Amazing Tenderness, Part 2

Today on Summit Life, J.D. Greer shares about the amazing compassion of Jesus. What you think about God determines how you will relate to him because this woman was sure of Jesus' compassion. She had the faith to come and touch him because she believed he was compassionate. She exposed her weakness to him and he had enough compassion for her.

In fact, he had more. Not only to give her healing, he adopted her and made her a daughter. Some of you won't come to Jesus because you don't know the power and compassion of Jesus. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian, J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. We've all heard the saying, nothing in life is certain except death and taxes, right? Well, today on Summit Life, we'll learn that what happens when we die is only made certain by the work of Jesus himself. Pastor J.D. Greer opens to the Gospel of Luke to show us two unique stories that demonstrate Jesus' tender compassion for people and his ultimate authority over death itself. This teaching is part of our series called Kingdom Come. So if you've missed any of the previous messages in this series, you can catch up online at jdgreer.com.

But for now, let's return to our message titled Amazing Tenderness. Here's Pastor J.D. How do you cleanse the real part of you that cannot be touched with water, the part where the sin dwelt, the part where the defilement seems the most acute?

How do you deal with that? The answer is the blood of Jesus Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ is able to cleanse the soul. That's why we sing a song like he breaks the power of canceled sin. He sets the prisoner free. His blood can make the phallus clean. His blood availed for me. Verse 49, while he was still speaking to this woman, somebody from the ruler's house came and said, your daughter is dead.

Do not trouble the teacher anymore. Verse 50, but Jesus on hearing this answered him, do not fear. Only believe and she will be well. Verse 51, and when he had come to the house, he allowed no one to enter with him except Peter and John James and the father and mother of the child. Verse 52, and all were weeping and mourning for her. Some of the worst moments I've ever had in my life were being with a friend after their child died.

Ever had that happen? This guy, this 12-year-old little girl is dead. It says that everybody was weeping and mourning. The official funeral has started. In those days, they didn't embalm, so they would start the funeral within hours of the person dying. In those days, funerals were noisy affairs. Today, funerals are kind of quiet.

That's the way you show respect is you sort of sit in hushed silence and that's how you grieve with the family. In those days, they would try to take upon themselves the anguish and emotion of the family and they would yell and they would mourn. They would rip their clothing. In fact, the Jewish Mishnah, here's a little trivial pursuit fact for you, had 39 different rules for how you rip your clothes at a funeral. Why they needed all those, I do not know, but things like you had to rip standing up. If you were a woman, you couldn't rip your outer garment because that would be indecent.

You could rip your inner garment and then take it off and put it on the outside of your outer garment and show everybody that you had ripped your clothes, right, in case you needed to know that. That's how you do that according to the Jewish Mishnah. And all these people ripped their clothes, weeping loudly, and he arrives there in verse 53. She's not dead, she's sleeping. They laughed at him knowing that she was dead. I mean, this is almost, this is not laugh like a joke. This is like bitter scorn because it's almost like he's being cruel. Imagine you went to the funeral of a child of a friend. You walk in, you look at the body and you're like, oh, they're not dead.

They're just taking a nap. You're like, shut up. This is not a time for jokes. This is not a time for theological postulating.

Jesus, everybody go out. Just a couple of disciples and the girl's parents in verse 54, taking her by the hand, he called and said, child, arise. Verse 55, and her spirit returned, and she got up at once and he directed that something should be given her to eat. Verse 56, and her parents were amazed, but he charged them to tell no one what had happened. Yeah, good luck with that one. Hey, I thought your little girl was dead.

Yeah, darnedest thing. Now, you guys remember Jesus' miracles were signs, right? Which means that every miracle has something specific about Jesus that is being taught to us.

He didn't have to do it this way, right? I mean, he gets distracted by another miracle and misses this miracle, and it's almost like, oops, if I had been there, this wouldn't have happened. But if you read the previous chapter of Luke 7, you'll know that there was another time when Jesus healed somebody from a distance. He's like 100 miles away, God dying, bam, be healed. He throws out the miracle bomb and, you know, drops it on the guy's house, and the guy gets healed. So he could have done that here.

He could have just stayed where he was and been like, be healed. Why did he do it this way? Well, that's because he's trying to teach you something about himself. So how do you learn that? Well, the answer, I'm trying to teach you how to read the Bible, is always in the details. So you've got to look at the details because the details are teaching you something about himself. They show you what the sign is signifying about him.

We'll walk through the details. He sits down on her bedside. He takes her hand, and then he says two things to her, talitha cumai. Talitha. By the way, if you want to tell where I get the word talitha in Mark, Mark gives you the Aramaic that Jesus would have said in this, and talitha is from Aramaic, and that's the language Jesus is probably speaking. Talitha, Aramaic means little girl. It's a very, very tender term.

Scholars say it could be translated something like sweetheart. Cumai means get up, not be vow resurrected or come forth. Nothing regal, resurrection, apocalyptic sounding, just get up. Jesus is facing the most feared, devastating enemy the human race has ever known, death.

And he simply takes the little girl by the hand and says, sweetheart, get up. What he's showing you is that when he's holding your hand, even death itself is nothing but a little nap. Or to quote J.R.R. Tolkien from Lord of the Rings, in his presence, everything sad on earth literally becomes untrue. Even death itself, the most final devastating enemy of the human race, just unravels in his presence.

You want to know why that's true? Before Jesus left earth, he would take the sting out of this little girl's death into himself. So now everything that's scares us about death is removed. Death feels so final to us, doesn't it? And for some people, it is final. There's nothing sadder, more pathetic than hearing a true atheist, a true skeptic talk about death.

I've heard some very eloquent skeptics try to put a positive spin on death, but if you cut through all the junk, it's just sad. Because you're like, that's it. That's the end of every relationship. It's the end of any meaning whatsoever. It's just the end. Is that it?

Is that it? It feels so final. Jesus would take the sting out of that. The way I've described it to you before is to use the words of King David, now that when we walk, we don't walk through the valley of death, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

It's just a shadow that remains for us. I told you this story before, but there's a pastor by the name of Donald Gray Barnhouse, who's about my age. His wife died. He had a 10-year-old little girl, and they were in the car between the funeral and the gravesite. And this little 10-year-old girl, of course, crying, says, Daddy, it just feels like Mommy has gone forever. And he says, she's not.

She says, I know, Daddy, that's what you say, but it just feels like I'll never see her again. And Dr. Barnhouse said that just as she said that, this big old Mack truck drove by the side of their car, and he looked at it, and he said, Sweetheart, would you rather be hit by that truck, or would you rather be hit by the shadow? The little girl said, well, of course, the shadow. And he said, well, that's what the Bible teaches us about death, is Jesus got hit with the truck, so you and I could just have the shadow pass over us. Mommy just had the shadow of death go over top of her. It's not really death, because Jesus took death unto himself.

It's not final. It's just a little nap. Death feels so alone. We feel so abandoned. That's what's so scary about it. You know, Jesus sits by this girl's bedside and holds her hand, because on the cross, he would lose his Father's hand. The Father's hand would be separated from him. That's why he'd say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because he was abandoned in death. I know that when I go through death, I'll never be abandoned. He took everything that stung out of death.

He took it. He absorbed the finality of death so it would only be like a nap for me. No one in the Gospels ever dies in the presence of Jesus. Nobody in the presence of Jesus ever stays dead. Now, what's the point of that? It's the point of that that God resurrects all believers like, and so if you go pray, you just heal everybody and get them out of there.

No, I mean, here's the thing. Everybody who Jesus raised from the dead end up dying again. Anybody know where this little girl is?

She around here this morning? How about Lazarus? God raised Lazarus from the dead. Is he still here? No, he's dead. Not like, you know, Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade.

You're gonna find him in a cave somewhere, right? Which kind of stinks for Lazarus because he had to die not once, but twice. It was a sign. It was a sign that those people who know Jesus, even when they go through death, it's like a nap. So when I go through death, I don't have to be afraid of it. And by the way, it's more than the moment of death itself we're talking about here. It's the whole feeling of death. You see, death sometimes gets absorbed into people while they're living.

I got a letter this week from a girl, just to use an example, who doesn't go to this church, which is why I feel like I can share this letter. Well, it was at somewhere where I was speaking about a college-aged girl, and she was just talking about how empty her life felt. She was talking about and basically, read between the lines here, unloved, I'm a failure, all that I have in front of me is failure.

Nobody's ever going to love me. It's just this depressing kind. She's living under a curse. She's living under a curse. Listen, the gospel is that there is a God who loves you so much that he's taken every ounce of curse unto himself, so nothing remains for you anymore. So now the sovereign God of the universe could not love you more than he does right now. You have no curse whatsoever above you. There is a God who is so powerful that he constrains every miracle, every molecule in the universe to work for his purpose and your good. There's no way that you can despair if you know that, because the one who's higher than the heavens has a love for you that could not be any more intense than it is right now, and his power could not be any greater. How could you possibly look into the future and feel the shroud of cursing? The one whose opinion matters most could not be more favorably disposed to you and could not be more working for your good. There's no way you could believe that and despair about life.

No way. So if you have that feeling, it's because you've never grappled with the fact that in death he absorbed the curse so it'd be like a nap for you. I don't have to fear suffering. I don't have to fear aloneness. I don't have to fear singleness, because God is working all these things for his good. His power guarantees that he can.

His love guarantees that he will. You are listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. For more information about this ministry, visit jdgreer.com. And while you're there, I want to remind you about an amazing free resource that we have available for you. It's Pastor JD's Ask Me Anything podcast. Have you ever had tough questions about the Bible, theology, money, relationships, or parenthood, and you aren't sure where to turn for solid biblical wisdom? On Ask Me Anything, Pastor JD provides quick and practical answers to your most challenging questions. The goal is to share biblical truth and practical advice that can help you grow in your faith and navigate life's difficulties. So if you're a fan of Summit Life's teaching, you won't want to miss this free podcast. You can access Ask Me Anything with J.D. Greer by visiting jdgreer.com slash podcasts or by searching in your favorite podcast platform.

So why wait? Subscribe to Ask Me Anything today. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. The first person this little girl saw when she opened her eyes was Jesus. The first voice she heard was Jesus' voice. The first touch she felt in her newly resurrected body was Jesus'. That's a picture of what everybody who dies in Jesus has to look forward to.

It's a sign for those who are in Jesus. By the way, every once in a while I go to the funeral, I'll do a funeral, and it's very clear that at funerals everybody gets really chummy with Jesus. Quote the Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23. Can I just say this?

I don't mean this to be rude. I say this at funerals sometimes. If you don't follow Jesus in life, He's not with you in death. And for the way we say that here is a faith that won't change you in life won't save you in death. And just because you quote the Lord's Prayer and feel sentimental about grandpa or mom at the funeral, Luke has made very clear that if you're a follower of Jesus, it means you have totally surrendered your life with no conditions and said you will follow Him anywhere. And if you have never become a follower of Jesus, then do not think that by quoting the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 at a funeral suddenly makes everything better. You can repent at a funeral.

That's awesome. You should. But I'm just saying that a faith that wouldn't change you in life won't save you in death. If you are Jesus' follower, then yes, at death itself He will sit by your side and hold your hand. But if you have rejected His Lordship and said, no, you will not be my Father, I reject you as King, then no, He's not going to be with you in death. Verse 56, now I think you were ready to understand this verse. Her parents were amazed, but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.

Why did He do that? Listen, very important. Because Jesus' primary ministry, listen, was reconnecting us to God. And if Jesus got the reputation of being the guy who would show up at a funeral and raise everybody back from the dead, then everybody starts coming to Jesus because they're like, hey man, this guy can bring Paul back, get him at the funeral.

This guy can heal all the sick people. And what happens is Jesus becomes a means to an end. And if that happens, if Jesus becomes a means to an end, and Jesus doesn't become primarily the one who reconnects you to God, then even His healing and blessing has become a curse to you.

That's what that means. And so Jesus would sometimes hide Himself and say, don't tell everybody about this because I don't want to get distracted and start using me. We got a lot of people here who want to use Jesus to make something work out. I need Him in my marriage. I need Him to bring my wife back. I need Him to fix my kids. I need Him to help me.

And that's awesome. He can do that. But don't get distracted that His primary ministry is not just to fix the externals, but is to reconnect you to God. See, and so He hides Himself and says, I cannot let even these secondary things get in the way of the primary thing, which is why sometimes He doesn't heal the sick, why He doesn't heal the sick, why He doesn't raise the dead, because He wants to show you that the person who knows God has a greater treasure than physical healing or even physical resurrection. Here's what I want you to walk away from this passage with, okay? Here's your four takeaways for you to meditate on this week.

Real quick, look at number one. Come to Him. Come to Him. Don't let the crowds keep you from Him. Don't let the law, what Jesus, what this woman grabbed, don't let that keep you from Him. Some people won't come to God because they feel so messed up.

Don't let the law, the crowds, He can make all things new. And if the Son of God calls you daughter, who cares what all the little idiots around you think about you? You're like, well, don't call them little idiots. In God's sight compared to God, they're all little idiots. We're all little idiots, okay? Don't let the crowds, don't let the law keep you from Him. Come to Him, because Jesus makes all things new, and His opinion matters more than every other person in the universe.

Let me ask you something. Are you like this woman? Have you given up on doctors, and now you're just into painkillers?

That's kind of where this woman was. Your marriage, you've given up on it, so what do you do? You bury yourself in your work, you bury yourself in your kids, get used to this kind of a bad marriage, flirt with an affair, entertain yourself to death. You're into painkillers now, don't just numb the pain, fix the problem. Your soul was created for God. That's why everything feels meaningless to you, and your soul was created with a God-shaped vacuum in it, so get God back in the right place. That's what Jesus can do for you, and that's better than a good marriage, it's better than a healed body, it's better than a great career. Knowing God is what your soul was created for, quit numbing the pain, deal with the problem. Number two, be public about it.

You've got to come forward. Listen, Jesus called her daughter after she owned it. I know that you're afraid, just like she is, but the gospel is that Jesus turns dirty outcasts into beloved sons and daughters. You might look at this church and feel like we have it all together, right?

That's just an illusion. Around here we have a statement, everybody's normal till you get to know them, and then you find deep dysfunction and weird families and all this stuff going on in people's life. Listen, get to know people here and you'll find out we're just as messed up as you are, and what we are are a group of dirty outcasts who God has made sons and daughters, and there's room for you, and we need you to come forward and be public because when he calls you daughter, I love this, there are certain things about Jesus that he gives you when you come forward that you don't get when you're anonymous. That's why we encourage you to be in a small group instead of just sitting in a crowd, because we want you to move out of anonymity into a place where there's some dimensions of Jesus you experience by being known. Number three, you can scarcely underestimate his tenderness and compassion.

There's so many, I love this story because there's so many things about Jesus that I probably would not have known had this story not been in there. Tenderness, accessibility, interruptibility. I love that about Jesus, probably because I am so not interruptible. People interrupt me and it just ruins my whole week.

I'm like, why, you know, I clearly on the schedule I had time for crises between one and four on Thursday, not now. Jesus didn't like that. He's interruptible. And by the way, listen to this, he doesn't change. He cares.

And I'm telling some of you that you need to go to him now because you'll find the same God and Jesus of compassion that walked the earth. I've told you that in churches like ours sometimes we talk about Jesus like all he cares about is restoring your soul to God. And he does primarily care about that. But we talk about it like, oh, he doesn't care about your physical pain. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about that stuff.

He didn't care about your marriage. He just wants to make you one with God. He does want to make you one with God. But Jesus can hardly be around somebody in pain in the Bible. That Jesus doesn't change. And I'm saying that some of you, if you took your issue to Jesus might find that he gave the same miraculous power today that he did then because he's just the same. Some of you, I believe in physical healing and some of you will ask Jesus for this in your family, in you, and you'll find that Jesus heals. If he tells you no, like he did to Jairus at first, and your daughter dies, then you can trust that the same miraculous Jesus will sit by your bedside and hold your hand so even death itself will feel like a nap and you can trust him. But I'm saying some of you won't experience a miracle that Jesus can and will do because you don't ask because you don't believe in the tenderness of Jesus.

He's tender and he's interruptible and he can hardly be in the presence of pain. You ought to perceive that and take to him your family and your soul and your body, your physical issues. Number four, what you think about God determines how you relate to him. What you think about God determines how you relate to him.

My greatest desire as a pastor is that you learn the truth about Jesus so you will relate rightly to him. See, what you think about God determines how you will relate to him because this woman was sure of Jesus' compassion. She had the faith to come and touch him because she believed he was compassionate. She exposed her weakness to him and he had enough compassion for her. In fact, he had more, not only to give her healing, he adopted her and made her a daughter.

Some of you won't come to Jesus because you don't know the power and compassion of Jesus. Look at him. Look at him. He's the same.

He's the same. If you understood who Jesus was, first of all, you would pray all the time. One thing is true of people who pray a lot and that is they understand how tenderly Jesus cares about their situations. If you really understood Jesus, you would pray. I wouldn't have to stand up here and tell you to pray. You would just do it because you understand how willing and able he is to help.

The other thing is if you understood who he was, you wouldn't have any problem yielding your whole life to him. You would say, Jesus, no strings attached because there's no more tender, caring, powerful presence in the universe, no safer arms I could be in. So take me.

I don't put any conditions on this. You want to take me to Afghanistan single? That's fine because I'd rather be there with you than I would be here without you. You want to take me to the Sudan? What do you want to do? It's all yours because I can rest in your arms because there's nothing more tender.

There's no one who cares more for me or my family or this world more than you and so there's nothing I'd rather entrust myself to than you. If you thought rightly about Jesus, you would yield yourself to him and you would pray and you would walk with him. If I could show you, if I could show you the truth about who Jesus is, I wouldn't have to yell at you all the time about doing the right things.

You just do them. So for believers, that's what I'm trying to get you to see is just see him. This is him.

Look at him and then just respond. Do you believe in the compassion of Jesus the way the woman who touched Jesus did? Will you expose will you expose yourself and your weaknesses to him, trusting that he will love you and accept you as his child? A powerful challenge today on Summit Life with Pastor, Author and Theologian J.D.

Greer. J.D., we're in the middle of a teaching series working through the Gospel of Luke. So give us the bird's eye view real quick. What is this series called Kingdom Come really all about? So in this series, Kingdom Come, we're basically just walking through the Gospel of Luke, which is a gospel that in many ways is written for skeptics. He has in his mind, he has Greek and Roman scholars that he is wanting to give the eyewitness evidence of who Jesus was and what he taught. And so the Gospel of Luke explains how the power of God, the kingdom that God was wanting to bring, it begins in the restoration of a relationship with the Father.

And then you experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing healing into your relationships and your community and situations of injustice all around you. To go along with this series, we have a small book called Kingdom Come that has 20 devotions that'll take you deeper into the Gospel of Luke, not only to get more out of the Book of Luke, but also how to better apply it to your life and your situation. And we'd love for you to reserve your copy right now. Just go to jdgreer.com and you can reserve your copy today. We'd love to get you a copy of this set of 20 devotionals.

As you work through the content, we pray that it'll encourage you to align your life around the power of the gospel and to share it with others. Get a hold of Kingdom Come, 20 devotions from Luke when you donate today to support this ministry. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or you can give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Join us again tomorrow when Pastor J.D. teaches on the life-changing power of prayer. Be sure to listen Thursday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.