A Proud Man and a Suffering Girl, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Humility, that's the one thing that God keeps going after with Naaman isn't it? Isn't that the one thing he keeps going after? Naaman in this story keeps trying to go to the top. God keeps sending him to the bottom. God will only speak to him through servants.

He's going to make Naaman bathe in a nasty creek. You see the path to God is the path of humility and you can't get there any other way. The one thing, the one thing that you absolutely need when you come to God is need. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of J.D.

Greer. If you've been with us for a while now, you'll know that we're in the middle of a teaching series called The Whole Story. It's a cover to cover overview of the Bible, revealing how every story is really part of one greater story, the story of the gospel.

If you've missed any of the previous messages, you can always listen online at jdgreer.com. Today we're looking at a lesser known account in the Old Testament that gives us a powerful picture of God's purpose in suffering. It's the story of a young girl's faith and a proud man's brush with death. Sounds intriguing, right?

I bet you've heard it before, but maybe not quite in the same way you'll hear it today. Let's join Pastor J.D. right now as he teaches from the book of 2 Kings. 2 Kings 5 verse 1 through 18 is the story of Naaman. Y'all chapter 5 verse 1, Naaman. Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great mighty man with his master and in high favor because by him the Lord had given victory to Syria. Now the Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little girl from the land of Israel and she worked in the service of Naaman's wife. And she said to her mistress, Wood, that my Lord were with the prophet who was in Samaria.

She's talking specifically about Elisha, who was one of the mightiest prophets of this era. He, Elisha, could cure this man of his leprosy, could cure Naaman of his leprosy. Verse 4, so Naaman went and told his lord, the king of Syria, thus and so is for the girl from the land of Israel. And the king of Syria said, Go now, I'll send a letter on your behalf to the king of Israel.

So Naaman went, taking with him 10 talents of silver and 6,000 shekels of gold and 10 changes of clothing as a gift that he can give to Elisha. Verse 6, and he brought the letter to the king of Israel and the letter said, When this letter reaches you, know that I've sent you, you Naaman, my servant, that you may cure him of his leprosy. And when the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, Am I God to kill and make alive that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Only consider and see how he is seeking a quarrel with me.

In other words, he thinks the king of Syria is looking for an excuse for war. Verse 8, but when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent to the king, Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come now to me that he may know that there is a prophet in Israel. Verse 9, so Naaman came with his horses and his chariots.

I mean, you can imagine what this would look like. You need this mighty cavalcade of horses and chariots showing up at little old Elisha's house. Verse 10, and Elisha sent out a messenger to him saying, Go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.

Elisha doesn't even go out to see him. But Naaman was angry. He felt disrespected and he went away saying, Behold, I thought surely he would come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. So he turned and he went off in a rage. The word for rage in Hebrew means literally super ticked off. But his servants, verse 13, notice more servants, come near and say to him, My father, if it was a great word, the prophet had spoken to you. Wouldn't you have done that? Man, all he told you was go and wash. What have you got to lose, Naaman?

Try it. Verse 14, so he went down and he dipped himself seven times in the Jordan. You got to picture this scene and he's seething with rage and he gets into the Jordan River and somehow he gets his whole body into that muddy, nasty little creek. And he goes down that seventh time. He comes up cussing. And when he comes up, it says he looked and behold, his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child.

He was clean. Verse 15, then he returns to the man of God, Elisha, he and all of his company. And he came and stood before him and he said, Behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel. He makes not the first mention of leprosy. Naaman was not looking for God.

Naaman was looking for a cure for leprosy. But God used his search for a cure to lead him to something even greater than the cure itself. Number one, God uses your pain to bring you to himself.

You see, here's the question I want you to think about in your life. What if God had a much bigger purpose in your pain? You see, the point of this story is not that every leper who heads out to the Jordan River is going to find healing for his skin disease. The point is to show us that God uses these kinds of things to bring us to himself. This story is about how God pursues sinners, not just then how he pursues them today.

In fact, before I move on to our second point, let me show you how the story ends. Naaman says, verse 15, except now a present from your servant. But he, Elisha, said, as the Lord lives before whom I stand, I will take none of it. But see, Elisha knows that to receive this gift might confuse everybody watching. Naaman had started this process thinking that he could purchase the miracle because of his riches.

And if he ends up receiving this gift, even in gratefulness, people might assume that he had been able to purchase it. And the one thing, the one thing that has to be understood about the gospel is that it is a free gift of grace. Verse 17, then Naaman said, well, if not, please let there be given to your servant two mule loads of earth. For from now on your servant will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any God but the Lord.

Now that's quite a jump, isn't it? And what is going on with that? His plan is to spread it out underneath him whenever he sacrifices to God back in Syria, because you're only supposed to offer sacrifices to God in Israel. So he's gonna take a little bit of Israel with him and offer sacrifices to God there. Verse 18, in this matter, may the Lord pardon your servant. When my master goes into the house of Ramon, that's a false God, to worship there, leaning on my arm, and I bow myself in the house of Ramon, the false God. Could the Lord pardon your servant in this matter?

What? He seems to be asking Elisha for permission to be a coward and bow down before a false God. He said, verse 19, Elisha says, go in peace. Naaman's obedience is imperfect, but it's a start, and he's coming in faith, so God receives it. Y'all, I feel like a lot of Christians forget this, because they talk like you come to Jesus and then bam! All of a sudden you wake up the next morning, the spirit filled into her Christian, you're humming God songs in your head, all the Beyonce and Eminem on your iPod is transformed into Kami and Hank singing gospel tunes, and I'm just going to tell you, that's not true.

You start out as a baby, and babies crawl, and they drool, and they run into stuff, and they break things, and that's okay, because you're crawling the right direction. You see, if you're serious about repentance, God is serious about having you, regardless of what shape you come in. As a compassionate father, he will patiently guide you if you just start coming his direction. Y'all, the only thing you need to come to Jesus, the only things that you need are humility and faith. Humility, that's the one thing that God keeps going after with Naaman, isn't it?

Isn't that the one thing he keeps going after? Naaman in this story keeps trying to go to the top. God keeps sending him to the bottom. God will only speak to him through servants.

He's going to make Naaman bathe in a nasty creek. You see, the path to God is the path of humility, and you can't get there any other way. The one thing that you absolutely need when you come to God is need. In fact, it's all that you need. All that you need is need.

It's the one thing you can't do without. Naaman wants to find salvation through power and strength, but it can't be found that way. It won't be found that way, because it is by grace you can be saved through faith. Faith not in how awesome you are or even all the great things you're going to do.

It's faith in what God in his grace did for you when Jesus died on a cross. It's not of words, because God doesn't want anybody to boast. Naaman's problem is his pride, and so God has got to tear down his pride, and God's got to say, you are helpless.

You got nothing. You're only going to have my grace, and until you get that, you're never going to be saved. You see, the cross absolutely destroys our pride, because the cross tells you that God's verdict on your life was death. You want to be like, how am I doing? God, how am I doing? And God says, how you doing? Death.

That's how you're doing. And most people don't want to embrace that. Most people don't really want to wrestle with that. For most people, what keeps them from the gospel is they don't have the humility it requires to agree with God that the verdict on their entire life is death in hell, and they are powerless to do anything about it, and their only hope is grace. Y'all, we talk about how much we love grace, but we don't really. Most of us want to be in a position where we really need it, because it's insulting, because we don't like to feel needy. We don't like to feel like we're dependent on the favors of others. We don't like to feel like we are dependent on grace.

The question is, I know you say you love grace, but do you have the humility to actually come to Jesus and say, you got what I deserved. You took what I deserved. That was the verdict on my life. I did not get a gold star. I did not get a passing grade.

I failed entirely and completely. And if you gave me what I deserved, I would be apart from you forever, because that is where the gospel begins. You know, I'll give you one other thing on this. Think about how much humility it took for Naaman to cross that border to come into Israel. These people were an inferior race to him. It was a despised culture.

He had to admit that salvation was not found among the mighty Syrians. Let me tell you why I point that out, because there's about 10 of you. I would guess what 10 of you at all of our campuses that what I'm going to say next applies to you. You never thought that you would be in a place like this with people like these, listening to somebody like me. In fact, I'm not even sure. You don't even know why you're here.

You lost a bet. And that's why you're here right now, because we are born again Christians. And you're like born again, Christians, knuckle dragon, Neanderthals, you people use snakes. I'm just scared of you people. I don't know what, and that's not really true by the way, but you, you, I'm just, and your thought, this is like, there's no pause.

Here's the question. Do you have the humility to question your convictions and the humility to admit that salvation might actually come from people that you previously despised? Because that's what Naaman had to go through in order to find this healing, humility, and then faith. You just got to believe what God says, and then you got to accept it. God says, there's a river that can wash away your sins and heal you, but you have to believe that and plunge yourself in it and receive it as your own. You say, it can't be that easy.

That's what Naaman said. It can't be that easy. If you're saying that it's only because you're still looking for a way that you can save yourself. You're looking for what mountain to climb, but salvation is not found.

It's not about what you do to save yourself. It's about what he has done that you simply believe and receive. You see, there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stain. That river is not made out of the good works that you do.

It's not made out of how religious you can be, how many verses you know. That river that flows is entirely fueled by God's grace. It's a gift and you plunge in and you believe it and you receive it. Baptism that we do, it's a picture of that.

That's all it is. It doesn't save you. What it does, it gives you a picture of what salvation looks like. Just like somebody gets put in the water, you are basically putting yourself into Jesus and you're saying, I didn't do it. I didn't do the work of salvation.

You did it. And then you put yourself into it and you receive it and it washes away your sin. It makes you a new creation and you become in your heart white as snow. Before I go on to that, let me just show you one other thing in this story. And then I'll bring you back to the baptism thing. Number two, God uses our pain to bring others to him. That's what we see from this story. God uses our pain to bring us to him. He uses our pain to bring other people to him after we become believers.

Let's turn away from the pain of Naaman and go back to the little girl that we saw at the beginning, because in my opinion, she's the real hero of this story. Let me ask you a question. How would you respond to the person that had murdered a lot of your friends and family, and then taken you as a slave to live in his house? How would you respond when that person got leprosy? I can tell you exactly what I would have done. Ha, old goons got leprosy.

Now I get a front row seat to watch his decrepit old body fall apart and die. And I will say, there is a God. That's what I would say. Listen to what this sweet little girl says. Would that my Lord were with the prophet who's in Samaria, he could cure him of his leprosy. She seems genuinely to care about him. She seems genuinely to care about him. Remarkably, she seems to have forgiven him. Somehow a little 14 year old girl has the faith to say, I'll let God be the judge who makes things right.

I'll have compassion on Naaman. I really want to give this girl a hug when we get to heaven. Cause this little sweet 14 year old girl, whose name we never know, gives us maybe one of the clearest old Testament pictures of Jesus.

Think about it. She was suffering through no fault of her own. In fact, her suffering was caused by Naaman's sin, but she forgave him. And what's more, her suffering became the means of his salvation.

Right? I mean, think about it. Had she not been in this situation, then Naaman would have not known about Elisha and Naaman would have died in his leprosy. So her suffering, which he caused, became the means of his salvation. In the same way, our salvation would come through a suffering servant. Like this little girl, Jesus suffered not for his own sin, he suffered for ours. And like her, instead of hating us for causing this suffering, he forgave us and he kept loving us.

And this suffering became the means by which we can wash our sins away. We killed him. We killed him. But he was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was put upon him. And by the stripes that we put into his body, by those stripes, we are healed. So Lord, now indeed I find thy power and thine alone can change the leper spots and melt the heart of stone. Jesus paid it all.

All to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. My sin had left a crimson stain.

His blood washed it white as snow. And see, here's what that means for you, believer. Like this little girl and like Jesus, God is going to use your suffering to bring other people to him. You see, last week we saw that God was punishing Israel for their disobedience by putting them into captivity. But here we see God had another purpose in sending them out to other nations. He was going to use the suffering of the innocent people caught up in that, like this little girl, to point the name ins of the world to salvation.

Let me get you to write something down. It's a difficult statement, but it's true. Suffering is the God-ordained means by which God brings salvation to others. The suffering of the church is the God-ordained means that God uses to bring salvation to others. Let me show you where that's in scripture.

It's all over the place, but a really clear place. Paul said it in Colossians 1 24. It's a very difficult verse. Now I rejoice, he says, in my sufferings for your sake. But Paul's not a masochist who's like, I rejoice in my sufferings because, you know, give it to me again, God, I just, I'll take it. No, I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, because in my flesh, my body, listen to this, I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ afflictions.

What? Hadn't Jesus on the cross said it is finished? What do you mean something is lacking in Christ's afflictions? But how does Paul have the nerve to say something is lacking in Christ's afflictions after Jesus said it is finished? It's true that Jesus paid the full price for our sin. That part is finished.

And there's nothing that you or I could ever do to add to that. But Paul understood that it wouldn't matter if Jesus died for people if they never heard about it. And while the work of salvation has been finished, the work of evangelism has not.

And Paul knew that in order for people to hear about Jesus's death and believe and be saved, wounds were going to have to appear in his body. The way that God would bring salvation to the world, I hate to tell you this, and I don't even like to think about it myself, but the way that God brings salvation to the world is not through our elevation. It's not through our success.

It's not through our, you know, becoming rich and awesome. The way that God brings salvation to the world, according to scripture, is through suffering. In 1950, some of you may have heard the story of five young American men who were speared to death on a beach in Ecuador as they tried to bring the gospel to a group of tribes people that had never heard it. It was an unexpected tragedy. Jim Elliot, if you've heard that name, he was from that.

Nate Saint. Some three other guys, they were just tragically killed right there on the beach. All they were trying to do is bring medicine and health and the gospel to this group of tribes people. And everybody asked, why would God let that happen? Well, years later, Nate Saint's son, his young son, when he grew up, they did this very careful investigation. They talked to a lot of the Alka Indians who had actually murdered these guys because they had become Christians, about what happened on that day. And after doing this careful investigation, Nate Saint's son said the most remarkable thing in this interview.

Listen to this. He says, it looks like there's no way this could have happened apart from the direct intervention of God. Meaning there were so many things that went wrong at the same time. It was just too random to all go wrong together.

This should never have happened. It was like God arranged it all just perfectly so that they could die. Which means that not only did God not protect them, God seems to have arranged their deaths. And he said, it's because of Colossians 1 24. God had appointed the salvation of Alka is to happen to the death of the church, just as our salvation happened to the death of his son.

You see for the world to live in many ways, the church must die. So when John Piper says that at any given moment in your life believer, God is doing about 10,000 things in your life, you're aware of about three of them. The other 9,997 you don't know about.

And of those 909,097, about 9,992 don't have anything to do with you. It has to do with what is God is doing through you to the world. God brings salvation to the world to the suffering of his church. So the question is, are you willing to take on wounds so that other people can come to know Jesus? You see, maybe God has been putting on your heart that you make this financial sacrifice, it's really going to affect your lifestyle.

You want to kind of give off the excess. But God says, no, I want you to give it away. It's going to change your lifestyle. And it's going to bring a kind of pain into your life. But see, that's going to become the means of salvation for others. Maybe it's letting your kids have the freedom to pursue the mission of God, letting your kids be able to go on one of these mission trips, even though it scares you as a parent.

Maybe if your kids are grown, it means that you give them the freedom to not live near you if God is calling them to live as a part of a mission somewhere in the world. And you're going to suffer by not being that close to your families you always want, but God's going to use it to bring salvation. Maybe it's for you to forgive somebody and it feels painful.

It feels like death. Maybe it's for you to endure the scorn of other people who talk badly about you because of your convictions and your choices. When I got really serious about God in high school, I was the first of my friends to do so. So I got made fun of by a lot of my friends. And I was the Jesus freak and the Bible banger and self-righteous and all those things.

And by God's grace, I kept going because I knew there was no other alternative. And years later when I, well, not that long, but four or five years later, second year of college, I got this letter from a girl who I'd spend, I'd probably talk to for 30 seconds total in high school. I never knew her.

We never had any kind of relationship. She sends me this letter out of the blue and says, I became a Christian last week. And she says, they, a person who led me to Christ asked me what it was that brought me to faith in Christ and named the influences.

And she said, the first person that came to my mom was you. She said, when you got serious with God in high school, she said, I was in a place where I didn't really know what I believed. Seeing how you believe made me realize that I wanted to know Jesus. You never knew it, but how you endured the mockery of those people gave me the courage to follow Him. I realized when I got that letter that God had appointed the mockery of my friends as a means of bringing her to faith in Christ so she could believe. Are you willing to become a suffering servant for others?

You see, I think the story of Naaman presents two questions, one to the believer and one to not a believer. If you're a believer, are you willing for your suffering to become a means of salvation? Will you say, God, here am I, use me? I don't like pain.

I wish I didn't have pain. But if that's what you got to do to bring salvation to my kids, my neighbors, my family, my friends, and unreached people groups from all over the world, then God, here am I, send me. If you're not a believer, let me ask, do you have the humility to come to Jesus? You see, it only takes two things, humility and faith. Humility is the ability to admit He's your only hope, faith to believe that He will save you and reach out in faith and receive it.

That's all it takes. Maybe today you're ready to take that step of humility and surrender your life to Jesus. If so, we'd love to help you learn more. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer, and we have a ton of resources on jdgreer.com designed to help you take that all-important step of trusting Jesus as your Savior. Well, if you join us regularly, you know that in addition to the daily teaching on this program, we also pick out different resources to go along with our study. A lot of these are workbooks or Bible studies, but this month we've picked out something pretty unique.

So, J.D., can you tell us just a little bit about it? Yeah, in this series of the whole story, we're looking at the Bible as what it really is. 66 books written by different authors, 40 different authors that tell one continuous story, and that is the story of Jesus, the story of the gospel. And so, to go along with this series, we've got a new resource simply called the books of the Bible cards. It's a set of cards that will help you as you read the Bible to make connections with the context of the original audience. Each card, there's one for each of the 66 books, is going to include a great illustration that just represents the book, give you details about the book, some historical must-knows. It'll give you at least three key truths that you can glean from the book to get your mind around it. It'll show you where the book points to Jesus and the good news of the gospel so that you can read it through a gospel lens. I'd love to give you this resource as a reference for any time you're reading through a book of the Bible. It'd be a great stack to keep next to wherever you daily meet with God.

You can find out more about those cards and this offer at jdgrier.com. When you give a single gift or when you make your first donation as a monthly gospel partner, we'll say thanks with a set of books of the Bible cards. Use these as you read through the Bible to help you better identify where you are in the grand narrative. Ask for the books of the Bible cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or you can also request the books of the Bible cards when you sign up to be a gospel partner online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, and I'm so glad that you joined us today. Be sure to listen again Thursday when we continue our series called The Whole Story on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.