Evel's Greatest Leap

Spirituality Column #46
September 25, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

Evel’s Greatest Leap
By Bob Walters

Motorcycle stunt daredevil Evel Knievel’s heartfelt baptism into Christ on Robert Schuler’s Hour of Power television program recently was remarkable.

The event, first aired last spring, took place April 22, 2007 during Sunday services at the famed Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. I heard about it over the summer, and the program re-aired Sept. 15 & 16.

This wasn’t about Schuler, TV evangelism or non-immersive / non-liturgical Baptism. The 69-year-old Knievel’s stunning testimony – plain, clear, resolute and urgent – was about Christ and brought the 3,000-seat Cathedral service to a halt. It inspired hundreds in the audience to come forward and be baptized.

We Christians have our own language about these things, so when I say “the power of the Holy Spirit moved” inside that church that day, it’s not code. Watch the video and those baptisms, and feel what happens in your heart. You’ll understand what that phrase means.

Anyone – but especially those of us who have lived part of our life “believing in God” but not quite figuring out the power of Christ, not quite understanding Christ as God and Man, not quite thinking we needed to be “saved” from our sins, not quite getting the phrase “I am a sinner,” not quite accepting who Jesus is or what He means to us, not quite believing – will recognize Knievel’s words as humble, honest, heartfelt, sincere, persuasive and totally, immaculately, divinely true.

Bob Schuler, Robert’s son who is now the Cathedral’s senior pastor, followed Knievel by wondering aloud, citing the Holy Spirit, who else in the building desired baptism. Hundreds lined up at impromptu stations at the front of the church and, one at a time – believing that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and trusting Him as their Lord and Savior – accepted Christ and were baptized.

Schuler canceled his sermon.

This is worth watching. Show the online video stream or DVD (Knievel’s Leap of Faith, hourofpower.org, $20) to your Bible study, small group … or most importantly, to someone who knows more about Evel Knievel than they know about Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows the Indiana collector who owns Knievel’s helmet from the failed Snake River Canyon jump in Idaho Sept. 8, 1974. After the drag chute opened on the launch ramp, I think now we know why Knievel’s head wasn’t still in it.

Reproducing a Controversy

Spirituality Column #45
September 18, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) Newspaper

Reproducing a Controversy
By Bob Walters

In a recent Sunday morning Bible study on Genesis 1 my friend Tom, a scientist, posed a great creation-vs.-evolution question:

How did sexual reproduction evolve?

That’s a real stumper. Cells (maybe God’s most underrated miracle) can divide to the satisfaction of an evolutionist who’d rather not accept the Creator God’s existence, but sex isn’t just a dividing; it’s a joining then a dividing. How could it evolve? No room there for evolutionary trial and error. Either you reproduce on the first try or you don’t get another generation to, um, evolve.

Like they taught in journalism school, you can’t get a little bit pregnant.

The first chapter of Genesis of course is the story of how God in the beginning over six days created 1. the heavens, the earth and light, 2. land, 3. seeds and vegetation, 4. the stars, sun and moon, 5. birds and fish, and 6. animals and Man (male and female; created Man in His own image).

You have to read Genesis 2 to get details of Adam and Eve, which – I guess – is the detailed version of Day 6. A lot of people stop right there and start arguing about man versus woman or how all that could happen in one day or in one week.

They forget it’s about God, not about them.

I think it’s easier just to believe Genesis and move on to what the story says to us about God in this one life we live.

In the unfallen and perfect world of Genesis 1 and 2 (the “fall,” aka “sin,” happens in Genesis 3), morality wasn’t yet an issue. Since the “fall,” morality – knowing right from wrong – is mankind’s second biggest issue next to our salvation in Christ.

If God created it – sexual reproduction, that is – He must have thought it was pretty important. Maybe we should respect all that He has to say about it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that God created light (Day 1) before creating the stars and the sun (Day 4). So then, what is light? Hint: Jesus Christ.

9/11 - Faith and Clarity and Choice

Spirituality Column #44
September 11, 2007
Current In Carmel (IN) newspaper

9/11 - Faith and Clarity and Choice
By Bob Walters

In early September 2002 PBS Frontline aired “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” chronicling America’s and specifically New York’s religious take on the previous year’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The show truly wasn’t about faith in God; it was about doubting God. It perpetuated the myth that those four hijacked airliners and the resulting loss of life and peace were a “senseless act.” It suggested morality is in the eye of the beholder. It said confusion about faith is normal. It indicted cultural misunderstandings.

Now six years later, if we remember nothing else about 9/11, with great clarity we must remember this: those violent attacks had clear moral purpose and made perfect sense to the perpetrators. Theirs was the ultimate act of faith. Those people attacked us because they most definitely understand our culture, which represents evil to them.

Since then we have all had to make choices about God and about our faith in the light, or perhaps I should say, in the dark, of that tragedy.

My choice was to learn all I could about God. My choice was to learn all I could about Islam. My choice was to study the philosophical and practical foundation and implications of religious and personal freedom in America.

My choice remains to love and fear God, to have faith in his plan on earth and in heaven, and to rejoice in our salvation through Jesus Christ. My choice is to fight evil where I find it, and when it finds me or those I love. My choice is to love my country.

Evil found the United States that day. God didn’t take the day off. It was a day He put us on His shoulders. It was a day to remember that God loves all mankind, and proof that our fallen world can be just awful.

I do know this: I stopped being confused about 9/11 long ago, and am able to make choices.

I choose God. I choose America. And I choose faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wrote a newspaper editorial, partially excerpted here, that was published in the Indianapolis Star on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.  In Bob's book Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary (2011), the clip of the original Star article from 9/11/02 is on page 243.

Natural Conflict

Spirituality Column #43
September 4, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

Natural Conflict
By Bob Walters

Charles Darwin may have failed to accurately explain how we all got here, but his theories succeeded in creating a secular religion – Naturalism.

Naturalism is the accurate “ism” to describe the opposite of “Creationism,” where the Bible tells us God created the world, man, morality and relationships. Naturalism tells us that the creation is all there is, and that, essentially, creation created creation. God isn’t there, morality is a figment of our imagination, and love is a collection of brain waves.

Not a Creator? Darwin’s “Origin of Species” left even the author unsure as to whether his theories were accurate (read Lee Stroebel’s Case for a Creator). Though Darwin’s science, true to his own suspicions, was dreadfully flawed, it was the best alternative yet to God’s story of Creation told in Genesis 1 and 2.

Darwin obviated a need for “God” in the grand scheme of things. Hence we become, if not Creators ourselves, masters of our own morality. We decide what is good and evil; and it doesn’t matter, because we are all just accidents of nature anyway.

I think there is way more mystery, drama, magnificence and truth in the Biblical story, but our secular world has arrived at a place in history where the Bible is largely dismissed, God is easily ignored, Christ is routinely ridiculed, and the Holy Spirit has been morphed into a spirit of man rather than God.

What is the difference? And what does it matter?

This:

Naturalism rejects a personal God, rejects absolutes, rejects morality and ridicules faith. It gives us nothing and explains nothing of our spirit. Instead of faith, hope and charity, the natural order is survival of the fittest.

We have a great gift in God’s love and the transforming grace of Jesus.

Why, in God’s name, would anyone give that up?

PS – You don’t really think we crawled out of the slime and started thinking, by ourselves, do you? God created science, too.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) has made plenty of mistakes, but knows God doesn’t look at him as a mistake. That’s true of everyone. God wants us all.