The nuclear family is not the center of God's kingdom.
Now do not miss what I'm saying. The family unit is the building block of our society, and it should be, by the way. God ordered it that way. Jesus never dissed the importance of the nuclear family. He just said that it's not ultimate.
It's not the most important family connection that we have in the kingdom of God. Welcome back to the Summit Life podcast with J.D. Greer. I'm Molly Vitovich. Today, Pastor JD shows us why the church isn't just something we attend.
It's a family that we belong to. And when we truly embrace that, when we faithfully invest our lives in this spiritual family, we begin to see a kind of fruit and impact that goes far beyond anything we could ever imagine. We'll join Pastor JD in just a moment, but first let me tell you about an easy way to stay in the loop with everything happening here at Summit Life. When you sign up for our weekly newsletter, you'll get regular updates from Pastor JD, including recent messages, free resources, and stories of how God is at work through this ministry. It's the best way to stay connected and never miss what God is doing.
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Now, let's get started in Mark chapter 3. This week, I want you to open your Bibles to Mark chapter 3. I know that there are some of you in here listening to me right now at one of our campuses for whom what we've been talking about the past several weeks just doesn't seem that relevant for you. Maybe, for whatever reason, marriage is just not on the horizon for you. Or maybe you're interested in marriage, but you're an older single or a widow, and the way that we've approached this topic just doesn't seem to fit where you are.
It's not scratching where you itch, so to speak. And I get that. But what I hope you can always realize in these kinds of situations is that the church is a family. And that means certain messages are going to be more applicable to some family members than they are to others. And we put up with that kind of stuff for the sake of the rest of the family.
Amen. All that said, I did want to take a moment. And step back to address the question that we've been dealing with from the perspective of those of you for whom marriage. or a good marriage. isn't really anywhere on the immediate horizon.
Let's do a quick little poll this morning, okay? Here's a question: How many of you are currently married? Raise your hand up at your campus.
Okay, raise your hand.
Okay, hold on. All right, good, good. How many of you now are not married? Raise those hands up high, too. Come on, up, up.
Here we go. All right, okay, put them down. How many of you are not married? And would really be open to meeting the one sometime soon. Raise your hand, okay?
Raise them. Keep them up. Keep them up. I'm doing you a favor right now, okay? Look around.
See who else's hand is raised.
Okay, just kidding. Just kidding. Gotta hear waving his hand back and forth. There we go. How about this one?
How about this one? How many of you met and married the one? that you thought was the one, but now after a few years, you'd like to trade in that one for another one, okay? Just kidding. Do not raise your head.
Do not. Yes, sir. God bless you, sir. I see that hand.
Okay. I'll pray for you. I'll pray for you. Hey, did y'all know that this generation is going to remain single longer than any other generation in American history? The average age for an American male getting married now for the first time is almost 31.
For women, it is 28. We have close to 7,000 single people at our church services each weekend. And I will acknowledge, okay, sometimes being single in a church can be tough. My family and I have had various singles live with us over the years for seasons of time. And one of them told me it felt like a lot of times in our church, a lot of people were subtly pressuring her to get married and almost communicating to her that if she didn't get married, then there was this underlying assumption that something had gone wrong.
She said married people would say things to her like, oh, don't worry, you'll get married someday. As if to say, Buck up, poor one, you won't have to live in this inferior stage forever. One of our former elders was single in this church for a long time. He said sometimes when he would go to these weddings here at the Summit Church, these sweet little old ladies would come up to him and say, Don't worry, you know, you'll be next, you'll be next. And he said, Eventually, I got so sick of it.
He said, When we were at funerals, I returned the favor. He said, I go to him and be like, Don't worry, give me. And I told him he had a hateful spirit and needed prayer, okay?
Sometimes, sometimes, this single girl who lived with us said that people in the church would say to her, as if trying to console her, well, God's just got some work to do on you before he brings you that special someone. And she would think, well, does that mean there's something wrong with me? That God's got to fix before I can get married? And that's not to mention, by the way, she said that when she looked around, it seemed like some of the most dysfunctional people she'd ever seen in her life had managed to get married. And she was like, if God gives marriage out as a reward for readiness, then sometimes it seems like he got the wrong address.
Amen. Amen. Well, the title of our series is Finding Love. And so, what I want to talk about is finding lasting love when you're not married. By the way, married people, what Jesus is going to say to us today has profound implications for how you think about your own marriage.
So I want you to pay attention, okay? It starts with challenging. What might be the most cherished myth in our culture? A deeply, deeply ingrained myth, one that is sadly often perpetuated by the church, and I call it the marriage equals completion myth. This myth holds the idea that marriage or having a close-knit biological family is some kind of ultimate state for us.
It is the pinnacle of earthly blessing. And thus, if you don't find that special somebody to marry, then you will have nissed out on the essential part. of a full and a happy and a complete life. I want to start this morning by showing you how Jesus utterly and entirely refuted the myth that marriage equals completion in several places. The first of which is Mark chapter 3.
Mark chapter 3. Here we go, verse 31. And his mother and his brothers came. And standing outside of where Jesus was speaking, where he was ministering, they called to him, verse 32, and a crowd was sitting around him, listening to him. And they said to him, Hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.
I want you to imagine that this happened somewhere today. A pastor is up somewhere preaching, and somebody comes up to him and says, Hey, your mother and your brothers need to see you. We would expect that pastor to say, Oh well, family first. Family is my first calling, you know.
So see you guys later. In fact, we would almost be scandalized if he didn't say that, right? But look at how Jesus responds. Verse 33, He answered them: Who are my mother and my brothers? And then looking about at those who sat around him, he gestured at them.
He's like, Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother, and my sister, and my mother. Again, I want you to just imagine if I did that.
Somebody comes up to me and it's like, your family needs you, JD. And I said, who is my wife in my family? You all listening to the Word of God right now, you're my family. Here's a question, was Jesus dissing family? No, he was using hyperbole, exaggeration.
To teach something very, very important. By the way, Jesus did that often. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter into heaven. If your hand is prone to sin, cut it off. Because it's better to go to heaven with one hand than go to hell with both.
He's using hyperbole to teach something important. And here's what he's trying to teach, to quote our friend Rebecca McLaughlin. Jesus is teaching us that our first identity, our ultimate identity, our primary identity as followers of Jesus is not biological. It's theological. Give me a minute to build this out for you, okay?
And I'm gonna use several places that Jesus spoke to this. First, let me be very clear. Let me lay this part of the case out. Jesus did not diss the importance of family, nor did he diminish the importance of our commitment to it. In fact, Jesus had such a high view of the commitment levels involved in marriage and family that it sometimes shocked his disciples.
For example, Jews in Jesus' day had a whole list of reasons that divorce might be okay. But Jesus said in Matthew 19 that getting divorced for any reason, any reason except for a marital unfaithfulness was, in God's eyes, like committing adultery. In 1 Corinthians, Paul would expand that list based on Jesus' thinking. He would expand that list to include a couple of other things. But the point was that Jesus and Paul had a higher view of the commitment levels involved in marriage than anybody else at the time.
Similarly, Jesus put an incredibly high value on the responsibility of parents to care for children, far beyond people of his generation. In the first century world, children were thought of as secondary.
Sometimes it's little more than property. The needs of adults always came before. They were far more important than the needs of the kids. To Jesus in Luke 18, scandalized everybody, offended everybody by pushing all the adults to the side and gathering everybody's kids around himself and telling the adults that their needs could wait because the kingdom of God consisted of people like these. Luke 17, Jesus said that if somebody didn't do right by their kid, it'd be better for them to have a millstone, a one-ton rock hung around their neck and thrown into the sea than have to face God's judgment for neglecting their kids.
Paul in 1 Timothy said that if a man did not properly care for his family, he was worse than an infidel. Worse than an infidel, and Paul made being a good dad, if you got kids, a requirement for being a church leader. The point is, nobody talked about the importance of commitment to our earthly families more than Jesus did. In fact, in Mark 7, Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites for using religious obligations as an excuse for not providing for their parents in their old age. In every situation that I see in the Bible, Jesus raised the commitment levels that were expected in biological earthly families.
And yet. And yet, Jesus consistently prioritized spiritual family over biological. In Luke 18, right after Jesus talked about the value of kids and the importance to God about how we treat them, Jesus said this: Luke 18: Nobody who's left houses or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come, eternal life. And I'm like, Jesus is saying that to be part of his kingdom, you've got to leave wife? And parents and children?
For the sake of the kingdom, isn't that the opposite of what he just taught? In Luke 14, Jesus even says, if anybody comes to me, And does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes. Even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And I'm like, hate? Jesus said we can't be his follower unless we hate our father and mother and wife and children.
Wouldn't that go against everything else Jesus taught about the commitment we're supposed to have to them? His point, obviously, is not that we should actually hate our parents or our spouses or our kids. What he's saying is that compared to the value That we place on him And our spiritual family, our commitment to our biological family should seem like. Hate. Yo, listen, what I'm about to say is radical.
I mean radical radical.
Some of you are going to make you mad. And you're going to write it down. And you're going to get your Bible and you're going to study all week trying to prove me wrong and you're going to come back saying you were right.
Okay, you ready? The nuclear family is not the center of God's kingdom.
Now do not miss what I'm saying. The family unit is the building block of our society, and it should be, by the way. God ordered it that way. But it is not the center of Jesus' kingdom. Jesus never dissed the importance of the nuclear family.
He just said that it's not ultimate. It's not the most important family connection that we have in the kingdom of God. Two more places. I want to show you where Jesus teaches this, and then we'll draw some conclusions. And that's all we're going to do today.
Luke chapter 11, verse 27, as Jesus was saying these things. As he was teaching some great truth. A woman in the crowd called out, Blessed is the womb that bore you. and the breast at which you nursed.
Now y'all I am all into people talking back to me while I preach. I love it when somebody says I preacher, preacher, and so forth. But that's got to be one of the weirdest things ever said to somebody whether they were preaching. Is that right? Blessed are the breasts at which you nursed.
And Jesus turned and said, Weird. No, no, he said He said, Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. What was this woman trying to say? She was using a Jewish metaphor that really doesn't translate into American culture. Basically, she calls out, Jesus, how awesome it must be to be related to you.
And Jesus said, nope. Those who obey the word of God are more blessed to me than even my own biological mother. You all think about how awesome would it be to have Jesus in your ancestry tree. Yo, if that were true about me, I'd be working that into any conversation I could. Oh, you were related to some of the pilgrims on the Mayflower?
Well, my great-great-uncle was Jesus. I mean, anybody who knows me at all knows that if you give me half a chance, I will tell you that my great, great, great, great uncle was Davey Crockett. If you bring up Tennessee, Texas, or the 19th century in general, I will find a way to slip that into the conversation. But how cool would it be to be blood related to Jesus? And yet, Jesus says, being my brother, my mom, not that big of a deal.
Being in my family and having my spirit dwell in you, huge deal. Christopher, you won. Christian author. Who I really respect and who has himself been single for many, many years, says this: our earthly families. are temporarily bound by blood.
But the family of God is eternally bound by thee. blood of the Lamb and that's why it takes precedence. All right, one more. Mark 12. For a lot of people, they found this passage confusing.
Mystifying. Even initially depressing. And the Sadducees Who say that there is no resurrection, which is why they are. Sad, you see. Right?
Asked him a question. Y'all never heard that? All right. You got to read this one, by the way, in a sanctimonious tone, because that's how the Pharisees would have said it, okay? Teacher, huh?
Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, But leave no child, the man must take up a widow and raise offspring for his brother. That is indeed in the Old Testament. There were seven brothers once upon a time. And the first took this one girl as a wife. And when he died unexpectedly, they left no offspring.
So the second one took her, and then he died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. By the way, at this point, if I'm brother number four, I'm going to be like, nope, not doing it, okay? But the bottom line is: this woman has seven different men, all brothers, and all of them die. How's the mother-in-law feel about that girl, by the way?
Okay, verse 22. The seven left no offspring. Last of all, the woman also finally died. In the resurrection, when they rise again, here's the trap: whose wife is she going to be? For all seven had her as wife.
Now, I know that sounds like the prologue to a Mormon joke. It's not. Jesus said to them. His resources, it's a trap question. Jesus said to them, No, no, no, you're wrong.
The premise of your question is wrong because you know neither the scriptures or the incredible power of God, what he's going to be doing in eternity. You don't have any concept of that. For when they rise from the dead, they're neither going to marry nor are they given in marriage, but they're like the angels in heaven. Jesus answered very simply: in heaven, marriage and biological family do not exist. As I showed you the first week of this series, marriage was God's first solution for dealing with our loneliness.
But. It wasn't his only solution. or even his ultimate one. In heaven, in our ultimate, glorified, resurrected state, we will not have lost our need for companionship. It's just that up there, God's going to deal with our aloneness in a better way.
No one is married up there, and whoever we're married to down here, we're not going to be married to up there.
Now I'm gonna admit Part of me finds that a little sad. I mean heaven when I see Veronica there's not going to be anything Well, I at least give her a wink and a suggested nod, maybe, you know? You say, well, Pastor, that makes me sad too. And yet? And yet we know that in heaven there's no sadness.
That's because in heaven, you see, our joys are never diminished. Our joys are always heightened. transformed. matured. C.S.
Lewis in his book Miracles had a great analogy for this. It says a toddler. Thinks the single greatest thing in life is to eat candy. Right? So imagine you're an elderly grandmother.
Trying to explain to your toddler granddaughter some of the things you most love about life. The joys of friendship, the joy of falling in love, the joy of staring out over the grandeur of the Grand Canyon. And your toddler granddaughter, the whole town, looks at you and says, Yeah, but can you eat Skittles while you do those things? You have a hard time explaining to her that those pleasures are so much better when you're so wrapped up in them, you won't even be thinking about Skittles. Lewis said that we, like that child, lack the ability to understand the joys of eternity.
We don't know the scriptures or the power of God. What we know now The pleasures of earthly things, things like sex and married life and nuclear family. Lewis says, we do not know, though, except in glimpses, the other thing which in heaven will leave no more room for them.
So whatever God has got for me up there will be even better than what we have here. And that means, however, things go down up there, and I don't really know that much about it, and I don't think anybody really does. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'll be even closer to my wife and kids there than I am here. Which makes me less sad.
So what's the implication of all of this? Listen to John Piper, who's talking about Jesus' shocking words there in Mark 3. Here's what John Piper said: Jesus here in Mark 3 was calling out a new family. Where single people in Christ are full-fledged family members on a par with all others, bearing fruit for God. and becoming mothers and fathers of the eternal kind.
Marriage is Temporary. Light. Momentary. It will finally give way to the relationship to which it was pointing all along. Christ in the church.
The way a picture is no longer needed when you see face to face. Travel, I'd carry around pictures of my family, of course. And I will look at them when I miss them, but when I'm home, I put up the pictures. Because I now have the reality in front of me. Marriage Earthly family, that was just a picture, a distorted, blurry, fading picture of the love of Jesus and the beauty of his body.
Jesus is the intimacy and the tenderness and the unconditional love your soul craves, and his church is forever. You say, well, Pastor, that's sweet and spiritual. But I don't want to be alone. At Christmas. And I don't want to grow older alone and I don't want to have nobody to take care of me when I'm old.
That's what I'm trying to tell you. You're not supposed to be alone. It's just that marriage is not the only way that God takes care of that. In fact, you catch this. I read this a minute ago.
Jesus said this in Luke 18: Truly, I say to you: there's nobody who has left house or wife or brothers or partners or children for the sake of the kingdom of God. Who will not receive many times more in this time and In the age to come, eternal life. You see that and? That's a huge and. Not just in eternity, I'm saying it's all going to be okay.
I'm saying now, right now, in your day-to-day life, you're going to receive a hundredfold of these things. Y'all listen, in the book of Acts, go home and study this. In the book of Acts, the early church faces every kind of hardship you could imagine, right? Poverty, famine, getting stoned, being shipwrecked, being falsely accused, persecution, all of it. The one thing I can't find a single person in the church, in the book of Acts, dealing with is loneliness.
I can't find a single place in the book of Acts where somebody in the church was lonely. You should develop the kinds of relationships in the church. that you spend Christmases with. The kind that will take care of you. As you get older.
Here's the point. Singleness is not a second class. inferior state in God's kingdom.
Now, think about it. Jesus was the happiest, most fulfilled, most fully alive person ever to walk the face of the earth, and he was single. At no point in the Gospels Do we see even a hint? that Jesus' singleness was a source of dissatisfaction for him. Jesus' singleness certainly did that mean.
That he did not fully know the experience of love, right? I mean, just before he died, Jesus told his disciples, greater love has nobody than this. What is the greatest earthly love imaginable? Oh, the honeymoon night, right? That's got to be it.
How about 50 years of marital faithfulness? That's the greatest love. He said, No, greater love has nobody than this, that somebody lays down his life for his friends. And you, the church, you are my friends, he said. He knew and experienced the greatest love available.
Uh Before we get back to today's teaching, I want to share about an upcoming event that might be for you or for the leaders God has placed in your church. This spring, our partners at the Summit Collaborative are hosting a Multiply Intensive, a two-day experience designed for pastors, planters, and church leaders who are ready to take the gospel further through intentional, scalable multiplication. But here's why I'm telling you about it. Movements don't start in isolation. They start when everyday believers invite their leaders to dream bigger.
The Multiply Intensive brings together those who are planting churches, raising up disciples, and equipping teams to make kingdom impact at scale. Through main sessions with Pastor J.D. Greer, Summit Collaborative Leaders, and Trusted Practitioners, as well as focused workshops for church teams, participants will gain the vision, tools, and next steps needed to move from maintenance to movement. The event takes place on Tuesday, March 24th through Wednesday, March 25th in Raleigh, North Carolina at the Summit Church Capitol Hills campus. Don't just grow your church, multiply your impact.
Learn more or invite a leader from your church today at summitcollaborative.org. You say I have the JD. I really want to have kids. I really want to have kids. Let me respond to that.
With the words from a letter that I got from one of our single missionaries, a lady who had just come back off the field. where she had served over in East Asia for almost 10 years. She said, for the first few years on the mission field, as I realized that I was going to be doing this single. I grieved the loss of being able to have biological children of my own. But God used that.
Listen, by grace and through my tears. To make me the proudest and most joy-filled spiritual mom on the planet, the day I saw my spiritual son baptized. in the unreached corners of East Asia. I don't know what it's like to hold my my own new born baby for the first time. I would imagine that it feels like your heart's about to burst.
I imagine that because that's how I felt as this young man came up from the baptismal waters. The doctrine of spiritual children that Jesus teaches in Mark 3 has been by far the most inspiring, joy-giving, biblical doctrine maybe of my whole life. And another perk. I only had to wait six months for a spiritual grandbaby. As amazing as biological offspring is.
Jesus prioritized spiritual offspring even more. Listen to me. It is okay. It is okay. to mourn the lack of ability to have biological kids.
It's okay to mourn that. That is a real loss. but by grace. Even that real genuine grief can be overshadowed by an even more real genuine joy of having eternal spiritual children. The only part of your life That will be truly unfulfilled if you're single is sexual.
And that is a legitimate earthly loss. I don't want to minimize that. But God says that even in that he will give you a special charisma. Which is Paul's word for a spiritual empowerment. 1 Corinthians 7.
He'll give you a special spirit endowment to be able to do that well and abundantly and joyfully. God can enable you to live a happy and fulfilled life without sex. All the other things that marriage supplies, companionship, offspring, God gives you those now. In an ultimate form, in an eternal form, in a hundredfold form through the church. Rebecca McLaughlin again, she says, you won't weather without sex.
You will weather without friend and family connection.
So what's all that name? What's all this mean? Three things. Free conclusions, they should be kind of obvious. Number one.
Don't make an idol out of earthly family. Don't make an idol out of earthly family. Idols are not usually bad things, they're good things we've turned into ultimate things. I'm saying this to you whether you're single or married. You need to reject the marriage equals completion myth.
It is a lie. And I am not just talking to single people when I say that. For a lot of you married people, the reason you got so many marriage problems is that you founded your marriage on this myth, and now you both live by it. Throughout your whole marriage, you have been looking for marriage to give you something that it wasn't designed to give. Gary Thomas, a Christian marriage counselor, says marriage does not solve emptiness.
It just exposes it. Problems like loneliness and insecurity are not solved by a relationship with another human being. They're solved by a relationship with Jesus. That's why I said our first week that you're not ready to date. until you're ready not to date.
Because until you're ready not to date. you are inevitably going to try to use that romantic partner for something they were not designed to give you. That romantic partner will never meet your deepest soul needs. They won't. They can't supply the love that you crave.
That complete acceptance where somebody knows you completely and loves you unconditionally, anyway, despite all your flaws, despite whatever he knows about you. That hole in your heart is a Jesus-shaped hole, not a missing lover-shaped hole. You're looking for that missing person. You're looking for that one perfect match who will complete you. I'm telling you, that's not found at the marriage altar.
That's found at the cross of Jesus Christ. Find your identity, find your security, find your happiness in Christ first. And when you do that, when you do that, marriage and singleness. will begin to take on a different weight in your life. You might still want to be married.
I'm not spiritualizing that. I'm not saying that you won't care. What I'm saying is that if God withholds. Marriage or a good marriage from you for some reason. He will give you the spirit empowerment to endure that well.
1 Corinthians 7, Paul calls both marriage and singleness spiritual gifts. Which means he says you got to have spirit empowerment to do either one of them well. One of my single friends. Said that singleness It can be like a fast. In a fast, you go without something that you want, like food, for a while.
And during those times of desire, you genuinely desire food. What you learn is that God can sustain you even without that thing you desire. You don't ever have to give up asking for marriage. I'm just saying you won't need it. to be a complete person.
So I urge you, Summit. Whatever stage of life you're in. You need to reject The marriage equals completion myth. And listen, I get it. That is a lot easier said than done.
Because that myth is so ingrained everywhere in our culture. Yo, what's the theme of our favorite movies? It saturates the lyrics of our favorite songs. I don't want to think of anything else now that I've thought of you. I've been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night, and now I only see daylight.
I only see daylight. And I'm not picking on all you Swifties, okay? I'm not trashing her. All the songs we love say that. But you got to reject it.
Jesus is the daylight that you're looking for. Only he can lead you out of your 20-year or 40-year. or eternity of dark nights. Here's a story I've never told you. When Veronica and I got married.
We were trying to figure out what song we should use for our first dance. Had to be a slow song because I'm not a good dancer. We both loved Do Not Judge Me.
Okay. We both love There's No Way by Alabama. It's an old country song. But I just could not bring myself to make that our first dance. And y'all, maybe I took myself way too seriously back then.
I know that's true. But I knew the chorus was patently untrue. There's no way I could make it without you. There's no way I'd even try. If I had to survive without you in my life, I know I wouldn't last a day.
Oh, baby, there's no way. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sweet song. It's a sweet song.
And I'll be honest. I did not want to live any more days of my life without Veronica, and I do not want to imagine any version of my future life anymore without her. But ultimately, the words of that psalm are not true for us. I could make it without her, and she could make it without me. And that's because Jesus is our Savior.
He's our daylight. He is our completion. I'm never going to have to look at my Savior in a grave. He's the Savior who promised He would never leave me or forsake me and told me that not even the grave itself could take away His love and presence from me. And it's true.
I don't want to live without Veronica. I genuinely don't. But Jesus is my life, and Jesus is hers. Two. And I don't want to start out our marriage on the foundation of.
a myth, so we opted not to go with that song. Instead we chose get jiggy with it. I'm just kidding. We just need to. That's not true.
That's not true. Number two, number two. Number two, treat your church as family. Treat your church as family.
Now, y'all, when I say the church is family, most of us think in terms of a weak metaphor. Meaning, you got some kind of sentimental attachment to this church and feel about it like you do, say you're alma mater. But for Jesus, saying the church's family was not some kind of weak sauce metaphor. He thought of his body, the church, as his actual family. And he said that his commitment to his family, his spiritual family, was of the highest order imaginable.
He would give his life for the church. As we saw, Jesus consistently pointed to a day when marriage and biological relations would be no more, and all that would remain would be the church.
Now, we are not there yet. We're not there yet. But that reality should shape how we interact with each other in the church now. I heard a story from one newer Christian. Knew a Christian lady whose husband suddenly collapsed one weekend at church.
He ended up having to spend a week in the ICU. It was a terribly frightening time. This newer Christian said that people from her small group volunteered to take off work to keep her kids so that she could spend time with her husband. One even referred to her kids as our kids. Not in some creepy kind of way.
They were just making the point that this woman would never again have to carry those kinds of burdens alone. She said she never felt so loved. And cared for in her whole life. Y'all, I hear versions of that story over and over and over in our church. I cannot tell you how many times I will reach out to somebody here who is going through something and they will say to me, Pastor, it's been an unbelievably hard time, but the church has been awesome.
And by that, by the way, they don't mean the staff, they don't mean me. They mean you. The members. They'll say things like: My small group has been here round the clock and made sure that all of my needs were met.
Sometimes y'all brings tears to my eyes just being on the phone with these people, hearing that person on the other end of the line telling me how much and how well you've loved him. The church is family. That means you should invest in it as family. Please don't treat this like some kind of religious weekend pep talk where I'm your motivational speaker. If that's how you treat this church, and quite candidly, it's how a lot of you do treat this church.
Then you are only experiencing a fraction of the blessing that Jesus intends the church for you to be. I'm not mad at you like you ought to be in church. I'm just telling you, you're missing it. You're missing the blessing that it's supposed to be. You say, well, what are you telling us to do?
Be in a small group. That's what I'm telling you to do. Volunteer. By the way, they say that for you newer people, unless you have seven personal relationships in this church your first year, you likely won't be here for the second year. Parents, you need to get your kids known here.
I saw a study that showed that the single greatest predictor. Of whether your kid will continue on with the Lord after he or she goes to college, the single greatest predictor. If he or she has five meaningful relationships in the church with other adults who know their names and invest in them. That is the single greatest predictor. of whether a kid continues to follow the Lord in college.
So get your kid known here. Oh, but my kids need to travel every weekend with soccer. Yeah, great. Do some of that. You need to make sure they get connected here because you need to be more concerned about where they're going to spend eternity than where they go to college.
Listen at our church. I will go and tell you, we put all the coolest adults in the student ministry already. Just go check it out. We've already done all the hard work for you. We picked out the non-dweeby people and just put them there.
Just take your kids there. You'll see what I'm talking about. Invest in others outside of your family. Whether you're married or not, invest in the kids of this church. Be the spiritual aunts and uncles to the kids in your small group.
Men, get involved in the men's ministry or volunteer in the student ministry where you can speak wisdom into the lives of younger men who are growing up without a father. Ladies, you need to do the same thing in the women's ministry. Part of how God fulfills his promise to be a father to the fatherless and a mother to the motherless is by providing those relationships through the church. Here's another one. Don't rush in and out of here so fast like you're trying to beat the traffic out of a football game that your team has clearly lost.
Yo, it's like every week as soon as I'm done, I'm walking off the stage, worship team's coming up, and some of you act like it's the fourth quarter in the UNC JMU game, and you're down by 25. And there's no way you can come back, so you might as well go ahead and beat the traffic and leave. Y'all, one problem with that, Jesus is already won, okay?
So stick around for the full celebration. I always challenge our staff. I tell our staff to do their best. To be available for the first seven minutes before church and the first seven minutes after church. Because that's where we can help this church feel much less like production and more like family.
Rebecca McLaughlin, who I've heard to a couple times here, she wrote a blog in 2018. I love the title of it. Why I don't sit with my husband and sometimes my kids in church. It was an amazing article. You should look it up and read it.
But she said that some of the response she got to that article from the Christian community was as if she had suggested stomping on puppies in Sunday school. How dare you undermine the importance of the family and church? She said, but I also got a lot of messages from single Christians who explain how much pain they feel in church when they sit alone. And yeah, I get it. Listen, sometimes people want to be alone at church, and there can be a season for that.
But in general, she says We come to church. to be together. as the family of God. Not to have our private moment with the Lord. She gives three rules.
I love these. An alone person in our gathering is an emergency. Two, friends can wait. Number three, introduce a newcomer to somebody else. Listen, y'all, I am just charismatic enough to believe that if you notice a new person at church by themselves, the Holy Spirit wants you.
to notice them and go talk to them.
So don't be disobedient to the Holy Spirit. You should be looking around for people at the beginning and the end of service. Your friends can wait. Meet them at Shabbotle later. At church, find those people who look alone and introduce yourself to them.
And then introduce them to somebody else. That is spiritual family, summit family. What if we reserve the seven minutes? right before church and the seven minutes right after church, just to do this.
Now, I know y'all to be in here seven minutes early means that some of y'all are gonna have to leave your house 30 minutes earlier. But wouldn't that one thing be a great way of saying to our community, hey, you're not invisible to Jesus. He sees you and we see you. Wouldn't it be great to be a part of the church like that? One more thing on this before I go to point three.
Treating the church like family means committing to the church like family. When you got a family member, that's annoying. Raise your hand if you've got an annoying family member. Raise it up. Keep it up if they're in the building right now, okay?
No, no, don't don't do that, I'm just kidding. You don't just kick them out. You don't kick out your family. You may want to. But you know for family the rules are different Sometimes you just roll your eyes and you're like, well, that's Uncle Billy.
No, I'm not talking about ever tolerating sin or racism. I'm just saying that in church, you are going to encounter people who rub you the wrong way.
Sometimes they love the music that you hate.
Sometimes they dress in ways you can't understand.
Sometimes they express political perspectives that drive you baddie.
Sometimes when You sit next to them in church, they sing off-key. Anybody in here sitting next to somebody this morning that's saying off-key, raise your hand. I'm just kidding. Don't do that. I keep telling you, don't do that.
Sometimes.
Sometimes they smell weird. But if we're family, you don't just say, well, I don't know, I really enjoy this relationship, so I'm out. Mm-hmm. We're not consumers, we're family. And that means bearing with people when they are not our favorite people.
It also means confronting them lovingly when they're doing or believing something harmful. Instead of just doing the easy thing and being like, well, mom's going to go somewhere else.
Alright, last one, number three. Prioritize expanding God's family. Not every person in here. is going to have biological or earthly family. But all of us can and should and must.
have spiritual family. As important as investing, listen. And your biological family is, and let me be clear. Jesus said it was very important. But your earthly family.
is not the only family you should be investing in. It shouldn't really even be, hear me, the primary family you invest in. If you are single, maybe you don't have biological offspring. But you can have sons and daughters in the faith. That's what Jesus said.
It's what he did. And he loved those children as much as anybody has ever loved their biological kids. Let me apply this one other direction.
Sometimes I will hear older people in our church talk as if the only thing they plan to do when they retire is to invest in their grandkids. Hang around their grandkids. as if biological family was everything. And basically, they spent a lifetime building this kingdom, and now in retirement, I just get to enjoy it. Again, let me be clear.
Investing in your grandkids is An important and a great ministry. It should be where you start as a grandparent. I hope you grandparents are like my mom and dad and Veronica's mom and dad that are very intentional with our grandkids, taking them out on special trips, taking them on special dinners, discipling them. But I'm telling you, if you're a follower of Jesus, grandpa, or grandma, even more fundamental than investing in your earthly family is investing in the eternal one. Don't make your family an idol.
Don't make your earthly family an idol. Who are my mother and my brothers? Jesus said. Those that God is bringing into his kingdom.
So just as you invest in your grandkids. As you do that, don't lose the centrality, the primacy of the kingdom of God. Hey, news flash. Your kids probably don't want you hanging around that much anyway. They got enough to deal with without feeling like they always got to take care of you.
You know, like, well, but JD, when I'm retired, I'm going to be old and tired. Too old and tired to get involved in some ministry. To quote our current president, who I don't quote very often. That's malarkey, okay? You arguably have the most to add in this stage.
Paul tells Timothy that older women should be diligent to mentor younger women, that older men should be diligent to invest in younger, faithful men. That's not to mention. The great things for God's kingdom that some people start in retirement. Caleb in the book of Joshua was 80 when he pointed out a mountain and was like that one. That's the mountain I'm going to go take for God.
John Wesley was in his 70s when he headed out to preach the gospel and plant churches in the American Midwest. All right, so there's a lot that you can still do. Don't make an idol out of earthly family. Treat your church as family.
Prioritize expanding God's family. Signing laws. Jesus said he came to give us life. And not just life, but life more abundantly. The full essence of life is love.
Finding and showing love. Is the pinnacle of the Christian life because God is love, the Apostle John said. God is love and the ones who know God are the ones who love like he loves and It wasn't just talking about married people when he said that. Like he wasn't really talking about married people primarily. People talking about a love for God and a love for each other.
Jesus called you to family. He called you to love.
Solid teaching once again here on the podcast. Remember, if you'd like to see the message transcript or explore other related resources, be sure to visit jdgreer.com. We'll see you next time. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
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