Friends: With the U.S. election on our doorstep, what role in government should Christians assume to be our own? What about the politicians? May our nation be saved. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #937

October 29, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Shepherd, Hireling, or Wolf?

By Bob Walters

“He who is a hired hand (hireling) and not a shepherd … sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. I am the good shepherd. I know my own … and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Jesus, John 10:12,15 (ESV)

This presidential election next week, combined with a random comment I heard in church on Sunday, got me to thinking.

For President of the United States, will our nation be better off electing a shepherd, or a hired hand? While I am set in my preference of the candidates, it also is obvious that nobody wants to elect a disinterested hired hand. A shepherd is better.

So, later I was thinking about the shepherd/hireling dichotomy vis-à-vis the election and realized I was asking the completely wrong question.  Christians often say that we are electing “a president not a pastor,” supposedly removing religion from the docket.  And for darn sure, we had better not be mistaking – or imagining – that either “shepherd” elected is Jesus Christ. My point: is it a “shepherd” we should even seek?

I suppose there are many folks who do indeed view, errantly, that they are voting for some sort of civic or cultural shepherd or “savior.”  Huh uh, no.  It is not Jesus the electorate imagines it is voting for; it is Satan the electorate imagines it is voting against.

But back to my continuing thoughts on the shepherd/hireling thing.  Driving home it occurred to me – and I teach high school American Government – that I don’t want to elect a shepherd at all.  As an American citizen – you, me, all of us – are not sheep, not where our government is concerned. The government is supposed to be our servant.

Is that currently an accurate reflection of the state of American government on almost any level?  No … the government is a wolf. But you know what else? As an American citizen, I am supposed to be a wolf. A hungry, free, independent, responsible, purposeful, creative, and aspirational wolf. That should be my civic identity, not a sheep.

The Lord, not the government, is my shepherd. Let me be a citizen wolf.

Now, am I a sheep in the kingdom of God? Oh yeah. And on all matters divine, Jesus is my Shepherd, Savior, Lord, Way, Truth, Life, and Body and Blood of all my faith, hope, and love.  That is who Jesus is, but it is not who I’m voting for. Jesus has no “term in office” and is not up for election.  Christ is permanent, forever, just, and good.

Jesus was and is the Son of God, maker of all that was made, savior of mankind, and our only mediator with God. But his first and greatest duty was and is as a servant.

So, let’s not confuse the government of the heavenly realms with earthly politics. That “pay grade” thing our American leaders often joke about when faced with a task larger than their office, should never be confused with Jesus, or fanciful about the extent of what an American leader needs to be: a servant. Like Jesus? Sure. But not Jesus.

Most nation/tribal leaders in all history have been wolves.  The U.S. Constitution, written with a close and sacred understanding of the Bible, works only with a just, moral, and Christian people. Obedience? Yes … but not sheep. Love God, love others, be just.

Romans 13:1-7 tells us government is to provide order, protect citizens, and help the citizens protect their persons and their aspirations.  Where God is concerned, I’m part of the flock. Where this election is concerned, I’m howling against false shepherds.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: wolves are loyal mates and protect the pack.

Friends: Pam’s daughter Lauren married Greg Saturday, blending families and going forward in life.  I officiated the service and wanted to share the homily I wrote on love. Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #936

October 22, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Complete Love

By Bob Walters

“Love … always perseveres.” – The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:7

Lauren and Greg, with her three small children and his one, were married and became a blended family last Saturday.  It was a career first for me, officiating the small, cozy ceremony among their dearest family and closest friends. I thought I’d share the homily:

Not one of us, individually, is “complete.” I believe our singular human incompleteness was and has been part of God’s plan since the Garden of Eden. We need a sure savior. We need trusted friends. We need nurturing family. We need a loving mate. It is a blessing to have loving children.  Hope resides in all these things.

The Bible says, “God is love,” but our earthly, human, temporal understanding of love we have in this life is better experienced in the context of God’s giving, sacrificing, eternal love. It is with God, and with each other, that we discover our completeness.

Consider that God – who we know as the Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – God Himself is a community of three.  Why a community? Because love cannot exist alone, as one. 

A wise man once said that God is three because three is the smallest number of a community. God, therefore, can be – and is – love, and teaches that we are to love those whom he created in His own image … us.

It follows that the great commands of Jesus are to love God, and to love others.

The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4-7:

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres.”

Notice that the things that cast light on ourselves – envy, boasting, pride, self-seeking – are warned against.  While things that express love, patience, kindness to others, and truth are recommended.

Chapter 13 of the Bible’s New Testament book of 1^st Corinthians is a staple of Christian and even not-so-Christian weddings, as we proclaim the strivings of human love. But the chapter is primarily about God’s perfect love.

Back in verse two, Paul says “if I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Love is how we are completed in God’s eyes.  Our ability to see through to the eyes of God is the gift of Jesus Christ, and of those we love.

The passage also says that we must “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). That is because we have grown and learned a greater love – a sacrificial love – for others and humility for ourselves.

Yes, in our earthly life we can have many things, talents, desires, dreams, and intentions.  But in the end, Paul says, faith, hope, and love remain; the greatest of these being love.   Love is the greatest because it invites divine relationship, and is God’s language of community, and completion.  

Greg and Lauren, may your lives and love become complete with God, with each other, and with your children, in heaven’s earthly realm. AMEN.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) obtained one of those “online ordinations” to be “legal” for the ceremony, but prior to the ceremony counseled with several personally known and trusted pastors for their blessing and imprimatur for him to officiate.  

Friends: Meet Cliff.  Cliff’s awesome.  If you haven’t run into him on the internet, you might run into him on an American college campus explaining Jesus. Posting early this week due to MCA Fall Break. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #935

October 15, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 3 – True Religion

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. Do this with gentleness and respect.” – 1 Peter 3:15

“What I am saying is true and reasonable.” Paul to Festus and King Agrippa, Acts 26:25

Over the past couple years Cliffe Knechtle has become something of a YouTube, internet, and college campus sensation with brief videos airing all over social media.

Ask Cliffe a hard question about Christ, the Bible, or religion in general, and right there, whether amid Christians or – quite frequently – a skeptical crowd on the campus square, he’s always prepared to provide true, reasoned, gentle, and respectful answers.

Whether it is a Christian school or even the lion’s den of the Ivy League, dialogues range from reassuring explanations to rebuttals of challenges.  My favorites are the arrogant, cynical, know-it-all undergrad philosophy majors who take the tone of patronizing this poor sap who actually thinks Jesus, salvation, eternity, the Bible, God, and the Holy Spirit are true. And, for questioners from other faiths, that God is the One True God. Cliffe immediately says things in reasoned ways I wish I could think to say.

Cliffe is fun to listen to. But an overnight sensation?  He has pursued his “Give Me an Answer” college ministry for 40-plus years, including television in the 1990s.

A gifted street preacher and apologist, Cliffe is also senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was actually organized in 2001 around his Bible teaching talents. His books include Give Me an Answer (1986), Help Me Believe (2002), and Heaven Can't Wait (2005).

Turns out Cliffe and I are the same age, born days apart in May 1954. And, the church he pastors first met on Sept. 2, 2001, the exact date I first attended church as an adult … any church.  It’s what I call my “Awake Date.”  Maybe that’s why I like him.

Age 70, then, and Cliffe isn’t slowing down. Three weeks ago at the invitation of the Yale Christian Union, Cliffe (and son Stuart, a minister) spent six hours sharing with and being challenged by Yale students in Beinecke Plaza. Here is a five-minute clip of a discussion with a Jewish student about the Bible, morality, and modern values (LINK).

Video snippets of Cliffe’s encounters pop up regularly on social media.  His ministry has 719,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Instagram.

Cliffe won’t solve the entire problem of the Christian deserts that American colleges have worked so hard to become – officially and administratively – but ministries like his prove the Spirit moves in places where Christ’s truth is attacked.

And one more thing about the event at Yale … it was not a “school sponsored” event by an approved student body club.  ChristianUnion.org (LINK) is a ministry based in Princeton, N.J., that has a dozen chapters around the Ivy League and other schools. My guess is that “Christian Union” is on the more liberal side of the Christian doctrinal ledger: its website talks a lot about “transforming society” but not much about Jesus.

That’s a warning light, to me, but as long as Christian Union is willing to put Cliffe unmuted on the college green, the seeds of Christian truth are sown.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays the soil is fertile, not fallow. Come, Lord Jesus.

Friends: American academia may have kicked Christian clubs off campus or out of school, but Jesus isn’t that easy to get rid of.  The faithful persevere, spirits are revived.  See the column...   Blessings, Bob

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Labels: Christian campus ministry, Ephesians 2:2, father of lies, Isaiah 57:15, John 8:44, religious studies, revival, truth

Spirituality Column #934

October 8, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 2 – Seeds of Revival

By Bob Walters

“For this is what the high and exalted One says – he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’” Isaiah 57:15

Last week I took the spiritual status of American university academia to the woodshed.  It has been an ugly thing the past 150 years as bedrock Christian theology classes have been largely replaced in colleges by soft-core “religious studies,” and detuned as the central fabric of society. “Higher” education? Higher than God?   

Yet … there is a glimmering light.  Christianity tends to be hard to get rid of. While universities have expunged Jesus from their curriculums – I mean the real, Son of God, Lord and Savior, Jesus, the way and the truth and the life of the Kingdom of God Jesus – no shortage of Christians and Christian missions are alive and well on campus.

Of all the ironies of Christianity – the King of Creation arrives as the humble, helpless child Jesus; His death brings our freedom; His resurrection assures our restoration, God’s Spirit animates our hearts for God’s Kingdom, God’s mysteries somehow seal our faith in love and truth – Church history teaches us that it is during persecution when Christian light burns hottest. From darkness comes revival.

As in: after Jewish leaders conspired to have Jesus murdered on the cross, His resurrected body and life lit the fire of faith in thousands … then millions.  After Romans persecuted Christians for two centuries, Emperor Constantine became a Christian.

Today, doctrinally true Christian clubs and ministries are largely banned on campuses whose administrations – and student bodies generally – place a higher value on individualism of identity, freedom for sins, and group-think than discovery of truth.

While we might wonder what is better than forgiveness of sins, or more individual than a personal relationship with Christ, academia frets that its secular, homogenized, “truth” will be challenged. Yet it is not truth; it is a false gospel of false uniqueness. 

God’s Truth, the truth that governs reality, is eternal. But Satan – as the “Lord of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and “the father of lies” (John 8:44), - creates perennial temporal havoc.  Humanist philosophies and pagan gods/worship go back thousands of years across all cultures. Satan’s greatest enemy is the truth of Jesus Christ.

Campus ministries organized as “approved student activities or clubs,” have been mostly defenestrated by university administrators under their “anti-discrimination” policies (speaking of ironies).  But plenty of students have their “swords” – Bibles – with them, share in Christian fellowship with their sisters and brothers in the faith, and evangelize on campus not with argument, apologetics, and protest, but with “the hand and heart’ of service and kindness. That was the social model of the earliest Christians.

University sponsored/approved Christian clubs may be nearly extinct, but outside churches, ministries, and missions either amid or near college campuses love, support, and encourage faithful students. Among the most effective campus ministries nationally are the hundreds of Catholic parishes adjacent to colleges but controlled by the church and “energized by its theology of the body.” (LINK: The Campus Ministry Boom).

Jesus hasn’t left campus, even as campuses try to leave Him. More next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) repents, having once thought Christians were weirdos.

Friends: Christian faith and knowledge – along with truth, generally – have slipped off the radar screens of most American college and university curriculums. Next week ... seeds of revival. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #933

October 1, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 1

By Bob Walters

“If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first …” John 15:18, NIV 1984

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” John 16:13, NIV 1984

Our E91 pastor Rick Grover mentioned in a sermon a few years ago that his son had headed off to a Big Ten college that was, Rick offhandedly said – accompanied by a nervous chuckle – “one of the largest Christian mission fields in America.”

What he was saying was, his son’s faith would be challenged. We all understood.

Let’s not reveal or pick on that particular school because the modern university academy – in toto and nationwide, big or small – does indeed comprise arguably the largest, most hostile, unchurched, uncomprehending, unsympathetic, unfaithful, and unknowledgeable Christian environment in our nation. At least, that I can think of.

College USA is now Satan’s favorite playground; Jesus need not apply.

Consider the trajectory. Virtually all early American colleges were formed as seminaries or religiously sponsored schools. After the Civil War, Land Grant colleges popped up across the United States emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and math. Religion and philosophy were supplanted by the empirical sciences.

By the 1920s, smaller Christian schools bloomed as havens of Christian thought, truth, and doctrine. In the 1930s the philosophy of public education began to stray from its Christian grounding, and in the 1960s Christian prayer and the Bible – by act of the U.S. Supreme Court – were expunged from public schools and most public places.

On college campuses in the later 1960s and 1970s – those of us of a certain age well remember – were violent protests over Viet Nam, establishment politics and Watergate, not to mention far-reaching and enduring racial, sexist, and sexual tensions. 

In the past decade we have witnessed a “breathtakingly rapid sprint” (LINK) of identity politics through virtually all our institutions – not just colleges and public schools, but government, business, sports, entertainment … even many churches and ministries.

The Woke virus seemingly traveled faster than Covid.  Colleges whose earlier mission was to teach “expert competence” (LINK) in a recognizable and marketable skill now focus almost entirely on identity politics, victimhood, and the condemning of oppressors.

Engineering? Computer science? Health care? Law? Education? OK, we will educate you, the colleges say, but have your politics right, first. If you don’t? Keep your head down and your mouth shut.  How about a nice degree in Gender Studies?

I don’t think it is possible to overstate the pervasiveness of anti-Christian bias on most of today’s college campuses, who administratively and among the broadest swath of faculty evince an overt hostility against exactly what Christianity provides: the reality of God, the truth of Jesus, the presence of the Spirit, and the authority of the Bible.

Oh … and the correct interpretation of “Love God, and love others.” Love itself is not the God, or rather, god, that the identity-first crowd thinks it is.  Love is the truth of God’s intention and purpose for creating us in the first place: in His image holding us up to His standards.  God’s righteousness flies straight into the face of Woke humanism.

Welcome to college. 

But all is not lost. Next week we will examine some encouraging seeds of revival.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes Rick’s son majored in Law Enforcement, faith intact. P.S. – the LINKs embedded in the column are both to the following article, referenced in previous columns: The Age of Incomplete Religions | Joshua Mitchell | First Things

 

Friends: Humanity’s spiritual sin debt is settled in hope and sacrifice, while our modern spiritual social debt is mired in irresolution. The right hand needs to understand what the left hand is doing … and fast.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #932

September 24, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Debt Load   

By Bob Walters

“…forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus, Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:12

In the beginning, there was debt.

With only barely-necessary apologies to Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning,” etc.) – whether considering Genesis 3, the Code of Hammurabi, Plato’s Republic, Jesus and Paul in the New Testament, or humanity’s march through history – we see justice, price, and the paying of debts as the “central consideration from the very beginning of human civilization … No agreed understanding of debt, no civilization.”

So asserts Georgetown political theorist Joshua Mitchell in his recent First Things article, The Age of Incomplete Religions. (Link below.)  Yes, Mitchell does a laudable, circumspect job of assessing the Christian, historical, and political ubiquity of debt in human interaction.  But his assessment of contemporary social debt, I think, is brilliant.

As we wonder and lament why so much of current western civilization makes so little sense, Mitchell’s description of the pervasive, incomplete religion of identity politics lays out a coherent and rational – if disturbing – description of debts and economies.

As sin debt is unpayable by us, so is our social debt to the perpetually offended.

While Jesus settled sin debt on the cross to bring forgiven believers back to God, the social debt charged to us by the identitarian left perpetually boils in a cauldron of hate.  It is not forgiveness that is sought or even on offer.  Just, agree … or be purged.

Mitchell makes the good point that long trusted, conservative political kill-shot descriptives like “Marxist,” “Communist,” and “Progressive” are now neutered.  Bernie Sanders’s Marxism, for example, isn’t the enemy; the enemy is Identity Politics.

On a fervored religious par with Christianity, this unpayable social debt of grievance-based politics is the incomplete religion about which Mitchell writes.  Christianity is complete because it divinely shepherds us into the eternal. Any number of social movements in history (The Terror of the French Revolution, for example) or today guarantee only a pious busyness in this life of inconsequential, self-made angst. 

Wokeness, LGBTQ, Critical Race Theory and the rest constitute an overall religion that offers no salvation and won’t follow one’s soul into the grave.  Or, maybe it will, but the religion itself is temporal and only of this world.  What happens next?

Let’s just say I’d rather be right with Jesus.

Mitchell tracks conservative confusion regarding this new “truth,” if you will, to previously understood human debt in three categories. One is the spiritual debt about which we are speaking, and the other two are economic and traditional debt.  Economic debt is about money; traditional debt is about what we owe our fathers (both Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, etc., and our parents). Conservatives understand them.

A Christian’s spiritual debt is vertical … it goes upwards to God.  Social debt, in a telling turn of phrase, goes sideways.  It is demanded by the all-virtuous “pure, mortal, innocent victim groups,” i.e., the liberal left, from “impure, mortal, transgressor groups,” i.e. the conservative right. Forgiveness is not on the table, but civilization is on the line.

Politically, and in light of the election, may I suggest we know left from right.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) highly recommends The Age of Incomplete Religions.

Friends: In this political season it is fairly easy to spot Satan’s work. Better run to Jesus, scorn the devil, and smile. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality column #931

September 17, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Cheerful Scorn

By Bob Walters

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to the texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” – Martin Luther quote and epigraph to C.S. Lewis’s 1942 classic, The Screwtape Letters.

When I hear someone pray about “binding satan,” I reflexively and immediately spiritually go stand next to Jesus.  I talk to Jesus, pray with Him, trust Him, love Him, and entreat His peace, mercy, healing, wisdom, and grace on the prayer’s target issue.

What I try to do, in other words, is avoid talking, let alone arguing, with the devil.

C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, in 31 wickedly funny fictional missives from executive demon Screwtape to confused and incompetent junior demon Wormwood, splays open how best to tempt and control mankind into leaving our reliance on God.

Satan, you see, loves to argue.  And I posit to you this: America is in an intractable season of political argument, and Satan is having a heyday.

Perhaps our best Christian move is not to wade too far into the political muck because neither political party – if you read the article links I included last week – remains interested in forwarding the biblical Christian worldview. The Democrats strayed decades ago, and the Republican party at its convention this past summer generally offloaded, or at least softened, its traditional conservative and Christian aura.

As mentioned in those links, sixty-plus years of Republican-centered Christian political activism has brought large talk but few policies.  The idea of a “Christian fifth column” setting civic policy is a canard, i.e., it’s not there.  And the moniker “Christian nationalist” is a polemical chimera without meaning, as in, there is no “there” there.  It is a nebulous, debasing label invented for annoyance and argument, not clarity or truth.

These are indeed trying times for a believing Christian, but we may have been given an unexpected gift hidden within the political rancor and cultural upheaval of recent times. We are looking at a fifty-fifty U.S. presidential election where each side sees the other side’s candidate as Satan.  And without rehashing the news, perhaps we’ve learned at least this: Debate, alas, is futile. Maybe it is time just to be Christians.

It’ll be the hardest thing we’ve ever done, because Christians have long been cushioned from true activism by that with which we are about to be bludgeoned: a political system and culture now wholly disinterested in Christian influence.

What’s the cheerful part?  This: Jesus never told us to argue, Jesus told us to love God and love others.  He did not tell us, nor did he model for us, acquiescence to lies. He answered satan with scripture, the pharisees with truth, and disciples with love.

Our nation’s founders did not imagine a nation unmoored from Christ. As pointed out by Ronen Stoval in First Things (Link), Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 “saw in America not just a land of the free, but a land of the responsible … a place where liberty was always tethered to the common good. The founders understood that true freedom is not the absence of restraint, but the presence of purpose.” We are increasingly tethered to lies.

Stoval asks if we can reclaim our national moral compass. It’s a good question. Our challenge as Christians is to not lose our moral compass, and to not let the un-reality of identity politics – wokeness, LGBTQ, DEI, Critical Race Theory, climate and environmental bullying, intersectionality, perpetual grievance, and the like – govern us.

I’ll keep my joy in Christ, and cheerfully scorn the enemy where I find him. Sure, I’ll vote, but Christians need to focus on Jesus. The devil is in the political details.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests these article links: The Screwtape Election and The Broken Promise of America, both from First Things. Also, the links mentioned are still live at the bottom of last week’s column.  Just scroll down.