Surrender

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. I guarantee you that if you have a problem with generosity, if you have a problem with obeying God and his commands with money, I guarantee you it is a worship problem. Because you cannot take your hands off of all that you have until Christ is all that you need. And when you say Christ you are all that I need, you can say I can take my hands off of all that I have because I am clinging to you. Hey, thanks for joining us here for a new week of solid biblical teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. You know, the holidays bring out something unique each year. It seems like a lot of people get interested in church because they realize that something's missing in their life. They expect that being a Christian will maybe give them that nuisance of purpose or a better family or comfort needed during a hard time. But today, Pastor J.D. is challenging us to change our thinking about why we follow God.

Today's teaching is the conclusion of our short teaching series called All In. So if you've missed any of the previous messages, you can catch up online at jdgreer.com. But right now, let's join Pastor J.D.

with a message he titled Surrender. So if you have your Bible, I'd invite you to take it out right now and open it to the sixth book of the Bible, which is Joshua. That is, if you have a Bible with an Old Testament in it, the sixth book is Joshua, so it should be pretty easy to find. This is an absolutely awesome story, and it really brings to a head everything that we've talked about with All In up to this point. So here we go, Joshua 5, verse 13.

Let me give you the context real quick. Moses has died. Moses, who has been the leader of the children of Israel for many years, and the mantle of leadership has now fallen to his right-hand man, Joshua. Joshua is tasked with leading Israel into the promised land, and his first major challenge to that end is Jericho, which happens to be the most fortified city in the world at the time, had walls that were so thick that you could ride three chariots across it simultaneously.

So this is no easy challenge. The scene in Joshua 5 that you're about to look at takes place on the eve of that battle. Now, as you can imagine, Joshua is pretty nervous. I mean, war is imminent.

Israel is armed, and they're ready to fight. Plus, this is Joshua's first true moment to show his leadership. So, understandably, he's having a little trouble sleeping. And so he goes out late at night, and he takes a walk all by himself. He's killing time.

He's probably praying. Verse 13. Now, when Joshua was by Jericho, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went up to him and said to him, Are you for us, or are you for our adversaries?

Verse 14. And he said, No. No? Did Joshua ask him a yes-no question?

Hey, what's your name? No. Sorry, I asked.

Right? No. No, but I am the commander of the army of the Lord.

Now I have come. No means you're asking the wrong question, Joshua. The question is not, Am I on your side?

The question is, Are you on my side? Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshipped. And he said to him, What does my Lord say to his servant? And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua, Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy. And Joshua did so. Okay, first of all, who is this that Joshua has encountered?

Well, it gives you a few clues. First of all, it's the commander of the army of the Lord. Second of all, Joshua worships this guy without being rebuked.

And you could never do that with an angel or another human being. Third, if you look in the next chapter, it's going to identify this strange visiting man as the Lord himself. In other words, this is what theologians call a theophany.

A theophany, which means an Old Testament pre-nativity appearance of God in human form. This is Jesus. He's going to show you four incredibly crucial defining elements of what your relationship with God has to look like if you're going to walk with him or know him at all.

These are so important. Here's number one. Jesus invites us, number one, to surrender. He invites us to surrender. He is not someone that we enlist, listen, onto our side, onto our team. He comes as the commander to whom we surrender. You see, up until this point, Joshua has seen himself as the commander and his hope is that God will help him.

But Jesus shows up and says, this is my army. The question is not, Joshua, am I on your side? The question is, are you on my side? My army, my agenda.

I'm not here to help you. I'm going to use you in this process. Well, this is my army. Have you surrendered to me?

Here's why that is so important. A lot of us, a lot of us at some point, have realized that we need God to be a part of our lives. You've realized that you can't make life work without him. You need him in your marriage. You need him in your family.

You want to raise your children to know God. You realize that you need him to help guide you in decisions. You realize that life can be overwhelming to you. You need him to get you through some situation. You know that you need him when you die. You don't want to go to hell. You need him to take you to heaven. You certainly don't want God to be your adversary. And so you have approached God with this question.

God, how do I get you on my side? How much do I have to do? How much do I have to give? How many commandments do I have to keep?

How often do I have to keep them? How much do I have to go to church? What's the amount that gets me in your good graces so you will not be on my adversary, you will be on my team? That is a completely wrong way of approaching Jesus. Because it's his universe. He's the commander. That bumper sticker people used to have in their cars, God is my co-pilot. And I told you that if God is your co-pilot, then somebody is in the wrong seat. Because Jesus does not come to, you know, get in the passenger seat of your car and to say, hey, you know, let me be here to give you some directions and let me be here to make some chummy conversation and to keep you from being lonely. And let me be here to make sure that if you get in a jam, you can get out of it and to fix a car when it's broken.

That's not how he comes. He comes to you and says, hey, that's my car and you stole it. You get out and you're like, hey man, I'm sorry. I'm going to get in the back seat. Please don't take me to jail.

Where are we going? When you come to Jesus, it is a moment of surrender where you say, not God, how are you going to be a part of my universe, but you come to a point where you surrender to him everything. He's the commander. The other reason that this approach of what must I do to get Jesus on my side never works is that you just simply can't bargain your way into salvation. You can never do enough to get God on your side. You see, the gospel is that God gives you his acceptance as a gift. He only receives you by grace, grace, G-R-A-C-E, God's riches at Christ's expense. And the only right response to God accepting you not by your works but by his is complete and total surrender. So my question for you is have you come to that point of complete and total surrender? Not where you are trying to get God onto your side, but where you have surrendered to Jesus and his mission. As it relates to your money, as your approach, God, how much do I have to give to you so that I can get on with my life? Or is it Jesus, it's all yours, all of it.

I need you to show me what I'm supposed to do with it. I have a pastor friend who told me that he challenged his congregation. It's a little cheesy, but it made a point. He said, I'm not going to have you do this. He said, but I had them all pull out their credit cards, and then we gave them a black magic Sharpie. And he said, I had them where their name was on their credit card to write Jesus's name over their name. He said, so that everything that they used that credit card to buy, they would ask, is this how Jesus would spend his money? WWJD, what would Jesus debit? Is this something that Jesus would go into debt for? Because it's all his.

I've not paid him his tax and moved on. He's the commander of the army of the Lord. So it means he commands everything I have of you come to that point where you have taken your hands off of everything you have. It says it all belongs to you. It's your car.

What do you want to do with it? That leads me to number two. He invites us to follow. He invites us to follow. You see, Joshua, up to this point, I've been thinking I'm going to fight this battle for God and I need God's help. And what Jesus says is, nope, I'll be fighting this battle. It's my battle. I'm going to use you in the process. But, friend, listen, that is a fundamentally different approach to God's work. This is so important.

Write this down. At no point does God tell us to go fight the battle for him. He invites us to follow him as he fights the battle through us. I mean, think about what happened in this story.

You know how the story ends? God tells Joshua to get the armies of Israel and to march around the walls of Jericho seven times. Then he'd yell at it and blow some trumpets. And then God knocked the walls down.

Is that something, Joshua? You think that was in his plans up to this point? You think he was like, oh, yeah, you know. I guarantee you whatever battle plan he'd come up with did not include that. Did God need him to do that? Did God need his shout? Was that the missing piece that was going to knock the walls down?

No. God did not need anything Joshua could offer and he's trying to show him that. He's trying to say, that's my battle. I'll fight it.

I'm going to use you in the process. But that's fundamentally different than you going out and fighting the battle for me. You just follow me and do what I say because I can do more in a few minutes with one shout than you could do if you amassed the most powerful army the world had ever seen. Jesus made this exact same point. Listen to his disciples when he gave them the Great Commission.

The Great Commission, which was the largest assignment that he'd ever given to anybody. Jesus said, you're going to take the gospel to all these people groups all throughout the world. And then after laying on a group of 12 guys, the most extensive assignment anyone has ever received, do you remember his first instruction to them what to do?

I want you to go wait and do nothing until the Holy Spirit comes. Now, you know that out of a group of 12 some of those guys had to be type A, right? And some of them are like, wait, we got to get going. We got a conference to organize. Peter, you need to start a preaching tour. John, you should write a book. You know what I mean?

They're starting to think this way. Jesus said, nope. Nope. You go wait because this is not something that you are going to do for me. This is something I'm going to do through you. At any point did Jesus ever say, you will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Nope. He said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. So the question is not, listen, how do I save the world? Because I've told you that question leads to constantly feeling overwhelmed. It leads to never-ending guilt. It leads to you always feeling like you're never doing enough. You're always feeling guilty and eventually it leads you to paralysis.

I know because I've lived there most of my life. The question is not how do we save the world. The question is simply what has the Holy Spirit given me to do? What gifts has the Holy Spirit given to me? What is he directing me to do with my talents and my resources?

Listen, I realize that there are some unique things happening in the book of Acts, but I am not one of those who believe that we have a fundamentally different relationship with the Holy Spirit than did those early Christians in the book of Acts. They depended on him. He led them in the mission. They were sensitive to him. They followed him. Are you following him? When's the last time the Holy Spirit spoke to you? When's the last time he guided you in the mission? Because he doesn't show up in a fundamentally different way than what we see there.

Let me give you a few examples so you know what I'm talking about. Acts 11, Peter has a dream. In his dream God tells him that he should meet with some Gentiles, but he doesn't know whom.

Then there's a knock at the door and Peter goes down to open it and it's some soldiers. Acts 11, 12, watch this. The Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with him. In other words, he's already had the dream. Now there are these soldiers there that would certainly frighten him, and the Spirit told him in his spirit, don't hesitate here. Don't doubt.

I'm doing this. Acts 16, here's the other side of it. Luke, recounting how the gospel is spreading throughout Europe. Acts 16, as they went through the region of Galatia. These are two of the strangest verses in the book of Acts. They go through the regions of Galatia having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the gospel in Asia. What? The Holy Spirit stopped them from preaching the gospel somewhere?

Yep. He said, I need you to go through Galatia because I need Paul to write a book about that place and I need him to get familiar with it, so I want him to go over there for a while. Verse seven, and when they'd come up to Missia, they attempted to go there into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. Didn't allow them to do what? Didn't allow them to look at porn? Didn't allow them to tell a lie?

To say a curse word? No, didn't allow them to preach the gospel in a certain place. You see what's happening? The Holy Spirit is guiding them. He's telling them, don't hesitate here. No, no, go through here. Not doing this. Give this.

Say that. Is that how you relate to the Holy Spirit? Do you follow the Spirit of God? Is he the commander that you're following?

Or is he a help that you're trying to enlist? Because in whatever ways we execute the mission of God, if we are not following the Spirit, we will not be doing it effectively. Parents, as you disciple your children, are you following the guidance and the prompting of the Holy Spirit? Do you really think you're going to be able to raise a kid who knows and loves God in this day and age if you are not following the impulses and the promptings of the Holy Spirit?

Really? If you're going to do anything successful in ministry, you're going to have to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. You're going to have to get up each day and say, Holy Spirit, I need you to guide me. I need you to tell me what to say, when. I need you to help me speak about you. I need you to help me be effective. I need you to guide me because I'm following you.

I'm not doing this for you. Is that how you approach life? Throughout this series, I've asked you, are you following the Holy Spirit in your giving? Because that's ultimately the question, isn't it? What's he putting in your heart?

Have you even asked the question? I'm not the Holy Spirit for you. I don't know what he's telling you, but have you ever just laid it all before God and asked him how to guide you how you would give it? God doesn't need your money, but God's Spirit guides you and says, this is what I want.

This is what I want. You've got to at least ask the question and follow the impulses that he's putting in your heart. Now, some of you are like, well, how do I know it's the Holy Spirit? Maybe it's like the devil or something put in my heart. Listen, I am not sure what is on the official list of what Satan prompts you to do, but I am pretty sure sacrificial giving is not on that list. Therefore, whenever something is in my heart to give it to somebody, I always assume that is from the Holy Spirit and I try to obey it. And by the way, you should notice that the apostles are not waiting on the Spirit to tell them to get into the mission. They're counting on the Spirit to guide them as they're in the mission. And the reason I make that clarification is we've got a lot of people sitting around waiting on God to tell them to do something he's already told them to do. I can guarantee you if you are not sacrificially pouring yourself out of mission, if you are not using your spiritual gifts, if you're not telling other people about Jesus, you are not walking with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit steers moving ships. That's the only way you can steer a ship. You've got to start moving it. You move it by your obedience and then God steers you as you go.

What that looks like is this. Jesus, I am going to give sacrificially. Show me where and how. Jesus, I'm going to tell other people about you. I'm going to make disciples.

Show me where and how. The question is no longer whether you should be involved in the mission. The question is where and how and what is the role you are to be in the mission. Have you ever begun that process with obedience and then let him guide you? You're to surrender. You're to follow.

Here's number three. Jesus invites us to worship. He invites us to worship. When Joshua sees Jesus, he immediately hits the deck. He verbalizes absolute surrender and then he takes off his shoes, which is an Old Testament sign of deep respect for something that's holy. This, listen, is God's first and primary agenda for us, to be prostrate before him in worship.

You see, you worship whatever you put ultimate value on, whatever you feel like you absolutely must have in order to have life and happiness and security. Throughout this series, I've explained to you that for many of you that one thing that you absolutely must have for life and security is money. That's what you fall on your face before. That's what you've fallen on your face before all your life. That's what you cling to. That's what, metaphorically, you take your shoes off in front of and what you say, hey, wherever you lead me to go, that's where I'm going to go.

You're the biggest factor in my decision making. Jesus' first call for you, listen, is to replace money with him because he is such a better God than money. I wish I could convince some of you of that because he gives a joy and a peace and a security that money can never touch. Some of you have fallen on your face prostrate before money all your life, and you don't have peace and security and joy.

That's why, because money makes a terrible God. I guarantee you that if you have a problem with generosity, if you have a problem with obeying God and his commands with money, I guarantee you it is a worship problem because you cannot take your hands off of all that you have until Christ is all that you need. When you say, Christ, you are all that I need, you can say, I can take my hands off of all that I have because I am clinging to you. The invitation is for you to get off your face for the first time in your life and not worship money and to get off your face before that and get down on it before Jesus and to stay prostrate before him and to start to worship him. What is the God that you serve and what does your giving say about the God that you serve? Number four, to surrender, to follow, to worship. Here's the best one, to win.

To win. When Joshua encounters Jesus, did you see this? Jesus had his sword raised. When Jesus raises his sword, it's because he intends to fight.

My friend, there has never been a time ever where Jesus raised his sword and lost. Matthew 28, the Great Commission, you remember how the Great Commission starts? What's the first word of the Great Commission? Don't say go. Don't say go.

All right, trick question. Go comes after the first statement which is, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth, therefore go. All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth is basically Jesus raising his sword.

It's the same thing. He is raising his sword saying, this is the battle I'm going on. I want you to join me and I'm going to tell you what you're supposed to do in it. Victory is assured. The Great Commission begins and is fueled by the great announcement of his ultimate victory. Great sacrifices for the Great Commission come from great confidence in our great Savior and the fact that he has raised his sword, that it has been drawn and that he will certainly build the kingdom that he has said he will build. Do you believe this?

Do you believe that? Does what you do with your money show that you believe that his sword has been drawn and that's the only kingdom he's building? Summit Church, I want you so badly to think about your life from the perspective that you will have five seconds after you enter eternity. Will you not at that point look back on your life and wish that you had leveraged everything you possibly could to be a part of building the kingdom, to doing the mission that God had given us to do? Don't think about, you know, investment counselors tell you, don't think three years from now, think 30 years. That's how you should invest your money.

Jesus, the ultimate investment counselor, says don't think 30 years, think 30 million years from now and leverage what you have for the kingdom you can't lose. We know he wins, we know his kingdom's the only thing that's eternal. Are you all in? Are you all in with that kingdom? Have you come to a point of total surrender?

Are you following? Is he really what you worship? Have you taken your hands off everything and said you're all that I need? And are you living in the confidence that his kingdom is the one that will last and the one that's eternal?

Every area of our lives belongs to God if we're truly living out his mission, if we're all in. Have you told him recently that he's everything that you need? Let me encourage you, do that today. This has been a powerful conclusion to the teaching series called All In from Pastor J.D.

Greer. Remember, if you missed any part of this series, you can find all the messages free of charge at jdgreer.com. J.D., we only have a couple days left for our listeners to reserve their copy of your latest study guide. What can you tell us about it?

Yeah, it is a little different, Molly. This is sort of a here and now book that's got a study guide about joining God in what he's doing right now with us. You know, one of the most profound experiences I had was years ago. It was when I was in college, which, what, a couple years ago, I think?

A couple years ago, times 10. It was Henry Blackaby's experience in God. And the basic idea was you find what God is doing and you join him in it. Well, that's a great study, but it's a principle that I've tried to, we've tried to put into what we teach and preach, and I think that's certainly true of what we've got for you this month. You know, the Summit Church, our mission statement is that we want to follow the Holy Spirit and then to create a movement of disciples, making disciples. And sometimes people brush over that following the Holy Spirit part because you're just like, oh, well, Christianity is, I'm going out to do a bunch of things for God. I can tell you that is an exhausting way to live. You know, sometimes people listen to us and they're like, well, I could never do what you do, Molly, in addressing that.

I can never do what you do, JD, in teaching. But it's, there is a disciple making capacity that God calls each of us to. And this will show you how you can have a role in it and how you can live that out. Reach disciple sin. That's what God has called the earliest disciples to do. It's what he's called you and I to do.

And that's what this study is all about. It's about God's movement and you being, you, you perceiving it and moving along with him. Every penny you give goes to covering the cost of producing and distributing these messages so that more people can dive into the gospel with us. In addition, we also take 10 percent of every gift and help plant churches across the country and around the world.

That means that your gift is helping spread the gospel on the radio, TV, and web, as well as reaching communities through God's ultimate, and the local church. What a huge mission to be a part of. Join with us when you give today. And remember to ask for your copy of our newest resource titled, Be the Movement. Call 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220 or give and request the study book online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vinovich, and I'm so glad that you've been with us today. Be sure to tune in tomorrow when it begins to sound a lot like Christmas here on the program. Pastor J.D.

Greer will explain what sets the nativity story apart from any of the others we tell at this time of year. Join us Tuesday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.