The Church, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. See, here's the good news. What the law is unable to accomplish, the power of new life accomplishes in the gospel. The gospel shows us that we're not ultimately defined by our culture. Trusting in Jesus does not remove our cultural distinctives, but it shows us, listen, that we are not ultimately defined by our cultures. We are defined first by who we are in Christ. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian, J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Okay, honesty time. Do you feel more at ease with someone who shares your political convictions? Or how about someone who shares your faith in Jesus?

I think the answer is unequivocally yes, right? Well, today pastor J.D. Greer demonstrates how moving beyond awareness of our differences to engaging with others in our differences helps us create the kind of gospel community that celebrates our diversity. And make sure you listen all the way to the end where pastor J.D.

tells us about the perfect followup resource. So grab your Bible and let's jump in. So what I want to reemphasize today is that one of the best ways that we can demonstrate the wisdom and the power of God is by being known for our unity in diversity.

Again, Ephesians 3.10. It's how we display the multifaceted wisdom of God to our community. I think I've told you a group of people all share in one culture getting together is not miraculous. That happens at any football game, any rock concert, any political rally. But when you got a group of people who have little in common except for a common experience of grace, that points to the magnitude of the gospel.

It points to the power of the new man created in the resurrection. That kind of unity is fun to talk about and it is hard to achieve and it takes commitment. Let me give you a handful of reasons just from personal reflection and observation.

I think it's so hard. First of all, Satan. Take a note, write that one down, Satan. Satan hates this kind of unity, especially in the church. This is how God gets his best glory. So you can better believe Satan wants to do everything he can to obscure it.

And when we start talking about this, he will pull out every weapon in the book to try to confuse and try to distort and try to make you angry. Because at its core, this is a spiritual battle because it's about the glory of Jesus and you should always be aware that he is working in us to try and undo the good things the spirit wants to do. So that's why letter A, Satan, letter B, pride. Racial, political and educational characteristics tend to become core parts of our identity, don't they? These are what begins to set us apart from others and what makes us feel significant. And so whenever you've got something about yourself that makes you feel significant, then you tend to feel proud about that thing. And you start to resist anything that would threaten to undo or remove or belittle that distinction. Again, let me just consider with me, what makes up your core identity?

What defines you? I'm Hispanic, I'm white, I'm black, I went to this school, I'm rich, I have a PhD, I ran a marathon. What other thing are you allowed to brag about on the back of your car and it's socially accessible other than a marathon?

I have several friends who do that and they know that I'm kind of kidding. Pride, pride grows out of defining yourself primarily by things about you that set you apart from others. Now again, there's nothing wrong with many of those things but where pride in them exists, there will be no unity, period. John Piper says it like this, racial tensions are rife with pride, aren't they? There's the pride of white supremacy, there's the pride of black power, there's the pride of intellectual analysis, the pride of anti-intellectual scorn, the pride of loud verbal attack and the pride of despising silence, the pride that feels secure and the pride that masks fear. Where pride holds sway, there is no hope for the kind of listening and patience and understanding and openness to correction that these Ephesians 2 relationships that we're talking about require. Or the way that Chris Green, one of our African-American pastor says that, I think so much more simply, the reason we have skin issues is because we have sin issues.

Letter C, preference, preference. Simple preferences for what worship should look like. I looked around one weekend at the Briar Creek campus where I was attending and was just amazed at the different people who come to our church.

You got a lot of people who are, I guess, raised, let's just say Southern Baptist. And so when they're into church, here's what they do. They sing boisterously.

Man, they really love to sing and they stand there and they belt out the songs. When it's time for the message, they sit down and open their Bible and they take out a pen and a notebook because they're gonna take copious notes on God's word. And occasionally, if I say something really good, they give a short punctuated amen, right?

That's kind of what they do. That's different than some of our African-American members because some of them talk back to me in full sentences with nouns and verb clauses and questions that I wonder if I'm supposed to answer in the middle of church. And I'm listening like, am I supposed to be talking back right now?

I don't know what to do here, right? Now. Now, I contrast that, now get to this. I contrast that with our, we have a group of Korean believers that come and they will sit together all the times in one row together. And I was watching them, I watched them for several weeks because I'm telling you that there is nobody in our church that worships with more passion and energy than that group of Korean believers.

They don't sing the songs, they shout the songs. But then every time that I got up to preach, I'd stand up to preach, the whole row of them would sit in dead silence. And eventually, my feelings actually got a little hurt because I thought, well, maybe I'm just not connecting with them.

Maybe they love the worship, but they're kind of enduring the preaching. And so I just asked them one weekend, I was like, is it me? Like, am I talking too fast? And the guy says, oh no. He said, no, no, no. He said, in our culture, when somebody that is an authority is speaking, you don't say anything.

You listen and you write things down. In our culture, it's disrespectful to talk back to the person that is talking. I have a friend who was a missionary in Japan. And he said that the church that he planted over there in Japan, he said, if you looked at their faces in worship, they would have the most intense emotional feelings written on their face, sometimes tears, sometimes joy. He said, but everything they did in church was in a whisper. And he asked why.

He's like, why would you do that? He said, well, we want to show our emotion to God, which he can see in our face, but we don't want to disturb others who are doing the same. Now I contrast that with some of our members who stretch before they come to church because if you ain't sweating, you ain't praising. That's just kind of how they think about it. And then they've got a bunch more y'all in our church.

You don't really know what you're doing. You kind of like, I'm not sure what this church is about. And so you come in and I love how Tim Hawkins describes this progression.

Your first Sunday, you're like this. And then as you sort of get used to here, you start doing the chicken wing. This is what you do during worship.

This is like the progression. And then you get really bold. And so you do the carry in the TV, right? This is kind of the first worship posture. And then you move to the widescreen TV, okay? And then you'll graduate to the mime in a box, sort of worship posture right here.

And then when you're really getting bold, you go up to the village people and then there's Rocky Balboa and then there's touchdown. And that's kind of the worship progression that we watch happen. And then we got our formal Pentecostals and some of the lady Pentecostals are my favorite because they're out there and they're like washing heaven's windows. Is there like the dueling light bulbs going on up here with this? I didn't even start it by the way on our summit in Espanol.

When I get done with all the services here, I walk back down there to summit in Espanol and they're still on their first song set. Because if it doesn't last like three or four hours, then it's just not really a church. Now here's a question. Which one of those is God's favorite? Amen. Amen is what you would say back to that. Let every Southern Baptist say, amen.

Right, so let me say this. Listen, that means that in order for you to be a part of a multicultural church, you're gonna have to be willing to be uncomfortable sometimes with people around you not doing things your way. My friend Vance Pittman, who's spoken here a couple of times, he says the way to know, the way to know that you're part of a multicultural church is that you frequently feel uncomfortable in church. If you don't feel uncomfortable, you're not part of a multicultural church.

Many people who want a multicultural church only want a multicolored church. Brian Loretz says that we know, we know multiculturalism was a huge issue in the early church because of how much of Paul's letters talked about food. Food is not an issue in a homogenous church. You just eat your kosher meal and be happy. But when you got Gentiles starting to show up at the potluck, oh, they start bringing in different dishes, squirrel souffle and sausage casserole and Jews are like, what do you do with this? Whenever the Bible talks about food, you should sub in music. If you want a diverse sanctuary, you gotta have a diverse dinner table.

If we want a diverse church, then there's gonna be things around the dinner table and things in our customs that some of which are not gonna be your favorite. All right, here's letter D, apathy. I think this might be the biggest one I'll talk the shortest about though.

It's just easier. Man, when we try, let me tell you this, when we try this, as we've tried this, it's difficult. When you get hurt, you get misunderstood, your motives get thrown back at you. I'll go ahead and tell you, I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me, I will get more emails in response to this message than anything I've preached all year long. Somebody feeling like I said too much, somebody feeling like I didn't say enough, why did you say that? You shouldn't have said that and that's okay. But there are times to me that it's like, you know what? It'd just be easier to just forget all this and just do, run in the lane that I know that I'm comfortable in, but the glory of Jesus and the success of the great commission is worth it, so we're gonna press on, all right?

Letter E, letter E, lack of empathy, lack of empathy. Paul tells us very clearly throughout his epistles that we ought to bury each other's burdens. And that certainly applies in this area. Let me say something to those of you who are in the so-called majority culture. What we need to learn to do in this is to say to one another and to those who are not part of that culture, I need you to help me understand how that feels.

I need you to help me understand why you think that way. The book of James tells us that we ought to be quick to hear slow to speak, slow to anger. If there were ever a place for us to apply this verse, it's in this arena. James doesn't say there's never a place for you to speak.

There's never a place for you to be able to give a perspective. It just has to be slow to speak. Slow to speak means that you listen a whole lot more than you talk. You seek to understand more than you seek to be understood because to listen to somebody is to love them. I love what Albert Tate, the great African-American pastor leader here in our country says, it's hard for me to love.

It's hard for me to love when I am so busy trying to defend myself. We do not wanna be a church that focuses so much on this relationship, vertical, that we ignore the neglect, the pain of each other on the horizontal sphere. In fact, Jesus told a parable just directly forbidding that, didn't he?

In Matthew 5, verse 24, I'll show you. Therefore, if you're offering your gift to the altar, you're a church, you brought your offering, and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you. It's not even that you're mad at somebody. They're mad at you. They got something against you.

What do you do? This, by the way, right here, this shows you Jesus understood pastors. Leave your gift there in front of the altar, but just go ahead and leave the offering right there, just leave it and then go and be reconciled to your brother and then come back and the offering will still be there and we'll have already taken it. But that's how the order's gotta go, is there's no, it is insincere, Jesus says to God, for there to be a robust vertical relationship with him while we neglect and ignore horizontal pain that is going on all around us. You're listening to a message titled The Church here on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. We'll rejoin this teaching in just a moment, but be sure to visit us online at jdgreer.com to take a look at all of our resources. You know, we say it all the time here, the gospel isn't just the diving board into Christianity, it's the whole pool and we don't want anyone, anywhere to miss that. Charles Spurgeon once said, whenever I get a hold of a text, I say to myself, there is a road from here to Jesus Christ and I need to keep on his track until I get to him. So our goal is to bring solid Bible teaching straight to homes and cars everywhere so that no one misses the opportunity to know Jesus personally. When you give to Summit Life, that's the mission that you're supporting. You're helping us reach out and bring the gospel message to your neighbors and other fellow listeners. We'd love to have you join our gospel partner program as a monthly giver. You can find all the information about joining this group of faithful supporters by visiting our website at jdgreer.com. We look forward to having you join our team. Now let's get back to today's teaching on Summit Life.

Here's Pastor J.D. I wanna say this especially to you that are again in the so-called minority cultures. I know that there are times that we have been blind to some of the struggles that you have had to go through. We do not want to be. We wanna walk with you through these things. We want to share your burdens even as you share ours. We wanna fight together for each other because that's what family does.

And that's what the kind of church we wanna be. Letter F, unforgiveness. Unforgiveness, Paul will tell us later in Ephesians four that failure to bestow forgiveness is one of Satan's primary ways of gaining a foothold in any relationship. He's gonna tell us that a failure to forgive quickly on all sides is how this strife keeps going.

I think it was Gandhi who said, reflected on Jesus's words that if we insist on justice always being an eye for an eye, then eventually the whole world will be blind. Somebody has to break the chain. Let me tell you a lie about forgiveness that many of you believe in multiple arenas of your life that keeps you firmly in Satan's grasp on this area. The lie is this, I can't forgive you until I know that you know how much you've hurt me.

Think of it like in marriage. You got a wife who hurts her husband. She repents and asks for his forgiveness. But he still doesn't think that she's understood the extent of his pain.

Now there are two sides to this. Maybe she hasn't and maybe he needs to continue to help her see that and she in love needs patiently to work at understanding his pain. But, and this is key, if he makes his forgiveness of her conditional on her understanding everything about his pain, he's gonna be A, holding himself captive to a standard she will likely never meet. And B, what he's actually saying is, I can't forgive you until you felt bad enough, which is a way of paying for your sin. And that's pay making somebody, pay for their sin is not forgiveness.

Forgiveness is extending grace even when somebody doesn't deserve it. And maybe the best teaching on this of course, came from Jesus sermon on the Mount when he talked about turning the other cheek. The cheek in Jewish kind of thought always represented the relationship. The face represents relationship. So when you smack somebody's cheek, you're not trying to kill them, right?

I mean, no martial arts instructor ever says, go for the cheek. You know, it's like, no, they're insulting you. They're insulting the relationship. They're breaking the relationship.

So what do you do? Well, your options are you can stand up and smack their cheek, right? You insulted me, I'm gonna break the relationship back.

You could be passive and just sort of sit there and take it, take it on the same cheek. What Jesus is saying is neither of those, he's saying a third thing, which is, I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna turn the other cheek, which means I'm going to confront you about what you did wrong, but I'm gonna do so while extending to you, the invitation to be rejoined in relationship that starts with forgiveness. So yes, I am telling you, you can't smack my cheek. That's why I'm turning it away from you. But even as I say that, I want you to understand the pain, but my forgiveness of you is not conditional on the pain on you recognizing all that. It's just conditional on you saying, yes, let's be at peace and let's walk together. If there were ever a place that this needs to be applied, it's in this area because it's how we stay in Satan's grasp there. I've given you six things that keep us from being able to achieve this.

Is it any wonder that our society can't do it? But see, here's the good news. Here's the whole message of Ephesians. What the law, what the law is unable to accomplish, the power of new life accomplishes in the gospel.

Write this down. The gospel shows us that we're not ultimately defined by our culture. Trusting in Jesus does not remove our cultural distinctives, but it shows us, listen, that we are not ultimately defined by our cultures. We are defined first by who we are in Christ. Now I wanna be really, really careful here because God created the rich beauties and diversities of culture and God is not on a mission to erase them. It's just that when you become a Christian, God gives you an identity that goes beyond and deeper than any of your other cultural distinctives. In saying that Christ has created one new man, when he said that there in Ephesians, he is introducing a concept that a lot of theologians call the concept of the third race.

Hang with me here, okay? Your first race, that is whatever race you are. So for me, it's a white, Caucasian, whatever, Southern.

That's me. My second race is whatever I'm not. I'm not Hispanic, I'm not Asian. So whatever I'm not, it's my second race. My third race is what I am in Christ. This new man that he has created me in Christ. When I become a Christian, it's not that my first race disappears, it's that my third race, who I am in Jesus, becomes more formative and becomes more significant than even my first race.

My first race becomes insignificant enough to me that I can lay it aside when I need to, because it doesn't ultimately define me. Paul himself is the example here. Let's kind of blow your mind. 1 Corinthians 9, Paul is talking about how he becomes all things to all men. Here's what he says. Listen, to the Jew, I became a Jew.

And you're like, what? Paul was a Jew. How, if you are a Jew, how do you become a Jew to a Jew? In Paul, listen to this.

In Paul's mind, his Jewishness was so light to him that he could take it on and off like a garment and say, I need to become a Jew back to you. And if I need to take that off to become something else for somebody, then I can do that because I become all things to all men that I might by all means save some. The question is this, listen, is your whiteness like that?

Can you take it on and off like a garment? Is your blackness like that, your Asianness? Can you lay that aside when you need to, because it's not ultimately a defining characteristic of who you are? Again, it's not that our previous cultures disappeared so something greater starts to define them something deeper. Galatians three, Paul says it this way. For many of you were baptized in Christ and not put on Christ.

There it is, new concept. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, and a male or female. You are all one now in Christ Jesus. He didn't mean that I ceased to be Jew or Greek any more than he means I ceased to be male or female. He means, yes, you're still a male, but what you are in Christ is more defining than even your gender and certainly more than your skin color and your blood type and your job. If you're Christ, you're actually Abraham's offspring, not ethnically, you're Abraham's offspring of faith and that is your most defining race.

You are heirs according to the promise. You don't get what you get from your culture. You get what you get from God. If you still feel division with other believers who love Jesus, it just shows that the gospel has not gone deep enough in your heart. For example, if you find out somebody shares the same political convictions of you and you're like, oh, okay, I can be with this person. What that shows you is you feel a kinship with them that may go deeper than the kinships you feel with the gospel.

It ought to be that I look at somebody and say, oh, this is how you do that and this is how you do that. Yeah, we should talk about that sometime, but you love Jesus, I love Jesus. That puts us together in a unity that goes beyond anything else and I'm happy to call you brother and sister even as we talk about those very, very things. The gospel teaches us to subjugate our preferences for other's salvation. I mean, at the end of the day, it's what it's about, right? How many of Jesus's preferences did he lay down when he came to save you?

All of them. Do you know the hypocrisy of standing in here in this place worshiping a savior who laid down every preference he had to save you and you worship that savior while you insist that everybody else around you worship that savior according to the styles that you prefer. Can you think of a greater absurdity if we worship a savior who laid down his preferences? Of course, we'll lay down our preferences to see other people reach for the gospel. So my church, I want us to be committed to this and I just want to say, I want to applaud those of you who are, especially those of you who are not part of the majority culture and you've chosen to come to this church. I know it's not been easy for you, but I believe that what you're doing is glorifying to Jesus and I believe it is a great benefit to the Great Commission. You know, when Paul went into a new city to plant a church, not one time did he ever go to the Gentile section of the city and plant a church over here and then over to the Jewish section to plant a church over here and hope that they get along one day.

Paul always went right to the middle and said, I'm planting a church where Jew and Gentile are gonna come together because that's gonna bring glory to Jesus. And what you've done, some of you that are not in the majority culture is you've come across town, metaphorically speaking, and you sat down in a culture that may not be as familiar to you as your own and you've done it for the glory of Jesus and you've done it for the Great Commission. And I just wanna say thank you because I believe it has given us a vision of what the future ought to look like. I wanna encourage the rest of you, all of us, to move beyond mere awareness to engagement. The gap between awareness and gospel community is intentionality.

You can be aware of it. You can post on your Facebook and you can be a slacktivist, but if you wanna not, if you want gospel community, there's gotta be an intentionality. And there are many of you that need to pursue this by starting relationships with people that are different than you. The point of all this is not that we just have different colored faces in this audience on the weekend. The point of this is that we know each other and love each other and show the world the greatness of our Christ that far exceeds any of our cultural differences or preferences, amen? Amen, amen.

We wanna live multicultural lives, not host multicultural events. The only path to real gospel community is through awareness and intentionality. You're listening to Pastor J.D.

Greer and this is Summit Life. Pastor J.D., we're working through the book of Ephesians in your teaching series called Love Incorruptible. And as we go, can you help us zoom out a little bit and see the big picture of this letter from Paul?

Yeah, you know, Molly, sometimes people like to think that like deep theology and practical living are two different things. But what Paul shows you in Ephesians is that what you think about God and what you understand about what He's done in the gospel and how you understand you has the most profound impact on how you live. So to go along with our teaching here on Summit Life, we got a new study that we wanna share with you that'll help you work alongside us through the book of Ephesians.

It's called Your Place in God's Plan. It's eight sessions that explain and apply Ephesians to our lives as church members and individuals. It's great for personal study, but it also has a leader guide if you wanna take a group through it. So get yours at jdgreer.com today. Allow us to get this study to you by reaching out at jdgreer.com. You're welcome to request it when you support this ministry with a donation of $35 or more. Give us a call at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or if it's easier, you can give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. Join Pastor JD Friday as he continues teaching through Ephesians right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.