Grow Up, Part 2

Today on Summit Life, J.D.

Greer continues our study in Ephesians. God's like, why would you pray and then not plug yourself in? Quit praying because you got to put yourself in the place where he flows his power. So the question when somebody says, how involved should I be in the church? Based on chapter four, I would tell you a better way to phrase that question is, how much do you want Christ to be a part of your life? How much do you want to know Christ? That's how involved you should be in the church. Welcome to another week of gospel-centered teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovich. Okay, I know it's July, but isn't one of the best parts of Christmas morning seeing all those pretty packages wrapped up under the tree? But no matter how pretty they are, it would be silly to just leave them there, right? In fact, anyone with kids listening to me right now is actually praying for the day when the sun actually comes up before it's time to excitedly tear into them. Presents are meant to be opened, used, and enjoyed, and today Pastor J.D. is calling us not to leave our spiritual gifts under the tree. It's time to tear into those with the same joy and enthusiasm. We're in a series called Mystery and Clarity, and if you've missed any of the previous messages, you can find them at jdgreer.com. Now here's Pastor J.D.

with the conclusion of our message we began last week titled, Grow Up. You don't do the things that I'm telling you today that Paul is saying here in Ephesians 4, it's because you don't get the gospel. Verse 2, look, he says you should walk with all humility. If you get the gospel at all, that your righteousness to God was like a filthy rag, and God stepped into your life and intervened to begin to seek you.

If you get all that, you won't look down on other people with feelings of superiority or self-righteousness. Humility, the response to the gospel, and gentleness with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. He says if you get the gospel, you'll be eager to see peace.

You will not love controversy or division or strife or hatred. Keep reading, verse 4. Just like you were called to the one hope that belongs, you see that word?

Belongs to your call. It's all inherent in your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. Now verse 7, Paul shifts and starts to talk about what the fact that God lives inside of you means for how you relate to the church and the world. Verse 7.

Grace, you see, Paul says, was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it, the Old Testament says, and he quotes from Isaiah, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives, that's us, and he gave gifts to men. This is an Old Testament prophecy that when Jesus rose from the dead, he would put his spirit into the people that he left behind, that's us, and he would give us supernatural spiritual gifts. Verse 9, in saying he ascended, what does it mean, but that he had also descended into the lower regions of the earth?

He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things. Verse 11, and so he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all maintain to the unity of the faith, and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love to each other. We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head and to Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. God's purpose in salvation, get this, was not just to save you and take you to heaven. God's purpose was to fill you with himself. So he fills you and gives you spiritual gifts, whereby you experience him not just working for you and not just working in you, but working through you. So I want to look at three questions from this passage.

Here they are. What are spiritual gifts, and how do I know what mine is? And secondly, we're going to ask why is it so crucial that I know what mine is? And then after that, I want to give you a quick word about what all this means for our church's philosophy, and then I want to make a personal challenge to you.

There we go, here we go. Number one, what are spiritual gifts, and how do I know what mine is? Let me give you a definition that I think comes out of this passage.

Here it is. Spiritual gifts are an experience or an ability that gives you a sense of what mine is. An ability that God has given to you that he intends to use to build up others. You're like, well, how do you know what your spiritual gift is? Here's how you know.

A lot of times you can just feel it. Sometimes, and usually, it's because other people tell you about it how God used you in their lives. So number two, why is it crucial that I know what mine is? Well, it's because you're uniquely gifted, see, and you have a particular gift. And there are certain things that only you can do in ministry. And if you don't use your gifts, there will be people that God intended to reach through you who will otherwise never be reached. The other dimension of this is I know that you'll never really experience fulfillment until you find your gift. God saved you so that you could be filled and used by him to the point as many of you feel unfulfilled and bored spiritually because you never experienced the power of Christ surging through you.

Here's something I know. My sermons will never be entertaining enough to keep you coming back here week after week. The ones of you that will come here and be committed are the ones who have an awareness that God has a plan for you and he is using you. So number three, why should I be involved in the church? Well, again, these verses tell us that it's because God reveals a part of himself through each of us. But it's only when all of us are together that we get a fuller picture of who God is.

You see what he said there? You want you to arrive at the knowledge of the Son of God that's revealed in the church. You see, some of you have experienced certain things, watch this, in your life that I haven't experienced. You've experienced God in certain ways because of how your life has gone that I haven't experienced. And if I want to know that dimension of God, I've got to know you.

There's no other way. So you become involved in the church because you want to know Jesus more. Furthermore, we know the power of God from this passage. It tells us that the power of God flows through the church. Thus, if you want the power of God to be a work in your life, you've got to be involved in the church.

I explained that a lot of people pray to God, oh God help me, God work in my life, but they're not involved in the church. And God's, you know, in heaven listening to this and he's like, okay, you're wanting my power here, but you're not where I place my power, so why are you praying and asking me for power if you hadn't put yourself in the place where I give it? It's like you're, it's like you're like you're standing there with your TV unplugged complaining that it won't work. How come the TV doesn't have power? You're like, well plug it in moron.

That's where the power is. A lot of people are like, well, I really want God to work in my marriage. So you're praying and some of you, this is totally you, God help me in my marriage. And what you want is for God like to zap you from heaven with the Holy Ghost taser gun. So suddenly you wake up and you're a perfect husband. You wake up playing the harp, singing love songs to Jesus and your wife. You know, your wife is suddenly into you.

She wants to be intimate with you. You're now selfless. God just fixed your marriage. And if that doesn't work, then maybe I go get involved in a small group.

Maybe I get, you know, around some people who could speak into my life and they could minister to me and they could show me how to have a God relationship. But that's plan B. That's if the zap doesn't work. This tells you that the church is plan A. That's how God does his work. And think of the analogy of the body, right? I mean, think of this. My elbow, if it starts itching, it sends a little message out to my brain.

That's a prayer. And says, I itch, help, I can't itch myself. So what does my brain do? Does my brain send a little electronic message back to the elbow that just says, stop itching, I command you?

No. It sends another little message to my digits on my right finger and it says, go and itch the left elbow. Now, this is really deep. What just scratched the itch on my elbow? Was it my brain or was it my fingers?

What a dumb question. If it's my brain through my fingers, right, my brain doesn't send a message down and take care of it itself. It sends the body to do that. You want God to work in your life. It is through the church, the place where he has placed his power, that he does that. If you are praying for God to work in your life and you're not connected to his body, quit praying! God's like, why would you pray and then not plug yourself in?

Quit praying! Because you got to put yourself in the place where he flows his power. So the question, when somebody says, how involved should I be in the church? Based on chapter four, I would tell you a better way to phrase that question is, how much do you want Christ to be a part of your life? That's how much you should be involved in the church. How much do you want to know Christ? That's how involved you should be in the church. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. We hope you're finding today's program to be helpful and encouraging as you look to grow in your relationship with God. Before we return to our teaching, I'd like to share with you about a new resource that we've created to help you take your study of the Bible to the next level. It's the second installment of our popular Gospel Flipbook series, this time focusing on four of Paul's letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. It's a unique and interactive way to engage with these four key epistles found in the New Testament. This new spiral bound resource has a ton of helpful features like a reading plan through each book, key passages, and themes from each book, a bit of history, and so much more. It's available exclusively to you, our Summit Life listener, when you support the ministry with your gift today. So whether you're a seasoned believer or just starting out on your faith journey, the Gospel Flipbook is a valuable tool meant to help you really know these four influential books in greater detail.

To get your copy, simply call us with your gift at 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgrier.com. Now let's return to today's message here on Summit Life. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. Now, in light of all this, let me tell you a little bit of our philosophy of ministry here at the Summit. This is kind of the method behind the madness. This is the method behind the madness.

Now, you look at us, you think we're insane, I'm going to tell you what's behind that that makes us insane. I understand, you see, according to this passage, that God has filled you with his Spirit and with his gifts for the purpose of ministry. So my role as a pastor is mostly to teach you to discover and how to access that power.

My role as a pastor is not for you to come and be amazed at how strongly the power of God flows in me. I don't mean to be crude here, but when you're a baby, you have to be fed and nursed by your mother. Veronica, my wife, gets our youngest kid who's just a few months old out of bed several times a day, feeds him from her breast. His role is he drinks and then he recycles that into a neon rainbow collage of colors that he puts out in his own time. Then she burps him and changes him and puts him back to bed.

And they do this six to eight times a day. And that's okay as a baby, but she doesn't want to do that forever. Listen, I don't want your relationship to me to be in any way similar to that, because that is disturbing on so many levels. I want to empower you. I don't want to nurse you. I want to empower you.

I want you to grow up. And Paul says in verse 11 that pastors and teachers, that's me, we are put into the church to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Who does the ministry? The saints. Who are the saints? Again, not the football team. You.

You're the saints. What's the pastor's role? What's the pastor's role? Starts with E, rhymes with whipper. Equipper. That's my role is I equip you for ministry.

That's why I tell people, and I say this kind of tongue in cheek, but I actually totally mean it. When I became a pastor, I left the ministry. I left the ministry. I left the pastor. I left the ministry. According to that verse, because the ministry happens in the community.

That's where the power of God wants to be. The people that I work with on a day-to-day basis, you guys work in the community. I work in the church. The people I work with on a day-to-day basis are mostly saved.

Not all of them, a few of our staff I got questions about, but most of them are saved. You are in the community, and my role is to equip you to see the power of God come to you. That's why I point out all the time that of the 40 miracles in the book of Acts, 39 of them happen outside the church. That means the last thing that I want to do is gather a group of people to bask in the gifts of one great leader. What I want to see are a group of people empowered to be leaders themselves. Not a group of people coming to be awed at the power of God in me, but a group of people being released to take God's power into the community. The greatest access to power is not in me, in the church, it's in you, in the community. See, the goal, the goal is you to grow up in Christ and not depend on me.

I don't want this to be a safe house where you spend all your time in a holy huddle. A lot of Christians mess up this whole discipleship thing. For years, Christians have thought of discipleship as basically taking people out of the dirty old world and then dipping them in the holy ghost Clorox and then putting them in the church like a greenhouse and trying to keep them away from that nasty old world so they don't get dirty. And that's disciple.

We define holiness by what you avoid. That's not discipleship. To be a disciple means that you come to know Jesus and you live like he did and he was not a man that was separated from the world, he was a man that was in the world. To become a disciple means that you take God's healing into the world. Holiness is not what you avoid. Holiness is becoming like Jesus and Jesus was a man who poured out his life.

You see that? A lot of times what churches end up doing is they disinfect Christians, they don't disciple them. And discipleship is mission. Our vision is seeing Jesus released in and through you in the community, not contained in the pulpit. A lot of churches I feel like are like, I mentioned the word huddles a minute ago, it's almost like if you were watching the Super Bowl and one of the teams comes out in the field, they all get around and you see the quarterback call in the play and they're all nodding their head and they all clap their hands and they all run back over and they sit down on the sidelines and they sit there and they mess with the cheerleaders for a while and then they run back out in the field and they get around and get the huddle and the quarterback calls the play. Like, ah, it's awesome.

They go back. I was like, that is such a good picture of the church in a lot of places. I mean, imagine this football team around the quarterback going, man, what a great play. Nobody calls to plays like you. Man, when you were calling that play, the hair in the back of my neck was standing up. And then the cheerleaders, that little dance they were doing with the play, that's like our worship team.

They, man, they really got me fired up about it. What an awesome play. I love this team. Let's go sit in the sidelines. And after a while you're like, for God's sake, run the play. Run the play. I'm not calling this play so you can come back next time and get in the huddle and listen to me call the play even better. Run the play. The play is not in the church. The play is in the community. I'll call the play. Don't tell me what a good play it is. Run it. Run the play. All right, last thing I've got a challenge for you.

You ready? It's real simple. Grow up. That's it. Grow up. Some of you have been sitting on the sidelines for so long. Stop complaining to me about how the church is not meeting all your needs and start being a part of the ministry.

People are like, well, this church isn't doing this for me and I'm not being fed in this area and I want to go get a bib for you and then put you down for a nap when you say that. I think about Raya, my daughter. She's my youngest daughter.

She's like two. If she is not satisfied after dinner, oh, she screams, feed me. I want something else. Nana, give me a nana.

And when she does that, I get this image of certain church members. Now feed me. My diaper needs to be changed.

Like seriously, grow up. It's one thing when Raya does that to us. That's a whole nother thing if I did that to Veronica. After dinner, I was like, I'm still hungry and I think I wet my pants. After dinner, I was like, I'm still hungry and I think I wet my pants.

And she'd be like, go change your own pants and if you're hungry, fix yourself something to eat. If you see something wrong in this church, you try and fix it. If you see a ministry that we're not doing, you get it started. People come up to me and they get this list of things they don't like about the church as if I think the church is perfect, right? And they're going to inform me about some areas that are not good and then as soon as I know about them, I'm just going to waive my holy ghost wand and everything is going to be fixed. And people come to me with this list of complaints. I promise you, you will never come to me with a list of complaints about this church, a list of what's wrong with the church that is longer than my list, right? In fact, some of you were on my list of what's wrong with me. God didn't put me here to fix the church. He didn't put the spirit of God only in me.

He put it in all of us. See, grow up. Take the bib off. Get up from your nap.

Take your diapers off. It's time to be potty trained and let the spirit of God go to work in you. Let me close today by giving you a little insight that makes all this make sense. And I want to talk to you that are Christians, you that are not Christians, both of you. Because I want to explain to you why some of you feel so unfulfilled, Christians or non-Christians. You see, the Bible teaches, get this, that we're created in the image of God.

That's how God made us. The image of God, well, God, there are two fundamental things about him. One is he is a trinity, which means there are three members of the trinity. It's only one God, but what that means is that forever, in eternity past, God has always been in community. God has never been alone. There's always been fellowship in the trinity. Secondly, it tells us that God is love. It's the only description that is used of God where it says, a predicate nominative, God is something. God is love. And the way that God showed his love to us was by pouring himself out and giving himself for others and coming to invest in and be a part of our lives.

Follow. You are created in the image of God. What that means is that you will never feel fulfilled until you, like God, are in community and until you are pouring yourself out for others.

Do you catch that? You see, that goes totally against the American culture's prescription on how to be fulfilled in life. Two words define the American dream for fulfillment. One is the word alone.

Right? Be alone. If you're going to get in a relationship, don't get committed because marriage is like a prison. It just ties you down. So don't get committed. Don't get involved.

Don't get connected because that becomes a prison. Do it alone. If you're going to get married, don't have a lot of kids because kids totally encumber and mess up your life. When you have kids, you can't go to movies anymore, just whenever you want, and life is about going to see good movies. So don't have a lot of kids because it's totally going to screw that up.

Alone. The other word that describes the American dream is the word acquisition. Acquire. Money, wealth, power.

Get it and leverage it for yourself. Do you realize that is exactly the opposite of the image of God? God is community. God is love. The reason some of you don't feel fulfilled is because you're operating outside of your design.

You're alone and you're acquiring. You're created to be in community and to be pouring yourself out. It's a design thing. It's just like any other design thing. If you decided that your car was not running smoothly and you thought in order to lubricate your car, you would pour bacon grease into the gas tank to lubricate.

That makes sense on one level, but it's not going to work because it's not designed to do that. You're created to be in community. You're created to be pouring yourself out.

Therefore, I am telling you, that's why some of you feel so unfulfilled. If you're a believer, it's time to get off the sidelines and get in the game and engage. Get involved in a small group. Get involved in a ministry. If you're not a believer, get involved in a ministry. If you're not a believer, realize that what's all behind this is a God who created you for these purposes. And it all starts with a relationship with God. Will you rise to the challenge?

Will you keep growing? Dig in and get your hands dirty in the work of ministry and see how God might use you. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor and author J.D.

Greer. To go along with our teaching over the last few weeks here on the program, we've created a great new resource called the Gospel Flipbook. Pastor J.D., can you tell us more about this and why we like it so much? Yeah, no matter what age you are, let's just say whether you're eight years old to 90 years old, one of the things that you may really enjoy is someone to read the Bible along with you. That person can always be there sitting beside you when you're having your time with God. So we produce these resources as a way of doing that, helping you get more out of these Bible books.

Just think about it. When you're listening to the messages on Summit Life here, you're reading the same passages and you've got this companion resource. I'm not saying there won't be more in each passage to learn because the Bible is like a, you know, you're at the bottom of it.

But, you know, it will help you navigate better and you'll get done with a book and say, I really, I think of the world and I think of myself. And certainly it's a Bible book differently. So it's a Gospel Flipbook. It features Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians.

It's our way of saying thank you for being a generous supporter. Just go and look for the Gospel Flipbook at jdgrier.com. Thanks JD. This second part of our Gospel Flipbook series is a great tool for sharing the good news of Scripture in a simple and engaging way. To receive your copy, we simply ask that you make a donation of $35 or more to support this ministry. And if you missed the first Gospel Flipbook covering Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we'd love to send it to you with an additional donation. To give, call us anytime at 866-335-5220 or visit our website at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Bidovitch inviting you to join us tomorrow when Pastor JD reveals the one thing that sets Christianity apart from every other religion. That's Tuesday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.