Will God Forsake His People?, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. It is true once saved always saved, but it's also true that once saved forever following and if your salvation is real and sincere you will hold on to it for the rest of your life. Saving faith is staying faith. You see the evidence of saving faith is not the intensity of emotion at the beginning. The evidence of saving faith is its endurance over time. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. I'm sure many have heard this before, but it bears repeating. If you were put on trial for being a Christian and the only evidence came from what your friends observed about you at work or at school, would you be convicted? Today, Pastor J.D. teaches from Romans chapter 11, revealing the danger of taking God's forgiveness for granted. By looking at God's promises to the nation of Israel and their response, we learn what it means to make Jesus Lord of our lives and have an enduring and recognizable faith.

Now, if you missed the beginning of this message from last week, you can catch up online at JDCreer.com. Let's rejoin Pastor J.D. in Romans chapter 11. Has God failed to keep his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations? Paul's answer, absolutely not. And here's how I know that, he says, because a lot of Jewish people have been saved like me and even their rejection, even Jewish rejection of the gospel has led to Gentile salvation, but the best is yet to come. Now, before I move on from this to the warning, I just want to point out one incidental thing that you can learn from Paul and all this. Here it is, okay?

Here's your takeaway. Never, ever, ever give up on the people that God has placed in your life to reach for the gospel and the ones that he's put on your heart. Even after facing rejection after rejection from the Jewish people, Paul never gives up hope. Even after being driven out, even after being persecuted to the point of death, Paul never gives up hope that his Israelite friends can be saved. There was a passage we skipped over in Romans 9, and I promised you that we were going to come back to it.

Boom, here we go, all right? Romans 9, here's Paul first of all opens this section. I'm speaking the truth in Christ. I'm not lying. My conscience bears new witness in the Holy Spirit.

Hang on. That's very unusual for Paul, what he just did right there. He is qualifying his statement in three ways to tell you that he's telling the truth. Paul's normal kind of mode of writing, his motif is, I'm an apostle, I speak for God, of course I tell the truth, you shut up. That's Paul's general attitude when he writes. Here, he does something totally unusual, and he kind of takes the glasses off, puts the pens down, puts the notebook down, and says, listen, what I'm about to tell you, I'm not exaggerating.

I'm not posturing. This is what is going on in my heart. Verse two, I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ.

You know what that means? I'd turn in my salvation if I could. I would go to hell forever if it meant that my brothers, my family, my friends in Israel come back to faith in Christ. This was not some academic thing for Paul. Paul said if I could, I would go to hell itself if that meant they would come back.

And he never gave up hope, and he never stopped working. My question for you is, who is like that for you? Who is that person, who is that group of people that God has put on your heart that you would say, I sense that kind of anguish? I know that my kids are certainly like that for me. And if one day one of my kids walks away from God, then yeah, I'll be the one that's up early and up late, praying for them to come back. I know of a guy, I just heard about it, I think he's at the North Raleigh campus, for 27 years has been praying for his daughter, who had walked away from God, and she just came back to faith in Christ. And he is like a brand new man.

It's amazing. And that'll be some of us. Some of you parents are going to be like that. You never give up, and you just keep praying, and you keep believing. Some of you are going to start to feel like that about groups of people. And John Knox, the famous reformer in Scotland, 16th century, one of the largest European awakenings of the gospel of anybody. 16th century, John Knox was known by his friends to pray with loud laments and tears, God give me Scotland or I'll die.

And his friends who knew him well said, he meant every single word of that. I know missionaries today from our church who right now are facing unbelievable obstacles in the places where they are, but they won't leave. And no matter how hard it gets, they just won't leave because they have this kind of anguish in their heart.

And they say, I don't care how hard it is. I've got to see these people come to faith in Christ. Friend, I just want to ask you, who is that one for you?

Who is your many? Don't give up on them. You understand God put them on your heart for a reason. That anguish in you for their soul is divine. And Paul says the good news is that those people, your friends, your family is loved because of the promises God gave to you. He said, these Jewish people who rejected Christ, they're still loved because of the promises God gave to the forefathers. Your friends are loved because of the promises God gave to you. In fact, here's one Psalm 126, those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. It means you're out there and just weeping and praying and you will one day walk in joy. Those who go forth with weeping will doubtless come again, bringing the harvest with them. That's Paul's answer to the question, has God cast off his people? He says, absolutely not. He will fulfill every word of his promise. That leads number two to the warning. We whom God grafted in should never get haughty or broken place in our salvation.

Watch what he does here. Verse 17. Some of the branches were broken off and you, that you're a wild olive branch.

How's that for your description? Okay, you wild olive branches. You were grafted in among them and have come to share in the rich. Oh, by the way, I think that's a good tattoo idea. So I always like to throw these in.

So if you want something on your back, I get that. We were grafted in among them and have come to share in the rich root of the cultivated olive tree. I don't boast that you're any better than those branches. Let me, in case you're not a horticulturalist or you're not a gardener, which I'm not, here's how this works. They say that certain kinds of plants and trees, if you got bad branches on them, they don't bear fruit or they're sick or, you know, something's wrong with them.

You can cut them off. And then what you can do is you can take a branch from another tree, sometimes a different kind of tree, and you can graft it in to where the old branch was broken off and you can bind it together. And what happens is this new branch, which was not originally part of the tree, begins to draw life and sustenance and nutrients off of the root of this other tree. And Paul says that's what's happened in Israel, is there was all these branches on the Israelite tree that weren't bearing fruit. And so God just cut them off, all the Esals and all the Ishmaels and God just cut them off. And then in their place, God has started to graft in Gentiles who are now drawing spiritual life and eternal life and fruit. They're drawing it from the root, which has previously belonged to the Jewish tree. And so what he says now, verse 20, they were broken off because of unbelief. But you Gentiles, you've been grafted in by faith. So don't be arrogant.

You should beware. Because if God didn't spare the natural branches, he's not going to spare you either if you do the exact same thing. In other words, if God was willing to cut off branches from his own original tree because of their unbelief, why would we who have been grafted in somewhat unnaturally into this Jewish tree, why would we ever think that we can get away with the very things that got them removed?

And what was it that got them removed? Compromise. Taking their salvation for granted. Giving lip service to God and going through the religious motions while their hearts really didn't belong to him.

Y'all, so many Christians today, this would be the description that Paul would have of them, right? Culturally, they're Christians. Ask them if they're Christians. They say absolutely. Ask them what tree they belong to.

I belong to the Christian tree. They think church is a good thing. They're usually involved somewhere. Maybe they're involved here.

Maybe at this campus. But you look closely at their lives and they're not really committed. I mean, they're not involved in any ministry. They don't sacrificially give. They couldn't tell you the last time that they told somebody about Jesus. In fact, their church attendance is probably pretty sporadic.

Once every, I don't know, four, six weeks, two months, they show up. They just can't get here the other times because they are so busy. Oh, man, just having kids is just so busy. And plus, the in-laws have a beach house and it would just be bad stewardship to not go down there when the weather's good. And so we get here every once in a while. Plus, it's just hard to get kids out of the door on a Sunday morning.

Am I right? Like to get our kids up and get in. That's just hard. Nobody ever talked about the fact you do it five days a week without fail to get them to school, but you can't do it on Sunday because, oh, it's just so hard, right? And so you're like, oh, I just don't know. Church is a good thing.

I don't want to be out of the tree, but I'm just not that committed. Do you not understand he's describing you here? Or they believe in what I call Prozac Jesus, which is the Jesus that makes you feel calm when things are going wrong. You turn to him in a jam. He makes you feel better.

He speaks positive, you know, affirming truths into your life. But you've never offered your life to him as a disciple. And you are not fully surrendered to him. Ask any of these people in the south if they are saved and they'll say, oh yeah. And they'll tell you about a time that they prayed a prayer and got baptized, but they just don't live their lives as if Jesus was Lord.

Are these not like the branches that God removed from Israel? I'm especially concerned, I think, here for children who grow up in churches like this one. You're raised in a Christian family. And that means that at some point you got saved.

Because that's just what's expected of you. And you live up to expectations. And it was expected to get saved. And all the kids around you were getting saved. And they got baptized. So you got to get baptized. And so you did it.

And you went through the motions on that. And because you're part of this community, you probably avoided most major sins. Right? Like I just didn't know that many drug dealers growing up. I knew that they were out there, but they didn't come over to my house all the time. And I always say the only drug problem I had growing up was getting drugged to church three times a week.

Right? So I avoided most major sins. But in your heart you know he's not really Lord. You know he's not really full surrender.

That was me growing up. Paul says, wake up. If this is what God did to the sons and daughters of Abraham, it's what he's going to do to you. Are you really so foolish and arrogant to think that you can treat the things of God casually or with such disdain and God will let you get away with it? What did he do with Israel?

He removed the branches. I even had a girl tell me one time, I accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was 13, but I just haven't accepted him as Lord yet. And my friend, that category doesn't exist. You can't bifurcate Jesus. He's not a la carte Jesus. Build a bear Jesus where you take the parts of him that you like and assemble the deity that that does you good. Right?

You don't do that. He's the Lord of all. He's not Lord at all. study through the book of Romans called in view of God's mercy. It'll take you through the second half of Romans highlighting chapters eight through 16 and it features seven studies that are perfect for either your own Bible study or for use in a small group or maybe even with someone that you're discipling. Don't miss part two of Pastor Tim's Romans Bible study. And if you missed part one, just let us know and we can get that out to you as well. We'll send it your way with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry.

To give, call us now at 866-335-5220 or visit jdgrier.com today. Now let's jump back into Romans chapter 11 here on Summit Life. Sometimes Christians use a perverted version of the doctrine of eternal security to assure themselves they belong to God. The doctrine of eternal security says this, once saved, always saved.

That is, once you've been truly saved, you can never lose your salvation. I think I've told you before, I had a guy at the gym I used to work out at. I met playing one-on-one basketball on the court.

And it's just me and him out there. Now, I'm going to give you a little description here. Don't judge me for the way I'm going to say this.

I'm just telling you what was in my heart. It probably reveals that I think wrongly, but he didn't look like a Christian. I know you shouldn't judge people by the outside, but he just didn't look like a Christian. And I mean, he had hair like long hair down to his back. Nothing wrong with that.

Okay. But just paint a picture for you. He had tattoos over his entire body. You could not even see his original skin except for his head. Just tattoos everywhere. Nothing wrong with that. He looked like he had tripped and fallen face first into a tackle box. He had like little piercings, you know, several of them in his face. Nothing wrong with that.

Just paint you a picture. And he cussed like, I mean, it was an art form. I mean, like it was more than I'd ever heard somebody, just every other word was blank this, bleep that, and so I'm thinking he's not a Christian. And so we're playing and I start sharing my testimony with him. And he grabs the ball, puts it on his hip, and he looks at me and he goes, dude, are you trying to witness to me? And I was like, I don't know, you know, I'm not saying anything. And he was like, are you? He goes, he goes, that's awesome, man. I was surprised he knew the word witness because I was like, that's Christian insider talk.

Like, how did you know that word? And he was like, that's awesome. And nobody has tried to witness to me in years. He was like, I guess it's because of how I look. I was like, not me because I don't look at the outside.

I look at the heart. And he said, yeah, he goes, you're wasting your breath. He said, here's why. He said, when I was 13 years old, I grew up in this little Baptist church. He said, when I was 13 years old, I went to youth camp and I got saved. He said, I don't mean like a little saved.

I got way saved. He said, and I came back and man, I was the president of my youth group and I led FCA at my school and I went on mission trips and I memorized scripture and I was like Bible champion for like two years. He said, man, I got into high school and I just decided, I don't know, I just, I want to put this on the back burner because I was having fun and God began to get less and less important. He said, then I went to college. His words were, I discovered sex.

And I just decided that I wanted freedom in this part of my life. And so I just put my relationship with God completely on the back burner. He said, after a couple of years, I just didn't really believe in God anymore. He said, I'll be honest with you. It probably was my preferred lifestyle that was controlling what I believe. But however we got here, I'm an atheist now. He said, but here's what's awesome.

Here's what's awesome. He said, I was saved in a Baptist church. Don't you go to a Baptist church?

I said, man, I'm not saying anything else from this point on. He said, at our Baptist church, we believe in eternal security. Once saved, always saved. He says, even if you're right and Jesus really rose from the dead, I'm still in. He goes, it doesn't matter because I was saved and so I'm eternally secure. So if you're right, I win.

If I'm right, I still win. Now, what do you say back to that? What do you say?

How do you respond? Is that what the doctrine of eternal security means? Does it mean that, oh yeah, you prayed the prayer, you're done, you're in. Look at what Paul says here.

Just look at it just the way he wrote it. Verse 20. Paul says that you will be kept if you avoid the unbelief that Israel had and if you stand firm by faith.

If. Very similar to what the writer of Hebrew says. Look at this, very closely. Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God.

Watch. For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm all the way to the end. In other words, only if you maintain your confession of faith and surrender to the end are you going to be saved. Now you say, wait a minute, wait a minute, J.D., are you saying a person can start out saved and then lose it? Nope.

Hang with me. I know this is a tad bit confusing, but there are way too many places in the Bible that teach you that once you are truly saved, you will never lose it. John chapter 10, Jesus said, when you're my child, I put you in my hand and nothing can ever separate you from my hand. You remember what we looked at at the end of Romans 8, where Paul said, all those that God foreknew, he predestined, predestined, called, called, justified, justified, glorified.

There's no breaks in the links of that chain. And once you get on that train, you're going all the way to the station. So what you've got in the Bible, listen, are two seemingly contradictory truths. On the one hand, you've got the truth that once God saves you, you'll always be saved. On the other hand, you've got the truth that only if you endure to the end will you be saved. What do you do when you have two seemingly contradictory truths in the Bible?

You put them together. And here's how that sounds, right? One of the essential marks of truly saving faith is that it endures to the end. If your faith endures to the end, that is evidence you have the salvation you could never lose. If it doesn't endure to the end, that means you never had it to begin with. The real doctrine of eternal security would read like this, once saved, always saved.

Yes, absolutely. But there's another part to this. It's also true, once saved, forever following. It is true, once saved, always saved. But it's also true that once saved, forever following. And if your salvation is real and sincere, you will hold on to it for the rest of your life. Saving faith is staying faith. You see, the evidence of saving faith is not the intensity of emotion at the beginning.

The evidence of saving faith is its endurance over time. In fact, Jesus told a story to illustrate just this. The sower who goes out to sow the seed, he said some seed fell on shallow ground. And as a result, it sprang up quickly. What does spring up quickly mean? It means it showed fruit quickly, right? And all of a sudden you had flowers on the plants and it looked like, wow, this is amazing.

But then the sun came out and the weeds grew up and it choked the life out of it and the plants went away. They died, they disappeared. Here's the question. Do these represent saved people who lost their salvation?

No. They represent unsaved people who for a while look like they're saved people. I see this happen all the time at church. I see people come in, man, they pray the prayer, they get baptized, they walk the aisle, they do what they're supposed to do. And for a few months, maybe even a few years, they're like in.

And then it just fades. The evidence of saving faith is not the intensity of emotion at the beginning, but the fact that it endures over time. Think of it like a marriage. You don't judge the sincerity of a marriage vow by the lavishness of the wedding ceremony. You judge the sincerity of the marriage vow by the faithful commitment that follows it. A lavish ceremony without a faithful commitment would be a sham.

When it comes to God, a lot of Christians are all ceremony and no marriage. I mean, imagine if on my wedding night after Veronica and I had gotten married, I looked at her and was like, whoa, that was awesome. That was fun.

All right. I got a date. I'm so glad we've made this decision. I'm so glad this is a part of my life now, but I got to get out of here. I got a date tonight. And I don't go back to be with her and I don't live with her.

And I live with all my old friends and do all the things I used to do. You would say that kind of marriage is a sham. You come and pray in a prayer, getting your grandmother to initial your Bible where you did it, doing all these crazy, awesome things. And then not walking with Jesus as Lord is a sham. The evidence of saving faith is not that you had some emotional moment. The evidence of saving faith is that you're now walking as a surrendered disciple of Jesus Christ. So be cautious, Paul says. Like the writer of Hebrews says, beware, lest sins go unchecked in you and begin to choke out your faith. Beware of tolerating compromise. Beware of being casual and complacent in your spiritual growth.

Because here's what I know. Spiritual growth is a fight. I've heard it described like riding a bicycle, right, uphill. If you're not pedaling, you're going backwards.

There's no neutral. It's a fight. If you're not killing sin, sin is killing you. And my fear for many of you in this church is what Paul's seems to be for the people to whom he's writing here.

That is that you just take it for granted and you're doing the very things that got Israel removed. You prayed the prayer. You went to the ceremony and you're like, I'm in the tree. I got my get out of hell free card from Jesus. And you like Prozac Jesus who comforts you and is your BFF. There's only one Jesus and it's Lord Jesus. And if he is not Lord of all, he's not Lord at all. And his Lordship is not demonstrated by the confession of your lips. His Lordship is demonstrated by the obedience of your life.

So let me ask you to consider what I often tell teenagers they need to consider. If we were to put you on trial for being a follower of Jesus and the only evidence that we could submit was from your best friends whom you hang out with at school, would there be enough evidence to convict you? If the only evidence that we could submit is what your mother would say about your life at home, that's the only evidence, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Because I'm just gonna tell you right now, if your best friends at school or on the golf course or your spouse does not know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a follower of Jesus, then you probably aren't. If your mother could not stand up here or your spouse and give evidence that you're born again, it's probably because you haven't been. And Paul says you need to wake up because the gospel is good news. But friend, if God removed those branches from Israel who didn't really walk with God and God removed those branches who didn't submit to his Lordship, won't he also remove you? Therefore you should consider God's kindness and his severity, both of them, severity toward those who have fallen.

This is not a game. God's kindness toward you. If you remain in his kindness, otherwise you too will be cut off. I need you to grapple with the severity of the gospel. God's kindness is he will receive all who come to him and surrender in faith and humility. And God will resist those who come and use him. You're playing games with God. Is there someone God is telling you not to give up on?

Or maybe you've been the one to feel like you're okay because you prayed a prayer or have been baptized, but in reality, Jesus isn't really your Lord. Today is the day to change that. And if you have questions on how to make that happen, please feel free to give us a call right now at 866-335-5220. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. JD, during our last broadcast, we introduced part two of Pastor Tim Keller's Romans Bible study.

Can our listeners still get the first volume as well? I mean, what we're offering right now is the second part of the study guide. And we'll do that when you donate, when you go to jdgreer.com and you give some gift that enables us to stay on the air and to take the gospel to new places. We'll send you that immediately. But if you miss the first part of this, we'd love to make sure that you get that as well.

So just let us know when you donate if you miss that and we'll make sure you get both parts. Each of these studies walks you through about a dozen questions that really help you get into the meat of the Scripture in addition to giving you some application and some prayer prompts. And it's a great study. I think you'll get even more out of Romans if you use it. You can use it as an individual.

You can use it with a group. You can listen to the messages I'm preaching and then use the study guide to take you back through the same verses so that you can continue to soak in them. There's even a leader guide included if you're planning to lead a group.

The second volume is going to cover chapters 8 through 16 of Romans and take us all the way to the end. Visit jdgrier.com today to reserve your copy. We'd love to send you the second part of Tim Keller's Romans Bible study today with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry.

To donate, simply call us at 866-335-5220 or visit jdgrier.com to give your gift online. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Be sure to join us tomorrow when we'll talk about something I'm personally passionate about, pouring our hearts out to God in worship. Be sure to listen Tuesday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.