Testing One, Two, Three ...

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 (rlwcom@aol.com) knows from experience that when horrible things happen, it’s even more horrible not to know and trust God.

The Thing with Suffering

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 and peace” mechanism. UPDATE: Bill passed peacefully, at home, on Dec. 28, 2011.

Heroes of Faith

Spirituality Column - #17 – March 6, 2007
Current! In Carmel newspaper

Heroes of Faith
By Bob Walters

C.S. Lewis once spoke of a sculptor’s chisel; how the violence of hammer hitting chisel against a rough surface eventually makes a perfect shape. It was a Christian metaphor for how God shapes us with suffering.

Suffering? Christ? What about abiding love and salvation from our sins? Sure He suffered, but that was so we’d have neat stuff and great lives and …

Please.

The truest but most overlooked (and undersold) passages in the Bible are the ones where Christ assures us that being with Him in this world will create for us persecution, and no exclusion from suffering. It’s not a message the prospering “health and wealth” TV preachers sell. If our faith is right, they fervently preach, God will bless us with tangible evidence of His love.

Balderdash.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus not only tells us to expect exactly the opposite (John 16:33); He tells us God wants the opposite from us as well.

Christ doesn’t want our “stuff;” He wants our faith. In perfect symmetry, Christ doesn’t promise us “stuff;” He promises His faithfulness.

In John 11 Lazarus is raised from the dead; showing a large, Jewish crowd that Jesus could defeat death; it was a miracle. But perhaps the greater and more instructive element of that story comes earlier, when Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha must believe that Jesus can save their brother (John 11:4, 25), even after Lazarus is buried.

Here is what Christ is asking us: Can we have faith in His love amid a world that constantly throws at us suffering we cannot possibly understand?

Christ saved us from our sins, but not from our suffering. Suffering, or not suffering, isn’t finally the point; faith in Him and the eternal life He promises is the point.

Faith is what makes a hero in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), a Carmel resident, asks those Christians who disagree with him to pray that he gets a new car.