Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. The words, it is finished. You see, listen, are not just words that we believe one time to find forgiveness. They are words we believe again and again to experience spiritual power. The first time we believe the words, it is finished, we were released from the penalty of sin. As we continue to believe them, we are released from the power of sin. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor and teacher J.D.
Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. I think it's safe to say that our Western culture is highly individualistic. We all want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and to make our own way in the world.
We don't want to be dependent on anyone. Well, today, Pastor J.D. is giving us a cautionary message because that self-made mindset doesn't work when it comes to holiness. We're getting an important and humbling reminder about our dependence on God as we continue our study in Galatians called Freedom in the In-Between. And if you haven't gotten a copy of our featured resource this month, be sure to visit jdgreer.com right now. Pastor J.D. titled today's message Free to Change.
Let's join him now. Galatians chapter three, if you got your Bible, I am very excited about the message today. This is one of my favorite short passages in all of the letters of the apostle Paul, because Paul is going to get a little salty here with the Galatians.
And that's when I think Paul is at his best when he's getting a little frisky and he's a little irritated. So as you're turning to Galatians three, imagine with me for a minute that you are one of those consultants who gets hired by a company that is about to go under and you are brought in to turn that company around. And so you take on the case of a company that has just declared bankruptcy.
But as you really get into the weeds and you start to look at their assets, you discover that they actually have a great product. The reason they're going bankrupt is not because of a deficiency in their product, it's because the CEO is corrupt and incompetent. Their ledger is a veritable litany of bad decisions and fiscal mismanagement and corruption and nepotism and discrimination and embezzlement and just about any other kind of bad business practice you can come up with. But all the CEO wants in your meetings with him, all he wants is for you to find a way to get the company back in the black so that he can carry on business as usual. Well, if you were to make a report to the board of directors, you would probably say something like this. Listen, your debt is the least of your problems right now. You need to fire this corrupt CEO and you need to bring in a new one.
Simply throwing money at this problem is not going to fix it unless you change the corruption underneath this problem. Well, see that is very similar to the point that Paul begins to make in Galatians 3. Our salvation had to be more than simply having our sin debt removed and that is because our sin had done more than simply leave us guilty before God. It had also left us utterly unable to live the Christian life. That is why so many of us struggle to make relationships work even after we become Christians.
It's why many of us still cannot find that elusive peace and sense of happiness and calm or satisfaction that we have always yearned for. You see, we need not only to be given a clean record before God, we also need to be released from sin's power. And Paul says that this also is a gift of God that is accessed by faith alone in Christ.
This is what many of you have yet to grasp. You have grasped Christ alone as your forgiveness provider, but you have not yet grasped Christ alone as your righteousness producer. You believe salvation is by faith alone, but you think sanctification or growth in Christ, that that is all up to you. The essence of salvation, Paul says though, is you in Christ and Christ in you. You in Christ where you stand in Christ's righteousness, His righteousness has been applied to your account, but also Christ in you where His resurrection power becomes the source of your spiritual life. Paul's summation of all of this is Galatians 2.20. Here's what Paul says, I've been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet it's not I who lives anymore, it's Christ who lives in me. Now watch this, the life I now live in the body, the growth I have in Christ, the spiritual life I'm living, I'm living by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. And so now that leads us into chapter three, where we're gonna pick up and here's how Paul starts chapter three, you foolish Galatians.
Who has bewitched you? Before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. In other words, at one point you understood the gospel so clearly, it was like Jesus had died right in front of you. It's like you were there and you had seen His wounds and you heard Him from the cross declare, it is finished.
And at one point you understood it so clearly, but now it's like you've completely, it's like you've completely forgotten that. Verse two, I only wanna learn this from you. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or did you receive the Spirit by believing what you have heard?
Now this is really important because this is the first time the apostle Paul mentions the Holy Spirit in Galatians and the Holy Spirit is going to become His primary theme for the next four chapters. And here is his question, listen, how did you first receive the Spirit? Did you first receive the Spirit because you did something?
Was it because you ate something or did not eat something? Was it because you went through some ritual? No, it happened because you put faith in the finished work of Christ. Well then he said, after beginning by the Spirit, do you now think you're gonna finish by the flesh? Does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law or is it by believing what you heard? Just like Abraham who believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness.
Here is the game changing question. If you initially received the Spirit by believing, why would you think growing in the Spirit would be achieved in any other way? Why would God start our salvation by faith in His provision, but then expect us to grow by us grabbing ahold of our bootstraps and pulling ourselves up through obedience to the law?
No, he says, the way we grow in the Christian life is the same way we begin in the Christian life through faith in Christ finished work. The words it is finished, you see, listen, are not just words that we believe one time to find forgiveness. They are words we believe again and again to experience spiritual power. The first time we believe the words it is finished, we were released from the penalty of sin. As we continue to believe them, we are released from the power of sin. Now let's pause here for a moment because I've told you before, as Paul ties all this to the Holy Spirit, I told you that most Christians in churches like ours are not really exactly sure what to do with the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, we know Christians who seem obsessed with the Holy Spirit.
He is this mystical force that is always revealing himself through warm, fuzzy feelings and strange coincidences. Oh pastor, I was praying about whether or not to ask this girl out. And as I was driving home, I looked up and there was a billboard and the same color of the billboard was the same color as her eyes.
And the last two digits of the phone number on the billboard were the same as her age. And just at that minute, my favorite Christian song came on K-Love and Jehovah Jireh. I just knew the Holy Spirit was telling me to ask her out. And you're like, I'm not sure that was the Holy Spirit telling you to ask her out. It sounds to me like a preamble to a restraining order.
So I'd be really, really careful without it. Or you've heard Christians that received the Holy Spirit, encounters that just seemed kind of mystical and weird. Before I became a pastor, I was at a pastor's conference. It was with a world renowned, I guess you would call him a Pentecostal preacher, that everybody was very famous.
And there were about 150 of us there. And at the end of his talk, he said, hey, if anybody wants to receive more of the Holy Spirit, would you come forward and I'll lay my hands on you and you can receive the Holy Spirit. Now I was like, I'm always one for more of the Holy Spirit.
We didn't have a class on this in seminary. So I thought, absolutely. So I come down there and there's a row of about 20 of us. And he starts on one end and he is praying for people to receive the Holy Spirit. And I noticed that as he does it, they fall backwards. But I was like number 13 or 14 in line. I noticed that the closer he got to me, I was watching.
I was like, it sure looks to me like he is pushing them down. And so I said to God, he's about two people ahead of me. I said, Lord, you can do whatever you want to me. If you want to knock me down, that's fine.
If you want to knock my shirt off and tattoo Jesus loves me to my chest, I will receive that in Jesus' name. But I am not going to let that man push me down. And so he comes up to me and he puts his hand on my forehead and he starts to pray. And as he prays and it gets more intense, I can feel the pressure of his hand pushing me back. And I was like, bro, that is not the Holy Spirit.
That is you. And so he starts pushing me down. So I start pushing back. Like, you know, we're having this moment here. And eventually he muttered something probably about me being stiff necked or whatever.
And he moved on to the next person. But you think that that's really what it's like to have this encounter with the Holy Spirit. Well, there are other Christians in churches, probably like ours, who in reaction to that, we just kind of ignore the Holy Spirit altogether. And we believe that he exists, but we're not exactly sure what to do with him. A couple of years ago, I preached in the Holy Spirit and I explained to you that most Christians in churches like ours relate to the Holy Spirit the same way that I relate to my pituitary gland. I know it's in there somewhere. I know it's really important for some thing.
I don't want to be without it, but I don't really know what it does and I don't really relate to it. In churches like ours, we say we believe in the Trinity, but actually the Trinity that we would believe in would be God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Bible. We're not sure what to do with the Holy Spirit.
The apostle Paul would point us away from both of those kinds of interpretations of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit for him is very real. He is the third person of the Godhead. He is the person who lives inside of you. He is absolutely essential to the Christian's life.
He is Christ in you, the way that you live the Christian life yet he is not accessed, listen to this, through weird mystical ceremonies and he's not experienced primarily through a random confluence of circumstances. His ongoing power in us is released in us through renewed faith in the gospel. As we continue to put faith in the finished work of Christ, the power of the Spirit is continually released in us. Or think of it this way, by believing it is finished, we gain the power to continue.
By believing it's finished, you gain the power in the Christian life to continue. The fire to do in the Christian life comes from being soaked in the fuel of what has been done. That is why we so often say around here that the deeper you go into the gospel, the wider, the higher and the farther you will go in obedience.
The way to progress in the Christian life, Martin Luther said, is always to begin again. If you wanna grow in Christ, you don't go beyond the gospel, you go back to the beginning and you go deeper into the gospel. The deeper you go into the gospel, the farther and higher and wider you will go into obedience. You see this in one of the best pictures in the Bible of what salvation is.
The book of Numbers, it talks about Israel sinning and as a consequence, God sent this fiery serpents in there which bit the Israelites and it was extremely painful and many began to die and so they cried out to God for mercy and God told Moses to take an image of a serpent, a bronze image and put it up on a pole and put the pole up on top of a hill and to tell the Israelites that whoever would crawl to that hill and look upward in faith, believing that salvation and healing belong to God, that as they looked and as they believed, they would be healed. That is a picture, Jesus said, John three, of how you and I obtain forgiveness as we look at Jesus on the cross and we say there is my salvation and when you believe that, His righteousness is imputed to you. But here's what Paul is saying in Galatians three, as you continue to look at that, as you continue to believe it is finished, then the healing power of righteousness will begin to be infused into you. That is the way that you grow in the Christian life.
Think of it like one of those new cell phone batteries where it doesn't have a cord that connects it to the charger, it just charges when you place it on the charger. Christians receive spiritual life-changing power when they are resting on the cross. So when you want to grow spiritually, when you are frustrated at the lack of spiritual fruit in your life, you come back to the message that it is finished and you rest there. And you thank God that His acceptance of you is not based on how much spiritual fruit you show. It's not based on how you feel, it's not based on what you've accomplished, it's based on Christ finished work and then as you rest there, you will start to bear spiritual fruit.
Okay, maybe too much. Well, did you know that you can follow Pastor JD on social media? Why not get some biblical insight as you scroll? Just search for Pastor JD Greer on Facebook, at Pastor JD Greer on Instagram and at JD Greer on X.
He's also on YouTube where you can subscribe to his channel at j.d.greer. Follow along on all your favorite social media platforms and stay up to date with this ministry while filling up your timeline with encouragement from God's word. Now let's get back to today's teaching here on Summit Life.
Once again, here's Pastor JD. The irony of the Christian life is that the only ones who get better in the Christian life are those who recognize that their acceptance before God is not conditioned on their getting better. You believe it is finished once to escape the penalty of sin, now you believe it again and again and again and again to escape the power of sin. You don't escape it through the works of the law. You don't escape it by resolution. You don't escape it by learning doctrine. You don't escape it through anything except for resting in the finished work of Christ because that is where the power of healing flows from.
In the words of those modern day musical prophets journey, don't stop believing, don't stop believing, hold on to that it is finished feeling or something like that, let the lyrics go, whatever. In verse six, Paul now compares it to the experience of one of the most famous Old Testament people, Abraham. He's just like Abraham. Then he quotes Genesis 15, six, like Abraham who believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness, all right. Genesis 15, God makes a promise to Abraham that from him would come a great nation that would provide forgiveness and salvation for the world. The problem when Abraham gets this promise is that Abraham is old and he's childless and he's given up the thoughts of having a child. When Abraham believed God's promise however, two things happen. Number one, he was declared righteous it tells us.
His faith was credited, in Greek that word is logizomai and what it means is literally reckoned or credited. Think of it like a check. You millennials know what a check is? Back in the old days, you could take a piece of paper and you could actually write somebody's name on it and an amount of money you give it to them and they could take it to the bank. Now that check wasn't actual money but it represented money that they could just present to the bank and say, this person owes me that amount of money, this is what you did before you just had mom and dad's credit card everywhere.
The check wasn't actually money but it was reckoned as money, right? Faith in Jesus, faith that Jesus paid our sin debt in full on the cross is like the check that is counted as Christ's righteousness whereby the riches of Christ's righteousness are applied to our account. So when Abraham believed God, it was credited to him. He was reckoned to be righteous even though in his account he had no righteousness. Christ's righteousness was applied to him. Second, when Abraham believed, number two, his dead sterile body was given the ability to reproduce. When God made this promise to Abraham, Abraham was an octogenarian married to another octogenarian and they had no kids.
By that point, usually most people mercifully have given up on trying to have kids but even though God's promise defied everything Abraham felt in his heart to be true, even though nothing in his body, nothing in his experience corresponded to the promise of God, he against all reasonability trusted that what God said was true was true and when he did, God gave his old dead sterile body the ability to reproduce. In the same way, Paul says, when we believe Jesus' statement from the cross that it is finished even though we feel condemned and feel spiritually lifeless, in that moment God imparts to us resurrection life and he puts into our old dead wretched sin-sick spiritual hearts the power of his spirit. How did you start? You started by trusting it was finished. How do you continue?
You continue to believe it is finished. The power of the spirit is not learned in a sermon. It is not acquired through doctrinal knowledge.
It is not from a list of to-do things. It is acquired simply by believing that Jesus did everything he said he did and then when he said it is finished, it really was finished. That's how it works for Abraham.
That's how he says it's gonna work for you. Interesting little thing here that God did to symbolize this in Abraham's life. Shortly after Abraham believed the promise, God changed Abram's name. His name was Abram, A-B in English, we spelled A-B-R-A-M. Changed it to Abraham.
Put a little H-A in there. I heard one Bible teacher explain that ha is the sound you make for breath when you're breathing, ha. So in Hebrew, the word for breath is the same word for spirit. So this name change was symbolic of God putting his spirit into Abraham to give him life. Now I'm not exactly sure that's what God had in mind when he did this, but I think that's a cool thought.
So I have officially changed my name to Jehadi if you wanna call me that from now on, okay? Few years later after this, at the ages of 99 and 90, Abraham and his wife Sarah have a son and that son would father a nation who would bring Jesus into the world and Jesus would provide forgiveness of sins and eternal life for all who believed through his death and resurrection just like God promised. Paul then asked the Galatians, what part of this exactly did Abraham accomplish by his own strength? Was it some technique or new way of positive thinking that infused fertility into Abraham's sterile body?
Was that it? No, it was all God. All Abraham did was believe what God promised and he kept believing it. If that's so, if that's so Paul says, then why would we think, why would we think that we could achieve spiritual life, which is even more difficult than giving physical life to an old man? Why would we think we could achieve spiritual life by our own strength through obedience to the law? If we started in the spirit through faith and the gospel, do we really feel like we're gonna finish in the flesh through obedience to the law? If Jesus could have saved us by us pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, that would have been the way of salvation.
But salvation was we could not do that, so Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves and he continues to do for you what you cannot do for yourself, which is to produce spiritual life in you. In fact, Paul points out that when God made the promise to Abraham, Israel hadn't even been given the law yet. They haven't even initiated the covenant of circumcision. Look at verse 17. My point is this, the law, which came 430 years later, hadn't invalidated a covenant previously established by God or thus cancel the promise. Obedience to the law, in other words, can't be a condition for obtaining the promise.
He wasn't even around yet. If it wasn't for 430 years, they would get all this stuff. So if it's not even around yet, how could obedience to the law be a way of getting you close to God? Abraham just believed the promise and it was credited to him for righteousness and he received life in his heart. Righteousness and spiritual life are given to all who simply believe the promise of Jesus that it is finished just like he said. It is the kind of spiritual power you need in your marriages.
It is the kind of spiritual power you need in your singleness. You need it to overcome temptation and the only way that you get it is by believing the promise that it is finished. It is finished is not just the way we obtain forgiveness for the past.
It is finished is the way we obtain power in the present. The first time you believe that it's finished, it released you from the penalty of sin. As you continue to believe it, it releases you from the power of sin. This is what the hymn writer was talking about when he said he breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the prisoner free. And so as I continue to believe it is finished, he breaks the power of canceled sin. Just like he canceled my sin debt, he breaks its power over me through faith in the death of Christ so that the life I now live in the flesh, in the body.
I live how? By faith in the son of God. I am not looking to myself to correct my problems. I'm not trying to correct them in my kids. I'm not trying to correct them in you because what Jesus did, he alone can do and so it is faith in the gospel that releases spiritual power, that and nothing else.
The Galatian error was that after they had started through faith in the gospel, they thought they would be perfected or they would thought they would come to maturity by the power of the flesh through obedience to certain laws or circumcision or obedience to dietary restrictions or whatever. Now the very first week of this series, I pointed out to you that those are not the same things that we usually turn to, right? And so what I gave you was a number of laws, modern day laws that we turn to. We don't turn to the same thing they turned to in the first century. None of you were like, hey, how about circumcision and how about avoiding pork and that kind of stuff?
You don't do that. You turn to a different set of laws to try to perfect yourselves. We can't grow through just obeying a bunch of rules that supposedly earn us God's favor. The only way that we'll truly grow is by allowing God's spirit to release his power in us through a growing faith in what Christ has already done. So JD, our current featured resource is a seven-part Bible study called Galatians Gospel Matters. Tell us, what do you hope our listeners and friends will take away from this Bible study?
Yeah, Molly, Galatians is such a rich book that we wanted to give away a tool along with our on-air teaching to help listeners dive deeper into the beauty of this book for themselves. Experiencing true gospel freedom. It didn't come from just learning facts.
It didn't come from listening to message. It comes from wrestling with the implications of the gospel for you. Martin Luther used to say that the gospel is like a well.
You don't get the best water from the well by widening the circumference of the well, but by going deeper into it. So that's what this seven-part Bible study guide will help you do. It'll help you go deeper into the beauty of the gospel and the fullness of the spirit that's taught in the book of Galatians. Galatians is literally a transforming book. It transformed Luther. It transformed the world that he lived in. It's transformed me. It'll transform you. So take advantage of every tool that you can to go deeper into this book.
And one of those is the seven-part Bible study. We would love to give you one of these. You can take a look at jdgrier.com. As always, you can give right now by calling us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.
Or you can give online anytime by visiting jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. I'm so glad you joined us today. Be sure to tune in Friday as we continue our series called Freedom in the In-Between on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
