Freed to Unite

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Our ethnic identities and our cultures are beautiful things. They are created by God like a mini-sided diamond to reflect His glory. But when they become our primary distinguishing identity, they always cause division. When we become Christians, our cultural distinctives do not go away.

They just become a lot less important. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we're so glad that you're back with us for another week of solid biblical teaching here on the program. You know, if you turn on the news these days or browse through Facebook or Twitter for a minute, it'll be pretty obvious that we're living in some unprecedented and turbulent times. Emotions run high over issues like politics, race relations, and especially these days, a virus that has changed our lives.

Our world seems so divided and, quite frankly, angry. And unfortunately, that same attitude can often creep into our churches ever so subtly. Today, Pastor J.D. challenges us to pursue unity for the sake of the gospel message. It's part of our new study in Galatians called Freedom in the In-Between, and our message right now is titled Free to Unite. Galatians chapter two, we're in number three of a series called the Freedom in the In-Between.

I'll explain what that title means here in a little bit. But whenever cultures come together in close proximity, such as in a church like here, inevitably there's going to be some misunderstanding or some confusion or even some conflict, not the least of which occurs around language. I was with a Ukrainian church pastor who told me that he had visited the United States once, and he was actually right here to Raleigh, and he didn't speak any English, or he's just learning to speak English. And he said, I wanted to practice my English, and I was in one of your Starbucks, and there was a woman there. She had a big dog, and I wanted to ask her what the dog's name was. And so he said, I went over to her, and I was forming the words that I knew in English in my mind. He said, now, in Ukrainian, we do the word order differently. So what I said to her was, and you gotta imagine it in the thick Ukrainian accent, he said, I said to her, what is your name, dog?

And he said, she just kind of looked at me, and so I repeated it again for emphasis. He said, I almost created an international incident. Of course, language is not the most serious thing that causes conflict. And as we often experience right here in our own country, when people from different backgrounds or different religious upbringings, different cultures are brought together in close proximity, quite often we experience conflict. This is the practical problem that the Apostle Paul was writing about in Galatians chapter two. And the way that Paul answers or addresses this problem is gonna illustrate the truth of one of our summit plumb lines. Plumb lines are little short phrases that we use that kind of encapsulate our approach to God and ministry.

And one of the, probably the most important of our plumb lines is this one. The gospel is not just the diving board. The gospel is also the pool. And what we mean by that is most people consider the gospel to be the diving board off of which they jump into the pool of Christianity. It's the prayer you pray to begin the Christian life.

It's the ABCs. It's the introduction to Christianity. But after you become a Christian, the way that you grow in Christ is that you're gonna learn all this other stuff and learn these doctrines and learn these facts and do all these new disciplines and that sort of thing. But that's not how Paul talks about the gospel. According to Paul, the way we grow in Christ is the same way we begin in Christ. That if you want to grow in Christ, you don't do it by going beyond the gospel. You do it by going deeper into the gospel. And what Paul is gonna say is that practical problems in our lives or areas of immaturity are not found by growing beyond the gospel, but by going deeper into the gospel. The gospel is not just the diving board. The gospel is the pool itself. And so Paul is going to deal with a practical problem in a gospel way. Here we go.

Okay. Chapter two, verse 11. But when Cephas, Cephas, if you remember, was Paul's nickname for Peter, it means the rock.

When the rock came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he was to be blamed. Because he regularly ate with the Gentiles before certain men came from James. James was the leader of the Jewish branch of the church, the Jerusalem church, James the half brother of Jesus. However, when these Jews came, he withdrew himself and separated himself because he feared those from the circumcision party, which is another way of saying the Jewish Christians there.

Now here's what had happened. In Acts chapter 10, Peter had been given this vision where a gigantic blanket kind of unrolls from heaven. And in this blanket are all kinds of animals that Peter and other Jews considered to be unclean, like rabbits and shrimp and the pigs and that kind of stuff. And a voice, the voice of God called to him from heaven and said, Peter, kill, grill and eat.

I call it Peter's pigs in a blanket dream. And at first Peter resists and he says, I can't do that Lord because these are unclean and I'm the Jew and I don't eat unclean things. But God shows Peter that Jesus's death had made all food clean for the believer. And thus ritual cleanliness had nothing to do anymore with being close to God because Jesus's blood had cleansed us. We no longer needed all these other things that would would bring us close to God.

And so Peter started to eat with the Gentiles and he began to eat what they ate. And here's the thing, once you eat bacon, there's no going back. Amen. Amen. Amen. I used to be part of my evangelism strategy by the way, with Muslims.

I'm like, just try some bacon. You'll see the truth. You'll see the truth. So Peter is out every single night with the Gentiles eating high on the hog, literally. But then some Jews from Jerusalem show up and Peter withdraws and he goes back to his old ways of not even eating with Gentiles, lest they shake some of their uncleanness dust on him or they give him the uncleanness cooties or whatever. Verse 13, then the rest of the Jews joined in his hypocrisy so that even Barnabas, who was like the nicest guy in the church, he loved and accepted everybody. Even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. I've often heard when there's a mist in the pulpit, there's a fog in the pew. And so the rest of the church, following Peter's example, they begin to separate themselves from Gentiles and begin to insist that if Gentiles are gonna be real Christians, they need to adopt the manners and the customs and the eating habits of the Jews.

Now watch this, watch this. But when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the gospel, that's a really important phrase. We're gonna come back to it. So you should underline it in your Bible. I told Cephas in front of everybody. Here's Paul going head to head against Peter.

And he is gonna, he's standing there. I'm sure it was a little awkward by the way. What you're gonna see, and I'm gonna come back to this in a little bit, is that sometimes you care enough about the gospel and you care enough about somebody and you care enough about the church that you get awkward.

Listen very, very closely to this, okay? Gospel unity is not the same thing as Southern politeness. And a lot of us don't get that.

And Southern politeness is where everybody just smiles at everybody and tries to ignore any controversy or avoid any unpleasant conversation. But sometimes you gotta love people and you gotta love the church and you gotta love the gospel enough to get awkward with them. And so what Paul says to Peter is he says, listen, go back, listen, blackhead, back there. I told Cephas in front of everybody, if you who are a Jew live like a Gentile, if you're eating bacon now and not like a Jew, how can you compel Gentiles to now adopt Jewish customs as if this has something to do with now how close they are to God, all right?

And then he does this, watch this, next one now. He says, we know, Peter, that a person is not justified by the works of the law. We're justified by faith in Jesus Christ.

By the works of the law, no human being will be justified. Paul starts explaining the gospel to Peter in front of everybody, which might seem a little condescending, but Paul is saying, Peter, at his core, this is a gospel issue. You see the gospel, Peter, is that we're justified not because of something about us.

It's not because of something we eat or don't eat or because of something we do or don't do. It's because we accept Christ's righteousness as our own. Our justification is a gift that God gives to us because of what Christ did in our place. You see the word justified means to declare innocent. Think of it like in a court of law. When you are declared innocent in a court, you are justified.

And that means that no part of the penalty can ever be put upon you and that you are restored to all the privileges and benefits of full citizenship. When God justified us in Christ, it means that we were declared guiltless and perfect and innocent in God's sight. We are completely accepted. We are beloved sons and daughters of God.

There is no condemnation that belongs to us. And we have been restored to all the privileges and all the benefits and full citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. And Paul says, that's the basis of our acceptance now.

And when you really embrace that, it's gonna tear down any sense of superiority that you might feel towards somebody else. And then Paul concludes chapter two, verse 20, with maybe one of the most famous statements of Christian identity anywhere in the Bible. He says, you see, in reality, I've been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live yet not I, but Christ lives in me.

And the life I now live in the body, I'm living by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. We've called this series the freedom in the in-between because the book of Galatians is about the freedom that the gospel alone can provide for us. You say freedom in between what exactly? Freedom in between when we trust Christ and when he takes us to heaven. In this story, we're gonna see Paul illustrate at least three different kinds of freedom that we experience when we trust Christ. The first of these three is the most substantial.

So we're gonna spend the most time on it, but then we're gonna hit the other two right toward the end because they're all so important and they tie into this first one here, but the first one is the longest. Paul says, because of Christ, we are now finally free to unite. Free to unite. Paul explains that much of our interpersonal strife goes back to a failure at its core. Much of our interpersonal strife goes back to a failure to understand and to apply the gospel. That's why he said that Peter was deviating from the truth of the gospel.

Let's take a few minutes and unpack that. Now let me warn you, this is a little theologically deep, so I need you to put your big boy theological pants on and just hang with me, but it will be worth it, I promise. Paul is showing us that a lot of barriers that exist between people come because we are trying to justify ourselves. In other words, to declare ourselves righteous and acceptable through some things, some characteristic about us. Jewish people did this through the law. Jewish people had a whole system of things that they did that they thought distinguished them from the world. The Old Testament alone has 613 laws every Jew had to conform to. In addition to that, they came up with what they called the hedge about the law. Think of disobedience to the law like falling in a hole, and so because you don't want to fall in the hole, you put up a hedge around it, and so they came up with all these extra laws that kept them really far away from actually ever disobeying the law. There were literally thousands of these little rules that took place as a part of the hedge of the law.

Y'all, I know it got confusing because they were like, how many steps are we allowed to take on the Sabbath again? Can you eat llama meat? Is that on the approved list? How about turkey bacon?

Does that fly under the radar or yoga pants? Is that a forbidden fabric or just bad taste? I don't really know, so what is it that I am allowed to do? See, the more you conform to these things and the better you kept them, the more accepted you were by God and the higher you were spiritually. Now, having a list of things like this, that if you do them, you're accepted, and if you don't do them, you're rejected, and how well you do them makes you closer, and how little you do them makes you farther away, that is not something that is unique to Judaism. All religions have this kind of list, and see, it goes back to, listen, it goes back to a soul condition I've described to you like this before. Now, this is one of those analogies I probably repeat five times a year, and it is because I really want it to be embedded in how you see the gospel.

It goes back to Genesis 3, and here it is. The first emotion that human beings felt after they had sinned was what? They felt shame.

That's right, shame over what? Over their nakedness. Now, were they naked before they sinned? Yes, they were naked before they sinned, but their nakedness did not bother them. Why did their nakedness not bother them before they sinned? St. Augustine's answer to that was, before they sinned, they had been clothed in the love and the acceptance of the heavenly father, and so they felt no shame about their nakedness, and they weren't embarrassed about it, but after they sinned, they had stripped themselves of the love and acceptance of the heavenly father, so now they felt vulnerable, now they felt exposed, now they felt like something was missing, now they felt shame, and so what did they do?

What did they do? Well, I ask you, what do normal people do when they feel naked? They try to clothe themselves, right? I've described it like this before.

If you have a problem sleepwalking, and so you wake up in Super Walmart in the middle of the night, and you're buck naked, what do you do? You're not like, oh, I pick up a few odds and ends from the house, you know why I'm here. No, you try to find clothing because you want to be covered, and this is a picture of the human race is that from that point on, the human race has been trying to find something that could clothe themselves to take away the shame and restore their sense of things being right like they have worth. They are trying to justify themselves, and so what we are always doing is putting something on that distinguishes us from other people. It's like life is one big survivor episode where we're always trying to prove that we're not the ones that ought to be thrown off the island, and it means that I'm always in competition with other people because I got to show that I'm better at this so that that makes me worth something, right? Pride, I told you a couple of weeks ago, pride is at its essence competitive to pride.

It doesn't matter if I'm good looking only that I'm better looking than you. It doesn't matter that I'm religious or righteous. It only matters that I'm more religious and more righteous than you, and so I'm always in competition with other people, and that creates division, and that division that comes from competition that is rooted in pride that comes out of insecurity, that is what fuels all the division that is taking place in the Galatian church. Now some of you say, well, that's exactly why I hate religion. It makes people self-righteous and competitive. All people, not just religious people, all people do this. The human soul feels naked and exposed, and we are constantly looking for something to justify ourselves. Charles Spurgeon, who is the 19th century British pastor that I quote so much that some of you have asked if he is on staff at the summit church.

No, he is not. We do refer to him as pastor emeritus of the summit church, but Spurgeon said that in 19th century London, he saw three main dividers between people and the society. It's amazing how 100 plus years later, these are the same three main dividers we see today. He said, there is the pride of race. He said, number two, there is the pride of face and place, and he said, number three, there's the pride of grace.

Now let me kind of unpack each of those because like I said, they're still pretty relevant. The pride of race. For many, their ethnic identity becomes a way of distinguishing themselves above others. So they take pride in their Americanness or their whiteness or their blackness or their southerness or their Asianness or their Indian culture or their Hispanicness or whatever. A racial distinctive makes them who they are and begins to form their identity, and it's very protecting for them because it gives them a sense of identity and worth. Now hear me very clearly, our ethnic identities and our cultures are beautiful things.

They are created by God like a mini-sided diamond to reflect his glory. But when they become our primary distinguishing identity, they always cause division because you become really proud of and protective and defensive of your culture because your culture gives you a sense of identity and it sets you apart. It's part of what justifies you.

It clothes you. But Paul would say, friend, do you not understand the gospel? There's only one race of people, the human race, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and that race has one core problem, sin, and that race has only one hope, the blood of Jesus that cleanses all of us, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, and mixed alike. That's why Paul says in Romans 10, there is no difference in the Jew or the Greek or the black or the white or the rich or the poor, the young or the old or the Arab or the Asian because all have the same curse that is put upon them and all of them call to the same Lord who can show them grace and mercy when they call upon him for salvation. Where is boasting then, Paul says, in your race?

Where is a sense of superiority? Your race could not save you. Your culture could not save you. If salvation could have come through our cultures or our ethnic identities, then Jesus would have come in one race, but he didn't. He came as the Lord of all humanity. And what gives you worth and identity now is not your Jewishness or your whiteness or your Americanness or your blackness.

By the keeping of the law or by the preserving of culture, no human being is justified. And after my identity in Christ, when I embraced that, Paul says, all the rest of these defining characteristics seem to me like garbage compared to the worth of our identity in Christ. In fact, the word that Paul used was much stronger than garbage. Philippians 3, now one of my favorite Greek words, Paul said, compared to what I have in Christ, not Jewishness, not education, all my background, it all seems like scubala. Now it's a great Greek word.

You want to say it? Scubala. Now you just said a bad word in Greek because scubala is the kind of word that if your 12 year old son used it, you'd wash out his mouth with soap.

Your Bible very politely translates it as dung, but it was a much stronger word than that. Paul wasn't self-loathing. He didn't hate his culture. He loved his culture. But Paul said, compared to my identity in Christ, my Jewishness, all my accomplishments, all my education, everything just seems so light.

It just seems like scubala. Listen, y'all, this is really, really important. Listen, when we become Christians, our cultural distinctives do not go away. They just become a lot less important. Tony Evans, an African-American preacher and one of my favorite all-time preachers, he says, listen, the racial application that Paul's teaching here in Galatians 2 is that it is technically incorrect to say I'm a black Christian or I'm a white Christian because now you've made black and white adjectives and Christian a noun. And the job of the adjective is to modify the noun. So now you got to keep Christian looking like the adjective that describes it, or it ceases to be Christian. But black and white culture have nothing to do with the essence of being a Christian. So better to say, I'm a Christian who happens to be white, or I'm a Christian who happens to be black. God is not telling Jewish people to become Gentiles or Gentiles to act like Jews.

He's not telling white people to become black people or black people to act like white people. He's telling all people to be kingdom people, having crucified their whiteness or their blackness or their Jewishness to the cross and regarding it as scubala in giving them worth or justifying them before God. And see, when we begin to experience racial division, almost always at the root of that division is that our ethnic identity has become too large in our hearts. Our identity in Christ has to become greater, much greater than any other identity we possess. You see, for many people, they would say, well, of course my identity in Christ is the biggest, but here's what happens. Our identity in Christ is here, but we've got this other kind of identity that's right up close to it. Like whether we're black or white or Hispanic, for example, or maybe it's this one, whether we're a Republican or a Democrat or independent.

So that's just a really important identifying characteristic for us or American, Asian, or European. And so what happens, listen, is that anytime we have a discussion that affects something in this area, we can't have that discussion with people who disagree with us without it dividing us from them. So for example, we can't really talk about politics because if you and I disagree on the best approach to nationalized healthcare, then we're going to be a division between us.

Or we can't discuss whether or not kneeling during the national anthem is an appropriate response to racial disparity in our culture. Because if we disagree on that, then we're going to divide. And the reason, the problem with that, Paul says, is that this identity here has become so closely tied to this one that these right here control relationships. He says, really, when you understand what it is, these identities are going to go way down the list there.

It's not that they did disappear, it's that your identity in Christ just so far outweighs them that all these others just seem kind of insignificant to you in light of who you are in Christ. In fact, I love the way the apostle Paul talks about it. It's kind of shocking. First Corinthians nine, Paul says to the Jew, I became a Jew.

You say, well, what's shocking about that? He was a Jew. So how does a Jew become a Jew to other Jews? What it's showing, listen, it's showing you that his ethnic identity was so light to him, he could take it on and off like a garment.

He could take it off and put it right back on. Now, to a first century Jew, their Jewish ethnicity and their heritage was precious to them because, I mean, they were a very persecuted group. They've been shoved into ghettos. They've been persecuted by the Romans. They were very self-protective of their Jewish identity and they loved their heritage and their culture. And Paul says, yeah, he says, but compared to who I am in Christ, even that identity seems like it's just not that significant.

Yes, I love it. Yes, it's important. But my identity in Christ is so far more significant to me that even if I disagreed in some of these things, or even if you do things differently than me, then I'm not going to, it's not going to affect how we relate to each other. When there's racial division, quite often, the cause that it goes back to is that something about our culture or something about our political disposition or whatever, it's become so significant to us that it causes division. Our identity in Christ must become greater, greater than any other identity we might have. A relevant message about the importance of unity from Pastor J.D.

Greer here on Summit Life. If you happen to join us late or if you'd like to share this message with a friend, be sure to visit our teaching archive at jdgreer.com. Today's message is titled Freed to Unite, and it's part of our study in Galatians called Freedom in the In-Between. We believe that the Bible is the best resource for understanding the will of God and understanding gospel unity.

In fact, God's Word promises us that if we ask anything according to His will, then we can be confident that God will hear and answer. Let your time in God's Word take you into deeper communion with Him. This month, we partnered with the publisher Crossway on a custom Bible. No, we didn't change any of the words of the Bible, but we were able to add some pages to the front of the Bible to give you one of our custom Summit Life reading plans with little check boxes and everything for 52 weeks of Bible reading. So you can pick up reading here in Galatians as we continue through this study, or you could start at the beginning and work your way through. Or here's an idea. You could actually give it away to someone who you think might need some encouragement in reading their Bible.

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Box 122, 93, Durham, North Carolina, 27709. You also don't want to forget to follow Pastor J.D. on Facebook and Instagram for more updates and encouraging content. I'm Molly Vitevich. Be sure to join us again tomorrow as we continue our series called Freedom in the In-Between on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.