Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. When was the last time that you went to bed with the idea that it could be tonight? Jesus could come tonight or you got up in the morning with the thought that today, today might be the day. We're so frantically busy taking care of daily needs that we never even stop to think about this.
It's like we're totally asleep to it. The coronavirus is God's merciful wake-up call telling us to be ready. Welcome to Summit Life. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Even though we may not know exactly what God is doing every second and in every situation, we can still recognize that God is sovereign and He is faithfully fulfilling His promises. Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer gives us five things that God is doing through COVID-19.
It's part of our series called The World Upside Down. And if you missed any of the previous messages, you can hear it online at jdgreer.com. But now here's Pastor J.D. This week, this week, I want to step back and I want to try to give you a big picture view of five things that the Bible teaches us that God is doing in a time like the coronavirus. A couple of weeks ago, I read a short little book that John Piper wrote called The Coronavirus in Christ. And I know your first question is, he had time to write and publish a book since shutdown started?
I mean, who does that? Suddenly your gardening project or your garage clean-out doesn't feel that impressive anymore. But it's a real short read.
It only took me an hour or so total and it's definitely worth it. In this book, Dr. Piper outlines six things that God might be doing in a time like this. Our family actually has discussed each of these one at a time around the dinner table for the last six nights. It's made for some great discussions. So, what I want to do is share five of them with you.
For the other one, you'll actually have to get Dr. Piper's book and read it yourself. Now, let me give you one caveat before we jump into these five things. You might say, well, wait a minute. How can any of us claim to know what God is doing? I mean, after all, aren't the ways of God unknowable? Romans 11, in fact, uses the word inscrutable. How unsearchable are your judgments? How inscrutable are your ways? Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Who has been His counsel? That's Romans 11, 33. Inscrutable means unable to be known. How can we claim to know then what is on God's mind?
And you're right if you ask that. And that means that we ought to approach any question of this nature with a good deal of caution. But that said, God is not silent about what He is doing in the world. And in fact, one of the primary purposes of our Bibles, God says, is to help us understand these purposes, process them, and participate in them. Paul, for example, in Ephesians 3, tells us that by reading the Bible, we can gain insight into the mystery of what God is doing in multiple other places in the New Testament. The authors give you handles to understand what God might be up to in various situations.
So even though we may not know exactly what God is doing every second in every situation, and even though there's always more that He is doing that we will never recognize, we can know the general patterns of how He is working. In fact, Jesus even criticized the religious leaders of His day for not understanding the meanings of His divine work in history. He criticizes them for not knowing how to interpret it. He said, and I quote, You hypocrites, you know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? That's Luke 12, 56 and 57. Let me give you the first three of these five.
Again, I'm following John Piper here. Number one, in the coronavirus, God is giving the world a physical picture of the moral horror of sin. Sin is, of course, why any misery and any suffering exist in the world at all. The word that God used repeatedly to describe the creation that He made was good. God saw it and it was good. Good means a world without the coronavirus, a world without misery. It was human sin that brought the curse of disease and death into the world.
Paul says in Romans 5 that because of sin, the curse of death passed to all men. Romans 8, he says creation itself was subjected to futility, not willingly. It's longing, in fact, to be set free from the bondage of corruption.
It's groaning right now together in the pains of childbirth. Words like futility, bondage to corruption, groaning, these are all graphic images of global devastation and misery. All of that came because of our choice to rebel against God and do things our own way. But most of us, Christians or not, live our whole lives without ever really grasping the true ugliness of sin. And we just don't think of it as that bad. We may want to be delivered from the penalty of sin, but we just never find sin that repulsive.
We say things like, well, I need to be a better person, or I'm not perfect, or God will forgive me. But our sin against God is a deadly, serious thing. And physical suffering, it screams that at us. To quote Piper here, he says, hardly anyone in the world feels the horror of preferring other things over God.
I mean, who loses any sleep over our daily belittling of God by neglect and by defiance? But oh, oh, how we feel our physical pain, how indignant we become if God touches our bodies. Physical pain is God's trumpet blast to tell us that something is dreadfully wrong in the world, and that thing that is wrong is sin.
I'll tell you that whenever I suffer, I always try to remember that all of this is here because of my sin. This is a picture of how bad sin actually is. One of my prayers is that all of us here will learn through this how ugly and how offensive our neglect of God is. This is how hideous our casual treatment of God's commands are, how outrageous it is that we give Jesus less attention every day than we do the style of our hair. And I pray that in this, we will feel the grief that God has over how sin has ruined and devastated his creation. So that's the first thing God is doing.
Here's the second, number two. God intends the coronavirus to be a wake-up call for us to be ready for the second coming of Christ. Now, let me give a caveat here before I talk about this one.
We know, we know, embarrassingly so. We know that Christian history is littered with false predictions about the end of the world. I think I've told you about a book that came out when I was in high school. The book was called 88 Reasons Why Jesus is Coming Back in 1988. Some of you recognize that book? This thing took the Christian world by storm.
The guy who wrote it was a NASA scientist who was also a Christian, and you can buy NASA scientists and, you know, a conservative Christian, and you got a recipe for a conspiracy. Well, he identified a three-day span in 1988, September 11th through 13th, when he said Jesus would return. And people were like, well, wait, didn't Jesus say that we couldn't know the day or the hour of his return? And this guy was like, well, yeah, that's true, but he never said we couldn't know within a three-day window.
I mean, I know the day or the hour, but this is the three-day window there. That book was a huge deal at my Christian school. The afternoon of the last day, in fact, on September 13th, my soccer coach ended practice 30 minutes early, and he said, he said, you know what, we're all just going to sit here on the bleachers for the last 30 minutes of practice, and we're just going to wait to see if Jesus comes back. And then he looks at me and he says, hey, if Jesus actually does come back, J.D., make sure all the equipment gets back in the bin, which I thought was rather unkind. But, of course, that day came and went, and Jesus didn't come back. Well, the next year, the author released a follow-up book, I'm not kidding, called 89 Reasons Jesus Will Come Back in 1989.
He explained that he had miscalculated because he'd used the Gregorian calendar and not the Hebrew one, which, of course, happens to the best of us. So we're all familiar with false predictions. But even though Christians have often botched this up, we know that we can't know the day or the hour or even the three-day span in which he will return, it is true that Jesus is coming back. And scripture says that it could be at any moment. In fact, the scriptures, the New Testament talks about the second coming of Christ eight times more than it talks about the first. It says that Jesus, when he comes, he will come like a thief in the night, which means unexpectedly, when you're not looking for it. I mean, if a thief is going to break into your house, he doesn't schedule an appointment with you and say, hey, I just want you to know I'll be there between 1 and 1.30, I'll text when I'm on my way.
No, a thief is going to come suddenly when you're not looking for his coming. So his coming is unexpected, but it's also true, Jesus said, that there will be pointers, signs, as his coming gets closer. Matthew 24, wars and rumors of war, famines, earthquakes, and plagues. In Matthew 24, Jesus compares these to birth pangs that the world will show before it gives birth to the new world that Jesus will bring at his coming. Just like a woman, he says, in the hours leading up to the moment of birth has these intense moments of anguish, so the world is going to experience painful moments like the coronavirus that show us that the coming of Jesus is near. In this virus, Jesus is saying to us, according to Matthew 24, wake up, the world that you're living in is not going to last forever. It's about to give birth to a new world, the lasting, the eternal world.
You need to think about that world and you need to prepare for it. When was the last time that you went to bed with the idea that it could be tonight, Jesus could come tonight, or you got up in the morning with the thought that today, today might be the day. We're so frantically busy taking care of daily needs that we never even stop to think about this.
It's like we're totally asleep to it. The coronavirus is God's merciful wake-up call telling us to be ready. Listen, I don't know when He's coming.
I don't know if it's going to be in the next year. I don't know if it'll be in the next hundred years, but signs like this show us that it is likely not that far away. The last words of the New Testament were Jesus saying to the church, surely I'm coming quickly.
He's coming back. The third thing Scripture says that God is doing is that the coronavirus is God's thunderclap for us to realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ. There's a very enlightening story in Luke 13 where evidently there was a tower that had collapsed on a crowd of people in an Israelite city, and 18 people died when this tower fell on them. And so the people want to know from Jesus if this particular tragedy was a specific judgment on those 18, like God was angry at all 18 of them, and He saw them all standing together in one place at one time and thought, hey, now's my chance.
And then He knocks the tower over on them and squashes all of them. Jesus' response was surprising and jolting. He said, no, I tell you, it wasn't a judgment on those 18 for their sin, but I tell you, the meaning is that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
In other words, they wanted to know what the disaster meant for the victims. Jesus responded with what the disaster meant for us, for the rest of us. Disasters like these aren't usually God's specific judgment on somebody, but they are a message to all of us of the seriousness of sin that we all need to repent. Sin is serious.
I don't know how many times I can say that. Disasters like this are a gracious summons from God to repent and be saved while there's still time. Here's what God requires of us. He says, this is the great commandment, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. In fact, He tells us, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. In Matthew 10, verse 37, let me ask, is that your heart?
Is that what you're pursuing? Is God calling you through this disaster to repent, to finally take your relationship with God with the seriousness that He deserves? Is He trying to get you to wake up? Friend, don't ignore this call. The gospel, of course, is not that you could ever love God enough to be worthy of Him. The gospel is that you haven't, but Christ has paid the penalty for you and offered to receive you fully on the basis of what He has done. But when you receive that free gift, the life that you are surrendering to is one where you will begin to pursue Him above all things, and you will treasure and obey Him above everything, that you will love Him with all your heart, your soul, and your mind. Are you living that way? Number four, God uses distress in a time like this as a theater to display the distinctive generosity of believers.
I'm not going to talk much about this one, because we've talked about it so much over the last few weeks. But times like this are where Christians demonstrate the distinctive generosity of the gospel. John Piper says this in this book. He says, It is not mere good deeds that give Christianity its tang and its luster. It's good deeds in spite of danger.
Many non-Christians do good deeds, but seldom do they do them at great cost to themselves with the sole purpose of glorifying God and not themselves. It is in a time of distress that Christian generosity shines most brightly. Matthew 5, Jesus said, He said, Blessed are you. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in that moment will be great in heaven, because, He says, without skipping a beat, you are the salt of the earth, you're the light of the world. In other words, He said, because you are able to rejoice and to be gracious and kind when you're being persecuted, that's why you will be the light of the world, because you show generosity in a time of distress, right? Everybody can show generosity and happiness and peace in times of peace, but it's in a time of distress when the distinctive nature of gospel generosity comes forward.
Now, of course, the distress that Jesus is talking about there in Matthew 5 is persecution, not disease, but the point is the same. Gospel-fueled generosity goes way beyond the bounds of normal human goodness. Lots of people, all right, are just neighborly, and they're kind and gracious in times of prosperity when goodness and generosity are relatively easy. But when generosity is costly, when it comes at great personal suffering, that's when the gospel shines forth, because at the center of our faith is a Savior who laid down His life, not just for His friends, but for His enemies. And that means that in moments like this, that we, His followers, we go forward in faith and self-sacrifice, not backwards in fear and self-preservation.
We're not wagging our fingers telling people they should be better prepared. We're offering from what we have to take care of those who maybe are suffering more than we are. It's during times like this that we rise above self-pity and we go outward toward danger with courageous joy to do good works of love that glorify God. Listen, this has always been true of Christians throughout the centuries, and I've told you a few stories about that, but let me just say to you, Summit family, in this time, I have been blown away by your gospel-fueled generosity. A lot of it has happened organically as you've just taken care of one another and you've just reached out to and loved your neighbors, but you've also continued to give God your first and your best here. And because of your generosity, we've been able, we've been able by God's grace to minister to people in need in these unexpected and unplanned-for circumstances. Some of it has gone to families in our community who are not directly connected to our church, but whom this pandemic is leaving truly destitute.
Wake County asked us to partner with them to help provide shelter and emergency provisions for 300 families who had fallen through the cracks of the CARES Act. We haven't even begun to feel the full impact that this is going to have on the most vulnerable in our community. Our response, and this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, but all this is possible because you give your first and your best to God, even in a time of uncertainty and in a time of distress. That glorifies the gospel, Summit. It shows that we have a Savior who ran toward danger and need, not away from it. And these kind of good works, like Jesus said in Matthew 5, they glorify our gospel. They show the distinctive nature of our gospel, and they point people to our gracious Father in heaven. Lastly, number five, God uses the coronavirus to loosen the roots of settled Christians to send them to the unreached peoples of the world.
This one of all these is probably my favorite. I'm not sure if you know this, but I have a book called What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? It's an encapsulation of one of our core messages around here at the Summit Church, and that is that all people are called to the mission of God.
The question is no longer if you're called, only where and how. And you should consider, all of us should consider doing something new and radical with your life, and that means maybe planting it somewhere where the gospel's not known. We always say you got to get a job somewhere. So why not get a job in a place that's greatly in need of the gospel where you can be a part of one of our church plants? My prayer has been that this book that I was writing will help motivate thousands, maybe tens of thousands around the country to go and serve among unreached peoples or people in less evangelized parts of the United States. Well, that was the plan, and then this coronavirus hit, and I thought, well, great, this is a terrible time for a book about moving your life overseas. People can't even leave their houses.
This is going to go over like a lead balloon. I know that's a very selfish concern, very superficial during a time like this, but I was pretty discouraged. And then Dr. Piper sent me a copy of this book that I'm sharing parts of with you today, and in this book he talks about how in Acts 7 God used a calamity, an unexpected calamity, a religious persecution that started with the stoning of Stephen. He used that to produce the greatest worldwide expansion of the gospel up to that point. The early church hadn't asked for it, they hadn't planned for it, they weren't prepared for it, and Satan was undoubtedly behind this persecution, and his purpose was to discourage the church. Yet God used that persecution. Instead of making the church go backward, he used it for a great worldwide gospel advance.
Well, I wrote Dr. Piper and I told him about my discouragement, and he wrote me back, and he said, and I quote, he said, and I quote, On the contrary, J.D., you should be very encouraged. Many around the world are praying that at this very moment, which Satan means for hindering the mission of the king to the nations, that God will instead use for his strategic advance. Your book will be well-timed. May God grant thousands to grasp what God is doing and madden the evil one by turning his tactical ripple against the kingdom into a tidal wave of completion. Now first, let's be real. Madden the evil one by turning his tactical ripple against the kingdom into a tidal wave of completion? That has to be the most Piper-esque line ever written in any email anywhere.
I mean, who talks that way? But second, but do you sense that he's right? In Genesis 50, God promises that what Satan means for evil, God uses for good. He takes Satan's tactical ripples of opposition and transforms them into tsunami waves of completion of his purposes. John Piper tells this story. He says, January 9th, 1985, there was a pastor named Hristo Kulichev. He was an evangelical pastor in Bulgaria, and he was arrested and put in prison. His crime was that he preached without government permission.
His trial was a mockery of justice, and he got sentenced to eight months in prison. But during that time in prison, he made Christ known in every way that he could. When he got out eight months later, he wrote, he said, both prisoners and jailers asked many questions, and it turned out that we had a more fruitful ministry in the prison than we could have expected in the church in normal circumstances. God was better served by our presence in prison than if we had been free. Friend, this is often God's way. Piper says the global scope and seriousness of the coronavirus is too great for God to waste. God is gonna use it for a great advance of the mission. Summit, I started to pray that we will see coming out of this a movement of people out of our church toward the mission field like we have never seen before, that hundreds of us will use this shaking to sense the urgency of the Great Commission, the desperate condition of our world, and we will uproot our lives if that's what God is telling us, to take the gospel to the places that most need it. Is he perhaps calling you?
I mean, can you sense that perhaps even right now? Well, again, those are the five things, and I'm not saying that I understand all that God is doing in this situation. The totality of his ways are inscrutable, and he's doing a lot more than you or I could ever track.
At any given point, God is doing 10,000 different things in my life, and I'm only aware of about three of them, but what I do know is that God is sovereign, that he is faithfully fulfilling the purposes that he has declared that he was pursuing. He's shaking the world. He's calling to repentance. He's purifying his church. He's trying to wake us up, and he is repositioning us to get the gospel to the people and the places in the world that haven't heard it.
Don't waste this coronavirus. Have you surrendered yourself to these purposes of God during this time? In fact, which of these five best encapsulates what God might be doing in your life during the season? Don't ignore how God is working. You're listening to Pastor J.D. Greer on Summit Life. If you missed any part of this study, you can find it all online at jdgreer.com. Well, I'm sure you're well aware that at midnight tonight we'll be closing out 2020 and heading into a new year. And as we've been saying for the past few weeks, the end of the year is a critical time for ministries like Summit Life. I think for a lot of people that might be kind of surprising because as a listener, you don't necessarily get to see all that goes on behind the curtain in producing this program. So I asked Pastor J.D.
if he'd break it down for us a little. What it does is it enables us to be on the air. The person that listens in their car, in their home, on their computer, or we even get letters from people who listen to this in prison. It always comes to them free of charge. They just have to tune in. But in order to get it to them, we have to be able to produce the shows.
We have to be able to get the airtime. And it's your gift that enables us to do that. All of these sermons are made available on the web and on radio completely free. So when you give, you're equipping a young mom or a young dad to teach the gospel to their kids, you're allowing a college student to be able to tune in to a gospel-centered message as they go about their life on a secular campus.
You might be enabling a truck driver. We hear from them a lot who is just as they're going down the road tuning in and hearing things that they've never heard before, making them understand the hope and the love that God has for them in this life. I received this note just a few weeks ago from a gentleman who listens to our program.
He said, I listened to Summit Life, listen to this, when I was incarcerated. These messages brought real change into my life. I'm so thankful for your ministry. You have a part of that, because it wasn't just the preaching of the message that blessed this man.
It was him being able to hear it, and that was because of your generosity. The gospel reaches everywhere, even into our prisons. What an encouragement that the Lord seeks us and finds us wherever we are.
I hope that you and I both understand what a privilege it is to be a part of that process. Right now, as we're coming up to the end of the year, your gift is especially important to us to help us stay strong and to gain more momentum as we go into the next year to be able to explore where are other places that we might be able to make the message of the gospel more accessible to people. I would invite you to join with us today to become a gospel partner in enabling us to make the gospel accessible and free to people, as free as Jesus made it when he died on the cross. It was costly to him, but free to us in the same way as our sacrifices that enable others to hear the message freely.
Today is the last day to have your gift count for 2020. So if you've never given to support this ministry, right now is the time to take that step. Every dollar counts, helping more people hear and grow in the gospel. If this program has made a difference in your walk with God, will you give that gift to someone else today? When you donate, we'll say thanks by sending you the 2021 Summit Life Day Planner.
It comes with Bible verses and a Bible reading plan to help you keep Jesus at the center of all your plans in the new year. Ask for the planner when you give an important year-end gift by calling 866-335-5220 or by giving online at jdgrier.com. If you'd rather mail your gift, make sure it's postmarked by midnight tonight. Write to J.D. Greer Ministries, P.O. Box 122-93, Durham, North Carolina, 277-09. And in case you missed it earlier, the phone number is 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgrier.com.
I'm Molly Vitovich. Be sure to listen Friday when Pastor J.D. answers one more question that we might be asking after the year we've all had.
How do we keep praying when God doesn't seem to be answering? Be sure to join us Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
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