When Drinking, Politics, Cussing, and Circumcision Divide A Church, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. I think the Bible needs to shape how we think about everything. I think we need to learn to think biblically about everything from taxation to immigration reform. But for a lot of people, certain positions become like religious law, an external sign of whether you're right with God or not.

I'm not telling you you should soften on your position, but I don't want to make it hard for the Gentiles who are turning to God by making some secondary thing a gateway to the first thing. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of J.D. Greer, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Okay, so if you're on the outside of the church looking in, it might seem like there are all kinds of rules and regulations to follow in order to be a Christian. But today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer explains how to remove these types of barriers that just may keep people from coming to Jesus. It's not about watering down the message, but sometimes laying aside our personal beliefs for the good of the body.

Today's message is creatively titled When Drinking, Politics, Cussing and Circumcision Divide. So grab your Bible and a pen and let's join Pastor J.D. in Acts chapter 15. Acts is the story of how this earthly community that is filled with the Spirit and sure of the resurrection with no money, no power, nothing else to their name, spread that gospel message over the entire planet. And along the way, Luke, who is the author of Acts, is going to stop to tell you these stories about things that happened to this first church so that you and I can learn from their example about the church that we are a part of in our day. And that brings us to Acts chapter 15. So if you have a Bible and you haven't opened it there yet, Acts chapter 15, we're going to begin right in verse 1. The church encounters a problem that I'm going to tell you could have significantly derailed the church had they not handled it exactly the way that they did.

I don't want to overstate this, but this was a subtle danger that didn't look that dangerous on the surface. But had they not done it the way that they did it in Acts 15, you and I would probably not be sitting here today. Now, I'll also tell you that a lot of people, and when they preach through the book of Acts, I've noticed this, don't preach on this text because it is about a theological debate. And theological debates can be boring, right?

Right? But this one is going to answer some really important questions. For example, what role should politics play in the church?

I mean like Republican and Democrat, that kind of stuff. How should we talk about that in the church? How should we handle gray areas like, is it okay to drink alcohol? Or if marijuana is ever legalized in North Carolina, is it okay for a Christian to smoke marijuana? And what do you do if people in your small group disagree on those questions about alcohol? How should you handle that? And even, what should you do when a new believer cusses in church? Some of you are like, this passage deals with all that? Yep. I'm going to show you that.

I'll show you right at the end, but let's unpack the story first, okay? Verse one, but some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. You see, there were 613 Jewish laws. Circumcision was just one of those. There were 612 others.

And Peter's looking at everybody. He's like, I don't know about you guys, but I never felt like I was keeping them all. And I was born a Jew. If we could barely keep those laws ourselves, and we were born Jews, why would we project this burden onto Gentiles? Verse 11, but we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

In other words, none of these laws saved us anyway. They didn't make us closer to God. It wasn't what we did that made us close to God. It's what Jesus had done. We put faith in what Jesus had done, not in what we were doing.

That's what saved us. And so if that's what makes them close to God, why are we projecting this burden onto them? Verse 12, and all the assembly fell silent. And then they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.

After they finished speaking, James replied, brothers, listen to me. It's my judgment, therefore, that, listen, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. See, we have to make it not difficult for Gentiles who are turning to God in how we do our church.

See, I would all stand up here and yell at you about the need to volunteer because I want you to do a good deed. I'm doing it because I don't want us to make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Verse 20, instead, we should write to them, the Gentiles, that is, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, and from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood. And you read that and you're like, what?

And everybody was like, whoa, wait a minute. So we just went from 613 laws down to two, which are basically avoid sexual immorality and don't offend the Jews. I mean, that's quite a reduction. Verse 28, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed idols, from blood, and from what's been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. So when they were sent off, they went down to Antioch and having gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter. And when they had read it, they rejoiced because of its encouragement.

And all the men went to the new member's class the very next week. Andy Stanley, who was a pastor down in Georgia, talks about several drifts that this text warns us to avoid. Drifts that the early church by Acts 15 is already facing. Drifts that we as a church and every church are going to face as well. I'm going to use a few of his and then add a few of my own. Every church, listen, and every Christian will face these inevitable drifts, both in the church's mission and in your personal Christian life.

Here they are. Number one, the drift from a passion for outsiders to pacifying insiders. The drift from a passion for outsiders to pacifying insiders. Every church you see tends to do this. When we first got started as a church 12 years ago, I didn't plant the church, we relaunched the church 12 years ago, we were so focused on reaching those people on the outside because that's just what we had to do. But see, now we're established. And now we've got a lot of people coming and now you've got a big budget and we got needs, we got preferences.

And so it's so easy for us to start thinking about ourselves. It's hard for me for a couple of reasons. One, first of all, I have my own preferences about what I want our church to be. Secondly, I want to make you happy too, right? I mean, I want job approval to be high and you're the ones who determine that.

And so I want to make you happy. Plus you're the ones that write me letters and tell me things you don't like in the church. People on the outside who aren't coming to church don't write and tell me the reasons they're not coming to our church. I don't get complaints from them.

I get complaints from you. So I want to reshape this church around my preferences and around the things that make you happy. But we ought not to make it hard for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

So the question is not, what do I prefer and what do you prefer? The question is, how are we going to reach those that God is bringing to himself outside of our church? In everything we do, I got to be considering people who have no voice here.

Is what we're doing making it hard for them? It is sad. And I don't mean to be judgmental here, but it is sad to go into churches. You walk in there and you feel like that there is a group of people that have been sitting in the same seat since the Revolutionary War, right? And the average age is 78.

If you're 40 years old in your mid-40s, you're in the youth group in that place. I walk in these places and I'm like, man, if the 1940s ever come back, these people are going to be ready, right? They're going to be cutting edge when they do that. But they won't change. Even though they know they're not reaching the next generation, they'll complain about that. They're like, oh, we're not reaching our, you know, we're not reaching no young people in our church, but they're not going to change.

You want to know why? This is sad. It's because they love their traditions more than they love their grandchildren, it seems. We ought not make it hard for the Gentiles, whether those Gentiles are our children, whether those Gentiles are our neighbor, we shouldn't make it difficult for them to come to God. Every church in every generation has to ask the question, are we more concerned with pacifying the insider or a passion for the outsider?

The drift from a passion for outsiders or pacified insiders. Number two, the drift from grace to law. The drift from grace to law. The ones who were calling out for circumcision were saved people. They believed they were saved by putting faith in Christ. But see, after they were saved, they started to drift back toward a rules-based relationship with God.

Because, see, that's what always happens. Martin Luther said, the human heart is hardwired for works righteousness. Works righteousness means the idea that it's what you do and how well you do it that determines how God feels about you. To update Luther's analogy, we're like a car severely out of alignment that the moment you take your hands off the wheel, it veers into the ditch of thinking that it's how well you keep the laws that determines how God approves of you. Now, our list, our law is different.

I would say probably that circumcision is probably not a big deal to most of you anymore, right? That's not a big deal to us, but we got our own list of things. And we say about those things, well, if you do these things, these are going to make you right with God. And these are going to show everybody else that you're a good Christian. They're never bad things.

They're almost always good things. Questions like, you involved in ministry, you doing a quiet time every day, you involved in a small group. How many people did you share Christ with last week? Do you adopt kids? Do you have a perfect family? Have you ever been divorced?

How much money do you give? All good things, but these become the measure of our spiritual lives and the measure by which we evaluate others. Not only, listen, does this make us lose the gospel in our own lives, it makes it really difficult for other people to come to God because they start seeing a type of profile that they have to fit before God will accept them. Have you ever been really lost? I mean, like so physically lost, like so lost you don't even know where to turn or where to start to get back. Anybody that knows me knows that I have a notoriously bad sense of direction of all the brain cells that God gave to me. Thank you. Of all the brain cells that God gave to me, I have chosen to direct none of them toward direction.

Okay. I use them all for something else. And so that means that I just cannot, I mean, I'm the worst. And the worst for me is whenever I go to a new city, like, you know, I'm traveling, if I'm staying downtown, I just think it's the coolest thing to get up in the morning and go running in downtown. That's a horrible idea for me because every single time it happens the same way. I run for 15 minutes and I'm always like, I have no idea where I am. I have no idea how I got here or how to get back. I don't even know where to start to get back.

Right? You just feel so lost. I don't even know where to begin. Do you understand that there are people who come into our church that feel that way spiritually?

I have no idea how to get even get back to the starting point. And we have this thing we present there for them, like, oh, this is what it looks like. The gospel is, listen, that Jesus has done everything necessary to make you fully right with God. And you believe not in your ability to fix yourself, you believe in what He has done to save you. And by believing that you are reconciled to God and made right with Him. And we don't ever want to communicate to people that if you'll look like this and talk like this, then you'll be right with God.

Because they're like, I don't even know how to begin that. What we want to communicate is, listen, you're saved not by what you do, but by what He's done. When Jesus said it is finished, He meant it was as finished for you as it was for the most religious person on the planet.

And by believing in what He did, not in what you can do, you will be right with God. So you'll see this drift from grace to law, which leads to a third drift. After you drift from grace to law, you're going to see a focus on internal transformation shift to one on external conformity.

A focus on internal transformation to one of external conformity. The gospel's focus, you see, is on transforming the heart. Jesus said the essence of all the law is to love God with all your heart and to love other people. He said, if you do this, then you'll keep all the laws. That's the essence of what it means to be a believer.

Now, let me just be clear on this. The Bible outlines for you what love for God looks like. You're not just like, well, I have warm feelings toward God so I can, you know, have three wives and that's just how I love God.

I mean, the Bible tells you what purity and justice and what love for God looks like. But the point is, it grows out of a heart of love for God, listen, and that heart of love for God is produced by faith in Christ. The way we say it here is, listen, love for God in you is produced by embracing the love of God for you. It is not becoming a religious righteous person that makes you love God. It is understanding what God has done for you in Christ. Believing that is what produces that heart of love for you. It is the love of God for you that produces love for God in you. In places that lose their focus on the gospel, they begin to replace a focus on inward transformation. It becomes less about loving God and loving others and begin to put an emphasis on outward conformity. And when that happens, inevitably, you got a whole host of things that become laws that determine whether you're spiritual or not. And they're not always bad things. It's just like, well, this is externally what you should look like, and that determines where you stand with God.

Now, in those days, it was circumcision. And like I told you, I just don't feel like there's many of you that probably that's a big deal to you anymore. So let me give you a few that are common in our church backgrounds.

All right. Alcohol. Alcohol.

Whether you should drink alcohol or not. I grew up with teetotalers. You know what a teetotaler is? Somebody who doesn't drink for any reason? Our church was teetotaler. I mean, we were 110 proof teetotaler, right? You just never drank alcohol for any reason whatsoever, right?

And if you'd ask them why, they actually had really good reasoning. The Bible often speaks very negatively about alcohol, warns us of the dangers. You know, one out of six people who drink alcohol become an alcoholic.

I saw a New York Times article this week that said that same thing. One out of six people who drink alcohol become an alcoholic. And their reasoning was, I wouldn't keep a dog in my house that bit one out of six people.

I wouldn't walk around with a gun that randomly shot one out of six people. Why would I keep a drink in my cabinet that destroyed the lives of one out of six people? One out of 10 children in our country grow up in a home where there's alcohol abuse. There are a hundred thousand alcohol related deaths every year. And if that is your thinking, and for that reason, you do not drink alcohol, listen, I commend you.

That is very conscientious. It's very loving towards your fellow man. But there are other Christians who say, well, just because something's abused doesn't mean we should get rid of it totally. Sex is abused. We get rid of it. Words are abused.

We all remain silent. Food is abused. Do we stop eating? If you want to talk about things that kill, last year there were a hundred thousand deaths related to alcohol.

There were 300,000 deaths related to obesity. Nobody's advocating getting rid of all desserts. Well, I mean, actually a few people are, but you know what I mean? And they'll say, even though the Bible warns us that alcohol can be abused, we clearly see people in the New Testament who were drinking fermented beverages like Jesus. Paul at one point even prescribes a little alcohol for Timothy.

Those are also good arguments. So rather than leave this as an issue of conscience, some churches pick a side and make it law. If you're going to be a member of this church, you better sign this covenant.

This is what we do here. It just seems to me that we ought to leave this as a matter of conscience. And we should, like they did there in Acts 15, we should try in deference to each other, not to offend. Isn't that the spirit of what's happening in Acts 15? I'm not going to make a new law, but I'm also going to be very conscious of people that are around me. See, if you just heard that right there, especially the second part, and you're like, oh yeah, can't wait to get back to my small group.

I'm going to be like, in your face, as I open up a Heineken in front of them and be like, I told y'all. That just shows how little of the gospel you actually understand. If your attitude really is so selfish and all about me that you would say, well, forget what everybody else thinks.

This is what I'm doing. I'm free in Christ. Then, you know, it just shows you how, see, we love each other and we are following our consciences. And listen, when you have a church full of people that are not uniform about some of these things, it makes for some really interesting unity, doesn't it?

It'd be easier if we all disagreed on everything all the time. I told you, I've told you before, in my marriage, it made for some interesting unity because my wife comes from a Presbyterian background and they are free in Christ all over the place, right? And so, you know, I've told you that when we got married, our compromise was I made her quit drinking. I baptized her and I consented to the fact that it was all predestined to happen.

That was the way that we formed our union. Her pastor, her Presbyterian pastor told me when we got married, he said, the only difference between a Presbyterian and a Baptist on the issue of alcohol is a Presbyterian will actually wave hi to you in the ABC store. The alcohol, the Baptist will pretend like you're not even there, right?

So it's been interesting as we've formed this more perfect union. But the point is, listen, this is what gospel charity, it's what it leads us to do, right? Here's another one, Christian appearance or vocabulary. Christian appearance and vocabulary.

Some of you grew up in churches where Christians dress in certain ways. No tattoos. You shouldn't have a tattoo on your body, you know, because this is the body Jesus gave you and you shouldn't mark it up or poke it up with any piercing. So that's just what, if that's your conviction, seriously, that's fine. I understand, you know, why you would think that way, but let's not make that into a new law.

Or how about this one? The use of profanity. Hear me out of this. Some Christians have a certain way that we talk and we have reasons for that.

That's fine. You don't hear me using profanity, right? I don't want to judge somebody else's heart, especially somebody new, just because they haven't learned to talk like us yet. You follow what I'm saying? Now, I'm not saying it's okay to, you know, just go have at it.

I'm just saying I understand that external conformity doesn't always match internal transformation. The other day, I was standing right down here after the sermon, a guy who was pretty new to our church, I could tell, he just sort of gave off that vibe, walks past me and says, Pastor, that was one H-E-L-L of a sermon. And I said, thank you very much, right? He doesn't know. He doesn't know that that's probably not how you compliment your pastor. I love it.

I love it. I was sitting in a discipleship group with a guy who was a brand new Christian. And I was describing something, I mean, there's something awesome about God. And I was describing this and he's just looking at me, his eyes are just wrapped attention. And he goes, usually with his mouth, I saw him, he kind of whispered, he was like, D-A-M-N. I was like, he just worshiped with a cuss word. I mean, seriously.

Now, after a while, he'll probably figure out we don't talk like that. And there's a reason that we, you know, talk in different ways. But the point is, I don't want external conformity to eclipse what God is doing in somebody's heart. Politics.

Here's one. I think the Bible needs to shape how we think about everything. I think we need to learn to think biblically about everything from taxation to immigration, reform. But for a lot of people, certain positions become like religious law, an external sign of whether you're right with God or not. And listen, maybe you're right about your political position. Maybe you are.

Maybe you got good reasons. And I'm not telling you should soften on your position, but I don't want to make it hard for the Gentiles who are turning to God by making some secondary thing a gateway to the first thing. Let's have the discussions, but let's have them in the right way and let's never make them the main thing because the main thing is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Hey, I'll give you the perfect proof of this. Jesus had 12 disciples, right?

You ever read, you probably read right over this and never noticed it. One of the disciples was a guy named Simon the Zealot. You know what that means? He was a guy that believed that Israel ought to secede from Rome and do whatever it took to get away from them. You also had in the list, Matthew the tax collector, which was a guy that took up tax money for Rome. You had a tea party conservative and a big government liberal in the same group of disciples. And somehow Jesus brought them both together and I'm sure they had some great discussions around the campfire. But see, the point was, listen, the main thing remained the main thing. And so people of wildly different political positions could come together and find the gospel in the same place. Those three shifts, those three drifts destroy the forward movement of the church in every generation. Do you remember what they are?

I don't, hold on. From a passion for outsiders to pacifying insiders, from grace to law, from a focus on the internal to a focus on the external. Guys, this was a moment. It was a moment of subtle but incredible danger for the church. It could have ended the rapid expanse of the Christian movement right there in Acts 15. Many churches go through this same chapter and they don't make it. And they're dying. Do not get self-righteous and do not think that we're past this chapter.

Every year we got to re-go through this chapter. I don't want to make it hard for the Gentiles in our community who are turning to God. I don't want to make it hard for them.

And so I'm always going to be asking the question, not what do you want, not what I want, but how do we make it easy for them? If the gospel is offensive, let's make nothing else offensive. And if you're not a Christian, listen here, let me tell you what you should take out of this. God wants to know you.

That's the gospel. He cares so much about you that when you were alienated from him, he came to earth to rescue you and died in your place, suffering the full penalty for your sin in your place so that you could be reconciled to him. No matter how lost you are right now, no matter how lost you feel, you can be fully reconciled to God because the basis of your reconciliation is not in your ability to fix yourself. It's in what he has done on your behalf. Jesus' last words on the cross were not go fix yourself and come back. It was it is finished. And if you will believe that it is finished on your behalf, you can right now, this moment, be fully reconciled to God.

All you got to do is receive it. Maybe you've been overwhelmed because you look at a church full of people and you feel like I'm just not like those people. Listen, it's not becoming like us that makes you a believer. It is simply believing that Jesus loved you, that he wants to know you and receiving his gift as your salvation. No matter how lost you might feel, you don't have to clean up before you come to him. He'll start that cleaning process when he comes into your life. Aren't you thankful for that? You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor, Author and Theologian J.D.

Greer. Not every believer is supposed to become a pastor or move overseas as a paid missionary, but we are all called to be on mission. Around Summit Life, we say it this way. You're either a missionary or you're the mission field. We've got a great new resource for you that gets more in depth about the role of the Holy Spirit in your life. It's called Sent the Book of Acts Volume 2, and we'd love to get a copy of it into your hands. Our prayer is that through this teaching series on the air and through the workbook that we created to accompany it, that you'll be encouraged to join God's mission and leverage the opportunities and gifts that you've been given to reach your community with the gospel. Ask for Sent the Book of Acts study guide when you donate at the suggested level of $25 or more. Just give us a call at 866-335-5220 or request the ACT study guide when you give online at jdgreer.com. While you're on the website, you can also sign up for our email list to get ministry updates, information about new resources and Pastor JD's latest blog post delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up when you go to jdgreer.com. Be sure to tune in tomorrow when Pastor JD shows us three vastly different examples of people who found hope in the gospel message. That's Friday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.