Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. On the cross, John says, God made Jesus who knew no sin, had no curse of death. He made him to become sin for us. Jesus can be the resurrection for me because he first became death for me. He broke up my funeral by starting his own. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of Pastor J.D.
Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. We're in a brand new teaching series called I Am, and it's taking us through the book of John. Listen to any previous message from this teaching for free online at jdgreer.com. Does it feel like you're in a long second day of waiting before the resurrection? Today Pastor J.D. teaches us why sometimes God seems to delay his help or deliverance. We'll see that even when life feels like meaningless chaos, Jesus is never absent in our pain. He's right there alongside us, comforting and leading us closer to him. So let's rejoin Pastor J.D.
in John 11 right now as he concludes our message titled I Am the Resurrection and the Life. It's become accepted wisdom now to say that, you know, all religions are basically the same. They all generally lead to the same place. They may teach different names for God.
They may encourage different rituals, but the core of them is basically the same. But Jesus promised something that no other religious or political leader in the world has ever been able to promise, much less been able to make good on the promise, and that is to erase death itself. Moses and Abraham and Buddha and Muhammad and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and insert your favorite political leader. Yeah, they all taught and they all led some great things, but the truth is they all died.
And I'm not trying to be catty about that, but none of them ever overcame death or even claimed to be able to overcome death. Only one person in history has ever gone into the darkness of the grave and walked out by his own power, and now he's standing there in front of Mary and Martha saying, I am the resurrection and the life. And then he says to them, do you believe this?
Which leads me to the third word, truth. Truth, Jesus makes a promise in this verse. Verse 25, I'm the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
Do you believe this? Of course, this does not mean that no Christian ever dies. I mean, the whole point of this story is that Lazarus believed in Jesus and he died.
By the way, twice. After being raised from the dead here in John 11, Lazarus died again one day, right? I mean, Lazarus is not somewhere hanging out in a alive in a cave like that night Templar in Indiana Jones's last crusade. Lazarus died again, which by the way, I love how John Chris says this.
We love to talk about how awesome this story is for Mary and Martha and for us, but you know who this story wasn't awesome for? Lazarus. Lazarus has been in heaven for four days by this point.
He died four days ago. He's moved into his mansion. He's getting the furniture arranged in there in his mansion like he wants. He had a bum knee that used to hurt, but now it's all better.
He started playing pickup basketball with Abraham and Obadiah and King David who had a wicked jump shot supposedly. Every afternoon he's doing that when suddenly there's a knock on his mansion door. When he opens, there's a rather sheepish angel standing there who says, yeah, Lazarus, we got to send you back.
We don't normally do this with special circumstances. Lazarus was a follower of Jesus and he died twice, which doesn't sound awesome to me. So Jesus' statement clearly does not mean that no Christian ever dies. What Jesus meant is that for his followers, death would not really be death. Not in the final sense, not in the eternal sense, and one day like Lazarus, Jesus' followers are all going to wake up from death like they're waking up from a bad dream. In fact, I love that imagery of a dream. We're not talking about some pie in the sky consolation that God gives us for our troubles. Oh yeah, that was really tough.
Here's some streets of gold. No, we're talking about God undoing the damage that our sin caused. Tim Keller, where I get this idea of a dream from, he said that about once every year or so, he would have a recurring nightmare that his wife said she felt very flattered by. In my nightmare, he said, my wife dies.
He said that's an odd thing for her to be flattered by. He said, but what happens is in my dream, I'm desperately trying to figure out how to go on in life without her. My wife says she's flattered because the recurrence of this dream means that her death is obviously my greatest fear.
He said, but let me tell you something really weird. I almost like having this nightmare now because the first minute after I wake up is so unbelievably awesome. To wake up and be able to say, oh my, it was only a bad dream, everything bad I thought I was living through has come untrue. It's not like I'm awakened just to have somebody give me something to make the pain better. It's not like when I wake somebody up and somebody says, oh, Tim, sorry, your wife died.
Here's a new wife. Like it's a consolation. No, he says in waking up, the dream itself becomes untrue.
It's a wonderful feeling to be able to say it is morning. It was only a bad dream. Dr. Keller then says, do you know what Jesus Christ is saying when he says I am the resurrection? He's not saying that he's going to give us a nicer place, like some kind of consolation for the pain. No, he is going to make everything that happened in our pain seem like nothing but a bad dream.
He'll make everything bad come untrue. Jesus Christ is not giving us consolation. He said he is giving us resurrection, and in the resurrection, he undoes the effects of sin. For those who live and believe in Jesus, this is what he promises. Jesus then asked the question to Martha and to us, do you believe this? The late Billy Graham said before he died, one fine day you will hear that Billy Graham is dead. Of course, that's true now. But he told us in advance, don't you believe it. I will be more alive than ever.
I will just have changed addresses. Do you believe this? In verse 38, Jesus goes on to raise Lazarus. It's an amazing scene. Jesus prays to the father, verse 42. He says, do this father so they will believe that you sent me. And then Jesus yells Lazarus' name down into that grave, and suddenly there's a story and there's a commotion down there, and Lazarus just walks out.
I mean, can you just imagine that moment? African-American pastor Charles Blake famously said, it's a good thing that Jesus used Lazarus' first name there. Otherwise, every dead man in that cemetery would have walked out.
By the way, one little detail you might overlook. John points out that this happens on the fourth day after Lazarus has died. The reason that's significant is Jews believe that the spirit hung around the body sometimes for about three days just to make sure there wasn't a misdiagnosis. But on the fourth day, when decomposition had really kicked in and the body really started to stink, that was when the spirit was gone for good. In other words, in the Jewish mind, Lazarus was not just dead, he was dead, dead, really dead, mega dead. And yet Jesus calls him back to life like he's waking somebody up out of a nap. Jesus then says, take off his grave clothes, and they all rejoice and marvel at Jesus' power, and you might think the story is over.
Yay, Jesus! But the story's not over. In fact, the real story begins in verse 45, because the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, they hear about this miracle, and so they call an emergency session.
And in that emergency session, they decide that this is the final straw. They're not sure what happened back at Lazarus' grave, if that was some kind of trick, or Jesus was maybe raised in the dead by the power of Satan. But this miracle, they figure that's gonna give people false hope, and it's gonna give to Jesus way too much authority. And so from that day onward, they made plans to put him to death. This marks the turning point in the Gospel of John, where Jesus starts his march to the cross, and in less than two weeks, they will have killed him.
It is not accidental that John ties these two things together, because he's showing us that to break up Lazarus' funeral, Jesus has to commence his own. And see, that leads into our fourth and final word, grace. Grace, in order for us to never die, Jesus had to die in our place. You see, God had said back in the Garden of Eden, at the dawn of time, that the penalty of sin, the consequences of sin were death. Sin separates us from God, puts a wall between us and God, and God is the source of life.
I mean, imagine if Earth rebelled against the sun and rebelled out of its orbit and began to drift off out into space. Death would be inevitable. That's what sin is like for us.
It separates us from God and puts upon us the curse of death. In fact, let this book right here represent my curse of death. I asked somebody on my team, I said, would you get a book that was supposed to represent my sin? And they chose the largest book that I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
This book weighs like 52 pounds, so this will be a short illustration. But this is me, my aunt, this is me. This is God up here. This represents my curse of death, my sin. Because I've sinned, because I've voluntarily chosen to walk away from God, that's what sin is when you choose what you want to do instead of what God wants you to do. This curse is now upon me.
Now, here's the thing. I may have times in my life where I feel closer to God. Things are going well.
I feel things are going great in my life. Then there are other times where I don't feel that way and I feel far away from God. Either way, whether I feel close to God or feel far away, the curse of death always remains between me and God.
No amount of religion, no getting close to God can ever change that. The gospel, the central Christian message, the point of the gospel of John is that on the cross, John says, God made Jesus who knew no sin, had no curse of death. He made him to become sin for us. God placed my sin upon Jesus. As the prophet Isaiah said, the punishment that brought me peace would be placed upon him so that by his stripes, his death, I could be healed. So when Jesus died, he took my sin into the grave and buried it. Jesus can be the resurrection for me because he first became death for me. He broke up my funeral by starting his own. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.
Greer. I wanted to take a quick break here to let you know more about who we are. At Summit Life, our mission is to take people deeper into their understanding of the gospel and then help them advance the gospel wider into their world. It's a simple mission at its core. Just remember, deep and wide, we believe that everyone should have access to the life-changing truth of Jesus Christ. Through broadcasts, podcasts, devotionals, and other resources, we work tirelessly to make the gospel not only known to you, but more accessible to a world in need. This vital mission is made possible by friends like you. Your prayers and financial gifts help us bring hope-filled teaching to homes, cars, and workplaces. Would you consider becoming one of more than 500 gospel partners who sustain this ministry? Every contribution, whether small or large, plays a significant role in advancing the message of Christ to the lost. Visit jdgreer.com to learn more about how you can support this ministry and start your monthly gift today. Remember, it's time to go deep yourself with Jesus and then take that good news wider into your world. Now, let's get back to the conclusion of our teaching.
Once again, here's Pastor JD. I heard a story about a dad who was driving down the interstate with his little three-year-old daughter in the back seat. She's back in the car seat. When suddenly she began to scream, daddy, daddy, a bee. She was terrified of bees. Her father knew that she was also deathly allergic to them. So the dad rolled down the windows and was doing that thing that we dads do sometimes you're on the interstate trying to shoo the yellow jacket out of the car.
It wasn't working. The dad was panicking, so he pulled the car over, went over in the back seat of the car, jumped in the back seat, covered her over, reached over, and trapped that bee against the glass of the back windshield with his hand. After a moment, he pulled his hand back and the bee flew away, at which point the little girl started to scream and panic again, daddy, daddy, the bee, the bee, it's gonna come back.
But the dad says, sweetheart, that bee can never hurt you again. And he opened his palm and showed her that the bee's stinger was lodged there in the palm of his hand. On the cross, Jesus took the stinger of death into his hands so that when I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, there would be no stinger left for me. O death, Paul says, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?
The stinger is gone because the grave has been conquered. Jesus, by his death, put death to death, and now he offers resurrection life to all who will believe in him. Do you believe this? Which brings us back to what Jesus said, the whole point of this encounter was. Verse 15, to this you may believe.
Believe what? Believe that Jesus is who he says he is, even when he is doing things that you don't quite understand. In verse 42, Jesus is praying to the father to raise Lazarus through him.
He makes this aim even clearer. He says, look at it in your Bible, verse 42, do this father so that they may believe that you sent me. Would you imagine that for a minute, imagine you'd been one of Jesus's disciples there that day, and you heard Jesus pray that.
You might say, Jesus, you're telling us that you engineered this entire event just so we could understand who sent you? Jesus would say, without hesitation, yes. You might follow up by saying, but Jesus is understanding that such a big deal, so important, that it's worth all of this pain and grief and confusion? Jesus would say, absolutely, because the true knowledge of God is the most valuable thing in the world. The apostle Peter said that your faith is worth more than the finest gold in the world.
The true knowledge of God, Jesus would say in John 17, that's the essence of eternal life. So, Jesus, through this story, gives us a picture of what the father is like. You see, the gospel of John, the rule in the gospel of John is like son, like father. Jesus said repeatedly in the gospel of John, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. Whatever Jesus is like, the father is like, because Jesus is the radiance of God's glory. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He is the divine word that communicates God to us. What that means is that what we see Jesus be to Mary and Martha, that's what the father is to us. So what Jesus wants you to believe from this story is that in your pain, there is a heavenly father who stands beside you and weaves with you. Not only that, he is so angry at what sin and death had done to those that he loved, that he wants to deliver them from it forever.
The only way he could do that was by suffering sin's curse in our place. By the way, some of you I know are sitting there right now saying, but J.D., you don't understand, my pain is my fault. I brought all this on myself. My marriage is in shambles because of me. The kids have left because of me.
I lost my job because of me. That doesn't matter as it relates to how the father feels about you. When the prodigal son had run away into the far country, the father still stood at the gates every day, looking longingly out in his lost son's direction with broken heart and tears in his eyes.
That's how he feels about you right now, regardless of how you got into the mess you're in. Jesus showed us how much the father loves us, so much that he would send his son to take sin's curse in our place. Now he promises that all who live and believe in him will never die.
Death for believers will never have that fatally bitter taste that it does for so many. It's like I often say to grieving families at a funeral. I'm like, you know, in the next few days, a lot of people are going to say to you, oh, it's so sad that you lost so-and-so this year, but you haven't really lost them, have you? You just lost contact with them for a little while. And oh, by the way, if you could just see them now, you would not feel sorry for them. They feel sad for you. But soon and very soon, you're going to see them again, and this nightmare will be over. One day, friends, one day, soon and very soon, this whole veil of tears we call life will end in resurrection, and we're going to see that Jesus was not absent after all, and we're also going to see that life was not meaningless chaos. Yeah, sometimes Jesus seems to delay because there are some things that he wants to teach us about God that we can learn from pain that we can't learn any other way. And I know you say to me, you're like, but why? Why does it have to be this way?
I don't know if I can fully answer that, to be honest. But see, I do know that everything in your Bible teaches us that it is this way. I think I've told you before, it doesn't totally make sense to me why Jesus made the disciples wait until the third day for his resurrection. I mean, I get at least waiting until the next morning. If he died in the afternoon, give it a night to prove that he's dead, plus the imagery of the resurrection and sunrise, that works really well together.
But why wait a whole extra day in the middle? I mean, talk about a miserable day. The Messiah that the disciples had thought was the Son of God had just died. They were devastated. They felt lost. They didn't know what they believed anymore. Why make them wait a full extra day in that condition before the resurrection? Again, I don't know if I know the full answer to that, but I do know, in part, it's because this is what our lives often feel like now. We live in that second day of waiting.
That's where we are now. And we say, like Mary and Martha, where are you, God? But see, there's an empty tomb in Jerusalem that assures us that he has not forgotten. We may feel like we are in a pointless Saturday of suffering, but Resurrection Sunday is just around the corner. And in the meantime, we know that he stands by the grave of our disappointment, weeping with us and praying for us, Paul says, with groanings and sighs too deep even to articulate in human words.
Now, let me be very clear. I am not urging you to believe this because it provides some kind of hopeful, happy, pie-in-the-sky ending for you. I'm urging you to believe it because there's an empty grave in Jerusalem that Jesus used to occupy that declares that your hope is justified. And I'm trying to get you to see that Jesus orchestrated this entire story in John 11 with all of its confusing twists and turns so that when you go through a time where it feels like God is absent from your life, you'll know that he is not absent, and you'll know that he cares, and you'll know that he'll be faithful to you just like he was to Mary and Martha. So see, that brings us back to Jesus' central question. Do you believe this? Because see, if you do, there's a promise attached. Everybody who lives and believes in me will never die.
Now listen, this is a promise for everyone, literally everyone. Jesus did what he did for everyone, but you have to take it for yourself. What he means there is you don't automatically get it just because you're a member of the human race. In fact, John opens his gospel by saying to as many as received him, to them and only them, he gave the power to become the children of God to those who believe in his name. This is like the thesis of John's gospel. Every single story he tells is to urge us to receive Jesus for ourselves, not to learn about him in history, but to receive him for ourselves, because only those who receive him personally get the benefit of his promises. You say, well, pastor, what does it mean to receive him? Well, it doesn't mean what a lot of people seem to think it means, which is living a life that makes you good enough to earn the title child of God. I had someone tell me that recently.
I'm not ready to become a Christian yet because my life is not in good enough shape. And I'm like, that's not receiving, that's earning. Receiving him does not mean just going through a church ritual like baptism or confirmation. Those have their place, but technically they're not receiving either.
Those are accomplishing. It's going through a checklist. Receiving him means exactly what you think it means. It means you receive him like you would receive a gift that was being offered to you. Somebody offered you a gift. You open your hands and you receive it or think of it like how a bride and groom receive each other on their wedding day. One stands at the altar and says, in essence, I want you in my life do you receive me?
And the other says, yes, I receive you. From now on, you and I go together. Where you go, I go. From this point onward, I belong to you.
You belong to me. I don't know what you think it means to be a Christian. So many people seem to be confused about this. They think it means obeying the rules sufficiently. They think it means being regular in church.
Those are great, okay? But that's not the essence of what it means to be a Christian. The essence of being a Christian means having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Receiving him personally for yourself. Have you ever done that? Have you ever let him come into your life and take full control of you? Have you received him personally?
Because if not, if not, or you're not sure, you can do that right now, today. If what Jesus said is true, then the only question left is, do you believe him? Have you put your trust and your faith in him? You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. We're in a study of John called I Am, and if you'd like to hear any of the previous messages, you can always find them online at jdgreer.com. Are you looking for a way to deepen your understanding of the Bible and connect with the life of Jesus in a way that is both meaningful and transformative? Our brand new featured resource this month called I Am, Seven Weeks in the Gospel of John, is your answer. It's a printed resource that explores Jesus's seven I Am statements with commentary on each of the claims he made about himself, as well as reflection questions designed to help you personalize what you're learning. We've designed this resource to help you appreciate just how much our Savior loves us and the enormity of the grace he showed us on the cross. It's really all about knowing him deeper and then sharing that wonderful news with others. You can get this exclusive new study when you donate today by calling 866-335-5220.
That number again is 866-335-5220, or give your gift online at jdgreer.com. If you're looking for a local church in your area, we would love for you to check out our Summit Collaborative family of churches, which share the same DNA as the church Pastor JD leads here in Raleigh-Durham. Head over to jdgreer.com, scroll all the way to the bottom, and you'll see a link to the Summit Collaborative, or you can go directly to their website, summitcollaborative.org. I'm Molly Vidovitch, inviting you to join us tomorrow when we'll be talking about the Good Shepherd, Fix Your Eyes on Jesus and How He Cares for Us, Wednesday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
