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2011-12-22T22:28:00.002-05:00

We've written a book ... and moved!

The blogspot site is now:
www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com
See the latest newspaper columns there!

And ... the book is available!
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
by Bob Walters
was published November 28, 2011
Book is a compilation of these weekly columns
with a foreword by Dave Faust, president of
Cincinnati Christian University.
Book is available at Lulu.com, Find: Common Christianity
Contact Bob directly at rlwcom@aol.com
HOT TIP ... coming soon ... BobWaltersOnline.com - The Blog

Praying for Grandma's Gravy

2011-11-21T18:15:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #263
November 22, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Praying for Grandma’s Gravy
By Bob Walters

Thanksgiving dinner can be one of the spiritually richest and most comforting gatherings of the year – God’s bounty on our plates, loving family and dear friends at our reverently bent elbows.

Or, it can be a prickly, uneasy theatre of differing and generally incompatible intra-family opinions on relationships, culture, government, and God … simmering like grandma’s gravy that everyone hopes doesn’t get scorched by excessive heat or fractured by inattentive stirring.

Scenario One will likely have a rich pre-meal prayer of thanks for overflowing goodness and fellowship and abundance. It may or may not be a specifically religious prayer because not everyone’s spirit is connected, in an aware way, to a specific faith system. But don’t most of us just know, deep inside, that saying “Thanks” on Thanksgiving isn’t just an expression of appreciation? It’s an affirmation of the existence of God … whatever we understand that God to be. We look around the table, with love, and know that truth exists. God must be here somewhere. We are thankful.

Scenario Two can lead to the guests primarily being thankful when the meal is over and the ride home has begun. Even if family squabbles and political dissonance can be laid aside, the issue of whether God has a proper place at the table is a significant bellwether of enjoyable fellowship. This much I know from my own experience as a non-believer – it feels real weird to pray to a God you truly do not know.

During the 30 years of my life I didn’t go to church, I wasn’t mad at God; I simply didn’t know him and didn’t really care. I know many people today who gave up their faith “for cause.” It might have been a church scandal, the personal sleight or transgression of an insensitive Christian, or the feeling of abandonment by God. To some people, the whole “God” thing just seems stupid. Often, non-believers are simply ambivalent.

I would urge my Christian brothers and sisters to gird up for Scenario Two by praying deeply for understanding, wisdom, courage and patience. We can never argue our faith into another soul; we can only be an example another soul could choose to emulate. And remember … most people don’t have a problem with Jesus; they have a problem with Christians, the church, or “religion.” You’re an ambassador for all four.

Keep “grace” – the pre-meal prayer – simple, but pray clearly with the conviction that thanks is something truly worthy to give to God. It’s the sincerity and the love that you show to God and to others that will rub off on the souls of lost loved ones.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) advises praying for people by name. It works.

WWJD? - No Ifs, Ands or Buts

2011-11-14T18:12:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #262
November 15, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

WWJD? – No Ifs, Ands or Buts
By Bob Walters

Christians ask “What Would Jesus Do?”

A better question is “What DOES Jesus Do?” An even better question is “What does Jesus do that is a model for my life?” And an even better question than that is “What IS Jesus doing in my life right now?”

Asking what Jesus “would” do splits a couple of linguistically problematic hairs.

A common critique of “WWJD” is that it comes dangerously close to putting “me” in the place of Jesus. Becoming “like” Christ (Philippians 3:10), and actually being Christ, are two vastly, massively and dramatically different things. Jesus commands us to love God, not to be God (thanks to Satan, Adam and Eve learned that one the hard way). Jesus said, “Remember me,” not “Be me.” Be careful.

Also, the word “would” signifies what grammar class calls a subjunctive mood or “conditional” phrase; it implies “if” and introduces doubt. Jesus is not an “if,” He is eternally God and human. Sectarians debate the “nature” and personhood of Jesus after the resurrection but the Bible says He is eternally fully God and fully man.

That’s the final answer, mystery and all. “Jesus is,” not “Jesus if.”

Certainly our earthly, human lives are full of subjunctives, contradictions, ifs, ands, buts and maybes. I project my worldly pride and fight for my “rights” yet often realize later, I’m not in the right. Other people see my failings, which robs my integrity, and I hate when that happens.

Jesus had perfect integrity and never wavered in his responsibility. Not one thing about Jesus was “proud” but everything about Jesus had integrity. Jesus came as a servant (in Greek, dulos, “slave”) without pride or rights, only responsibility to God. He was steadfast in that integrity, and the prideful Pharisees and many others hated Him for it.

If we are shooting for “like Christ,” the starting line is to emulate the integrity of Christ’s commitment to God.

On the up-side, “WWJD” very importantly puts Jesus in our lives today, as in … “What Would Jesus Do … right now?” We don’t “carry that old rugged Cross” because of what happened, like the hymn says, “On a hill far away.” We carry our cross today because Christ is alive today, and because what Jesus did “once for all” with grace and passion on the Cross perpetually restores our eternal human relationship with God the Father … a relationship that perpetually renews with our ongoing faith in Christ.

Jesus is never past tense, and is never woulda’, shoulda’, coulda’.

Jesus is “I am.” Right now, and forever.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) observes that pride and rights are almost always about “me,” and that integrity and responsibility are almost always about God.

© 2011 North Faith Publishing

Dividing Politics and Religion

2011-11-07T20:17:00.003-05:00

Spirituality Column #261
November 8, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dividing Politics and Religion
By Bob Walters

On this off-year Election Day, let’s take an off-beat tour of America’s mix of church and state. The Bible gets first “ups.”

Jesus separated church and state long before the eighteenth century secular humanists identified and attached the inalienable rights of man to modernity. Rights, by the way, are not in the Bible; responsibilities are.

One can consider the entirety of the New Testament and understand the unique moral and creative wholeness of Christian freedom in Jesus Christ.

Or, one can take the common Gospel verse “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:12:17, Luke 20:25), and see that Caesar (specifically here “Caesar’s money” or euphemistically “Rome’s man-made government”) and God play on different teams.

The apostle Paul declares the primacy of our “citizenship in Heaven” (Philippians 3:17, 20), but also invokes his own Roman citizenship in order to be heard (Acts 21:39) and then not to be executed (Acts 22:22ff). In Romans 13 Paul says government is ordained by God and that if we “owe taxes, [then] pay taxes” (verse 7).

While Paul seems to indicate the scary proposition that “Government is God,” he doesn’t, and it’s not. Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus plainly says that while both He (Jesus) and we (Christians) are “in the world,” neither He nor we are “of the world” (John 15:19, 17:14, 16). Christ commands that God is first, and that we are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 19:19), and even to love our enemies (5:44).

What the United State Constitution and all it amendments describe is a political context within which the creative freedom of man and the God-ordained morality of “love others as we love ourselves” can prosper and thrive. Over 224 years they have mostly – though not always – thrived, but it is only in the Christian moral context that this kind of document is possible.

Democracy demands moral responsibility, which is different from the “fair” (read “blind”) application of “religious freedom” the secular modern world mistakenly equates and jingoistically describes as “all religions are the same.” They, um, aren’t.

Moral discernment is the first casualty of secularism, which replaces God’s moral truth – Jesus Christ – with man’s moral relativism.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Under God” we enjoy freedom and defend a “government of, by, and for the People.” It certainly can and will “perish from the earth” lest we understand, and understand soon, the indivisible equation of our citizenship both in Heaven and as Americans.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recently read about and laments Europe’s cultural disestablishment of Christianity. He is sure we’ll either learn from Europe’s example, or die the same spiritual death.

Why and How: The Limits of Love

2011-10-31T20:04:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #260
November 1, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Why and How: The Limits of Love
By Bob Walters

We look at God and ask “Why?”

We struggle with faith and ask “How?”

Why should I believe? How can I know?

The Bible says much about why (For God so loved the world …) but not much about how. God could, so he did. Why? To be glorified and because He loves us. But, how did He do it? Why does it matter? Why did He bother?

Conversely, church is full of “how” but not much “why.” Do this, do that. Pray, read the Bible, repent and be baptized, obey, go to communion, make disciples, tithe, serve, show up. Repeat. That’s how. Amen. God said so.

But why? Why so many churches? There’s only one Father-Son-Holy Spirit. Why so many doctrines? John 14:6 plainly quotes Jesus Christ: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

But how? “Tell me why, Lord,” we beg, “and I’ll believe. But first, tell me how I’ll know!”

We’re desperate for faith and plead for answers. But we overlook the obvious. The Bible gives us a perfectly clear picture of who God is and what God does.

Our God is a God of action and stories and creativity; a God of life and love and courage and good. He’s a God of communion and relationship and freedom and doing for others. He is forgiving, fearsome, freeing and just. He is a God of accountability and generosity, of judgment and peace, of authority and purpose, of mercy and grace.

God is with us, about us, for us and in us. He created us. Jesus Christ His son is the author of all knowledge, the truth of all things, and the servant of all creation. He’s both “out there” and “in here.” The Holy Spirit is God’s light in our reverent lives and comfort in our human challenges. God is eternal and unrelenting. He pursues us.

What do we do? We get stuck at “why” and “how.” Rather than worshipping a great God of Love and Hope in faith, we worship the diminished idols of Why and How in knowledge. We focus on us, blur Jesus Christ, and Satan is all for it.

When we demand finite answers to God-sized questions, we limit faith. We also limit truth, stray from grace and lose focus on the awesome splendor, grandeur, bigness and everything-ness of God.

Love God, and love others … and limitations go away.

Not that anyone besides Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is counting, but this marks five years – 260 straight weeks dating back to November 7, 2006 – of filing this Christian column for Current newspapers. Thanks to all. A book is on the way.

Boo! Angels and Where They Find Us

2011-10-24T19:33:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #259
October 25, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Boo! Angels and Where They Find Us
By Bob Walters

“You’re going to love this story!” a Christian co-worker recently exclaimed.

I knew immediately this was a Kingdom faith story. A non-Christian would have said, “You’re not going to believe this, but …”

Anyway, my co-worker’s brother Mike (also a believer), slipped and fell – hard – the day before outside a busy gas/convenience store in a small northeastern Indiana town. Mike was numb from the neck down, tingly all over, and unable to move. A friend comforted Mike, told him to lie still, and dialed 9-1-1. A crowd gathered.

Amid the confusion, seemingly out of nowhere, a woman appeared. Telling Mike’s friend she was a nurse, she knelt down, stroked Mike’s hand and quietly, clearly assured him, “You’ll be all right.” Then she walked away.

Everyone’s attention was focused on Mike. The “nurse” came and went without being recognized. Immediately after she left, Mike’s feelings began to return. When the paramedics arrived, Mike was fine.

Certainly, it’s possible the injury was less severe than initially thought. And having been around sports injuries and charitable paralysis foundations, I know “stingers” can come and go quickly.

Or not. A small town and nobody recognized the nurse? She left before the ambulance arrived? (Most nurses would stay.) Mike’s paralysis disappeared just like she did? Gotta’ be a God thing; an angel moment.

My wife and I had a similar “close encounter” this summer when our right-rear tire exploded on northbound I-465 nearing the I-69 high-speed connecting ramp in heavy traffic at 10:30 on a Saturday night. Driving in the middle “thru” lane with no sane way to get to either shoulder, we were forced into the most dangerous place imaginable – that striped, “V” shaped no-man’s land in front of the ramp-split crash barriers.

Needing not to stay there, we crept a hundred yards down the I-69 ramp (not the way home), still situated horribly: on the narrow left shoulder with a disintegrated right-rear tire exposed to whizzing traffic scant feet away. We had a flashlight and a spare tire, but no jack, tire iron or lug wrench (long story).

Suddenly, the way I like to tell it, “Jesus showed up.” A slight, scruff-bearded man in dirty work clothes stopped his old, rusted compact car, backed up the ramp’s left shoulder, dug through his cluttered trunk for loose tools and scattered sockets, grabbed his jack, and changed our tire crouching perilous inches from the speeding ramp traffic. ‘Said he usually drove a tow truck – in Noblesville. With my profuse, astonished thanks and $30 he didn’t ask for (all I had on me), he drove off.

I just love that story.

Walters (email rlwcom@aol.com) encourages people to tell angel stories this Halloween instead of ghost stories.

Fate is a Fickle Fashion

2011-10-17T19:11:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #258
October 18, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Fate is a Fickle Fashion
By Bob Walters

Fate, which rationally explains nothing, is often the secular world’s crutch for explaining everything.

It’s a great way to blame God without, you know, actually believing in God.

The ancient Greek, Roman and other cultural mythologies typically cast the Fates as three goddesses of 1) things that were, 2) things that are, and 3) things that are to be. Intricate stories and great epics were written around past, present and future favors, curses and justice visited on various characters by the Fates.

Mankind has always wanted explanations and answers, and the less culpability any one person has for his or her specific actions, the more comfortable the theology. Fate today is the land of “stuff happens,” “it is what it is” and “it’s not my fault.” That’s not exactly a theology but it certainly is a highway to blissful unaccountability, tort-happy lawsuits, and maybe even spiteful, generational victimhood.

“Don’t blame me” is fate’s bumper sticker; “I’m going to blame something else” is its implicit message. “Don’t talk to me about God” is fate’s no-fly safety zone.

Faith – specifically Christian faith – puts God in our midst with the incarnate humanity of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Bible, the church, and the immutable faith in my heart are exhibits A, B and C for the enormity of the Godhead against the smallness of fate.

A living God really complicates and messes up the blissful ignorance of fate-focused living, for faith in God requires much that fate does not. Faith in the Trinity takes commitment, study, action, creativity, wisdom, willful intent, patience, perseverance, humility and total personal involvement.

Fate requires none of that. It asks only resignation, diminishing life by destroying hope and limiting dreams. Whether life seems good or bad at any particular moment or over any stretch of time, ugh, it’s stifling to think, with fate, “this is all there is.”

For all of its demands, faith’s greatest gift is joy – the long-term condition of hope, peace and trust in the goodness of the Creator God no matter how crazy life gets.

It’s puzzling to me how the non-believing world can so comfortably and fashionably believe in fate which can only hurt them, yet refuses to believe in the grace of Jesus Christ, which can only help them. “Fate” is accepting the work of the lord of this world, and that lord, my friends, is Satan.

Satan wants us to worry about explaining everything; knowing our Lord Jesus Christ gives us the peace not to.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) sees belief in God as both rational and reasonable, albeit indefinable. Some conundrum, huh?

Kicking Around Notions of Belief

2011-10-10T16:03:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #257
October 11, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Kicking Around Notions of Belief
By Bob Walters

Here’s a recent newspaper quote from an athlete who came off the bench and made a humongous play to win a humongous game:

“I believed in myself. I said a little prayer … and it went in.”

Kudos to the athlete’s success. What an admirably innocent and humble comment. I’d never criticize an athlete who is that sincerely succinct.

Yet, a question leapt into my mind because that particular sentiment – “believed in myself” – is omnipresent in our culture, and prayer is omnipresent in our souls. So I wonder: If one truly believes in oneself, to whom does one pray?

Let’s consider the magnitude of our cultural and educational bluster about the sovereignty of rational thought, self esteem, and the removal of God from public sight. We are cheered on by our secular institutions to irrationally “believe in me,” but under no circumstances is it tolerable in a public institution to pray to God … and mean it.

Pity, because God is where the real action is.

Secular irony brooks no boundaries. For all of modern culture’s self-glorifying bravado – “I believe in me,” “I am special,” etc. – our secular institutions just as vigorously attack the notion that any one of us actually is special. That’s because truly special requires God, and God is generally outlawed if not outright ridiculed.

Look at public school and university science classes, desperately teaching the reasonableness of a universe that – they swear – happened for no reason. “Life is totally an accident, but you’re special.” Huh? Really? Schools teach facts and things, but shy away from truth. To wit, “God? Oh, that’s just your opinion.”

Imagine a public schoolroom where the self-esteem poster says: “The eternal Creator God took an intentional, special, eternal moment to specifically form you in your mother’s womb so He could love you, prosper you, and make it possible for your life to glorify His holy existence. He sent His Son Jesus Christ to save you and His Holy Spirit to comfort you. Trust this: You ARE special. God says so. Believe Him.” Powerful.

The modernists – the intellectuals running our academic institutions under the premise that man’s knowledge supersedes God’s knowledge – would panic, weakly wheezing “You are special” but lacking God’s authority, ability and passion to prove it. (Postmodern intellectuals would dismiss all knowledge and specialness, period, but that’s another column.)

What is revealing and reassuring about the athlete’s quote above is that regardless how much we “believe in me,” most of us down deep crave the peace of even a little – but honest – prayer to the God who made us.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) longs for a day when “I pray to God” means more than “I believe in me.”

My Way or the High Way

2011-10-03T19:39:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #256
October 4, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

My Way or the High Way
By Bob Walters

- “Regrets, I’ve had a few … but, I did it my way.” – Frank Sinatra (actually, Paul Anka)
- “What’s past is prologue.” – Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1
- “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” – Leroy “Satchel” Paige
- “Go in peace.” – Jesus Christ, Luke 7:50

Regret, fate and fear rob us of the blessed peace we should experience in Christ.

Sinatra’s trademark ballad "My Way" – actually a 1960s French tune with American lyrics written later (presumably “his way”) by Paul Anka – is a beautiful song with the worst possible message; the perfect anthem for the postmodern, Christ-free world of “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” Why? Because there is no salvation in doing things “my way,” only in doing them God’s way that is taught in the Bible, with faith in Christ.

“My way” is the fallen human way, and that is not good.

Even though I’m married to an English teacher whose college minor was Shakespeare, I always thought Marx or Nietzsche or Kant – not the Bard – authored this familiar “prologue” quote. Oops. Turns out this statement rationalizes an upcoming evil act (murder) and insinuates our human helplessness against the fates.

It’s tragic how more readily we accept a shortsighted statement of human fate than an eternal statement of divine faith. “Fate,” apparently, absolves us of our human responsibility (whew!), while Christian faith ties us directly to our responsibility (bummer!). But there’s a huge problem: fate eliminates freedom, choice and hope, making us powerless slaves. Faith in the saving work of Christ on the Cross, however, sets us free from our sinful past, our hurting present, and promises us, one day, of a sinless eternity. Christ is the true engine of ultimate human freedom, and that is good.

Modern psychology generally insists we understand our past, face our fears, and stare back directly at what Satchel Paige suggests “might be gaining” on us. Christianity urges us to gaze forward with hope, but the lesson of the Bible is also that repentance comes before baptism. Observe Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Luke 19:1-8. It helps very, very much to have Christ in our hearts when we look in the rearview mirror of our lives. Only in Christ can our fear turn to compassion and peace.

Throughout the Bible the penitent are blessed, like the sinful woman in Luke 7 who with her own tears washes Jesus’ feet, is forgiven, and saved.

“With Christ” is the best way, the high way, and the only way, to go in peace.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) figures fate is a function of the lord of the world, Satan, who would rather we ignore judgment, doubt grace, and ridicule Christ. That’s his way.

Dispensing with the Pleasantries

2011-09-26T18:22:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #255
September 27, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dispensing with the Pleasantries
By Bob Walters

“It’s unusual to meet a pleasant Christian.”

Ouchhhh … that one hurt. And it’s a statement, I hate to admit, that I found personally very convicting.

It was made on opening night of our Wednesday Bible study by our teacher George, who this fall is walking us through “Citizenship in Heaven: Philippians and Colossians.” George was introducing the early Christian church at Philippi, and noted how easy it was in that multi-cultural first century town of Jews, pagans and other religions to figure out who the Christians were.

Christians were the ones who were happy and non-judgmental. Christians brightened everybody’s day. Christians lived a loving life with the light of the Holy Spirit and the truth of Jesus Christ shining forth from every corner of their being. Christians supported each other, and cheerfully shared the Lord’s servant-attitude with all.

Even with the coming decades and centuries of purges as the Romans and others tried to stamp out Christianity, there was a larger-than-this-life spiritual positivism that spilled naturally from one Christian to another. Christianity survived the toughest of times because of the unusually complete humanity of its adherents, organized around history’s only perfect human, Jesus Christ. How do we know? The Bible tells us, and Church history backs it up.

These Christians didn’t try to trick or bully others into “accepting the Lord or else” because they had so much knowledge about Jesus. These early Christians simply loved others, cared for them, helped them, fed them and nurtured them, knowing that every human person has been created in the image of God the Father. These Christians were an example of God’s love for mankind both inside and outside the faith.

Our teacher George is one of the most cheerful, pleasant and learned Christians one could hope to encounter. He was making an important point about knowledge-based present-day Christianity, and what it is that makes Christians “Christians.”

A loving, servant heart is the core of who we are supposed to be as followers of Jesus, just as a loving, servant heart is the core of the human Jesus, incarnate among us, as the perfect example of divine love.

Whether in old Philippi or in these modern times, the example of Christ is an example of love. The measure of our Christian walk is not in strutting our knowledge, which tends to divide the world, but by exercising a Christ-like, selfless love, which always builds a more pleasant world.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email at rlwcom@aol.com) notes that George’s class is free and open to the public. Email Bob for more information.

How the Rest Was One

2011-09-19T17:42:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #254
September 20, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

How the Rest Was One
By Bob Walters

One of the great big things largely missing from contemporary Christianity is a coherent understanding of church history.

And by church history, I don’t mean Vatican II, the Billy Graham Crusades, or the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment. I mean the years and decades immediately following Jesus Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection, followed by centuries of doctrinal and church development.

Why, or rather, how, did Christianity thrive in those early years when no modern understanding of popular faith can explain its survival? Jesus wasn’t especially well known. Christians were killed, oftentimes in horrible ways, for the crime of simply being Christian. Jewish scripture was not widely known outside of Judaism. There were no Bibles, and the New Testament was unwritten.

And yet, here were these spirit-filled Christians.

Pagan idols were manmade. The mythic gods provided stories but no consequential teaching. Roman law dictated worship of Caesar. Academics of the day relied on the Greek understanding of evidence and logical proof. Yet here were these Christians, worshipping the living Son of the Creator God incarnate among mankind, revealing the truth of God’s love for His creation, and dying to erase mankind’s sin. How do you explain that?

The thing is … you can’t explain it. What happened in those earliest years of Christianity was that eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus shared what they saw and heard, and in faith followed Christ as their Lord. There was evidence and proof in the hearts of the eyewitnesses, and by the power of the Holy Spirit those hearts continued in faith through the generations of mankind. The Spirit remains with us even now.

It’s not enough for today’s Christian to read the Bible’s Book of Acts (written by the Apostle Luke), memorize verse 2:42, and say, “OK, let’s sing some breezy modern worship songs, feel good about Jesus, and come back to church next week.”

The story of Christianity is magnificent, because Jesus Christ is magnificent.

Those early Christians understood the human heart’s hunger for something infinite, experienced man’s thirst for things that last (immortality), shared the human desire for life beyond death, and found the fulfillment of those truths in their joyous community of Christ, the early church, that’s now stretched forward 2,000 years.

Jesus, our rest, is eternal and infinite … but hard to explain. Knowing where the faith has been can build our hope in where our faith, as one body of believers, is going.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), who knows Christianity is more about where we’re going than where we’ve been, nonetheless recommend’s Alister McGrath’s “Christian Theology” and Robert Wilken’s “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought.” Don’t just “look up” … look it up!

So Then What Happened?

2011-09-12T20:41:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #253
September 13, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

So Then What Happened?
By Bob Walters

When I share my “Awake Date” with people – Sept. 2, 2001, the day I accepted Christ, sitting in church for the first time as an adult – it usually hastens an assumption.

And that assumption is that the ensuing pain and magnitude of 9/11 nine days later drew me further into the church; that my deepening faith was a palliative reaction to seek comfort after the awful events which rocked our nation.

Traumatized, in other words, I found Jesus.

That’s so not true.

What happened was that the Sunday after 9/11 I went to a church “Welcome” class instead of the worship service, and then ran into a work acquaintance in the lobby (“narthex” in church language). As we talked, retired pastor Russ Blowers came up to chat with him, and I was introduced to Russ as a newcomer. I ran into Russ again a few minutes later in another hallway and he said, “Hey Bob, we ought to have lunch.”

He came up to me, already remembering my name.

A few days later we had lunch at Sahm’s Restaurant in Fishers. Russ offered to say grace before the meal and my reaction while he prayed was to be embarrassed sitting there praying in public. I’ve since grown out of that.

We talked that day about many things – Russ was the epitome of a pastor, had multiple interests and he loved people. Discussing the 9/11 attacks, we decided to read Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong” book about Islam. After several weeks of reading the book “together” and emailing back-and-forth, we were friends.

In October 2001 I took a four-week “Walking with Christ” class taught by our senior minister David Faust, discovering – surprisingly – that suddenly I could read and understand scripture. Following the last class I asked to be baptized … at 9 o’clock on a Sunday evening. In 2002 I read the entire Bible.

In May 2002, I met Cambridge theologian George Bebawi, new to this country, at a social gathering here in Indy. After helping to get his weekly class started at my church in 2004, I’ve been studying with George for seven years.

My walk with the Lord has been a run, really, of meeting fascinating people who I am convinced God sent my way. Because that’s what God does; He sends for us. And even though we think we seek God, what Christianity is really all about is that God sent His son Jesus Christ, in divine grace, to seek us.

It’s when humanity runs away from the grace of Christ that we have trouble.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) thinks America’s institutionalized long-term reaction to 9/11 has been just backwards: religion shouldn’t be minimized, Christ should be maximized.

The Hour I First Believed

2011-09-02T16:57:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #252
September 6, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Hour I First Believed
By Bob Walters

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.
– 2nd stanza, “Amazing Grace”

“The hour I first believed” was 10 years ago this Labor Day weekend.

Specifically it was Sept. 2, 2001, sitting in a Sunday church service for basically the first time in 30 years. Dave Faust, who later baptized me, and Russ Blowers, who taught me until his death in late 2007, were sharing the East 91st Street Christian Church pulpit that day, with Russ talking gently about Jesus, faith, hope and love.

It was Russ’s 50th anniversary with his beloved congregation. Dave, a gifted preacher, moved on within a year to be a college president, where he continues to raise ensuing generations of Christian ministers at Cincinnati Christian University.

I sat in the back row with mystifying tears rolling down my cheeks; tears that made no earthly sense, but tears that welled up from deep in my heart with the full cooperation of my mind. Before that, I didn’t know what I believed. Today “belief” doesn’t adequately cover the spiritual and intellectual enormity of a life in Christ.

It – Christian life – is not what I expected. It’s not the limiting, rules-following, holier-than-thou, faith-groveling, meek, mind-numbing existence centered on a guilt fetish that I had imagined. The Christian life is an inexplicable hybrid of empowerment and humility; of intellect and emotion; of binding love, and freedom to choose what binds us; of fear, and freedom from it. It is comfort in hard times, courage in harder times, and the excitement of knowing that every day is new when our steps point to Jesus Christ.

I can’t explain my conversion. Jesus didn’t zap me where I sat. Nobody hit me over the head with a Bible. The Holy Spirit didn’t send me into convulsions and God didn’t rend a single curtain. I just knew that whatever awakened within deserved and required my full attention. That it was right. That it was important. That it was true.

And that it was good. Not just any good, but God’s Good. The real deal.

Humanity is bigger, life is better and eternity abounds when they are boldly defined in Christ. I am thankful beyond words for God’s faithfulness, the Holy Spirit’s presence, and the amazing grace of Jesus Christ.

I truly needed it – we all do – and am happy to share it. Jesus is Lord. Amen.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) was in church that day because his then-13-year-old son Eric had randomly wondered a couple weeks earlier at a family dinner, “How come we don’t go to church?” So they went. True story.

Testing One, Two, Three ...

2011-08-29T17:48:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #251
August 30, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Testing One, Two, Three …
By Bob Walters

Horrible things happen and we ask God, “Why?”

The crazy, awful, accurate answer is: Because it’s a fallen world and everything that we might think is a test of God’s love for us is really a test of our faith in Him.

I know. It’s a typical, maddening, unsatisfying, mysterious and at-first-glance non-definitive Christian answer. It seems appallingly cold, impersonal and unfeeling; a nearly criminal endorsement of accepting God no matter what.

It’s the last thing we want to hear when we suffer. But honestly, it’s the first thing we must understand.

The truth is that there is nothing more intensely personal to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit than our individual faith and suffering. Christ’s suffering work on the cross – dying to defeat death and erase our sin – was 100 percent about the well-being of our eternal relationship with God the Father, in faith. In our own moment-by-moment existence, that doesn’t seem to do me any good. That doesn’t heal me or my loved one, relieve today’s suffering and fear, or establish and enforce temporal justice.

God abides; we fret and condemn.

And while it is perfectly OK to shout at, argue and plead with God – He is listening, after all – God calls for and insists upon our faith, not our agreement. That’s no test; that’s the truth. God in his holy realm can indeed “do whatever He wants.”

But “whatever He wants” is different in the eternity of God’s perfect, immaculate, complete, literal goodness and purpose, as opposed to our “on the clock” perspective in an imperfect, sinful, limited and situationally dynamic world.

We can count on God being faithful to Who He is, and to be Who He says He is to us. Always. Christ on the Cross is our proof of that, and the Bible backs it up. Too often, we want God to conform to who we say we are, and Who we want Him to be. The Bible explains that God’s truth is precisely the opposite; God is God, and we’re not.

It’s better and healthier to test God with our love than with our anger. Death, you see, is part of our fallen world but not part of God’s perfect eternity.

So don’t ask God, “What have You done for me lately?” Pass the true test of faith, and say, “Thank You, God, for what You have done for me eternally.”

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows from experience that when horrible things happen, it’s even more horrible not to know and trust God. Next week, what the Bible says about testing.

Literal Truth, Inerrant God

2011-08-22T21:45:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #250
August 23, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Literal Truth, Inerrant God
By Bob Walters

A popular online news organization recently posted a feature story about why it’s a mistake to read the Bible literally, and folly to think the Bible is inerrant.

Written by a Christian professor, the article cited predictable scholarship and supporting evidence. The Bible itself claims to be “inspired and useful” (2 Timothy 3:16), but not inerrant. Revelation (the Bible’s final book) in parts is impenetrable. Even the brilliant St. Augustine had to allegorize (or, “say it was something else”) the story of Jonah and the whale. The four Gospels don’t agree about what happened on which days of Holy Week when Jesus was betrayed, tried, crucified and resurrected.

Lots and lots of stuff in the Bible doesn’t seem to add up.

Well, it’s a good day for the Devil when he can sow doubt about the Bible, and by extension, about God. The double-entrendre headline, “4 reasons not to read the Bible … literally,” may be harmless, or could imply: The Bible is wrong, so if the Bible is the story of God, then God must be wrong. Hallelujah, we can ignore the Bible and God!

Misinterpreted or not, the headline harkens rehashing.

You see, a Christian faith conversation centered on literalism and inerrancy of the Bible will quickly go out-of-round for the simple reason that the conversation isn’t truly centered. The Bible is something dramatically more important than “literal” and “inerrant.” It is truth, which almost always involves more than simple calculation.

If the issue is, “The Bible doesn’t add up,” then let’s go to math class. Let’s add up a list of numbers, terms and factors; we’ll get a defensibly inerrant answer. But, if the “list” is actually a quadratic equation and calculated with the wrong method, say, addition, we’ll not only get the wrong answer but entirely miss the point of the exercise because we have mistaken its central purpose, which is not addition.

Secularist logicians and sadly more than a few Christians miss the “answer” of the Bible because they refuse or confuse the Bible’s central purpose – revealing God’s truth. Scripture’s message isn’t simple addition, it’s a cosmically complex equation of faith, hope, love, truth, creation, relationship, separation, loss, betrayal, death, redemption, eternal life and perfection. It’s the ultimate story problem.

And what’s the story? Jesus Christ is the literal truth about an inerrant God, and we – each of us personally – is a loved and important part of the equation.

That is the true center of the Bible.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) was horrible at high school math but scored higher in math than verbal on the SAT.

I'm Glad You Asked ...

2011-08-15T18:26:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #249
August 16, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

I’m Glad You Asked …
By Bob Walters

… Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have [in Christ] … – 1 Peter 3:15

When G.K. Chesterton was asked, Orthodoxy was his answer.

In his earlier book Heretics, he had described the spiritual inadequacy of the early 20th century’s burgeoning social and academic inclination away from Christianity and toward Darwinism, socialism and science. When publicly challenged for disparaging “modern thought” without clearly describing his own Christian faith, Chesterton responded in 1908 with Orthodoxy.

Rather than presenting an impenetrable apologetic about scripture or the Trinity, Orthodoxy plainly describes how Chesterton arrived at his faith the same way a secularist arrives at his disbelief … through experience and investigating the facts.

Modernist indictments against Christianity are many. Christianity can’t be right, modernists say, because man is too similar to the beasts. Religion is only the darkness of superstition. The church causes more problems than it solves.

Chesterton looks closely and finds differently, composing a withering yet common-sense return of rhetorical fire. He notices that man is entirely dissimilar to beasts, that Christianity was the only light at both ends of the tunnel known as the Dark Ages, and that the Christian church historically has provided an underappreciated yet perpetual spiritual safety net for Western civilization. His argument is reasonable; his conclusions reassuring.

Chesterton notices that modern philosophy plays fast and loose with spiritual “facts.” Setting God aside, modernism voices contradictory opinions focused on the ultimate sovereignty or non-sovereignty of man.

Chesterton found his faith at the intersection of that contradiction; at the center and the heart of the Cross of Christ.

God may well be eternal and separate from man, but God as Jesus Christ entered time, space and humanity to prove that God – to be truly God – needed to be something even beyond omnipotent; He needed to be courageous, proven in the real courage of the real trial on the Cross. On the honed edges of Christ’s sundering sword we learn that love is an exercise in recognizing differences, not similarities. Astonishingly, we learn that divine power, ultimately, is an exercise of servanthood.

The Cross has a “collision” at its core and “can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape.” As modern society seeks empirical predictability for all phenomena, Chesterton insists that it is Christianity’s wonder, awe and faith that divinely feed all human morality, creativity and hope.

As for Chesterton’s beliefs, I’m glad someone asked.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) writes from the perspective that faith is an intellectual strength, not a weakness.

Christianity Begs to Differ

2011-08-08T18:13:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #248
August 9, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Christianity Begs to Differ
By Bob Walters

“The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

In the spheres of modern religion, morality, politics, education, science – quick, name some more spheres – I can’t think of a more frighteningly accurate assessment or warning about mass-marketed “truth” than this nugget Christian essayist Gilbert K. Chesterton wrote in 1908.

And by “modern” we mean in the philosophical, intellectual sense which – over the past 500 years or so – has come to mean “intelligence invented by man” (e.g. secular humanism, faith in man) as opposed to “intelligence that emanates from the Creator” (e.g. religion, faith in God).

This is relevant in today’s Christian conversation because “modern” culture has overtaken most of civilization’s greatest institutions thereby narrowing the influence of Christian truth. The modern culture of education, the media, “intellectual elites,” most governments (including ours), and even distressingly many churches – all insist that man not only is on at least an even plane with God, but that to be politically correct man must be “one” with everything around him, such as the universe, the planet, animals, the trees, the weather, each other … whatever.

The fact is we are not one. Even God is not One but a society, the Trinity. Our love, creativity, rebellion, decisions, industry, loyalties, talents and freedom all prove that it’s the differences in the universe that animate God’s plan, not the similarities.

Where modern thought identifies patterns and sameness, it frequently and mistakenly imputes “truth” where none exists. Here’s an example: “The religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.”

Observes Chesterton, “It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do differ greatly in what they teach … they are alike in everything except the fact that they don’t say the same thing.”

Chesterton uses the massive differences of Christianity and Buddhism – the external, creative “otherness” of the Christian God vs. the inward, quiet “oneness” of the Buddha – to make his case. His larger point though is that it is easier and more “modern” simply to say “they are the same” than to deeply consider why they are not.

“Go along to get along” was not the teaching of Christ.

Orthodoxy clearly explains why Christ makes a difference, not just to Chesterton, but to all Creation. God’s truth – Jesus Christ – is a truism we can trust.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) celebrates our differences while marveling at God’s cohesiveness. Next: Chesterton explains his faith.

Chewing on Chesterton

2011-08-01T17:17:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #247
August 2, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Chewing on Chesterton
By Bob Walters

My wife’s parents live on a quiet lake in northern Michigan where our annual summer visit provides a wonderful setting – and the time – for thoughtful reading.

This year’s reading included G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 classic Orthodoxy, mainly because in late June our little dog Kramer randomly pulled my copy off the bottom bookshelf at home and chewed the book’s binding. Assured this was a lake-reading sign from God, I set the book out to take. Two days before we headed north Kramer pulled it off my reading stack and destroyed the back half of the 150-page paperback.

Scrambling to find a replacement copy, I was stunned that two nearby Christian book stores I called acted as though they’d never heard of the book, didn’t have it on hand, and one told me it appeared to be “going out of print.”

Sad. I can’t imagine a Christian bookstore not recognizing Chesterton’s masterpiece that for a century has never gone out of print and, according to Amazon.com, currently has a dozen or so versions in print. Orthodoxy is an incredibly helpful, thoughtful, deep, relevant, relatable and ahead-of-its-time exposition of personal Christian faith in a world overwhelmingly trending toward agnosticism, progressivism, atheism, Darwinism, socialism, and all those self-glorifying, self-centered all-about-me “isms” that “… [fall] short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). Chesterton presents a compelling, elegant and entertaining case for Christianity.

Anyway, I called a nearby big-box bookstore and they simply asked whether I wanted the hardcover or paperback version they had in stock. Paperback, please. I buried the new book in my sealed travel bag (so Kramer couldn’t get to it), and then at the lake read it twice, compulsively underlining and annotating as I went. A comfortable chair on a shaded wooden deck overlooking a beautiful lake, to me, is an unparalleled environment for considering God’s grandeur and truth.

Orthodoxy doesn’t disappoint. Chesterton describes Christianity as the ultimate and complete adventure, romance, answer, explanation and purpose for the human experience. Christianity’s gift is the gift that keeps on giving because every day, every tomorrow, is filled with the enormous anticipation and boundless wonder of new intellectual and spiritual revelation. God is that big. Christianity doesn’t just reveal truth. Christianity builds, creates and is the foundation of the multifaceted, chaotic, seemingly conflicting but always ultimately perfect and complete truths of God’s universe.

Orthodoxy is a book with teeth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), who perceives in Chesterton’s writing a nice mix of later writers C.S. Lewis and Will Rogers, re-reads the really helpful books because he too often forgets the best arguments

Hubble, Humility, and Man

2011-07-28T13:30:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #246
July 26, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers

Hubble, Humility, and Man
By Bob Walters

Dramatic deep-space images from the Hubble satellite telescope have inspired worldwide awe the past couple of decades.

On TV, in magazines, and clogging our inbound email, we’ve seen the luminous light of exploding quasars and collapsing galaxies, thanks to Hubble’s above-earthly vantage point and mindboggling technology. The pictures are phenomenal: scientists marvel, artists are humbled, and poets are left speechless. Atheists proclaim man’s insignificance. Believers see God’s magnificence.

Some people just sit back and say, “Wow!”

A recent network evening newscast noting the end of NASA’s space shuttle program aired a sidebar on the oft-repaired Hubble’s history, trials and triumphs. The reporter’s parting words grabbed my attention. Voicing over surreal intergalactic photography, he intoned (approximately), “Hubble’s images have made mankind think differently about how he views himself.”

I just sat back and said, “Wow.” For here was a brilliantly crafted, politically correct, non-committal statement carefully and perfectly framing a truth with no conclusion, casting light with no heat, making a brick with no straw, and balancing a platitude squarely on a secular fence.

The reporter left the sharp arrow in the quiver, the logical follow-up question: “Different … how?” That ponderance was left dangling with the audience. One could muse, simply, “Look what man found!” For sure, many said, “Behold, the face of God!”

Because the interview leading into that final statement was a scientist marveling at our “13-billion-year-old universe” – which I interpreted as an enthusiastic and institutional bon mot for Evolution and a purpose-pitch at the chin of Creationism – it seemed the reporter intended us viewers to gain further appreciation for our personal smallness against the big, meaningless, postmodern emptiness of everything else. In other words, “Those Hubble images sure put mankind in his rightful, small place.”

I think not. In the Hubble images I see unequivocal, gigantic proof of a great God, and the shimmering, show-stopping, unimpeachable truth that God not only exists but that He builds utterly amazing stuff. I see overwhelming evidence of a God Whose glory I cannot adequately express.

“What is mankind that you are mindful of him?” David asks God in Psalm 8:4.

The Hubble images are no adequate picture of God, because God is bigger than that. But in those images we see something the creation of which God considered worthwhile for His glory. And to think, He created us, too.

All I can say, humbly, is “Wow!”

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the Bible gives us a more instructive view of God than any telescope. Psalm 8. Yeah.

IMHO, Christ is the Truth

2011-07-18T18:22:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #245
July 19, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

IMHO, Christ is the Truth
By Bob Walters

A talented writer friend who occasionally reads this article said to me recently, “You must get tons of scathing criticism. That topic (religion) is so totally an opinion.”

And it immediately struck me and I said out loud, reflexively but gently and kindly (I think), “Yeah, you’d think that might be the case, but I get very little negative criticism. And what’s even crazier is that I’ve never thought of it as an opinion column. I think of it, and write it, as a truth column.”

The truth of Jesus Christ is the core of the Christian faith. And – when I allow the Father, Son, Spirit Godhead it’s proper place in my life – Christ’s truth answers my questions large and small about life, purpose, reason, hope, love, family, the future, relationships, grace, conflict … everything.

The hard part for me (this is the truth) is the “when I allow” part, because I lack the natural patience, humility and surrender to look at every circumstance and think, “Just let the Lord handle that.” No, I want to get in there and fix things, argue points, make a difference and control my little corner of the Kingdom.

I think most believing, serious, praying Christians would agree that’s not a great way to go about one’s walk with the Lord, but (this is an opinion) many can relate to the shortcomings and fears we all experience dwelling in a fallen world.

Religious opinions and doctrines over the years have split Christian believers time after time, despite the truth that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, Who we must trust as our Lord and Savior. Amen. That brief creed is fairly universal, but for Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Baptist, Evangelical and other strains of Christianity, the person of Jesus Christ may be the only thing they agree on.

We fight viciously over our religious opinions which, I know from experience, too often supersede our trust in the thing we know is truth, Jesus Christ.

Christ’s truth is the lone and absolute antidote to these human shortcomings and fears and, in this sin-riven fallen world, provides grace, hope and the ultimate repair. That’s the truth, the capital-T Truth, and immune to man’s opinion.

My question is, why does man try to make himself immune to God’s truth?

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion), Christ is no opinion. And that’s the truth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) suffers from extreme opinionation (a word he just made up and loves), but revels in God’s truth.

NFL, NBA - Rumors of Wars

2011-07-11T14:27:00.005-04:00

Spirituality Column #244
July 12, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

NFL, NBA – Rumors of Wars
By Bob Walters

“It’s the end of the world as we know it …” - Rock band R.E.M., 1987

“Small group” is a familiar church fellowship phrase that has, ostensibly, nothing to do with sports or rock and roll.

These are small groups of Christians – friends, couples, families – who “do life together.” Especially in large congregations where it is difficult to feel human “closeness” (except when you’re crammed into the pews), it’s typical for 10 to 20 believers to join together for Bible study, prayer, Christian accountability, social and family activities, and even vacations. They just generally share together, as Christians, in the joys, ups, downs, burdens and sorrows of everyday life.

As a side note, our church used to call them “K-Groups” after the Greek word koinonia (coin-o-NEE-ah) meaning “communion of intimate participation.” Only we old folks still say “K-Group.” The “K” has been lost, I think, because modern church management wants to avoid scaring seekers with elegant, traditional and accurate Greek words. There are 2,000 years of Christian faith and thought that too many churches, sadly, choose to ignore. But the Christian story is too big for just Sunday, and small groups help us do life with Christ and with other Christians every day.

So … my K-Group, most Sundays in fall and winter, gathers at someone’s home to watch the Colts play. And when the Pacers are behaving and winning (remember those days?), or Butler is in the NCAA tournament, we watch hoops. There are couples and kids and lots of food and fellowship.

On this score, we are sunshine patriots. Winning teams foster community; so we watch. Losing teams don’t, so we don’t. Presently, the awful spectacles of the NFL and NBA locking out players, cannibalizing themselves in the midst of great success, and claiming the righteousness of their “cause” make the sane among us avert our eyes.

We can’t watch. Scripture helps us cope:

Matthew 23:33 (“Seven Woes”) – “You snakes! You brood of vipers!”

Matthew 24:6 (“Signs of the end of the age”) – “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. But see to it that you are not alarmed.”

1 Timothy 6:10 (“Love of money”) – “… the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

The lockouts are a shame but not the end of the world. I believe that’s coming one day (the “end”), but I doubt it will be about sports.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) wonders if anyone at the negotiations has suggested beginning with prayer. You can bet all the vendors and sports infrastructure people are praying. Read all of Matthew 23.

God, America and Nonfiction

2011-07-02T21:22:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #243
July 5, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

God, America and Nonfiction
By Bob Walters

I finally got around to reading David McCullough’s nonfiction book 1776, and realized something striking.

To be clear, this isn’t the musical 1776 about signing the Declaration of Independence. This is the exhaustively researched and meticulously footnoted 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning No. 1 bestseller that chronicles the ups and downs of George Washington’s fledgling Continental Army in 1776.

McCullough enlisted his own armies of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to comb libraries, collections and historical societies for authentic personal letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, maps, newspapers, speeches and official correspondence that detail “what it was really like” in that place at that time.

The book ably collates countless sources into a fascinating story, liberally citing and directly quoting the American and English officers and soldiers, Patriots, Loyalists, politicians, onlookers and bystanders in their own words.

And here’s what was striking: the most elegant prose, the most common expositions and the weightiest communiqués were replete with sincere, faithful, earnest and reverent appeals to God. McCullough does not write to prove America a God-fearing country. The story itself reveals how thoroughly God was assumed to be attached to everyone’s lives and the momentous events of the day.

In 1776 America, the average conversation of the people reflected their absolute conviction that the Hand of the Almighty was intricately woven into the affairs of all.

It’s different today. The sad reality of our politically correct, postmodern, public “God” conversation in America was well represented recently by, appropriately enough, Susan Jacoby, the “Atheist Columnist” for The Washington Post. (An aside: If you have a Religion page, you have to have an “Atheist” column, right? SMH.)

Anyway, last week in this space we discussed the charming little book, Heaven is for Real. A 4-year-old boy nearly dies, really, and later tells his minister father how he visited heaven. The No. 1 bestseller is a heart-touching, simple, affirming story about Jesus, God and Heaven. It’s popular inside and outside of faith communities; scandalous among more than a few Bible-centric theologians … which is about normal.

Atheist Jacoby, reviewing Heaven is for Real with extreme snideness and confidently labeling contemporary American minds “immature,” wrote, “Only in America could a book like this be classified as nonfiction.”

Did you catch that? Jacoby says God should be classified as “fiction.”

I think … we are a better nation when we say God is real.

Happy Fourth of July.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) read 1776 because it was on sale at Costco. Also, “SMH” is Twitter for “shakin’ my head.”

This Book Sure Seems 'for Real'

2011-06-27T22:15:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #242
June 28, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

This Book Sure Seems ‘for Real’
By Bob Walters

My Christian friend Nancy put a book in my hands just recently, wondering if I had read it.

“No,” I said.

“I guess a lot of people have,” she said.

Yeah, I guess so.

Heaven is for Real has been atop various New York Times bestseller lists since March. Published in November 2010 in paperback only, by mid-June with upwards of four million copies in print “for Real” remained the No. 1 title on the Times’ “Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction,” “Combined Hardcover and Paperback Nonfiction” and “Paperback Nonfiction” lists.

I’ll not spoil the book’s story, except to say that a four-year old boy in small-town Nebraska has surgery and later begins telling his father, a Wesleyan minister, about visiting heaven and, among other things, meeting Jesus.

It’s a short, praiseworthy read; a couple hours of a simple yet magnificent – and dare I say, highly believable – exposition of one of this life’s greatest mysteries: “Is Heaven real?” Little Colton Burpo tells us it is.

There is no shortage of books on the “Heaven” experience. I’ve read some and not read others. I tend not to dwell much on either Creation or Heaven, because I trust God has them both all figured out. I can’t add much to His plan.

No, my routine reading and prayer focuses on my and mankind’s relationship with Christ, understanding the Bible, religion’s place in our culture, and learning and sharing all I can about the real existence of God, and the truth, goodness, knowledge and morality provided to humanity by the eternal Logos Word of God, Jesus Christ.

So, I’m examining our relationship with Christ? Here is a kid who – pretty convincingly – says he met Jesus.

It got my attention in ways other books haven’t.

The Shack was a mature man’s recollection of a dream, or an experience, or fiction, or something. It was charming and made people think; but it shouldn’t make anyone believe. Randy Alcorn’s Heaven was, to me, very unsatisfying (sorry) in its over-literalized attempts to define Heaven. I put it down after a few pages. Ninety Minutes in Heaven was compelling, but the storyteller was a Bible-savvy adult preacher.

Heaven is for Real is a child’s perspective. It smacks of the truth, to me, because it doesn’t smack of fiction. It is Biblically on point and simple enough to be real. I’m obviously not the only one who has noticed.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that Jesus says a lot about children in the Bible. Matthew 19:14; Mark 10:14. For real.

Where Pride Properly Resides

2011-06-20T17:30:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #241
June 21, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Where Pride Properly Resides
By Bob Walters

Years ago I had a colleague who would compliment my work by saying, “I’m proud of you.”

It annoyed me. I took pride in my own work and it was both unsatisfying and a little creepy, frankly, to have my work evaluated from the standpoint of someone else’s overreaching pride. I, um, had plenty of pride of my own.

A decade later I began attending church, discovered my life in Christ, was well-mentored by some amazingly intelligent Christians, read the Bible, and over time began to look really, really hard at the pride in my own life vs. the humility of Jesus Christ. No way have I “cured” my own pride, but I now understand pride from a biblical perspective.

And that perspective is this: Pride is the Lord’s alone. The Lord is humble, yet only in Him may pride properly reside. Simple, huh?

I know … it’s a seeming three-way collision of intellect, logic and faith, the kind that keeps “smart” people out of church. But once we understand pride as a “God” thing, humility as a “Jesus” thing, and faith as a human thing, it starts to make sense.

The Bible talks about pride a lot. In the Old Testament, where we learn so much about God, God is constantly telling people that their human, worldly pride will be their undoing, that it is willful, arrogant, foolish, sinful and in several ways destructive to them and offensive to God. The problem boils down to this, God tells man in Ezekial 28:2,

“In the pride of your heart, you say ‘I am a god; I sit on the throne of a god’ … but you are a mere mortal and not a god, though you think you are as wise as a god.”

The modern dictionary isn’t much help here, because it defines “pride,” generally, as “justifiable satisfaction.” What God says throughout the Bible is that the “pride” He detests is mankind’s misplaced, unjustified, self-satisfying and self-directed glory, which I interpret to be the biblical opposite of “justifiable satisfaction.”

Glory is God’s, not ours. Pride belongs to God’s wisdom, not man’s.

Jesus sets our standard and example: He was humble before God and Man. Therefore rather than harboring pride in our human selves and worldly situations, our pride must reside in our faith that Christ is our sovereign Lord.

God knows, it’s no sin to be proud of that.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) is thankful for God’s blessings rather than proud of the shiny spots in his life.

The Thing with Suffering

2011-06-13T17:29:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #240
June 14, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Thing with Suffering
By Bob Walters

It was a brief conversation with my dear friend Mike about our mutually dear friend Bill. Mike and I were alone outside Bill’s house after a visit, each of us fighting back tears.

Bill has brain cancer, the really, really hard kind. He and his wife, both deep and mature believers in Christ, are bravely battling the disease. Their grace is wonderful to behold; the effects of the disease are horrifying.

Mike, not a church-goer but deeply imbued with sincere human compassion, said, “I just don’t want to see anyone suffer.”

“Suffering is part of the deal,” I told Mike, quietly, referring to a life in Christ. I added, approximately, “It’s as clear as anything the Bible says. Our faith in Christ and belief in God are tested and purified in our suffering. It doesn’t glorify God to ‘believe’ when times are good. As crazy as it sounds, suffering – and keeping our faith as we suffer – is the greatest earthly way to glorify God.”

Mike and I blinked back tears one more time, and left. I pray my words sank in.

Bill and his wife are glorifying God in their suffering by keeping their faith. We who despair with them must also glorify God by trusting His ultimate mercy.

“Suffering Glorifies God!” is a slogan seldom seen on church signboards. No, marketing the Christian faith today focuses largely on “me.” God loves and forgives me. Or we scrutinize my sin and guilt, or God solving my problems, or having Jesus see things my way. “Please Lord,” we pray, “give me what I want.” We want God to ease our suffering, not be glorified by it.

Jesus prayed, “Father … not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Jesus told His disciples repeatedly that to follow Him they must value God above everything else, including their families, their circumstances, their very lives. Jesus told them they would suffer and be persecuted for their faith, yet they would glorify God.

Suffering is among the Bible’s hardest teachings, one of its most obvious truths, and one of the last things the modern church “sells.” Suffering matters because it is the central lesson of Jesus on the cross, “that your son may glorify you” (John 17:1).

God’s purpose isn’t to make us suffer, but that we persevere in our faith when we suffer. Pray with Jesus that God’s will, not ours, be done.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) resists thinking of faith as a “coping” mechanism. Faith in Christ is a “truth” mechanism.

The Rapture that Wasn't

2011-06-06T11:07:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #239
June 7, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Rapture that Wasn’t
By Bob Walters

The difference between Harold Camping’s evidently errant May 21 rapture forecast and almost everyone else’s reaction to it was smugness.

Not Camping’s … almost everyone else’s.

In Camping’s declarations I didn’t hear smugness; I heard faith. I thought he was biblically wrong – glaringly so – on several points, and I saw but didn’t really understand his eschaton (ESS-kah-tahn, i.e. last things) arithmetic. But I never heard from him a belittling smugness. The California Christian fundamentalist is obviously a true believer who I think is befallen by confused signals, not demon possession. It happens.

So let’s look at the bad news and good news.

On the one hand, Camping didn’t do the Kingdom any favors by being that wrong about something that even uber-secular Doonesbury got exactly right. To wit, Zonker in the May 20 comic strip very un-smugly (opposite most public commentary) cites Matthew 24:36. There Jesus says, “But concerning that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” Jesus is “the Son” and even He doesn’t know what Camping claimed to know.

On the other hand, Camping got everyone talking – even Doonesbury – about Jesus Christ. False prophet or misguided sop, Camping created a multi-national buzz that forced many people to stop (or at least downshift) and consider whether they personally were or were not a candidate for rapture. Motivating the many to mull that mystery, however momentarily, is quite a feat.

What’s really wrong with Camping’s prediction, which I think is the same egregious error of the “Left Behind” end-times novels, is this: The relationship focus that properly should be on Jesus Christ is at best obfuscated and at worst entirely lost.

“How is my relationship with Christ?” is the correct question, not, “What’s all this rapture business?”

Anything that lessens rather than sharpens a person’s focus on a relationship with Jesus Christ plays into Satan’s hands. That includes rapture, creation, prophecy, prosperity, faith healing, the Bible, the church, a preacher … anything.

Camping’s focus, for example, was always “The Bible says …” He used the Bible, in toto, to supersede Christ. Bad mistake, in my view.

So … we don’t know, we have to trust.

And I say “evidently errant” in the first paragraph because what if God threw a rapture and nobody made the cut? The last thing I want to be before God is cocky.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) holds the same opinion of Camping’s next date, Oct. 21. Focus on John 3, not Matthew 24; relationship, not rapture.

Memorial Day in War and Peace

2011-05-29T18:44:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #238
May 31, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Memorial Day in War and Peace
By Bob Walters

’Some thoughts for Memorial Day, when America remembers her war heroes who died that we might be free, fought that we might know peace, and served us that we might serve others.

-Memorial Day easily captures the context of Christian faith, as we offer to God prayers of thanks and remembrance for the sacrifice of others.

-Jesus Christ, it is supremely worth noting, died for our freedom. He invented the concept, really. It is something that never occurred to or in humanity until Christ died on the Cross, defeating death and erasing our sin: we were free. It was a gift we didn’t request, solved a problem we didn’t know we had and, with faith, provided a victory impossible to imagine: eternal loving relationship with the Creator God in heaven. That's what God wants for us.

-The Bible exhorts, “God is love.” Christ’s example teaches that love requires freedom. That must be God’s toughest task – loving us enough to provide our freedom, with which we choose whether to love God or not. God knows love resides only in the presence of freedom and the absence of coercion, for coercion robs freedom, drains the soul, stifles hope and strangles faith. Love dies. That’s not what God wants for us.

-The Bible does not mandate systems or festivals commemorating Christ, because Jesus appeared once for all, took on our sins once for all, was cleansed once for all, died once for all, and we were entrusted with His faith once for all. It’s why Jesus says of taking the bread and cup, His body and blood, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

- “Once for all” means the eternal God appeared in mortal time as Jesus Christ and entirely changed the game for humanity’s relationship with God. God no longer mandated a place or a time or a behavior – like a temple or a festival or a commandment – to access divine relationship. Christ, by His work once for all, is to be alive in our hearts always and everywhere … in faith.

-The greatest war is our war with Satan … we fight it every moment of our lives.

-The greatest memorial is our communion with Christ.

-The greatest peace is in Christ.

-The greatest victory abides not with the swift or strong, but belongs reliably to the humble and faithful.

-Victory is not a remembrance of yesterday, but a hope for tomorrow.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) is named after his mother’s brother Bob, a naval aviator who died in WWII.

Shrugging Off Selfishness

2011-05-23T21:43:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #237
May 24, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Shrugging Off Selfishness
By Bob Walters

Hang with me for a minute … this is a book / movie review, sort of.

I’m old enough to remember the economic malaise of the late 1970s and no, the Disco era was not an adequate off-setting cultural pick-me-up.

I was just out of college making $10,000 a year as a sportswriter. Gas was a dollar a gallon, unemployment was high, American automobile quality was low, inflation hovered near 9 percent, home mortgage rates chased 20 percent, gold prices were astonishingly north of $800 an ounce, President Jimmy Carter was cheerless, and the nightly news – still with Walter Cronkite – offered “the Misery Index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) instead of hope.

With institutions failing us, we maturing baby boomers constructed a self-absorbed culture that appropriately became known as “The Me Decade.” Certainly in my mind, the world revolved around Me; I was unmarried, unchurched, unbelieving and unconcerned with salvation, damnation, justification, sanctification or glorification. I didn’t own a Bible, and even my old Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (a gift from my dad when I was confirmed in 1965) was out of sight somewhere in a dusty box.

Please understand, I was “a perfectly good person,” I just didn’t need all that Jesus jazz. I had friends and an interesting job … what else was there? I knew the church “story,” but it wasn’t worth getting out of bed for on Sunday; there wasn’t anything at church about “Me.”

In the late 1970s I read a book that unveiled for Me many comforting mysteries of the Me life: “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, first published the year I was born, 1954.

Rand (1905-1982) was an atheist, ardent anti-communist, “objectivist” (her word) and, if her TV interviews are an indication of the woman, a very, very bitter human being. Our highest moral duty, Rand taught, is to care for ourselves. Service to others is a self-immolating charade. God is an empty promise wrapped in ultimate disappointment. Jesus Christ, Rand wrote, presents an unsolvable contradiction; subordinating one’s ego and soul to the needs of others is impossible.

I bring this up because Atlas Shrugged, recently released as a widely-panned movie, often carries near-scriptural authority for unchurched political conservatives.

Play some defense. Understand. The May 2011 issue of “First Things” magazine offers a brilliant Christian review of both the book and the movie (free access at www.firstthings.com).

Don’t ever shrug off Jesus.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) wrote about Rand and atheism April 8, 2008, column #74 at this blogspot archive site.

The Upside of Great Despair

2011-05-16T18:41:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #236
May 17, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Upside of Great Despair
By Bob Walters

It’s a darn shame but a fact of life that often we have to bottom out before we can be lifted up by Christ.

Non-believers find the logic of that truth impossible to understand. That’s partly right – it is impossible – because at its core Christ’s truth is about faith, not logic.

We generally, rationally, think we have the best shot at saving ourselves from whatever malady might befall our human existence. “My brain and my logic are all I need,” we reason. “If I’m strong enough, I can fix this.” “I believe in me.”

Religion, many people think, is a cop out. I have had real conversations with smart people – some of them dear friends – whose view of someone “finding Jesus” was accompanied by a long, low whistle and a dipping motion of the hand.

“People turn to Jesus when it’s as bad as it can get …”; then comes the long low whistle and hand dip, implying, “They’re a mess. It’s so bad, they found Jesus!” The perceived awfulness isn’t so much a concern for the despair, suffering or hardship a person faces – that would take Godly compassion – the awfulness is turning to Jesus.

Oh no! Not Jesus! You’re a goner!

Our pride and egos are horrid things, and the power of Jesus Christ is opposite everything the world thinks it knows about power. In the world, power is the imposition of will. It’s living one more day. In Christ, power is love and freedom, and eternal life at the throne of God.

“Our egos are prisons that keep us from the love and freedom of Christ,” notes my teacher George. What a great statement. Our egos want power because we think with power, we can forestall death; maybe just for today or tomorrow – and we admit we’re all going to die someday – but power is about my strength.

We cannot tap into God’s inexhaustible supply of strength when we try to compete against it with our own. Christ is like an experienced lifeguard, George analogizes. He knows when to approach a drowning person. After letting us fight and tire awhile in the deep, swirling water of our sin and pride, when we realize we can swim no more, Christ comes and gets us.

The power of God is to forgive and to love, and His ultimate strength is His compassion. That’s the gift He gave us all in Jesus Christ.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) found Christ when things were going fairly well; God somehow overwrote his sizable ego.

If You Meet Jesus ... Then What?

2011-05-09T20:49:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #235
May 10, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

If You Meet Jesus … Then What?
By Bob Walters

Whether we know it or not, we all meet Jesus in an infinite number of personal and spiritual ways throughout our lives.

Working mysteriously through us and through others all around us in ways we cannot fathom or often even recognize, we encounter Jesus. We might forget that He’s there, not believe that He is near or deny that He even exists. But as the Son of God, the Word of God, the Light of the World, and the Way, the Truth, and the Life, Jesus is close all the time.

And as if the Gospel isn’t “good news” enough, even more good news is that Jesus keeps coming back to us despite our persistent, disbelieving rebuffs.

Here is a Guy trying to give us the nicest vehicle imaginable yet most people treat Jesus like an annoying car salesman, underestimating the glorious ride He has in store. It’s an uncomplicated choice: turn the key, or turn our back.

But suppose we actually came physically face to face with Jesus. He’s standing in front of me / us. We’re awake, alive, breathing, thinking and, with everything we know and have heard about the Son of God – believing in Him or not – we know Who He is. What do we do?

When Jesus approached Peter on the fishing boat, or Matthew in the tax booth, or Thomas after the resurrection, they had neither a New Testament nor nearly two thousand years of scholarship, reflection and tradition to help them understand Christ’s mission. It was all new. Now most of us, believers or not, know the story.

So, Jesus is standing in front of me, today. What do I do?

It’s an intriguing question that I love to ponder. Would I have the presence of mind to just shut up and listen? Would I shout with joy? Be awestruck and confused? Give Him a hug? Put my face on the ground in shame?

Would I be doubtful like Thomas, or blinded like Paul? Would I utter, “Yes, Lord?” Or, knowing what the Bible says about the next time we see Jesus, simply say, “Uh oh.”

We may not be sure how we’d respond, but in examining our reverent, joyful, fearful, dumbfounded or selfish reactions, we discover a great deal about our relationship with Christ and the state of our faith.

That’s important; because we’re in front of Jesus all the time.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) points out that no matter how many times we tell Jesus “No” in this life, He continually tries to help us find a way to say “Yes.”

Only Sinners Need Grace of Christ

2011-05-02T17:35:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #234
May 3, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Only Sinners Need Grace of Christ
By Bob Walters

There is no better way to explain the presence of Jesus Christ on this Earth than to say God has a special love for sinners.

And while the fallen world strives to condemn sinners, Jesus Christ came to save us from the fallenness of sin, not to condemn us for it. Jesus obeyed unto death, sharing His perfection so that we might not be condemned for our imperfections.

Don’t get me wrong … we can still be condemned, but it is us, we, ourselves, who do the condemning with our worldly disobedience. God loves us, wants us saved from our sins, sent his Son Jesus to seal the deal, and yet gives us the freedom to screw it up if we so choose.

John 3:16-18 and 14:6 pretty much make the entire case. God loved the world … Jesus came to save not to condemn … whoever does not believe is condemned already … no one goes to the Father except through Christ.

That’s it in a nutshell, paraphrasing Jesus’ own words. Where it gets sloppy, our stumbling block, is in discerning what “obedience” means in God’s divine context of love rather than in the fallen world’s context of power. Christ’s message isn’t “Obey Me or else!” It is “Follow me” (Matthew 4:19, plus 20 more times). It’s “repent and be baptized” (Peter in Acts 2:38).

Too often Christian doctrine – the kind even preached inside some churches – is mistakenly cast as an opportunity to condemn sinners, when the truth is just the opposite. Christ is our only chance for forgiveness, and it’s a forgiveness residing in God’s love, not our restitution.

And while condemnation avoidance should never be faith’s main point, what’s even worse is the false doctrine of “no condemnation.” From front to back, the Bible plainly reveals that there is indeed condemnation, Hell and a great opportunity to fail God. Only a false prophet would say otherwise, and the worst things about false prophets are their sweet sounding lies that hasten eternal condemnation.

“Be warned,” the Bible continually says.

Romans 8:1 provides a succinct, reassuring reminder about the truth: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus …”

Read those words carefully, “in Christ Jesus.”

The name of God’s special love for sinners is “grace,” and it is ours for the asking through Christ, freely and in faith. Only sinners need apply.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) quotes his Christian friend May, “Praise God that I am a sinner; it is my only qualification for receiving the grace of Christ.”

Of Denials, Thorns and Truth

2011-04-25T19:55:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #233
April 26, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Of Denials, Thorns and Truth
By Bob Walters

Peter famously denies Christ three times (Matthew 26:69-75) in the pre-dawn hours of Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified.

Paul suffers a “thorn” in his flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7), described as a “messenger of Satan” to prevent Paul’s conceit in possessing the great revelations of Christ with which he is entrusted.

Whether by denials or thorns, don’t we all encounter temptations to fashion our own truths about God and ourselves despite the Bible’s plain instruction, revelation and truth of the primacy of Jesus Christ in our overall world and individual lives?

Every day we witness modern culture’s continuing academic, legal, social, and scientific broadsides on all things God, yet often it is from within the Christian community that the most disturbing and direct assaults on Jesus Christ emanate.

Here’s a huge church that doesn’t mention Christ. There’s a preacher who won’t preach against sin. Over on the best seller list is a book saying Hell won’t happen. Denials and thorns; Satan loves to see man worship at the altar of self-importance.

The danger in all this is not to God the Father, Christ the Son, or the Holy Spirit. The danger is to us, to people, to anyone led astray from the truth of Jesus Christ by the fuzzy theology of don’t-worry-be-happy pop-culture doctrines.

To be clear, I don’t think Hell is a doctrine. The Bible tells me Hell is a real place, no matter how many feel-good contemporary “Christian” preachers, writers and churches deny it. In these denials is Satan’s effort to whitewash the blood of Christ away from us. Whether we are planted in good spiritual soil or not, we all suffer the thorns of life’s challenges and worldly temptations with every breath we take.

I love God, trust Jesus, and pray with the Holy Spirit not because I fear Hell but because of the autonomy of love – God’s gift of freedom and truth embodied in Jesus Christ. Even amid my own self-interested denials and worldly thorns, that’s what my head, heart, trusted Christian mentors and Bible all lead me to do.

If we are led by any church, any book, any one or any thing that denies Hell, minimizes sin, does not challenge the wretchedness of our sin and tells us Christ isn’t Who the Bible says He is, well, then we had better be warned and take a hard look at who is holding the leash.

Walters (www.beliverbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) just finished reading Pope Benedict XVI’s excellent book “Jesus of Nazareth, Part 2” and saw nothing citing Jesus Christ as an optional aspect of Church, or Hell as a mistranslation.

Words Fail Us at the Cross, Lent Part 7

2011-04-18T18:36:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #232
April 19, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not That into God, Part 7
Words Fail Us at the Cross
By Bob Walters

Some people are just not that into God because they have difficulty putting their faith into words.

So remember that faith is first about our relationship with God, not the words we use to describe faith. Like my mentor and friend George says, “Develop your relationship with God. The words will come later.”

Besides, the word “Word” among theologians is a confusing powder keg. Most regular folks are merely trying to communicate ideas or concepts with spoken or written words. But “Word” in the Bible – the Word of God – has many meanings with theologically intricate nuances such as Christ, message, spirit and prophecy.

This Easter week – Holy Week – we encounter the Cross of Jesus Christ. Words easily fail us if we rely on them to describe our deepest love, faith and hope we have in the redemptive relationship we receive in Jesus.

The Bible is full of words, yet is a book about relationships. Why the Triune Godhead (Father-Son-Holy Spirit)? Because God is community, relationship and love. Why the Covenant with Israel? To reveal a relational God. Why was Jesus born? To present eternal God as a humble servant capable of entering our history of human relationships. Why was Jesus crucified? To defeat death, erase our sins and restore relationship with God. And why the resurrection? To teach us the truth of salvation: that in faith our relationship with God extends infinitely past death.

Relationship, relationship, relationship. Not words. Christians throughout the centuries have fought over words: “nature,” “will,” and “worship” are common tinder for church debate. But Jesus wasn’t primarily about words. He was about living an example, dying for others, and living again in relationship with us. Jesus returned sinful mankind to communion – relationship – with the eternal Creator God.

The great danger of putting words before relationship is in evidence throughout the Christian landscape. We fight over words, even the ones in the Bible. Countless books, teachings, seminars, sermons and doctrines are full of words expressing countless ideas, concepts and gadget ways of doing this or that. Some are good, some are bad, some are heresies.

Jesus Christ is not an idea or a concept. He is a real, living person, the “Logos” Word of God with, in and through whom we are promised and invited into eternal, divine relationship with God in Heaven.

Know God first, then trust Him for the right words when you need them.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) wishes all a prayerful Holy Week and a blessed Easter. The Lord is Risen Indeed.

Perfect God is No Contradiction, Lent Part 6

2011-04-11T18:14:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #231
April 12, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not That into God, Part 6
Perfect God is No Contradiction
By Bob Walters

Some people are just not that into God because God seems to harbor so many contradictions.

Is He the Old Testament’s good and mighty God of Creation? The exasperated God of the Great Flood? The unfair God Who delivered Israel out of Egypt, made the Jews wander 40 years in the desert and ultimately denied His servant Moses entry into the Promised Land? The warlike God Who vanquished Israel’s unsuspecting foes from Canaan, but then banished disobedient Israel to Babylon? The abiding God of Psalms 51 and 91 Who delivers us from all trouble? Or the absent God of Psalm 88, Who leaves us despairing in the pit?

In the New Testament, utterly humble baby Jesus grows into a friendly, gentle man Who works miracles, picks fishermen and tax collectors for Apostles, ransacks the Temple, heals the lame, preaches never-before-heard truths, and leaves cryptic but indisputable proof that He is Christ, the Son of God; the fully human and fully divine Second Person of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit Trinity.

This glorious, eternal, innocent King of Kings is brutally murdered on the Cross – dead – then resurrected to life.

These evident contradictions lead some people to reject God, the Bible, or religion, or to diminish Jesus’ mission with theologically suicidal rules of engagement, e.g., “Don’t worry about Jesus or Hell. God saves all. Everyone goes to Heaven.”

Theologians through the ages have worked exhaustively on that idea, known by the Greek term “apocatastasis.” It means “everyone is restored” suggesting, bottom line, Christ’s work on the Cross was unnecessary because death and sin didn’t really need to be defeated. Now there’s a contradiction.

God does nothing unnecessarily, and underestimating Jesus’ sacrifice is a human death sentence.

So here’s the real deal. There is one unwavering, patient, faithful, good, loving and eternal God. He is Perfect, and God’s idea of “Perfect” is the Bible’s point. Our fallen, self-interested, worldly, human idea of “Perfect” is not.

We pine for our “Perfect.” Scripture reveals time and again, God insists on His.

The Bible’s overarching proposition is this – Which is better: God giving sinful man the Law to attain righteousness, or God giving sinful man Jesus Christ whose righteousness removes our sins?

The Bible, you see, reveals a New Covenant, not contradictions.
It takes work to understand the Bible, faith to understand Jesus, and belief to go to Heaven. The contradictions reside in us, not God.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), a sinner, is humbly thankful for God’s love and securely trusts the Bible’s truth. Amen.

Demanding an Explanation, Lent Part 5

2011-04-04T20:16:00.007-04:00

Spirituality Column #230
April 5, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not That into God, Part 5
Demanding an Explanation
By Bob Walters

I was just not that into God for a long time because no one could explain specifically what God was supposed to be in my life.

Many caring people told me I “needed Jesus,” should “go to church,” had to “be saved,” proclaimed the “inerrancy of the Bible” and invoked the “sovereignty of God.”

I’d engage, arguing that I was basically a good person, didn’t trust organized religion, and pooh-poohed the whole “Jesus is the only way” mantra. “The way to where, and why?” I’d ask.

I’d dismiss the Bible as just an “old book” of generally decent advice and rejected the notion that anything or anyone was totally in charge of this often inexplicable world. Plus, the irrational math of the “three in one” Trinity was too bizarre to take seriously.

In sum, nobody’s explanation of their faith ever overcame my combination of self assuredness and skepticism.

Turns out … everybody who’s been there and understands say “Amen” … that nobody else can explain God’s place in our individual lives. Only we can sense it, believe it, know it. Only the ironic combination of self examination amid revelation, scripture, teaching, love, hope and raw faith can explain – to me – God’s overpowering presence in an individual life.

Thunder, lightening and drama are optional. My own epiphany 10 years ago while sitting quietly in church, outwardly, was little more than a tear on my cheek.

I just knew.

It’s such an unexpected equation. My walk with the Lord is mine alone, but only works when shared with others. One’s relationship with the Lord is formed in many ways, pieces and places – Church, the Bible, prayer, received instruction and preaching, service, patience, trust, investigation, reflection, study – but ultimately it is a one-on-one encounter with God that actuates one’s faith. We cannot install our own faith into someone else, not even with love.

What we can do – what Christians are called to do – is reflect the loving light of Jesus Christ on the world around us. We can introduce Jesus – “witness” – to others in many ways by sharing our story, citing scripture, preaching, praying, explaining, loving or serving, but faith cannot be forced … neither by my will nor another’s request. Only the Holy Spirit can answer that call.

So … make the call. And when the call is answered, listen.

No one else’s explanation will ever be as convincing as your own.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) received a surprising email recently from someone he worked with but barely knew back in the 1970s. ’Said they’d been praying for him all these years. Amazing.

Trust in God Trumps Understanding, Lent Part 4

2011-03-28T12:11:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #229
March 29, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not That into God, Part 4
Trust in God Trumps Understanding
By Bob Walters

Some people are just not that into God because He’s too big to fully understand.

He’s infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent … and we’re not.

We seek the truth, chase the good, and pursue righteousness. God actually is all those things. He’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The “good” is all that resides in and with Him. His righteousness is the final answer.

In our humanness, we require an intellectual middle ground for discussion, rationale and knowledge. We crave to learn but we need context. We strive to form an opinion, find the logic, or settle an issue. God is different. Way different.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God tells mankind plainly in Isaiah 55:8. God is so big He hides from knowledge as we define it. “God,” theologian Joseph Bottum notices, “reveals himself only to faith.”

As people we have a contradictory mix of good and bad in us. Our human truths have limits and conflicts. We debate righteousness. We divide our loyalties on a sliding scale of convenience between human concerns and divine providence.

On truth, good and righteousness, God is everything, but He’s not a mix of anything. He’s an absolute, not a sliding scale. We want logical answers, and God wants obedient faith. When we trust with faith, God makes sense. When we trust with logic, we trip over syllogisms.
For example: If God is everything, and evil exists, then God is evil. Blame God.

Wrong answer. Try it again with discernment and faith.

When we encounter evil – and evil assuredly exists – it is because something is in disharmony with the perfection of God. The starting point is: God is good and created a perfect world. Since the sin of Adam, “… the whole creation has been groaning,” we read in Romans 8:21-23. We’re in “bondage to decay.”

Examples are everywhere: an earthquake in Japan, a ruthless dictator in Libya, my friend’s baby granddaughter diagnosed with cancer. Our faith must surpass all understanding, trusting God to shoulder every tragedy borne of a fallen world, earthly sin or human mortality, and ultimately make the world right.

Make the world right. That was the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. Trust in that, and God starts to makes sense. His ultimate, eternal compassion isn’t about the greatness of our understanding; it is about the greatness of God’s faithfulness.

Now that’s big.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) predicts that if we understood God, we’d want a bigger God we didn’t understand.

Blessings

Drive-By Disbelief in God, Lent Part 3

2011-03-21T18:54:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #228
March 22, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not that into God, Part 3
Drive-By Disbelief in God
By Bob Walters

The “Center for Inquiry,” a group plainly just not that into God, recently installed billboards around Indianapolis, Washington DC and Houston, Tex., exclaiming:

You don’t need God – to hope, to care, to love, to live. Livingwithoutreligion.com.

What a great discussion starter. It’s even better when transposed into a question: Do you need God? In a hundred different ways Jesus asks the same thing throughout the Gospel. The billboards are fascinating.

First, note that they contain no direct mention of Jesus Christ. The billboards merely and clearly target the Creator God. If they meant someone else, it would be small-g god. I wonder whether it was politeness or perspicacity (shrewd awareness) – it likely wasn’t faith – that led them to capitalize “God.” And if their main pitch is that God is insignificant or doesn’t exist, then they capitalize to patronize.

I mean, who would both admit capital-G God exists and claim He is unimportant?

Second, and however, these particular billboards obviously and especially target Christ because they appeared the first week of Lent, the purely Christian season preceding purely Christian Easter. Citing “hope” and “love” – two of the big three divine gifts (faith, hope, love) of 1 Corinthians 13:13 – it is a dead giveaway, so to speak, that denigrating Christ, the giver of all life, is central to cfi’s anti-religion pitch.

The group says, soberly, that the Lent timing is “just coincidence.” Whatever.

Third, the group’s logo is an inscribed circle surrounding lowercase initials “cfi.” A flame dots the “i.” A flame … symbolizing human intelligence? The eternal hope of the Holy Spirit? The eternal flame of Hell (capital H)? None of the above?

Fourth, the billboard logo says “Center for Inquiry.” The real cfi logo includes the unpunctuated motto: “Reason Science Freedom of Inquiry.”

Reason? They nullify the author of all reason, Jesus Christ.

Science? Ultimately science doesn’t replace God, it reveals God.

Freedom of Inquiry? Except … don’t freely inquire about God.

Jesus was big on free inquiry. He asked, “Who do they say I am?” “Who will cast the first stone?” “Do you love me?” When people asked Jesus questions, He typically answered in thoughtful and thought-provoking stories. He wanted us – then and now – to constantly inquire with our entire minds, hearts, souls and faith, “Who is He?” and “Do we need Him?”

These are questions we should never fear, tire of asking, or stop answering.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) believes it’s more of a “God thing” than a cfi “coincidence” that the billboards popped up now.

Fact Finding vs. Faith Finding, Lent Part 2

2011-03-14T20:22:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #227
March 15, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not that into God, Part 2
Fact Finding vs. Faith Finding
By Bob Walters

Some people just aren’t that into God because they are so busy fact finding that they ignore, shun, or ridicule faith finding.

Look at our educational system. Look at our legal system. Shoot, look at several aspects of our church system. Our modern culture is wired, networked, satellite-linked and surfing for a universe explained by facts.

Educationally, we shun faith, and I don’t mean prohibiting public school prayer. Schooling at every level, K-through-college, institutionally asserts that faith has no part of functioning intellect. Rubbish. Faith is, precisely, a function of intellect.

Legally, we expend enormous energies assessing the facts of various cultural conveniences, bringing our judicial system to the opinion that while it is not necessary to protect live, unborn fetuses or the “this-man-take-this-woman” institution of marriage, it is indeed necessary to protect itself from faith. Ten Commandments? Adios. Faith, you see, is “non-factual opinion.” It’s also the ultimate “inconvenient truth.”

Churches that are faith-based, faith-directed and faithful to the Gospel truth of Jesus Christ are awesome. Churches that survey the expediencies of current society and rewrite the truth of Jesus Christ into fashionably inoffensive – or incredibly fear-inducing – facts to better “market” or “sell” religion to “a non-believing world,” are awful, not awesome. Why go to church to find the “truth” if church is just as treacherous and self-serving with the facts as the rest of the world?

Truth is, the world’s game of facts is stacked against “the truth.” And by truth, I mean Jesus Christ. He’s the lightening rod of all lightening rods, and He’s the source of all truth, all light, and all joy that is truly worth having. That His “truth” doesn’t rise to the adequate level of “fact” in our public institutions is what day-by-day gives Satan hope.

Yet no matter what facts we find, the truth stays the truth 24/7/365: For His glory God loves us, Jesus Christ has saved us, the Holy Spirit is here with us, and the Bible tells us so. Amen.

Faith in just that much truth changes the complexion of every fact we can ever discover. Thinking we can reflect our own glory with facts is Satan’s most powerful weapon against us. Knowing in faith that all Glory is God’s, we discover the vast and true love, grace and beauty of God’s Kingdom; and it’s all around.

That’s the power of faith, and that’s a fact. Find it today.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that cell phone texting and surfing has us all bowing our heads. How hard would it be to throw in a prayer of thanks to God once in a while?

I'm Just Not That into God, Lent Part 1

2011-03-07T18:18:00.002-05:00

Spirituality Column #226
March 8, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011
I’m Just Not That into God, Part 1
By Bob Walters

We are conditioned by our culture to believe that God – especially the person of Jesus Christ – is merely one of life’s extracurricular activities, not the full-time source and center of our humanity and life itself.

There is doubt. God is OK but organized religion is a pain. Yeah I suppose there is a God but until He proves to me he or she exists I’m looking out for No. 1. When I sincerely tried to pray, I got no answer. What’s God ever done for me?

There is reason. Survival depends on my ability to reason, to choose and to judge right and wrong. I’m supposed to deny my powers of reason and “believe” in a God I can’t see? Who allowed his own son to be killed? Who needs a father like that?

There is precedent. I’m free, aren’t I? Don’t Bible-thump me with that Jesus nonsense. Arose from the dead? Loves sinners? Forgives even the stuff I’ve done? C’mon. I’m too smart for that. I know things. And don’t mix faith with public schooling. It’s my God-given right to have church and state separated!

“God-given?” Alas.

Truth is, people generally accept the existence of God. Survey after survey pegs “atheist” as identifying only four percent or so of the US population. Not that God tracks his ratings, He’s there whether we believe in Him or not. But our culture of media and personal esteem makes it far too appealing and easy for us to seek reality elsewhere.

I did that for about 30 years.

I never thought God didn’t exist. Nor did I think Jesus, the Bible and the church were all that important. Just a bunch of old characters, old stories, old thinking. Jesus was a good man, the Bible has lots of good advice … but, the center of all life?

I just wasn’t that into God.

Thing is, I realize now, I wanted to BE God. As I grew to understand that the job was already taken, Jesus – our human-divine connection with God – suddenly became very important.

Lent, the church season of Christ’s passion and sacrifice, begins tomorrow and ends at Easter. Traditionally, many Christians give up something for Lent.

To take the critical step of putting Christ in the center of our lives and recalibrating / downsizing popular culture, let’s give up trying to be God.

That job’s taken, and it’s a full-time gig.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) will look at non-believers through Lent, urging believers not to give up on them.

Remembering to Forget about Me

2011-02-28T19:31:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #225
March 1, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Remembering to Forget about Me
By Bob Walters

How often we sit in church during a worship service – I know I have – imploring God for a way out of, through or around life’s cataclysms.

God’s glad we’re there talking to Him, and we’re glad He’s there to talk to. God’s available anywhere, yet sitting in church is where most of us feel closest to God’s ear.

But worship isn’t supposed to be about us or our present situation, good or bad. Worship is about God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not about “me.” We lose the best part of worship if we focus on our problems and desires rather than immersing ourselves in the true, powerful heart of worship, the heart of Jesus Christ.

The Christian life is about loving God and loving others. Jesus Christ is our example of what a Godly human life looks like. His love, peace, mercy, forgiveness, service, grace and more are outwardly directed manifestations of a life dedicated to God and humanity. For us those virtues can become vices if they are instead directed inwardly, selfishly … truly impeding our ability to worship God.

We don’t put a lamp “under a bowl,” says Matthew 5:15 (also Mark 4:21 and Luke 11:33). A “lamp on its stand” – Christ’s light in a Christian believer’s life – “gives light to everyone in the house.”

Christ’s life, death and resurrection are His light shining on us and bringing mankind back into communion with the Creator God. Our worship should reflect that light, remembering Christ’s unparalleled Kingdom gifts of defeating death, erasing sin, and restoring us to heavenly relationship. That’s bigger than anything I’d be praying for.

The bread and the cup of communion represent the closeness and reality of our covenant relationship with God through Christ, and with the community of believers with whom we share it. It’s a meal of love, a meal of remembrance, a meal in the here and now that attaches us to the eternity of God’s love, and to the eternal gift of Christ’s obedience, sacrifice and fellowship.

The fastest way to richer worship is spending more time outside of church praying. St. Paul tells us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Amen. We should praise, pray, ask, thank, confess and witness in all that we do, all the time.

And when it’s time to worship, forget yourself and free yourself.

It’s all about Thee, not me.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that if one’s approach to worship is “What’s in it for me?”, by all means, go and find out.

Famously Favored, or Just Famous?

2011-02-21T17:53:00.002-05:00

Spirituality Column #224
February 22, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Famously Favored, or Just Famous?
By Bob Walters

Thoughtful author and music reviewer Neil Strauss recently described a common theme he hears when interviewing the hyper-famous and highly talented.

Those occupying the top echelons of their craft and celebrity, whether a musical artist, movie star or pro athlete, typically express profound belief that his or her place and purpose are determined by God, or a higher power … or something.

Strauss also noted that those less inclined to identify a Godly sense of purpose as the source of their talent and position, have lesser career trajectories. Exceptions notwithstanding, believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous.

Strauss wrote, “…from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual's soul than his or her secular success … So what's helping these stars is not so much religion as belief – specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.”

The Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars – events glorifying people, not God – all happen this month. Each is replete with exactly the folks about whom Strauss writes, prone to either thank a God they barely know, or to cite generic “belief” for success.

At issue is whether God’s purpose is to fulfill their human glory.

Purpose and belief and faith obviously are not all identical concepts, but they share the similarity of driving and undergirding our confidence in our ability to perform. “There is a higher power that wants me to succeed” sounds much more compelling – to others as well as to us – than simply, “I want to succeed.”

While it’s ill-advised to pick apart the sincerity of any person’s faith, it is nonetheless interesting to compare, say, Eminem’s expression of purpose, “God sent me to [make people mad],” which he rapped on his first hit record, juxtaposed with the Jesus-believing, ego-bridling humility of the average Christian.

All people – celebrities too – experience a mix of earthly successes and failures. The Christian walk teaches that God is not keeping track of what we or other people say, think or believe about ourselves. God’s Book of Life keeps track of what we say, think and believe about Jesus Christ.

Misplaced glory, you see, is misplaced faith. Earthly applause fades.

The lesson for all is this: The glory is always God’s, never ours.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) respects NASCAR’s Daytona 500 because unlike these other February mega-events, “The Great American Race” begins with a sincere, public, God-honoring prayer.

Sold on Faith, Not on Sales

2011-02-14T18:47:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #223
February 15, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Sold on Faith, Not on Sales
By Bob Walters

Looking back on the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day, are you at all weary from being in the cross-hairs of America’s high powered marketing mechanism?

Be the MVP, we’re told. Everybody’s a VIP. Sit on the 50-yard line. Buy a big TV. Win love with a gift. Say it with flowers. And on, and on.

Back in the late fall there was all the election hoopla, followed by Christmas. More marketing. Vote now. Buy this. Consume that. Experience the magic.

As consumers we are bombarded with sales messages encouraging us to maximize our personal feelings of importance. That’s the coin of the realm these days – personal esteem – and oh how it’s laid on thick, aimed at our hungry egos.

Is it any wonder that churches often struggle to create effective marketing plans? The whole world is telling people how to buy personal specialness and importance, and the message of Jesus Christ – of humility and service – is just the opposite.

Our world, or at least our nation, is filled with people whose profession it is to make sure we have fun and they make money. Through a trade, purchase, transaction or “deal,” our personal prestige is a commodity vigorously sought, bought and sold. We learn to be savvy, to trust no one, and to look out for Number 1.

Antithetically, Jesus Christ tells us to have faith, love God and love others. Our faith and love become our Christian life, loving the Christian community and serving mankind as best we can. No marketing, just trust.

For a consumer, that’s not much of a deal. But salvation is a gift, not a transaction. There’s nothing in it for the marketer; you can’t make money on free gifts.

In Philippians 3:20 we read, “Our citizenship is in heaven …” I haven’t always “gotten” what that scripture meant. But I recently read an interesting theological/political commentary which described “consumers” and “citizens” as opposite sorts of creatures. A consumer waits for the best deal and looks out for himself. A citizen focuses his or her own life on selfless service to others.

The difference is the basis of relationship. As a consumer, it’s money, pride, “me” and maximized value. As a citizen, it’s love, truth, service and the right thing.

Our relationship with Christ is a tough sell, because it’s not a sale; it’s a gift.

No purchase necessary.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) spent most of his career in public relations, frequently at odds with marketing people.

Love Starts with God, Not Us

2011-02-07T19:51:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #222
February 8, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Love Starts with God, Not Us
By Bob Walters

I love my wife, my kids, my family, my community, my church, my work, my home, my country.

I don’t love my sin, my debts, my mistakes, my thoughtlessness, my impatience, my pride, my fear, my selfishness.

Everything – and more – on the first list is a gift from God.

Everything – and more – on the second is a function of my fallen humanness.

As for the vagaries of health, wealth, family dysfunction, natural disaster, political turmoil and other things that blow hot and cold in our world, I think they provide context to learn when to call on God and when love matters most.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, love is in the air. But what we should learn about love from God’s word, the Bible, is far different from the playful rituals of human romance celebrated on February 14.

The “love chapter” in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13 – recited often at weddings (Love is patient, love is kind,” etc.) – is lovely to read. Indeed, the chapter describes the necessity, characteristics and permanence of love.

But parts of it make little sense unless we realize it’s not about marriage; the chapter is merely one part of St. Paul’s larger argument sternly warning the first century Corinthian Christians to knock off their pagan-like worship involving tongues and prophesy. It’s an argument for the sufficiency and totality of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ (read Burton Coffman’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 13 for a most interesting perspective).

Then of course there is the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) in the middle of the Old Testament (just after Ecclesiastes). This is first rate poetry celebrating wisdom and love as gifts from God. It’s typically read as a steamy allegorization of human sex, or a description of God’s relationship with Israel, or even a story of a maiden choosing a shepherd over King Solomon (he of 900 wives).

I don’t favor allegorizing so much as a single word in the Bible (another topic for another day), but Song of Songs lyrically tells us that God beautifully authors both the emotional and physical joys of love.

Perhaps the Bible’s clearest, simplest, shortest discourse on love is 1 John, especially chapter 4. Nothing in it about chocolate or flowers though; it says “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 4:16).

Love starts with God. It’s His gift to us that we can share it with others.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), noting that Valentine’s Day is about human romance, is reminded he needs to go buy a card.

Easy Jesus, Difficult Doctrines

2011-01-31T21:31:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #221
February 1, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Easy Jesus, Difficult Doctrines
By Bob Walters

Does our eternal salvation depend on doctrine?

Recall that Jesus was crucified between two robbers (Luke 23:32-33, 39-43), one of whom has ever since been known as “the good thief.” That’s because in Luke 23:42 he said, while hanging on the cross next to our Lord, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

No doctrine, no church, no tracts, no conversion, no baptism, no weekend prayer retreats, church golf outings or even mission trips. The good thief simply recognized Jesus for Who He was and what He could do. He professed faith, in so many words, that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, trusting him as Lord and Savior.

The good thief thus established a relationship by expressing the truth, and Jesus gave him paradise. The first human Christ “saved” had faith, not doctrine.

So in light of that, I’m going to go with no, doctrine is not the key to salvation. Salvation has everything to do with recognizing the person of Jesus Christ as the son of God. Salvation is about professing the truth of our relationship with God.

A smart friend of mine wrote: “What we call doctrine is in fact how we are related to God the Father in his Son because of how God came in Christ to bring to us His Kingdom. If we think of eternal life as a doctrine or a statement, the message of Jesus is lost; but if I take eternal life as the Father’s gift, then there is a reception of a gift rather than having merely an ‘idea’ called the doctrine of eternal life.”

In other words Jesus, and our relationship with God the Father through Jesus, is real. It’s not just a concept, idea, doctrine, explanation or vaporous opinion. It’s real.

Notice the good thief’s literal proximity to the body of Christ. We are taught that the church is the body of Christ (Colossians 1:18 and elsewhere), and that it is only by being part of the body of Christ, the church, that we can follow Jesus’ instruction of both equipping ourselves with faith, and sharing that faith with others (Matthew 28:18-20). So, don’t go it alone; join a church.

But Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)

Like the sign says, “Jesus Saves.” That’s all the doctrine we really need.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the Bible also directs us to repentance, humility and service. But that’s because of Jesus Christ, not doctrine.

God and Man: Who's Seeking Whom?

2011-01-24T18:24:00.004-05:00

Spirituality Column #220
January 25, 2011
Current in Carmel, Westfield, Noblesville, Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

God and Man: Who’s Seeking Whom?
By Bob Walters

Do we seek God, or is God seeking us?

Often lost in “seeker-sensitive” worship is the truth of what Jesus Christ’s earthly mission actually was. He was sent by God to seek us and bring us back to His flock like the shepherd who looks for the lost sheep in the New Testament parable.

Too often it’s marketed in churches that Jesus is entirely about “paying for” our sin and that our guilt should make us love Jesus. I can’t think of a worse way to describe God’s love, the work of Jesus Christ, or the reason for the Holy Spirit.

Folks, we’re sinners and we have to understand that. But fear and guilt will never help us find God; they only create focus on ourselves. Read the Bible and know that God already dealt with our sin by loving us and courageously giving His son.

When we immerse our “faith” in guilt and shame, we reject God’s love and free gift of salvation. We make God’s divine love a transaction or a payment plan instead of letting him just give it to us on His terms … on faith.

What does John 3:16 say? For God was so mad at the world that He killed His only begotten Son so believers would be guilt-ridden forever? No. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Then comes the clincher in John 3:17: Jesus was sent into the world “not to condemn the world” but so “the world through Him might be saved.”

It’s easy to become so focused on “seeking” or “finding” God that we forget that the greatest revelation of God’s grace and love was the fact that He already sent His Son humbly – without sin, into a fallen world, to seek us – to restore us to the perfect communion with the Godhead in the Kingdom of God, “not to condemn us.”

So don’t obsess over seeking God; He’s already seeking us. The biggest part of trusting God is trusting that He is looking for – and looking out for – each of his sheep.

Take some terrific Old Testament advice from Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Over and over Jesus says that with faith in Him, we’ll be saved.

He’s telling us the truth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), noting that Jesus Christ came to find the sinners not the righteous, is thankful to have been found.

Belief in Belief is an Empty Sheath

2011-01-17T18:08:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #219
January 18, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Belief in Belief is an Empty Sheath
By Bob Walters

I recently saw a poster titled “Believe” on a schoolroom wall.

Superimposed over a pleasant picture of a farm field was a parable about an old, blind horse that could pull a heavy wagon by itself as long as the farmer called out the names of several other horses in addition to its own. The moral of the poster is that because the horse “believed” it was hitched with a team, it found extra strength to pull the wagon alone.

Yeah, well. It’s a charming story for a moment, depicting overachievement and trust. In a spiritually sanitized school setting, it bespeaks personal perseverance, community effort and shared task. People helping people. Strength in numbers. I’ll never walk alone. It takes a village, etc.

But think about it; does the poster describe a belief worth having? To believe – or more pointedly, to be tricked into believing – that something strong, helpful and important is with us when it’s really not? Belief in a … lie?

Beyond the behavioral genius of the farmer, the poster’s context tells us – as do so many entities in our society and culture – to simply “believe.” Tricks and behavioralism, idols and false gods, are fine. Just, believe.

Ever been told to “believe in yourself”? How about to believe in a cause? Believe in a sports team or sports star? Believe to achieve? Believe everything will work out just fine?

The horse poster tells us to “believe” in things that aren’t permanent, lack ultimate truth, and, in this specific case, aren’t even there. Just, believe.

In a world created by God, visited and saved by Jesus Christ and indwelt with the Holy Spirit, my belief, faith and trust reside in the palpable reality that my help, my Lord, is really there. God is not a phantom team of horses.

Rather than debating our religious differences, let’s just say that under any circumstances it is empty sloganeering to have a relationship merely with the word “believe.” A relationship with God through Jesus Christ is the only proper context for knowing the bedrock permanence of belief that matters.

My wonderful old pastor Russ Blowers, now deceased, always had his Bible with him. “I never go anywhere without my sword,” he’d say. Ephesians 6:17 calls the Bible “the sword of the Spirit.”

Remove God and God’s word, and there is no sword in the sheath of belief.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) was initially encouraged to see the “Believe” poster in a public school classroom. Now he just feels sorry for the horse.

Faith and Knowing What You Know

2011-01-10T20:31:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #218
January 11, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Faith and Knowing What You Know
By Bob Walters

Simon Peter evidently was the first of the 12 apostles to catch on to who Jesus really was.

In Matthew 16:16, Mark 8:29 and Luke 9:20, St. Peter identifies Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Peter knew the truth not because someone told him. He knew because … well, he just knew.

Isn’t our faith still that way? We simply “know.” Like Peter, we see things we can’t explain. We feel things we can’t explain. We do things we can’t explain. We understand things we can’t explain.

Faith in Jesus Christ is a completely knowable, experiential, real, absolute, moral, living relationship, but trying to explain it falls short of proving it. Why is that?

The key is the next verse, Matthew 16:17. Jesus explains that Peter’s faith “was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” Maybe we can’t “prove it” to others because we’re not supposed to; because our faith in Christ comes from God. Faith is in our own hearts because God put it there, not because some human argued it into us.

The historical wave of mankind’s own knowledge hinders faith, too. The Classical Greek influence in epistemology – the study of how knowledge is formed and known – has urged the Western world to “prove it” for the past 2,500 years.

Thanks to the lasting intellectual influence of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, if we can’t prove something by talking about it or showing evidence, then what we have is an opinion, not the truth; certainly not The Truth – the ultimate, inviolable, objective Truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

When Hebrew Jesus showed up, he threw the Greek knowledge of knowledge entirely out of round. It wasn’t the intellectual elites who first identified the Truth. It was the simple, hot-headed, uneducated, until-then unspecial Jewish fisherman Peter who first understood what the anointed John the Baptist (not John the Apostle) had been saying all along … that Jesus was the Christ, the living Son of the Creator God.

We possess Truth not because a human argued it, but because God’s word demands it, Christ’s sacrifice proves it, the Holy Spirit reveals it, and my heart and mind know it. Jesus wasn’t here to argue His case with the Socratic Method.

When our faith and God’s Truth join forces, relax. There’s nothing left to prove.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) loves a good debate, but is thankful the Holy Spirit does the heavy lifting where faith is concerned.

Loving God without Reason

2011-01-03T17:02:00.005-05:00

Spirituality Column #217
January 4, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Loving God without Reason
By Bob Walters

Have you ever asked …

“If God loves us so much, why would He permit (fill in the blank) – death, sin, disease, Satan, disaster, war, sadness, hunger, violence, cruelty … ?”

It’s a long list, and a question that separates many people from God.

The Bible tells us God created a perfect world in Genesis 1 and 2. “So,” we syllogize, “if that’s true, then …” we demand an explanation. We want answers and reasons. We want to know who’s in charge and what can be done about fixing things.

C’mon God, get with the program … I’m waiting here!

God the Creator Almighty, humans reasonably assume, is the very best place to lodge complaints, voice issues and seek answers about The Way Things Are. That’s one reason people seek God, go to church, get religion, etc.: in order to Fix Things.

When the fix they want doesn’t happen, when human expectations are unfulfilled, God begins to seem unreasonable, and logic tells us, “I’m at the wrong window. Surely there’s an answer, and this guy (God) doesn’t have one.”

So, we lose faith in God. Based on our reason, He can’t possibly love us.

Fresh into 2011, let’s examine reason as it relates to God, His love and our faith.

First, reason is a human thing, not a God thing. God didn’t reason the World into existence, He … created it. Reason is a tool God gave to mankind, presumably, to survive, express our freedom, and to help us discover God. I think this is true, or at least a good guess, because the Bible says nothing about “reason” applicable to God, only to mankind.

Besides, God would have no more need for reason than for a wristwatch. Where God lives – in eternity, in perfection, in community (the Trinity), in love, in His omniscient and omnipotent forever – the calculus of “figuring things out” – reason – would be utterly superfluous. It’s already figured out.

Second, divine love isn’t about reason. Humans use reason to define love, and then wonder why they lose it. God is pure love, and God giving us Jesus Christ – pure grace – should be all the evidence we need.

Third, the Bible says God will know our love by our faith, not by our reason.

Go ahead and ask God for reasons, but don’t be surprised when His answer is, “Love me, and have faith.”

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) hid the real problem inside the question. Satan is why things are so screwed up; he excels at giving us reasons to doubt our faith.

Childlike Faith, Grown Up Love

2010-12-27T11:53:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #216
December 28, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Childlike Faith, Grown Up Love
By Bob Walters

It’s easy to think the Bible has it backwards telling us to become like a child (Matthew 18:3-4) when we are working so hard at being grownups.

But maybe we get the “grownup” thing wrong. If I have one prayer going into the New Year it’s that I never “mature in my faith.” The wonder of Christ is so much fun, so exciting, so big, so interesting, so deep, so comforting, so assuring, so challenging and so complete that the last thing I want to do is have my faith get old.

Consider that “being a grownup” in the societal context is generally about earthly works – responsibilities, problem solving, more responsibilities. Ever notice that? Satan sure does. He’d much rather have a responsible adult worried sick about earthly travail than have a responsible adult with a childlike faith in God. The latter doesn’t give Satan much to work with.

Having the ability to lay anything at the feet of Christ is the kind of grownup I want to be. I’m fine with responsibilities; it’s a joy when we can trust each other. Most of us have been on both sides of that one, though. We’ve sometimes trusted the wrong people, and maybe on occasion we have been entrusted with the wrong things.

The point here is that childlike faith knows God can be trusted all the time, every time. It knows God is the good, the right, the eternal; that God can do anything but actually does everything according to His own plan. God gives us the freedom – love’s foundation – to make up our own minds about our faith.

Childlike faith? I think that means, “no doubts.” It definitely doesn’t mean “unquestioning.” Have you ever known a child that didn’t have a million questions? God loves that! “Ask and ye shall receive” (John 16:24) isn’t about Christmas presents. It’s about God’s grace and mercy. Ask for that, and believe.

I know plenty of people who define the completeness of their adulthood by “knowing what they want and getting it.” Satan’s plan is to get us to focus on the things we want so that we either second-guess or completely ignore the things God wants.

Certainly that sounds childlike (childish?), but have you ever known a parent who wasn’t second-guessed or ignored despite their child’s neediness?

Christ on the Cross proves our Father loves us anyway … even the grownups.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) hopes you’ll enjoy childlike faith in the New Year. When you can feel God smile, you’ve succeeded.

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 4

2010-12-20T22:39:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #215
December 21, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 4
By Bob Walters

I wandered away from religion as a teen and no part of college or career the next 30 years pointed me toward God, church, or Jesus.

Not that I especially wanted it to, or expected it to.

Little about secular society points us to anything resembling Truth. Do your own thing. Believe what you want. Try to do something nice for others once in a while, but look out for No. 1. Half truths, blind ignorance and personal arrogance are completely OK with Satan, the lord of this life’s shiny falsehoods.

But I’m a sucker for tradition and, church or not, when Christmas rolled around every year I was hungry for the “Spirit of Christmas” I knew so well as a child.

Presents were a minor part of it. Our feast was always Christmas Eve, during which Dad played a German recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Before saying grace he read the beautifully lyrical King James Version of Luke 2:1-14 …

And it came to pass … Mary was great with child … no room in the inn … firstborn son … swaddling cloths in a manger … shepherds in the field … sore afraid … multitude of the heavenly host … fear not … good tidings of great joy …

For unto you is born this day a savior ... Christ the Lord … Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The first time I tried to read that to my own young family, I had a hard time finding a Bible in the house, a harder time finding the verse, and no clue why the words had changed (different Bible translation). I was in my mid-30s.

In my mid-40s I finally “got it,” the truth of that annual Christmas heart-tug.

The Holy Spirit on behalf of the Savior patiently abides – waits – and when given the chance, lights our yearning for Christ, for truth, for love. After all, that’s what God is, and our yearning for Christ grows immense because God is immense.

Satan works overtime to darken the truth of the season but I wish we would all “get it” that Jesus Christ arrived on earth and became flesh (John 1:14) to save us all (John 3:16). That’s the light of Christmas, the reason for the season.

And why not find Christ in Christmas? He’s been looking for us all along.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) worries not when Christ was actually born, but rejoices that in fact He actually was.

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 3

2010-12-14T06:29:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #214
December 14, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 3
By Bob Walters

I once visited a local church to hear an internationally known Christian minister and author preach at an evening worship service.

Shockingly, this visiting purveyor of the loving Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Holy Word of the Bible stopped speaking midway in his sermon and in mid-sentence demanded that a young mother – at whom he actually stretched out his arm and pointed – remove both herself and her somewhat-crying baby from the room.

The child was distracting him, he said. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s my fault,” he said. “I couldn’t concentrate.”

Nothing else the famous preacher said was as memorable as that. Most likely the humiliated young mother hasn’t forgotten the rebuke, either. As she retreated from the room holding her baby, my momentary relief at the silence turned to shame at my own impatience. My sympathies grew toward the mother, and away from the famous preacher’s broken concentration.

I thought of another young mother, a couple thousand years ago, who also had to hide a real, live human baby – Jesus – from earthly authority and social convention. Mary, with God’s grace, was patient with her circumstances.

I have narcissistic tendencies which make me not naturally patient. When we love ourselves too much, one finds, we have difficulty loving the world amid the world’s inconveniences. This would include lacking patience with crying babies, waiting in check-out lines, inconvenient stoplights, traffic, whatever.

Christmas too often is an exercise in impatience. One might rightly notice that the first victim of impatience is joy. Perhaps “Joy to the World” ought to be understood to mean, “Be patient with the world.”

God is. Christ is. The Holy Spirit is. Patient, I mean. Sinful man usually is not.

Try this as an antidote. Next time you’re inconvenienced, pray for the person that is inconveniencing you. That would include each person in line ahead of you. Or the relative whose Christmas plans conflict with yours. Or the baby crying in church.

As our Pastor Derek Duncan once advised, let a crying baby remind you of the one in the manger whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.

Christ came to reconnect mankind’s loving relationship with God, and to build our human communion with the Holy Trinity and with each other. Crowds at Christmas are an awesome time to do that, but to find Christ amid the chaos, you have to be patient.

Concentrate.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t mind a baby’s cry in church as much as … alas … he minds its parents’ deafness.

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 2

2010-12-06T20:52:00.002-05:00

Spirituality Column #213
December 7, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 2
By Bob Walters

You’ve seen the word “Dolby” on audio equipment or at the movies, right?

Named for inventor Ray Dolby in the 1960s, “Dolby Noise Reduction” electronically masked the omnipresent “hiss” (background noise) of audio tape recordings and movie film. “DNR” enabled the massive stereo cassette tape industry of the 1970s and 1980s. “Dolby Surround Sound,” introduced in 1975, redefined cinema sound tracks and theater audio systems.

My brother-in-law Bill, an electrical engineer (Master’s degree from Purdue), explained Dolby Noise Reduction to me once. He fashioned a graph that mimicked musical staff paper.

Recording-tape friction and recording-machine vibrations, he explained, created unavoidable hiss and rumbles – noise – at predictable frequencies when tape is recorded and when it is played back. Dolby electronically compressed nuisance noise frequencies and expanded the desirable music frequencies.

Anyone old enough to have hit the “Dolby” button on a tape player likely remembers the magic – just music, no noise! Modern Dolby digital cinema surround sound quality is even more astonishing in its life, clarity and depth.

Do you ever wish, like I wish, that we could hit a Dolby button to remove the secular junk noise from the Christmas season?

How wonderful to be surrounded by only the magic, wonder, depth and astonishment of Christmas; to know simply and clearly that God arrived on Earth as Jesus Christ the Son of Man to remove our sins, to intercede unceasingly with God on our behalf, to offer us the gift of adoption into the Kingdom of God, to give us eternal life, love and peace with Him at the right hand of God in Heaven.

Yet Satan hisses at us like a snake, and the earth rumbles with mistrust of man’s misguided faithlessness. Happy Winter Holiday! Alas …

How soothing to remove the hiss, rumble and noise of a greedy world busily promoting holiday commerce while it sneeringly conspires to stifle the spirit, silence the truth and disrupt the simple harmony of saying “Merry Christmas.”

Blessedly, God provides us with many Christmas “Dolby buttons.” We can pray, read the Bible, go to church, talk to a priest or pastor or a trusted Christian friend.

We can do for others and give of ourselves.

Yes, we can find Christ in Christmas. We can pray. We can beseech the Holy Spirit to silence the noise in our hearts, and surround us with the love, life, clarity and depth of Christ.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates the clarity of digital, but likes the realism of analogue. God, however, is not a recording.

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 1

2010-11-29T19:22:00.001-05:00

Spirituality Column #212
November 30, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Finding Christ in Christmas, Part 1
By Bob Walters

There’s an old theology joke about God playing hide and seek with man.

Everywhere God hid – mountains, oceans, stars, streams, books, paintings, culture, music and magistrates – man found Him. God succeeded only when an angel suggested, “Hide in the human heart; man will never look for You there.”

Then there is Dorothy, who needed only to search her heart and click together the heels of the shoes she was already wearing to find her way home.

And there is the wandering drunk who stumbled upon a riverside revival. He was grabbed and dunked. The third time the unwitting sot was pulled up out of the baptismal waters, the thundering preacher once again demanded, “Have you found Jesus?” The soaked and stammering man gasped, coughed and sputtered, “I-I-I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for him!”

So, three quick lessons. 1. God is always right here. 2. Home is where our heart is. And 3, the most underrated belief is to simply believe we’re supposed to look for Jesus.

Christmas is a great time to look for Jesus – the person of Christ, the Son of God, the unique and holy Word of God, the salvation of mankind ... the voice crying in the wilderness.

Jesus is especially easy to see this time of year. What does one think all the lights are for?

Notice loving people doing loving things for other people – buying gifts, preparing meals, decorating their homes, being hospitable. That’s the servant heart of the Lord Christ in action.

Yet we also notice the immense efforts of those trying to hide God, cloak Christ and make Christmas about worldly desires. That’s the wicked heart of Satan, the lord of the earth who exalts man over a God who Satan prefers people don’t seek.

At His earthly arrival, Christ wasn’t the powerful conquering warrior for whom the Jewish Nation awaited and prayed. Jesus was a helpless, humble baby born away in a manger to the frightened teenager Mary whose immaculate heart led her to obey God regardless of legitimate earthly peril.

And so Jesus came gently, I like to think, into that still, silent, good night.

Satan vigorously seeks to remove all that gentility, love, servant, humility, salvation stuff from the Christmas story, but commerce and greed are no match for the glory of God in Christ.

So be strong. Seek Jesus, search your heart, and find Christmas.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that a great place to start one’s search for Christ is by reading Isaiah 40. More next week.

Grace, Peace and Thanks

2010-11-22T22:00:00.000-05:00

IS-Walters-11-23-10
Spirituality Column #211
November 23, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Grace, Peace and Thanks
By Bob Walters

“Please” and “Thank you,” we learn early in life, are “the magic words.” They help us create positive relationships with each other.

“Grace and Peace,” we learn in the Biblical letters of St. Paul, are the magic words of the Christian life. They help us understand our loving and eternal relationship with God.

Each of Paul’s 13 letters in the New Testament contain some version of the greeting “Grace and Peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Though occasionally dismissed as a routine greeting, “Grace and Peace” is loaded with meaning following the earthly arrival, life, teaching, passion, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Grace is Christ at work. It is God restoring us in a way no one would have thought to ask for, with the humble, loving servant Jesus – God incarnate – beating back death and erasing our sin. It is not a gift we can repay. It is not a gift we are somehow “charged” for. It wasn’t negotiated. It is not a transaction or trade. Grace is the love of God delivered through the work of Christ.

It is “the grace of God in all its truth” (Colossians 1:6).

Peace is our life in the risen person of Christ, not our life thinking about Christ or reading the Bible or going to church or “being a good person.”

It’s easy to get this one confused because we plainly see the world’s mayhem, chaos, evil, inequity, tragedy, disease and disaster. Let’s be clear: Satan is the engineer of the bad and eschews peace because he is against God.

Jesus Christ “himself is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14), because He is God.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week let’s note that in the Bible thanks is almost always directed at God. Let’s also note that faith, hope, love, truth, salvation and mercy – the Good News of the Gospel – are centered in Jesus Christ.

Thanksgiving is a public holiday but grounded in the Christian faith. The persecuted Puritans in Great Britain arrived in America on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620. A year of hard survival later they celebrated a bountiful harvest by thanking God. Abe Lincoln made Thanksgiving official in 1863.

While there are lots of ways to tell our historical Thanksgiving story, it is God’s grace and peace that enable loving relationships and compose the true spirit of thanksgiving.

Please remember to thank Him.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) recommends Colossians 1 for a prayerful Thanksgiving Day devotion and reflection.

Throwing God's Weight Around

2010-11-15T19:29:00.000-05:00

Spirituality Column #210
November 16, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Throwing God’s Weight Around
By Bob Walters

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:30)

That is Jesus talking to the Galileans about resting their souls in Him. Jesus isn’t saying “take Me lightly.” Jesus is saying that since God the Father Almighty and Creator of All Things has committed all things to Him (11:27) – think about it – the smartest play is to take Jesus very, very seriously.

Jesus is saying – to the weak, the weary, the beat down, the sinners – that He is the answer to all questions, provides the strength to face all problems, and shows us with humility and gentleness that our faith is safe with Him.

Thankfully, most of us enjoy an occasional earthly success when we feel upbeat instead of beat down. Jesus is telling us that in Him, our own joy can be a permanent condition, not an occasional symptom.

This good news follows some really bad news in verse 20 when Jesus denounces the cities that heard Him teach but did not repent. “Woe to them,” He says.

There was a long period when I was not secure in my faith in Jesus Christ, but there was never a time as a church slacker, agnostic or whatever (don’t know if you can relate) that I would have wanted to bear the weight – with the certainty of having heard it from Jesus Himself – of Jesus the Son of God denouncing me.

“Woe to Bob …” Yikes.

That weight, the weight of God, is more than we can imagine. Jesus Christ on the Cross is what makes that weight bearable.

And you know, God throws His weight around. God’s weight, in fact, is an almost perfect way to describe God’s Glory. When God appears, his weight makes the earth quake. We see it over and over in the Bible.

Life being the surprising banquet it is, I found myself in Dallas, Tex., on a recent Sunday morning sitting with my elder son Eric in Northway Village Church, listening to Matt Chandler preach an engaging, convicting, 50-minute-that-seemed-like-20-minute sermon about God’s glory, weight, and reality.

Have we learned yet that God doesn’t flex His muscles for us, but for His own glory? Have we learned that the purpose, point and power of our own existence are to seek and understand the reality, weight and glory of God?

Only in Jesus Christ can we know it, bear it, and hopefully reflect it.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) urges you to pray for Chandler, his family and the 10,000 or so weekly “Village” attendees. Matt is battling brain cancer.

Blurry Survey Sees God

2010-11-08T19:06:00.002-05:00

Spirituality Column #209
November 9, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Blurry Survey Sees God
By Bob Walters

A much-ballyhooed news story recently reported that 95 percent of Americans, according to the new book “America’s Four Gods,” have an opinion what God is like.

In a (presumably random) survey of 1,648 adults, God was broken into four pieces – Authoritative, Benevolent, Critical, Distant. “Which of these is how you view God?” was the question. The results came back evenly divided among the four. Five percent of respondents said they are atheists or agnostics.

And that, the authors claim, is how Americans see God. I would guess, too, that the secular news media was happy to see that mystery solved: “Here’s what people think of God. Next question.”

Oh dear. We do like to put God in a box, don’t we?

Here’s some news: We can’t divide God.

Presumably the comforting aspect of the survey for non-believers is that God can be a “settled thing.” Here’s what God is, here’s what people think, here’s how people behave who think about God in certain ways. If we can just define God, I took the story to say, we can get on with the truly important affairs of our lives. You know, our needs.

While I am thankful and joyful to have God to think about, to praise, to worship, man’s opinion of God does not define God; God defines God.

Better to ask, “What is God’s opinion of man?”

Psalm 8:4 eloquently pleads of God, “… what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” The all-time best answer for that one came in the person of Jesus Christ, when God arrived on earth. Talk about huge news.

A survey of who believes that will sort out more about the current state of man’s relationship with God than any survey assessing man’s opinion of a divided God. God sent Jesus into a fallen world amid broken humanity, because the Truth is … God loved us, and wanted us back.

The totality of God is unknowable, but the part of God that is in our hearts is to be treasured. We should pay Him back by loving and trusting his Son, and by rejoicing in the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Surveys and knowledge don’t really do that. God reveals Himself only to faith.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), beginning his fifth year writing this column, thanks and congratulates Current publications for four years of being a light in this community.

Judge Not, Lest Ye ... What?

2010-11-01T21:41:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #208
November 2, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Judge Not, Lest Ye … What?
By Bob Walters

“Judge not, lest ye be judged.” (Matthew 7:1-2)

Is there a more widely celebrated scripture verse in society today?

Or one whose true meaning is more misunderstood?

My friend Brent Riggs’ “SeriousFaith.com” blog provides illuminating reading for any biblically literate believer. He says it’s illogical “not” to judge.

“People say, ‘the Bible says don’t judge.’ What the Bible says and means is ‘don’t judge … in a manner that will bring judgment on you.’ Everyone leaves out the second part,” Brent writes. “It means don’t judge in a way that 1) is hypocritical and 2) uses human standards instead of God’s divine standard that is above pettiness, selfishness and the agenda of man.”

“Don’t judge”? Nonsense. We have to judge. We have to discern. We have to develop smarts and discretion and wisdom. We have to judge – constantly – between good and evil, helpful and harmful, loving and unloving, right choice and wrong choice.

Psychology and sociology have unfortunately replaced theology and philosophy as the primary behavioral guiding lights in the Academy. The post-modern academic world of science and research universities constantly seeks to diminish, decentralize and compartmentalize truth. It abhors judgment based on the absolute moral authority of God. In its “judgment” – firmly and ironically – there are no God standards.

Perhaps, like me, you find it disturbing that these soft-science academics (along with journalists and pundits) pass for arbiters of ultimate worldly judgment guiding our cultural conversation on who can judge whom about what.

Why do we intellectually allow that? God’s standards are high, so why do we dumb down expectations of ourselves and each other, reacting to corrections and rebukes by misapplying a Biblical proof-text?

“Don’t judge.” Baloney. We may as well say it in the vernacular: “Get out of my face!” In other words, it’s not “Don’t judge,” but “Don’t judge me.”

My favorite definition of sin is “anything that falls short of God’s standards.” And God’s standards according to the Bible include declaring one’s faith in Jesus Christ, loving God, loving and serving others, and engaging one’s heart, soul and mind in pursuit of God’s truth, to gaze at the face of Christ.

Channeling Johnny Cochran, “Human standards are in dispute, while God’s standards are absolute.”

Saying “don’t judge” is akin to saying, “don’t think.” Even secularists know we have to think; believers know how comforting it is to think of God first.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) felt that a discussion on right judgment and God’s standards was appropriate on Election Day.

Hearing Music Between the Notes

2010-10-25T20:13:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #207
October 26, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Hearing Music between the Notes
By Bob Walters

“Be still, and know that I am God.” – Psalm 46:10

There was a 30-year period of my life from my mid-teens to my mid-40s that I didn’t go to church and was utterly without conviction about God.

God was quiet and I wasn’t listening anyway.

College and career and home and family filled life’s gaps. The idea of “going to church” or “being a Christian” seemed a grim, limiting, monochromatic, spirit-shrinking, intellect-killing enterprise.

My experience since coming to Christ has been the opposite of that. Any Christian who strides humbly but confidently in his or her walk with the Lord can relate to the joy, wonder, color, freedom and thought of Christian life.

I’ve been reading A Place for Truth, a thought-inspiring new book which recounts various “Truth” discussions at leading U.S. college campuses sponsored by the Christian Veritas Forum. Jeremy Begbie’s dissertation on music revealed to me new and surprising dimension and depth of the faith experience:

Christians must learn “to hear between the notes.”

Begbie is a theology professor at Duke Divinity School, an Anglican priest and also a classically trained musician. In his 2007 presentation at Cal-Berkley, he talked about musical tonalities and meter; about tension and resolution. There is a “beat” in music, Begbie noted, the same way there is a “beat” in our lives, and a meter in mankind’s relationship with God.

Exhibit A is the Bible. God’s interaction, silence, and surprises are easily compared to the movements of a classical symphony where properly placed pause or a tension-filled passage leaves us gasping for resolution.

Spiritual “silence” is not uncommon in our lives. There are, quoting Begbie, “in-between times … when it seems God is on vacation … when grace doesn’t seem very amazing anymore.” That’s when it’s time to listen “between the notes.”

Recount the Old Testament’s trials and truths; then consider God’s silence before the appearance of Christ, signaling the salvation of mankind.

Jesus Christ, Begbie teases, “is the Big Downbeat” providing humanity with the expectation, hope, and discipline for the symphony yet to come. God’s silence should be for us a time of prayer and trust in God’s resolution, not despair.

Once I only paid attention to the simple melodies and dissonant noise of life, with no clue how to appreciate the divine music between the notes.
Now I know that God is talking then, too, and it is joyful to listen.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) has great appreciation for great music, but no musical talent.

Safe Place to Tell the Truth

2010-10-18T18:56:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #206
October 19, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Safe Place to Tell the Truth
By Bob Walters

We respect and trust people who tell the truth.

So how is it we’ve slipped into a vast public place where it is not politically correct – often, even illegal – to claim that capital-T Truth actually exists?

Certainly, this isn’t a sudden development. Humanity has been slipping in that direction for a long time … maybe for 2,000 years since Jesus said “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” (John 14:6).

In this country, the Truth has been seriously slipping from public view since Knowledge and Truth became an academic dichotomy after the American Civil War. Whether in the public square, a city council, a courthouse (that dispenses justice), a great university or a humble local school system, Truth today is out of vogue.

Our institutions instead clamor for facts and research, not the Truth. They want answers. They often want to do the right thing … overlooking, of course, the utterly inconvenient logic that absent Truth, right and wrong don’t exist. Neither does freedom. Neither does justice. Neither do ethics.

Instead, public institutions abide by a socially acceptable and tautologically nonsensical truth, which is that one can claim any truth one wants, and it will be accepted in the loftiest Ivory Towers of the Academy … but call it Science. Call it Progressive. Call it Green. Call it Social Justice.

Just – please – don’t claim a Truth from the author of Truth, the only person in the history of mankind or in any religion to claim to be the Truth: Jesus Christ. Leave Him out of it; lest you offend someone. Christ as Truth is an unwanted opinion.

The, um, truth, of course, is that the Truth of Jesus Christ has pretty much always been, for competing doctrines or most governments, an unwanted opinion. Exhibits A and B are the Pharisees and Pontius Pilate.

America was supposed to be different because our founders believed:
1. It was unwise to codify religion in our Constitution, and
2. Only God’s free Truth residing in the free hearts of ethical citizens would prosper and congeal a free society.
3. Truth was cherished by the people

Dallas Willard’s just-released book, “A Place for Truth,” published by The Veritas Forum, contains a series of on-campus presentations on Truth by many of the world’s greatest thinkers: Christians, philosophers, scientists, atheists.

The book is encouraging, fascinating, challenging and … has a lot of truth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) warns the faint hearted, the book is an open academic discussion. Thankfully, the good guys win.

Dig Deeper for Church Foundation

2010-10-10T16:16:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #205
October 12, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dig Deeper for Church Foundation
By Bob Walters

My friend, mentor, and our Hamilton County neighbor George – I’ve written about him before – is a renowned scholar on the Eastern Church, on general church history including the Fathers (“Patristics”), and is a multi-lingual Bible translator.

He has worked at the Vatican, been a missionary in sub-Saharan Africa, served as a medic with the International Red Cross, was mentored at the ancient monastery of St. Macarius in northern Egypt, and for a time was a Coptic cleric in his native Cairo.

George retired from the divinity faculty at Cambridge University, England, in 2004 and since then has been living, writing, and teaching here in central Indiana. We have his lovely wife May, with her American career in computer systems management, to thank for that.

Though “retired” George teaches seminars throughout America and England, has taught select classes at several area churches and colleges, and recently began his seventh year teaching Wednesday nights at Castleton’s East 91st St. Christian Church.

George can write maddeningly meticulous class notes dissecting linguistic and spiritual subtleties of Hebrew, Greek and Latin Biblical pronouns (of Christ, in the Spirit, unto the Lord, etc.). But he can also simplify obvious but stupefying theological questions into three or four understandable points.

His current E91 series is “Bible Themes.” During the “Temples” class, George noted that Jews built temples where God appeared (theophany) or commanded. God dwelled, or tabernacled, in these Holy Places.

Later in that lesson, George asked, “Why do Christians go to church?” The public class draws a diverse, church-savvy crowd, but the room fell silent. After all, Jesus said nothing about “keeping the Sabbath,” only loving God and each other. Plus, “Christ dwells in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 3:17), not in temples.

So … why church? Typical George, “Three points …

“One, Jesus promised that when ‘two or three’ believers gather, He will be there.

“Two, to share the Lord’s Supper, the gift of the body and blood of Christ; that many may become one. This is highly symbolic, and also very, very real.

“Three, we are the ‘called,’ – the ecclesia. We are called to community, to worship Christ so He may give us strength and we will experience the love and commitment of our faith.”

Good answer. If you’re there for the music or so you can feel good about yourself … George would suggest you dig deeper and feel good about Christ.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), at George’s request, left out his last name. But the class is fascinating.

Sin and the World's Shortest Book

2010-10-05T19:36:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #204
October 5, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Sin and the World’s Shortest Book
By Bob Walters

What is the world’s shortest book?

It’s not “Different Ways to Spell ‘Bob,’” “The Engineer’s Guide to Fashion” or “Al Gore, The Wild Years.”

And no, it’s not 3 John, the Bible’s shortest book.

The world’s shortest book is “Sins for Which Jesus Christ Did Not Die.”

Jesus, you see, died for them all (2 Corinthians 5:15, 1 Peter 3:18).

The human race is a motley lot. We seek Godly heights yet often stumble into the lowest of pits due to either our own sin or the fallenness of the world around us.

"We are,” to quote my worship minister friend Shockley Flick, “sinful, rebellious, willful, demanding, slow to learn, resistant to change, egocentric and sometimes just not very pleasant to be around.
“Yet,” he continues, “Jesus Christ, through His grace and love, reached out and lifted us up from our squalor to walk with Him.”

As Christians we are taught that we must deal with our sin, but sometimes forget that Jesus Christ has already dealt with our sin … all of it.

Every sinful thing we’ve done, are doing and will do is why Jesus died on the Cross. For the sake of our eternal salvation, our sin was forgiven, taken away, removed and erased.

The “debt” was cancelled on the Cross.

Despite this Biblical truth, non-believers scoff at Christ and salvation. Even some Christians cling to their own sin, wallow in their guilt, and speak somberly of their – or accusingly of someone else’s – “unresolved sin.” But that makes me want to ask, “What sins could anyone possibly have that Christ didn’t die for?”

In God’s eyes, Jesus Christ already resolved our sin by His sacrifice on the Cross. That forgiveness, that grace, is a gift for which humanity did not ask, but is a gift freely given to anyone who in faith believes and declares that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Living God and trusts Him as Lord and Savior.

Faith is the key. Trying to resolve one’s own sin, with effort or works, is a fool’s errand, a canard, an oxymoron, an impossibility.
We can’t resolve sin. Jesus can, and did.

Sin is death in each of our lives until we declare our faith in Jesus Christ, confess our sin, and live our life dedicated to His Glory rather than our effort, happiness and comfort.

That’s the long and short of it.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) figured out years ago you can’t hide anything from Jesus. Confess, repent, worship, try to do better. Above all, have faith.

Sin, Knowledge, and Faith

2010-09-27T21:33:00.000-04:00

Spirituality Column #203
September 28, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Sin, Knowledge, and Faith
By Bob Walters

Why does one believe in Jesus Christ?

Is it to:
a) Escape one’s sin,
b) Increase one’s knowledge, or
c) Because our faith tells us to?

Defining and justifying one’s belief in Christ can be a lonely, confusing enterprise.

Our increasingly schizophrenic, postmodern society systemically tries to both acknowledge truth and deny the existence of God, self-righteously insists on goodness but scoffs at morality, and smugly claims heaven as its own while rolling its clouded eyes cynically at the person of Jesus Christ.

But clear-eyed to Christ some of us are drawn. All are invited in grace, but the world tugs hard against the heart that hears the heavenly hearkening of Jesus.

Sin generates pleasure and fear, and fear pulls some toward the Cross. The pursuit of pleasure, of course, pulls the other direction.

If Jesus is presented merely as a “get out of jail” pass, some will misinterpret that as a divine call rather than the selfish, empty escape that it often is; for guilt always focuses on us, not the Lord.

Knowledge is the exclusive province of Christ. He is the Word of God from the beginning of the world (John 1:1), and knowing Christ – which is the New Covenant brought by Jesus – is the only way to know any part of God.

But alas … who pursues Christ in order to obtain knowledge? Secular science has replaced the throne of God as the public seat of knowledge. Where in science does one find grace, or mercy? Facts, please. Let us discover the facts.

“The postmoderns,” to quote Joe Bottum, “say there is neither Good, nor right and wrong.” Justice becomes an opinion or an open-variable equation. Do the math; there is no God.

Faith is an agonizingly simple enterprise. The intuitive examine their heart. The aware learn from experience. The intellectual study the evidence. God is near. Be still, and know it (Ps. 46:10).

Proving faith is agonizingly difficult. I can prove faith only as I can prove love … by my actions, by my joy, by the depth and fullness of my life. Yet the proof is in my heart and, like all eternal things, unseen (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Believers may arrive at Christ’s hem quaking in guilty fear, or possibly seeking ultimate wisdom. How real and wonderful it is when the indefinable quality of faith animates the undeniable fact of God in our soul.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) weeps for those whose walk with the Lord is a guilt trip. The best answer is C.

Creation, Facts, and Purpose

2010-09-21T11:36:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #202
September 21, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Creation, Facts, and Purpose
By Bob Walters

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth …
(Genesis 1:1)

Considering that Creation is among the hottest of contemporary, fightin’-words, flash-point topics in church, theological, political, scientific, cosmological, educational, philosophical and biblical circles, this could be a dangerous discussion.

However the intention here is to simply present a few non-combative thoughts on the how and why of Creation, not challenge anyone’s Christianity or second-guess God.

Neither is this an attempt to prove the “six day” teaching nor to bash evolution, but we will put the Bible in its rightful and true spot as God’s voice.

The truths we’re working with are that God exists, God is eternal and uncreated, God is the creator of all things, God had a reason for creating all things, God is omniscient (knows all) and omnipotent (can do all), and the Bible is what it says it is.

Let’s also clearly state that the world is real, we are real, we are alive, we are aware, and what we do matters. Plus, it is reliably entrenched in our human brains to ask how and why Creation happened, and how and why we are here.

Science and Philosophy (God created them, too) ask how and why all the time.

Science asks: How do things happen? What are the predictable and repeatable results? What are the facts?

Philosophy asks: Why am I here? Why are we here? What is truth? What is our purpose?

The scientific “How” leads to facts: we find out how God made things, leading to knowledge. And then, philosophically asking “Why” God made things leads to discovery of God’s purpose, leading to relationship and faith.

The Bible reveals little of “how” God created us, but is overwhelmingly packed with “why.” From Adam and Eve to Abraham to Moses to the Prophets to Jesus Christ to Paul, God describes His relationship with mankind, and the relationship He wants us to have with each other.

God’s purpose for Creation becomes clear as our faith grows, and that purpose boils down to one word: Love. God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), and his Son Jesus Christ entered this world to defeat death, remove our sin, and save us for eternal communion amid God’s love.

I appreciate science exploring how God does things, but am thankful beyond expression that faith is all we need to know why.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) thinks science is God’s way of having us look for Him in Creation. Too often we think we see ourselves instead.

Did God Just Lose the Argument?

2010-09-13T20:37:00.001-04:00

Spirituality Column #201
September 14, 2010
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(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Did God Just Lose the Argument?
By Bob Walters

Some years ago I picked up Prof. Stephen Hawking’s popular 1988 physics book, A Brief History of Time.

About halfway through, I realized I was mentally overmatched. I generally enjoy complex reading, but Hawking is one smart dude and the physics of time is one mammoth mental challenge. Time, so to speak, wasn’t on my side. I put it down.

It’s not the only book I couldn’t finish the first time I picked it up. The Bible was like that. I grew up Christian and understood I was supposed to believe the Bible, but on several attempts, I couldn’t understand the Bible. Even in English, it seemed like a foreign language.

That changed about 10 years ago when, in my mid-forties, the eyes of my heart opened to the meaning of the Bible. I read it, I got it, I still read it, and I still learn new things every time I open it.

Hawking – who closed Time stating that when man achieved a complete understanding of science, it would “reveal the mind of God” – has published a new book this month, The Grand Design. In it he reverses field and announces that God is unnecessary to the universe and irrelevant to Creation.

“Because there is a law such as gravity,” Hawking writes, “the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

So God, it is widely reported, has been declared not only irrelevant but nonexistent. Stephen Hawking said so.

Let’s not panic and think that settles it.

Hawking, recently retired, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, England, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Suffering life-long ill health and confined, paralyzed, in a wheel chair, Hawking is the most celebrated scientist on the planet since Albert Einstein.

It is beyond odd that a guy that smart would claim that physical “law” and “gravity” had to exist for “spontaneous creation” (on its own) to happen. It’s borderline hopeful that academics and secularists, despite their initial “God is gone” glee, could not overlook that statement’s inherent oxymoron: that gravity had to exist before the universe could independently, exclusively, and spontaneously create itself.

Even secular CNN quickly asked: Who created gravity?

Good question. I, for one, don’t think Prof. Hawking’s mathematical mastery has sufficient gravity to unseat God as Creator.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), who will discuss Creation next week, is pretty sure Hawking has underestimated God.

The Importance of Patience

2010-09-06T12:00:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #200
September 7, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Importance of Patience
By Bob Walters

“The passion of our Lord is a lesson in patience.”

St. Augustine wrote that in the fifth century, echoing the even-earlier Christian writer Tertullian of Carthage from approximately AD 200. It is God’s nature to be patient, said Tertullian, and impatience is the primal sin of Satan.

In religious and philosophical writings, there is no shortage of lists when it comes to virtues, those earthly constructs we pursue to try to find God.

We have the Four Cardinal Virtues from antiquity – prudence, justice, courage and temperance. We have the Gospel’s three theological virtues – faith, hope and charity. We have the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5:16 - “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

Better not leave off mercy, forgiveness, humility, modesty, wisdom, religious devotion and fear of the Lord.

It’s easy to come up with a long list, but patience is a specific attribute of Jesus Christ that teaches us much about God’s love for mankind.

Patience, you see, wasn’t considered much of a virtue by the ancients. Sure, it’s in the Bible, but to the Greeks and Romans “perseverance in adversity” was admired, not Godly patience. What the King James Version calls “long suffering” and “slow to anger” while “forgiving iniquity and transgression” (Numbers 14:18) was the novel lesson of Christ on the Cross.

Patience. When you can be patient, you are being Crucified with Christ. Tertullian taught that patience is not endurance or fortitude, but hope … hope in the Resurrection. And it is a sign of longing for the good things to come; things that are promised nowhere but heaven.

“On Patience” was among Tertullian’s master works, though history tells us he was not an especially patient man. Yet he wrote, “When God’s Spirit descends, patience is always at his side.” Patience, Tertullian redefined, is what it means to be “like God.”

This survey of Christian patience came thanks to the church historian Robert Louis Wilken, who recently put together a terrific work called The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. It landed in my mailbox not long after I renewed by subscription last year to “First Things” magazine.

Wilken has done us an enormous favor by forming this wonderful and clearly written study on the formations of the Christian story.

Otherwise, I’d never have the patience to read these ancient works.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) needs to read everything he can get his hands on about patience. FYI, this is column No. 200.

Is a World of ‘Cool’ Killing Christ?

2010-08-30T19:37:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #199
August 31, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Is a World of ‘Cool’ Killing Christ?
By Bob Walters

“World” in the Biblical sense can mean very good, godly things, or very bad, evil things.

For example, in John 3:16 we are assured God will save our world and us with it because He created it, He loves us, and in faith we are worth saving.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son … ”

Great! The world is good.

But then, “In this world you will have trouble.”

John 16:33 presents the world as a catch-all name for the bad stuff. Only God, in the person of Jesus Christ, can “overcome the world.”

Uh oh! The world is sin.

The Bible plainly credits God with all Creation, and at the same time lays the root and blame of all sin on “the world.” Any wonder why the Christian church has a hard time trying to figure out where it fits into the modern world?

The accomplished young magazine writer Brett McCracken (Christianity Today), has taken a thought-provoking and entertaining stab at sorting out the modern church world of fads and fashions in his first book, Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide.

The title, he writes, is a “nod to Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis. McCracken recently finished writing Hipster at the Kilns, Lewis’s home near Oxford, England. The book was published this month.

Thankfully, the book is not about how to be a Christian hipster. It is a look at the history, pros, and cons of Christians trying to improve on the look and work of Jesus Christ through the lens of “cool.”

Ah yes. “Cool.” McCracken provides an intelligent conversation on how Christians try to synergize their faith with the world of intellectual fashion, cultural trends, technology, and marketing. All quantified with modern metrics, and a steaming café au lait on the side.

The history of the church has been riddled with heresies which were an expression of contemporary “cool.” Today, hipsters young and old walk out of churches, never to return. The church, you see, is too much like the world.

And eventually, the world will do something God won’t … go away.

Serious Christians will appreciate the depth and direction of McCracken’s conversation, and I pray hipsters will learn that Jesus Christ plays “cool” at a level unique in the history of mankind.

The world of Christ is a world worth seeing. Worldly cool won’t cut it.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) learned of this book in an Aug. 13, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, written by the author.

Strong Enough to be Weak

2010-08-23T21:53:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #198
August 24, 2010
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(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Strong Enough to be Weak
By Bob Walters

There is a weekly CBS TV drama called “The Good Wife” where a female lawyer more or less “stands by her man.”

The adulterous husband is a formerly high-powered public official convicted in a complex political scandal. He lives in 24-7 ankle-bracelet home detention at their trendy downtown apartment.

It’s mainly a lawyer and law-firm show, but the disgraced husband – philandering, yes, but is he wrongly convicted? – provides an interesting layer of moral dilemma.

I tend to watch cable news, history and movies, not “TV shows.” My wife … a good wife … DVRs programs to “watch” while she is sewing or scrapbooking since we rarely have the time or the inclination to watch weeknight TV dramas.

My attention was grabbed by a DVR’ed rerun of “The Good Wife” when it introduced a Christian spin in the “bad husband’s” rehabilitation.

In a nutshell, the bad husband, Peter, has a loyal private investigator / public image consultant named Eli Gold who advises him to start going to church as a public relations tactic.

Gold picks out a nearby urban evangelical church pastored by a very devout and savvy black preacher who tells Peter – who is white and grew up Episcopalian – to get out of his church. He felt Gold and Peter were using him and mocking Christ, which of course, they were.

But Peter is struck by the preacher’s sincerity and directness, tells Gold to leave, and Peter accepts Christ. Peter wants to change, confesses his sin, wades into Bible study and prayer, and the preacher begins mentoring Peter in twice-weekly home visits.

Neither “The Good Wife” nor Gold can understand Peter’s conversion, much less take it seriously. There is much eye-rolling, sarcasm, and skepticism. Peter’s mother, a formidable, smart, matriarchal, old-money type, insists Peter see the family’s long-time Episcopal priest to “put his (Peter’s) religion in perspective.”

Her final decree against Peter’s deepening faith in Christ, belief in salvation, understanding of his sin and desire for change is – irony of scriptural ironies – “I will not allow my son to be made weak.”

Weak? In Christ?

I don’t know a single Christian who believes Christ makes them weak. Christ is about humility and strength; He is man and God. But we all know, sadly, that much of the world seeks power anywhere but in Christ.

The TV show got that right.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) hasn’t regularly watched a network TV show since “The West Wing.”

Being Definite about the Infinite

2010-08-16T23:12:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #197
August 17, 2010
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(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Being Definite about the Infinite
By Bob Walters

Logic and infinity have a tough time with each other because logic demands definition, and infinity cannot be defined.

So it is with faith and relationships. Our human logical minds wish to define every human or divine encounter, and yet there sits our Father God up in heaven, utterly infinite, utterly safe, utterly good, utterly unique, utterly holy.

Utterly real, yet utterly indefinable.

And because of that indefinablilty, many humans refuse to accept the God-inspired yearning of our hearts and minds to seek God, praise God, love God, and love others.

Funny … it’s His infinite indefinability that makes God worth worshipping.

Our culture has developed a love affair with practicality, both inside and outside the church. Don’t we individually insist on seeing the evidence? Don’t we say, “Show me the money”? Don’t we insist on a logical definition for … an infinite God?

Infinity seems like it should be a quantitative thing, a great big number or a great big space. But God’s infinity makes more sense as a qualitative thing, more like beauty or love or faith or relationships.

Defining our relationships with God and each other are not things that lead easily to pat answers and rote definitions. Define your family: that’s my wife, those are my sons, there’s our dog. Define God: there’s my church, there’s the Bible, Jesus is my Lord and Savior, Amen.

But does any of that truly describe a relationship? Does it consider the infinity of possibilities, the infinity of freedom, the infinity of love, the infinity of the throne of God?

As Christians we desperately want to define God in ways that help our logical minds resist all challenges to our faith. And perhaps even more desperately, we want to share our faith – to express our relationship with God – in ways that persuade a non-believer’s logical mind.

The fully man, fully divine person of Jesus Christ is the bridge between logical man and the infinite God. Notice though that Jesus is not a bridge of how far or how much, He is a bridge of relationship; a bridge of faith, hope and love.

Most of us learn to love our families without a lot of specifics, and Jesus commands us to love others … also without a lot of specifics.

Don’t wait for the specifics to love God. Let God’s infinity draw you in, not push you away.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows “we are weak but He is strong.” Yes, Jesus loves me.

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 4

2010-08-09T22:01:00.005-04:00

Spirituality Column #196
August 10, 2010
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Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 4
By Bob Walters
Last in a series

Author Mark Noll graciously replied to an email I sent after I finished reading his “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”

I wondered, now 16 years after Christianity Today named “Scandal” its 1994 Book of the Year, if he thought Evangelicals were gaining ground intellectually. I asked if there was a follow-up book in the works.

He responded that as it happens, he has just recently finished a manuscript that Eerdman’s in Grand Rapids will publish next year, titled “Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind.” Noll said that the book “tried to make a positive statement concerning how traditional Christian belief can support strong intellectual life.”

He also referred to a postscript he wrote for the new book that is a revision and expansion of an article he wrote for First Things journal, Oct. 2004, “The Evangelical Mind Today.” He lists 10 areas where positive impact is being made. I’m looking forward to the release of the book.

Noll points to a couple of glaring intellectual weaknesses in modern evangelicalism. One is the nearly total absence of serious consideration for tradition and the 1800 years of Christian thought that preceded the great evangelical revivals.

Missing from evangelicalism are the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Galileo, Luther, and Calvin. Similarly Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, even Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, are immense Christian intellects given less stature in the evangelical community than a Sunday preacher.

Sorry … not to harangue any specific preacher, but to put a point on it – deep feelings do not equate to deep theology, or bedrock, true, biblical understanding.

We cannot study great music without studying great musicians. How could we possibly study great theology without studying great theologians?

Quoting Galileo, “It is most pious to say and most prudent to take for granted that the Holy Scripture can never lie, as long as its true meaning has been grasped.”

A second glaring weakness is evangelical separatism, a resistance to engaging the Christian mind and energy in the whole spectrum of modern learning, from political science to economics to linguistics, history, science and literary criticism.

Says Noll, “Personal faith in Christ is a necessary condition for Christian intellectual life, for only a living thing can develop.” Evangelicals definitely have the heart, soul and strength of personal faith … Noll insists we plug in our minds.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) figures this is a good stepping off point as school begins. Take Christ along, in your heart and mind.

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 3

2010-08-03T10:32:00.005-04:00

Spirituality Column #195
August 3, 2010
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Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 3
By Bob Walters

American Christian historian Mark Noll wrote about the limitations of Evangelical intellectual development in "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind."

But I hope no one thinks he’s saying Christians, or Evangelicals, are stupid.

He’s saying that since God created everything and gave us freedom, every Christian ought to have the courage to study everything.

Right on. Noll’s thoughts are critical to reclaiming intellectual life for Christ.

Noll writes from the refreshing, academic viewpoint of the reality of God. The absence of that reality is one of the most distressing omissions from modern education at every level. Schools – except for religious ones - are not only afraid to admit God exists, they are afraid to mention His name. Satan must love that.

Noll, if I’m reading him right, is calling it a “Scandal” that believers too often and for too long have retreated from the big, messy, public, social, scientific square of academic knowledge and cultural opinion that conflicts with biblical comfort zones.

We Bible Christians are likely to say: "Here’s the Bible, I believe it, end of discussion." Well, it’s not the end of the discussion. Consider Galileo, who suggested that the earth revolved around the sun. He was a heretic! No, wait, he was right.

The only unchanging truth is Jesus Christ. As for physical science, our global knowledge of that changes all the time.

I think it’s a mistake to limit one’s understanding of Jesus Christ to one’s understanding of the Bible. Start with the Bible, sure. Read it. Study it. Know it. Repeat.

But don’t worship it. Worship Christ.

Believe the Bible, of course. But it’s more important to believe Christ.

Think through and with the Bible, but develop a mind for Christ.

The Apostolic Christians who actually knew Jesus, then those who came after the Apostles, then those who formed early doctrine and battled early heresies, didn’t have a Bible to study. But they knew and worshipped Christ.

If our heart, soul and strength are in our faith in God, we still come up short if we don’t accept the importance of the full engagement of our mind. God loved the world and made the world. We better be enthusiastic about studying the world.

Scripture encourages us to “have the mind of a child” (Matthew 11:25, 18:3).

Right. I think that means, “Be curious and grow.” That’s what freedom is for.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) contacted Noll for an update on what the Evangelical mind looks like in 2010. That’s next week.

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 2

2010-07-25T19:36:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #194
July 27, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 2
By Bob Walters

We’re talking about Mark Noll’s 1994 book “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” and his very learned observations regarding the state of Evangelical intellect.

In this four-part series I want to talk a bit more about the book this week, comment in part 3 why I think this topic is critical, and will finish up with some information from Noll regarding his new book on Christian intellectual life, “Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind,” that is due out in a few months.

Some weeks ago in this column I recounted how my Wednesday night Bible study had recently wandered into a minefield of conflicting theological perceptions regarding whether Adam and Eve would have been immortal had they not sinned.

After the column I received reader comments of both agreement and dissent at the suggestion. Class discussion had been lively, to say the least, and what calmed the storm in the class was the assertion that before jumping combatively to opinion-based conclusions, it’s important to broaden what we really know about theology.
Noll’s book was suggested.

Noll tracks Christian intellectual life of the Great Awakening (Jonathan Edwards, et al, 1740ish), the formation of the United States (1750-1790), the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1790-1840), and then discusses the enormous education and cultural changes from after the Civil War through the 20th century.

At the nation’s founding, the freedom of the political system, the urgency of new thinking in the society and the insistence on results in the economy supercharged a religious system – Evangelicalism – that was all about freedom and urgency and results. This was the explosion of Christian Spiritual Revival, camp meetings, and salvation right now. Amen!

Ivory tower philosophy, monastic theology, and careful denominational construct …who had time? When the Holy Spirit moves … get saved, and get on with it! That was the glorious firestorm of Evangelicalism.

“Evangelicalism,” Noll notes, has never been a tightly defined “ism,” or formal church. It’s a belief in the truth of the Gospel centered on conversion (to Christ), the Bible (God’s Word), sharing faith (evangelizing) and Christ’s redeeming work on the Cross. Denominational organization isn’t a central aim; having a heart for Christ is.

One can argue whether Christian intellectualism is important – I would argue that it is critical – but it’s hard to find fault with Noll’s insistence on the importance of the mind in understanding God’s purposes.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) hopes we never confuse theology, the study, with Jesus Christ, the truth.

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 1

2010-07-20T12:58:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #193
July 20, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Storming the Intellectual Ramparts, Part 1
By Bob Walters

Some weeks back I mentioned Mark Noll’s classic book “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” promising to read it and get back to you.

OK … I have, and here we go.

Written in 1994, “Scandal” surveys Christian Evangelical intellectual development over the past few hundred years and the news, to say the least, is not great.

The dominant points I got from the thoroughly researched and citation-laden book are that 1. Jesus Christ plainly tells us in the Gospels to “Love the Lord your God” with all our heart, soul, strength and mind (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27), and 2. (… ouch …) Evangelicalism so far has largely failed at the “mind” part.

Shocking as that may seem, Noll is in a position to make such an observation.

A prolific and noted author, Noll taught for 27 years at robustly biblical Wheaton College outside Chicago as Professor of Christian Thought. He was a Wheaton undergrad, has a Masters in Theology from Trinity Evangelical Seminary, and a PhD in Church History from Vanderbilt.

Noll received a National Humanities Medal in 2004 from President George W. Bush, and in 2005 was listed among Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America. In 2006 Noll was named Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic School.

Note the diversity of plaudits and affiliations; he’s respected in many camps.

Noll is renowned especially for his scholarship in the Christian religious history of the United States, and has written extensively addressing the complexity of the question of whether America is a Christian nation. Look him up if you want to know more.

"Scandal” is a worthy read in order to understand how Evangelical Christianity developed at first toward, and then away from, intellectual pursuits. One of my favorite statistics in the book is that in 1839, 51 of America’s 54 college presidents were clergymen, and mostly evangelicals. By the late 1800s, college attendance had exploded and college academics became focused on technology and science.

Theology, once the crown of the Academy (the educational establishment), by the 1900s steadily retreated from the main stage of America’s collegiate administrations and course offerings, becoming the purview mainly of Bible colleges and seminaries.

American scholarship took a track toward the materialistic, and the Bible became Evangelicalism’s intellectual ramparts.

There’s no better book on the planet than the Bible but, Noll asserts, Evangelical thought narrowed.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows some of this is painful, but believes Noll speaks an important truth. More next week.

Whose Crown is it, Anyway?

2010-07-13T11:09:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #192
July 13, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Whose Crown is it, Anyway?
By Bob Walters

“And on his head are many crowns … ” Revelation 19:12

Just before Satan “gets it” in chapter 20 of Revelation, the Bible’s final book, the resurrected and heavenly Jesus Christ is dramatically described in Revelation 19 as an avenging conqueror called “Faithful and True” that nobody in their right mind would “mess with.” Of Christ is written …

The “roar of a great multitude” shouted “Hallelujah!” Twice.

“With justice he judges and makes war.”

“His eyes are like blazing fire.”

His robe is “dipped in blood.”

“Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.”

He will rule with “an iron scepter.”

“He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.”

His name is “the Word of God.”

His name is also “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

And in the middle of all this we learn that “on his head are many crowns.”

This … is our loving, gentle and humble savior? The Lamb of God?

You bet. He is also the righteous warrior who defeats sin, releases the world from death, and seals our eternal salvation by throwing the “beast,” the “false prophet,” and Satan into the lake of burning sulfur to be “tormented day and night” for all eternity.

I want to be on the Conqueror’s side. I want to glorify Him. I want His righteousness and power to battle Satan when I sin, and I desperately want His forgiveness to intercede with God the Father on my behalf when final, eternal, “lake of burning sulfur” judgment is handed down on my soul.

Not that there’s, uh, anything to worry about.

Serious business, this salvation. Yes it is. And that “sword” coming out of the Conquering Christ’s mouth? We can be sure that sword is “Truth.”

In this life we are pretty much on a death march if Christ is absent from the picture. That’s not to impugn any other religion; it’s just that eternal salvation by faith is an utterly unique aspect of the truth of Christ. No other theology teaches that.

The many crowns of Christ aren’t the vanquished; they are the believers who humbly and faithfully follow Him, and accept His gift of salvation.

And if you are working hard to get your own Christian crown … you’re missing the point; the crowns go on the head of the Conqueror.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) loves the hymn, “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” It’s great advice.

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 3

2010-07-05T09:57:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #191
July 6, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
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Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 3
By Bob Walters

Gimme that old time religion, Gimme that old time religion,
Gimme that old time religion, It’s good enough for me.

This is not a song I learned in my traditional church as a kid, but often pops up in American culture (movies and TV) so I sure know the tune. It was adapted from an African-American spiritual by Charles Tillman and was first heard, the story goes, at an 1889 Christian revival camp meeting in South Carolina.

The five tripled verses are:
It was good for our mothers …
Makes me love everybody …
It has saved our fathers …
It will do when I am dying …
It will take us all to heaven …
… and it’s good enough for me.

A simple song for simpler times?

Maybe. But I am not sure there have ever been truly “simpler times” when it comes to trying to express the Christian faith. Jesus Christ has always been a tough sell despite the seeming simplicity of His message: Love God, and love each other.

Certainly not every era of the Christian faith has been great. Early on there were the Christians and lions as Roman entertainment. Then came the heresies of the early church. Then there were the Muslim marauders, the Christian Crusades, the Great Schism, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials and the several TV-inflated maladies of modern times – insincere preachers, church scandals, self-serving doctrine.

It seems someone is always either trying to kill the Christians, or the Christians are trying to kill each other. What’s been nice about the American experiment in democracy and religious freedom is that, with a few notable exceptions, the Christians here have only had to worry about fighting each other.

The Second Great Awakening in America’s early 1800s invited God to the far-flung camp-meeting party by celebrating independence with the Bible, and Jesus.

Christianity has thrived here in the USA over the years. But when I hear “Old Time Religion” it brings to mind a cultural default position that accepts the existence of God, believes Jesus Christ is His Son, and invites the Holy Spirit into America’s collective heart to seek truth and justice with faith, hope, love … and peace.

“Old Time Religion” is a Gospel song that’s extra light on theology, but assumes a widely shared belief in the goodness of God. Gimme some of that this Fourth of July.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) recommends authors Mark Noll, George Marsden and Nathan Hatch for U.S. religious history.

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 2

2010-06-29T09:01:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #190
June 29, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 2
By Bob Walters

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
– Preamble, U.S. Constitution

“… Blessings of Liberty …”

Did you catch that?

“Blessings” – capitalized in the original – is a God and faith word, not a secular, non-faith word. It’s a word that assumes a Creator and more importantly assumes a relationship with that Creator.

Yes, one could argue that a blessing can be as secularly simple as doing something nice for someone else, but that’s a good deed. One can also argue that all the nouns except “defence” are capitalized in the Preamble, but that’s grammar.

I would argue that Blessings are God-inspired things, and that words like “Blessings” and “ordained” clue us into the intent of the Constitution’s framers – that for this grand venture of American democracy to succeed, God needed to be not only on our side, but in the very hearts of the republic’s newly empowered and free citizens.

Given that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin were all more deist than conservative Christian, and that secular humanism was the philosophical fashion of the age (and especially of the Founders), let’s not worry for now whether 18th century America was founded as a “Christian Country.”

Let’s instead focus on the immense, frontier-penetrating Christian revival, the Second Great Awakening, that almost immediately followed our nation’s birth.

Revival is when the Holy Spirit works to reveal the Gospel truth of Jesus Christ. And regardless of the “Christian Country” debate, America with its unbridled freedom was surely a nation of unlimited personal opportunity, an unimaginably vast expanse of land, and with no establishment church, previously unknown religious openness.

Americans proved thirsty for the Gospel message. In many ways we were a people without tradition. New directions and snap judgments fueled the ferocious growth of the nation. The population physically grew away from the Protestant religious establishments of the East. The independent pioneers went west, and independent Bible preachers followed.

The Holy Spirit knew the opportunity was ripe to shine the light on Jesus Christ from sea to shining sea. The old rules were left behind, and Bible revival was on.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) can’t think of a worse hindrance to freedom – and brotherly love – than state religion. More next week.

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 1

2010-06-22T09:02:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #189
June 22, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Gimme that Old Time Religion, Part 1
By Bob Walters

It’s funny what people do with freedom.

Among the topics covered today in standard U.S. History high school text books is the Second Great Awakening, the Evangelical Christian movement in America’s first 50 years or so from the late 1700s into the mid-1800s.

Remembering that the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and took full effect in 1789, it’s interesting to note that historians typically date the start of the Second Great Awakening as 1790.

FYI, the “First Great Awakening” in America was circa 1740, led by philosopher and scientist Jonathan Edwards. His phenomenal grasp of Christian intellectual and spiritual pursuits, and his prolific writing, are often overshadowed by one exceptionally famous yet (for him) highly atypical sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

That sermon has been used ever since, oxymoronically it seems, to scare people into the secure and loving arms of Jesus Christ. Christ didn’t die because God was mad at us; Christ died because God loved us (John 3:16), and Edwards knew that. It’s more illuminating to read Edwards’ less famous works (15 volumes worth), but I digress.

Back to 1790, the Second Great Awakening, and a new government created by “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Perhaps the first full, free cultural expression of America’s newly ordained citizenry was to get God into the act.

For all the hue and cry and debate about whether the United States of America is a “Christian Country,” at its founding (1770s and 1780s) only a small minority, perhaps only 10 percent, of the Colonial population belonged to a mainline Protestant church –the Anglicans, the Puritan Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.

The organized Protestant churches, remember, were part of the British tyranny and European establishment from which the Colonies were trying to free themselves.

Belonging to a church, we infer, was not the fashion. Believing in God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, however, was demonstrably pervasive in American culture.

To that point, it is telling that the U.S. Constitution’s “We the people” Preamble quoted above, included the action phrase, “and [to] secure the blessings of Liberty on ourselves and our Posterity.”

America thus began, and an awakened, free people understood Liberty to be a blessing from God. Political and cultural freedom, united with personal faith in God, proceeded to storm across the American landscape.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) contemplates America and has no doubt “God shed His grace on thee.” More next week.

A Wooden Response to Real Faith

2010-06-15T07:48:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #188
June 15, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

A Wooden Response to Real Faith
By Bob Walters

In the small-city, American innocence of my youth in the 1960s, it seemed that everybody went to church.

To my recollection nobody talked much about Jesus Christ but “Where do you go to church?” was a socially acceptable, non-invasive inquiry. God was at church, everyone went to church, everyone understood God was God, and God was good.

Of course, we didn’t go to church in the summer. We rode our bikes, played ball, and went swimming. We went to church during the school year.

And in school I learned that in 1776 our nation declared its independence in no small part because people “are endowed by their Creator (capital C) with certain unalienable Rights.” It made historical sense to recite daily the Pledge of Allegiance, facing the American flag as “one nation under God” (no comma).

How surprised I was to learn years later that the Pledge was relatively new (1892, Francis Bellamy), and “under God” was really new (1954, President Dwight Eisenhower). “In God We Trust” on our paper money first appeared in 1957, having been adopted officially as our national motto in July 1956.

Given that era’s bristling Cold War with the Soviet Union, the motto was a “purpose pitch” promoting American values like God and freedom. Some dismissed it as mere propaganda against godless Communism, but so what? Communism was a horrible idea, horribly applied, with horrible effect. Communism chokes individual freedom, creativity, wealth … and God.

Anyway, even today ninety percent of Americans like the motto.

So why is it that so many of us are willing, happy, even thankful, to Trust in God, while so many also blanch at any public confession of the miraculous, freeing character of redemption through the saving power of Jesus Christ?

These thoughts cross my mind when a great American like John Wooden dies. In his death, our culture reduces John Wooden’s enormous, demonstrated, lifelong, prosperous, humble faith in Jesus Christ to sports, championships and coaching.

Mercy gracious sakes.

It’s hypocrisy that all this reporting is done with an understood wink of the mass media’s eye. Everyone knows Wooden was a devout believer in Christ, and that every corner of his life witnessed to his Christian faith.

Wooden’s is what an abundant, American life in Christ is supposed to look like.

If truly “In God We Trust,” why is “Christ” so hard for so many Americans to say?

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that while Wooden wasn’t shy about his faith, the media only reports on earthly rewards.

Wholly Imitating Holiness

2010-06-08T07:50:00.005-04:00

Spirituality Column #187
June 8, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
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Wholly Imitating Holiness
By Bob Walters

We can never go wrong shining a light on Jesus Christ.

And the most assured way to do that is to imitate God by being holy.

How are we holy? Surprisingly, not by being sinless (we aren’t), not by being divinely loving (we fall short), not by being perfect (only God is perfect), and not by going to church, reading the Bible, shouting “Amen!” or haranguing non-believers.

Holy is a special assignment.

“Holy” can mean many different things, few of which any of us would typically apply to humans. But God (Leviticus 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:7, 1 Peter 1:15-16) tells us to “be holy as I am holy.” And as we are told frequently in the Bible to “imitate” or “be imitators” of God, what can we do to carry out that assignment?

I’ve often wondered about that, and heard a pretty good answer on the radio a couple weeks ago (Today in the Word, WGNR 97.9, May 25, 2010).

We can be holy in the same way God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are holy in the Trinity by shining the light on Jesus Christ.

In theology the Trinity is called the “economy,” which refers to the working relationships within the Godhead. Jesus willingly submits to God, and the Holy Spirit willingly places all focus on Jesus Christ (John 14:26, 16:13-15).

We imitate God and obey His command “to be holy” when we imitate the Holy Spirit and put Jesus Christ center-stage. We are holy when we focus on Jesus Christ.

Naturally, believers and non-believers alike balk at putting Christ first, which means putting Christ first in everything – in our work, in our love, in our lives, in our nation, in our community, in our world, in our knowledge. In everything.

Most people have a problem putting Christ first on Sunday; heck, some have a problem putting Christ first in their church. They’d rather not mention His name. They’d rather put Jesus Christ in a convenient box of human restrictions, making it easier to focus on their (our) human desires.

It’s wrong to think, “Hey, I’m a good person. God will take care of me. Jesus isn’t a big deal.”

When God says, “Imitate Me” and “Be holy,” God is saying “Jesus Christ is a very big deal.” We’re holy to do it, and wise to believe it.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows he is more unholy than holy, but appreciates the opportunity to shine a light on Jesus.

All You Need is ... Christ

2010-05-31T18:20:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #186
June 1, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

All You Need is … Christ
By Bob Walters

St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians addressed a first-century church community which had its Christian beliefs under fire.

Epaphras (and possibly Philemon) heard Paul preach the Gospel in Ephesus around 55 A.D., and took that message home 100 miles to the west in Colossae, a smallish town in what today is west central Turkey.

The believers at Colossae heard, believed and thrived in their newly-found truth of Jesus Christ. But the converts were confronted with those in their community – and some even in their church – who insisted the Gospel Truth of Christ could not be all they needed.

There were Judaizers who denied the sufficiency of Christ. There were Pagan practices, Greek philosophies, Gnostic “wisdom” and Eastern mystics. Many were drawn to the new church; drawn by the powerful story of Christ’s resurrection, drawn by the message of faith, hope, love and salvation.

How quickly the purity and simplicity of Christ – salvation by faith – was muddled. An NIV Study Bible I looked at listed the likely “heresies” Epaphras reported to Paul, who was under house arrest in Rome.

The heresies – although not named – likely included ceremonialism (strict rules about food, festivals and circumcision, e.g.), asceticism (severe prohibitions and physical denial), angel worship, deprecation of Christ, “secret” knowledge, and reliance on human wisdom and tradition.

Bible scholars have inferred these were the negative problems Paul was addressing, based on the positive specifics of Paul’s letter. And the crux of Paul’s message was this: Christ is pre-eminent, Christ is sufficient, Christ is complete. Paul’s words are strong, but are an encouragement, not a scolding.

Take every bit of “other” religions and philosophies – Paul was saying – and none of it adds up to the hope, life and completeness of Jesus Christ.

Colossians, a succinct, four-chapter book located in the middle of the New Testament, describes Christian doctrine, presents the dangers of heresies, and describes the duties of a believing Christian.

If Epaphras were to look around today – in our towns and churches – what would he report to Paul? What are we worshipping that minimizes or replaces Christ’s truth? Would he see denial of Christ? Idol worship? False doctrine?

He’d see many of the same things Colossae faced 2,000 years ago, with all the amplification of modern communications. We must know the truth, and be the vessel, tool, carrier and sharer of Christ’s love and care … like Paul.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), recommends Warren Wiersbe’s “Be Complete,” a study on Colossians.

There's a Name for That

2010-05-24T19:35:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #185
May 25, 2010
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There’s a Name for That
By Bob Walters

Public schools have pesky problems navigating the narrow straits of political correctness at graduation time.

Of course, we celebrate the accomplishment of education. But even though modern society is convulsed by crediting anything other than individual, human achievement, most of us feel a need deep in our souls to be thankful and hopeful in a community, spiritual, meaningful kind of a way.

That leaves us with the problem …

How do we thank the author of all knowledge for our … knowledge?

“Who is that author?” you ask. Well, here it is. And please duck …
The author of all knowledge is Jesus Christ.

Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life. He is Knowledge. He gave us the Breath of Life. He gave us our Creativity. Genesis, John and a whole bunch of other places in the Bible make that very plain.

Inasmuch as God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit constitute the Godhead, it’s a “technicality” to complain about the absence of the name of Jesus Christ from our public celebrations of knowledge. “God” covers it. But, c’mon. We achieve what it takes to graduate and are still dumb enough to think that we can fool God? Please.

It is plenty tough most places to slip in a nod to “God” in a generic quasi-prayer at a public commencement. In PC-run-amuck settings, a clever student body might sneeze in unison and have the valedictory speaker say, “God bless you!”

In more forgiving settings, like a baccalaureate, we might hear The Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father” and “Lord” are code words for God and Jesus Christ, and “Kingdom” can refer to all kinds of things without cluttering up the ceremony by praying specifically and out loud for “the reign of God.” The Lord’s Prayer is from Jesus (Matthew 6:9-13) but, whew! … you don’t actually have to say “Jesus.”

Or, just sing Christ’s praises in Latin. It’s pretty, and nobody knows.

Fact is there is true, divine, Godly power in the name of Jesus Christ. And the name of Jesus Christ causes trouble and persecution. The world hates Him, and I think that’s because Christ has true power many of us think our knowledge alone provides.

Our graduations teach: “Don’t pray; but if you do, don’t you dare mean it.”

That’s what it means when we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. We mean it.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) believes it is natural to thank God. Praying “Thank God school’s over” isn’t really thanking God.

Defining Life in the Spiritual Lane

2010-05-17T16:38:00.004-04:00

Spirituality Column #184
May 18, 2010
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Defining Life in the Spiritual Lane
By Bob Walters

Our Wednesday night Bible study weathered a lively exchange recently regarding whether human beings were mortal or immortal before “The Fall” of Adam and Eve.

Most of us in the Western church assume that if not for the sin of Adam and Eve, we would physically live for ever. Death, Genesis 3 seems to say, only entered the world after Adam and Eve’s sin of trying to be like God without God: eating from the tree of “God’s knowledge” at Satan’s tempting against God’s strict orders not to.

It turns out there is more than one school of thought on original immortality, even though most of us have heard only the one above. At issue are a couple of fairly major topics:

- God’s intention of Natural life vs. Spiritual life

- God’s intention of death in Creation.

Our teacher – a former Cambridge lecturer, Bible translator, and expert on Eastern Orthodoxy – cited Patristic (Church Fathers) sources suggesting that God created humans as He did all other life, to live a natural life and die a natural death. What makes humans the “image of God” is our spiritual immortality, not our physical immortality. It’s our Spirit life that sin puts to death, and our Spiritual death that Jesus Christ hung on the Cross to defeat.

This our instructor said to a room full of thoughtful Evangelicals, schooled in “Sin Brought Death,” not “Natural Death Happens Anyway.” It was a split, animated discussion. It was Western St. Augustine vs. Eastern St. Irenaeus.

Evangelicals like straight, dependable answers, with straight, dependable definitions for faith’s day-to-day questions: What is sin? What is forgiveness? What is grace? What is life? What is death? What is salvation?

Thing is, anyone can learn “about” God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, church history, other religions, meditation, faith systems, theology. For these pursuits, definitions are helpful and can make religion seem easy, if superficial. Defining a relationship – actually knowing someone, like God, for example – defies labels.

God’s goal is not our mastery of definitions or doctrine. God is hungry for our loving, freely-found relationship with Him through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit; and our love for each other.

God gave us a brain to discover Him, and learn. Let’s not sell God, or ourselves, short with narrow definitions. There is a big history of Christianity that precedes modern religious “definitions.” Learn, and love, all you can.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) is going to read “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark Noll, and will report back.

Paul: Grace, Peace, Preeminence

2010-05-11T09:08:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #183
May 11, 2010
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Paul: Grace, Peace, Preeminence
By Bob Walters

St. Paul – who we meet in St. Luke’s Book of Acts as “Saul of Tarsus” – wrote 13 of the New Testament’s 27 books.

Really they were letters, or in church language, “Epistles,” that Paul wrote to various towns and people describing the proper doctrine of Jesus Christ: how to worship, how to obey, how to identify heresy, how to defend the faith, and how to interact and function with fellow Christians and non-Christians.

Paul (c. 5 – c. 67 A.D.) had been a Pharisee, a high-ranking Jew, who disdained Christians and routinely, harshly persecuted them. Within a couple of years after the Crucifixion, Christ appeared to Christian-hating Paul on the Road to Damascus (Acts 9, 22, 26) and converted him from an enemy to an Apostle.

Just this bit of preceding information could start enough arguments among modern theologians to make Paul shake his head in bewilderment. Such as:

- Paul really wrote 14 of the 27 New Testament books, because “Hebrews” was the unsigned work of Paul;

- Paul really only wrote six epistles, the rest were either co-written or forgeries;

- Paul’s writings inspired great legalism (codified, enforced obedience) among some Christians;

- Paul’s writings – especially Romans and Galatians – are Christendom’s greatest arguments against legalism.

Authorship, in my view, is secondary to message. Scripture is scripture. If you want to argue tangent issues, then Paul’s important central point is being missed.

And that point is the preeminence of Christ.

You can’t add to Christ, and you can’t take away from Christ. He’s already the complete, main attraction in our salvation saga. If we add rules, we will worship the rules instead of Christ. If we make Christ – the fully human, fully divine Son of God – less than His promise, we won’t truly know Him and unleash in our lives the awesome spiritual power of faith, hope and love – the core of the Gospel.

Paul’s greeting in each Epistle contains the phrase, “grace and peace.” That’s grace, as in forgiveness of our sins and eternal communion in heaven with God; and peace, as in “Christ is our peace.” God’s grace. God’s peace. Only through Christ.

It was an entirely new way to see and relate to God. We make a huge mistake worshipping anything other than Christ, and waste our time arguing what to add to or take away from His completeness. That was Paul’s message.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, mail rlwcom@aol.com) paraphrases Vince Lombardi: “Christ isn’t everything, He is the only thing.”

Rejection of Rejection

2010-05-03T19:51:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #182
May 4, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Rejection of Rejection
By Bob Walters

Do you worry God has stopped, will stop – or never started – loving you?

Don’t.

Through Christ on the Cross, we know God will not reject any one of us. That was the point of the crucifixion. Christ’s death covered over and forgave our human sins – all of them – restoring our communion with God which we lost at the Fall of Adam and Eve.

That’s “covered over forever,” not “covered over for now.”

Not “covered over until we commit a sin.”

Not “covered over until we do something so disastrously awful we cannot forgive ourselves.”

Not “covered over until we work off our sin debt,” a crazy idea since that debt was already erased, cancelled and voided on the Cross.

Nope … we’re stuck with the love of God. For good.

I find that comforting. In Romans 8:35-39 St. Paul assures us, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God."

Nothing, that is, except ourselves. God cannot forsake us; only we can forsake Him, and in the process, forsake ourselves.

It’s easy to see how it works. God gives each of us free will, with which we can seek God, have faith in God, study God, question God, doubt God, fear God, or give up on God. Or we can do what He wants us to do – but will not force us to do – which is to love God.

God doesn’t coerce. He loves us too much, and wants our love for him to be true. It is only a free heart and mind that can truly love.

We of course are free to reject God, defile Him, curse Him, blame Him, leave Him. A lot of people do today; it’s what most did at the Crucifixion.

Too many Christians fear the loss of God’s love. Too many churches prey on those fears and turn them into a marketing tool: Better get to church or God will not love you! Better not sin or God will condemn you! Give us money and God will favor you!

Nonsense. Christians often reject each other; many people reject God, but suggesting that God rejects anyone is folly. Christ came for all (John 3:16).

Are we saved? Only in Christ. That’s our choice: to believe, or not.

Don’t choose Christ? Reject God? Don’t get on board?

Then the Saved train – when it leaves – leaves the station without you.

Who’s fault is that?

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows lots of people think God’s mad at them. More likely, they’re mad at God.

Of Disasters and Salvation

2010-04-26T21:24:00.005-04:00

Spirituality Column #181
April 27, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Of Disasters and Salvation
By Bob Walters

“What we know about Jesus Christ tells us everything we need to know about God.”

That was a pretty good comment in a recent sermon by our co-preacher Daron. He was making excellent points about how we try to assign common social roles to God (sheriff, judge, Santa Claus, dad), separating God from Christ.

I got to thinking, “Man … how true is that?” We figure God will give us stuff and spare us pain if He likes us, which only happens if we do good things. “Watch out for God!” we think. “It’s Jesus who loves us unconditionally, while God is that horrible, wrathful guy from the Old Testament.”

No. Don’t ever separate God and Jesus. Here’s why.

Consider a few “must know” things about the person of Jesus. One is that He was fully man and fully God. Another is that He was blameless.

See? Fully God, and blameless. Was, is, and always will be.

That means just as Jesus loves us, God loves us. And just as Jesus is blameless, so God is blameless. Hebrews 1:3 says “the son (Jesus) is the … exact representation of his (God’s) being.”

But don’t we just love to blame God when bad things happen? 1 Peter 4:11 is crystal clear, “… that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” We’re supposed to praise God, not blame him.

So who do we blame?

Looking closely, it is the fallen world that is to blame. Examine Adam and Eve and the Fall (Genesis 3). The perfect, good, ordered world God created has been groaning ever since. Disasters are evidence of that.

Remember that the Lord of this “world” – Lord of the Bad Stuff – is Satan. When we peg our miseries on God, we are missing the peace and joy that a right relationship with God brings.

And we are cutting Satan slack he doesn’t deserve.

Disasters, cruelty, disease, assorted miseries … nobody ever blames those worldly things on Jesus, yet we are quick to blame them on God. Even our insurance policies call them “acts of God.”

They aren’t. They are acts of a Fallen World. God is “the Good.”

Don’t worry about whether God loves you; Jesus proves that He does. Worry about whether you love Him back. That’s our Salvation, and our only shelter from the disasters we encounter in this world.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Daron Earlewine at E91 Church for the wise words.

God: A Burden or a Blessing?

2010-04-19T21:18:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #180
April 20, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

God: A Burden or a Blessing?
By Bob Walters

As though co-habitation of Traditional and Contemporary worship styles in one church isn’t challenge enough, our young-ish, spiky-haired co-preacher Daron recently invited congregants to text-in live sermon questions by cell phone.

During the Traditional service. On Sunday morning.

iWorship has arrived.

Plenty of churches have split merely over what kind of music is played. Can we survive interactive sermon texting?

We already know Christians fight about many silly things, too often turning the Holy Spirit’s great gift of faith in the Body of Christ – which should be a sanctuary for Christ’s mercy and grace – into a theater of wrathful, schismatic combat.

Why question music or technology (or spiky hair) when perhaps the only question should be: What is the true nature of this God we are worshipping?

First of all, we ask about God because He hardwired it into our mortal souls to seek Him; to wonder who we are, who He is, how we were made, who created everything, and what is the truth about right and wrong, good and evil. God either provides – or is – the answer to all those questions.

Granted, the God of the Old Testament often looks mean, wrathful, and scary; quite different from the merciful, forgiving visage of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

Truth is, human beings fouled up Truth in the Old Testament. And even since the enormous event of the Cross, people still foul up the Truth of the New Testament.

Do we think God brings the burden of “Do what I say”? That His purpose is to curse our lives promising punishment, wrath, judgment and guilt?

Or, do we correctly learn that God is saying, emphatically, “Love what I love”? That when we know and understand Jesus, we can rest easy and trust that God’s nature is a blessing, promising love, grace, peace and joy?

I pick No. 2, thank you.

That should be one’s conclusion when one finishes reading the Bible. The Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and God are all God, all have the same goal, and they’re all on the same page. Scriptural evidence is heavily on that side.

John 3:16 says “God so loved the world.”

1 John 4:8 and 4:16 say “God is love.”

Matthew 11:30 quotes Jesus, “… my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

And know this: God is easier to understand than church.

Believe it. Trust it. Text it to someone you love.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notices that both OT God and NT Jesus are VERY particular about how believers represent their faith and God’s Truth to others.

The Face of a Christian

2010-04-12T21:07:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #179
April 13, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Face of a Christian
By Bob Walters

Do you know anyone at church, or elsewhere, who is just a real sourpuss?

I heard a good sermon on Easter about the ongoing joy Christians should experience. Easter teaches us that Jesus knows our human frailties, carries us in our troubles, forgives us of our sins, and that his resurrection – Easter’s main point – should transform our grief, guilt and fear into perpetual courage, hope and joy.

Christ did all that for love, for freedom, and for communion.

So … I thought about all the times I’m not joyful; when I’m impatient or scared or nervous: i.e., when I’m a sourpuss.

I also thought of a lovely funeral service I attended in Anderson a few weeks ago for a sweet Christian lady who died at age 97.

She had lived well, had failed physically in her last few years, but had her mental capacity to the end. What her preacher said at the funeral was glowing and gracious, but one particular comment stuck out.

Through her decades of marriage, raising children and generations (through great-great grandchildren), being an energetic and generous servant-saint in the church and community, and in those last, difficult months in a nursing home as her mortal body shut down, “she never complained,” he said.

We know someone has lived well and died well when we attend a funeral like that. We Christians are a funny bunch when it comes to death … we cry like everyone else, but know that the eternal point of our faith is meeting Jesus on the other side.

So not every death is heartbreaking, although some are. Neither is every life uplifting, although each one can be. Christ forgave each one of us, saved each one of us, and asks faith of each one of us. The ball of salvation is in our court.

As we think deeply about how faith and fear cannot be compatible, and about how our faith and love are acts of will, not accidents of fate, we should also contemplate our response to this amazing gift of forgiveness. We can’t repay it, nor should we try.

Whether one believes faith is preordained or not, one’s actions are definitely not. Accepting God’s love means managing – for His Glory – pure freedom.

So a Christian’s face should reflect grace and courage, not impatience or fear.

Don’t be a sourpuss. Choose, always, to let your face show God’s love.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Derek Duncan at E91 for the sermon, and Doris Edgecomb (1913-2010) for the example.

After Easter - The Season of Seeing

2010-04-05T19:48:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #178
April 6, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

After Easter – The Season of Seeing
By Bob Walters

In the hours and days following the Resurrection, those closest to Jesus – those who loved Him, followed him, doubted him, misunderstood Him, denied Him, fled from Him, stood by him, and mourned him – learned their Lord Jesus was indeed God the Messiah, Christ the Redeemer, and the Savior of mankind.

Jesus had defeated death, would soon join the Father in heaven, and promised his followers the same ultimate victory over the flesh and suffering of this world. They too could join eternal communion with God in heaven … if they would trust Him, have faith in Him, love Him, and love people as God loves each one of us.

Christ died on Good Friday and rose from the dead on Easter. Today the ensuing seven weeks mark the official “Easter” season of the church calendar. The Gospels recount the many physical visits of the resurrected Christ …

- To the 11 remaining disciples (Matthew 28:16-20, Mark 16:14-19),

- On the road to Emmaus and as “flesh and bones” sharing a meal with the disciples (Luke 24:13-53),

- In the locked room to the doubting disciple Thomas; on the shore directing the fishermen; and by telling Peter to “feed my sheep” (John 20:19 – 21:25).

Following Christ’s Ascension to the right hand of God weeks later, Pentecost marked the descent of the Holy Spirit into the disciples and the establishment of the fellowship of believers (Acts 2).

It was during these Easter weeks that the flesh and blood Jesus, in multiple ways, proved that He was Who He said He was … and is. Replacing Jesus on Earth, into our hearts came the Holy Spirit, also fully God, and the perfect completion of the Communion of the Holy Trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The disciples, with their own eyes, saw the Truth of, and promises kept by, Jesus. Today, it is the Holy Spirit Who is with us, Who abides in us, and of Whom we ask in the words of the popular Christian song, to “open the eyes of my heart.”

These weeks are when the death and resurrection of Jesus are most fresh in our minds and hearts. It is a most opportune time to ask the Holy Spirit to teach us, as Christ taught the disciples, that God’s love and gift of salvation are truth marked in faith.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the Holy Spirit has the toughest job in the Trinity … living with us.

Too True, Too Wonderful, Too Hard

2010-03-29T06:28:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #177
March 30, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Too True, Too Wonderful, Too Hard
By Bob Walters

When “The Passion of the Christ” was released in 2004, I joined hundreds of local folks at a pre-screening of the film.

When it first appeared in stores, I bought the DVD.

Now years after that first theater viewing, the DVD is still in the wrapper and I’ve never seen the movie again.

It was that kind of movie. Our sin is that kind of awful.

Too many people debate the wrong elements of that film. They complain it is anti-Jewish, it is too violent, it includes story elements that aren’t in the Bible, the androgynous Satan / serpent character is too creepy, the theology is “old school,” producer Mel Gibson got a DUI and drunkenly made racist comments, Gibson’s father is a nut-case Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorist, and Vatican II crank.

Satan just loves it when he can pull us off point.

You see, the point is that the Cross of Christ’s crucifixion shows us the reality of our sin, and the depth of God’s love. The truth is that the Cross of Christ is not a picture of God’s wrath; nor does the Bible anywhere call it punishment or payment. Christ on the Cross is a picture of God’s grace with Jesus bearing the infinite burden of our sins, erasing them with his death, and defeating death itself with His resurrection.

It was the world’s evil and the wickedness of man – Satan – that beat and bloodied Christ. Those are a fallen world’s sins and our individual brokenness for which sinless Jesus suffered pain and humiliation, which are so realistically, shockingly, disturbingly, horrendously and mercilessly depicted in The Passion of the Christ.

If we blame God – or Mel Gibson or his dad or the Church or the Jews – for what happened on the Cross, we are blame-shifting something for which we must take full responsibility, and for which we must be willing to claim in faith as the ultimate truth:

- That I am a sinner and Christ died so I wouldn’t have to.

- That the victory of the Cross is our freedom from death; our salvation.

Do I believe that? Oh yeah.

What the innocent Jesus – fully man and fully God – endured to provide my salvation could not have been God’s hate and retribution; it could only have been God’s love.

But oh, I loath being reminded how the victory was won.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows other people who saw the movie, and then bought the video but never watched it.

Holy Week - Peace, Violence and Victory

2010-03-22T18:15:00.002-04:00

Spirituality Column #176
March 23, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Holy Week – Peace, Violence and Victory
By Bob Walters

How odd that the greatest truth in the universe – Jesus Christ’s saving grace revealing God’s love, power over death, and our eternal home – is not explained in plainer language.

I know … it’s all right there in the Bible. But it’s a gigantic truth too big for words, too good for our sin, too eternal for our temporal understanding.

Next week is Holy Week – Palm Sunday to Easter – the Christian celebration of that enormous truth, of the Logos, of the Word of God.

Palm Sunday commemorates Christ’s “triumphant” arrival into Jerusalem. How odd that he rode a donkey, a symbol of peace and humility, rather than a horse, a symbol of power and triumph.

How odd is the violence of the Crucifixion on Good Friday, when Christ, the sinless Prince of Peace, died horribly to defeat death and erase our sin.

How odd that Christ’s victory over the grave on Easter assures us of eternal life. How odd that God’s love resides not in our understanding, but in our faith in His love, which gives us true hope.

How odd that a believer’s heart is assured and at peace, yet the world expects words to soften hardened hearts. How odd that a man without sin erased my sin, yet I’m still a sinner, yet I am loved, and in my faith am saved.

The difficulty describing this with words is at least twofold:

1. God’s truth is a love relationship, not a word puzzle. Try describing your love relationship with someone or something using only words. Can the totality and expression of love be contained in words? Not a chance.

2. Christ is a real person, not merely an idea, so words and images fail. The Bible’s words show us how to meet Christ, but truth resides in the relationship, not in the meeting.

Holy Week begins with the Peace of Christ and adulation; peaks with the crucifixion’s infinite violence and scorn, and ends with Christ’s resurrection and mankind’s victory over death. And so begins the truth of eternal life.

It’s a big week. Read about Palm Sunday in the Bible (Mark 11:1-11, Matthew 21:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19), and continue reading each book to the end.

Ask Christ to send the Holy Spirit to help you understand. I pray you’ll find love and peace, discover truth, and learn that it’s not odd at all.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows you can’t argue the Holy Spirit into someone, knows truth exists in Christ, and knows God loves each one of us. Amen.

Bars Closed on St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-15T19:17:00.003-04:00

Spirituality Column #175
March 16, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Bars Closed on St. Patrick’s Day
By Bob Walters

A four-leaf clover, a pint (or several) of Guinness and a parade do not a proper Irish observance make for Patrick, the patron saint who drove the snakes from Ireland.

The four-leaf clover and snakes, in fact, are completely wrong, and pubs used to be closed.

St. Patrick, known as the Apostle of Ireland, was actually born in Scotland in 387 AD to a Roman family of high rank whose relatives included the great patron of France, St. Martin of Tours. Captured at age 16 by Irish marauders, Patrick was sold as a slave in Ireland and tended sheep, during which time he prayed continually for deliverance and guidance, and spoke with God in his dreams.

By learning the Celt language, Patrick was well-equipped later to share his faith with the pagan Druids and win them – and all of Ireland – over to Christianity.

Patrick, a Bishop, helped defeat heresies of the day, explained the Holy Trinity using the green three-leaf clover or shamrock, is credited with miracles of escape, healing and victories, and likely in his life never so much as saw a snake.

Snakes, you see, are not indigenous to Ireland. “Snakes” probably refers symbolically (think “serpent” in Genesis 3) to Druid paganism, a religion Patrick drove from Ireland.

Patrick died in Downpatrick, Ireland, probably in 461 AD and possibly on March 17, a date ever since celebrated by the Irish who themselves made Patrick a “Saint” some 500 years before the Roman Church began the practice.

In the early 1600s the Church formally put March 17 on its calendar to honor St. Patrick of Ireland. It wasn’t until 1903 that St. Patrick’s Day was an official holiday in Ireland – a day upon which all bars in Ireland were closed (until the 1970s) to preserve religious solemnity.

Oddly enough, the first “St. Patrick’s Day Parade” anywhere on record was in New York City in 1762, when Irish soldiers of the British Army marched to identify each other and build fellowship.

The traditional meal of corned beef and cabbage is American. Irish prefer pork with their cabbage as pious Catholics take a break from their no-meat Lenten fast.

So it’s a three-leaf clover, not four. Druid religion, not snakes. Pork, not beef.

But as for Guinness … aye Celts, a fine Irish quaff.

Erin go bragh! (Ireland forever!)

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) here excerpts the beautiful prayer “St. Patrick’s Breast-Plate” for a proper St. Paddy’s observance:
“… Christ with me, Christ before me; Christ behind me, Christ within me;
Christ beneath me, Christ above me; Christ at my right, Christ at my left …”

The Meaning of Life

2010-03-08T18:41:00.002-05:00

Spirituality Column #174
March 9, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Meaning of Life (it can’t be that easy … )
By Bob Walters

What is the meaning of life?

Many philosophers, spiritualists, deep thinkers, academics, theorists, Darwinists, humanists, humorists, dreamers, artists, odds-makers, rascals – and more than a few theologians – make the answer to that question more difficult than it needs to be.

The answer, the capital-T Truth, is built into Christian doctrine: life means seeking God, praising God, loving God … and loving other humans as we love ourselves. Our faith in Jesus Christ on the Cross – that He erased our sins so we may have eternal life and fellowship with God in heaven (John 3:16) – is the Truth’s straight path and narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14).

Looking around us, it is hard to imagine this life should be dedicated to God and other humans because so much of it seems to be dedicated to ourselves. Our innate fear of death, our natural appetites (some sinful, some not), a culture that exalts self, even our God-given freedom, all conspire against our trust in Christ’s new covenant and new creation, which divinely calls us not to selfish power, but to selfless, sacrificial love.

God promises this new covenant in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 31:31), and Christ delivers it in the New Testament (Luke 22:20). St. Paul explains that when we allow Christ to live in our hearts, we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). With this comes new meaning for our lives.

Is life’s meaning founded in loving our family, neighbor and nation? Only if we understand it is God Who authored and gives meaning to love.

Is life’s meaning money, wealth, power … or fear? Each can wreak spiritual destruction – as can poverty or ill-health – if loving God is not one’s first priority. Love is an exercise of our God-given freedom; but love isn’t something we create. We think we do, but … we don’t. We can’t.

“God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Period. Believe it.

A personal relationship with Christ that truly gives one’s life peace, joy and meaning “beyond all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) is not what the above earthly thinkers readily or willingly accept as life’s meaning.

They put too much “me” in meaning, and too much “I” in idea.

Life’s true meaning is only in us if Christ is in us, and if our faith is in Christ, because life’s meaning is Christ.

Know what I mean?

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) quotes the Westminster Catechism of 1647: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.” Amen.

If God is So Smart ...

2010-03-01T19:46:00.004-05:00

Spirituality Column #173
March 2, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

If God is So Smart …
By Bob Walters

Who is smarter … us, or God?

The vast majority of humans – who in this bit of the conversation must necessarily and by definition believe God exists (if God doesn’t exist, neither does this conversation) – will likely concede that God “is smarter than me.”

Yet evidence suggests that culture and academia have long since concluded that sincere, experiential, active, sharing, evangelical belief in God disqualifies one from consideration of being a true intellectual.

In other words, God is smart; but if I say He is real, I must not be smart.

Spend a moment thinking that one over.

The rationalist non-believers may now enter into the conversation.

Late last year at the New School in New York City (Greenwich Village, Manhattan), the intellectual journal “n+1” convened a discussion panel on “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” The proceedings were august, thoughtful, deliberate … all very smart, liberal and intellectual.

It is quite telling that missing from the panel was even one evangelical intellectual, or any professing Christian. A Wall Street Journal commentary on the proceedings noted that all the panelists discussed their “move away from evangelical faith as a part of becoming intellectuals” which I believe infers they believe no evangelical intellectuals exist. Emotion is a disqualifying component.

And, it infers that a modern intellectual, necessarily and by definition, considers his mind to be superior to that of the necessarily non-real God’s.

When thoughtfully pressed to name someone both intellectual and Christian, the panel listed several, all of whom were liberal Catholics or Anglicans. Surprisingly, intellectually steeped Pope Benedict XVI wasn’t named, an omission that makes one doubt the intellectual weight of the exercise.

The underpinning of modern liberal intellectual thought, it would seem, is that no issue can ever be fully settled; hence, no truth can ever be known. And if you think an issue is settled, such as salvation through Jesus Christ, or that you know the truth … well, you can’t by definition be an intellectual.

Wouldn’t a true intellectual be thankful for the fact of the Creator God’s authorship of intellect, certainly a powerful sanction and purpose for intellectual endeavor? Yet the panel didn’t consider God sufficiently real to be intellectual.

The panel certainly was unwilling to profess that the truth of the Gospel – the saving grace of Jesus Christ – is God’s greatest and smartest truth.

Thinking one is smarter than God, I think, proves the opposite.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) believes intellect proceeds from God, and too often recedes from “intellectuals.”

We Should All Agree with Matt

2010-02-22T17:37:00.004-05:00

Spirituality Column #172
February 23, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

We Should All Agree with Matt
By Bob Walters

In the autumn of 2000 at Purdue University, fliers mysteriously appeared around campus with the question: “Do You Agree with Matt?”

A serious buzz enveloped the campus – Who was Matt? It was almost on par with the buzz created by that season’s Boilermaker football team which would earn its first Rose Bowl berth since 1967.

Matt was Matt Cahill, a non-football playing senior at Purdue who hailed from Hamilton Heights High School, class of 1997, where he had been an outstanding student and soccer player. Even now, just about this time every year, HHHS announces the winner of the Matt Cahill Soccer Scholarship.

Matt was also a serious Christian and something of a marketing genius. As the Purdue Exponent student newspaper reported in early 2001:

“Cahill, a senior in the Schools of Engineering, was the Matt of the ‘Do You Agree With Matt?’ campaign last October. Members of Campus Crusade for Christ wore lime green T-shirts that read ‘I Agree With Matt,’ and they covered campus with fliers asking the mysterious question, "Do You Agree With Matt?"

In the end, Cahill revealed the mystery by giving a speech about how Jesus Christ became the center of his life.”

In the “reveal,” Matt’s testimony ran in the campus newspaper. He wore a t-shirt that said, “I Am Matt.” And at mixed, mass, all-campus rally Matt presented his compelling and eloquent witness, that boiled down to this … he believed Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Matt trusted Him as his Lord and Savior. Amen. Most cheered; some jeered.

How big was the buzz? Indy channel 13 put the story on the late news.

Two months later, January 2001 was a bleak month at Purdue.

On Jan. 1, the Boilermakers lost 34-24 to Washington in the Rose Bowl. Putting that setback into perspective, on Friday, Jan. 26, Matt was riding with his friend Jacob Cushman, a Purdue sophomore and Christian musician, when both were killed in a car crash on Indiana SR 26 in Grant County.

The October campaign compelled bold members of the Purdue campus community – professors, students and at least one notable athlete – to sign on to the campaign via advertisements and interviews proclaiming, “I agree with Matt.”

One of those very public proclaimers was the senior quarterback of the Boiler football team, now 2010’s Super Bowl MVP, Drew Brees.

True story.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), like most of us, has had quite enough of “those” Saints. Gotta love a bold witness, though.