It Ends in Wonder

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The Bible is not primarily a book of best spiritual practices. The Bible is a book that is designed to lead you to wonder. The stories we see in the Bible are not primarily of heroes that you're supposed to emulate. The point of all these stories is to give you a savior that you are supposed to marvel and adore. That's the point of all of it. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. Let me ask you a question. Does thinking about God's mercy ever lead you to pour out your heart in worship? I don't mean just a casual prayer or an uplifting thought, but a moment of genuine adoration of God.

Maybe it's singing and maybe it's deep prayer or meditation on His word. But today Pastor J.D. turns to Paul's exuberant response to the gospel in Romans 11, where we learn some crucial principles of worship and the right way to respond to God's grace. Let's dive right into today's message titled It Ends in Wonder.

Romans 11, if you have your Bible, and I hope that you brought it, I am pretty confident, not confident of a lot in life, but I'm pretty confident that you will get much more out of this study if you will write things down and you will think on them throughout the week. All right. So if your neighbor besides you doesn't have something out to take notes on, just look at them right now and judge them.

Just mentally judge them. You have my permission. No, no, no, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. Everybody, look at your neighbor right now and just look at them and say, you know what? I prayed all week long that I would get to sit next to you. Say that to them right now. For some of you single guys sitting next to that girl, that is literally true. So I'm sending you out there. Now, listen, I can't prove this y'all, but I am pretty sure that there is a note taking gate in heaven.

It's like the fast pass line at Disney World, where you're just going to get the things a whole lot quicker. I can't prove that. I'm pretty sure it says it somewhere in Deuteronomy, which is where pastors always quote from when they want to make stuff up because nobody ever looks in there. Okay. But you should take notes.

All right. Today's is a wonderful, wonderful passage. It is definitely memorization worthy. It is a hymn. It's a song.

Unfortunately, I don't know the tune. I don't know anybody that knows the tune, but it is a song that Paul wrote in reflection on everything that he's just explained in chapters nine through 11. If you recall throughout nine through 11, chapters nine through 11, Paul has been considering the question, did God fail in keeping his promise to make Israel a blessing to the nations? God had promised, you might recall in Genesis 12, not only to bless Israel with salvation, he also promised to use them to bring that blessing to the nations. Yet now they've turned away and they've even helped murder the Messiah that God sent to bring salvation. So the obvious question for Paul is, has God failed in keeping his promise?

Paul's answer to that, and we've looked at it now for four weeks in a row. Paul's answer to that is absolutely not. After all, he says, God built his church with Jews, right? All the apostles, including Paul were themselves Jews.

And so God used them mightily to establish the church. Furthermore, he explains God has to this day, even here in the 21st century, God has to this day preserved a remnant of Jews who still trust him and embrace his promises. Finally, Paul says, we know that still the best is yet to come. One day, Paul explains God is gonna bring the nation of Israel as a whole back to God.

And when that happens, Paul says, that is gonna spawn the largest worldwide gospel movement in history. In the meantime, Paul says the irony is that even the Jewish rejection of the gospel has blessed the Gentiles by affording the Gentiles. And by the way, just in case you weren't here last weekend, Gentiles just means you're not ethnically a Jew.

If you don't have Jewishness in your heritage, then you're a Gentile. God has blessed the Gentiles through the Jewish rejection of the gospel. He's given us a unique opportunity to hear the gospel by pushing the apostles out of the synagogues and get them into the streets.

A lot of our ancestors were able to hear the message of the gospel that they may not have been able to hear as easily and the Jewish people all embraced it and it stayed with inside the synagogues. So yes, Paul says, yes, God has kept his promise to the Jews to use them as a blessing to the nations. Paul starts to summarize all this in verse 30, check it out. Just as you Gentiles, watch, have disobeyed God, but you now have received mercy through their disobedience, right? In other words, because they disobeyed, you got a chance to hear the gospel. It was through their disobedience that you got mercy. So they too now have disobeyed resulting in mercy to you so that they also may now receive mercy. In other words, God's mercy toward you now is gonna lead them to mercy because as we saw, God's mercy toward the Gentiles is gonna make the Israelites jealous for the relationship that Gentiles have to God that Israelites know that they should really have also.

And so it's gonna make them jealous and that's gonna bring them back to God. For God, he says, verse 32, has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may have mercy on all. And then y'all, Paul's emotions just seem to get the best of him and he just explodes into praise. Verse 33, oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his ways. In other words, Paul says, what kind of God is so gracious that he turns even our disobedience into blessing?

What kind of God is it that would take our rejection of him and use that as a part of his good plan in our lives? It was through disobedience that God brought salvation to the Gentiles. It is through disobedience, ultimately, he's gonna bring salvation back to the Jews. God took our disobedience and used even that as the instrument of our salvation.

The even clearer illustration of this, of course, is the cross itself. Was not the cross the ultimate act of human rebellion? Yes. Yes. Was it not also the instrument of our salvation?

Also, yes. God did not save us despite the cross. God saved us through the cross, right? We didn't murder Jesus and God say, oh my goodness, well, I'm gonna save him anyway.

No, that very thing that we did that was the ultimate act of evil became the opportunity of our salvation, which means the cross was simultaneously the ultimate expression of our rebellion and the instrument of our salvation at the same time. The irony of the gospel is that we live through the death of the God that we murdered. Paul's like, who but God would do that? And so Paul exclaims, who has known the mind of the Lord?

Who has been his counselor? Would any of us have conceived of such a plan? Do we realize how much better and wiser and loftier God is than us? Verse 35, and who was ever given to God that he should be repaid? This whole salvation thing, is it not the most unbelievable outpouring of grace that you could ever conceive of? Anybody here, anybody here, Paul says, want to ask God to repay them what they deserve. God has not given us what we deserve, thank God, otherwise we'd all be lost.

Instead, he repaid us with grace, which we did not deserve because what we did deserve was condemnation. For from him, Paul says, verse 36, and through him and to him are all things. All things came from God. He is the source of life in all of them. He is the purpose for which they exist. Everything that he created, he created to point out his glory, which means that God pursued the salvation process in a way that would put his power and glory on display. This is a little difficult for some of us to get our minds around, but God's ultimate motive and the way that he pursued salvation was his glorification.

That was his priority. He leads me, Psalm 23 says, in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. The ultimate way that he's leading me is so that he is going to get the glory for him and through him and to him are all things. When it's all said and done, he has designed this salvation process such that none of us will cross the finish line and raise our hands and say, look at what I did.

Look at what I've become. No, all of us will cross that finish line and we will say, only God, who else compares to him. Only God, only God could have done this. Only God deserves the praise. So Paul concludes to him be the glory and all of this forever and ever. Amen. Amen.

All right. I love this passage for multiple reasons, but primarily because it teaches us five crucial things about worship. And by the way, this morning, when I say worship, I do not mean merely the 20 minutes of singing that we do in here each weekend or the 60 minutes they do down in Summit in Espanol.

I'm not just referring to that. I'm talking about the whole way that we think about God, the whole way we respond to God. Sure, worship can be expressed by singing, but worship is not primarily singing. And in fact, the very word worship, just a, you don't know the etymology of that word, comes from two English words, worthship. You worship something by showing the worth that you put on it. Of course, that is reflected in the singing that we do, which is one of the reasons we tell you that lethargic singing surely makes observers conclude, wow, this God that they're singing about must be pretty boring if they can keep their hands in their pocket and a bored look on their face when they're talking about him, right?

You put your worth of the team that you are cheering for on display by the passion with which you cheer for them. In the same way, when we worship God, we are putting his gloriousness on display. That is a expression of worship. But the primary way that we worship God is in how we respond to him throughout the day, how eagerly we obey him, how much we treasure him by what we're willing to do for him.

So here's the first of the five principles of worship, worship by that definition. Number one, number one, we see that all of God's works are designed to lead, to wonder, and to worship. The way Paul ends all of this shows us that in the end, when everything is said and done, everything that was done, God has done in pursuit of our salvation is designed to lead us to amazement and wonder. Do you remember what Paul said in chapter nine?

We looked at it briefly, verse 23. What if God did all this? What if all that he did was to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy, that would be us, that he prepared beforehand for glory? What if the primary purpose of how God pursued salvation was to make us stand amazed at the glory of his grace?

And what if, Summit family, listen, what if that vision was so compelling and so beautiful that it was really worth any price to get there? What if the best part of heaven was seeing God in all of his glory? And I know for a lot of you, that doesn't make sense. You're like, I just don't get that.

That just sounds weird to me. I'm not sure how that is enjoyable, but here's how we know that's true. The Bible tells us in the book of first Peter, that the angels, the angels who already experienced all the other joys of heaven, what they yearn to get a better glimpse of, what they yearn to press into more is the glory of God that has been expressed in the gospel. And Paul tells us, Peter tells us that one day we're gonna see what they see and even more because we've been personal recipients of that love. What if I told you that deep down, it is the glory of God that you've always been yearning for your whole life? You didn't know what to call it.

You didn't know that's what it was, but that's what it's been. You were created for it. Did you know that you can follow Pastor JD on social media? Why not get some biblical wisdom and encouragement as you're scrolling? Just search for Pastor JD Greer on Facebook, at Pastor JD Greer on Instagram, and at JD Greer on X, formerly known as Twitter. Follow along on all of your favorite social media platforms and stay up to date with this ministry while also filling up your timeline with encouragement from God's word.

Now put your phone away just for a few more minutes and let's get back to today's teaching from Pastor JD Greer right here on Summit Life. Christian counselor, Paul Trepp, he says that we humans are glory junkies, which means we're constantly searching for something to adore. And that's why we fixate on some, the talents of some boy band if we're middle school girls, or why we fixate on some athlete's skill, or why we focus on somebody's intelligence or artistic ability, why we admire their strength of character, their superhuman endurance.

It's why grown men can't get enough of Navy Seal books and like look at what they can go through. It's why we admire riches and prowess and skill. We want something to adore and admire, something that we think has ultimate worth and that is worthy of ultimate devotion. God has been trying to show us since we were born that He is that glorious one. That's why Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare, the heavens declare the glory of God.

You know what that means? It means that every single day and night, the heavens are declaring, look here, look here, look at me, because this is what it took to create these things through the majesty of creation. God shouts and puts on display, on tangible display, His awesome power and beauty.

John Piper says, open your eyes. Do you see it? Do you hear it? He shouts at us to the billowing clouds. He shouts at us to the endless blue breath of the summer sky. He shouts at us with gold on the horizon in the morning and through the breathtaking expanse of galaxies and stars at night. Don't you see it? Don't you love it?

You were made for this. This is why we exist to see that in all these things He is shouting at us, I am glorious. Everything is pointing to that. This world is all husks and ashes. All the glory that we thought was so attractive here is ultimately just pointing us there. He's building on something St. Augustine said 1,500 years ago, St. Augustine, everything, the beauties of the world, St. Augustine said, are only like the ring that the bridegroom gives to his fiance. The ring, when a bridegroom, when a man gives it to his fiance, that ring is beautiful and it is valuable. And the girl who receives it doubtlessly is gonna find herself staring at its beauty. That's just part of the package and showing it off annoyingly to everybody. You start noticing that all our Instagram posts are like, look, I got my nails done. And all of a sudden it's in there.

Look, pumpkin spice latte or, oh, hey, she's just waving at everybody like this or it's September, it's so hot. And she's always making sure you see it. And that's natural. It's fine.

Okay. But how tragic if her love for the ring ever made her forget the ring giver, because the point of the beauty of the ring is to show her something far more valuable than the ring itself. And that is the love and commitment of the one who gave it to her. It wouldn't it be tragic if she took the object of that love and use it to replace the one whose love it symbolized in the same way, St. Augustine said, the beauties of creation, nature, art, romance, food, sport, they're all there to point us to the love of God. You should enjoy them, but you should never forget what they are pointing to.

C.S. Lewis said that when it comes to the beauties of creation, we humans can be just like a dumb animal. Lewis said, if you try to point out something to a dog, right? If you point out something to a dog, the dog, a lot of times we'll think you're trying to tell the dog something about your finger. You're wagging your finger at him. The dog's like, oh, what do you want me to see about your finger?

The dog will come out and sniff or maybe even lick your finger. And you're like, no, I'm not talking about my finger. My finger's pointing to something. It has a trajectory.

I'm pointing over there, right? He says that that's what we humans can be like when it comes to creation. We don't realize that creation has a trajectory. And that trajectory is the magnificence and the glory of God. Paul says, look there, because that's the whole point of salvation. And here's the thing, it is developing that vision now that is the way to maintain joy in life. You remember in Romans eight, Paul had revealed his own way of possessing joy in the midst of great suffering. He showed us it was this vision.

It was seeing this already. He said verse 18 chapter eight, I'm convinced that the sufferings of this present time are not even worth comparing to the glory that is going to be revealed in us. In other words, the glory that is coming is of such an all satisfying, infinitely beautiful joy producing reality that 70 or 80 years of pain in light of that is going to seem like nothing.

I have a friend who's about my age, who contracted a very serious and deadly form of cancer. It looked and still looks like it may rob him of some of the best years of his life. He said, you know, people sometimes ask me if I've reconciled with this, if they think that when I get into heaven, God's going to immediately pull me aside and say, well, this is why this happened. And this is the good that came out of this.

And I'll finally be able to understand the method behind all the madness. He said, but the more I read the book of Romans, the more I press into Romans eight, the more I see that what Paul is explaining is when I get to heaven, I'll look at them and I'll say, what pain are you even talking about? I don't even remember it. It's just been swallowed up in this beauty of this glory.

I can barely even remember the pain. Honestly, it is hard for me to imagine what kind of good and glorious ending could make something like cancer seem insignificant. What kind of good and glorious ending could make the loss of a child seem insignificant or apparent leaving? Paul is not saying that any of these are small things. And he's not saying that your pain is insignificant. He is saying that what we find hard to imagine is still in fact true. What drives Paul to worship here is that if even for just a brief moment, he has caught a glimpse of that future, which you and I find hard to imagine a future with a God so glorious, it makes everything else pale by comparison. And so Paul says the point of everything that God has done is to lead you to that kind of vision, because in that vision is eternal and abundant life, which leads to number two. All Bible study, whether it's in here or it's around your living room, all Bible study should end in worship. The fact that Paul ends his examination of doctrine and explanation and an explosion of worship illustrates for you and me that the purpose of Bible study is not just to expand your spiritual head.

It is to set your heart on fire with passion. And I say this because for many of you, growth in Christ is primarily growth and knowledge of Bible facts and doctrines. That's what you love. Then you come here and you like bringing your 48-inch notebook, and you got your big Bible with the Greek and the Hebrew interlinear, and you're going through and you're listening to your sermon podcast.

And when I say first, second, and third John, you're thinking about John MacArthur and John Calvin and John Piper, and man, you love it. You're deep into it. You're reading all these books and I'm right there with you. I love knowledge, but the point of the Bible is not to fill your head with knowledge. It is to fill your heart with wonder. For others of you, your interest in Christianity, I would say is more of the practical variety.

Maybe even more of you are in this category. Now you want to know how God can help you have a better marriage, how He can give you better kids, how you can have a more stable family, how you can have a more fulfilling career. And so you love those messages where I start breaking it down for you and making it practical. And you're like, oh, pastor, it was great today.

I got like three things I can actually do this week with that message. I love to see it change my life. And listen, that's great. That's great.

I love giving that kind of guidance. The Bible is full of wise counsel on ordering your life, but you understand that the Bible is not primarily a book of best spiritual practices. The Bible is a book that is designed to lead you to wonder. The stories we see in the Bible are not primarily of heroes that you're supposed to emulate, where you're supposed to have courage like Daniel, where you're supposed to fight Goliath like David did and have faith like Abraham did. The point of all these stories is to give you a savior that you were supposed to marvel and adore. That's the point of all of it. I've told you that nearly 75 years ago, there was a British pastor named D. Martin Lloyd Jones who jumped into a controversy in his day about whether sermons should tend more toward the doctrinal or whether they should tend more to the practical. Because already 75 years ago in the Western world, they were arguing. Sermons ought to be full of doctrine.

You ought to leave with just knowledge about Greek heiress tenses and superlapsarianism and how this fits with that. That's what they want. And the other group, people are like, no, it's just gotta be practical. You gotta tell people how it changes their lives.

You probably have an opinion too. D. Martin Lloyd Jones says, I would humbly say the purpose of the sermon is neither of those things. The purpose of a lecture is that you leave with a page full of notes. The purpose of a motivational speech is that you leave with a page full of action steps.

The purpose of a Bible sermon is that you leave worshiping. There must come a time, he said, in every message where the pen goes down and the eyes go up and you stop saying, oh my God, look at all these things I gotta do for you. And you start saying, oh my God, look at who you are. And oh my God, look at what you have done for me. And you stand in wonder.

You stand in wonder. That's why D. Martin Lloyd Jones said, I spent half my time telling Christians to study doctrine and the other half telling them doctrine is not enough because worship is the point. Number three, we see from this passage that worship arises with right posture of humility toward God. Worship arises with a right posture of humility toward God. Our worship often gets short-circuited right from the beginning by two false assumptions. The first one is that we're smarter or more fair or more compassionate than God is. And so we get into some situation when we think, well, God, this is the way you should do it.

If you're really just and you're really fair and you're really compassionate, you really understood how things work, this is how you would do it. And we start lecturing God. The second assumption is that God is somehow being unfair to us, that God owes us good things and the fact that bad things, any bad thing that's happening to us is unfair.

God, why me? Paul addresses both of those false assumptions with just two phrases because he knows that both of those assumptions will destroy your trust and your joy in God. Verse 34, who has known the mind of the Lord?

Who has been his counselor? In other words, which of us is in a place where we think we can lecture God on the right thing to do? Before you lecture God on the right thing to do, you should stop and ask, where did I learn these concepts of justice and compassion from?

Where did they come from? Did I not learn them from him? And now I want to teach him. Furthermore, has he not worked out the salvation process in a way that showed me that he's worthy of our trust? Just the little glimpses Paul says you get of what God is up to. Don't you already see that God took some of the very worst and turned it into the best? He took the cross and turned it into the resurrection. He took Jewish rejection and turned it into Gentile salvation.

Don't you realize that given enough time and perspective, you're going to see how he does that with everything in human history? He is worthy of our trust and he is worthy of our praise, no matter our circumstance. It ends in wonder. That's the title of our message today from Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. This week, we've jumped back into the final part of our year-long teaching through the Book of Romans. And if you're finding it as life-changing as I am, I'd like to encourage you to get our new Bible study. It's the second part of Pastor Tim Keller's two-part study through the Book of Romans called In View of God's Mercy. We'll send you this second volume as an expression of thanks when you donate today to support this ministry. Ask for part two of Pastor Tim's study called In View of God's Mercy when you give by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or give online at jdgreer.com. If you'd rather mail your donation, our address is JD Greer Ministries, P.O. Box 122-93, Durham, North Carolina, 27709. And if you're wondering about that first volume, you can also request it when you give.

Complete your set today. I'm Molly Vitevich. Join us tomorrow when we continue this message called It Ends in Wonder, right here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.