Community, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with Jiddy Greer. There are two kinds of people we want in our church. Those people who need Jesus and those people who know Jesus who are now involved in His mission and realize that it's not about them. You're like, well Pastor, aren't you afraid those people aren't going to come back? No, I'm not afraid of that because it's that whole consumer Christian thing that says I got Jesus to meet my needs and now it's all about me. That's not discipleship.

We have two factors that we think about. Does it please God? And does it reach people? Welcome back to another week of teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer of the Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. You know, I think for many Christians, church is just an event that they attend on the weekends. And switching churches is as easy as trying out a new movie theater. But that's not what God intended when He designed the church body.

And it's not going to lead to lasting spiritual growth. Today, Pastor J.D. challenges us to flip our view of church.

It's not about what I can get out of the service. It's about what I can give to the body of Christ. So if you missed the beginning of this sermon, I just wanted to remind you that you can always hear our previous broadcasts at our website, jdgreer.com.

But right now, let's return to our teaching titled Community. Here's Pastor J.D. All right, John 15, 12. Here's where we see the next thing that Jesus introduces about the gospel-changed, gospel-centered heart. John 15, 12.

This is my commandment, Jesus says, that you love one another as I have loved you. All right, Mark number three of the gospel-changed heart, living in community. Now, what you'll find is that this theme surfaces quite often in Jesus' talk that He's given in John 13 through 17. You remember the first week I explained to you that John 13 through 17 is kind of a unit.

It is Jesus' farewell speech that He's giving to His disciples. John 15, the 17 verses there in John 15, they kind of function somewhat like a summary of all that Jesus has talked about in the rest of the talk. So that's kind of where you go for the outline, but you'll find at other places in John 13 through 17, He'll take these subjects He mentions in John 15 and He'll go deeper with them. So let me take you a couple other places in John 13 through 17 to show you where He developed the idea that He's talking about there in verse 12. Go first to John 17. John 17, 23. This is Jesus praying for His disciples and their presence. I pray, He says, that they may be one even as we are one.

I am them and you and me that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me. Go from John 17, go back four chapters now, go back to John 13. John 13, 34. John 13, 34. A new commandment I give to you that you love one another just as I have loved you so you also are to love one another. By this will all people know that you're my disciples if you have loved one for another.

Now I want us to dig down on this one. How did Jesus love us? How did Jesus love us? Let me give you five ways that Jesus in John 13 has just demonstrated and expressed His love to them.

If you take notes, I'd encourage you to write these down. Number one, He served them. He served them.

The whole context of John 13, if you go back a few verses, is you see that Jesus has just washed their feet and as He washed their feet in John 13, you'll see that He explains to them that this washing of the feet is just a symbol of the ultimate way He was going to serve them. He was going to spill His blood to wash the dirtiest parts of them, which was not their feet, it was their sin-blocking souls, which leads me to number two. He leveraged His abilities for their needs. He leveraged His abilities for their needs.

Let me go on to number three. Number three, He shared in their pain and their sorrow. He entered into it.

He felt it. You know, right before these chapters, in John chapter 11, there was a story where Jesus shows up at the tomb of Lazarus. Mary and Martha, Lazarus' two sisters, are standing there outside the tomb and, of course, they're weeping because their brother died.

And it says that when Jesus got there, the shortest verse in all the Bible, you know what it is? Jesus wept. He weeps.

Why? Because He entered into their pain. Because He had become one with them, just like He's saying here in John 17. He had become one so that when they weep, He weeps. Which means that when you go through pain, He weeps. Do you have a broken heart?

Are you lonely? If Jesus Christ has entered into you, then whenever you weep, He weeps. Because He shares in your pain and His sorrow, He has made them His very own. Number four, He lived among them. He didn't stand in heaven and shout His love toward them with a bullhorn. He took on flesh and blood. He was born into our pain and our poverty. In fact, He was born as poor as you could possibly get because He was taking on Himself, the poorest of the poor, and coming close to them. He got so close that He could be touched. He could be interrupted.

He could be betrayed with a kiss. He lived among them. Number five, number five part of number four, He bridged the gap to get to them. These five things are probably what's on the Apostle John who wrote obviously the Gospel of John when he wrote 1 John 3.1 when he says, Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us that we should be called the children of God. Not just the amount of God's love, not the fact of God's love, but what kind of love the Father gave to us.

It was a serving. It was a self-emptying and empathizing and incarnating gap bridging love. So now the question for us becomes, does this describe our relationships to one another and to the world? Galatians 6 10, I love how Paul says it. He says, Do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. Do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. This is where our love starts, right here, just with one another. Sometimes I think we forget that.

We start thinking about what's going on out there and we forget that we're a family. And then when one of us has a need, I feel your pain and so I step into it and I share it. You know, I remember hearing a guy one time teach on Galatians 6 10, I kid you not. He stood up in front of the audience and I was just sitting there taking notes and he said, Now this verse says do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. He says, I don't really agree with that. I think we ought to do more good for those outside the church than those inside the church.

And then he went on to teach. And I had two thoughts. I thought, one, it's nice to hear somebody actually admit that they're just going to go ahead and blatantly defy the word of God.

That was my first thought. But my second thought was, you're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to just contradict the word of God. God's word tells us that my first responsibility is to you and your first responsibility is to me and we love each other. We share each other's pain. The church ought to be the most well taken care of community in the world.

Because Jesus said when that happens, then they'll know that you're my disciples. Number three, he shared in our pain and our sorrow. Do you share in the pain of others? Let me jump down to number four.

He lived among us. Are you really involved in people's lives? Can people touch you? Are you close enough to them to feel their pain? Who do you know right now that you're praying for daily that is outside of the people that are in your family?

Here's one. Are you investing in people? Even if you're a brand new believer, there's somebody you ought to be bringing along. That's the whole process of making disciples, life on life, two or three people that you're bringing along. If I asked you to pull out your phone right now and show me the numbers of three people in your contact list who are not Christians that you could call or text right now and get them to meet you at Starbucks after this to talk about something, could you do that? Are you involved in the lives of others? Are you close to them?

So that leads me to number five. He bridged the gap to get to us. Are you bridging the gap to get to others? Are you building your life around people that you feel comfortable with or are you building your life around people who need Jesus? Because to follow Jesus means that you follow him across the gap.

I told you last week that we got 150 of our members right now, 150 of our members who right now this weekend are living somewhere in an unreached people group. Contrary to popular opinion, that's not because that's their preference. They didn't do that because they thought, hey, I always want to live overseas in a fundamentalist Muslim country. They do that because they realize that Jesus left heaven to come to earth for them when they were lost and now we who know him have to leave what we know to go to people whose only way to hear about them is that we go to them ourselves. That's why they do that because there are unreached people groups in the world and to live like Jesus means you have the same attitude toward them that he had towards you. I remember when I felt, when God first called me to ministry, I thought it was to go overseas and I told my parents that. I remember how much of a struggle it was for my parents who were godly people. I remember at the end of this struggle, my mom told me, she said, she said, we always had dreams of our child, our first son living in very close to us, raising our grandkids next to us. She said, but let me tell you what God's taught me is that there are somebody's sons and daughters all over the world who don't know Jesus and they are as precious in God's sight as you are in ours.

And if that means that we have to postpone real fellowship with you until you get to heaven, until we all get to heaven, that's okay because somebody's sons and daughter needs to know Jesus and if that was you that needed to know Jesus, I would hope somebody would come after you. You bridge the gap. Are you involved in the poor parts of our city? You know, we talk about the homeless, the orphan, the prisoner, the young mother, the high school dropout.

Guys, those are all projects. That's not what we're talking about. Let me say this. I realize God has not called everybody the same thing. He's not called all of you go overseas, not called all of you to do what I'm about to say, but let me tell you this. Some of you, the way that you're going to follow Jesus is you're actually going to uproot your comfortable life and go live among the homeless, the orphan, the prisoner, the young mother, and the high school dropout in our city.

It's not one time of year that you're going to foray out into them, do something, run back to your car, parel your hands, and go on with your life and feel good about yourself. Some of you, we have people in this church that have moved out of rich neighborhoods and moved into poor neighborhoods because they wanted to incarnate Christ to those neighborhoods because you've got to come close. I'm not saying God's called all of you to do it, but I'm saying some of you, this is precisely how you're going to follow Jesus. You're not going to live where your income says you can live. You're going to live among people that you can incarnate Christ in the midst of.

How about this? Are you willing to be a part of a church that's not about you? There are two kinds of people we want in our church, those people who need Jesus and those people who know Jesus who are now involved in his mission and realize that it's not about them.

Are you willing to be a part of a church where everybody's not just like you, which means that we're going to do some things that are not according to your preference. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer and a message titled Community. We'll be right back with the conclusion of today's message, but first let me remind you about this month's featured resource. You know, our greatest joy comes not when we are working overtime to impress God, but when we're serving him from a place of gratitude for what he's already done. In the Gospel Bible study, Pastor J.D. wants us to see that the difference maker is the gospel itself.

This amazing gift that God has given us doesn't merely punch our ticket to heaven, but it is actually the driving force of everything we do as believers. For your gift of $50 this month, we'll send you the video teaching on DVD along with five Bible study guides for you and four friends. So give us a call at 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgreer.com to reserve this Bible study today.

This is a letter I got from a girl that this girl totally gets it and this is such a challenge to some of us and me. She says, I am writing to you as an African American female. I was in search of a church home in Durham and visited many different churches in the area. So I first went to where all the black people go in Durham and at the suggestion of my friend I came to the summit. Now my first reaction was quite hesitant simply because the praise and worship at my home church in Virginia and at the summit are about as different as Beyonce and Mother Teresa. She goes on to say how the worship grew on her after a while and then she said, she said, I was mainly just super excited to hear what was going to happen next to the Bible. I found myself leaving church every Sunday meeting up with friends or calling my mom and sharing what I'd learned and how the word was directly applicable to my life and circumstances. I've learned that it isn't about the color of the pastor but am I getting the word? Am I hearing the gospel? Am I learning and growing in my relationship with Christ?

And the answer to all those questions since I've been attending the summit is yes. I was just writing to thank the summit church, keep making it so that people like me who were far from God feel like it's okay to come back. She gets it that gospel-centered unity is not about, it's not that she doesn't have preferences, it's that the gospel is larger than those preferences. And that makes the rest of us ask a question, are you willing to be a part of a church that's not catering to your preferences? Are you willing to be a part of a church like that? As I have loved you, love one another.

There's five ways. Notice real quick, notice Jesus' prediction in verse 35 of the kind of power this church would have and its effect on the community. By this will all people know that you're my disciples.

What if you love one another? How's the world going to know? How's the world going to know? It's because I can articulate Christian doctrines with precision and clarity because our worship teams are able to lift us to the throne of God with how majestically they play the worship anthem.

No. How will they know? By seeing the love Christians have for one another. John 17, Jesus said when they observe your love for one another, what happens is they get in their heart an echo of my presence.

They might not even be able to articulate it. There are some things Jesus says that are even more powerful than logic. And that is sometimes you just know that you're in the presence of your creator and when there is a church that is living in love with one another, that is exactly what the unbelieving community sees. That's what you see in Acts 2, isn't it? Remember it says that 5,000 people got saved at the end of Acts 2? How did it happen?

How did it happen? Acts 2, it says that the Spirit of God filled the church. The church was just doing what I'm describing. They were loving each other. They were sharing their stuff. They were praying for each other.

They had all things in common. And it says that a great sense of fear and awe came upon every soul in that community. And God started to add to their number daily those that were being saved. You see, you know what he's showing us? What the author is showing us?

Watch this. That the greatest evangelistic catalyst in any community is the presence of a healthy local church in that community. Just a church being the church. It's not even that the church sends missionaries into the community. The local church is itself the missionary.

Just its presence. When the church is the church, the community says God must be at work among them. Francis Schaeffer.

You know who that is? Strange little European man who wore like long stockings that taught us more about apologetics than any other man in the last 100 years. He said this, Francis Schaeffer, we must never forget that the final apologetic which Jesus gave is the observable love of true Christians for other true Christians.

The world is going to judge whether Jesus has been sent by the Father on the basis of something that is open to observation. Summit, how are we going to change our cynical community? Is it my sermons?

No. It's not even so much what we do from the stage in here, it's how you live out there that does that. That's why we don't spend a whole lot of money on buildings.

You want to know why? Because the beauty of the church is not in the architecture, it's in how the members love one another. What we do in here is not as compelling to them as what happens when we live the way that Christ taught us to live out there. So my desire in all of this is that you see the centrality of the church, the local community, and God's plan.

There is a rich cross-pollination that produces abundant fruit. Some of you, I can hear you right now, I can sense the vibe. You're like, no, no, no, I'm part of the universal church. I'm not really part of the local church.

Wrong. The word church, ekklesia, is used in the New Testament 115 times. Over a hundred of those times it refers to the local church.

The word ekklesia in Greek literally means an assembly. The very word church means a gathering of people together. The Old and New Testament recognize no walk with God separated from the people of God. One of the phrases we say around here, and you'll hear it a lot, the local church is God's plan A. The local church is God's plan A. The local church is God's plan A. What we mean by that is that's how God gets his best work done. The local church is God's plan for doing that.

I'll show you what I mean by that real quick. First of all, it's how God works in your life. The image of the church is the body. First Corinthians, Paul talks about this. Paul says that God the Father is like the mind, and we're like the members. Jesus is like the mind. We're like the members of his body.

Think about that for a minute. On my body, when my left elbow itches, it sends up a little messenger up to my brain that says, I itch. How does my brain fix the itch? Does it like zap it with mental power, zap the itch?

No. It sends a message down to my right hand and says, hey, your brother elbow has an itch. Go fix it.

My right hand goes up and it fixes the itch. Many of you are praying for God to do something in your life, but you cut yourself off from the very thing that God intended to answer that prayer. Some of you are like, oh, God, I need direction in my life.

You want God to zap you from heaven with some kind of vision. That's not how he usually works. He puts it in the church. So if you have separated yourself from the people of God, you separated yourself from the power of God.

Some of you are like, my marriage is falling apart. God fixed my marriage. The local church is God's best plan for keeping healthy communities and healthy marriages. I've learned so much about raising my children just from being in the presence of this church. The local church is how God works in our lives. As many of you are crying out to God, but you're like a person standing beside a water fountain complaining to God about your thirst. He's like, I'm not going to dump water on you from heaven. Here's the other thing we mean by this.

The local church is God's plan A. It's how God reveals himself to you. You ever notice this?

I think this is fascinating. You ever notice that very rarely in the New Testament did Jesus ever heal people the same way. He almost always did something different. Some people, he would just speak a word. Some people would say, do you believe me? Some people, he would let them die and raise them back from the dead.

Bummer. Some people, he spit on the ground and made mud pies for their eyes. I mean, imagine that guy. You're like, come on, seriously? You just spoke a word and healed the guy over there, and you're going to spit on the ground and make me wipe that on my eyes now?

Seriously? Why did Jesus do it differently? Because everybody needed something different.

That was why. And that means, watch, that it was only when they came together and shared their stories that they got the fullest picture of who Jesus was. That's how God works in the church.

He works with everybody differently based on what you need. And see, watch, there's a part of Jesus I'll never know unless I know you. Because I only see one part of Jesus, and that's how he's dealt with me, but he had to deal with you differently because you were much more proud, stubborn, and rebellious than I was. So he revealed himself a certain way so that I could know Jesus through you, and that is why together we know Jesus more fully than we do alone. The action step for you is if you're not involved in a small group that you need to get involved in one because that's part of being in the church. But let me just kind of close this whole thing by telling you, as a pastor now for lo these many nine years, I have, there are two reasons I've seen that people don't get involved in small groups.

Here they are. Number one. Number one is they have an unhealthy desire for privacy and isolation. They're afraid to let people in because they're afraid that everybody will see how screwed up they are.

News flash, we already know it. And the more you try to convince us of your perfection, the more ridiculous you become in our eyes because we can all see it even if you can't. Around the summit we say everybody's normal until you get to know them, and then when you get to know them you realize how dysfunctional they are. What happens, watch this, this is, this is, I love this, what happens is when you come to know Jesus, you are in the presence of one who is infinitely holy, but one who accepted you through all of your faults because he died to make you new. And when you have the opinion of the only one whose opinion really matters, then you suddenly become much freer in being able to let other people see your flaws because I don't need you to think I'm perfect because I'm accepted by Jesus.

The second phrase of the gospel prayer, you're all I need for everlasting joy. I don't need you to think I'm perfect, I can let you see my weaknesses. I can let you see where I'm screwed up because Jesus sees those and he has accepted me and promised me that I will be made new. You see, what we believe around here is that Jesus is not just the model for how we love each other, he's the power. Because until you get this right, you'll never get this right. Some of you need to open up your lives because the only way that God can work in your life is for you to open it up and you'll never be able to open it up until you realize that you were loved and cherished by Jesus himself who accepts you beyond your flaws and has died to make you new.

An unhealthy desire for privacy and isolation, here's the second reason. Because some of us, our Christianity has nothing to do with knowing God. You want to be a good person to come to church so you come do this on your religious checklist, check, I came to church, I feel like a good person. But truth be told, your Christianity has nothing to do with knowing and serving God and that is demonstrated by the fact that you never take the steps of discipleship that would lead you to knowing and serving God. You have zero thirst for God, that's why you're just a spectator. Yeah, you might be a follower of Jesus but you're a follower of Jesus like I'm a follower of people on Twitter. Some of you follow Jesus like I check in on him. To be a follower of Jesus is not that you check in on him and receive pieces of advice. He is the God of heaven and to be his follower means that he has total control and domination of you. And that means that you avail yourself of the commands that he has made to you and the offers he's made to you of how you could come to know him. And I will tell you this, weekend attenders, weekend spectators are not disciples of Jesus and they are not part of the kingdom of God. And you need to move beyond fan of Jesus and you need to move to follower of Jesus.

And this is one of the ways you will express that. Is God challenging you to take a step of faith today? It's time to saturate yourself in the truth of the gospel and gain the courage to step out wherever God is leading. So J.D., around here we talk a lot about something called the gospel prayer. What exactly is this prayer?

Well, it's not a magical prayer and it's not supposed to replace the Lord's prayer. There's a way that honestly grew up out of my own quiet time. What are ways that I could center myself on the gospel every single day? And so I came up with four kind of phrases that I prayed for a while just on my own. The first phrase is that in Christ there's nothing I could do that would make you, God, love me anymore, nothing I have done that would make you love me any less. Phrase two is that you are all I need for everlasting joy. Phrase three, as you have been to me, so I will be to others. And then phrase four is as I pray, I'll measure your compassion by the cross and your power by the resurrection. Those are four statements that will center you on the gospel.

And I'm not over promising here. They will transform your life. We would love for you to join our team. We are sending a copy to all of our gospel partners this month. It's just a way of saying thank you for their ongoing support. So take a look at jdgrier.com. Thanks, JD. The gospel prayer catechism is available for your one-time gift of $35 or more, or as our thanks for your commitment to being a regular monthly giver. And if you'd like to support Summit Life with a gift of $50 or more, we'll send you the entire gospel video curriculum that we mentioned earlier.

We're thankful for your generous support. So please contact us today for one of these featured resources. Give us a call at 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220. Or check out all we have to offer online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to listen again tomorrow as we continue our teaching on the mission of the church. We'll see you right here Tuesday for Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.