The Passive, Part 2

Today on Summit Life, an important challenge from Pastor J.D. Greer. Jesus said, He that is not for me, He that is not all alone with me, is against me. If Jesus is who He says He is, then what He says about eternity is more important than anything else in your life.

Do not make Pilate's mistake of taking eternal things to life. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host Molly Vidovich. Okay, this might seem silly, but have you ever come home and realized that your yard's gotten out of control? Weeds are everywhere and it's like a tribe of gophers have moved in and created a network of tunnels so intricate that they could survive underground for years. Nobody wants their yard that way, but sometimes it's easier to just ignore it and put off mowing until later.

And then before you know it, it's jungle warfare in your backyard. Well, today Pastor J.D. explains that a lot of us have a similar attitude towards faith.

We might not be actively rejecting God, but we aren't willing to make a decision to cut down the weeds and follow Him either. Pastor J.D. titled this message the passive. So let's turn to John chapter 18. We'll begin reading in verse 4. As the chapter opens, Judas has betrayed Jesus and he shows up in the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus.

He's got a group of armed soldiers with him. Verse 4, then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, whom do you seek? So they answered in verse 5, we seek Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus said to them, I am he.

Now in Greek, there's no he, so it's just I am, which is of course the Hebrew name for God. So verse 6, when Jesus said to them, I am, they drew back and they fell on the ground, which was clue number one that this was a bad idea. So he reaches down to help them up, verse 7, and asked them again, whom do you seek? And this time they said, much more meekly I might add, uh, Jesus of Nazareth, sir, there's not too much trouble, we can come back later if it's inconvenient. Jesus answered, I told you that I was he. So if you seek me, let these men go. This was to fulfill the word that had been spoken.

Of those whom you gave me, I have not lost even one. Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear. Now Peter's kind of late to the party, because if you remember, at the Garden of Gethsemane, he was, he was taking a nap.

So he's groggy and he's grumpy and he just shows up swinging. Well luckily he missed, just, you know, hacked off his ear. The servant's name was Malchus. So Jesus said to Peter, put your sword in its sheath.

Peter, shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me? Now in Luke's account of this, Luke adds that Jesus at that point reached down, picked up the guy's ear, and reattached it, which is clue number two that this is a bad idea. So the band of soldiers and their captain and their officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him. First they led him to Annas, for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was the high priest that year. It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people.

Now throughout this chapter, the Apostle John is going to note how Caiaphas accidentally fulfills every single part of God's plan in prophecy. The high priest then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching. Jesus answered them, I spoke openly to the world.

I've always taught publicly in the synagogues and in the temple where all the Jews come together. There's nothing that I've said in secret, so why do you ask me? Ask those who heard me and ask them what I said to them. When he said these things, one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand saying, is that how you answer the high priest? Jesus answered him, if what I said is wrong then bear witness with me about the wrong, but if what I said is right, why do you strike me? Verse 28, then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor's headquarters.

It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor's headquarters so that they would not be defiled, but so they could eat the Passover. Verse 29, so Pilate went outside to them and he said, what accusation do you bring against this man? They answered him, if this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you. So Pilate's like, well, that's not really an answer, so take him for yourselves and judge him by your own law. The Jews said to him, it's not lawful for us to put anybody to death, which is a lie.

So Pilate's in a tough place. He enters his headquarters again and calls Jesus and says to him, are you really the king of the Jews? Jesus answered, do you say this of your own accord or did others say that to you about me? Pilate answered, am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priest have delivered you over to me.

What have you done? Jesus answered, my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my serpents would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews, but my kingdom, you see, is not from the world. Then Pilate said to him, so you are a king? And Jesus answered, you say that I'm a king? For this purpose, I was born and for this purpose, I've come into the world.

What's that purpose? To bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.

Pilate says to him, verse 38, what is truth? After he'd said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told him, I find no guilt in him, but you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want to release, release to you the king of the Jews? And they cried out again, no, not this man, give us Barabbas. Now Barabbas, you see, was a robber, a rebel, a murderer, an extortionist.

That's who God chose to play you in this narrative. And that was intentional because he is trying to show you that no matter who you are or what you've done, Jesus' death can free you. You want to measure? You want to measure for how wide, how high, how deep, and how broad the love of God is for you?

You want to measure? The cross is the measure of that love. So I repeat to you, this is words of John Owen, I gave them to you a few weeks ago, the greatest unkindness, the greatest insult you could ever give to Jesus is to doubt his love for you. The price that he paid there, he paid because of your sin. What he did there, he did to save you from your sin. Thus you can be sure there is no sin so bad, no wickedness so great, no person so lost that the blood of Jesus cannot wash it away. Your sin is great, it is. God's grace is greater still. Do not insult the blood of Jesus by suggesting that your sin is too great for his forgiveness.

Because the point is no longer the size of your sin, the point is the magnitude of his grace. Two things are contrasted in this story, the gravity of Jesus and the levity of Pilate. Gravity means weight, levity means weightlessness.

That's where we get the word levitate from, it's something that's weightless. In this chapter you see Jesus showing the utmost gravity and Pilate dismisses it with, what is truth? What is truth? Truth is what's standing in front of you. Truth is what you built your life on. Truth is about to be crucified for you and you're just going to dismiss it with all what is truth.

I don't have the convenience to be able to figure it out yet. I've got political matters to deal with. Even when Peter, even when Pilate's convinced of Jesus' innocence, he won't act on it, he defers.

He washes his hands of the matter saying it's just too costly to render an opinion right now so I'm just going to back out and give no opinion. I mean really his opinions about Jesus' innocence are irrelevant when you think about that because his convictions either weigh on the matter lack the gravity to change his course. And there is no doubt that Jesus' seriousness, Jesus' gravity throughout this chapter bothered Pilate, I mean really bothered Pilate. In fact it tells us that Pilate was afraid. In chapter 19 verse 8 because he was plagued by a few questions.

He knew of Jesus' power. I mean you know that whole thing with knocking the soldiers down with your name, you know that got talked about because that doesn't happen every day. I'm telling you I got to say his name, we all fell on our cans, we don't know what happened to us. It's like some guy pushed us. You know that whole thing about Malchus is you're cut off, you know that got talked about. Here's a guy with seemingly unlimited power. Not only is he not using it, he's not even defending himself and that is bothering Pilate. Why don't you say something?

Don't you hear what they're saying? And then Pilate saw him get beaten. He saw that bloody heap of a man who could have stopped it with just a word. He sees him there and those wounds are screaming out at Pilate, you've got to decide about me. You can't just punt this and say what is truth? So what does Pilate do?

He just covers it up with some kind of levity. I'm a politician, I don't have the luxury to sit around and think about this kind of stuff. What is truth? What is truth? How does anybody know anyway?

That's how you know. What's Jesus going through and what's he doing it for? What is truth? Truth is this thing that is now a bloody heap in front of you who says he's doing it for you.

By the way, we didn't even read this part. Pilate gets a message from his wife that says, I had a dream because of him. Do not touch this man, he is innocent. Pilate has these flashes of gravity and these wounds of Jesus scream out for a verdict. But Pilate just punts it away and says, I'll decide on this later.

What is truth? You want to know who Pilate is today? You want to know who Pilate is today? Pilate is that group of you that are here that refuse to decisively act on the lordship of Jesus. That's who Pilate is. Don't you make the mistake of thinking that Pilate is a historical person that we read about and that we put into the story of Jesus and we refer to in the Apostles Creed and that's his purpose. Pilate is that group of you who come to church who are not against Jesus, who are here.

Maybe your parents have always brought you, that's why you're here. You're not against Jesus, but you are not fully in with Jesus. You're not. You're listening to me, you're like, I'm changing a few things. One day, one day I'll make this decision. One day I'll get to it. One day when I have kids. One day when I'm older. Right now, what I'm concerned about now, I'm concerned about my marriage, I'm concerned about my career, I'm concerned about my friends, I'm concerned about graduating.

Right? And Jesus looks at Pilate and says, you got to decide. He that is not for me is against me. You realize Pilate had no part of this crucifixion. Pilate washed his hands of the matter, but he didn't step in and defend Jesus either. And so that means that those of you who are not fully for Jesus, those you are not 100% in and surrender to him as Lord, like Pilate, you are in the camp of those who are against him.

Or here's another group of, kind of, Pilate today. It's a group of people I've heard recently begin to refer to themselves, I think this is a new word, they call themselves apotheist. Apotheist is somebody who believes in God. Atheist, somebody who believes there's no God. Agnostic, somebody who's not sure. Apotheist, somebody who's not sure and doesn't care.

And this is now kind of cool on college campus, kind of vogue on college campuses. Be like, I'm not sure if there's a God in me, I don't care. I don't care. I mean, you realize that right or wrong, this is the most important question you will ever consider, ever. That has to be considered, does it not? Eternal insanity, when you take the most important question ever and you just brush it off and say, what is truth? How are we supposed to know that? That's something I'll get to later. What is it?

What is it? That's the least logical, least sane, but it's where the majority of people that walk on our college campuses are. But every once in a while, every once in a while, something will rattle you, just like Pilate got rattled here. Something happened, a funeral, I see it happen there. You go to a funeral of a friend who dies when they're young. Has that ever happened to you? And you stand there in front of their coffin and something is deeply disturbing because it feels unnatural. It feels surreal. What if I told you that was the end breaking of eternity and that's probably the most real feeling you will ever have in your life, because you live under the delusion that there's nothing really eternal about life and what is happening is in that moment heaven and hell are yawning before you and it scares you to death and you run away from it and you cover it over with levity.

Some moment of fear where you realize how fragile life is or you have a moment of conviction. It happens every week here. I'm preaching on something and the Holy Spirit is putting his finger on some of you saying, this is wrong.

You got to change this. You got to walk with me and you get out, you go to lunch, and by the time lunch is over you have completely forgotten about it and put it aside. Or there are things about Jesus that intrigue you. Maybe they come up when you read the Bible. They come up in sermons like this one.

Or how about this? You see Jesus's power demonstrated in the life of your friends like Malchus's friends saw it in his life. And you're like, I don't know what's happened to my friends.

I don't know what's going on. And you have a moment of gravity like Pilate had, but you sweep it away with levity. It was not unbelief that sent Pilate to hell. It was indifference. That's what the philosopher, one of my favorites, Blaise Pascal said, ultimately in our day, in our culture, what keeps most people from Jesus is not unbelief.

What keeps them from Jesus is indifference. My friend, do you realize how serious this is? You understand I'm not up here because this is my job. I don't do what I do every week because this is how we build a church and I'm after a big audience. We do what we do when I preach like I do because I believe that your response to this kind of message, your entire eternity hangs on it. And then there are people who leave here, I know, and they're like, he's crazy. I don't know what's wrong with that guy. I mean, what's he yelling about?

He's passionate and all this. I had a girl come to me last night. She's got saved here. She said, first time I came to the church, you scared me to death. I never heard anybody stand up here and do what you did.

That just scared me to death. There's a reason that we talk like this because we believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life that what he was offering was not a self-improvement program that you could get from Buddha or Confucius or Muhammad or the latest Deprock Chopra of the day. We believe he was doing something here that you could not do, which was living a life that you could never live and then dying a death that you were condemned to die so that he could substitute for you. And without him, you're lost. That's why we do what we do.

It's gravity that is just coming, bursting out through this. Many people can't believe simply because they don't give the question the proper weight. Now that theme comes to a head in Pilate, but it appears all throughout the book of John.

Let me show you this real quick. John 5 44, Jesus says, look, how can you believe you who receive glory from one another and don't seek the glory that comes from the only God? How can you, how can you believe? Remember I showed you that the word glory in Hebrew is the word kabod, which means weight. You know what he's saying?

Let me translate it for you. How can you believe you who care so much about what everybody else thinks about you and care so little about what God thinks about you? That's what he's saying. You'll never come to believe because you never learned to put the proper weight on God himself. Jesus repeats that in a different form. John 7 17. I love this verse. If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority.

You catch that? What is the prerequisite for knowing that Jesus is the truth? For being willing to follow that truth wherever it would lead. That's the prerequisite. Many of you can't know that Jesus is the truth, and it's not an intellectual problem.

It's a heart problem. Problem is you wouldn't follow truth wherever it led, and the proof of that is the fact that you're here not following the truth that you know with all of your heart. That's what Pilate's problem was. Pilate ends when he knows Jesus is innocent by saying, what is truth? What is truth? I was sharing Christ with a Muslim girl one time who said to me, she said, there's no way I could believe this. There's no way I could believe it because if I did, it would mean that I would have a rift with my family, and I might even lose my life. And I read to her, John 7 17, and said, you realize according to that verse, the reason you can't believe it is because you feel that way, because you think those things are more important than Jesus. Because a prerequisite to following Jesus, a prerequisite to knowing Jesus is that you are committed from the beginning to going whatever he tells you to do and going wherever he tells you to go.

And until the question has that kind of weight in your heart, he will hide himself from you. You see, when I speak every weekend, I'm speaking to at least a couple thousand people who would fit right in that category. You come every week. Honestly, I'm not, please hear this charitably, I'm not even sure why you're here. Maybe you're here because you feel like you owe this to your parents, they raised you this way, but you're not all in with Jesus. You're not fully behind it.

You're not pursuing him. Jesus said, he that is not for me, he that is not for me, he that is not for me, said, he that is not for me, he that is not all in with me is against me. If Jesus is who he says he is, then what he says about eternity is more important than anything else in your life. Do not make Pilate's mistake of taking eternal things too lightly. If you know me well at all, you know that Adoniram Judson is one of my faith heroes. Adoniram Judson was the first American missionary.

He, my only son, bears his name. Adoniram Judson would undergo persecution in Jesus' name like few people in history ever have. He'd be the first Christian to go to Burma. He would go in there, he would endure unbelievable persecutions and torture.

He would lose a wife, he would lose several children to sickness while he was there, but when he left there many years later, he would leave over 7,000 Burmese believers on a copy of the Bible in their language. Adoniram Judson was raised in a Christian home, but when he went off to college at Brown University, he was lured away from the Christian faith by a fellow student who became a very close friend, an extremely intelligent young man named Jacob Eames. Eames was a philosophy student who rejected all revealed religion, including the Bible. Eames ridiculed the God of the Bible, and he ridiculed Adoniram Judson for his faith. And Judson's faith, which was already fragile, crumbled under Eames' intellectual assaults. He kept the loss of faith hidden from his parents until after his graduation, when on his 20th birthday, August 9, 1808, Judson announced that he was no longer a Christian. He had been valedictorian at Brown University, and he left for New York for a promising career as a playwright there.

While in New York, Judson found little fulfillment as a playwright, and he grew very quickly disillusioned. But God was beginning to work in his heart again. One night, while traveling through a small village, he stopped to stay at a local hotel. The only available room was next door to a man who was dying. All night, the man groaned and cried out in desperation. Judson was so tormented by the despair in the man's cries that he couldn't sleep. And as he lay there awake, he began to wonder, is this man prepared for death?

Because that's really all that matters now. And then he thought, am I prepared for death? You see, his philosophy had taught him that death was nothing. Death was just a door to an empty pit. But that brought him little comfort, Judson said, listening to a man who was actually dying.

But at the same time, he's having these thoughts. He could hear the voice of his friend, Jacob Eames, in the back of his mind, mocking him. Really, Judson?

Really? You're this weak? Are you really the valedictorian of Brown University? You're spooked by a little superstitious religion? You're spooked by a little death? Judson said, I went back and forth between fear listening to this man and being ashamed of that fear. He said, but still, those groans, oh, those groans. The next morning, he said, as sunlight filled his room, he'd finally gotten a little bit of sleep, he woke up, he didn't hear anything else.

Sunlight filled the room, the sense of despair lifted, and Adoniram Judson said, I felt ashamed for having given in to such weakness. He said, I got dressed, I went downstairs, and I asked the clerk at the front desk about the man in the adjoining room, has he gotten better? The clerk responded very simply, no, he's dead. Judson politely asked, well, do we know who he was? I mean, could we contact the family?

What's going on? And the clerk said, oh yeah, we know who he was. It was a young man from the college in Providence. His name was Eames, Jacob Eames. Adoniram Judson writes, he said, I could hardly move.

He said, I did not leave that in for hours. Later, he would reflect on that moment, he would say this, lost. In death, Jacob Eames was lost, utterly, irrevocably lost, lost to his friends, lost to the world, lost to the future, lost as a puff of smoke, is lost in the infinity of air. If Eames' own views were true, neither his life nor his death had any meaning. And why was he crying out as he was? But suppose Eames was mistaken, suppose the scriptures were true, and that God was real, that hell should open up in that country inn and snatch Jacob Eames, my dearest friend and guide, from the next bed over for me.

That could not, simply could not be a coincidence. Judson would come shortly thereafter, not only to believe the gospel, but to believe it so strongly he would pour out the rest of his life for it, ultimately paying incredible prices to see it go into the places in the world where people had not heard it. Because the gospel of Jesus was not a light thing for him. It was not a light thing in life, it was not a light thing in death, it was not a light thing in eternity, it was reality for him. He couldn't brush aside what is truth.

He said, that is truth. And if that is truth, then I gotta go wherever it tells me to go and do whatever it tells me to do. So here is my question for you, very simply, has the gravity of Jesus sunk into your heart? Are you prepared for eternity? What are you going to do with Jesus? It's been the whole point, you gotta decide.

You have to give a verdict. Is he the Lord? Is he the Lord? And if so, have you surrendered everything to him? Are you following him? Or do you acknowledge him as Lord with your lips while your life says that you're the Lord?

Have you decided? Have you believed his message? His message which is, you are not somebody who needs a little help getting to heaven. You're lost, you have no hope of eternity without me.

Because my work is not one of improvement. I'm not a prophet who comes to give tips. I'm not a life coach who comes to help you along. I come as a savior to die in your place. I'm going to live the life that you should have lived, the sinless life, but then I'm going to die to death that you were condemned to die. I'm going to hang on a tree cursed by God for you. I'm going to drink the cup of God's wrath until there's not a drop left. I'm going to be taken so that you can go free, but you're going to have to receive it as your own.

It's an invitation I'm going to offer. You've got to choose to surrender to him as Lord. You've got to choose to receive him as savior. Have you declared that verdict on Jesus Christ? Is he the Lord of your life?

If you've never made that decision, I invite you to make it now. This was a challenging message from Pastor J.D. Greer on Summit Life. This series is all about becoming aware of the things that might be holding us back from going all in with Jesus. Whether you've been a Christian for decades or you're hearing the gospel for the very first time, this message is for you. And listening along with you right now are thousands of others who are learning and growing through this ministry. It's all made possible by the generosity of people like you who donate to Keep Summit Life on the radio and web.

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Or it might be easier to give online at jdegrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, and I'm so glad that you joined us today. Don't miss tomorrow when we discover who God is and how we can fully trust Him, even in the midst of our doubts and our questions. That's Wednesday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.