Follow Me and Multiply, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. If you want to become a great person of faith like Abraham, it's not going to be a pleasant experience. He's going to lead you through the valley so that he can show you that he can indeed provide for you there. He's going to surround you with conflict so he can demonstrate that he can indeed prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist, J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. So have you ever considered this question, how serious is God about this whole live by faith thing he's asking us to do? Well, I'd say he's pretty serious. After all, it seems fairly obvious that before God can do something powerful through us, he's got to do something in us, right? Well, today we'll discover the path we have to walk so that God can truly multiply our lives right now. Our teaching is titled Trust Me and Multiply.

Here's pastor J.D. Open your Bible to Genesis chapter 12. In Genesis chapter 12, we are looking at the life of one of the most important figures in human history, a man we now call Abraham, to see how God multiplied his life for eternal significance. Maybe more importantly, we're looking at the path that God led him down to accomplish that because, listen, this is a path that you and I will have to walk also if we want our lives to multiply for eternal significance. Don't you want to go through life and get to the end of it and get to the end and know that you did more than just, you know, pay bills and occupy space and consume resources? I know that you do.

I know that's what burns in your heart of hearts. And so we're looking at the path that you got to walk to get there. And today we're going to talk about a very important part of that path called trust.

Trust. It would be great. It would be great if Abraham's choice to follow God at the beginning of Genesis 12 resulted in an unbroken string of obedience, a dazzling succession of faith victories.

But that's simply not the case. Before Abraham even gets out of Genesis 12, he's just about giving away the whole farm. Genesis 12, verse 10, God sends a famine to the region where Abraham was staying.

So Abraham has to detour down to Egypt because Egypt is the only place that has food at that time. Verse 11, when Abraham was about to enter Egypt, he says to Sarai his wife, I know that you're a woman, beautiful in appearance. And when the Egyptians see you, they're going to say, this is his wife.

Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. So say you are my sister that my life may be shared for your sake. In other words, somebody there that's powerful is going to look at you and say, she's hot.

Even though she's 70, she's hot. And I really want her to be my wife. And then they're going to have me killed so they can have you as my wife. So I want you to say, you're my sister. That way you can still be their wife, but at least I won't lose my life.

What do you call that? Is that a lack of faith or is that your answer to why I ought to be featured on the Jerry Springer show? Abraham, do you not believe that the God who promised to make you a great nation, don't you believe he can at least keep the Egyptians from stealing your wife and then killing you? This scene is strangely comforting to me because my life has hardly been an unbroken string of successes since I became a Christian. It seems like each epic of my life has been marked by wavering faith. In high school, I just could not be satisfied with God's opinion of me. After I became a Christian, I still felt like I had to prove myself to everybody else.

It just flat wore me out. In college, I wasn't content with God's timing. I wanted to have a girlfriend. Then I wanted to be married. Then I wanted to get out into the world. When I first became pastor here, I wasn't content with the ministry assignment that God had given to me. I wanted the church to be bigger.

I wanted to have more impact. I would look at things that God was giving to others of my friends and thought, why isn't he giving that to me? So y'all, I look back through my life and I see how every single stage has been characterized by wavering belief. Well, I look here at Abram's life and I can count at least five instances where he pretty dramatically drops the ball. We got this first one here in Genesis 12 where he lies about his wife. You're going to have another one in Genesis 16 when he gets worried several years later because he's like three decades in and God still hadn't given him a son. And so he follows Sarah, his wife's lead. He says, sleep with my house servant Hagar and then maybe you can get pregnant through her.

Well, that's lapse number two. He does that. Hagar gives birth to a son named Ishmael through Abraham. And you would think, hey, success. Sarah's happy. Abram's happy. Everybody's happy.

Do you really think that? Do you really feel like that was good for Abram's marriage? Sarah is ticked. So she starts abusing Hagar just for doing what Sarah asked her to do. And Abram, spineless wonder that he is at this point, says, okay, you girls work that out.

And he lets Sarah abuse her and drive her out. That's lapse of faith number three. Genesis 17, God reappears to Abram to renew his promise to give him a son through Sarah. And Abram laughs at God. The father of our faith scoffs in God's face.

Failure number four. Finally, Genesis 20, Abraham runs into another king who scares him. And he lies again, again about Sarah being his wife and says, she's my sister.

So the king won't kill him. This one is weird because it brings us back full circle to the beginning. I know somebody who was reading through the life of Abraham just as we're doing this series. And they got to the end and they were like, did I already read this? Like, it's like I'm having deja vu. It's in there twice.

It's the same situation that he repeats twice. It's almost as if the author is saying Abraham's no better at the end than he was at the beginning. He's still having the same struggles of faith when he's an old man of the faith as when he was a less old man of the faith. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a lot better about my life right about now.

Aren't you? Here's what we learn from Abraham's journey here. Four things. Number one, God grows our faith by testing it. God grows our faith by testing it. Right after Abraham started to follow God, God calls the famine so that Abraham would have to go to Egypt, a place where he knew Abraham would be scared for his life. God was testing Abraham and trying to grow his faith.

You see, we don't just make a one-time decision to follow God and then move on. God has to grow and test our faith because faith is our most important spiritual muscle. Faith, you see, actually works like a muscle. They say that you can only strengthen a muscle when you strain it. When you work and strain a muscle, they say, you produce thousands of tiny little tears in the muscle and then it grows back stronger.

That's the science of exercise. That's how God grows our faith. He puts us in situations where he tears us so that he can grow us back stronger.

Y'all, I see this happen so regularly in people's lives. I would say it is the standard experience for every new Christian without exception. You come to Jesus and pretty soon you're going to go through an experience where you're going to start asking questions like, well, how is God going to provide for me now?

I know people who when they become Christians and they get serious with God lose their jobs and they look at heaven and they're like, is this how you reward me? Is this how you're taking care of me? No, he's testing your faith. Or you say, am I going to be able to make it through this difficult season of my marriage? Man, I thought things were going to be different.

I thought things were going to be a lot smoother, but instead you're in the middle of this trial. Is God going to be able to provide for me here or he will allow people to turn on you? Seems like quite often when I see a high school or college student come to Jesus, a lot of their friends turn on him. A lot of their friends turn on him and turn their backs and it's like God is behind that asking, do you value these?

Do you trust these more than you trust me? Faith is the most important muscle in the Christian life and God is committed to strengthening it in you. Faith is your core muscle. Faith is not just how you begin the Christian life. Faith is the whole thing. We say that faith is not the diving board off of which you jump into the pool. Faith is the soil in which everything in the Christian life grows. So God is committed throughout your whole life to testing your faith and stretching it and growing it, which leads us to number two. In testing our faith, God often brings us to the very brink.

Think about this. God could have given Abram a son immediately. After he followed him in Genesis 12, it could have been like the very next month or the very next week, Sarah gets pregnant, but he doesn't do that, does he? He waits, get this, 25 to 35 years. And Abram's already 70. He's got a lot of life behind him. Why would God wait that long?

If God's determined to give him, why wait three decades to actually fulfill the promise? Well, let's go back to the illustration of the muscle. Workout specialists talk about something called muscle failure. And they say that when you really want to strengthen a muscle, you got to push it until it can't go any farther, until you literally can't lift anything else.

And only then when you go to muscle failure, will it begin to multiply in its capacity. That's exactly what God does to your faith. He pushes it to the brink. He pushes it to faith failure. Only then will he multiply it in you.

Listen to this. You see, if God had given to Abram a son immediately, it would have made Abram rejoice, but it would not have grown his faith. And God is not just after giving you joy, he does want that. The most precious possession he says you have more precious than gold itself is the faith. And so he is committed to increasing that in you. And he is going to push you to the point that it tears and it breaks down so that he can grow it. Abraham had to feel his total helplessness in the face of sterility. He had to feel his hopelessness in the face of Sarah's barrenness if he was to cast himself utterly upon the arms of divine promises and really grow in his faith.

Here's my question for you. Is God doing that with you right now? Is God pushing you to the brink? Listen, the way that you become an Abraham is not pleasant. It's not through listening to me preach the sermons. You're like, this is what I want to do.

I want to preach sermons and I want to take notes and I just want to be an awesome critic. If you want to become a great person of faith like Abraham, it's not going to be a pleasant experience. He's going to lead you through the valley so that he can show you that he can indeed provide for you there. He's going to send you into the storm so that you can see his ability to walk on water above those storms.

He's going to surround you with conflict so he can demonstrate that he can indeed prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies. God is serious about teaching you to live by faith because faith is not an addendum to the Christian life. Faith is not a part of the Christian life. Faith is all of the Christian life. Listen, in order to multiply, if you really want to multiply to eternal significance, you are going to have to learn to exercise faith. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer, and we'll get right back to today's teaching in just a moment. But first, did you know that Pastor JD has a brand new book releasing soon? It's called Twelve Truths and a Lie, answers to life's biggest questions. And let's be honest, there are hard questions that we all have to answer in life. Like, can I know that I'm going to heaven? And what's my purpose in life?

Pastor JD answers these questions with biblical truth, and he also answers one of the most prevalent lies in Christianity today. Now, the book releases on December 5th, but I'm going to let you in on a little secret. If you pre-order the book, we'll of course send you a physical copy when it releases, but we'll also send you the audiobook version read by Pastor JD right now. All you have to do is head to jdgreer.com to pre-order. But don't wait.

This special offer will end when the book releases on December 5th, so pre-order Twelve Truths and a Lie today. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Paul compared everything that God has given to us like a seed.

Think of that in three major categories, what God's given to you, your time, your treasure, and your talents. I told you there are two things you can do with a seed. Most seeds you can grind up for food and eat, like grain. Or you can take that same seed and you can plant it, but here is the catch, if you will. When you plant it, you remove your ability to eat that seed for food, because once you put it into the ground, you can't get it, access it any longer. And so there's an inherent risk in planting, because you're taking your hands off of what you could use right now, and you're hoping that in planting it, it will come back multiplied.

There's an inherent faith required in planting, and that is always a little terrifying. I read this story about some farmers in the Midwest who, 100, 150 years ago, had all moved out there because of these just incredible farm produce that could be gotten from the American Midwest. And so after moving out there, they went through, in Oklahoma, one of the worst droughts in American history.

It was like 10 years of no rain. And so many of these farmers, they say, by that last year, after a decade, had used up all their seed and are just surviving on it with their family. And so many of them had about a year's worth of seed left. And in order to plant, you had to plant about six months of it.

So here's the catch. If you plant six months of it, you got only six months enough left to eat, right? So if you plant in the fall, and then you plant six months, and you've only got six, when you get done eating, there better be a harvest there, because if not, then you got nothing, and your family's going to starve, and you got no money. So these farmers in 1939, this excruciating choice of, well, are we going to plant, or are we just going to hold onto this and survive?

The ones in 1939 who actually did plant, the rains came back that year, and they had one of the biggest crops that they'd ever seen. God continually does that with you. He puts you in those situations where He says, are you going to trust Me enough that you release these things to Me to give Me a chance to multiply them? During this multiply season, He is going to call some of you to give and to sacrifice in ways that honestly are going to scare you.

They may not be that huge in terms of a balance sheet, but for you, they're big. And the question that's going to be asked to you is, do you believe that God can multiply what you give to Him, that He can take care of you and bless the world at the same time? Because the only way, listen, the only way that you and I will multiply is when we begin to live and give by faith. So I see S. Lewis, he said, the only safe rule when it comes to your generosity, if you want to rule, the only safe rule is to give until it scares you, because only then do you know that you are living by faith. If you are after a nice, safe, neat, tidy life, where you just kind of do Christian things and you come listen to Christian sermons, and I'm not talking to you right now, but if you want to have a life that matters for eternity, you want to have a life of eternal significance, you can only follow Jesus with total abandon. And you have got to live, whether it's your time, your treasures, and your talents, you've got to do so in a way that just says, God, here is the seed. And you're going to have to multiply it and take care of me and take care of me and bless the world at the same time.

Only way to follow Jesus is with total abandon. It was a place I used to go with some friends of mine before I got married several years ago. When I lived in upper state New York, it was called Split Rock Canyon. You'd have to pull your car off the side of the road on the interstate, kind of walk through this little path about 300 yards into the woods, when all of a sudden the ground just dropped away and there was this little stair step waterfall. The first part of it was about 25 to 30 feet and it dumped at a pool. And then another few feet, there was another waterfall and it was about 35 feet into another pool.

And then the canyon along the side just went, you know, it stayed the same height. And so some of my friends showed me, they took me out there and they're like, if you run off of this side of this canyon and you just jump with all your might, you can land in that second pool down there about 75 feet away. Now here was the catch though.

Here's the deal. If you were to measure the amount of distance horizontally you had to cover, you could never do it in a broad jump. You could never do it. But because you were in the air so long, the trajectory would carry you safely into the pool. But the deal was you couldn't just walk off to the side and just step.

You had to just run with total abandon and just leap. You say, JD, did you do it? Heck no, I did not do it. Actually, I take it back. I did it not that trip. I did it later trips, but I was so terrified in it.

I cannot claim any manliness at all. But it was just, you can't do it if you hedge your bet. It is also true with the Christian life. You cannot walk forward and multiply if you're going to hedge your bets. You have to run and jump with total abandon. So that leads us to a question. Where in the world do you get that kind of confidence? Where do you get the courage to plant the seed that you have?

Where do you get the courage to jump? Question number three or statement number three, confidence to risk for God comes only from comprehending the commitment of God. Abraham shows us that confidence to risk for God comes from comprehending the commitment of God. We know that Abraham eventually got this. How do we know that? Well, Genesis chapter 22, we're not going to look at it today.

We'll get it more in depth to it a little later. But after God finally gave to Abraham this promised son, Isaac, after he gave him the son, he asked Abraham when Isaac was about 15 years old, he asked Abraham to offer the son up as a sacrifice. Now we're going to go more into depth than this later, but Isaac was not only what Abraham most loved in the world. It was not only his most treasured person, possession, whatever. Isaac was Abraham's only hope for the future of his family and his nation. He doesn't just represent what he treasures most.

It represents all his hopes for the future. And God says, offer it as a sacrifice. And Abraham in Genesis 22 does it. God doesn't actually let him go through with it.

We'll get into that later. He stops him before he does it, but Abraham is willing to put that thing he loves the most and that thing he trusts the most on the altar. But here's my question now, after failing again and again and again, after being the kind of guy who would throw his wife under the bus, not once, but twice, how does Abraham finally get the confidence to do that? I think I know.

I think I know. Genesis 15, if you've got your Bible, go there. Genesis 15, verse three. Abraham is in one of his doubting moods. God reappears to him and says this, Genesis 15, three, fear not, Abram. I am your shield and I am your exceeding great reward. And Abraham says, verse four, woo, thanks God. That's awesome. You taught me a new worship chorus.

I'll be happy to sing to you. That just, no, it's not what he said. It's actually kind of rude. After God reveals this to him, Abram says, behold, you ain't given me no son. That's all he says. If God appears to you, this is what Abram's response is, you ain't given me no son. Where's my son?

I'm like 90. So God takes him outside and he shows him the stars and says, as many as these stars are, that's how your offspring is going to be, Abram. And then occurs that famous verse where the apostle Paul says, shows us how we get saved. Abram, Genesis 15, six, Abram believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness. By the way, people say, well, how people saved in the Old Testament? Same way they were in the New Testament. They were saved by believing on the Messiah.

Abram believed that the Messiah would come. We believe that the Messiah has come. They believe forward. We believe backward.

The direction is the different, but the object is the same. Abraham believed God's promise that God would keep his word and God credited it to him as righteousness. Just like God credits us as righteousness when we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. All right, Abraham believed what God said.

So at this point, Genesis 15, six, we're like, whoa, way to go, Abraham. But then after the most famous verse on faith in the whole Bible, Genesis 15, six, Abram said, verse eight, but Lord God, how will I know? In other words, he doubts again. Now he's doubting two different things here and these two components always form the substance of your doubts. The first part of the doubt is God, how do I know I can trust you?

It's been like two decades. God, are you really going to keep your word? The second component is how can I trust me? God, you know, I've proven to be pretty unreliable.

What if I screw this up too? Those are the two pieces of what causes a doubt in you. God, how do I know I can trust you?

How do I know I can trust me? You want to know what God's answer is? It's pretty awesome.

It's probably not what you're expecting. Verse nine, chapter 15, and I'll summarize it instead of reading it. God says, you want to know how you can trust you and how you can trust me? Okay, go get five animals, a cow, a goat, a ram, a turtle dove, and a pigeon.

I want you to find a ditch and I want you to cut them in half and I want you to put either half of them on either side of the ditch so that their blood flows down into the ditch and makes a river of blood. Well, they're supposed to make this covenant at sundown. So verse 12, as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. A dreadful and great darkness fell upon him and a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. By the way, exact same words to use to describe the presence of God in Exodus when God came down at Mount Sinai.

The fire of his holiness and the light of his presence passes between those pieces. On that day, watch this, the Lord made a covenant with Abram. The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, but who didn't walk through that river of blood? Abram didn't.

Abram didn't. You know, in those days, if a king made a covenant with a servant, it was customary for the servant to walk through the river of blood alone because it was assumed that the king would keep up his end. This is the only covenant in recorded history where the king goes through and the servant does not.

The meaning is very clear. God is saying, if I fail to keep up my side of the bargain, I will pay with my blood. But if you fail to keep up your side of the bargain, I also will pay with my blood. I'm going to be responsible for both sides of the covenant. Even when we are faithless, God remains faithful. He holds up both his side of the deal as well as ours when we fail. What a loving and merciful God that we have. Thank you for listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Recently, I sat down with Pastor J.D. to talk a little bit about our current featured resource here on Summit Life. You see, one of my very favorite things about the holiday season is getting Christmas cards in the mail. It's so fun to hear from people this time of year.

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That's eight six six three three five fifty two twenty. Or visit us online at J.D. Greer dot com. I'm Molly Bittovitch inviting you to join us Friday as we continue talking about how God will multiply you when you trust in Him. We'll see you then right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.