When people ask me, how much should I be involved in the church? My answer is always to whatever extent you want God to be at work in your life. You want to benefit from one person in the church, one gifting, then you're going to get just a tiny fraction of what God wants to do in your life. You got no right to ask for the help of God in prayer if you intentionally separate yourself from the means of that help. Hey, and welcome back to the Summit Life podcast.
As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Have you ever found yourself asking, does this really matter? In our new featured resource titled Why Does It Matter?, Pastor JD tackles some of the most important questions that Christians wrestle with but don't always know how to answer. You'll explore why foundational beliefs shape the way that we live every day. From understanding why correct theology matters, to discovering the power and purpose of prayer, to seeing the significance of everyday faithfulness, this resource connects big truths to real life.
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Now, today, Pastor J.D. shows us that when we are defined by who we are in Christ and not our cultural differences, We were able to lay down our preferences in order for others to experience salvation, a very important distinction for those of us who love Christ.
Now, let's join Pastor JD in the message he titled, The Church. If you got your Bibles this weekend, I'd invite you to take them out to Ephesians chapter 2 and begin in verse 11. Paul has spent the last chapter and a half of the book of Ephesians bequeathing unto us the beauties of the gospel. And now, in the middle of chapter 2, he begins to turn his attention to the body of people that the gospel creates, namely the church. The passage that we are going to look at today, I think, is extremely relevant to us for at least a couple of reasons.
The first one, sociologists who study spirituality in the United States say that there are two seemingly contradictory things that are true in regards to American spiritual lives. The first is that spiritual interest is at an all-time high. People seem as religiously hungry as ever. But at the same time, the second truth is that there is a decided move away from institutional religion. 81%.
Of Americans answered yes to this question. Do you believe you can be a very good Christian without ever attending a church? 81% of Americans said absolutely. Paul gets into that in these verses. The second reason that this passage is so relevant for us, I think, is that in it, Paul gives us a prescription for racial and cultural unity in the church.
Racial strife in Paul's day and the churches that he planted was a real issue because you see, for the first couple thousand years that God had worked with human history, all of God's people had been Jews. And then Jesus showed up with this whole whosoever will may come program. And now, all these Gentiles have begun to believe. And so now there they are in these new churches that Paul has planted. And you've got Gentiles sitting right next to Jews.
And Gentiles, as you know, had their own Gentile preferences and customs and fashions and music choices and their own Gentile political viewpoints. And so it was a mess. Here we are 2,000 years later and it's still a mess. Many people in our day love the concept of a multicultural society, but achieving a truly multicultural society has proven to be quite difficult. I read an article not too long ago in the Atlantic magazine and it was a study done on people who, only people who chose to live in multicultural neighborhoods, because they preferred to live in multicultural neighborhoods.
They did a study on them and found that almost invariably, even those people who preferred to live in multicultural neighborhoods after they moved into those neighborhoods would gravitate toward the other people in the neighborhood that look like them.
So, even though the concept of it was attractive, actually living it out was different. It's the same study was talking about: you got a group of guys going in to play basketball, and you got a group of white guys on one end, and a group of black guys on the other end. That almost invariably, even if you were the kind of person that liked to have diversity, you would almost always gravitate toward the group of guys that look most like you. Many people who love the idea of a multicultural church are fine with it, they're just fine with it until you start doing things that are culturally uncomfortable to them. I will confess to you that I'm like this sometimes.
I love the concept, but living in the reality can be quite difficult. And if I could just be real with you for just a minute, based on many of your Facebook feed, some of you were all about racial reconciliation. But you don't really do anything about it. You're what one of our pastors calls a slacktivist, which means you champion things on Facebook, you don't live out on real life. This passage not only shows us the importance of cultural and racial diversity in the church.
It's also going to show us how to achieve it. It's going to show us how to move beyond virtue signaling and slacktivism to actual gospel community.
Now, I want you to hear this as we get into this this weekend. Please do not hear any of this as me saying that we are anywhere close to having this figured out. This passage that we're going to go through has a lot to say to us and a lot to say to me, and a lot that we need to learn from, which is why I want to begin just doing my favorite thing to do with a passage like this. I just want to walk through it line by line. And then at the end, after we do that, we're going to answer two questions.
First, why should we be deeply committed to the local church? I want to ask that. And then, second, how unity can be achieved within the church? All right, so here we go. Verse 11, chapter 2.
Paul says, Therefore, Remember that at one time you were Gentiles. The people that he is writing to are Ephesian Gentiles. Gentiles simply meant they weren't ethnic Jews. And all these Ephesian Christians, almost all of them, have been Gentiles. You were separated from Christ, alienated from the Commonwealth of Israel.
Notice, by the way, how those two phrases are put kind of parallel like that. Because in the Old Testament, one meant the other. In the Old Testament, if you were separated from the Commonwealth of Israel, you were also separated from Christ. In order to belong to God, you had to belong to Israel. If you wanted to know God, you had to become a Jew.
That's why stories in your Old Testament, like Rahab or Ruth, are essentially people that want to know God and become Jews in pursuit of him. And he says to these Gentiles, that's who you were. You were one of those separated people.
Next verse, verse 13: Foreigners to the covenants of promise, that's what you were. You were without home, without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the wall of hostility, literally around the Jewish temple. Was a literal wall. It was about 10 feet high.
It was made of really thick stone, and it had a sign on it that read, and I quote: any Gentile entering beyond this wall will have only himself to blame for his ensuing death. They clearly had not mastered the concept of the seeker service yet. But this wall separated in the Jewish mind the good from the bad, the clean from the unclean, the safe from the unsafe.
Now, let's just stop right here and acknowledge that we may be politically correct enough not to post signs like that anymore. But we still have walls in our minds, all of us, that separate for us the right kinds of people from the wrong ones. the good ones from the bad ones, the safe ones from the unsafe ones. Maybe those walls in our minds are racial. White, black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever.
But they could also exist because of education levels. Maybe you only feel comfortable being around people who have a similar education level to you or went to a school similar to the one that you went to. Or maybe on the other side, you don't like people who are really highly educated because you think that they're untrustworthy and they're snobs. It could be a wall in your mind separating the successful from the unsuccessful. Maybe it's a wall between the good-looking popular people and the nerds or whatever.
And so you kind of see people in two different categories. It could be political walls. You think people from one political philosophy are almost all good? And others in the other screen, they can't help but be bad. Maybe it's those from good families versus those with messed up families, or maybe it's single or married or happily married and divorced, whatever.
Who is it that you feel a natural kinship or bond with? And who is it that you think of as other? They're outsiders, they're foreign, they're unlike you, they're unsafe, they might even be potential enemies. Just ask yourself it this way. What is it about somebody that, when you meet them, if you don't know them, and immediately, when you find this out about them, it immediately makes you kind of relax?
And say, oh, okay, okay. These are my people. What is your people? Who is your tribe? Is it primarily those who share the same skin color as you?
Is it those who make about as much money as you? I know certain rich people that just feel tense when they're around people of more modest income. And I know people of more modest income that don't like to be around people who are rich. Maybe it's those who share your core political leanings. You find out somebody is a Republican, and you're like, oh, okay, okay.
All right, we can talk. Right, or you find out that they hate Republicans and you're like, okay, all right, I feel like we can be friends. There's nothing wrong with some of these natural affinities, of course, but they end up erecting walls that put divisions within the church. And Paul says Christ tore down all those dividing walls because in Christ, there's really only one category of people, sinners. When it came to God, we were all on the outside.
There were no good people or bad people. There were no winners or losers, people who have it together or dysfunctional people. There was only bad, sick, dead, sin-sick, rebels, children of Satan, sons and daughters of disobedience without God and without hope in the world. And Jesus' blood, Paul says, verse 14, has cleansed all of us alike. That tore down the wall.
By the way, think of how revolutionary this was. At the very time that Paul is writing these words, that wall still existed. That 10-foot wall was still there in the temple. It had been constructed by the command of God. And Paul.
Who had spent more time in the temple than he had in his house says that wall doesn't exist anymore. Before God, that wall is gone, even if it remains physically. Before God, all of our distinctions in society are gone also, even if they still exist in society.
Furthermore, verse 15, Paul says that Jesus' resurrection created a whole new race of humanity that every person who belongs to him now shares. See it, verse 15, in his flesh, he made of no effect the law consisting of commands and expressing regulations. No effect means they had no power to save all those Jewish regulations, all those customs, those dress styles, those food. It had no ability to bring salvation and resurrection.
So he made it of no effect so that he might create in himself. One new man. One new race from the two distinct races, Jew and Gentile, and that would result in peace. Christ was not raised, Paul said, as a Jew or a Gentile. He was raised as a completely new man, a new man, a third race, so that he could create a whole new race of people.
This creation of this new one kind of man, Paul says, it results in peace. Because listen to this very closely, because in his death and resurrection, Christ has removed anything that would have made us feel superior to others. Because he's shown that it had no worth before God, and he made relatively insignificant everything that distinguishes us from one another, giving us something more glorious in common that far exceeds our differences. In Jesus, there's only one kind of sinner dead. Only one type of believer alive in Christ, fully adopted into God's family, partakers of God's glorious inheritance, the end.
Hallelujah. Amen, somebody. All right? Verse 18. For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father.
One spirit of the Father, spirit notice the Father, so then you are no longer foreigners and strangers. You're now fellow citizens with all the other saints. You're members, each of you in God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone, verse 21. In him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple, and the Lord.
In him, you are also being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit. Did you notice, by the way, that the entire Trinity was involved in that process? You have the Father who is the architect of the building. It's his building. You have the Son who is the foundation.
And you have the Spirit who is the one that is doing all the building. The whole Trinity is involved. What Paul then goes on from that verse into chapter 3, we won't read it together, but he goes on to talk about how pointing toward this unified, multicultural body of people was one of Paul's specific life callings. And then Paul ends those 10 verses there in chapter 3 with this, I mean, absolutely amazing statement. Amazing statement.
Chapter 3, verse 10. This, this unified church, that's what this refers to in context. This is so that God's multifaceted wisdom may now be made known through the church. to the rulers and the authorities in the heavens. How is it that God's multifaceted wisdom is going to be displayed to the church?
How is it? Is it by brilliant sermons that I lay out? Is it because of the way that I show how all the scripture ties together? No, according to that verse, the way that they'll see God's multifaceted wisdom is when they see a group of people who have very little in common, but have deep unity and love for Jesus Christ that brings them together and puts them together in a context they wouldn't be in in any other place in the world. That's what demonstrates the unity.
That's what demonstrates the multifaceted wisdom of God. There is a way that we can do things that say, here's the kind of person I'm trying to reach. There's another way that picks up the New Testament and says, this is what God's trying to do. And we want to be aligned with what God is trying to do. And Paul said, that's where God gets glory.
And by the way, where God gets glory, people start coming to faith in Christ.
So let me give you a couple things that I think are action items for us out of this passage. Here is number one. Number one, it's pretty obvious. You should be very involved in the church. The church, Paul tells us in these verses, is what God is building on earth.
And like I showed you, literally every member of the Trinity is involved in it. If every member of the Trinity is involved, Do you really feel like it's optional for you? Each member of the church, Paul says, is a key part of the building. Each one, he says, is a precious stone. I love that.
Precious stone, not a brick. Bricks all look the same. Precious stones are all unique. Everybody is a precious stone that God has put part of His Spirit into you, a gifting of the Spirit. That you are supposed to demonstrate the beauty of God and exercise the gifts of God in ways that others of us cannot.
God places His gifts and His Spirit into each of us so that we could do His work on earth. This is a concept that, if you understood it, would forever change how you relate to the church. The place where the Spirit of God has chosen to reside is in the church. He didn't just come through my mouth. It's not that you're hearing wisdom dispensed every week, and that's what God's got for you.
What he's done is he's taken his spirit and he's put it into all the different members of his church. And so, if you separate yourself from the church, you are separating yourself from his power. And another place, Paul uses the analogy of the body, which is one of my favorites because of just how clear it is. He says: the church is like a body, and Jesus is the head.
Now, think about how your body takes care of itself. I got a brain that represents Jesus. If my left elbow decides that it itches, it sends up a message so the brain says, I itch. What does my brain do? My brain has not yet figured out how to send down magic brain juice power to take care of the itch.
So instead, what it does is it signals something over here in my right hand to these fingers, and it says, hey. Right fingers, brother left elbow has an itch, go take care of that. And so we all, you know, go over there, and that's how the body works.
Well, in the same way, when God has something that you are praying to Him about doing in your life. He usually, I would say almost always, he doesn't send down some kind of magic power from heaven to fix it. What he does is he connects you to another person in the body of his church, and that becomes the instrument through which he works in your life. That means if you disconnect yourself from the church, you are disconnecting yourself from the power of God. And when people ask me, how much should I be involved in the church?
My answer is always to whatever extent you want God to be at work in your life. You want to benefit from one person in the church, one gifting, then you're going to get just a tiny fraction of what God wants to do in your life. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that you got no right to ask for the help of God in prayer if you intentionally separate yourself from the means of that help. You're like, God, I need direction in my life. And God says, ah.
That wisdom that you're looking for is in the spirit, and my spirit resides in the church. You want to know how to get direction there? Go to church. God, I need help in my marriage. God, I don't know what to do with my kids.
Go to church. God, I'm lonely. Go to church. God, I don't understand you. Go to church.
My spirit can do all those things for you, but you got to put yourself in the place where my spirit resides. If you want God to work in your life, you got to be a part of the church. You see, sitting on the sidelines of the church, even if you were hearing the greatest sermons in the world, which you are not, but even if you were. That means you'd only be experiencing a small fraction of what God wants you to know. You've got to be involved.
You gotta be very involved. This church has a bad problem with what we call ninja Christians. Ninja Christians means you slip in and out unnoticed. You kind of sit on the aisles when I bow for prayer at the end of the service. You kind of get up and you sort of slip out the back.
You never get to know anybody. You're not really involved in anything. Yo, ninjas are cool. Ninjas are cool, but they make really bad church members.
Okay, that's number one. Join, get involved. No sideline Christians. Number two, number two, the summit should be known for its unity and diversity. And so, what I want to re-emphasize today is that one of the best ways that we can demonstrate the wisdom and the power of God is by being known for our unity in diversity.
Again, Ephesians 3:10, it's how we display the multifaceted wisdom of God to our community. I think I've told you, a group of people all sharing one culture getting together is not miraculous. That happens at any football game, any rock concert, any political rally. But when you got a group of people who have little in common except for a common experience of grace, That points to the magnitude of the gospel. It points to the power of the new man created in the resurrection.
They ought to look at us from the outside and just genuinely bewildered say, why do these people love each other? Why do they get along? I've often used the example with you of two of Jesus' disciples. When it lists Jesus' disciples, it usually just puts their name. But for a couple of them, it includes another detail.
And the details are not just random. One of them is called Simon the Zealot. Zealot was a particular political party back in the days of Jesus. They had political issues back then, just like we do today. They were different ones, but they were just astrid about theirs.
And there was a group of Jews that believed that they should work together to throw off Roman oppression, that Rome were occupiers, and it was their duty to get rid of Rome. On the other side, you had a group of Jews that said, you know what, God has appointed this for this time. We should work with them. We should be peaceable with them. And so they worked with the Romans.
Simon the Zealot would have been on one side of that discussion. Matthew the tax collector. Collected taxes for the Romans, he would have been on the other side. And Jesus chose both of them to be part of the 12.
Now I've told you, you cannot convince me they did not have some spicy conversations around the campfire. But what you find is that in these disciples, even though they had these differences in how things ought to be done, they came together, united around something larger, and that was their love for Jesus. And eventually, that circle was going to include people like Nicodemus. Nicodemus, the Pharisee ruler, and seated right beside him would be John 4, the woman at the well caught in adultery Samaritan who's had five husbands. And right next to her, John 8, the woman caught in adultery at the well.
And you got a group of people that don't look anything alike, don't share anything in common, but what they have is a love for Jesus. That is what shows the world that the resurrection is real and that the gospel is deep and it's powerful. They look at us and they say, why? Why would you love each other so much?
Now I'm just going to tell you. That kind of unity is fun to talk about. And it is hard to achieve. Then it takes commitment. Let me give you a handful of reasons I think it's so hard.
First of all, Satan hates this kind of unity. Especially in the church. This is how God gets his best glory.
So you can better believe Satan wants to do everything he can to obscure it. He will pull out every weapon in the book to try to confuse and try to distort and try to make you angry. Because at its core, this is a spiritual battle because it's about the glory of Jesus. And you should always be aware that he is working in us to try and undo the good things the Spirit wants to do. Let's be honest, most mornings move fast, and if we're not intentional, our time with God can quietly get pushed to the edges of the day.
That's why Summit Life offers a free daily email devotional, a simple way to begin each morning anchored in God's Word. These short devotionals are designed to meet you right where you are. Each one points you back to scripture and helps you carry gospel truth with you into your daily activities. And because they follow along with the teaching here on the program, you can stay connected even if you miss a broadcast or fall behind in a busy season. It's not about adding one more thing to your to-do list.
It's about forming an important daily rhythm that keeps your heart centered on Christ. You can sign up for this free resource at jdgreer.com slash resources. And while you're there, you can explore past programs, read transcripts, and find other tools to help you stay connected with Summit Life. Once again, that's J D G R E E A R dot com slash resources. Start your daily journey today.
Letter B, pride. racial, political, and educational characteristics. tend to become core parts of our identity, don't they? These are what begins to set us apart from others. They're what makes us feel significant.
And so, whenever you've got something about yourself that makes you feel significant, then you tend to feel proud about that thing. And you start to resist anything that would threaten to undo, or remove, or belittle that distinction. Again, let me just consider with you what makes up your core identity? What defines you? I'm Hispanic.
I'm white. I'm black. I went to this school. I'm rich. I have a PhD.
I ran a marathon. What other thing are you allowed to brag about on the back of your car and it's socially acceptable other than a marathon? I have several friends who do that, and they know that I'm kind of kidding. Pride. Pride grows out of defining yourself primarily by things about you that set you apart from others.
Now again, there's nothing wrong with many of those things, but where pride in them exists, there will be no unity, period. John Piper says it like this. Racial tensions are rife with pride, aren't they? There's the pride of white supremacy. It was the pride of black power.
There's the pride of intellectual analysis, the pride of anti-intellectual scorn. The pride of loud verbal attack and the pride of despising silence, the pride that feels secure and the pride that masks fear. Where pride holds sway, there is no hope for the kind of listening and patience and understanding and openness to correction. that these Ephesians 2 relationships that we're talking about require. Or the way that Chris Green, one of our African-American pastors, says it, I think so much more simply: the reason we have skin issues is because we have sin issues.
Letter C. Preference. Preference. Simple preferences for what worship should look like. I looked around one weekend at the Briar Creek campus where I was attending and was just amazed at the different people who come to our church.
You got a lot of people who are, I guess, raised, let's just say, Southern Baptists. And so when they're into church, here's what they do: they sing boisterously. Man, they really love the singing and they stand there and they belt out the songs. When it's time for the message, they sit down and open their Bible and they take out a pen and a notebook because they're going to take copious notes on God's word. And occasionally, occasionally, if I say something really good, they give a short, punctuated amen.
Right? That's kind of what they do. That's different than some of our African-American members because some of them talk back to me in full sentences with nouns and verb clauses and questions that I wonder if I'm supposed to answer in the middle of church. And I'm listening, like, am I supposed to be talking back right now? I don't know what to do here, right?
Now. Oh yeah.
Now I contrast that now get this I contrast that with our we have a group of Korean believers that come and they will sit together a lot of times in one row together and I was watching them I watched them for several weeks because I'm telling you that there is nobody in our church that worships with more passion and energy than that group of Korean believers. They don't sing the songs. They shout the songs. But then every time that I got up to preach, I'd stand up to preach, the whole row of them would sit in dead silence. And eventually my feelings actually got a little hurt because I thought, well, maybe I'm just not connecting with them.
Maybe, you know, they love the worship, but they're kind of enduring the preaching. And so I just asked him one weekend, I was like, is it me? Like, you know, is it just not? Am I talking too fast? And the guy says, oh, no.
He said, no, no, no. He said, in our culture, when somebody that is an authority is speaking, you don't say anything. You listen and you write things down. In our culture, it's disrespectful to talk back to the person that is talking. I have a friend who was a missionary in Japan, and he said that the church that he planted over there in Japan, he said if you looked at their faces in worship, they would have the most intense emotional feelings written on their face, sometimes tears, sometimes joy.
He said, but everything they did in church was in a whisper. And he asked why. He's like, why would you do that? He said, well, we want to show our emotion to God, which he can see in our face, but we don't want to disturb others who are doing the same.
Now I contrast that with some of our members who stretch before they come to church because if you ain't sweating, you ain't praising. You know, that's just kind of how they think about it. And then we got a bunch more of y'all in our church. You don't really know what you're doing. You kind of like, I'm not sure what this church is about.
And so you come in, and I love how Tim Hawkins describes this progression. You know, your first Sunday, you're like this. And then as you sort of get used to here, you start doing the chicken wing. This is what you do during worship. This is like the progression.
And then you get really bold. And so you do the carrying the TV, right? This is kind of the first worship posture. And then you move to the widescreen TV, okay? And then you'll graduate to the mime in a box, you know, sort of worship posture right here.
And then when you're really getting bold, you go up to the village people, and then there's Rocky Balboa, and then there's touchdown. And that's kind of the worship progression that we watch happen. And then we got our formal Pentecostals, and some of the lady Pentecostals are my favorite because they're out there and they're like watching heaven's windows. You know, is there crazy, like, you know, the dueling light bulbs going on up here, you know, with this? I didn't even start it, by the way, on our summit in Espanol.
When I get done with all the services here, I walk back down there to summit in Espanol, and they're still on their first song set. Because if it doesn't last like three or four hours, then it's just not really a church.
Now, here's a question: Which one of those is God's favorite? Amen. Amen is what you would say back to that. Let every Southern Baptist say amen. All right, so let me say this.
Listen, that means that in order for you to be a part of a multicultural church, you're going to have to be willing to be uncomfortable sometimes with people around you not doing things your way. My friend Vance Pittman, who's spoken here a couple times, he says: the way to know, the way to know that you're part of a multicultural church. is that you frequently feel uncomfortable in church. If you don't feel uncomfortable, you're not part of a multicultural church. Many people who want a multicultural church only want a multicolored church.
Brian Laritch says that we know, we know multiculturalism was a huge issue in the early church. because of how much of Paul's letters talked about food. Food is not an issue in a homogenous church. You just eat your kosher meal and be happy. But when you got Gentiles starting to show up at the potluck.
Oh, they start bringing in different dishes. Squirrel souffle and sausage casserole, and Jews are like, What do you do with this? Whenever the Bible talks about food, you should sub in music. If you want a diverse sanctuary, you've got to have a diverse dinner table. If we want a diverse church, then there's going to be things around the dinner table and things in our customs that some of which are not going to be your favorite.
Here's letter D, apathy. I think this might be the biggest one. I'll talk the shortest about, though. It's just easier. Man, when we try, let me tell you this, when we try this, as we try this, it's difficult.
When you you get hurt You get misunderstood. Your motives get thrown back at you. I'll go ahead and tell you, I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me. I will get more emails in response to this message than anything I've preached all year long.
Somebody feeling like I said too much, somebody feeling like I didn't say enough. Why did you say that? You shouldn't have said that. And that's okay. But there are times in me that it's like, you know what, it'd just be easier to just forget all this and just do run in the lane that I know that I'm comfortable in.
But the glory of Jesus and the success of the great commission is worth it.
So we're going to press on. All right? Letter E. Letter E, lack of empathy. Lack of empathy.
Paul tells us. very clearly throughout his epistles that we ought to bear each other's burdens. That certainly applies in this area. Let me say something to those of you who are in the so-called majority culture. What we need to learn to do in this is to say to one another and to those who are not part of that culture.
I need you to help me understand how that feels. I need you to help me understand why you think that way. The book of James tells us that we ought to be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. If there were ever a place for us to apply this verse, it's in this arena. James doesn't say there's never a place for you to speak.
There's never a place for you to be able to give a perspective. It just says be slow to speak. Slow to speak means that you listen a whole lot more than you talk. You seek to understand more than you seek to be understood because to listen to somebody is to love them. I love when Albert Tate, the great African-American pastoral leader here in our country, says, It's hard for me to love, it's hard for me to love when I am so busy trying to defend myself.
We do not want to be a church that focuses so much on this relationship, vertical. that we ignore the neglect the pain of each other. on the horizontal sphere. In fact, Jesus told a parable just directly forbidding that, didn't he? Matthew 5, verse 24, therefore.
If you're offering your gift to the altar, you're a church, you brought your offering. And there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you. It's not even that you're mad at somebody. They're mad at you. They got something against you.
What do you do? This, this, by the way, right here, this shows you Jesus understood pastors. Leave your gift there in front of the altar. Let's just go ahead and leave the offering right there. Just leave it.
And then go. And be reconciled to your brother, and then come back, and the offering still be there, and you will have already taken it.
So, but that's how the order's got to go. It is insincere, Jesus says, to God, for there to be a robust vertical relationship with Him while we neglect and ignore horizontal pain that is going on all around us. I want to say this especially to you that are, again, in the so-called minority cultures. I know that there are times that we have been blind to some of the struggles that you have had to go through. We do not want to be.
We want to walk with you through these things. We want to share your burdens even as you share ours. We want to fight together for each other because that's what family does. And that's what the kind of church we want to be. Letter F, unforgiveness.
Unforgiveness. Paul will tell us later in Ephesians 4 that failure to bestow forgiveness. Is one of Satan's primary ways of gaining a foothold in any relationship. He's going to tell us that a failure to forgive quickly on all sides is how this strife keeps going. I think it was Gandhi who said, reflecting on Jesus' words, that if we insist on justice always being an eye for an eye, then eventually the whole world will be blind.
Somebody has to break the chain. Let me tell you a lie about forgiveness. that many of you believe. In multiple arenas of your life, that keeps you firmly in Satan's grasp on this area. The lie is this.
I can't forgive you. Until I know. that you know how much you've hurt me. Think of it like in marriage. You got a wife who hurts her husband.
She repents and asks for his forgiveness. But he still doesn't think that she's understood the extent of his pain.
Now, there are two sides to this. Maybe she has it. And maybe he needs to continue to help her see that. And she, in love, needs patiently to work at understanding his pain. But, and this is key.
if he makes his forgiveness of her conditional. On her understanding everything about his pain, he's gonna be A, holding himself captive to a standard she will likely never meet. And B, what he's actually saying is, I can't forgive you until you felt bad enough, which is a way of paying for your sin. And that's pay, making somebody pay for their sin is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is extending grace even when somebody doesn't deserve it.
And maybe the best teaching on this, of course, came from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount when he talked about turning the other cheek. The cheek in Jewish kind of thought always represented the relationship, the face represents the relationship.
So when you smack somebody's cheek, You're not trying to kill them. Right? I mean, no martial arts instructor ever says, go for the cheek. You know, it's like, no, they're insulting you. They're insulting the relationship.
They're breaking the relationship.
So, what do you do?
Well, your options are: you can stand up and smack their cheek. Right, you insulted me, I'm gonna break the relationship back. you could be passive and just sort of sit there and take it. Take it on the same cheek. What Jesus is saying is neither of those.
He's saying a third thing, which is: I'm going to stand up and I'm going to turn the other cheek. Which means I'm going to confront you about what you did wrong, but I'm going to do so while extending to you. the invitation to be rejoined in relationship that starts with forgiveness.
So yes, I am telling you you can't smack my cheek. That's why I'm turning it away from you. But even as I say that, I want you to understand the pain, but my forgiveness of you is not conditional on the pain, on you recognizing all that. It's just conditional on you saying, yes, let's be at peace and let's walk together. If there were ever a place that this needs to be applied, it's in this area because it's how we stay in Satan's grasp.
There, I've given you six things. that keep us from being able to achieve this. Is it any wonder that our society can't do it? But see, here's the good news. Here's the whole message of Ephesians, what the law.
What the law is unable to accomplish The power of new life accomplishes in the gospel. Write this down. The gospel shows us that we're not ultimately defined by our culture. Trusting in Jesus does not remove our cultural distinctives, but it shows us: listen, that we are not ultimately defined by our cultures. We are defined first by who we are in Christ.
Now I want to be really, really careful here. Because God created the rich beauties and diversities of culture, and God is not on a mission to erase them. It's just that when you become a Christian, God gives you an identity that goes beyond and deeper than any of your other cultural distinctives. In saying that Christ has created one new man. When he said that there in Ephesians, he is introducing a concept that a lot of theologians call the concept of the third race.
Hang with me here, okay? Your first race. That is whatever race you are.
So for me, it's a white, Caucasian, whatever, southern. That's me. My second race is whatever I'm not. I'm not Hispanic, I'm not Asian.
So, whatever I'm not, is my second race. My third race is what I am in Christ. This new man that he has created me in Christ. When I become a Christian, it's not that my first race disappears, it's that my third race, who I am in Jesus, becomes more formative and becomes more significant than even my first race. My first race becomes insignificant enough to me that I can lay it aside when I need to because it doesn't ultimately define me.
Paul himself is the example here. This kind of blows your mind. 1 Corinthians 9, Paul is talking about how he becomes all things to all men. Here's what he says. Listen.
To the Jew. I became a Jew. And you're like, what? Paul, was it you? How if you are a Jew, how do you become a Jew to a Jew?
In Paul, listen to this. In Paul's mind, his Jewishness was so light to him. that he could take it on and off like a garment and say, I need to become a Jew back to you. And if I need to take that off to become something else for somebody, then I can do that because I become all things to all men that I might by all means save some. The question is this, listen.
Is your whiteness like that? Can you take it on and off like a garment? Is your blackness like that? Your Asian-ness. Can you lay that aside when you need to?
Because it's not ultimately a defining characteristic of who you are. Again, it's not that our previous cultures disappeared, just that something greater starts to define him, something deeper. Galatians 3, Paul says it this way. For many of you were baptized in Christ and now put on Christ. See, there it is.
New concept. There is neither Jew nor Greek. Slave or freedom, male or female. You are all one now in Christ Jesus. He didn't mean that I ceased to be Jew or Greek.
Any more than he means I cease to be male or female. He means, yes, you're still a male. But what you are in Christ is more defining than even your gender, and certainly more than your skin color and your blood type and your job. If you're Christ, you're actually Abraham's offspring, not ethnically. You're Abraham's offspring of faith, and that is your most defining race.
You are heirs according to the promise. You don't get what you get from your culture, you get what you get from God. If you still feel division with other believers who love Jesus, it just shows that the gospel has not gone deep enough in your heart. For example, if you find out somebody shares the same political convictions of you, And you're like, oh, okay, I can be with this person. What that shows you is you feel a kinship with them that may go deeper than the kinships you feel with the gospel.
It ought to be that I look at somebody and say, oh, this is how you do that, and this is how you do that. And yeah, attention, we should talk about that sometime. But you love Jesus, I love Jesus. That puts us together in a unity that goes beyond anything else. And I'm happy to call you brother and sister, even as we talk about those very, very things.
The gospel teaches us to subjugate our preferences for others' salvation. I mean, at the end of the day, it's what it's about, right? How many of Jesus' preferences did He lay down when He came to save you? All of them. Do you know the hypocrisy of standing in here in this place?
worshiping a Savior. Who laid down every preference he had to save you? And you worship that Savior. while you insist that everybody else around you worship that savior. according to the styles that you prefer.
Can you think of a greater absurdity? If we worship a Savior who laid down his preferences, of course we'll lay down our preferences to see other people reach for the gospel.
Some of church, I want us to be committed to this. And I just want to say, I want to applaud those of you who are. Especially those of you who are not part of the majority culture and You've chosen to come to this church. I know it's not been easy for you, but I believe that what you're doing is glorifying to Jesus, and I believe it is a great benefit to the Great Commission. You know, when Paul went into a new city to plant a church, not one time did he ever go to the Gentile section and said he'd plant a church over here and then over to the Jewish section to plant a church over here and hope that they get along one day.
Paul always went right to the middle and said, I'm planting a church where Jew and Gentile are going to come together because that's going to bring glory to Jesus. And what you've done, some of you that are not in the majority culture, is you've come across town, metaphorically speaking, and you sat down in a culture that may not be as familiar to you as your own. And you've done it for the glory of Jesus and you've done it for the great commission. And I just want to say thank you because I believe it has given us a vision of what the future ought to look like. I want to encourage the rest of you, all of us, to move beyond mere awareness to engagement.
The gap between awareness and gospel community is intentionality. You can be aware of it and you can post on it on your Facebook and you can be a slacktivist. But if you want to not, if you want gospel community, there's got to be an intentionality. And there are many of you that need to pursue this by starting relationships with people that are different than you. The point of all this is not that we just have different colored faces in this audience on the weekend.
The point of this is that we know each other and love each other and show the world the greatness of our Christ that far exceeds any of our cultural differences or preferences. Amen? Amen, amen. We want to live multicultural lives, not host multicultural events. The only path to real gospel community is through awareness and intentionality.
That wraps up today's message here on the podcast. Don't forget, if you'd like to learn more about our featured monthly resource titled Why Does It Matter? or receive our free daily devotionals, you can find it all at jdcreer.com. Thanks for spending this time with us. We'll see you next time.
Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries. Yeah.
