Monday, August 31, 2020

720 - Honorable Mention, Part 2

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Spirituality Column #720
September 1, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Honorable Mention, Part 2
By Bob Walters

“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.” – Apostle Peter, Acts 3:19

Our topic is honor: honor in the Lord, honor in our lives, and honor in our thoughts and actions.  And the sneaky truth is, hardly anything is as eternally uplifting and truly refreshing as honor.

No, not the honor we get.  What’s uplifting and refreshing is the honor we give.

It’s crazy … the hardest and most rewarding things we do in this life require the acknowledgement and expenditure of our own honor; not the acquisition of it.  I’m thinking of things like doing a job, keeping a promise, sacrificing for others, repenting of our sins, swallowing our pride so that we can take pride in honoring something else, remaining faithful amid fears and trials, and trusting God no matter what. 

It kind of sounds like humility, too, which is OK.  Humility isn’t the opposite of honor; it is a requirement for honor.  Honor vs. humility is a dynamic the world mostly has backwards; Jesus Christ teaches us about getting it forwards.  How honor actually works is one of Jesus’s – and the Bible’s – most surprising lessons.  It’s not about me.

If we look at all that Jesus Christ came into the world to do, in sum total Jesus is showing us how to honor God.  Wholly inadequate modern Christian doctrine and frequent teaching predominantly has the work of Jesus focused on “us”: forgiving our sin and getting us into heaven.  That’s fine, but what good is that unless there is some ultimately honorable, final, and glorious truth, reality, and purpose? Such as: God’s love.

Jesus came to show us how all that works.  Worldly honor and Christ’s honor are two very different things.  Everything about the Old Testament points to Jesus; everything about the New Testament – with Jesus leading the way – points to God.

Why did Jesus come into the world?  To initiate God’s Kingdom on earth: not to take us to heaven, but to bring heaven to us, ibid, “thy Kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)  How did Jesus honor God?  With obedience, even unto death.  What did Jesus say He was?  “The way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) to find God’s kingdom.  God’s glory was Jesus’s sole purpose. 

Are you glad to be forgiven and have a relationship with God through Christ?  Sure, why not?  But knowing the truth of God, the purpose of Christ, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and what is supposed to be the loving fellowship of all believers … that is the final teaching of Jesus to his disciples on the way to the cross.  Jesus talked not of forgiveness and heaven, but of perseverance, truth, trust, love, and obedience.

Oh … and God’s glory, plus the glory that would be Jesus’s in fulfilling His mission, and the Godly glory the disciples would share to the ends of the earth.

Jesus is the most honored human being of all time because He is the truth, and also the most reviled because Satan so hates the truth.  What the Bible truly teaches about honor is nearly the same as it teaches about love: that both reside in God and that to express them deeply to God’s glory, they must be given away to others.

That is the refreshment of repentance: sins gone, Jesus with us, God glorified.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes the scene in the movie mini-series The Chosen where the healed leper says to Jesus, “You do not seek your own honor?”  No, He doesn’t.


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Monday, August 24, 2020

719 - Honorable Mention, Part 1

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Spirituality Column #719
August 25, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Honorable Mention, Part 1
By Bob Walters

“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.” – Apostle Peter, Acts 3:19

Does everybody understand that we repent not to be focused on and shackled to our sins, but to free ourselves from worldly shame and enter into the honor of Christ?

That is how things will go best for us, when we honor God and others.

“Me” is the wrong thing to honor.

Honor.  Who in the current worldly culture talks about honor?  Almost nobody, because worldly culture is doing its utmost to remove God in general and Jesus Christ in particular from the controlling conversation of civil society.  We hear a lot about shame, because you can control people with their shame and/or their fear of being “found out” or accused of some shameful infraction of worldly protocol.

It’s fine, however, if in the conceited cause of human control, one dishonors God.
Freedom comes when we repent of our sins before God, honor others, and know, trust, and believe that in their own God-inspired humility, others honor and respect us.  We depend on that in a free society.  We need it and cherish it.  It’s what “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12) actually means.

Most of human history – including nearly 1800 years of the Christian era – did not get that right.  Humanity continued to make the same mistake of the ancient Israelites, demanding earthly kings rather than embracing the absolute Lordship of God of the old covenant, and the saving grace and Lordship of Jesus Christ – God – in the new.

How ironic that it was the non-devout, anti-church but not entirely atheistic philosophical Enlightenment era of the 17th-19th centuries – an era that mostly sought to dethrone, define-down, and “modernize” God – that led one society to fully embrace the Godly rights of man.  An ethical and Godly people – endowed with and, importantly, recognizing their rights from God – could honor each other with their labors, creativity, justice, opportunity, aspirations, government, and equality before God.  Hello, USA.

The trick to maintaining freedom and honor would be in remaining a “Godly people.”  I think that meant that however one viewed the authority of Jesus, the Bible, church, God, or Holy Spirit, it was nonetheless foundationally critical to honor the notion of a Creator who created humanity in His own image: a Creator who loves us, gives us purpose, watches us, is with us, and judges us. He is watching how we treat each other.

That’s a Christian nation, whether one chooses to call it that or not.  When we repent of our sins before man, freedom is not necessarily the prize.  But it is when we repent sincerely in the name of Jesus Christ.  Honor Him, and divine freedom follows.

Honor is hard to find today because along with original sin, never-ending guilt is front-loaded into the secular, social justice “gospel” so very ascendant in the divisive identity politics of our time.  Jesus isn’t honored; His grace isn’t considered. Today’s earthly, Pharisaical accusers cynically target the destruction of God-honoring order.

Things work best when we humbly listen to each other.  God is listening, too.  “Sinners repent!” sounds like a cry to focus on sin.  No, it is a cry to focus on Jesus, to refresh our love for one another, and to honor God.  He is the only place honor exists.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will discuss the Bible’s view of honor next week.

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Monday, August 17, 2020

718 - Shame is No Remedy

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Spirituality Column #718
August 18, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Shame is No Remedy
By Bob Walters

“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” – Paul, Romans 7:18

This isn’t because misery loves company, but I can’t be the only Christian who’s ever sat in church after a long week and thought, “Hoo boy, I can’t believe I did that.”

Fill in your own specifics if you feel so led, but don’t dwell on them.  Paul’s introspective on sin in Romans 7, especially verses 14-20, teaches us to shake it off – whatever it is – and to trust more in God’s grace in Jesus than to despair of our own onboard evil and the deadly power of sin.  We have a savior; and we know it.

That’s the truth to govern our lives.  Shame is no remedy for a hurting heart.

The first time I hacked my way through the theological thicket that is Paul’s letter to the Romans, this passage about our human weakness against sin stood out as a clearing with cool water in a seemingly endless, hot forest.  I understood this.  For all my good baptismal intentions I knew down deep in my sinner’s soul I was guilty as charged.  I could relate exactly to the contrapuntal harmony of Paul’s desire to do good against his powerlessness against the sin that was in him.  In his life he had done great right for the law of God, great wrong against the Son of God, and finally was among the greatest witnesses helping the world to understand the grace of God.

In my journey, it was a few years and much, much study later that I caught on to the depth of divine grace and the joy of forgiveness.  It overtook my earlier kneejerk inclination toward assuming a personal posture of shame and guilt.  The power of Paul’s witness teaches us to be bold in Christ, not weak in our fallenness; to be strong in faith and active in love, not stymied by sins and immersed in self-involved shame.

When they looked only at God, “Adam and Eve were naked and felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). It was when Satan interrupted their view of God that they realized they were naked (Genesis 3:7-13).  It was then that they sewed fig leaves, hid from God, and before God blamed the other for their sin.  Never since has shame helped anyone see or deal with God clearly.  Satan’s design, which includes us bowing to our shame, puts our focus unrelentingly on ourselves obscuring not only our comforting, worshipful view of a holy and loving God but complicating our charitable view of our fellow humans.

It is a Godly, cosmic, true-in-every-situation fact whether involving dicey church doctrine, scripture misinterpreted, Jesus misapplied, or the lowly, fragile inspiration of worldly wants, lusts, fears, and pride: looking away from God creates disharmony and endangers joy.  It is looking at God through Jesus with the Holy Spirit that properly orders life’s authority, priorities, and justice.  Joy is close at hand; the Bible really helps. 

Be careful with shame.  Learn to identify it.  Be a humbly repentant Christian with unwavering confidence in Jesus, yes.  But … don’t be a sucker for the worldly wiles of those who seek to hang shame of their own definition around your neck to pull your eyes off God, diminish your relationship with Jesus, and spuriously usurp divine power.

Control is their game, and there is a lot of that going around these days. 

Shame has spiritual power, and it is not the power of God.  Ask Adam and Eve.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: the opposite of shame isn’t pride, it’s freedom.

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Monday, August 10, 2020

717 - One Life to Live

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Spirituality Column #717
August 11, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

One Life to Live
By Bob Walters

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” – Jesus, John 15:13-14

“Give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry, 1775, Second Virginia Convention

“It is simply false that life is the highest good.” – Rusty Reno, 2020, editor, First Things

So much human, medical, media, and governmental energy in this pandemic is devoted to considering and containing the awful possibility of death.  Perhaps it’s time we seriously considered the more eternal priorities of life and put them in perspective.

We are all, together, facing this Covid mystery with varying degrees of rebellion and acquiescence, distrust and compassion, fear and anger, in many cases hardship, in most cases suspicion.  I can’t imagine anyone believing everything they hear.

We argue about masks; we wonder who’s telling the truth about reliable treatment.  What’s up with all levels of schools and all levels of sports? Church and state collide over distancing guidelines.  How do I save my life?  How do I save yours?  How much “information” is political agenda tied to public health panic?  Who is rigging the mixed-message statistics? What constitutes prudent precaution vs. culture-killing proclamation?  Our politicians claim they will do anything to save just one life.

And this while most abortion clinics are open, essential, and killing the unborn.

I include that line mainly for irony, but it speaks loudly to priorities and principles.

Our central point here is in whether as a society facing this disruptive and still in many ways medically mysterious coronavirus, we are asking ourselves the right questions and demanding of ourselves – in toto, all of us – the right sacrifice.

As a nation, in March, we were agreeable and quick to pull the plugs on production, commerce, companionship, religion, and education – anything to save just one life.  But it was a gigantic exercise of fear; not courage, sacrifice, and honor.  Jesus went to the horrible cross for our salvation; Patrick Henry urged his countrymen to war for their freedom, and Rusty Reno gasped at politicians urging Americans to cower before the false altar of anything to save just one life.  Shut it all down if it saves one life.

No, Reno accurately points out.  Life itself is not the most important thing.  “What of love, honor, beauty, justice, truth – faith?” he queried. I’d add freedom and aspiration.

Reno, a New Yorker writing in March for the upcoming May issue of First Things, specifically was criticizing Governor Andrew Cuomo’s defense of a devastating state shutdown “if it saves just one life.”  Reno, whose reflection I believe applies everywhere, noted Solzhenitsyn’s observation that the two principles of the Gulag and communism are “survival at any price” and “only material results matter.”  It’s wrongheaded morality.

“If we begin with wrong principles,” Reno suggests, “we make a mess of things.  It is simply false that life is the highest good.” That is this moment’s forgotten truth

In our fallenness, diseases always have and always will haunt humanity, but in Christ we are commissioned for love and hope in eternity, freedom and responsibility in this life, and to face hardships courageously.  Anyone selling despair is selling us short.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) isn’t fearful of the virus; he is angry at the politics.
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Monday, August 3, 2020

716 - A Fair Hearing

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Spirituality Column #716
August 4, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Fair Hearing
By Bob Walters

“Keep it fair, keep it fair!” Rodney Dangerfield character Al Czervik as he bribes the “referee” in the movie Caddyshack (1980)

Sorry to reference a low-brow comedy movie – classic, yes, but low brow – in a discussion of fairness as the notion appears in the Bible.  But just as golfer Al Czervik is bribing for favors – not “fairness” – so too does most of the world seem to think that “fairness” means God giving us a gratuitous break and seeing things our way.

If something isn’t fair, humanity says there is something wrong with God. No. If something isn’t fair, there is something wrong with us.  Maybe not in every instance is it something specifically “wrong with me,” because we as a species are regularly and obviously quite mean and unfair to each other.  And the natural world also serves up the darnedest challenges to our personal survival.  In any case, no one is getting out alive.

As much as the world wants to, or says it wants to, “keep it fair,” pleas for “fairness” are typically pleas of self-interest, “help me out,” or honest, loving concern for our fellow human beings.  Nothing wrong with wanting fairness; it’s just that the Bible doesn’t say a whole lot about anything being “fair.”  “Fair” is whatever God does.

Many ideas and doctrines appear in Christian faith and practice that do not appear in the Bible.  “Trinity,” for example, is not a Bible word at all (Tertullian, writing in Latin, came up with it a couple centuries after Jesus) but Father-Son-Spirit is bedrock doctrine.  Christmas, Easter, Lent, “Saints’” days, Sunday worship?  Not in the Bible.  On the topic of fairness and charity, modern folks reverently cite “social justice” all the time but it’s not in the Bible.  They wish it were, but it isn’t.  Humans invented it.

“Fair” – the word – in the King James Version of the Bible is referenced several dozen times but almost all of them refer to either human skin complexion, womanly beauty, or weather (e.g. “fair skies” in Matthew 16:2).  Forms of the Greek equivalent for “fairness” – isotes – translated as the noun “equality,” appear only a handful of times.

As for Bible teaching, nothing in all history is less fair than what happened to innocent Jesus on the cross.  It was obedient, necessary, glorified God, proved God’s existence and truth to the faithful, signaled God’s forgiveness of sin, and saved us.

Much of what happens with those that we love is not measured by “fair.”  We give freely, love freely, and don’t spend much time thinking about “fair” if our motivation is love and selflessness. When we look outward for the less fortunate and declare that in fairness we must help, that’s true.  To honor God and love others, we must help them. 

The catch?  They must help us too; not to “keep it fair,” but because it is right.

Paul says it almost perfectly in 2 Corinthians 8:13-14.  The Corinthians had a good previous year, and should give up their excessive wealth to help the less fortunate.  Paul notes in verse 14 that in return, when the Corinthians had hard times, the others could help them so there would be equality (NIV) or fairness (ESV).

Who says the world is fair? Well, not Jesus.  But in great love and sacrifice, the fairest thing in all Creation is God sending His Son to redeem fallen sinners God himself had cursed.  

Maybe there is nothing fair about any of it, but in love, it’s the right thing.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes how often folks demand God’s fairness without accepting God’s eternal and absolute righteousness. Satan, BTW, traffics in “unfair.”
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Monday, July 27, 2020

715 - Human Nature, Part 4

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Spirituality Column #715
July 28, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Human Nature, Part 4
By Bob Walters

“There is none righteous; no, not one.” – Romans 3:10

Our central Christian theme on sin seems to be, generally, “What did I do wrong and how is it going to hurt me?”

Many a sermon and devotional have been built on that premise.  We love to beat ourselves up in shame.  We sin, and fear what “God will do to me” or “What will other’s think?”  Most of us have committed head-shakingly awful and/or embarrassing deeds that – whether intentional, accidental, born of passion, or simply lacking in discipline and discernment – make us wonder if “God still loves me” and “How can He forgive me?”

Notice, here, that sin keeps coming back to how it affects “me.”

As we wrap up this series on sin today I want to leave you with some thoughts on what sin actually is (and does), and how to live a joyous life anyway.

Sin. Let’s start with the Ten Commandments. Do or don’t do these 10 things and you, yourself, will be virtuous, pious, and saved.  But when we update that to what Jesus said, we learn that what constitutes “all the law and the prophets” – the entire behavioral, sin-vetting shebang – is “Love God and love others.”  It’s not about “me.” 

I don’t think it is possible to hurt God, but it is possible to hurt others.  And that’s why I don’t think the commandments are so much a personal behavioral checklist.  I think they are a humanity-wide advisory for “how things will go best with us.”  In other words, maybe “my sin” isn’t so much about hurting me, it’s about how it hurts others.

Notice how each commandment, each parable, each Jesus teaching give us instruction for how best to live together.  When we isolate sin and salvation to “me” we miss God’s most important attribute and advice – love.  Wonder why God is a trinity, why God is three?  Because love cannot exist within a “one.” Neither can sin simply exist within a “one.” The danger and effect of sin is in how it disrupts the peace and love of the community, and throughout human history there has been plenty of disruption.

Oddly enough, history’s greatest disruption was our greatest gift – Jesus Christ.  He talked, taught, and demonstrated God’s love for others by going to the cross.  The cross is an important point, but don’t miss the part about “loving others.”  When we don’t do that – love others – that’s when we sin.  It’s really not just me; it’s all of us, everyone.

Our mess in the world of the moment is less a pandemic of Covid-19 than a larger pandemic of self-directed righteousness.  Notice the weird, religious-like culture separating us by our features and beliefs, calling it “social justice.”  Divide and conquer.

To spot the sin, spot the self-righteousness.  Spot the separation; the control.

That each of us harbors a sin-nature of self-interest is no surprise.  But our sacrifice in Christ is best manifested in our ability to help – not hurt, subvert, or alienate – others.  It is to provide freedom; not to exact a payment of shame, guilt, or silence.

In Christ my on-board sins were forgiven on the cross; His sacrifice glorified God.  Our own joy, now, happens by exemplifying Jesus’ example of forgiveness and mercy to others which also glorifies God.  I’m a sinner, yes, but I’ll spend my sin “debt” not on the misery of personal shame, but by joyously sharing love and mercy for God’s glory.

That’s how we turn sin into joy.  Praise Jesus, it’s the best of our human nature.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: my sin affects others; forgiveness affects me.

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Monday, July 20, 2020

714 - Human Nature, Part 3

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Spirituality Column #714
July 21, 2020
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Human Nature, Part 3
By Bob Walters

“There is none righteous; no, not one.” – Romans 3:10

We may not always want to admit to and describe specifics, but few among us would plead we belong in heaven because we’ve never sinned.

Sin, I think we all realize, is how we roll; human beings, I mean.  There is nothing else so sure in all human nature as our fallenness in sin, and nothing else so uplifting as knowing – with equal surety – that our sins, general and specific, are covered over and forgiven by the grace of Jesus on the cross. That was the Big Lift; the Good News.

Sin is this “bad thing” of course, but our ability, humility, and willingness to understand it is probably the healthiest overview we can have of our own and all human existence.  Let’s talk just briefly today about whether sin is our “true nature.”  Next week we will move on to what, exactly, sin is, and how to live a joyous and God-honoring life in spite of it all.

The initial “very good” news of our being is in Genesis 1:27-31. Humans – man and woman – were created in God’s own image; bequeathed nearly everything on earth God had made, and declared by God to be “very good” in verse 31.

Hey!  Encouraging start.  Doesn’t sound like we came out of the gate as sinners.  Genesis 2 goes on to describe, again, how God created everything and then gave names to Adam and then Eve.  I always love to point out that Genesis 1 and 2, and Revelation 21 and 22 – the first two and last two chapters of the Bible – are the parts of the Bible where Satan is not around. And Satan - thanks a lot - triggers our sin problem.

Genesis 3 is where Adam, Eve, and the whole of ensuing humanity fall into sin.  How?  By Satan’s temptation and by Eve’s and then Adam’s desire to take possession of the one thing God said was not theirs – the knowledge of Good and Evil.  That’s a little vague of course – we see it in “an apple” – but we must underscore and understand that God built into humanity the freedom to choose between right and wrong.  Another way to say it is we are created with the freedom to choose between honoring and loving God and others, or pridefully, fearfully honoring only ourselves.

Why a choice?  Because only in our freedom to choose can we properly, honestly, faithfully choose to love God and others.  Choice you see is critical because God’s love can’t be coerced and as we know, God is love.  Not until the sacrifice of Jesus does humanity regain its true freedom from sin and ability to know God’s love.

But, back to the original thought about human nature.  Are we humans – you, me, us – naturally “very good” (Genesis 1:31) or are there “none righteous” (Romans 3:10)?  The short answer, I am convinced, is “Yes.”  In His love, God created us with freedom to find His glory.  Then in His mercy God gave us Jesus to prove His truth and salve our sins, fears, and crazy choices our fallenness is perpetually prone to evince.  

Accepting sin and our “fallen nature” as facts of life gives us a faithful place to start, and knowing Jesus Christ gives us a trusted place to go.  More next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wonders how you (yes, you) “spend” your knowledge of sin, which he’ll discuss in this series’ next and final installment.

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