Freed To Unite

Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer talks about unity. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we are so glad that you're back with us for another day of solid biblical teaching here on the program. You know, if you turn on the news these days or browse through social media for a minute, it'll be pretty obvious that we're living in some unprecedented and turbulent times.

Emotions run high over issues like politics, race relations, and so many different hot topics that it can be hard to keep up. Our world seems so divided and quite frankly angry, and unfortunately that same attitude can often creep into our churches ever so subtly. Today, Pastor J.D. challenges us to pursue unity for the sake of the gospel message because that kind of unity says a lot about the God we serve as a watching world looks like one. Pastor J.D.

titled this message Freed to Unite, so let's turn to Galatians chapter two. Whenever cultures come together in close proximity, such as in a church like here, inevitably there's going to be some misunderstanding or some confusion or even some conflict, not the least of which occurs around language. I was with a Ukrainian church pastor who told me that he had visited the United States once, and he was actually right here to rally, and he didn't speak any English, or he's just learning to speak English, and he said, I wanted to practice my English, and I was in one of your Starbucks, and there was a woman there. She had a big dog, and I wanted to ask her what the dog's name was, and so he said, I went over to her, and I was forming the words that I knew in English in my mind. He said, now in Ukrainian, we do the word order differently, so what I said to her was, and you've got to imagine it in the thick Ukrainian accent, he said, I said to her, what is your name, dog? And he said, she just kind of looked at me, and so I repeated it again for emphasis. He said, I almost created my international incident.

Of course, language is not the most serious thing that causes conflict, and as we often experience right here in our own country, when people from different backgrounds or different religious upbringings, different cultures are brought together in close proximity, quite often we experience conflict. This is the practical problem that the apostle Paul was writing about in Galatians chapter two, and the way that Paul answers or addresses this problem is going to illustrate the truth of one of our summit plumb lines. Plumb lines are little short phrases that we use that kind of encapsulate our approach to God and ministry, and one of the, probably the most important of our plumb lines is this one. The gospel's not just the diving board. The gospel's also the pool, and what we mean by that is most people consider the gospel to be the diving board off of which they jump into the pool of Christianity. It's the prayer you pray to begin the Christian life.

It's the ABCs. It's the introduction to Christianity, but after you become a Christian, the way that you grow in Christ is that you're going to learn all this other stuff and learn these doctrines and learn these facts and do all these new disciplines and that sort of thing, but that's not how Paul talks about the gospel. According to Paul, the way we grow in Christ is the same way we begin in Christ, that if you want to grow in Christ, you don't do it by going beyond the gospel. You do it by going deeper into the gospel, and what Paul is going to say is that practical problems in our lives or areas of immaturity are not found by growing beyond the gospel, but by going deeper into the gospel. The gospel's not just the diving board. The gospel is the pool itself, and so Paul is going to deal with a practical problem in a gospel way.

Here we go, okay? Chapter 2, verse 11, but when Cephas, Cephas if you remember was Paul's nickname for Peter. It means the rock. When the rock came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he was to be blamed because he regularly ate with the Gentiles before certain men came from James. James was the leader of the Jewish branch of the church, the Jerusalem church, James the half brother of Jesus. However, when these Jews came, he withdrew himself and separated himself because he feared those from the circumcision party, which is another way of saying the Jewish Christians there.

Now, here's what had happened. In Acts chapter 10, Peter had been given this vision where a gigantic blanket kind of unrolls from heaven, and in this blanket are all kinds of animals that Peter and other Jews consider to be unclean, like rabbits and shrimp and the pigs and that kind of stuff. And a voice, the voice of God called to him from heaven and said, Peter, kill, grill, and eat.

I call it Peter's pigs in a blanket dream. And at first, Peter resists, and he says, I can't do that, Lord, because these are unclean and I'm the Jew and I don't eat unclean things. But God shows Peter that Jesus's death had made all food clean for the believer and thus ritual cleanliness had nothing to do anymore with being close to God because Jesus's blood had cleansed us. We no longer needed all these other things that would, would bring us close to God. And so Peter started to eat with the Gentiles and he began to eat what they ate. And here's the thing, once you eat bacon, there's no going back. Amen.

Amen. So Peter is out every single night with the Gentiles eating high on the hog, literally. But then some Jews from Jerusalem show up and Peter withdraws and he goes back to his old ways of not even eating with Gentiles, lest they, you know, shake some of their uncleanness dust on him or they give him the uncleanness cooties or whatever. Verse 13, then the rest of the Jews joined in his hypocrisy so that even Barnabas, who was like the nicest guy in the church, he loved and accepted everybody. Even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. I've often heard when there's a mist in the pulpit, there's a fog in the pew. And so the rest of the church, you know, following Peter's example, they begin to separate themselves from Gentiles and begin to insist that if Gentiles are going to be real Christians, they need to adopt the manners and the customs and the eating habits of the Jews.

Now watch this, watch this. But when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the gospel, that's a really important phrase. We're going to come back to it. So you should underline it in your Bible. I told Cephas in front of everybody, here's Paul going head to head against Peter.

And he is going to there, he's standing there. I'm sure it was a little awkward, by the way. What you're going to see, and I'm going to come back to this in a little bit is that sometimes you care enough about the gospel and you care enough about somebody and you care enough about the church that you get awkward. Gospel unity is not the same thing as Southern politeness. And a lot of us don't get that.

And Southern politeness is where everybody just smiles at everybody and tries to ignore any controversy or avoid any unpleasant conversation. But sometimes you got to love people and you got to love the church and you got to love the gospel enough to get awkward with them. And so what Paul says to Peter is he says, listen, blackhead, I told Cephas in front of everybody, if you who are a Jew live like a Gentile, if you're eating bacon now and not like a Jew, how can you compel Gentiles to now adopt Jewish customs as if this has something to do with now how close they are to God.

All right. And then he does this. He says, we know Peter, that a person is not justified by the works of the law. We're justified by faith in Jesus Christ by the works of the law.

No human being will be justified. Paul starts explaining the gospel to Peter in front of everybody, which might seem a little condescending, but Paul is saying Peter at his core, this is a gospel issue. You see the gospel Peter is that we're justified not because of something about us.

It's not because of something we eat or don't eat or because of something we do or don't do. It's because we accept Christ's righteousness as our own. Our justification is a gift that God gives to us because of what Christ did in our place. You see the word justified means to declare innocent. Think of it like in a court of law, when you are declared innocent in a court, you are justified.

And that means that no part of the penalty can ever be put upon you. And that you are restored to all the privileges and benefits of full citizenship. When God justified us in Christ, it means that we were declared guiltless and perfect and innocent in God's sight. We are completely accepted. We are beloved sons and daughters of God.

There is no condemnation that belongs to us. And we have been restored to all the privileges and all the benefits and full citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. And Paul says, that's the basis of our acceptance now.

And when you really embrace that, it's gonna tear down any sense of superiority that you might feel towards somebody else. And then Paul concludes chapter two, verse 20, with maybe one of the most famous statements of Christian identity anywhere in the Bible. He says, you see in reality, I've been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live yet not I, but Christ lives in me.

And the life I now live in the body, I'm living by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. We've called this series the freedom in the in-between because the book of Galatians is about the freedom that the gospel alone can provide for us. You say freedom in between what exactly? Freedom in between when we trust Christ and when he takes us to heaven. In this story, we're gonna see Paul illustrate at least three different kinds of freedom that we experience when we trust Christ. The first of these three is the most substantial. So we're gonna spend the most time on it. Paul says, because of Christ, we are now finally free to unite.

Free DNI. Paul explains that much of our interpersonal strife goes back to a failure at its core to understand and to apply the gospel. That's why he said that Peter was deviating from the truth of the gospel.

Let's take a few minutes and unpack that. Now let me warn you, this is a little theologically deep. So I need you to put your big boy theological pants on and just hang with me, but it will be worth it.

I promise. Paul is showing us that a lot of barriers that exist between people come because we are trying to justify ourselves. In other words, to declare ourselves righteous and acceptable through some things, some characteristic about us. Jewish people did this through the law. Jewish people had a whole system of things that they did that they thought distinguished them from the world.

The Old Testament alone has 613 laws every Jew had to conform to. In addition to that, they came up with what they called the hedge about the law. Think of disobedience to the law like falling in a hole. And so because you don't want to fall in the hole, you put up a hedge around it. And so they came up with all these extra laws that kept them really far away from actually ever disobeying the law. There were literally thousands of these little rules that took place as a part of the hedge of the law.

And y'all, I know it got confusing because they were like, how many steps are we allowed to take on the Sabbath again? And can you eat llama meat? Is that on the approved list? Or how about turkey bacon? Does that fly under the radar or yoga pants?

Is that a forbidden fabric or just bad taste? I don't really know. So what is it that I am allowed to do? But see, the more you conform to these things and the better you kept them, the more accepted you were by God and the higher you were spiritually. Now having a list of things like this, that if you do them, you're accepted. And if you don't do them, you're rejected.

And how well you do them makes you closer and how little you do them makes you farther away. That is not something that is unique to Judaism. All religions have this kind of list. It goes back to a soul condition I've described to you like this before. Now, this is one of those analogies I probably repeat five times a year, and it is because I really want it to be embedded in how you see the gospel.

It goes back to Genesis 3, and here it is. The first emotion that human beings felt after they had sinned was what? They felt shame.

That's right, shame over what? Over their nakedness. Now, were they naked before they sinned? Yes, they were naked before they sinned, but their nakedness did not bother them. Why did their nakedness not bother them before they sinned? St. Augustine's answer to that was, before they sinned, they had been clothed in the love and the acceptance of the Heavenly Father, and so they felt no shame about their nakedness, and they weren't embarrassed about it, but after they sinned, they had stripped themselves of the love and acceptance of the Heavenly Father, so now they felt vulnerable, now they felt exposed, now they felt like something was missing, now they felt shame. And so what did they do?

What did they do? Well, I ask you, what do normal people do when they feel naked? They try to clothe themselves, right?

I've described it like this before. If you have a problem sleepwalking, and so you wake up in Super Walmart in the middle of the night and you're butt naked, what do you do? You're not like, oh, I pick up a few odds and ends from the house, you know why I'm here. No, you try to find clothing because you want to be covered, and this is a picture of the human race is that from that point on, the human race has been trying to find something that could clothe themselves to take away the shame and restore their sense of things being right like they have worth. They are trying to justify themselves, and so what we are always doing is putting something on that distinguishes us from other people. It's like life is one big survivor episode where we're always trying to prove that we're not the ones that ought to be thrown off the island, and it means that I'm always in competition with other people because I got to show that I'm better at this so that that makes me worth something, right? Pride, I told you a couple weeks ago, pride is at its essence competitive.

To pride, it doesn't matter if I'm good looking only that I'm better looking than you. It doesn't matter that I'm religious or righteous, it only matters that I'm more religious and more righteous than you, and so I'm always in competition with other people, and that creates division, and that division that comes from competition that is rooted in pride, that comes out of insecurity, that is what fuels all the division that is taking place in the Galatian church. This is Summit Life, the teaching ministry of Pastor JD Greer. You know, our goal on this radio program each day is to keep you saturated in the truths of the gospel, but did you know that we have other resources available that have that same goal in mind? One of our most strategic and powerful ways we keep the gospel front and center is through our daily email devotional from Pastor JD. Couldn't we all use encouragement first thing in the morning or after work to remind us of God's love? I know the busyness of life can quickly choke out any joy that we feel in our walk with God, so let's remind ourselves moment by moment of His love and devotion to us and engage with His word even more.

And the best part? It follows along with our teaching here on the program, so if you miss a day, you can catch up quickly and easily. Sign up for this free resource at jdgreer.com slash resources. That's jdgreer.com slash resources. We feel blessed to offer free materials like this to those searching, and it's all possible because of the faithful giving of so many, so thank you.

Now let's return for the conclusion of today's teaching here on Summit Life. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Now some of you say, well, that's exactly why I hate religion. It makes people self-righteous and competitive. All people, not just religious people, all people do this. The human soul feels naked and exposed, and we are constantly looking for something to justify ourselves. Charles Spurgeon, who is the 19th century British pastor that I quote so much that some of you have asked if he is on staff at the Summit Church.

No, he is not. Spurgeon said that in 19th century London, he saw three main dividers between people in the society. It's amazing how a hundred plus years later, these are the same three main dividers we see today. He said, there is the pride of race. He said, number two, there is the pride of face and place. And he said, number three, there's the pride of grace.

Now let me kind of unpack each of those because like I said, they're still pretty relevant. The pride of race for many, their ethnic identity becomes a way of distinguishing themselves above others. So they take pride in their Americanness or their whiteness or their blackness or their Southernness or their Asianness or their Indian culture or their Hispanicness or whatever. A racial distinctive makes them who they are and begins to form their identity, and it's very protecting for them because it gives them a sense of identity and worth.

Now hear me very clearly. Our ethnic identities and our cultures are beautiful things. They are created by God like a mini-sided diamond to reflect his glory. But when they become our primary distinguishing identity, they always cause division because you become really proud of and protective and defensive of your culture because your culture gives you a sense of identity and it sets you apart. It's part of what justifies you.

It clothes you. But Paul would say, friend, do you not understand the gospel? There's only one race of people, the human race, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and that race has one core problem, men, and that race has only one hope, the blood of Jesus that cleanses all of us, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, and mixed alike. That's why Paul says in Romans 10, there is no difference in the Jew or the Greek or the black or the white or the rich or the poor, the young or the old or the Arab or the Asian because all have the same curse that is put upon them and all of them call to the same Lord who can show them grace and mercy when they call upon him for salvation. Where is boasting then, Paul says, in your race?

Where is a sense of superiority? Your race could not save you. Your culture could not save you. If salvation could have come through our cultures or our ethnic identities, then Jesus would have come in one race, but he didn't. He came as the Lord of all humanity. And what gives you worth and identity now is not your Jewishness or your whiteness or your Americanness or your blackness.

By the keeping of the law or by the preserving of culture, no human being is justified. And after my identity in Christ, when I embraced that, Paul says, all the rest of these defining characteristics seem to me like garbage compared to the worth of our identity in Christ. In fact, the word that Paul used was much stronger than garbage. Philippians 3, now one of my favorite Greek words, Paul said, compared to what I have in Christ, my Jewishness, my education, all my background, it all seems like scubala.

Scubala is the kind of word that if your 12 year old son used it, you'd wash out his mouth with soap. Your Bible very politely translates it as dung, but it was a much stronger word than that. Paul wasn't self-loathing. He didn't hate his culture. He loved his culture. But Paul said, you know, compared to my identity in Christ, my Jewishness, all my accomplishments, all my education, everything just seems so light.

It just seems like scubala. Listen, y'all, this is really, really important. Listen, when we become Christians, our cultural distinctives do not go away.

They just become a lot less important. Tony Evans, an African-American preacher and one of my favorite all time preachers. He says, listen, the racial application that Paul's teaching here in Galatians 2 is that it is technically incorrect to say I'm a black Christian or I'm a white Christian because now you've made black and white adjectives and Christian a noun. And the job of the adjective is to modify the noun. So now you got to keep Christian looking like the adjective that describes it, or it ceases to be Christian. But black and white culture have nothing to do with the essence of being a Christian. So better to say, I'm a Christian who happens to be white or I'm a Christian who happens to be black. God is not telling Jewish people to become Gentiles or Gentiles to act like Jews.

He's not telling white people to become black people or black people to act like white people. He's telling all people to be kingdom people having crucified their whiteness or their blackness or their Jewishness to the cross and regarding it as scubala in giving them worth or justifying them before God. And see when we begin to experience racial division, almost always at the root of that division is that our ethnic identity has become too large in our hearts. Our identity in Christ has to become greater, much greater than any other identity we possess. You see for many people they would say, well, of course my identity in Christ is the biggest, but here's what happens. Our identity in Christ is here, but we've got this other kind of identity that's right up close to it. Like whether we're black or white or Hispanic, for example, or whether we're a publican or a Democrat or independent.

So that's just a really important identifying characteristic for us or American Asian or European. And so what happens, listen, is that anytime we have a discussion that affects something in this area, we can't have that discussion with people who disagree with us without it dividing us from them. So for example, we can't really talk about politics because if you and I disagree on the best approach to nationalized healthcare, then where's going to be a division between us.

Or we can't discuss whether or not kneeling during the national anthem is an appropriate response to racial disparity in our culture. Because if we disagree on that, then we're going to divide. And the reason, the problem with that, Paul says, is that this identity here has become so closely tied to this one that these right here control relationships. He says, really, when you understand what it is, these identities are going to go way down the list there.

It's not that they did disappear, it's that your identity in Christ is so far outweighs them that all these others just seem kind of insignificant to you in light of who you are in Christ. In fact, I love the way the apostle Paul talks about it. It's kind of shocking. First Corinthians nine, Paul says to the Jew, I became a Jew.

You say, well, what's shocking about that. He was a Jew. So how does a Jew become a Jew to other Jews? What it's showing, listen, it's showing you that his ethnic identity was so light to him. He could take it on and off like a garment.

He could take it off and put it right back on. Now to a first century Jew, their Jewish ethnicity and their heritage was precious to them because I mean, they were a very persecuted group. They've been shoved into ghettos. They've been persecuted by the Romans. They were very self protective of their Jewish identity and they love their heritage and their culture. And Paul says, yeah, he says, but compared to who I am in Christ, even that identity seems like it's just not that significant.

Yes, I love it. Yes, it's important. But my identity in Christ is so far more significant to me that even if I disagreed in some of these things, or even if you do things differently than me, then I'm not going to, it's not going to affect how we relate to each other. When there's racial division, quite often the cause that it goes back to is that something about our culture or something about our political disposition or whatever, it's become so significant to us that it causes division. Our identity in Christ must become greater, greater than any other identity we might have. A relevant message about the importance of unity from Pastor JD Greer here on Summit Life. Now, JD, whenever we talk about freedom in Christ, some people might think we're talking about a get out of jail free card, an excuse to just do whatever we want since we're forgiven. But that's not what Christian freedom is about, right? Yeah, Miley, it reminds me of a bumper sticker I've seen on various cars just says, Christians aren't perfect. They're just forgiven.

And then it was a few months later I saw a bumper sticker almost in response to that one, which says Christians aren't perfect, but they're also not just forgiven. Meaning there's more to our salvation than just freedom from sin. We're also freed for something.

And that for something is what the book of Galatians is about. We're freed for life in the spirit. We're freed for good works. We're freed for unity.

We're freed for this abundant life that Jesus died to give us. And so this seven part study that we have put together with the help of our friend, the late Dr. Tim Keller, it will help you discover more of the four part of your salvation to show you that the life that God wants you to have in the fullness of the spirit. It's ideal for using your personal quiet time as well as in a small group setting. So we would love to give you one of these study guides. If you'll just go to jdware.com, I think it's something that'll help you. We'd love to send you a copy of this new featured resource.

It's a great companion to the teaching series we just started. So don't wait to get a hold of it. We'll send it to you with your gift of $35 or more. As always, you can give by calling us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can always donate online by visiting jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vinovich. Be sure to join us again Wednesday as we continue our series called freedom in the in between on summit life with JD Greer. Today's program is produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.