Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. What do you think sanctification really is? You think it means getting busy in church and memorizing verses, cleaning up yourself morally, and switching your radio to K-Love and not watching really bad movies? Is that what you think Christian growth is?
God did not save you to sanitize you and put you on the shelf. He saved you to send you into service. We could say it, he converted you not to quarantine you, he converted you to commission you. Yeah. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and teacher J.D.
Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. You know, we can come up with some pretty great excuses when we don't want to do something. Tell me if you've used one of these before. I don't have time, I don't know what to say, I don't have the skill needed.
Well, today Pastor J.D. Greer concludes our short but powerful study in Luke chapter 14 called Come to the Table by helping us deal with some of those obstacles. He encourages us to look at how our careers and even our dinner tables are a place where we can actually serve others, frankly without even having to learn anything profound or perfect a new skill. That's good news, right? Let's get started right now with the conclusion of a message we began yesterday titled, There's Room at My Table.
The gospel today spreads in the world through not through apostolic effort. Think apostle, somebody like me, somebody who works in the church. The gospel spreads mainly through ordinary people who just say, God showed me how to use my career for the Great Commission. I think here of my own father. I think I've told you his story before.
My dad, when he retired, the day that he retired, literally that afternoon, his company rehired him for more money. to be a consultant. on a project that was they were doing over in what we call the ten forty window, which is the least evangelized place in the world. They hired him to oversee the construction of a plant, a textile plant over there.
So he goes over for eighteen months with my mom and they live there. While he's there, he rubs shoulders with Asian businessmen that we have never been able to get close to on any of our mission trips, doing English corners and giving out water bottles. He's able to lead a couple of those businessmen to Christ. What it shows you is that God has already opened the door for so many of us to be there. I I I was reading this article in Admissions Journal.
That explained that if you count up all the missionaries over in the 1040 window, between the 10th and 40th parallel where most of the unreached peoples live, the total number of missionaries from every evangelical denomination is 40,000.
Now, that's awesome. Praise God. We need 10 times that many. If you add up the number of Americans working in secular employment, in the 1040 window. Two million.
Now, if demographic trends hold, which I assume they would, that means what, 36% of them identify as born-again? Let's just write off two-thirds of them is not really serious about their faith, okay?
So let's not even count them. And let's just take a third of that number. That means that there are 200,000 practicing Christians, practicing Christians who believe the gospel right now in the 1040 window is somebody else paying for it. What if they saw their primary purpose in being there as being there to be disciple-making disciples? That would go from 40,000 missionaries to 240,000 without costing the church another dime.
I want you to understand God placed in some of your hands a key. and that key he intends to unlock the nations. And you've got to ask the question, how can my job be you? I read this, I'm sorry I referenced so many articles, but Forbes magazine had an article that said that 75% of college graduates today, 75% believe that their career will take them overseas at some point.
Now, I'm gonna go ahead and take it. That ain't true. But it shows you that many of you have careers that very well could lead you to do. That's why we say, give us your first two years and let us put you on one of these church plans. That's why we tell retirees, hey, why not give your first two years after retirement?
To go in and serve it on one of our church planning teams because this is what God gave it to you for, which leads to question four: Do you see the primary use for the money that you make from your job? What do you see it as? The money you get from your job is certainly how you take care of and bless your family, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labor. God gives us richly all things to enjoy.
But one of the reasons God prospered you. You understand this? One of the reasons that he prospered you is for the purpose of blessing others. For many of you, the whole party you're throwing with the money you make from your job is for you. I mean, sure, you throw some change and some leftovers in God's direction, but you're not giving the first and the best to God.
You're not using the money God gave you for the purposes God gave it to you for primarily. God did not enable you to make the money you make just so you could drive the nicest cars or live in the nicest houses or have lives that are filled with the nicest amenities. He gave you, he prospered you so that you could leverage that prosperity for the poor and the needy. And we will have to answer to God for that, Jesus says, based on this parable. One of my favorite biblical heroes has always been a guy named William Tyndall.
This first guy first translated the Bible into English. He would end up being burned at the stake, and it's an incredible story. I was always so inspired by it. I learned not too long ago an aspect of the story that I'd never heard, the story of another guy named William Monmouth. who was a partner with Tyndall that I'd never heard of.
He was not in ministry. He wasn't a trained preacher. He was a businessman. Who William Tyndale led to Christ, and Monmouth got this vision. He owned this big fleet of merchant ships.
So he used the wealth from his merchant ship trading to Fund Tyndall's translation project and printing project, and then he used his network of all these ships going all throughout the English Empire to carry the gospel to all these different places.
So that when the king of England decided he was going to kill Tyndall and burn all his translations, there were way too many scattered all throughout. The world that they could never get them back, and in part led to the King James Bible that we have. And so I have a copy of one of the Bibles that Tyndall translated, and it just reminds me two things: one, how precious the word of God is. And number two, it reminds me that God takes different people in His church to prosper the kingdom. And some of you, that's why God gave you what He gave you.
And it's time for you to start asking that question: why did God give me this skill? All right, so that's all question number one. If your life were depicted as a party, who would be the invited guests? I promised you a second question. from Jesus' teaching, and here it is.
All right, this one's much more literal. Number two, are you including outsiders at your dinner table? That literally is what he's saying, right? Let's just take Jesus' teaching at face value around your actual table, your meals, your parties. Are you including the poor, the lame, the blind, and the crippled?
I read a book recently that I want to commend to all of you. It's called The Gospel Comes with a House Key. It is written by a lady who actually lives locally here. She lives in Durham. Her name is Rosaria Butterfield.
She has one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. She was a professor. at Syracuse University. of English literature. and queer theory.
She was a committed lesbian in a committed lesbian relationship, and she was what you think about when you think culture warrior on the left side. That's who she was. She just was, in fact, she wrote a seminal article on queer theory that is still referenced today by the homosexual movement as being instrumental in understanding it.
So she was very involved in that.
Well, a group named Promise Keepers was coming to her part of New York, and she just thought it represented the worst possible people, you know, these Christians who believe the Bible.
So she wrote this, I mean, just scathing letter. To the editor in the local newspaper, and she said, I got so much reaction from that. She said, I got all these letters, and she said, I actually had two piles on my desk for a couple of weeks after that: one called hate, one called Love. And people, some people would write me and they would just, oh, you're such a, you're awesome. And thank you for saying all this.
And I'd put it in the love pile. And then people would write me and they would just, you know, just rake me over the coals and tell me I was a disgusting human being. I'd put that in the hate pile. She said, I got this one letter I didn't know what to do with. It was from a guy named Kent Smith.
who was a local pastor of his little tiny church. And she said, it was obvious he disagreed with me, but he spoke with such kindness and tenderness to me in this letter. And he invited me to dinner at his house with he and his wife. She goes, I stared at that letter for it was probably five or six minutes and I couldn't figure out which pile to put it in. She said, So eventually I just put it in the drawer.
And she said, I pull it out every two or three days, and I look at it and say, Which pile does this belong to? She said, So I told one of my friends about it, and they said, Well, why don't you go to his house, have dinner with him and his wife, and you can just sort of do some study on them, like these crazy, you know, Bible-believing Christians, you can figure it out, and you can write a paper on them later.
So she says, I did that. And I started to go to dinner at his house on Sunday night. She said, I went almost every Sunday night for two years to dinner at his house. She said, I just in that two years became overwhelmed with his kindness and his tenderness and their generosity toward me. She said, and I'll make a long story really short here.
She said, through their love, eventually I came to faith in Christ. She said, I left the lesbian community. I came to faith in Christ and surrendered to him. She said, I ended up getting fired from Syracuse.
Now she's married to a pastor here in Durham named Kent Butterfield. They are part of a church up in Durham, and she's now the mother of four children, two of which are foster adoptions. And so she writes this book called The Gospel Comes of the House Key because she said it was through hospitality that I was brought to faith in Christ. And she makes the case that in this climate that we're in, Regardless of who we're dealing with, that our houses are the most important tools that God has given us for the spread of the gospel. She points out it's the primary way scripture tells us to reach out to people.
It's how Jesus primarily reached out to people. He constantly is eating with people. The gospel, she says, is supposed to come with a house key. When you're sharing the gospel, you give somebody a house key and say, I want you to be a part of my life. Here's what she says in the book: She says, Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality.
That's what she calls it. See their homes not as theirs at all, but as God's gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom. My prayer is that this book, Gospel Comes with a House Key, will help you let God use your home, your apartment, your dorm room, your front yard, your community gymnasium, your garden, or whatever for the purpose of making strangers into neighbors and neighbors into family. In the book, she gives what she calls a typical overview. Of a week in the overview of a typical week in the Butterfield household.
Sunday, she says, that's for worship and fellowship. That also includes a fellowship meal for our church family at our house that ranges usually from 10 to 30 people on Sunday nights. On Mondays, she said, I usually deliver a meal to a neighbor in need. She told me, I've actually, she actually had me over to her house, me and Veronica, my wife. Maybe she thinks I'm a neighbor in need, but it was an awesome meal.
And she said, yeah, she says, I'm not on any social media. Literally except for one thing, the next door app. She said, I'm the next door queen, I'm going to tell you. She says, every single time somebody posts on the next door app what they need, she says, I'm the first one there. I get there whether it's their cat sick or whether it's they need their dog walked or they need somebody to water their plants or they need to go to the hospital.
So Monday is delivering a meal to a neighbor in need. Tuesday, she says is dinner, informal conversation and prayer at our house with neighbors and church friends. We just do a little prayer for the neighborhood. Wednesday is a prayer meeting at church. She said, after that, we do errands like dropping off a gift to one of our neighbors who's in jail now.
Thursday, she said, we prayer walk in the evening with our neighbors. We have a set time where we just take a prayer walk throughout the neighborhood. We ask neighbors to join us. She said they're getting the hang of it because now they come out of their houses and they stand on their driveways so that when we walk by, they can give us prayer requests. She said, Friday, that's a regular Costco run with an offer to pick up items for neighbors.
An optional meal that I'll have that evening in fellowship with neighbors if it works out. Saturday, she said, that's another optional meal in prayer with church members and our neighbors. That's the typical week.
Now, I shared this with our church staff and I told them two things strike me about that schedule. Number one, It sounds kind of exhausting. To be totally honest with you, that is not my family schedule right now. But, second, most of it, here's what struck me. Most of it are things that any of us can do.
Right, you don't have to have a great home or a lot of money to be really gifted at doing this. You just need to believe that God wants you to include strangers and outsiders in your rhythms of life. Right? That's what he wants you to do. She thinks that the bulk of gospel ministry, she says, is accomplished just by being a good neighbor.
She said, That's what we're thinking. What's this key I need for evangelism? It's just your house, it's being a good neighbor. This is Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.
You can always find more resources online free of charge by visiting jdgreer.com. We'll finish up our teaching in just a moment, but let me remind you quickly about something very important. Our mission here at Summit Life is very simple, to help people dive deeper into the gospel message every day. And then once they've embraced it, to then spread it far and wide into the world. Deep and wide.
Just remember those two words. They're the heart of all we steward here at Summit Life. And you can join us in that mission today with a one-time gift or by joining with us as a monthly gospel partner. Gospel partners are a crucial part of our team, helping us boldly proclaim the gospel through our radio and TV ministry, as well as our online and print resources. They commit to a regular ongoing monthly gift, which helps immensely as we seek the Lord's direction for the future and plan accordingly.
And if you sign up today as a monthly gospel partner for the very first time, we'd like to send you a special welcome gift as well. It's Pastor JD's book titled Gospel. You can become a partner today when you make your first ongoing monthly donation at jdgreer.com or by giving us a call at 866-335-5220. Thanks for joining with us to be ambassadors of the good news in a world with great needs.
Now let's finish up our teaching series. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Throughout the book, she identifies what she calls obstacles that American Christians have to this. I'll give you a handful of them, and this is kind of my synopsis, not exactly her words, but she says: first one is the wrong definition of hospitality. She said, particularly in southern culture, we think hospitality means inviting over church friends and cooking a meal for them.
Biblically speaking, however, listen, hospitality in the Bible means welcoming in the stranger. The word hospitality in Greek literally means love of the stranger. Welcoming insiders around your table. To bring in other church friends, Christian friends, and the Bible is called fellowship. And that's also important, but it's different from hospitality.
Nothing wrong with enjoying fellowship, but the point is, don't limit that guest list to family, friends, relatives, and rich neighbors. Question is, where's the single mom around your table? Where's the orphan? Where's the foster kid? Where's the prisoner?
Where is the abused? This is central to Christian ministry. In fact, one of the requirements for an elder in 1 Timothy 3 is that they are devoted to. Hospitality. You see, but don't just include those you enjoy or benefit your life or those who can repay you.
Here's the second thing she identifies: fear. Many of us, she said, are afraid of what will happen. If we open up our homes. What are we going to expose our kids to? We like to think of our homes as our safe castles, as our territory.
She said, Yeah, but first of all, that's not how Jesus lived, and he wanted to be his follower, then you got to change that. She said the real danger is not what some stranger may introduce in your family. The real danger is the sin that'll grow in you and your kids' hearts when they live only sheltered, self-centered lives. She says it's not stranger danger that's really dangerous. It's selfishness and isolation from the stranger that really destroys.
There was another author I was reading who was talking about how fear kept his family from fostering. He said, Because he was like, Well, what will happen to my kids if I do that? Eventually, he said, I just sensed God telling me to trust him and he would take care of it, so I did it. He said, Now, having fostered now for many years, he said, There's three benefits from fostering. Number one, you have a real ministry in the life of a child who many times has never really experienced constant, steady love.
Number two, you end up having a ministry with a lot of the parents who had to give up their kids for fostering because they're, he says, usually they're like a single mom is the highest in that category. And we've had real ministry in their lives. This is the interesting one. Number three, he said, but third, providing care for these children is the single best things we've ever done for our own kids. We've learned how God uses hospitality to shape and form us.
That is a fascinating aspect of kingdom living. As you bestow a blessing for the benefit of others, You realize that you too are a recipient of God's grace. A real question he says the real question is not how dangerous is that stranger. The real question is how dangerous will I become? If I'm not more open.
What did you think growing in Christ's likeness meant? What do you think sanctification really is? You think he's getting busy in church and memorizing verses? cleaning up yourself morally and stop using swear words. Switching your radio to K-Love and not watching really bad movie.
Is that what you think Christian growth is? God did not save you to sanitize you and put you on the shelf. He saved you to send you into service. Or we could say that he converted you not to quarantine you, he converted you to commission you. And the essence of following Jesus is pouring yourself out for others like he poured himself out for you.
Your meal times, your table is a great way to do that. Here's letter C: viewing hospitality as performance rather than calling. This is a big one for Southern culture. Here's what Rosario says: We sometimes forget that the Christian life is a calling, not a performance. Hospitality is necessary whether you have cat hair on the couch or not.
People will die of chronic loneliness sooner than they will. Die of cat hair in the soup. Do not let pride over how clean or how not clean your house is keep you from using it for the kingdom because the issue is not what people think about your housekeeping skills. The issue is that they are broken and lonely and need a touch from God. The mission is too important to make hospitality primarily about what others think about your housekeeping skills.
She explains, she says, most of my hospitality is pretty mundane. I just keep a constant pot of coffee going and soup always on the stove. She says, I'm not trying to perform them or impress them. I'm just trying to be open to them. I mean, how absurd would it be for you to go to a hospital and need desperate life-saving stuff and to comment on, you know, I'm not going to this hospital because the plants need watering in the, in the lobby.
Yeah, they should water their plants, but you know what? If you go to a hospital, it's because you need something life-saving, and that's what Jesus says about our homes. Yeah, take care of your house, clean your house, but most importantly, use it. Don't let your pride over what people think about you keep you from opening up, even in its mess. By the way, other people need to see the mess of your life.
Because when they come into some polished, airbrushed, perfect structure. They don't relate to that. They're like, well, this is who Jesus loves. When they see you in your mess and all your dysfunction, that's when. You're like, hey, yeah, Jesus loves me this way, and he's working on me, and he can probably get involved in your mess too.
Of course she says, this is the last one, letter D, she says, this is the big problem, no margin. Practicing radically ordinary hospitality necessitates building margin time into the day. Time with regular routines. Right, where it can be disrupted, but not destroyed. The margin stays open for the Lord to fill.
To take an older neighbor to the doctor, to babysit on the fly, to make room for a family displaced by a flood or a worldwide refugee crisis. Living out radically ordinary hospitality leaves us with plenty to share. Because we intentionally live below Our means. You see, without margin, you're incapable of investing in your neighbors in the spontaneous way that relationships require. Without margin, you just won't have space.
to meet and serve them and meet their needs. Margin gives you the ability, we have said, to be interruptible for God's purposes. She says, this is how we'll reach our society today. Yo, we live in a post-Christian world. She says that is sick and tired of hearing from Christians.
What they need now is to feel the love of Christians. She said they can still argue with our beliefs. And she's a very committed Christian, believes. What this church believes, believes what the Bible says. She says they will argue with our beliefs, but who can argue with us just loving them through genuine, mercy-driven hospitality?
She says, in our day, in our day, for words to be persuasive. Our words, listen to this, cannot be stronger than our relationships. You understand that? Our words cannot be stronger than our relationships. Our words, no matter how beautiful, will not persuade if they're not backed up by this kind of love and hospitality.
My words from up here can be beautiful. And they will not compel people to come to Christ without relationships in your lives with them that will back it up and make it beautiful. Right, it's not rallies, it's not big events, it's not even the stuff we do on sometimes when we go to deep, those are all awesome. But it in our day, it is these relationships that create that environment that brings people to faith in Christ.
Social media posts are not bringing people to Christ. You understand that? Are we all really clear on that? Your angry Facebook rants on whatever you're angry, it ain't changing nobody's mind about anything. Because in our day, it's not words that change people's minds, it's relationships.
I love this. Stop thinking of witnessing to your neighbors as sneaky evangelistic raids into their sinful lives. She says, You got to know them and love them and get up close. You know, several of the baptisms we saw last weekend, this was awesome. Several of the baptisms.
And when you heard them tell the story. If you were listening, it was because somebody opened their life up. And so this person just got to know me.
So, two questions. Two questions we've got from this parable. Number one, if your life were depicted as a party, Who would the invited guests be? And number two, are you including outsiders at your dinner table? Right, here's the last thing I want to challenge you to.
I just want to throw this out there. I want to challenge every single one of you. To have one person who is outside of the faith. That you are praying about how to reach. For Christ.
Who is, what if every person in the summit church had one person? that they were praying for every day. To build a relationship and bring to faith in Christ, you were intentional with them about how you're including them in your life, right? you are committing to attempting To have them or somebody who's not of the faith in your home at least once a month. That is a very practical thing I'd love to challenge you to do.
Commit to one time a month. Having that person that you're one person or somebody that is not a believer in your home around your table. If we committed to that, can you imagine the change that it would make, not just in our church, but in this community? You are listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer and a challenging conclusion to our teaching series titled Come to the Table.
Pastor JD, Summit Life has been on the air for a little over eight years. Remind us again, why is media ministry such a powerful tool for sharing the gospel today? Yeah, Molly, I didn't really start out in media ministry. I started out just teaching the word of God to some guys in my dorm room in college. As God called me into ministry and now I do that with a church, eventually we realized that there was a way that you could take the word of God to people who weren't coming into the church.
And one of the ways we do that is through media. Right. I mean, think about it. Right now, listening to this, there are people that are scrolling on their phone. That's how they got here.
They're driving in their car. There are some we hear from on a regular basis who hear this when they're in a correctional facility in a prison. None of that's possible without the generous support of our Summit Life listeners. And so for those of you that support us, I want to say thank you. Your gift is making an incredible and real difference.
These stories that we're able to share from time to time on Summit Life, they're not just because of our teaching. They're because of your generosity and your faith and your prayers.
So we love those and are so grateful for them. If you're interested in being a part of this ministry and being a part of supporting it through your prayers, your generosity, just go to jdgreer.com. You can also find a lot of free resources there that we'd love to provide you to help in your walk with God and the ways that you are helping others with theirs too. While you're online, check out our July resource. It's a book by Pastor JD that's titled Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart.
It addresses a question that a lot of Christians struggle with. How can we know for sure that we are actually saved? Are you safe just because you prayed a prayer in Sunday school? Or is there more to it than that? Stop Asking Jesus into your heart tackles this fundamental question and a whole lot more.
You can request a copy when you give today by calling 866- 335-5220. That's 866-335-5220, or you can give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich inviting you to join us again tomorrow as we begin a new teaching series on love, something desperately needed in the world today. See you Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer.
Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
