Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. Some religions think you use the carrot. Oh, you want heaven? You want God's blessing?
Oh, go after it. You know, God's good. He's kind. He's, you know, the others are like, no, use the stick. You got to threaten him with hell.
You got to threaten him with cursing. The gospel is that God took the stick and beat Jesus with it, then handed you the carrot for free and then said, come and follow me. Welcome to Summit Life with J.D. Greer, where the world changing good news of the gospel takes front and center every day.
I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. During the next half hour, we'll see that man is incapable of constructing or living up to the true gospel. In fact, left to our own devices, we tend to twist and misconstrue what God designed as perfect. Our current teaching series is called Broken Saviors. To learn more about our Bible teacher and to access materials that will help you go deeper into the gospel, including this month's featured resource, go online to jdgreer.com. Today we're hearing the second half of a message titled Hot Dog Faith, and it comes from the book of Judges. So grab your Bible and let's rejoin Pastor J.D.
right now. Many Americans build their faith like a cheap hot dog. They take a little bit of something from this and a little bit of something from that, and they mix it with a little bit of something else, and the result is a concoction that you could hardly call Christian.
It's more than simply bad for you. It is spiritually toxic, and that is what you're going to see with JEPTA today. It's got a little bit of the meat of Christian faith that has been separated from true Christianity through advanced faith recovery system or whatever, mixed with a whole lot of the sodium nitrate and the maltodextrin of his culture. Keep that in mind as we get into Judges chapter 11. Now JEPTA was a mighty warrior, but he was the son of a prostitute. Gilead, who was JEPTA's father, had many other sons by his wife. When his wife's sons grew up, they drove JEPTA out because they said to him, you shall have no inheritance in our father's house, for you are the son of a prostitute. So JEPTA fled from his brothers, and he lived in the land of Tobah, and worthless fellows collected around JEPTA and came out to him.
He becomes a kind of crime boss in verse four. But after a time, the Ammonites made war against Israel, and so the elders of Gilead went to bring JEPTA back, and they said, hey, come be our leader, that we may fight against the Ammonites. And so JEPTA agrees, and JEPTA says, I'm taking my talents back to Cleveland. There's 30 JEPTA made a vow to the Lord, and he said, Lord, if you will give me the Ammonites into my hand, whatever comes out from the doors of my house to greet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall belong to you, the Lord, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering. So JEPTA crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them, and the Lord indeed gave them into his hand. And JEPTA came to his home at Mizpah, and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with tambourines and with dances. As soon as he saw her coming out after the battle, he tore his clothes, and he said, alas, my daughter, you have brought me very low. You've become the cause of great trouble to me, for I've opened my mouth to the Lord, and now I cannot take back my vow. Verse 36, and she said to him, my father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord, so do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has avenged you and your enemies on the Ammonites. So she said to her father, let this thing be done for me first, leave me alone for two months, that I may go up on the mountains and weep for my virginity with my friends. And so he said, go, and he sent her away for two months, and she departed, and she wept for her virginity in the mountains. And the end of the two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow that he had made.
Sometimes commentators try to soften what has happened here. They'll say like, well, JEPTA must have expected it to be an animal that came out of his house first, and that's what he's promising to God as a burnt offering, but animals will not have been kept in the house. So he's definitely thinking human sacrifice. Obviously, he actually burnt his daughter. He killed his daughter. It's just that he expected the first one out of his house would not be his daughter. He thought it would be one of his many servants. So a couple of questions I want us to consider.
Here is the first. Why did JEPTA make this vow? I'll give you two reasons. Because he was desensitized to violence. This was just the way they did things. Human life was cheap in those days when it came to obtaining the idol of military dominance. You see, before we shake our heads and bewilderment at JEPTA, we should realize that we're probably not as advanced of a culture as we think we are.
We just got different idols. Number two, here's the reason that he made the vow. It's because this is how you pleased pagan gods. That's how you pleased pagan gods. You offered sacrifices to gain their favor.
The greater the sacrifice, the greater favor you could earn from your God. Here's the second question. First question, why did JEPTA make the vow? Why did JEPTA keep his vow? That's the second question. For two months, he sat there and considered it, and then he just went through with it?
Listen to this. He kept it for the exact same reason that he made it. He has no concept of the grace of God. He feels like he has to earn God's favor the way you earn a pagan God's favor by making sacrifices that merit it. Now he feels like if he doesn't keep his horrific vow, then God's going to punish him. But God does not give victory or favor or salvation because we earn it.
Never. It is not by works of righteousness which we have done. It is according to his mercy that he saves us. He borne his own body the price for our peace. It's by his sacrifice that we were healed. Should JEPTA have kept this vow?
No. He should have said, God, you never told me you would give me victory if I would sacrifice something to get your attention. You give your people victory as a gift of grace. So instead of fulfilling this wicked bow in which I thought I could purchase your favor, I repent of making it in the first place. I repent of thinking there's something I can do to earn your favor and I receive your grace for what it is.
An unmerited gift. This is the gospel. It's always been the gospel.
From Adam and Eve all the way straight through to the last human that's ever going to walk the face of the earth. You and I never have to make promises or sacrifices to God to earn his favor. And you're some of you that come into this place at one of our campuses today. And you're really thinking the same thing as JEPTA. You're like, I really need God's blessing. I need his favor. And so you're making promises to God as you came in here. God, I'm going to do better.
God, I'm going to be a better this. And you're going to throw your lunch money in the offering at the end of this service as if God's going to be pleased with the $23 that you put in the offering plate. And that's going to guarantee his favor on you. You keep your lunch money.
Okay. God does not give you his favor as a result of you making sacrifices for him. It's a gift. It's like the favor I give to my son or daughter.
They don't earn it. They just receive it. There is only one way, only one way to please God, faith. Faith in his grace, faith in his loving kindness toward you. Ephesians 2 eight, it is by grace that you have been received by faith and that even not of yourselves. It's the gift of God.
It's not of works. It's not about you sacrificing things or giving things or promising God things or offering God yourself or your daughter or anything. It is a gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. We don't have to negotiate with God. You can't negotiate with God. A friend of mine says there's only one deal that God will ever make with you. His righteousness.
He gives his right. He gives you Jesus' righteousness as a gift for your absolute surrender. That's the only deal God will ever make with you. So whatever deal you're trying to pull off with God, put it down.
He doesn't negotiate. He says, I'll give you my favor as a gift like I give it to a son or daughter. You just receive that and you surrender to me.
This is the pure meat of the gospel with no poultry paste or maltodextrin mixed in. Well, as tragic as this story is already, Jephthah's family troubles are just the beginning. Chapter 12, the men of Ephraim called themselves to arms and they crossed to Zaphon and said to Jephthah, why did you cross over to fight against the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you?
We will burn your house over you with fire. Jephthah, who has tried diplomacy with the Ammonites, isn't going to do that with his own people. He immediately calls his men to arms. And Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim and the Gileadites captured the forts and the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. And when any of the fugitives of Ephraim, so after they defeated them, all these Israelites, these Ephraim's are trying to get away.
And they try to cross the Jordan and they're like, let me go over. The men of Gilead would say, are you an Ephraimite? When he said, no, they said to him, then say the word Shebalith. And the Ephraimite would always say, Sibileth, because he could not pronounce it right.
You understand what's happening here? Different parts of Israel pronounced words differently. It'd be kind of like if I was trying to figure out if you were from the country or the city, I would write J-E-S-U-S down and say, pronounce that word. And if you said it in two syllables, I'd say, you're from the city. If you say it in six syllables, we'll know you're from the country.
Jesus, you know, I'd be like, you're from the country. That's what they did. And when they figured out they were from the Ephraim, when they couldn't say the S-H sound, they killed him, right? They seized him and slaughtered him there at the Jordan River, 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell. And Jephthah judged Israel six years, only six years.
They've been oppressed for 18 years. This is the first time in judges, the deliverance is shorter than the oppression. Then Jephthah the Gilead died and he was buried. There are four lessons, four crucial life-giving, life-saving lessons that you need to learn from the story of Jephthah.
Number one, we are far more influenced by our culture than we realize. Jephthah didn't realize this, but his outlook on God and life was shaped by the culture he was in as God's, it was shaped by God's word. And so Jephthah ended up with a concoction of faith that may have looked Christian on the outside, but it was not Christian at all.
He's got a hot dog instead of the pure steak and it ends up destroying a lot of people. Now you can look at Jephthah and say, well, clearly I see that, but where have you done that? You see Christians tend to, they tend to have different approaches to culture. And probably the most common is that we assimilate into culture, meaning we absorb the values of our culture and we don't even know that we're absorbing them and how we think about romance and how we think about fulfillment, how we think about life is a shape by Hollywood and the New York Times as it is by the word of God. Some Christians react to that by, if they say, well, we don't want to assimilate, so we'll isolate and we'll pull out of culture.
We'll take our kids out of the public schools and we'll not watch, this is the way, honestly, I grew up, our tradition tended more toward this. You have your own music, you boys have their hair cut short, you got to look like a Christian and girls wear culottes and denim jumpers and that's just, we're just different. And I understand where that impulse comes from, but that's not what the Bible teaches either. Not assimilate, not isolate, it's recreate.
It means you go into culture, but you do so very critically. And the only way for you to do that is to be more shaped by the word of God than you are your culture. You see, the answer is not to isolate yourself in culture because you can't ever do that. The answer is to know the word of God more deeply than you know the poison of the culture that is around you. Because Psalm 119, 105 says, how can a young man keep his way pure? By taking heat according to your word. You don't keep your way pure by isolating yourself from the world. You keep your way pure by putting the word of God so deeply inside of you that you can resist the lies of those that are outside of you. This is Summit Life with Pastor J.D.
Greer. We'll get back to our teaching in just a moment, but first let me tell you about our latest resource created exclusively for our Summit Life listeners. And most importantly, today is your final day to grab it. Our current teaching series here on the program is called Broken Saviors because it reveals how we really can't place our hope in anyone except for the only unbroken savior and that's Jesus. So right now we're offering a Bible study to walk you through the book of Judges on an even deeper, more personal level. Along the way, you'll read key passages, examine them along with helpful commentary, apply them to your own life with pointed application questions, and then pray through what you've learned by using our helpful prayer prompts. We believe this study will help fuel your trust in the only savior worth trusting and see the beauty of the gospel in the book of Judges.
We'd love to get you this new digital study right now when you call 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to the final moments of our teaching today. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. You see, I know a lot of parents, they look at, you know, what's going on. There's a big discussion, you know, should you have your kids in public school or private school or home school?
And that's a very good discussion. And I know that some will be like, well, you know, we just got to pull them out and everything. What I want to tell you is this, the most formative thing is not what the culture around them is doing. It's how much of the word of God you're putting into them, which means that whatever decision you make about your kids schooling, the one thing that ought to be absolutely solid in their life is how much you are teaching them the word of God and how actively involved you have them at a place like this. They ought to be at every possible thing we do because our goal is just to stuff them full of Bible for every chance we get so that when the world's lies come upon them, they just exude God's word, right?
So not the culture. You got to do the word of God. Here, number two, our idolatry has devastating effects on those around us. We see that our idolatry has devastating effects on those around us.
The impurity of Jephthah's faith cost a lot of people, including his own daughter, their lives. My wife and I have realized that my idolatry as a dad and as a pastor is going to affect my kids and you. Because, you see, my idolatry as a pastor may cause me to do things that harm my children. It may cause me to pass on to them values that are not God's values. My idolatry as a pastor may cause me to make decisions for this church that are not in the best spiritual interest of what is good for you.
It may just be about my idolatry. The greatest gift that I can give to you and that I can give to my kids is a heart that is free from idols. Man, I will say to you specifically, there are many of you who your idolatry is destroying your children. It's not only destroying your relationship with them, you're passing on to them a set of values that are going to destroy their lives. You can talk all day long about God being the most important, but if they can see from your life that money and success are the most important, it doesn't matter what you say with your mouth, you're going to corrupt their soul and they give glory to money and not glory to God.
The greatest gift that you can give to somebody else is a heart that is free from idols. The idolatries we cherish in this country have effects as devastating on others as Jephthah's was on his daughter. Today, one out of every three children grow up in a single parent home and only a fraction of those are the result of one of the spouses dying.
Most are because one of the parents or maybe both decided their desires were more important than what was best for the family. Our appetite for pornography has created a sex industry where the average age of the girl who enters that industry is 13 years old. You may think that the idolatry of physical pleasure isn't hurting anybody because it's just you and a screen. It is creating an industry that is devastating the daughters of this country.
In our country, 30 million, mostly teenage girls, have been diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia, which happens in part because of how highly we have exalted the idol of a perfect figure in our culture that has created this sense that a girl has to be a certain size and it's our idolatry that is destroying them. So I will say it again, we are not nearly as sophisticated as the cultures we think we are. Idols enslave, idols kill, they kill Jephthah's daughter, they're killing our daughters. Which means that you and I should be as zealous for God to work in us as we are for Him to work through us. Because the greatest gift that we can give is not what we say with our mouths, it is a heart that is free from idolatry. Number three, we see from this story that we have a hard time believing in God's grace.
It's ironic because it's so simple. God's favor is a gift. And yet so counterintuitive that while a child can understand it, the most religiously sophisticated people miss it. Martin Luther said, we're hardwired for works righteousness. It means that the moment we forget the gospel, the moment we quit consciously thinking about the gospel, our heart naturally goes back to this idea that we have to earn God's favor.
And that produces all kinds of destruction in everybody's life, including your own. And I know you're like, well, we're Christians, we hear you preach every week. Well, let me just tell you about the guy who's up here preaching. I forget it all the time because my heart is hardwired for works righteousness.
Here's what happens, I'll prove it to you. I'm back here, I'm getting ready to come preach. I'm back here, I'm getting ready to come preach. And there are times I'm back here and the blast off while I walk up here is, God, I need you to bless a sermon.
And here's what I'll think. Oh, I had a great week. Man, I did my quiet time every day and I shared Christ with like three of my neighbors and it was an awesome husband.
And I put my kids down to bed every night and my wife, I gave her the night off a couple of times and I gave a lot of money in the offering and I read a book and I wrote a book and it's just been fantastic. And I recycled and, oh God, I just know. And I can just feel the warmth of God's love and his acceptance all over me. And I'm just like, oh, God's like, oh, he's awesome. And I'm just going to bless his sermon because he's just drips with awesome spiritual sauce. And so I walk on the stage and I'm like, man, I'm preaching because I feel close to God. And then a couple of weeks later, I've had a terrible week. I didn't read my Bible every day and the person next to me on the plane wanted to have a conversation and acted like I was asleep because I didn't want to talk to him. And so it was terrible. And I was mean to my wife and I kicked the dog and we don't even have a dog.
So it was a neighbor's dog, which makes it even worse. So I just feel like, and I can just feel like, and so you know what I do back there? I start making promises to God. God, I need you to bless the sermon. God, I promise next week, I'm going to be really generous and I'm going to witness to everybody I see. And I just start making promises as if my promises are going to buy God's favor and his acceptance. I'm a works righteousness guy, just naturally.
So you know what I have to do? I have to consciously remember the gospel back there. And I say, God, listen, I will literally say this to myself sometimes. God, here's why I need you to bless the sermon.
Let me tell you about my week, God. I'm just going to remind you what I did. I walked on water and I fasted for 40 days in the wilderness.
I did. And Satan came to me three times in the midst of that wilderness time. And I resisted him every single time. I didn't sin not one time this week. In fact, they nailed my hands to a cross. And while I was on the cross, I just looked at the people doing it and said, Father, forgive them.
They know what they do. And you're like, when'd you do all that? Well, obviously I didn't do any of that. That's Jesus's record that was given to me as a gift. And so now my pleas for his favor and acceptance are not based on the sacrifices I have done or things that I have said or what I will do sacrifice. It's a, his sacrifice that is given to me as a gift. God's righteousness given to you as a gift. That's the pure meat of the gospel. Religions are often divided into how to motivate people.
Some religions think you use the carrot. You know, you, oh, you want heaven? You want God's blessing? Oh, go after it. You know, God's good.
He's kind. He's, you know, the others are like, no, use the stick. You got to threaten them with hell.
You got to threaten them with cursing. The carrot or the stick. Here's the question. Which one of those is Christianity, carrot or stick?
Neither. The gospel is that God took the stick and beat Jesus with it that handed you the carrot for free. And then said, come and follow me. And that kind of gift righteousness produces a whole new kind of obedience in you. Martin Luther, the great reformer said it this way.
The law says do, but it's never done. The guy, even when you sacrifice your daughter, it's not done. The gospel says believe, and it's already done. Works righteousness is hard to believe, but it's the fountain of the Christian life. Number four, we need a better judge.
We need a better judge. This is a recurring theme throughout the book of Judges. Jephthah was a savior, but he was a broken savior. And he wasn't the real savior Israel needed, but he does give us a glimpse of a truer and better judge who was coming. You see like Jephthah, Jesus would be driven out from his brothers. He was despised and rejected of men, but unlike Jephthah, we didn't have to plead to get him back.
He came running back to us when he could bear our sufferings no longer. Jephthah started his deliverance with diplomacy, but when that didn't work, he wasn't afraid to kill. And he killed not only thousands of Ammonites, but he killed fellow Israelites as well.
And eventually he would kill his own daughter. Yet with Jesus, when pleading did not work, he took the war into himself. But when it came down to die, it was not our lives, but his life that he took. I didn't have to offer my life. I didn't have to offer the life of my children to earn his favor. He'd already taken that spot of sacrifice. It was his sacrifice, not mine. He did not take me to the river Jordan and threatened to kill me if I didn't say, shibboleth right. He took me to the cross and pronounced shalom and salvation.
Over me as a gift. Jephthah believed that we could only find favor with God through extreme sacrifice. Jesus offered favor with God as a gift free on the basis of his sacrifice, which is why the kid's definition of grace is still the best.
G-R-A-C-E, God's riches at Christ's expense. Jephthah was a savior of Israel, but he was a broken savior. And so he, like all the other judges, points us to Jesus, the perfect savior who was broken for the broken.
Israel didn't see themselves as broken. They just thought they needed a savior to get rid of their enemies. And God said, no, I'm going to give you a broken savior because you need to see that you're broken. And then one day I'll give you a perfect savior who will be broken for your brokenness. And that's the savior that we need, which is why Jesus is the only savior. He's the only one worth giving your life to. He's the only one who did what he said he did, who never backed down, never faltered, never failed, which is why he's able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through him.
He's the only one you can trust because he's the only one that said and did exactly what he needed to do to save you. That is the meat of Christianity. It is the grace of God that is received as a free gift. Ultimately, Christianity takes you a lot of places, but you never leave that. And that's why we say that growth in Christ is never growth beyond the gospel, it's just growth deeper into the gospel. Jephthah was a savior to his people, but he was still a broken savior.
Thankfully, he gives us a sneak preview of the true savior who would come. You're listening to Summit Life with pastor and Bible teacher JD Greer. I recently sat down with pastor JD and asked him to tell me a little more about our mission here at Summit Life, making the gospel known deep and wide, and how our gospel partners make that a reality. When we say that we exist to take people deeper into the gospel and to advance the gospel wider in the world, it comes right out of Colossians 1, 5, and 6. What we mean is that we want our hearers, those of you listening right now, to know the gospel deeply. I mean, to understand it better, to be transformed by it. It's like Martin Luther said, the way to progress in the Christian life is to always go back to the beginning. Wider means we want to see the gospel spread as far and wide as possible through you, as well as through this ministry here.
None of that happens by accident. It takes people who are committed to making it a reality. And one of the privileges we have is serving with one of the most dedicated teams at Summit Life who are committed to our audience and to praying for them and just the quality of what we put out. But there's another side of that partnership, and it's what we call our gospel partners, and they pray for us, and we pray for them, and they give financially.
Again, I want you to hear this. It's not about fundraising. For us, it's really about, I like to say, faith raising. Listen, I know people give to a lot of great causes. There's a lot of great things happening out there in the kingdom, but honestly, I don't think there's any greater investment that you can make that has a better E-R-O-I, eternal return on investment, than getting the Word of God to people.
So hey, if you're on the fence, jump in. You're not just giving, you're sending the hope of Jesus. As it goes deeper in you, you're sending it wider into the world. Remember, don't miss out on our current featured resource. It's an eight-part digital Bible study of the book of Judges.
Today is the final day to have this study sent to you. Give by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220, or you can donate online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vitovich, inviting you to join us again next week when we'll look at one of our favorite childhood Bible characters, Samson. Join us again next time for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
