Vision Weekend

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

Greer. What if you knew the cure for cancer but you were like, you know what, I just don't want to go public with it because it would end up in all these legal battles and I don't want the fame of it and it's just a hassle. So I'm just going to be quiet about it. How cruel and heartless would you have to be to know that and to not share it with a world that is literally dying because they don't know it.

I don't think it's a problem that you need motivated. It's a belief problem. Today on Summit Life, we're kicking off a brand new teaching series called Scent. It's a study in the book of Acts and Pastor J.D. is unpacking the birth and spread of the early church.

But don't worry, this isn't just a history lesson. J.D. is challenging us to reframe how we think about the church and it's not just a place that we attend once a week. It's actually a worldwide movement of God and we're called to be an active part of the team.

So are you ready? Grab your Bible and turn to the book of Acts and let's get started. Here's Pastor J.D. I'm not sure what images come to your mind when you hear the word church, but I'm pretty sure that it's a good ways off from how church was understood by the first people who used the term and how they saw church in the first century. In the Greek New Testament, the word translated church is the word ekklesia and the word ekklesia literally means an assembly. It means a group or a gathering.

It means a group of people who gather or assemble around an idea. In fact, you want to learn a Greek word? I'll say it, you say it. I'll say it, you say it. Ekklesia.

Everybody, when I say that, I mean everybody. Ekklesia. Ekklesia. Right now, if you break the word down, it actually comes from two Greek words, ekk and kaleo.

Ekk means out of, kaleo means called out. So ekklesia literally means a group of people who are called out around an idea. The church was a movement of people. It was a movement of people who assembled around a common conviction. That's how the church started.

But over the years, a terrible thing happened. People began to think of the church as a place that you went to for religious services. In fact, our English word church comes not from the Greek word ekklesia, but from the German word kirk. I think that's how you pronounce it. You can hear the similarity to church kirk, and kirk in German meant a sacred place where you gathered for religious purposes.

You hear the subtle distinction? That shift in thinking changed the fundamental way that people related to the church. And so throughout the Middle Ages, people went to church. Church was a place you attended or an event that you sat through rather than a movement that you were a part of. And so the church became an institution that essentially provided services for people and was controlled by powerful people who used it to serve their own interests.

But then something awesome happened. God raised up in the 16th century a group of people known as the reformers. And one of the main ones for the English-speaking world was a guy named William Tyndale. Tyndale came to the conviction that Christianity was essentially a movement and that if people were going to be devoted to the movement, they had to understand the message. And so Tyndale's life's work was to translate the first copy of the Bible into readable English, common English. And every time Tyndale came to this word, ekklesia, he translated it as congregation instead of church because he was trying to emphasize that the church was not a place you went to, it was a movement you belong to. In fact, I've got a page.

Somebody gave me a gift one time of a page. I have it framed in my office of a page out of Tyndale's the Bible that he produced in the 16th century. And every time you see the word church in his Bible, you're going to see the word ekklesia, you're going to see the word congregation. Well, that infuriated church leaders because it undercut their authority. And so eventually Tyndale was tried as a heretic, hanged, and burned at the stake, which seemed to be like a little overkill, no pun intended. But during his trial, right before he died, Tyndale said to these religious leaders that had him on trial, he said, if God spares my life or protects my ministry, er many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you do. His last words as he was being burned at the stake, someone heard him say, his last words were, Lord, open the King of England's eyes.

And if you've ever held a copy in your hands of the King James Bible, you will see that God answered his prayer in a very literal way by having the most famous English version of the Bible named after the King of England. I'm indebted to Andy Stanley who helped me understand a lot of that historical context. But here's the point, the danger of the church in every age, the danger of the church in every age is to cease being a movement of people moving, and then become instead a ministry that provides religious services to people, or even worse, a place that people begin to attend. The most important thing about movements is that, well, they move, right? And so if you're not moving, you're not part of the movement no matter how many times you come to the place. Right?

Does that make sense? Over the years, I've told you that church is a lot like a football game. Football game, you got 22 guys in desperate need of rest, surrounded by 22,000 people in desperate need of exercise, right? And when I said that last night, Pastor Todd, Briar Creek Campus pastor came up and said, that's 22,000, you're such an ACC guy, and the SEC, it's like 92,000 people. And I said, who cares?

Okay, we live in North Carolina. So, however you want to think about that. That is the question for us as a church. Are we as a church just doing ministry, we run in an institution, or are we part of a movement? For you personally, the question is, is the church a place that you attend? Is it a place where you have religious services provided to you, or is it a movement that you personally are a part of?

Movements move, and if you're not moving, you're not part of the movement. So let's go to the scripture, and I want to show you how all this started. Acts one, let's jump down to verse six, and we'll start there. Jesus had just resurrected, and now he's standing on the hillside with his disciples, and he goes through this. Verse six, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? In other words, what's your next move? What are you going to do? Verse seven, he said to them, it's not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.

In a few years, I will raise up my servant, Tim LaHaye, who will write the Left Behind books, and then you'll have all your questions answered. Verse eight, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses. Now, that word witness meant essentially the same thing then that it does today. A witness was somebody in a court of law who testified about what they had seen and heard. The primary purpose of a witness is not to do anything.

The primary purpose of a witness is to tell you about what's already been done. You're going to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria into the ends of the earth, and after he'd said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. Verse 10, and while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes. So you've got 12 guys or 11 guys looking up into heaven, and all of a sudden these two other guys are standing with them, but they got on white robes, and they're like, men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into heaven? And they're like, because there's a guy floating up into the atmosphere. And they say, well, this Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go. Now, this has got to be one of the strangest things ever, doesn't it? I mean, he gives these people the largest assignment that you could possibly comprehend.

Every people on every continent, you don't even know about all the continents, all of them, you're going to make disciples of it. It's a group of fishermen. It's a group of carpenters. It's a group of tax collectors.

Most of them have never been more than 50 miles outside of their hometown, right? Never has a more important assignment been given to a less capable group of people. Never. And then, without any explanation, with no plan of action, with no marching orders, he leaves. He just leaves. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? The whole world, as he's ascending to heaven, they're like, the whole world? Do you know how big the world is? He's like, I can see it from here, fellas. Yep, I know how big the world is.

You don't know how big the world is. That's where it all began. 2,000 years later, here we are, several thousand miles away, completely different language, still reveling in the movement that was started on a hillside with 11 fishermen, carpenters, tax collectors, and it's still reverberating. Two important things about that movement that made it move that I want to commend to you, because they ought to be true about you. This is the secret. This is the secret sauce of the whole thing, these two things.

That's it. It's very simple, okay? I want you to write them down. I want you to think about them, because this is going to come out of this.

Acts 1, you're going to see and ask if it applies to you. Number one, the message captured their hearts and minds. The message absolutely captured their hearts and minds, so my question for you is, has it captured yours? Their conviction was that Jesus had died as a substitute for sinners. He wasn't just another religious prophet with another religious message. He was God himself, their creator, who had come on a rescue operation to save them. We, humanity, had greeted his appearance on earth by murdering him, because we are a rebellious traitor race of people who would rather run our own lives than submit to God our creator. So we murdered him. But in the universe's greatest irony, our murder of him, his sacrificial death, was the payment that God accepted for our sins, if we would acknowledge it and repent of our sins and receive the gift that he gave through our murder of him. They believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, and they believed that, many of them by the way, against their wills, because they had no room in their theology for a messiah who would come and suffer and die and disrepute as a criminal.

A messiah should be a political figure. They'd never heard of somebody coming and raising from the dead, yet they believed that against their wills, because they'd seen him. Many of them hardly believed it after they'd seen him. They continued to doubt, Matthew 28 says, but eventually they got to the place where they said, we can't deny it, because I saw him with my eyes and I touched him with my hands. The apostles understood that if this were true, if he was resurrected from the dead, then Jesus really was who he said he was. And if this were true, this was the greatest act of grace ever imagined.

God, the creator, dying for his rebellious creation, calling a bunch of slaves and rebels, servants, or excuse me, sons and daughters. They knew that if this were true, it was the most important message ever given, because it was our only hope of salvation. That if Jesus really had died as a sacrificial death for sinners, then there weren't multiple ways to get to God. Because if there were multiple ways to God, Jesus would never have died like that.

Right? Why would God have sent his son to go through that if there were multiple ways to get to God? When Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he looks at God, his father, and he says, Daddy, if there's any other way, would you let this cup pass for me? How cruel would God the Father have to be to be like, well, actually, there is a bunch of other ways.

As long as people are sincere and do what they think is right and share their lunch, they're going to get in. But you, I just need you to go through this, because I don't know why, I just want you to. The fact that Jesus went through that shows you that there is no other way of salvation. He had said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.

And the apostles believed him because they understood that if that was who God said it was, then that was God saving us and doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. That man had done everything he could to save himself and ended up worse than he started. So God said, well, you can't do, I'll do, because beside me, there is no Savior. And you will glorify me forever because you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can't be a good person. You can't put your life back together.

So I'm going to do it for you, and you're going to receive it as a gift. They knew that if all this was true, that this Jesus that they saw ascend like the angels told them was going to come back, and that suddenly helped them see that everything in life was temporary. Nothing else they built on earth was really going to last. No house they built, no business they built, no nation they established. Those things are all temporary. And there's not that there's anything wrong with participating in those or having a nice version of those. It's just that they understood it.

It's temporary. The only thing that lasts are the souls of men and women because Jesus Christ was a sacrifice that determined whether or not somebody went to heaven or hell, and suddenly their priorities came into line because they said this is the message that has to be heard by every person on earth because Jesus makes the difference. They knew that if all this were true, this was a God so beautiful and so glorious that He was worth giving away their whole lives for, a God whose glory deserved, they believed, to be spread among all peoples of the earth. They'd seen this Jesus command hurricanes. They'd seen Him converse with angels. They had seen Him control demons, walk on water, heal lepers, and raise the dead. Yet in the hour He needed access to those powers the most, He turned His back on them willingly so He could offer His life as a sacrifice for their sins. And they said, that is a God who needs to be glorified and known throughout all the world. And so when they dragged these apostles in front of the Sanhedrin and they told them, if you don't shut up about Jesus, we're going to kill you, the Apostle Peter speaking for all of them says, well, you got to do what you got to do, but as for us, we cannot help but speak what we have seen and heard and because of what God has done for us in Jesus, we will never close our mouths about Him.

When you see what Jesus had done, you begin to see that He's worth nothing less than all, right? I've told you before I had a friend, I have a friend from Egypt who a few years ago told me this story about how he became a Christian. He was an Islamic imam in Egypt in a relatively small village and he said that he started a pen pal thing with a guy here in the United States. Make a long story short, the guy in the United States, he led him to Christ through reading the Gospel of John. My friend, he didn't know what to do with that, so he began to record his faith in Jesus and prayers to Jesus in his journal. He would still go to the mosque where he would pray, but he would pray to Jesus, to God through Jesus. One day he came home from work. It was a Thursday afternoon. He said, when I got home, he said there was a mob of about 200 people standing outside of my house and there standing on my doorstep was my mother and she had a copy of my journal in her hand that I had hidden.

I thought that it's open to the page where I had confessed my faith and a love for Jesus. He said, my mother walked up to me. She asked me if I wrote these things and if I believed them.

I said yes. She spit in my face in front of these 200 people. She took off her shoe. She slapped me in the face, which was a symbol, he said, in my culture of you are dead to me, you are no longer my son, and she said you shame me and I do not consider yourself to be my son any longer. She said she went back in the house and that crowd of 200, he said, beat me until they thought I was dead.

They broke several of my ribs. He said my face was all swollen. He said I passed out. He said they thought I was dead, but five or six hours later I came to.

It was the middle of the night. He said I came to, he said, and I dragged myself to a bus where I was able to go to another city where I found a Christian missionary who was from the United States and I asked him if he could help me find asylum in the United States. He said he did and that's how I got to where I am. As he's telling me this story, I asked him, I said, because he mentioned several times in the story siblings, he had three or four younger siblings, and I asked him, he seemed especially affectionate about his younger sister, and I said have you seen her since you became a believer, and this has been like five years, and remember he hadn't been emotional up to this point, but he kind of stopped and he swallowed and then he said no.

He says and I will never see her again, I don't think, he said, and he looked at me right in my eyes and he said that was the price, that was the price. He said but what I know is as much as I love my family, as much as I love my community, he said that if Jesus did what Jesus said he did for me, then there is nowhere that I cannot go to be with him or nowhere I will not go with nothing I will not do, nothing I will not endure. It is impossible for you to understand the glory of Jesus and not have your heart rise up to say what he has given to us is not worth nothing less than all. Right, so here's my question for you, it's very simple, do you actually believe this testimony? Do you believe it? Has it captured your heart until you can't shut up about it?

Are you willing to go anywhere with it and give up anything for him? Because if not you're not part of the movement, and honestly if you've been captured by this message you probably don't need a vision weekend to motivate you. Can you see the apostles need a vision weekend? We're all here dying, what's this for again?

Oh yeah, thanks Peter for reminding me while we're dying. No, they'd seen this, they felt it, they knew the weightiness of the gospel, they knew its urgency, they knew his value and his worth and they would never shut up about it. I'm going to tell you this, listen, if you're not the kind of person who is radically devoted to the gospel and if you're not the kind who is always talking about it, listen to this, this will be a little harsh, you probably don't really believe it. Either that, you do believe it and your heart is so cold and hard and calloused. How could you believe what you believe about Jesus and not urgently be telling people about it? Well what if you discover the cure for cancer? What if you knew the cure for cancer but you were like, you know what, I just don't want to go public with it because it would end up in all these legal battles and I don't want the fame of it and it's just a hassle, so I'm just going to be quiet about it.

How cruel and heartless would you have to be to know that and to not share it with a world that is literally dying because they don't know it? You see, my question really is this, I don't think it's a problem that you need motivated, it's a belief problem. It is impossible for us to really understand and believe the gospel and not become radical devotees to seeing it go out there, I just don't understand how, you see, that could be. So the question is, has it captured your heart and mind like it captured theirs? Here's number two, the apostles yielded themselves to the leadership of the Spirit, have you yielded yourself to the leadership of the Spirit? Again, the assignment they were given was extraordinary, never had a more important assignment being given to a less capable group of people.

How would they accomplish it? The clue, a very important clue, is given to you in verse one. People always overlook this word. In the first book, Acts 1-1, Luke, the writer, well what's the first book he's referring to? The Gospel of Luke. Luke acts as like a two-volume compendium. So in the first book, Luke, Gospel of Luke, old Theophilus, who's Theophilus?

It's a skeptic that Luke is writing the book for. I have dealt with all that Jesus, look at this word, began. That's a very important word, began to do and to teach.

Began implies continuation. It wasn't that, now watch this, subtle but it's huge, it wasn't that in the Gospel of Luke you see Jesus teaching and now in Acts you see the church teaching, what you see is Jesus began to do and to teach in the Gospel of Luke through his fleshly body and now he continues to do and to teach through his churchly body. That's why Jesus, after giving them the Great Commission in Acts 1-8, tells them to wait, which I've told you before had to be the hardest assignment for some of them, because I mean when you get that kind of assignment you're like wait we don't have time to wait and we got books to write, we got preaching conferences to organize, Paul's got to go on a missionary journey, we don't even know him yet so you got to go convert him. You know Peter, Peter's got to preach and John's got to write a book, several of us got to write a book.

What do you mean wait? Wait, wait for an indefinite amount of time because I need you to sit on your rear end and understand that this is not something you're going to do for me, this is something I'm going to do through you and that's going to be a huge distinction and so in every chapter of Acts as you read it you're going to get this sense that the church is just following the Spirit. The Spirit is the real mover, he's working in people over here and he's moving believers from one place to another, they're just yielding themselves to him as he goes about building this church.

So the question is have you yielded yourself to him to be used by him? You know I've pointed out to you before that the book of Acts if you read it to the end it has no real ending. It ends like with Paul in prison which is bad but people are getting saved which is good and Paul's like I got to get the gospel into Rome because they don't go throughout the whole world and it's breathing, is it going to be successful, is it going to work, and then boom Luke's like that's it we're done. It's a cliffhanger, you know what a cliffhanger is? That's how Luke ends the book of Acts.

You just don't know. Why did he end it that way? Because the movement had just begun.

It wasn't the end, it was the end of anything of the beginning and so the movement continues to move. The Spirit of God is moving you into people's lives to complete the Great Commission. An encouraging message from Pastor J.D. Greer and Summit Life.

To share this message with a friend visit us online at jdgreer.com. So J.D., like you were saying in the message today, God has a greater plan and purpose for our lives and that's one of the subjects of our new Bible study that we've been talking about over the past few weeks called Something Better, Something Greater, the study of Elijah and Elisha. Yeah, a lot of times we're looking for answers to what we ought to do in life when what we ought to be looking for is who God is because what you should do comes out of your understanding of God. The hope in this study is that by coming to know God and knowing the agenda that he's up to on earth, you can understand better God's purposes for your life. I've always found that when you want to know more about your life, start with God and not with you. This eight-part study will help you do that. It'll take you into the lives of two prophets who are very eccentric, very enigmatic, but very important in the biblical narrative and show you how they not only set up the coming of Jesus they also give a demonstration of what it's like to preach truth and live with the power of truth in an age much like our own.

It's amazing as I've said this multiple times throughout the series, it's amazing how similar Elijah and Elisha's contexts were to our own. I think the study will help you know some Bible characters but I also think it'll help you know God and know you in some really unique ways. If you'll reach out to us at jdware.com, we'd love to get you a copy of this. I think it'll be a help to you. Thank you, JD. We'd love to get you a copy of this resource today as our way of saying thanks when you donate to support this ministry. Summit Life is listener funded so when you give, you're helping your fellow listeners dive deeper into the gospel with us and you're changing lives. Join that mission today with your one-time gift or by becoming an ongoing monthly gospel partner. Call us at 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgrier.com and remember when you give at the suggested level of $25 or more, please request a copy of Pastor JD's resource, Something Better, Something Greater, A Study of Elijah and Elisha. It's the last week to request this study guide that will help you grow deeper in your knowledge of who God is and who He's called you to be. Call 866-335-5220 or online at jdgrier.com or if you prefer to write, you can mail your gift and request to JD Greer Ministries, P.O.

Box 122-93, Durham, North Carolina, 27709. And if you're new to Summit Life and you'd like to get to know us a little bit better, sign up for our email list. You'll receive Pastor JD's devotional blog posts as well as the popular Wisdom for Your Weekend posts. Subscribe right now when you go to jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovich and I am so glad that you joined us today. Join us tomorrow when we take a fresh look at what it means to be on the mission field right here on Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.