A Freedom That Could Only Come From God

Today on Summit Life, compelling evidence for the truth of the Gospel from Pastor J.D. Greer.

Skeptics have a hard time explaining how Christianity really got started. The question is what made 11 ordinary men, fishermen, and other blue-collar workers, and Paul, a sworn enemy who hated Christianity with every fiber of his being, what transformed them into such dedicated and unrelenting advocates for the Gospel? Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Bitovitch. You're joining us today in the book of Galatians, and let me just start with a question that you may have heard before. How do we know that the Gospel we find in Scripture wasn't just a clever conspiracy that the disciples came up with, that they didn't just write whatever came to mind? Well, the word Gospel literally means good news, and it is good news that we're saved by Jesus' blood alone, not by anything that we've got to do or earn. So that's nice, but how can we really know that the Gospel message is true? That's what Pastor J.D. is going to address today.

So grab your Bible, and let's see what God has to say to all of us about a freedom that can only come from God. In Galatians chapter one, if you'll find your way there, since becoming a Christian in high school, I have probably gone through about 20 different courses on how to share your faith. Each of these courses was different, meaning they were suggesting different verses that you would use or different approaches, metaphors for explaining the Gospel. The churches that I grew up in in high school and college particularly were fond of these tools, evangelistic tools that we called Gospel tracks. Anybody remember those things?

You track with me there? And so we had all different varieties and kinds and shapes and colors that helped us engage people with the Gospel. And over the years, I just kept a little collection of them, my favorites that I have in a file in my office, and maybe you will recognize some of these. Here is one I remember, Get Out of Hell Free, The Monopoly Way to Witness, was an easy conversation starter. Here was another one of my favorites, Wanted, Americans in Heaven. I'm not sure what conception you have of Jesus of Nazareth, but he never really looked like that in my book, and so I had to keep ahold of that one.

One of the churches that I was a part of growing up was pretty hung up on the King James version of the Bible being the only version of the Bible that could be considered God's Word. So I remember this track we had, which was two deadly viruses, HIV and NIV. I wanted to make sure that we got the message out about that one. Then there was also this one, Satan's Web, Rock Music, or You Caught. We made a pretty big deal out of the fact that rock music was Satan's tool for getting into the hearts of your children.

So we had that one. Had all these ingenious strategies for getting these tracks into people's hands, how to leave them in bathrooms and leave them in library books and Blockbuster video tips that you would turn back in, and just all these different ways. I had a guy actually come to our church, and one part of his presentation was explaining how you could take a track and hold it by the side of your car as you were driving at about 35 miles an hour, how to hold it, the angle, and how to let it go so that it would get the wind caught and land at somebody's feet that was standing on the side of the road.

This is the kind of evangelism training that I in part grew up on, and it's part of what led me to being your pastor here today. So one of the worst ones I ever saw was this one. On one side of it was a $20 bill that you folded. On the other side, you put this on a restaurant table for a waiter or a waitress. They'd be excited at a $20 tip.

When they flipped it over, like, nope, don't be fooled. The real tip is you should try Jesus, and there's treasures greater in heaven. I've told you that I don't really believe in purgatory, but I'm pretty sure that if there is a purgatory, you will directly go there for putting that down on a table. And if you're going to do that, put a $100 bill with it.

That is a real $100 bill that'll show your appreciation. But that was part of what the evangelism training I got. But almost all the training that I received said that at some point you should share your personal story about Jesus.

And that for me was always the most useful part of the training that I received. Often our most persuasive evidence for Jesus' existence is the story, the personal story of what he has done in our lives. Well, see, I share that because in the last half of Galatians 1, Paul is going to use his story as his evidence of the truthfulness of his gospel. Here's how he starts that section in verse 11. He says, I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin.

I did not receive it from a human source and I was not taught it. It came to me by a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. If you remember last week, we saw that Paul's primary concern in this letter to the Galatians was that the Galatians had started to believe a different, a perverted gospel. Paul wants to show these Galatians that there is in fact only one true gospel, and that is the gospel that he, Paul, is preaching. And so part of his case for that is that only a resurrected Jesus with real resurrection power could have changed Paul's life the way that Paul's life changed.

He's like, it takes a really resurrected Jesus with real power to change me like that. Paul seems to be responding, by the way, to a specific rumor going around Galatia that he had plagiarized bits and pieces of the gospel that he had heard from other apostles. He'd just taken little scraps and reassembled it into a brand new gospel without the apostles' permission and that Paul's gospel was different than that of the other apostles. And he was twisting it to his own selfish agenda. And Paul says, Galatians 1, he said, first of all, I was never even around the other apostles for about 17 years to be able to plagiarize them. If you're going to plagiarize somebody, you have to read their work or listen to what they're saying. I just wasn't even exposed to them.

Here's how he explains that. Verse 15, but when God who from my mother's womb set me apart and called me by his grace on the road to Damascus was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I should preach him among the Gentiles, watch, I did not immediately consult with anybody. I didn't go up to Jerusalem to those who'd become apostles before me. Instead, I went to Arabia, read that, the desert, by myself. And then I came back to Damascus, verse 18. Then after three years, I did go up to Jerusalem and got to know Cephas.

That's a nickname for Peter. And I stayed with Peter about 15 days, but I didn't see any of the other apostles while I was there, except for James, the Lord's brother. I got to meet him. And then I declared to you on the side of God, I'm not lying in what I write to you. Then after 14 years, plus the three of them makes 17, I went up again to Jerusalem and presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentile. That was the first time 17 years that I really spent any time with the apostles as a group.

And it's just impossible for me to plagiarize from them if I wasn't even around them. For the first 17 years, Paul labored in basic obscurity, having Jesus personally teach and reveal the gospel to his soul. By the way, I always use that fact whenever I'm talking with seminary students who are dissatisfied with the seminary portion of their lives, like, oh, I should have more responsibility. Oh, I should be out there saving the world. Oh, I should be in a higher position. I'm like, look, God took 17 years to train Paul before he really established him in the ministry.

I wouldn't complain about your four years. When we have a new intern here, it's like, when do I get to preach to the whole church? I'm like, probably about 17 years from now, based on what I see from Paul. But the point is Paul said I wasn't around the other apostles, so I couldn't have plagiarized from them. No, he says, he said, my gospel came straight from Jesus Christ, so it is the real one.

And then he's going to offer three lines of evidence to try to prove that his gospel is divine. Now, two of these pieces of evidence are what we would call objective evidence, and one piece is what we would call a subjective evidence. Now, do you understand what I mean in the difference between objective and subjective evidence? Objective evidence usually is about verifiable facts.

That's objective. Subjective evidence is where you talk about the effect that the experience had on you. Paul's going to give us two pieces of objective and one piece of subjective, and the reason I explain that is because it is really, really important that you learn that you master both types of evidence when it comes to talking about the gospel. I'm going to walk you through the two objective and one subjective, and after I walk you through them, I've got a really cool story of a modern day Paul who is right here in our church that I want to share with you as another evidence of the subjective evidence for the gospel.

Here we are. Objective evidence piece number one, Paul makes this statement or makes this claim. Only an actual vision of a resurrected Jesus could explain the conversion of Christianity's number one enemy into its number one emissary. He's going to say this in verse 13.

He's going to say, you know about my formal way of life in Judaism. You know that I was a Jew of the Jews. You know that I hated Christians, and I now, he says, verse 23, promote the faith that I once tried to destroy. Paul says, how else could you explain a conversion as dramatic as mine except that I actually encountered a resurrected Jesus?

I was a hater, and now I'm a promoter. Skeptics have a hard time explaining how Christianity really got started. The question is what made 11 ordinary men, fishermen, and other blue collar workers, and Paul, a sworn enemy who hated Christianity with every fiber of his being, what transformed them into such dedicated and unrelenting advocates for the gospel? Every single one of these apostles, including Paul, would die a martyr's death, and it's like I've often explained to you, people are not willing to suffer and die for something they know to be a lie. Now listen, it is true. It is true. Lots of people die for a lie.

900 people, for example, drank the Kool-Aid at Jonestown, and that was a lie, but people don't willingly suffer and die for something they know to be a lie. Maybe the best illustration I've ever heard of this is Chuck Colson was known as Richard Nixon's hatchet man. He was chief of staff there for Richard Nixon. He was a former Marine Corps colonel whom President Nixon trusted to do in his administration what nobody else would do, mostly the illegal and the dirty stuff.

Chuck Colson was the mastermind and the kingpin behind the Watergate wiretapping scandal. He teamed up with five other guys, all of them former soldiers, hardened veterans from the Marine Corps, the FBI, and the CIA. When the wiretapping operation went south, they all got caught, and as soon as the press wrote the story, these five guys got into a room and they came up with a false narrative. They came up with a lie to explain the events, and they swore to each other that they would all maintain this narrative so that they wouldn't get each other in trouble. Chuck Colson said, do you know how long it took for every single one of us to break? Under threat of prison, we started pointing fingers at each other to try to get ourselves out of trouble in less than a week. In less than a week, every single one of these battle-tested, hardened, CIA, FBI, Marine Corps soldiers, all of us cracked.

He said that's with Marine, CIA, and FBI agents, and you're going to try to convince me. He became a Christian later, by the way, and you're going to try to convince me that a bunch of untrained fishermen and blue-collar workers maintained their story unbroken, saying they had seen Jesus resurrected from the dead when it was a lie. They maintained that to the end as each was tortured and executed.

There is no possible way. In fact, just consider what happened to Paul himself because of his testimony. We know that on five separate occasions, he was given 39 lashes with a whip because he was preaching. Every single time, he got up and kept preaching. Three times, he was beaten with rides, which is like a step up from a whipping. More than once, he was publicly stoned.

He had baseball-sized rocks hurled at him until they thought he was dead. Every single time, both of the times that we know he did it, he took time to be healed, and then he got up and kept preaching. He was shipwrecked not once, but three times. By the way, how many times do you have to get shipwrecked before you assume that going on mission trips is not God's will for your life?

Sea travel is not for you, but every single time, Paul kept going. What would make Paul willing to endure that time and time and time again? Only a vision of an actually resurrected Jesus. Again, people sometimes will suffer for what is false, but they will not willingly suffer for something they know to be false unless there is something to be gained from it like money or power. But what did Paul gain from his lie? Year after year, he embraced a life of suffering to spread the gospel he formerly had hated, and that simply rules out the idea that he was using his apostleship as a cover for a con game because he didn't get money and power because of it. He only got death and suffering and persecution. So Paul offers himself as evidence, number one, that the gospel is true, saying that it really was revealed by a resurrected Jesus to him, just like he said.

Objective evidence, number two, is going to be this. He said, my message perfectly aligns with that of the other apostles and the prophets. In fact, this might be the primary proof that the apostles pointed to as proof that what they were saying was from God is that what they were saying perfectly lined up with what all the previous prophets had predicted. That's why all through your New Testament you're going to find phrases like, as it was written, or according to what prophet so-and-so said, or these things were written in order to fulfill some scripture. Even Jesus himself pointed back to what the previous scripture said as a validation that he really was.

So he said he was. For example, one time the Pharisees were arguing with Jesus about something that he said, and they're like, you don't really know what you're talking about. Now, let me ask you real quick, think about this. If you were Jesus and somebody was challenging what you were saying, how would you prove that you were telling the truth? Well, I would levitate. You know, just like 10 feet above him, like, go ahead, challenge me now. Or I do that thing in the matrix where he turns his, like takes away his mouth and is like, Mr. Anderson, how will you talk if you don't have a phone call? Or how will you, if you don't have a mouth?

Remember that scene? That's what I would do. I would do that for, and I would say, see, you shut up. But what Jesus did, what Jesus did is when they challenged him, he said this, he said, search the scriptures. For in them, you think that you have eternal life. Yet these are they which testify of me. Or beginning with Moses and the prophets, he explained to them that what was said in all the scriptures concerned himself.

You get that? Jesus' proof that what he was saying was true was how well it lined up with the previous revelations. Last week, I talked briefly about Islam and Mormonism, two religions that both claimed to have received additional revelation from God that corrects the previous revelation. Most of you that know me know that I used to live and work among Muslims for the beginning of my ministry. First two years were in an unreached people group and in Southeast Asia and Muslim priests there, Muslim Imams would often tell me that the reason I should become a Muslim is that Muhammad received the Quran from the angel Gabriel in a cave and that the Quran he received corrected all the revelation that had gone before it. You see, Muslims believe in four holy books, three of which you would recognize the Torah, the Zabur of the Injil, and then the Quran is the fourth.

The Torah, writings of Moses, Zabur, the writings of David and the prophets, the Injil is the teachings of Jesus. And they say that the Quran, the fourth book, is the book that goes back and corrects all that the previous three books got wrong, all that was incomplete in what they had taught. And they say the reason I should become a Muslim is because Muhammad is the seal of the prophets and he changes what had gone before it and corrects what was in error. Whenever they would say that to me, I would always point out to them that none of the other biblical prophets ever talked that way about previous prophets. Instead, they all grounded their claims to authority on how they stood in continuity and agreement with what the previous prophets had said. At the end of the day, y'all, I don't reject the messages of Muhammad and Joseph Smith.

He's with Mormonism. I don't reject them because of deficiencies in their characters. I don't reject them because Muhammad was a violent warrior or because Joseph Smith was a polygamist. I reject them because what they teach stands in opposition to what came before it. And God wasn't wrong previously, right?

And so that can be. Listen, this is one of the reasons that you need to learn your Bible. Because if you don't know the Bible, you can't know when some slick talking preacher is saying something that contradicts what God already said. And when you don't know the Bible, you are a sucker for Satan, which means you need to be checking and verifying what you hear and not just listening to somebody because they smile well or because they're charismatic and they capture your attention.

By the way, that includes me. I don't mean I smile well and I capture your attention, but I mean, you need to be checking what I am saying by the Bible. That's why I tell you to bring your Bible. If you don't have your Bible in front of you, how do you know the one I'm telling you is actually in there? When I'm telling you this is what it says, you need to be like, mm-hmm, that's exactly what it says.

And when I say something that's not what it says, you need to be very quiet and slowly be going, mm-hmm, that is not what it says, okay? But you need to base what you believe, not on what your pastor tells you, but on the Word of God. And that's what Paul says. He says, I'm not telling you to believe this because it's me, I'm telling you to believe it because this was given once for all of the apostles. Paul says, it's amazing, it's miraculous even, but when I finally got to confer with the other apostles after 17 years, what I was saying and what they were saying was exactly the same. Here's how he says that, chapter two, verse two, I went up to Jerusalem, presented to them the gospel that I preached among the Gentile.

Watch it, this is amazing. I wanted to be sure that I was not running and had not been running in vain. Even after seeing the resurrected Jesus, Paul said, if what I've been saying had contradicted what the apostles were saying, then I would have known, even after seeing the resurrected Jesus, I would have known that I got something wrong.

Why? Because Jesus had given the apostles the keys to the kingdom, Matthew 16, 19. Keys to the kingdom meant that he gave to them the authority to lay out the path of salvation that would unlock heaven. And Paul said, if what I'm saying is in opposition to them, then I've got something wrong. He promised them, John 14, 26, that he would give them his Holy Spirit who would accurately guide them in the recording of Jesus's message for the church, so that what they said about what Jesus said is what Jesus actually said. You see, there's this idea promoted out there by guys like Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code or Bart Ehrman, the professor over at UNC, that there were all these differing gospel accounts that came out of Jesus's first followers. And in the fourth century, the Roman emperor Constantine selected his favorite of all the different versions of Christianity, and then he just destroyed all the differing accounts.

But that's just not historically accurate, at least it's not complete. The gospels that are in your New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they were the only ones that came out of the apostolic community. And they were spread literally all over the world in a bunch of different languages by the time of Constantine. There is no way that Constantine could have collected up all the differing ones and destroyed them.

What we see from the first century apostolic church is one unified witness agreed on by all the apostles. You say, well, I watched this special about Jesus on CNN the other night, and it talked about the lost gospels like the gospel of Peter or Thomas or Judas or Mary or Casper the Friendly Ghost or whoever. And they got messages in these gospels that contradict what we see in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yeah, I saw that special too. Not everything that comes on CNN is the absolute truth.

A little lesson from Uncle JD. But these gospels that they're talking about all show clear evidence of being written a couple hundred years after the time of the apostles. Scholars don't even really dispute that. Whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written in the first century by the apostolic community. What comes out of the apostolic community is one unified message believed and affirmed by all of the apostles and by Paul.

And they all recognized each other's legitimacy. In fact, listen to what Peter says about Paul at the end of his second letter. I love this. This is Peter talking about Paul. Our dear brother Paul also speaks about these things in all his letters in which there are some matters that are hard to understand. Amen.

The untaught and the unstable twist them to their own destruction as they also too. The rest of the scriptures, two things you got to see there. One, you're discouraged because you find a book of Romans and Galatians sometimes hard to understand.

Be encouraged. Peter did too. He's like, Romans chapter nine, are you kidding me?

Pre-Dusta what? I don't know how to make heads or tails of that. Second thing, most important thing you should see is that Peter considered Paul's letters to be scripture. Peter recognized that the letters that Paul was writing were not just the letters of a Christian zealot. They were the word of God itself. There is one unified witness that came out of the apostolic community. And it was a gospel that was exactly the same preached by all the apostles and Paul. We can trust God's word and experiencing true gospel freedom begins with thinking right thoughts about ourselves and right thoughts about God.

You're listening to Summit Life and we're in a study of Galatians titled Freedom and the In-Between. So JD, since we can trust God's word, we should dig into it regularly, right? I mean, how else do you get to know him? But it's not like we just open the Bible blindly, hold it out and point to a verse. Yeah, well, it usually doesn't work like that. I'm not saying God can't do miracles, but I mean, we've all heard this story about the person who's like, oh, you know, God, what do you want me to do? And so he opens up the Bible and points to a verse and the verse his finger lands on is, you know, Judas went and hung himself. So he's like, well, that can't be right. So then he flips a couple pages and he lands on a verse and the next one says, go thou and do likewise. You're like, okay, that's not how God is speaking to you. And I know a lot of people, while not that extreme, that's how they approach the Bible. It's like Bible lottery, you know? But that's not, I mean, there's the way that God speaks best to you is when you get the accurate sense of what he is saying both to the original audience and then what it means for your life. So sometimes there are things in the Bible that are just stories being told and I'm like, well, this is a warning.

God doesn't want me to do this. So one of our burdens here at Summit Life is not just to unearth random phrases and promises and let you come up with ways to apply these words to your life. It's to help you see what it is in the original context.

We use a method here and we've talked about it here on Summit Life here. H is highlight. That's just where you're taking promises and you're responding. E is examining. That's the aspect of like, how does this fit into the overall biblical picture? What's the history here?

What was going on? A is apply. That's where you bridge the gap to your life.

And then R is respond. This Bible that we're offering, small, compact, take the church, put in your purse, put it in the backpack. It will help you with the examination and application. That's good. It will help fill the gap of those two things so that you can read and understand the Bible better and ultimately help you know God and His will for your life. We'd love to get you a copy of our new custom Summit Life Bible today, and it comes with our thanks when you donate to support this program. Summit Life is kept on the radio, television, and online by listeners like you.

So when you tune in, you've got another listener to thank for that message. And you can extend that gift to someone else by doing your part to keep this program going. Give today and remember to ask for your copy of the Summit Life Bible. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can donate and request this gift online at jdgrier.com. Before we close, let me remind you that if you aren't yet signed up for our email list, you'll want to do that today.

It's quick and easy to sign up at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again next time when we'll continue the message titled, A Freedom That Could Only Come From God. That's Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.