Why and How: The Limits of Love

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. - Buy Book at Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Fate is a Fickle Fashion

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

How Many Gods Are There?

Spirituality Column #41
August 21, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

How Many Gods Are There?
By Bob Walters

How many Gods are there?

The correct answer is “One,” of course, but there sure is a lot of lively and also deadly discussion and disagreement throughout history and even today about the number of God. The Number is One.

The Holy Trinity of the Christian faith is one God. God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three manifestations, three persons, of the same one single God. That’s Christian doctrine.

It is very easy to understand how this three-in-one, one-in-three nature of God is difficult to understand for one of God’s children who is outside the Christian faith. The math doesn’t work: three equals one. The grammar doesn’t work: the Trinity is? The Trinity are?

I guess most people accept that God exists, and I would point out that the multiple pagan gods of antiquity (Thor, Zeus, Apollo, et al) have not stood the test of time that the God of the Bible has withstood.

I realize it’s kind of a conundrum to even say that “God” our eternal Father has withstood a “test of time.” After all, He is eternal and He is very different from us. Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us His thoughts and ways are higher than our ways, and 2 Peter 3:8 tells us God’s time is different from ours (a day is like a thousand years and vice versa).

So it’s a mistake to put God into earthly constraints of time, math or grammar, and probably silly to argue about “One True God,” isn’t it? How can there be more than one? And it’s nonsensical to say "my God" or "your God." God is the one who put all of us here. Whatever name you call God, only One God can be the Creator God Almighty.

I’ll go ahead and worship the one God who created me and loves me, and not some random god I created because I love myself. Those gods are called idols, and there are lots of them.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is admittedly non-patronizing toward atheists but believes that if there is no God nothing is important; and if there is a God, nothing else is more important.

Falwell's Fundamentals

Spirituality Column #30
Current! In Carmel (IN) Newspaper
June 5, 2007

Falwell’s Fundamentals
By Bob Walters

After reading numerous obituaries following Jerry Falwell’s death May 15, this news surprised me:

How well liked and admired Falwell was by people who actually knew him.

I guess that explains how Falwell built Thomas Road Baptist Church, Liberty University and the Moral Majority when so much of the world saw him only as a big pain in the neck.

You wouldn’t necessarily pick up this virtue from watching him preach on TV, because he seemed harsh and unyielding, if truthful and faithful. On that score, TV didn’t do him justice. Yet I am glad some writers took the time to point out that he was a warm, personable and eminently likable guy. Up close he was so obviously and profoundly a good man on a mission for Christ.

I’m sure he was warmly welcomed Home.

Falwell won the respect of his enemies, most notably the profane and recalcitrant Larry Flynt. Falwell seemed like the type who held a grudge. He wasn’t. What a great witness for Christ.

Of all the obits I read – suffering the many “we’re glad he’s gone” sentiments – I thought the best (and most fun) apologetic came from Ann Coulter in her May 16 column (anncoulter.com, archives), “Jerry Falwell, Meet Ronald Reagan.”

Sadly, “Fundamentalist Preacher” has become an invective used to describe Falwell, as if there were something wrong with believing in and preaching the truth of the Bible; The Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), the Deity of Christ; the virgin birth, the fact of Christ’s death, burial, resurrection and ascension; the reality and presence of the Holy Spirit; and that Christ died for our sins, defeated death and gives us everlasting life with God the Father in Heaven.

Falwell preached that you have to have faith in Christ, and follow Christ, in order to enter into the joys of Christ.

Too many of us want the joys, without faith and following.

Yet, those are the fundamentals.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), a Carmel resident, wonders where the country would be spiritually if Falwell hadn’t created The Moral Majority.

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