The Insanity of God

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer Welcome back to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and apologist, J.D. Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch.

You're struggling to understand. Well, today, Pastor J.D. explains why some people seem to suffer more than others. It's an important part of our teaching series in the book of Acts called Sent. Remember, if you've missed any of the messages in this study, you can hear them online free of charge when you visit us at jdgreer.com. Pastor J.D. has titled today's teaching The Insanity of God.

Let's join him now. I've been rereading a book recently called The Insanity of God. It is the story of a guy who answered the call of God to go to Somalia. After he answered the call of God to go to be a missionary in Somalia, throughout the book, he tells you how his life basically fell apart. He goes through story after story where he basically leaves him looking up into heaven saying, God, this is what you called me to? This is what it means to follow you? I love the title, The Insanity of God, because I think it captures how some of us feel as we follow God.

It's certainly how I have felt at various points over the years. Kurt Allen, who serves as our missions pastor here at the Summit Church, talks about how after he had resigned his executive job in corporate America, right down in Cary, to go live overseas in a Muslim unreached people group. Right after he did that, their teenage son developed a medical condition that seemingly came out of nowhere. He wrote this in their book Sent that they produced that kind of chronicles their journey on this.

This is what he said. Wait, Lord, this is not supposed to happen. We just submitted to your will for our lives. We've sold everything that we have.

We are systematically disassembling the American dream that we have built now for years, leaving everything and everyone familiar. Now we're moving our family from the medical capital of the Southeast to a place across the world with little to no health care and one that is hostile to the gospel so that we can be your witnesses by your command and then you do this? Every serious Christian that I know has asked some form of that question at some point in their life. God, what are you doing? Because what you thought God was going to do, he didn't do.

And what you expected he was about to do is just not how it worked out. And God's apparent absence left you confused, left you disappointed, frustrated, maybe even doubting whether or not there is a God altogether. Have you been there? Are you courageous enough to admit that or do you just want to keep smiling and say, yes, brother, amen, and kind of take a note?

We've all been there. I want to show you a few things that happened to Paul right after his conversion that probably left Paul asking those very same questions. You see, the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 1.16, that's not where we are. Acts 9 is where we're going to be.

1 Timothy 1.16, Paul said that his conversion and his calling was a pattern for all of ours. You're going to see some things played out in Paul's calling that are pretty dramatic, but really they're just there to give you an insight into how God is calling you, which means there are things about Paul's story that should help you make sense of yours. Again, Acts 9, if you have your Bible, we were there a few weeks ago and we're going to go back there because we picked up the first part of Paul's life a few weeks ago.

Now we're going to get to the second part. God was telling in Acts 9, he was explaining to Ananias not to be scared to go and talk to Paul, because if you remember, Paul had been public enemy number one of the church, killing people in the church. So God says to Ananias, chapter 9, verse 15, go, for he is, Paul, is a chosen instrument of mine. If you underline stuff in your Bible, and you probably should, you should underline the word chosen.

Okay, or hold your finger on it until it blinks and then highlight it. He is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel, for I will show him how much he must suffer, underline that, chosen and how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. Now those two things don't seem to go together, do they? Chosen to suffer? I mean suffering, that's what the enemy causes, right? Isn't that what happens to you when you're doing stuff wrong and God's trying to get your attention? In the next 10 verses, you're going to see that Paul suffers from the very beginning, all kinds of opposition, all kinds of hardship, delay.

In fact, here are my three points today. Number one, Paul was chosen, yet he was opposed. Number two, Paul was chosen, yet God took many years to prepare him. Then number three, Paul was chosen, yet he suffered. This in many ways, again, is a pattern for you. You see, my goal this weekend is I want to give some of you hope regarding what God is doing in your life.

Hope, you see, is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, and hope enables you to endure some things that you are not able to endure without it, no matter how strong your character is or how strong the support group that you have around you is. There is a legendary experiment conducted at John Hopkins University. I think I've told you about this before, but there was a researcher there who wanted to determine how long rats could swim in water before they drowned. We found out if he just filled a tub up with water and threw a rat in there, a rat could swim about 10 minutes before he drowned. But if you would simply take that rat and over the course of 10 minutes, two or three times, lift it out of the water for just a second and put it down. Just in that 10 minutes, just do that two or three times, that same rat could swim for more than 60 hours.

Changing no factor, he said, except for the introduction of hope, gave the rats the ability to swim more than 100 times longer than they could without hope. My purpose is to give God's rats hope this weekend, okay, so that life will not drown you, so that you can see that in opposition and in delay and in hardship that God has a plan and there is a reason for you to have great hope. If you are not a Christian this weekend, my hope for you is that you will learn a little bit about why those who are around you who are Christians, maybe they're sitting next to you this weekend, why it is that they seem to be able to go through certain things differently than you are able to go through them and for you not to look at them and admire them, but for you to ask yourself some questions about, do I have this same kind of hope that takes me through these same kinds of chapters in my life? Here we go, we're just going to read the passage together beginning in verse 19. By the way, verse 19 picks up right after Paul comes out of the water.

The moment this is right after he is just still wet from baptism, verse 19, for some days after that Paul was with the disciples at Damascus and immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogue saying he is the son of God and all who heard him were amazed and said, is this not the man who wreaked havoc here in Jerusalem of those who called upon this name and has he not come here for this purpose to bring them bound before the chief priest? But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving through his reasoning and his logic and his scriptural study, proving that Jesus was the Christ. Now after many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul.

Saul, by the way, is the name of Paul's name before he changed to Paul. They were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him. But his disciples took him by night and led him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket. I mean, you've heard that story, right? I mean, lowering him in a basket.

This is like pure CSI kind of stuff. Over the city wall at night when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him because they did not believe it. He was actually a disciple.

Here we go. Number one, Paul was chosen, yet he was opposed. People rejected his message, they impugned his motives, and they tried to kill him. Sometimes, honestly, this is your biggest surprise when you become a Christian because people were supposed to listen. They were supposed to be excited about what God was doing in your life.

They were supposed to praise the great decisions that you were making. That's certainly what I experienced when I first began to get serious about God. God began to do a lot of things in my life when I was in college, and I started to share it with everybody that was around me. There were a lot of people who listened, but there were a lot of people who didn't. I've told you before, we started a little Bible study that grew from a handful of students, seven or eight, to several hundred students that were meeting with us.

That's great, right? A lot of people coming to Christ, a lot of people getting saved. Well, it seemed great, but then there were a lot of people who started to say things about us. I remember when one of my friends brought me the school newspaper and said, Did you guys realize that you're the latest cult on campus? A big article about us, how we had become a cult.

We got called in before the administration several times. They say to them, What are you trying to do? I'm like, We're trying to teach people the Bible. They're like, Well, you've got to be doing something else because you've got two or three hundred students meeting together. That can't be good.

Why is that not good? We just open the Bible, and we tell them what the Bible says, how they can be saved. But they didn't end it, I've told you, with basically at the end of my senior year, the school administration, bringing those of us who led the study in the school office, telling us that we are not allowed, to this day, this band is in place, as far as I know, not allowed to teach the Bible on that campus. So to this day, the college that I graduated from, I'm not allowed to go there and teach the Bible. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, and it leaves you confused.

We have people in the same situation. We have a college student, or a former college student here at our church, who after he got saved, he goes back to his fraternity to tell all his brothers about the things God is doing in his life, and he said at first, they just laughed. He says they laughed, like, Oh yeah, you're the Bible guy now.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. He said, and after they got done laughing after a couple months, then they just got mad. He said, because now I was supposedly judgmental, even though I was trying not to be judgmental. He said, now I was the guy that didn't have a good time anymore, and they didn't really want to be around me. He said, I thought they were going to be excited. I thought they were going to listen.

He said, but they didn't. We have students from our church who just got back from spring break, college students. When they got home, they were expecting their parents and their friends to be excited about what God was doing in their life, but they weren't.

Then some of you students brought up that you were planning on going overseas for the summer, or maybe for a couple of years after you graduate. Your parents said, no way. You're discouraged because you thought it just wasn't supposed to be that way. Paul's one of his biggest struggles with this was that the main persecution came from his fellow religious Jews. Of all people, they were the ones who were supposed to understand. I will tell you that the worst names that have been called the meanest things that have ever been said about me have come from so-called religious people.

It was the religious studies department of the college that I went to that were the ones who led in us being kicked off a campus. Even the church did not have Paul's back. You see that in verse 26? They were afraid of him.

They didn't believe that he was even a disciple. Where's Paul going to turn? Can I ask you a question? Are you ready for this?

Are you ready to be criticized, belittled, to have your motives impugned, have stuff written about you on blogs and in newspapers? When it happens, are you going to keep on preaching? Thanks for joining us today here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We're going to get back to today's teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to take a second to make sure that you know about all of the incredible gospel-centered resources we have available for you online, all completely free of charge, thanks to the generosity of our gospel partners. When you head to jdgreer.com, you'll find the full collection of Pastor J.D. 's Summit Life sermons, along with the full transcript for each one. You'll also discover his blog, which has covered practical, real-life topics about the Christian life, theology, family, and more for over ten years now. And you'll be able to access his Ask the Pastor podcast, sign up for our daily devotional, our weekly newsletter, and to get a hold of a free download we make available each month. Our mission is to help make disciple making disciples around the world, which is why all of this and more is available at jdgreer.com. And again, it's all free to you, thanks to our generous supporters.

So take advantage of that today. Now let's get back to our teaching for the day. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. Notice on the next few verses how often the word boldly is used. At Damascus, Paul preached boldly. Verse 28, he went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord.

When you quote verse 29, the implication is boldly and disputed against the Hellenists. Here's my question for you. What if Paul had not continued to preach boldly? You and I would not be sitting here.

That's what would have happened. So here's my follow-up question for you. Whose life is depending on you being bold? Do you understand how important the gospel is?

Do you think it's worth a little, or maybe a lot, of bad things being said about you? Hey, I read a story this week about a woman. Her driveway is kind of on an incline, and behind, in front of her house, is a fairly busy road. Cars going up and down at pretty high speeds. When she parked her car and got out, her two toddlers in the backseat, she gets out and starts to help them get out. When something went wrong with their parking brake, so the car begins to roll backwards down that into this busy street.

Well, it's all happening in a split second. She doesn't know what to do. She can't get back in the car and slam the brakes, so in a split second, she just threw herself under the car and kind of just threw it there to try to stop her from going in the road.

It worked. She kept the car from going in the road, saved her toddler's lives, but in the process, broke both of her legs, tore up one of her hips, and kind of ripped up her abdomen. Now, parents listening to that, you both admire her and completely understand, because you know that the life of your kids is so valuable to you that even if it meant having your body torn apart, you'd probably do that if it meant saving them. There are some things that are so important that it's worth the loss of almost anything. It's not the gospel, one of those things. We're talking about a message that determines people's eternity.

We're talking about the difference between heaven and hell. We're talking about the love of Jesus, and our enemy will do all that he can to silence you. But Paul kept preaching boldly, and thank God that he did, because you and I are here. Somebody's life is depending on you. Somebody's life is depending on you, and whether or not you will respond boldly in this moment determines their future.

Number two. Paul was chosen, yet God took nearly two decades to prepare him. Paul was chosen, yet God took nearly two decades to prepare him.

Something you don't immediately see here. There's a lot of time that passes in these verses. You won't really see that until you start doing some cross-referencing. Verse 23, for example, it says, after many days, he passed from Damascus and then went to Jerusalem. Many days in verse 23 is three years.

How do we know that? Well, Paul tells us himself in Galatians 1. Verse 15, right after I was saved, Galatians 1, I did not immediately consult with anybody, nor did I go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.

Instead, I went away to Arabia, which is a desert, by the way, and turned again to Damascus after that. Then after three years, then I went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, it's Peter's other name, and remained with him 15 days. Three years passed before Paul met with the very first apostle. Well, what did he do during those three years?

We don't know. He met with Jesus in the desert. He led Jews to Christ one by one. Then after three years, he finally met the pastor, Peter. After I had this little conversation with Peter, he leaves again for 14 years. How do you know it was 14 years? Well, Paul explains it to you. Galatians 2, verse 1. Then after 14 years, I went up again to Jerusalem with this time with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me.

Well, what happened during those 14 years? We don't know. We're not sure. We get a few clues in his epistles. By the way, epistles means his letters. That's not the wives of the apostles.

Sometimes people make that mistake, but that's not what that means. His epistles were his letters. You get some clues in his epistles.

Here, I'll give you one of them. 2 Corinthians 11, verse 24. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one at the hands of the Jews.

At chapter 13, Paul starts his ministry with the Gentiles, which means from 13 on, the ones he's being beaten by are the Gentiles so that when it's by the Jews, it's got to be happening in those 14 years. So five times that happened. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned.

That's not stoned in the sense that some of the college students think, but like stone as in pelted with rocks until they thought he was dead. Three times I was shipwrecked. A night and a day, I was adrift at sea. How many times would that have to happen to you before you said, sailing in ships is not part of my mission trip experience anymore, right? I was in frequent journeys and danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false prophets or false brothers and toil and hardship through many a sleepless night in hunger and thirst often without food and cold and exposure. Never make the mistake of asking Paul, how are things going? This guy would have had a killer blog though, right?

If he'd written an autobiography, it would have been called My Worst Life Now, right? That's pretty much what he's describing in verses 24 through 27. By the way, most of that happened, most of that happened in that little white space right there between verse 26 and 27. That's when most of that happened. Little white space that includes all the things you see there in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. Now, listen, I realize that there are some questions that scholars have about what exactly happened when, but here's one thing that we know absolutely for certain.

Listen to this. There is at least 17 years between the time that God knocks him off his horse and calls him to be an apostle, at least 17 years between that and when he's appointed as a missionary in chapter 13. For 17 years, he labors in obscurity. Even after verse 27, he just disappears in the church.

He becomes an usher or a volunteer or something where he doesn't ever get recognized. He doesn't hold his first church position until chapter 13. God took a minimum of 17 years to prepare Paul. But God, I'm sure he's like, but God, I'm ready.

Put me in the game. That kind of delayed preparation is so common in Scripture, I would almost say it is standard. God called Moses to lead the children of Israel. What did Moses do? He got sent to the desert for 40 years, 40 years, the herd sheep.

God called David to be the king of Israel. So what happened to David? Went to the palace, started trying on robes?

Nope. Went right back to the pasture to shovel sheep dung. Then after many years, he got his first break in the palace.

What happened? They just loved him, put him right on the throne? Nope. He got accused of sabotage and was driven out into the wilderness for a decade. God called Joseph to save his family.

He's going to be the one. So how did Joseph do that? Did an article about him on CNN? No?

No. He got sold into slavery and then he gets accused of adultery and then he gets put in prison and he stays there for years. God called Elijah to be his prophet to stand before Israel. What happened? He got an audience and a big microphone?

Nope. He got sent down to the brook Cherith in a famine, which Cherith literally means to cut down. He cut him down for a long time before he ever stood in front of Ahab. Moses, 40 years, David, 15 years, Joseph, 20 years, Paul, 17 years. Are you really complaining about how long God is taking to get you into the game? Billy Graham said this. He said, if I had it to do over again, I'd spend more time in spiritual nurture, seeking to grow closer to God so I could become more like Christ before I preach, is what he's saying. I'd spend more time in prayer.

I would have spent more time studying the Bible and meditating on its truth, not for sermon preparation, but for my life. Don't waste your white space. That's what some of you are right now, and I know it's frustrating.

I realize that. You're like, I'm ready, coach. Put me in. I want more. I want a position. I want recognition.

I got these dreams. Don't waste it because that's where God does his best work. Your white space for you might be the white space of singleness. It might be the white space of not being recognized. It might be the white space of obscurity. It might be the white space of serving on the rest of a prison sentence. I don't know what it is, but I'm telling you, God does his best work in the white space because in the white space is how he prepares you for the ministry that he has for you. That's what Billy Graham is saying. God takes a long time to prepare his servants.

He's going to take time to prepare you. It's in those moments. You understand what I'm saying? If you don't, it's like for you children in the 1980s. It's like Karate Kid, Miyagi and Danielson. Remember this?

Some of you are like, I totally was not tracking with the theology, but now I'm in, okay? How does Miyagi train Daniel to fight? Not in the ring. Lights on, lights off.

In washing cars. That's where you learn. That's how God trains his people. He doesn't train you in the arena. He trains you when he takes you into the wilderness for 17 years.

Wow. God chose Paul, but it took nearly two decades to prepare him. Does that give you hope in your situation? God may be just using this season to prepare you for something huge. You're listening to Pastor J.D.

Greer on Summit Life. Okay, so J.D., we're learning that God's mission to redeem mankind is at the forefront of the book of Acts. And as followers of Christ, he is still using us today to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. But what if we don't feel like we're qualified for that mission?

All right, Molly, let me do something we don't typically do. I'm actually going to flip the mic here because you talk about people that you are bringing to Christ. You talk about just ways that you're sent. What does that mean to you to be sent? Something that Justin and I have asked God is we want to be faithful just with whatever God has us in in that moment. So when we prayed about school for our kids, we really felt unity in God calling us to public school. That is the mission. We're not making them missionaries, but we're making the school kind of our mission field because that's where God has us right now.

But our yes is always on the table. And since we learned that you don't have to be sent overseas, that you can be sent across the street and that's where God has us now, we just want to be faithful with that and we're open to whatever. Yes, that's awesome. So what I take away from that is that whether you're home school, private school, public school, God has you there for a reason.

That's right. And so this pennant will actually help remind you that God has you there and He's going to invite you to join Him in what He is doing. To give, call us now at 866-335-5220.

Or you can give online and see the pennant for yourself at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. I am so glad you joined us today. Be sure to listen tomorrow when Pastor JD concludes this message titled The Insanity of God. That's Thursday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.