Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. All of us, even Jesus' closest disciples, have abandoned him. The ultimate failure of the human race has been put on display. Jesus has been nothing but loyal to us, but for the right price, all of us sell him out.
We abandon the one who never abandoned us. Let this sink in. Judas represents you. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.
I'm your host, Molly Vidovich, and today we begin a new teaching series titled Instead of Me. Pastor JD is going to walk through the dramatic events leading up to Jesus' death on the cross. By looking at the way Jesus' friends and enemies responded to him during his final hours, we will see how we too should respond to Jesus' shocking, upside down and precious sacrifice. But before we get started today, I invite you to stay tuned until the end of our program or visit jdgreer.com right now for information on our featured monthly resource. It's a book you'll want to be sure to have in your library.
But for now, let's join Pastor JD for this first message he titled, Be Trayed for Me. Thankfully, I'm at a point in my life where I don't have to take a lot of exams anymore. There is still one that I have to take annually that I do not like at all. It is the annual physical. There are numerous reasons that I don't like it.
Those of you who are over 40 will probably understand some of those, but one of the main reasons that I don't like the annual physical is the blood test. I don't mind the little prick and the drawing of blood. It's not that part that I hate. I just don't like the suspense of waiting for what those results show because I know enough people to know that I might feel fine. I feel awesome.
I feel healthy and sprightly and young. But that blood test can reveal that even though I feel fine, things may not actually be fine.
Well, the reason I share those things is because we're going to spend several weeks looking at the events leading up to the crucifixion to see how through these events that lead up to the crucifixion, God is doing an examination on the human soul. You see, the Gospel of Matthew, which is where we're going to be.
So, if you have a Bible, I'd encourage you to take that out now and open it to Matthew 26. But we're going to see how the Gospel of Matthew tells the stories of the arrest and the trial of Jesus in such a way that we see that it is really the human race that is on trial. It looks like Jesus is on trial, but when you learn to see it through God's eyes, Jesus is not on trial. It is the human race that is on trial, and we are the ones that are being examined during the trial of Jesus. You see, we should see ourselves in these stories.
And as we see ourselves, we'll get a bigger picture, a better picture of who Jesus was, why he had to come, and why he had to do what he did.
Okay, Matthew 26. Our first exhibit is Judas. Judas and his story starts in a very unusual place. Matthew 26, verse 6. While Jesus was at Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, evidently, this was a leper that Jesus had cleansed previously.
And so now he's throwing a party for Jesus. There was a woman who approached him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume. Other gospel accounts tell us that this woman was Mary, who was the sister of Lazarus, who was the guy that Jesus had raised from the dead. Jesus was very close to their family, and she felt very grateful to him and love for him.
So she poured this alabaster, very expensive perfume on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw it, they were indignant. Why this waste? They asked. You see, this kind of perfume was a family treasure.
It was kept in a sealed alabaster container that had no lid. The only way to get into the perfume was to literally smash it.
So you could open it one time and that was it. Usually was never opened. It was just handed down from generation to generation as a family inheritance. The text tells us that this perfume was worth 300 denarii, which is something like $10,000 today. Personally, I've never seen a $10,000 bottle of perfume.
If you have, at least don't tell my wife about it, but I would just be nervous all the time about breaking it. Open it.
Well, this woman comes, she smashes the thing and she pours it on Jesus' hair and on his feet.
Well, the disciples begin to object, it says. In fact, I'll tell you, I learned something this time around. You know, these stories are very familiar to me because I literally have grown up around them. But as I was studying for this one, I learned something that I just never seen. And that is that this objection right here, where they say, hey, this might have been sold for a great deal and given to the poor, Matthew says that all of them were the ones asking this.
See, the reason I point that out is because other accounts say that Judas was the one who actually voiced this. And I always thought Judas was the one who made the objection. But evidently, evidently, it was the common consensus of the group, and Judas was simply the one to express this kind of righteous indignation that this money had been wasted in this way. Verse 10, aware of this, Jesus said to them, Why are you bothering this woman? She's done a noble thing for me.
You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.
Now, really quick, when Jesus says that, he is not discouraging their care of the poor, saying, Hey, you can't do anything to actually change poverty, so you might as well not even try. No, his whole ministry taught us to care for the poor. What he is telling them is, this is a very unique moment, and you're not going to have me for very long, and you should be taking advantage of it. By pouring out this perfume on my body, this woman has prepared me for burial. Truly, I tell you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.
Now, keep in mind, the disciples that he's talking to are the very ones that are going to be proclaiming the gospel in the whole world.
So, basically, what he is saying to them is: every time that you tell this story from now on, you're going to be recounting how smart and insightful and perceptive she was and how dumb you were. Verse 14: Then, one of the 12, the man called Judas Iscarias, went left that group and went to the chief priests and said, What are you willing to give to? To mean if I hand Jesus over to you.
So they weighed out for him 30 pieces of silver, which is about $7,500 in today's terms. Verse 16. And from that time forward, he started looking for a good opportunity to betray him. You see, the Jewish leadership didn't want to arrest Jesus in public because he was so popular with the crowds, it would have started a riot.
So they needed to be able to arrest him privately when nobody was around. But evidently, Jesus was very secretive about where he was. he was in private for a couple reasons. One is he wanted to avoid arrest. And secondly, he probably just needed some space to get away from the crowds so that he could rest.
But bottom line is they didn't know where he was when he wasn't in public. And so they needed somebody on the inside to tell them so that they could arrest him privately.
Well, meanwhile, Jesus and his disciples have found a private place to celebrate the Passover. And so Judas rejoins them there in this private chamber. Verse 21. While they were eating, Jesus looks up and says, Truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me. Deeply distressed, each one began to say to him.
Surely not I, Lord. All right, let's talk here for just a minute about Judas.
Sometimes Christians in church have this idea that Judas was this sinister presence among the disciples with shifty eyes and little horns kind of poking out the top of his head. You know, he hissed when he talked. He had a parcel tongue. He was the shady disciple who slipped out after dark to smoke weed and told dirty jokes when Jesus wasn't around. But that is a totally wrong picture of Judas.
Notice when Jesus said somebody would betray him, they didn't all kind of look at each other and say, well, obviously it's Judas. Everybody knows that. No, nobody suspected him at all. Judas was, in fact, one of the most respected of all the disciples. How do we know that?
Well, we know that because he was the one elected by the other disciples to carry the purse. And you don't choose a shady guy to be your accountant. Judas had genuinely believed that Jesus was the Messiah. We'll talk about that more in a minute.
So when Jesus tells them somebody's gonna betray him, they all start to look around and say, surely, Lord, it's not I. He replied, the one who dipped his hand with me in the bowl, he will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to the man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been better for him if he'd never even been born.
Now, you might have wondered how this didn't make a scene. John's account of this, by the way, says that he dips it in and he hands it to Judas. Same thing to say it here. Basically, the one who shares this bread with me is going to betray me. And I used to read that and think, well, how did everybody not know at that point?
Like, it's Judas, you know? Evidently, there was a lot of conversation going on around the table. It's like today, you get 12 guys around the table. There's nobody's listening to anybody else. Everybody's talking to one person.
And there's a lot of conversation. And evidently, Jesus says this just loud enough for one or two people to hear. Then Judas, who was one of those who heard Jesus say this, his betrayer, he replied, Surely not I, Rabbi. And Jesus responds to him, You have said it. Judas may have asked this question, by the way, because he was still trying to work up the courage or wondering if he had the courage to follow through with this.
He may have said, Lord, is it I? Because he's just trying to see what Jesus knew. At any rate, when Jesus says this, Judas gets up from the table and he leaves immediately to go and get the soldiers to come back and ambush Jesus.
Now, what I want to do is, I want to do two things with the story of Judas today. The first is, I want to try to show you that Judas represents all of us. Judas is not just this lone villain out there that we're supposed to despise and hiss because he's such an evil man. Matthew is going to tell the story in a way to show us that Judas is you and Judas is me. Secondly, I want to explore with you why it is that Judas betrayed Jesus.
And then I want to try to show you how people still do that today, pretty much for the same reasons that Judas betrayed Jesus.
Okay? First of all, why do I say that Judas represents us?
Well, you can see it in how the story is told. Matthew does things like show you, as I pointed out, that all the disciples have the same reaction of disgust when the woman pours out this perfume on his feet. Judas is not alone in this, he's just representing all of the disciples. When Jesus tells the disciples that somebody will betray him, he presents it more as a question. He doesn't say, we have a traitor in our midst, and there he is.
No, he leaves out the who deliberately. The word he uses for betray means to hand over or to sell. Jesus is basically saying to them: one of you is going to sell me out for the right price. Is it you? Look into your heart.
What is the price at which you would sell me? They understood Jesus' question because notice how shaky and uncertain their response is. Verse 22, they're like, surely, Lord, it's not I. Greek commentators say the way the question is phrased implies a decided lack of confidence. You should almost read that phrase as, Lord, it's not I.
Is it? Is it actually me? Jesus goes on to tell them, it's not just one of you that is going to sell me out. Verse 31: all of you will fall away. They may not have each sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but none of them is going to go all the way with Jesus.
Every single one of them has a price whereby they will walk away from him. And see, the point is, a price. is a price. Reminds me of the story that I heard years ago attributed to Winston Churchill. The story goes that Churchill was trying to make a point that England should never compromise with evil.
And there was a newspaper reporter who was a very fierce adversary of his. It was a lady who kept accusing him of being an extremist and a warmonger, and he was going to lead England into war. And so, finally, exasperated, Churchill says to the woman, he says, Ma'am, if a king offered you 100 million pounds to sleep with him, Would you do it? And she kind of thought for a minute and said, well, 100 million pounds, yeah, there's not much I wouldn't do for 100 million pounds. She said, probably yes.
Mr. Churchill said, He said, Well, if I offer you 50 pounds, will you sleep with me? And she said kind of in disgust, Mr. Churchill, I'm not a prostitute. And he replied, he said, with all due respect, ma'am, we've already established what your identity is.
I just wanted to know your price.
Now, I've got strong reasons to believe that that story is made up, also, but it still makes the point. A price is a price. You're listening to a message titled Betrayed for Me here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. We'll rejoin this teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to take a quick second to tell you about a daily email devotional from Pastor JD that's delivered straight to your inbox.
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Well, good news, Summit Life offers a free daily email devotional that's designed just for you. These devotionals bring a fresh word from the Lord each morning, helping you stay connected to Him even in the middle of life's chaos. And the best part, they follow along with the current teaching series on our program, keeping you in sync no matter your schedule. Sign up today at jdgreer.com slash resources. That's jdgrear.com/slash resources.
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Now, let's get back to today's message. Once again, here's Pastor JB. The question being asked to these disciples is: what is your price? Look into your hearts and ask. Judas may betray Jesus spectacularly for 30 pieces of silver.
but each of them will do it eventually. All of them will walk away. Peter, who's the most outspoken among them, will cave and end up denying that he never even knew Jesus.
So again, Judas's betrayal is presented as a question to you. What is your price? When I lived overseas, and I was a missionary in a Muslim country, I had a situation where I thought that our presence there was going to end in prison. I thought it may end in bodily harm and might possibly end in one of us dying. We brought in a short-term team of missionaries while I was there to give out distribute Bibles in the region.
And to make a long story really short, they provoked a riot, a riot of close to 3,000 people that the police ended up rescuing these guys and four friends of mine and putting them in prison. The mob, the rioting mob, took both of their cars, burned them to the ground, and were demanding that they release my four friends so that they could kill them. I was put under a type of house arrest because they didn't have any proof that I was connected, but everybody kind of knew I probably was. And so they put me under house arrest. And it led to one of the worst two or three, four days of my life.
Because in that kind of loneliness of just being under house arrest, I remember saying to God, I don't want to do this. I just want to go home. I'm tired of this. I didn't see. Sign up for this.
I'm not sure why I'm here. Can you just get me out of this and send me home?
Now, here was the irony of that. I was very committed to Jesus. I mean, I was a missionary, for goodness sake. I mean, that's like, you know, top of the chain. I was, you know, varsity level.
In fact, before we left, we'd done this little ceremony where we, you know, you get your stick. I know you probably never did this. Do you have a campfire and you go and throw your stick in the fire, symbolic of the fact that you're letting your life be burned up for Jesus? And man, I did it with everybody else. I'm like, here's my stick.
I throw it in the fire and we all sang, I've decided to follow Jesus. You know, the world behind me, the cross before me, no turning back, no turning back, though none go with me.
So I will follow. I sang as loudly as anybody that night. But I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys one thing, just in case you don't know this. It's one thing to stand in a group around a campfire and sing that song that I'm willing to give up my life for Jesus. It's quite another when you think people are going to show up and take you up on that offer.
And what was happening in that moment was one of the lowest times I've ever been spiritually because God revealed I had a price. I had a point at which my commitment to Jesus stopped. It was one of the lowest points I've ever been in, and God used that to begin to rebuild me spiritually from that broken place. The point is, I was just like those disciples. I had a price, I could talk a big game.
I could talk a big game, but when you peeled away the layers, I had a price. The question is: what is your price? You see, you might be willing to follow Jesus when it is convenient for you. But at what point do you stop? For example, maybe you downplay your commitment to Jesus in front of your friends.
You want to be a Christian here at church, but you're a teenager and you don't want to do it in front of your friends because they might mock you or think of you as strange. Or maybe it's just an area of your life that you just don't want to let God have control of yet. Maybe God has told you to go somewhere and do something on a mission trip, or maybe with one of our church plants, and you are resisting Him. Maybe God has called one of your children to do something like that, and you don't want to let them go. Maybe God has convicted you of something like your music habits or your entertainment habits or a certain relationship that you really should not be in and you don't want to give it up.
I mean, maybe it's getting baptized. Right, maybe it's getting baptized. You know, you're just kind of like, I don't really know. You know, like, I know that we're always talking about getting baptized, but I just, it's just inconvenient and messy and wet, and I don't really want to do that. I mean, what an ironic thing for your commitment to Jesus to stop at the point of inconvenience.
That's your price. For some of you, you know that you shouldn't be living with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and or you know that you shouldn't be sleeping together, but that's just not a lifestyle that you want right now, so you're going to keep doing it and hope that God's going to be okay with it.
Some of you know that you work too much, or you neglect your family, you never take a Sabbath. Maybe God's calling you to put him first in your finances and trust him with a tithe and generous giving, and you're resisting him. Maybe it's simply committing to the church. Right? I mean, we got a lot of people that are just sort of sitting on the sidelines.
And you know what? Deep down, you know that church is not just an event you're supposed to show up at occasionally and kind of hear a religious pep talk. You know that you're supposed to be a part of the community. But when you really get down to it, That just feels overcommitted to you, and it feels messy, and it feels cumbersome. And you like the freedom that goes with non-committal, so you're just gonna kind of hold on to what's convenient, and you're not gonna do what you know God wants you to do.
Do whatever it is, that's your price. That's where your commitment to Jesus stops and you sell him out. Your point of commitment stops at a certain point. What is that price? All of us have one.
or all of us have had one. When Mark tells the story of all these disciples forsaking Jesus, which ends up happening a couple hours later in the Garden of Gethsemane. When Mark tells that story, he adds a curious, small, but I think very important detail. Mark 14, 51, and a young man. Followed him, that is, followed Jesus after his arrest.
With nothing but a linen cloth about his body. That's because it's his pajamas. He'd been sleeping when Jesus was arrested. And they seized him. But he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.
Now here's a question. Why include that detail in this story? Two reasons, I think. Number one, it's interesting. And anytime you're telling a story where somebody runs through it naked, you always have got to include that detail later, right?
I mean, some guy runs through our church service naked, and somebody asked you later how our church was. It has nothing to do with the sermon, but you're going to include that detail about the guy running through naked.
So that's one of the reasons. But second, and more importantly, many commentators think that in this running, fleeing, young naked man is a picture. Right of the entire human race, a metaphor for the whole human race. Here we've got a naked man fleeing from the Garden of Gethsemane. You might remember that Adam and Eve had fled from the Garden of Eden naked, fleeing from the presence of God.
And so, what we have in this image is a picture of the whole human race. All of us, even Jesus' closest disciples, have abandoned him. The ultimate failure of the human race has been put on display. Jesus has been nothing but loyal to us, but for the right price, all of us sell him out. We abandon the one who never abandoned us.
So again, let this sink in. Judas represents you. Sure, maybe you haven't actually done what Judas did. But that's probably just because you weren't put in the same situations he was in. under the same pressures.
But see, the stuff in your heart and my heart is the same as what was in Judas' heart. You see, the Bible teaches us that the reason some of us turn out better than others. Has more to do with the restraining graces that God puts into our lives than it does some inherent goodness in us.
Sometimes when I hear the stories of people who've really messed up their lives.
Some of them ended up in prison. And then I hear them talk about the pain and the dysfunction and sometimes abuse that they went through growing up. I always find myself wondering that had I grown up in similar conditions, if I wouldn't have made the exact same decisions. I'm not trying to excuse their crime. I'm not trying to say that they're not accountable for it.
I'm just saying that God put so many graces and privileges in my life that I had absolutely nothing to do with and cannot take any credit for. I had parents who loved me. I had good examples of character lived out before me. I never faced the kind of poverty or discrimination that pushes some people to extreme action. I was taught the word of God from my childhood.
These were all gifts of grace to me for which I cannot take one iota of credit. Do I really have reason to boast because of them? I mean, say you and a friend decided you were going to rob a bank, and on the way to rob the bank, you stop by another friend's house, and the friend said, I'm not going to let you do that, and grabs both of you by the shirt. Your other friend wriggles free and rips his shirt, goes off, and robs the bank, but you remain held by your friend and he won't let you go.
Well, your one friend goes and robs a bank and gets arrested. Can you really boast later about not having committed the crime? No, because what was in your heart was in what was in his heart was in your heart. It was your friend's restraining grace that kept you from doing it. That's what God has done for us.
He put graces that kept the sin in my heart from growing into fruition and destroying me. Yet, Yahweh, even with all of these graces, even with all of those, I still had a price whereby I sold Jesus. Our salvation is only by grace. It's a gift of God. We're not saved because of how committed we are to Jesus, but because of how committed He is to us.
You're listening to Summit Life with pastor and author JD Greer. If you'd like to listen to this message again or share it with a friend, you can find all messages online at jdgreer.com. I told you earlier that there was a book you would definitely want to have on your bookshelf, and it's on the topic of assurance of salvation. What an important question to settle for yourself or for those you love. You can get your own copy of Pastor JD's book called Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart when you donate to support this ministry.
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Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
