Spirituality Column #780

October 26, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Settled Faith

By Bob Walters

“But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.  Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect …” – 1 Peter 3:15

Some years back, being “prepared to give an answer” ceased being a difficult thing for me. 

At age 47 I set my heart – and mind – on Christ as Lord, though those close to me could still see the evident chinks in my armor.  I grew in Godly faith, knowledge, hope, and resolve through reading, study, prayer, and with the mentorship and encouragement of beloved pastors, teachers, and friends. With all I was learning and thinking, it was natural to share it … in writing.  Writing is what I do.

And with a few scattered mea culpas and the tolerance and abiding grace of many Christian brothers and sisters, “gentleness and respect” in these writings have been generally more present than absent … I hope.  Jesus is my favorite subject.

This writing marks 15 years of the weekly joy that has produced 780 consecutive Common Christianity columns.  As I hear a seemingly and increasingly lost world debate and reverence various elements of “settled science” and take opinion polls suggesting doubt about the grace, presence, and efficacy of God, Christianity, and the spiritual surety of the truth of Jesus, I confidently peck away at these weekly missives.

My faith and hope in Christ are settled because in all my studies, prayer, spiritual perceptions, life experiences, quiet times, and the occasional uproar of chaotic challenges, I’ve learned two essential and unwaveringly settled things:

1. God doesn’t change, and 2. Humanity hasn’t changed. 

God is love, He is righteous, He is the Creator, Logos, Word, and Spirit, and His eternal life is unchanging yet creative, reactive, seeking, and filled with personality.  It is the mystery of all mysteries how He does it, but the truth of all truths that He does.  

People can change, sure.  I have, perhaps you have, and I’ve seen many others who have.  But we learn a lesson from all those folks in the Bible, Genesis through Revelation, on up to today’s news headlines and unchanged neighbors.  Simply put, humanity, its joy transient, thin, and limited, has never shaken its fallen, sin nature. 

It is a nature that makes us chase many worldly things seeking life and security and, as Satan promotes, denying the truth and goodness of God.  We are happy to “settle science” – as mightily helpful as science is – but deny the God science reveals.

Individuals change by discovering the divine purpose that resides not in our pride, greed, or fear, but in the joy, peace, and trust in God’s life and goodness.  We may discover a purpose and meaning within our own being, but it will die with us.  Jesus arrived amid humanity as proof – that we see in His resurrection – that a life of humility, obedience, intelligence, and sacrifice bring to us – now – God’s joy and eternal hope.

Not everybody accepts, seeks, or wants God’s unwavering truth and hope.  A stated truth of the Bible is that some folks will get it, and some won’t.  But Jesus came to settle this issue once for all humanity; God’s invitation back into the Garden stands.

Science will never settle faith or meaning; Jesus settles them every day.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), Lord willing, and with thanks, will keep writing.

Spirituality Column #779

October 19, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

First Light

By Bob Walters

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. – Genesis 1:3

Into the formless and void world with the Spirit hovering over the darkness on the deep, on the first day of creation, the first thing God created was light.

Fast forward to the Gospel of John: Jesus is asserting His identity with the argumentative and intractable Pharisees, saying in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world.”  OK, obvious question: Is Jesus this “light” God created?

Please don’t panic.  The answer is no.

Christ Jesus wasn’t “created,” for the simple reason that Jesus, as the Christ, is the second person of the eternal Father-Son-Spirit Trinity. Jesus Christ, like the entire Godhead, is “un-created.”  Nobody knows “where He came from.”  God just always was and will be.  Worry about something else.

But this “light” created on the first day of creation is fascinating, because the sun, moon, stars, and apparently all the things that cause physical light, weren’t created until the fourth day of creation (Genesis 1:14-19).  So this first light was a creation of, if not Christ, then what?

My hunch is that everyone who regularly studies the Bible has their own answer for that one, but here’s mine.  The light created on Creation’s first day was God’s proclamation of His intention, will, purpose, and mission to divide the darkness and declare His glory in a world that “In the beginning”  was nothingness.  He molded it into a world only God’s love, truth, righteousness, perfection, and goodness could create.

And the Light of the first day is the authority bestowed on Christ to do so.

It was a good first week … then “very good” when man in God’s image was created on Day 6.  But we all know about the Garden, Adam, Eve, Satan, temptation, the apple, sin, the Fall, the curse, the expulsion, and God posting the Angel with the flaming sword barring Adam and Eve – all mankind – from re-entering the Garden.

We were “post-paradise” and on our own in a now-hostile world.  What happened to all that love, truth, perfection, etc., that was to mark the glory of God’s creation?  Did God change His mind? Change His heart?  Change his purpose?

No … far from it.  God’s light was the absolute diagram of love that would brook no part of sin.  But God, loving His Creation, kept a close eye on the creatures who had betrayed Him then and continue to betray Him to this day.

The light of life, purpose, and God’s glory that was Christ’s mission continued to shine in the heavenly realms of creation, tirelessly peeking at, prodding, and pronouncing to mankind God’s unwavering righteousness.

Mankind, with few exceptions, preferred/prefers the mantle of Satan’s darkness to hide its unrighteousness.  Jesus stepped into our midst as the perfect, restorative sacrifice to remove the angel with the flaming sword and light our way back into life in the Garden.

It is a gift we cannot buy, and a light that is ours, and yours, by asking in faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is confident this isn’t heresy (lmk if I need light<><).

Spirituality Column #778

October 12, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity

Long Division   

By Bob Walters

“Thus, the people were divided because of Jesus.” – John 7:43

At the announcement of our Lord’s birth, the angels proclaim “peace on earth.”

Then as Jesus moved toward the cross, He seemed to be dancing to a very different piper when He said this to His disciples:

“Do you think I came to bring peace on earth?  No, I tell you.  But division.  From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.” (Luke 12:51-52)

Were the angels wrong? (No.)  Did Jesus change? (No.)  Is He a psycho? (No.) Can we trust this guy? (Yes.)  Just don’t look in the mirror and expect to see Jesus.

I’m convinced most of the world has the Jesus thing backwards – either by will, by philosophy, or by ignorance – because so much of “The World” expects in Jesus a reflection of its own errant image of “kindness”: an affirming, unifying, non-judgmental, apparently passive, soft-humored, gift-giving, flock-building, cuddly, good-time Charlie.

Like, say, an unprincipled rich uncle: not especially serious, not authentically real.

And then the World discovers that Jesus’s first principle is the unwavering love and righteousness of God.  The World says “No thanks; that’s not what I want. Jesus is a myth.” No, I’m afraid it’s the unprincipled rich uncle who is the myth; he cannot save.

Jesus as the salvation of mankind is as serious and real as serious and real get.

A Christian believer who asserts the truth of Christ will, like Jesus, be hated by the World which thinks peace is merely the absence of divisive struggle.  But the struggle, in the world, will always be with us while Satan, the great divider, is around.

It is Jesus who provides peace in the midst of struggle, of the fight for our eternal souls that is the province of Jesus.  We reduce the Christian religion to “sin and forgiveness” when the Gospels repeatedly affirm that Jesus is less ruffled by sin than by people not knowing who He is.  Salvation comes from identifying and loving Jesus. 

Notice that Jesus consistently heals, helps, and is nice to sinners; He roars at the unbelieving Jews.  Jesus isn’t angry at the sinful woman, or the Roman centurion, or the woman at the well.  But among those who should know who He is, often including His disciples and always the “brood of vipers” as he calls the Pharisees, Jesus holds them to severe account for their doubt and/or ignorance of His identity as the Son of God.

It’s not surprising that the world thinks first of sin; Satan is lord of the world and man’s sins are Satan’s reins.  We take sin’s bit and prance to Satan’s goal of stealing God’s glory as, by pride and greed, he hinders humanity’s ability to recognize Jesus.

We implore others to “Be Kind” (saw that today on a sweatshirt).  We’d rather be “spiritual” than religious.  We need only “believe” (in what?) to find goodness.  And we are happy and confident to self-affirm, “I’m a good person.”  I shake my head.

I’m afraid that’s the long dividing line.  If Jesus were wearing that sweatshirt, I sort of imagine it would instead read, “Be Righteous.”  That’s what Jesus is all the time. 

Yes, Jesus is kind, but our salvation is in identifying His righteousness and His true personhood in God.  That’s how His grace is multiplied and our peace is achieved.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) relies first on Christ’s righteousness; His truth too.

 Spirituality Column #777

October 5, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

All Day Long

By Bob Walters

“Do you sense that Christ is yours all day long?” – Ray Stedman

Several years ago I piped up in a church Bible study group that I thought the key to knowing Christ and living with Jesus was to keep it simple.

The teacher looked horrified.

It’s been long enough ago that I remember barely any specifics of what we were discussing, nor the teacher’s barely audible response.  I only remember the teacher’s look. And it was a look that seemed mainly sad, and I don’t know if that was for my benefit or his.  We had generally, I think, been having one of those “How do we know we are Christian?” and “How do we know we are pleasing Christ?” type conversations.

I said something close to, and no more profound than, “Why worry about it?  The simplest thing is to trust Jesus.”  The teacher’s look and posture suggested, sternly, not only that my solution was inadequate, but a sadness that he knew he couldn’t do it.

Keep it simple, I mean. 

He trusted Jesus … but I sensed it was a great mental, spiritual, and emotional strain to accept whether he was “doing it right.”  He didn’t know, and when we don’t know, our joy in the Lord and comfort of the Holy Spirit grows thin and develops holes.

(As an FYI, for those of you who know me well, the teacher wasn’t George.)

Almost as many years ago (15? 16?) I got into the habit of reading Ray Stedman’s online daily devotional The Power of His Presence (link).  It is short, themed, free, focuses on one Bible book per month and one scripture passage per day.  Last month the book was 2 Corinthians, and the above quote appeared Sept. 24 suggesting we can sense Christ being ours “all day long.”  To me, that’s as simple as it gets.

All day long?  Yeah … you just live with Him.  I sort of liken it to a spouse who you don’t have to really think about to be with them in spirit all the time, because you just are.  Who forgets they are married?  Who doesn’t weigh their daily decisions and actions in consideration of their spouse?  Or their kids?  Or career or commitments?

Christ should be no different, except that Christ should be first.  I recently read a note somewhere that said a great marriage focuses on Christ, a good marriage focuses on your spouse, and a bad marriage focuses on yourself.  Any relationship on any terms can be trying, but Jesus being a part of our intimate, all-day-long daily life eliminates the need to go back to the Lord in prayer, saying, “Now where was I?”

You’re just there, and you live in your faith and in His light and truth.  The point isn’t that one’s life is easy, or without sorrow and challenges.  The point is the abiding bedrock trust in Jesus that leads one through life’s complications.  We may wonder, “What am I going to do?” Or, “What is Jesus going to do?”  Fair questions, but the simplest path to joy is knowing Jesus is right there at our sides all the time.

All we have to do is invite Him in, with love for Him and others.

If you let it, it’s as simple as that … all day long.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) offers this link to the 9/24 Stedman devotional The Simplicity Of Christ (2 Cor 11:3-15).  Also, Bob is now reading “Seeing is Believing” by scientist Michael Guillen (see column #776) and loving it.  Highly recommended!

Spirituality Column #776

September 28, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Welcome Aboard

By Bob Walters

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

Myself being a late-comer to faith in Christ I have perhaps a heightened compassion for those whose faith is bound up in the small and tight space of science.

I was never a scientist – not even close – but I have lots of beloved friends, family, and acquaintances who are.  Some live in faith; some don’t.  They cover the spectrum of having wide open and robust faith, no faith, some faith, seekers, no interest, lifelong believers, and never-in-a-million-years ”nones.” 

There are scientists I attend worship with every week, and some who would never open a Bible or darken a church door.  Some are all-in.  Some are curious, some sneer.  Some are respectful but distant: maybe embarrassed by the practices and optics of what a Sunday morning in church looks like or says about them.

What I accept is that their faith is their own business.  I can explain my faith to them (1 Peter 3:15), but I can’t explain their faith to them.  Sharing faith in Christ – with others – is a special and mysterious bond I never understood the first 47 years of my life.  It is not a bond I can imagine being conjured or forged in a scientific lab.

Scientists are on my mind this week because of a new book by Michael Guillen, “Believing is Seeing, A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith. Name ring a bell?  He has multiple PhDs, taught at Harvard, and was an Emmy winning science editor and reporter for ABC News.

I love Guillen’s story even before reading the book (which I ordered): a Harvard atheist discovers no explanation for the expansive, invisible world other than the very hand of God.  Guillen explains that as an atheist and scientist he was constricted to materially understanding the totality of all things as limited by their physical nature. He was wrong.

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal Houses of Worship editorial feature Why Atheists Need Faith (link), Guillen described, briefly, how his intellect grew beyond science and how among world religions and philosophies, he landed amid Christianity.

I’m one to follow Jesus more than to “follow the science.”  Jesus doesn’t change, and science always does.  Our culture wants to postulate that science, i.e., “seeing is believing,” will somehow, can somehow, replace God.  But that’s nonsense; science helps to reveal God.  I notice the Bible is big on Why, but not How.  And I believe God bequeathed us science to search for Him and discover His “How.”  Believing is seeing. 

G.K. Chesterton noted in his 1908 “Orthodoxy” that “every circle is infinitely round, but there is tyranny in its circumference.”  Translated, any field of study – law, science, philosophy, etc. – defines its size, breadth, reach, and scope by what it allows itself to imagine.  Minus God, human enterprise and purpose shrink to nothingness. 

Guillen observed that while the physical world is limited, the spiritual world is not. “Faith is the foundation of the entire human experience,” he writes.  “Our faith in spiritual reality drives us to seek treatments for diseases, to create works of art, music and architecture, and to see life as divine creation, not an accident of nature.”  Right on.

Polls meant to discourage cultural attitudes toward faith are no match – ever – for a human heart, mind, and soul that grasp Jesus Christ.  Welcome aboard, Dr. Guillen.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will likely have more to say after reading the book.

Spirituality Column #775

September 21, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Where Seldom is Heard …   

By Bob Walters

“… God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:19

Pam and I recently visited family at a favorite old haunt in northern Michigan: Mackinaw City. It was my boyhood summer home and my parents are buried there.

Time was short over the long weekend, but relaxation was bountiful, the weather was perfect, and a schedule was non-existent.  One of my favorite things is to visit small churches when we travel and I thought it might be fun to go to one in town not far from our old lakeside home.  But … I wound up not going.

I looked up the church online to see who the preacher was and discover any info about the congregation, doctrines, etc. This one was promising; it was a traditional Bible-based church with an obviously seasoned and able pastor.  I love those guys! But his sermon series was on “Discouragement,” and my enthusiasm waned.

Everything I read about Jesus in the Bible leads me to believe that my Christian walk is blessed by the encouragement of Jesus, not to be encumbered by the plentiful discouragement of the world, let alone a litany of discouragement from the pulpit.

“But you have to face up to the world, Bob!”  And I say … no, not like that.  Satan dishes out all the discouragement he can toward Christ specifically.  And I don’t agree with why churches (this isn’t the only one) feel the need to catalogue the world’s discouragement as an argument for the love of Jesus and our salvation in Christ. 

Why not just preach the encouraging message of Christ?  I can get a week’s worth of worldly discouragement from five minutes of any show on Fox News … and – trigger warning – I tend to agree with their slant on things. 

The pulpit message of Christ can be uplifting, should be uplifting, is uplifting.  When He faced the “discouragement” leveled at him by the Pharisees, Jesus knew the grace and love of God.  He also possessed the perseverance of His own mission, obedience, and love.  Jesus never lost sight of His purpose, which was to save the world, not gripe about it.  Our purpose is to accept His saving gift and glorify God.

It’s a legitimate if mysterious question to ponder: Was / is God “discouraged” by the sin of the world, the work of Satan, the gross disobedience of Israel, the death of His only Son, broken churches, heresies, or a largely disbelieving world? I won’t guess on that one, but I am sure God never doubts His own righteousness, purpose, or love.

I believe that the body of Christ – His church – should never purpose to scare or depress people enough about the world so that they crowd fearfully into a small space with no choice but Christ.  How much better when we see the glory and purpose of Jesus, fall in love with him, and freely choose to be in faithful relationship with Him?

This side of heaven we will never encounter a world where we seldom hear a discouraging word, but discouragement is no way to tell the story of Jesus.

I’ll never know what the nice preacher at the small church up north was going to say, but I do know that alienation and discouraging words come naturally into our fallen worldly lives.  In any case, my Home on the Range is the encouraging word of Jesus.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes the Good News of Jesus.  That’s true media. 

Spirituality Column #774

September 14, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Can’t Buy Me Bread …    By Bob Walters

“And give us this day our daily bread…” – from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:11)

“I am the bread of life.” – Jesus, John 6:35

The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John has Jesus, at a mountain along the seashore of Galilee, miraculously feeding “the 5,000” not just their “daily bread” but also a generous ration of fish to go with it.

Later in chapter 6 we read Jesus’s critique of what He saw in the people who ate, who then followed Him the next day, and what He was really trying to teach them.  We’ll go into that in a minute, including comparisons with God’s provision of manna in the desert hundreds of years earlier to the Israelites escaping Egypt.  But let’s notice first a few often lost aspects of this miracle meal on the mountainside in John 6.

You may see other minutiae, but I noticed these.

1.    Verse 4, “The Passover Feast was near.”  The Gospels teach that Jesus IS the new Passover, the salvation of life, not just for the Israelites but for all mankind.  Jesus throws His own feast of a kind with the bread and fish.

2.    Verse 5, the disciples ask Jesus, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”  In verses 6 and 7 we see a) Jesus was testing his disciples with that question, and b) Philip responding that it would take “eight months wages,” an exorbitant sum. Jesus is trying to teach them the lesson that some things cannot be bought; His bread is eternal and of faith, not for purchase.

3.    Verse 8 has Andrew, who is always introducing people to Jesus, introducing the young boy who has “five small barley loaves and two small fish.” Andrew’s news is quickly tempered by his own doubt, “but how will we feed so many?”

4.    Funny, we never hear anything more about the boy who donated his lunch.  You’d think somebody would have thanked him.

5.    Perhaps the lesson is akin to that of the tiny mustard seed from which great plants grow.  Jesus turns this small boy’s personal sacrifice into a giant blessing for the entire assemblage.  Never doubt what Jesus can do with the gifts we give, no matter how small.  In His multiplication is our joy.

6.    And, leftovers … verse 13 notes that they “filled twelve baskets … with pieces of the five barley loaves.”  Huh?  Why was no fish left over?  No idea.

Anyway, the people ate, recognized the miracle, and Jesus left before He let them crown him King by force (verse 15).  Notice that not a word of what Jesus said to the crowd – another significant and divine sermon on the mount? – is recorded.  I think that’s because the lesson here isn’t about what Jesus said to them, but what the crowd selfishly, foolishly, merely, expected of Jesus: to fill their stomachs, not their souls.

Note, the people were following the miracle, not the savior.  They liked the free lunch, but missed the eternal point about the bread of life by faith. This is the whole point of John 6:25-59, “I am the bread of life.”  Jesus promises life eternal, every day.

God’s desert manna was a one-day meal deal; the Israelites had to trust God day by day for another provision.  Jesus is teaching that His provision and gift – His bread – is eternal, it won’t rot like manna, and the bread of Jesus is not for sale; it’s for love.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) remembers the Beatles’ song, Can’t Buy Me Love.