Unpopular Love

Today on Summit Life, a challenging message from Pastor J.D.

Greer. We tend to put helping the needy around us under the category of charity, right? And so if you don't help the needy around you, we would say that you are stingy.

But according to Amos, God sees a failure to help the poor as injustice, a more serious thing. Well, welcome to another week here on Summit Life, the gospel-centered Bible teaching ministry of J.D. Greer, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. We're never going to truly repent. Today, Pastor J.D. describes a period in Israel's history when God confronted his people about their sin and called them to repentance.

It's part of our series titled Come Back to Me. And Pastor J.D. called this message Unpopular Love. Today, what I want to do is I want to introduce you to the most unpopular of all the prophets, and that is famous Amos, the most despised man in Israel. Amos is our third in our five-week series on the minor prophets. Now, a couple of quick things I want you to note about Amos. First is that Amos was unusual among the prophets and that Amos was not a vocational prophet like most of the other prophets. In the very first chapter, Amos tells us that he was a normal, shall we say, blue collar worker kind of guy.

He was a cattle farmer who also tended a field of sycamore trees. In other words, he hadn't gone to seminary to learn to write sermons for a living. He was simply a man that was trying to do his job when his spirit became so burdened and overwhelmed with what he saw around him that he couldn't stay silent anymore. And see, I want to point out before we begin, before we get started, that some of the greatest contributions in church history have come through ordinary people, non-ordained people, non-seminary trained people like Amos. It was ordinary people that brought about the most extraordinary reforms in the church.

I'm thinking of William Wilberforce, a layman who led in the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain, or William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, a lay person who did more to mobilize the evangelical church to care for the poor and urban centers than anybody else in history, or Rosa Parks, an ordinary woman whose boldness provoked many pastors to stand up against the injustices of segregation. Second, Amos was one of the most unpopular prophets in Israel's history because Amos brought a message of warning during the time of great national prosperity. The year was approximately 800 BC, Jeroboam II was king, and Israel was still surging under the prosperity that had been brought by David and King Solomon. They were the unchallenged, dominant military power in the region. They controlled the trade routes to the Middle East, which had led to a great financial boom.

Their stock market was good and the land was at peace. So when Amos shows up with a warning about a coming financial disaster and military destruction, what he said just seemed utterly unrealistic. In fact, some of the things he said just sounded unbelievable to them.

I'll give you a couple examples. Chapter 2, verse 15, the archer will not stand his ground. And he who is stout of hard among the mighty men shall flee away naked in that day, declares the Lord. The archers in Israel were a great source of national pride.

They were the crack warriors, fearless, devastating marksmen. Saying they will flee away naked in that day would be like saying to us, your Navy SEALs will collapse into the fetal position and cry for their mamas. Chapter 3, verse 15, I will strike the winter house along with the summer house.

And the houses of ivory shall perish, declares the Lord. What you should read in there is that these people had really nice houses, you know, multi-thousand square foot houses. And then they also had a winter house for vacation and a different summer house for vacation. When you got three houses across the country to live in, that means that you are pretty financially set. They felt sure that they were secure from any financial disaster. So the idea of ruin to them was just unrealistic.

But you see, mighty empires and mighty men and women are not usually brought down by financial or military disaster. They're brought down by sin, by corruption from within. And that's what's happening in Israel. So let's take a look at his message and let's try to see what's in it for us.

The first six chapters of Amos read like one sustained sermon that Amos preached, he says, on a feast day, a national holiday in Israel. In there, we're going to see the charge against Israel. We're going to see a counterfeit message. Then we're going to see the excuses that Israel brought up. And then we're going to see the difference between true and false hope.

So let's start with the charge. Amos chapter one tells us that during a national holiday celebration, Amos stood up in the center of one of Israel's most sacred cities, a city called Bethel. And there he started proclaiming the Lord's judgment on six surrounding nations, Damascus, Philistia, Tyre, Moab, countries like that, nations that were all competitors with and enemies to Israel. Now, that part of his sermon was undoubtedly well received because you know that one of the fastest ways to build a friendship with somebody is to get together and complain against the same people. Everybody likes to hear about judgment on their enemies, right? And I'm sure as he went through the judgments on these nations, the crowd was all nodding their heads and they were like, Amen, preach it, preacher. But then in chapter two, he suddenly pivots and he starts talking about Israel's sin, which did not go over quite so well. He talks about them in the third person and he says, as if he's not talking about the very people that are standing right in front of him, he starts talking about the charge against Israel. And here's the kind of things that he says.

Chapter two, verse six. They sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. In other words, they exploit the poor.

Some silver in those days was a synonym for a loan or a huge debt. You see, the world in economy in Amos' day was changing. Up until that time, Israel had existed primarily as a system of agrarian farms, a collection of localized farmers.

But in order to keep up in the new world economy, they had to focus on mass producing a few specialized cash crops, which is fine. But a few people had figured out in Israel how to rig the system through monopolies or inflation and that kind of stuff. And so they had put all the rest of the farmers in Israel into deep debt. Things were so bad that poorer people were going into debt just to buy a pair of shoes, which is what he's referring to there.

They're going to sell the needy for a pair of sandals. They're going into debt just to stay alive. In those days, there was no such thing as bankruptcy. So if you couldn't pay your debts, you went into forced servitude.

So in other words, people were having to sell themselves virtually into slavery just to stay alive. He continues, he said, they trampled the head of the poor into the dust of the earth. That means that they use their riches to twist the justice system in favor of themselves.

Later in the book, he's going to describe how the rich manipulated the court system to benefit themselves in ways that the poor could simply not do. Verse seven again, and they turn aside the way of the afflicted. That means they were just apathetic toward those around them who were suffering as long as it didn't affect them.

They lived lives of ease and comfort and luxury in the face of great suffering. An important thing to notice here is that God sees this as a breach of justice. He's going to make that clear in chapter five.

He's going to reuse the word justice over and over again. I point that out because we tend to put helping the needy around us under the category of charity, right? And so if you don't help the needy around you, we would say that you are stingy. But according to Amos, God sees a failure to help the poor as injustice, a more serious thing. The word justice in Hebrew is mishpat, and it occurs over 200 times in the Old Testament. And usually when you see it, you're going to see four classes of people brought up in the same context.

You're going to see the widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. What one scholar calls the quartet of the vulnerable. The just person in the Old Testament is the one who is involved helping these four groups. Not just the one that's doing business rightly, but the one that is involved, helping these four groups be empowered.

He'll give you an example. Deuteronomy 10 18, talking about the righteous man. He executes justice, mishpat, for the fatherless and the widow. And he loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Note what you need to notice there is the interchangeable nature of justice and giving somebody who is in need food. One scholar said it this way, in the Old Testament, justice is not just putting down the oppressor, that's part of it, but it's also helping to lift up the oppressed. The just person in the Old Testament is the one who sees his or her resources as belonging really to the whole community.

A gift that they have been given to steward for the benefit of the whole community. But see people in Amos's day didn't see it that way. No, they saw their riches as their own. Well, I'm the one who earned this. I'm the one who figured out how to get all this.

I got up early, I stayed up late, I worked hard. And so I deserve to use these things for my benefit. And therefore they were oblivious to those around them who didn't have them. Maybe the most politically incorrect verse in the book of Amos, Amos chapter four, verse one, hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, bring that we may drink. He refers to the housewives of Israel as the cows of Bashan.

That takes boldness and preaching to a whole new level. One commentator said, well, obviously the image didn't mean back then what it means in our language today. Yeah, but he still called them cows. These women, Amos said, spent their days spending their husband's money and pursuing luxury when people were suffering all around them.

These women didn't have to work, which was great, but they cared only about fashion and vacations and staying in great shape and eating organic and driving nice cars and spent their days pursuing those things while people around them were dying. Back to his description here in chapter two of what's going on in Israel. He says this, chapter two, verse seven.

Actually, let me just summarize this for you because it's worded a little strange in the verse. Amos calls out their complicity with the new sexual order of the day. Israel was undergoing its own version of a sexual revolution and God's people were just kind of going along with it. It was easier just to kind of comply, even if they didn't participate in it, to just go along with it. Even, you know, and not speak out against it. They didn't really preach against it.

Nobody confronted anybody else. They just kind of conformed to the new sexual standards of the day. Maybe the worst part of all this is verse six and seven there. God says, yet it was I, yet it was I who destroyed the Amorites before you. It was I who brought you up out of the land of Egypt and I led you 40 years in the wilderness to possess the land of the Amorite.

In other words, God says, I was the one who gave you this land by grace. I was the one who fought your battles. I rescued you when you were in slavery. And the way you respond to that is now by exploiting others and by twisting the system in your favor and by hoarding what I gave you. He goes on, he says, he says, and I raised up some of your sons for prophets, but you commanded the prophet saying, you shall not prophesy. After I delivered you, you didn't even know what I wanted, what I had to say. I mean, you could trust me to deliver you out of slavery from Egypt, but you couldn't trust me to guide you in your life. And so you just turned a deaf ear to what I said.

And you thought that the things I was saying didn't really apply to you. Most infuriating to God in all of this, Amos said, is that they did all this while remaining fervent in their religious devotion. They came right on into church acting like nothing was wrong.

It was like Isaiah who prophesied right after Amos would say, these people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. They stroll on into church and sing my praises, but their hearts are a million miles elsewhere. And that's demonstrated by what occupies them the rest of the week. Because you realize that what you really believe about God is not demonstrated by how loudly you worship on Sunday.

It's demonstrated by how you live the rest of the week. Well, when Amos got done with this section of the sermon, the amens had died down significantly. It reminds me of the story I heard about the woman in church who was so excited to hear the pastor was finally gonna preach a sermon against sin. So the pastor gets up there and he starts preaching against drunkenness and pornography and she's like, amen, preach it, preacher. He stands up there and he starts preaching about corruption in Washington and she's like, preach it, turns to her neighbor and is like, he is on fire this morning. Then he starts talking about the sin of gossip and he's like, he just needs to mind his own business. He's preaching way too long.

Well, the bridge between Amos' day and our day is not a hard one to make, right? I can stand up here all day long and talk about moral corruption in Hollywood, the violence and degradation of women depicted in certain kinds of rap music or how vulgar TV shows have gotten or the secularist agenda being crammed down our throat by media and the education establishment. I can talk about activist judges who are misusing their positions in our country to curtail religious freedoms. I can talk about the corruption and hypocrisy of groups like Planned Parenthood, the evils of Islamic terrorism or the wickedness of religious persecution in places like Russia or China or North Korea.

And I can talk about how bad all those things are and how surely God has displeased and the judgment of God has come in on those things. And we're all like, amen, preach it, preacher. Just like Amos' audience did. But y'all, what happens when the spotlight then turns on us the way that Amos did with Israel?

In fact, let's just go back through it. How many of Israel's sins do we also see replicated in the church? Don't we live in a country where justice has often been perverted in favor of the rich? Where too often we have seen underprivileged or minorities oppressed, even at times treated like they were subhuman. In a country where the rich can still work the justice system to benefit themselves. Where minorities have historically been treated differently before judges or in schools. And there is plenty of evidence that it continues to happen.

No, not everywhere all the time, but certainly in enough places that it should bother us. And maybe we're not personally guilty of it ourselves, but do we show empathy for those to whom it is happening and respond like we would respond if it were happening to one of our kids? On another front, sometimes I hear Christians justify abortion. Because they say, well, you know, imagine what her life would have been like if she'd had to have the kid. She had so much going for her.

She was the only one in her family to get to college. And that would have just messed everything up. As if that justified the taking of human life, the killing of somebody made in God's image. Is that not also a perversion of justice? I know Christians who live in sexual immorality throughout the week and then stroll in and sit in church on the weekend because, oh yeah, they want God to be a part of their lives. But in this area, they want to do what they want. And then they come in on the weekend and sing, I have decided to follow Jesus.

It's like A.W. Tozer used to say, Christians don't usually tell lies, they sing them. Or those who no longer tell the truth to their friends about what the Bible says about sexual immorality, because it's just easier to go along with it and not get the reputation.

For being that guy or that religious chick who's always saying unpopular things. You might not be doing it, but you're going along with it. You're complicit with it. Maybe in our church this weekend, we have married men and women who are cheating on their spouse and they justify it by like, well, you just don't understand how bad my marriage is. You don't understand how poor I have a job, my spouse.

I'm just lonely and I'm needy. Or we made a mistake getting married back when we got married. As if that excuses what they're doing. There are plenty of Christians in churches across America who work in businesses that use questionable, even if legal means in order to exploit those with less economic power. And of course, just as in Amos' day, we have Christians who live in luxury while people around them perish.

Evangelical Christians, which is the kind of Christians that we normally get labeled as. Evangelical Christians on average give about 2.4% of their income to God's work. And a lot don't give anything. A lot don't give anything.

A lot don't give anything to it. Jesus, who was a prophet similar to Amos, said to the religious people in his day, he looked at them and he says, you know what? He says, you tithe. You tithe, which means give 10%. You tithe everything in your life. You tithe down to the spice and the mint and the cumin.

I've told you this before, but when you tithe your spice drawer, that's varsity. When you show up at the offering and not only you give 10% of your income, but you're like, here's some spices and some cumin and here's 10% of my pepper. And Jesus says to them, that's great. I'm glad you tithe all those things, but you haven't even gotten to the weightier parts of the law.

The weightier parts of the law are to love other people like you love yourself. And that means to use your money to show mercy to them and use your money to take care of people, whether it goes beyond 10% or not. Most Christians in America aren't even at the tithe.

They wouldn't even have reached the standard that Jesus was saying didn't even get to the weightier parts of the law. By the way, 80% of those at this church aren't there either. And the irony is the richer you get, the less percentage wise you tithe.

That's also true of this church. The families in our church who self identify as making less than 45,000 a year are twice as likely to be tithers as those who self identify as making more than 150,000. I've heard one more wealthy guy justify it by saying, well, that's just a huge sum of money. He's like, you know, I mean, he says, when I made 25,000 a year, of course I'd die. But now there's just so much more money and I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to do with that.

And I'm like, right. And God gave you that huge amount of money for you to steward, not to insulate yourself from suffering. He gave it to you for you to help alleviate suffering. You might make a huge amount of money, but there's a huge amount of people who don't know Jesus. And there's a huge amount of suffering in our world and God gives it to you. He multiplies it and he blesses you so that you can use it to alleviate suffering, not to insulate yourself from it.

In fact, let me ask that question to you. Which direction is your money taking you? The money that you make, which direction is it taking you? Is it taking you away from pain and away from suffering and inconvenience? Or is the money taking you deeper into the pain and suffering and inconvenience of others? Be very careful how you answer that question. Because how you answer it will determine whether or not you are really a disciple of Jesus, or whether you're just a religious hypocrite like Amos is talking about.

Let's be honest. I am talking to a group of people, and I am part of a group of people who for the most part have grown up in privilege, like the people of Amos' day. For some of you, it has been the privilege of being a part of the majority culture so that you tend to get the benefit of the doubt when others do not. For others of you, it is the privilege of getting a good education and having a good job or growing up in a country where you had lots of opportunity. Even being lower wage in this country carries with it privileges that some of the richest people in other countries do not have. Trust me, I've been there and I've lived there. All of you are privileged. Let me be very clear. Usually there is nothing immoral about being in a position of privilege.

There's nothing that you should feel guilty about. But justice demands that we use that position of privilege to help empower those who are in the position of privilege. Those who don't currently share it.

To make sure that they get treated equally under the law and that the doors of opportunity stay as open to them as they do to us. We love talking about the sins of others. But would not Amos probably say many of the same things about us that he was saying about Israel? And y'all listen, I know that talking about our sins is not gonna make me popular. I wonder when I was going through this and just trying to listen to the Holy Spirit and trying to really interpret Amos correctly, I wondered, I was like, we're gonna have people walk out while I'm speaking.

Or maybe they walked out just now at one of our campuses, or at least they're composing angry emails to me in their mind. But listen, I know, I know. This is not popular. I don't like doing this, but here's why we have to do it. God makes clear to Amos, if you want my presence, you will take sin seriously. And those who don't take sin seriously, don't take me seriously.

People who treat sin lightly don't take God seriously in churches that tolerate sin alienate Christ. So that's the charge he gives against Israel. Well, sadly, Amos' voice was not the only one heard that day. There was another preacher, TV preacher, big ministry. Everybody knew his name, bought his books.

Listen to him on the radio. His name was Amaziah. Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, you notice he's got a pretty good position. He sent the Jeroboam king of Israel saying, Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel. The land is not able to bear his words. This other preacher, Amaziah, also claiming to speak for God, rose up to oppose Amos. He told the king that Amos was a radical and a troublemaker.

He convinced Jeroboam to banish Amos. If we let God's word guide us, we'll hear not only what we want to hear, but what we need to hear. That's an important truth to remember from our teaching today here on Summit Life, with Pastor J.D.

Greer. There's more to come in this study, but in the meantime, you can listen again, free of charge at jdegreer.com. This is the last week to get our latest resource. It's a 20-day devotional from Pastor J.D., and it's meant to help us fully understand the love of Christ. It's called, What is the Gospel? What we learn pretty quickly about the Bible is that from the Old Testament to the New Testament, it all tells one story of redemption. And what we also find is that we can't separate the gospel experience from the mission experience. I recently asked Pastor J.D.

what that means exactly. One of the things we say is that if you truly experience the gospel, it's going to always propel you outward to carry the gospel to others. You see, the stark reality is that at most, only one third of our world is Christian. More than anything else, you and I have a responsibility in our generation to make sure they have a chance to hear the gospel before it's too late. And so I want to see us at Summit Life take that responsibility seriously. We do that through the radio. We do that by going on mission trips. We do it by planting new churches.

We want you to be a part of all of those things. If you'll reach out to us at jdgrier.com, we would love for you to become a gospel partner with us, just as a way of saying thank you to you. We would love to put into your hands some of the resources that we provide through this, like this new 20-day devotional I have called, What is the Gospel? That'll take you more deep into the gospel. And I promise you, when you press into it, you're going to find this sweet compulsion pushing you outward to carry the gospel to people who don't know it, whether that's a son or daughter who lives in your house, a neighbor across the street, or somebody in a country far across the world whose language you don't know. But you know that you've got to do something to help get the gospel to them.

So come check it out at jdgrier.com and join up with us today. This brand new 20-day devotional written by Pastor JD comes with our thanks when you donate to support this ministry at the suggested level of $25 or more. We also have a special bonus gift this month just for you. So for an additional small gift of $10, we'll send you the Book of John scripture notebook. When you give, remember to ask for your copy of the, What is the Gospel? 20-day devotional. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or it might be easier to give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Benovitch inviting you to join us again next time as we continue our study of the Minor Prophets right here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.