, faith, love, God, purpose, humanity, Spirit, and all of existence that Jesus never reduced His mission on Earth to a PR or ad campaign of “Hey! Look Who I Am and What I Can Do For You!”  Jesus wasn’t here on a sales call; it was God’s mission of mercy and faith.

This humble, loving, and righteous Jesus revealed the power of a humble, loving, and righteous God.  Only in faith and love is our salvation in Jesus Christ possible; only in faith and love is an eternal seat next to Him in heaven possible.

It is humbling and true: there is infinite power in the name of Jesus.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) admits it is fair to question whether the claims of Jesus are true, but it is beyond question that the claims of Jesus were made. Btw, McDowell is speaking (free of charge) at Indy’s East 91st St. Christian Church Wed., Feb. 13, at 7 p.m.
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