Share This Episode
Summit Life J.D. Greear Logo

God, Where’s My Help?, Part 2

Summit Life / J.D. Greear
The Truth Network Radio
November 22, 2024 9:00 am

God, Where’s My Help?, Part 2

Summit Life / J.D. Greear

On-Demand Podcasts NEW!

This broadcaster has 1451 podcast archives available on-demand.

Broadcaster's Links

Keep up-to-date with this broadcaster on social media and their website.


November 22, 2024 9:00 am

Psalm 91 seems to say that if you trust God, nothing bad will happen to you, and your life will go smoothly. And, well, maybe then if things aren’t going well, you must not be trusting God. That’s troubling, right? It almost sounds like karma. Pastor J.D. uses Romans 8:28 to show us how the promises of Psalm 91 are still true. Today, we’re concluding our series called, Help.

COVERED TOPICS / TAGS (Click to Search)
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. If God didn't spare his son for you when you were his enemy, of course he's going to work in the pain in your life to bring it about for good.

He wouldn't have done the first thing if he wasn't also going to do the second thing. Jesus' resurrection is the promise of what is to come for us, a resurrection in which every phrase of Psalm 91 is going to be literally true in your life. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we're so glad that you're back with us today. Psalm 91 seems to say that if you trust God, nothing bad will happen to you and your life will go smoothly. And so then if things aren't going well, you must not be trusting God. And that's troubling, right?

That almost sounds like karma and that is certainly no place we want to hang our hat on, right? Well, today Pastor J.D. Greer uses Romans 828 to show us how the promises of Psalm 91 still can ring true, even when things might look a bit uneasy. Today we're concluding our teaching series called Help.

To catch up on previous messages you may have missed, go to jdgreer.com. But right now, let's rejoin Pastor J.D. Verses like Romans 828 show you how the promises in Psalm 91 are true. Romans 828 promises us that God is working all things together for good.

Work together for good does not mean that bad things are really good things in disguise. It means that God takes genuinely bad things and He brings His power to bear in them so that you will be better off for them having happened. It means that from the vantage point of eternity, you're going to be able to see how God exercised His power and grace in such a perfect way that all the evil that happened will in the end only lead to greater glory for God and greater joy for us. That is the ultimate defeat of evil. All evil deeds ultimately accomplish the reverse of what their authors intended. We see little glimpses of this all throughout the Bible.

In the book of Acts we see that all of Satan's attacks on the church lead instead to the spread of the Gospel. We see it, of course, most clearly in the cross because that is where Satan and evil people, us, we did our worst to destroy Jesus and God turned even that worst act of evil into our salvation. God turned the worst thing that ever happened on earth, He turned that very thing into the means of our salvation. And believer, you can rest assured that God is doing the same thing with your pain.

That's what the cross shows you. I've told you before that my guess is that already, if you have any experience in life, if you're older than 20 years old, already you can see some of the good things behind some of the bad things that happen in your life and you see how God used them for good. A couple of months ago I used this quote from a British journalist named Malcolm Muggeridge. Malcolm Muggeridge said this, contrary to what I would have expected, I look back now on experiences that at the time seemed especially devastating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything of value that I've learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence has come through affliction, not through comfort and ease.

Some of you can see that already in your life, can't you? You can see how God was using the unanswered prayer, the season of difficulty. You can see how He was doing something good in the pain.

So here's the thing, if already with just a limited vantage point of time, if already you can look back and see a good purpose for some of the suffering in your life, don't you think given infinite time and perspective you're going to see the reason for all of it? The testimony of countless believers throughout history has been that stubbed toes and serpents and pestilences can be where God does some of His best life-giving work in you and in other people. And like we said in the first point, the greatest thing He does is give you this knowledge of Himself. I love this quote by Martin Luther to quote him again. And he said that as soon as God chooses you to be His child, He lets the devil afflict you to turn you into a real doctor, a real understand, a real professor of the Word. Luther said, I credit the devil, the pope, and all my other persecutors with my deep knowledge of the Word. Through the devil's raging, they've turned me into a fairly good preacher because they drove me into the gospel to depths I never would have reached without their afflictions. It means that God is always in these things giving you genuine life.

With long life, I will satisfy Him, which is real genuine life that comes from the knowledge of God. It reminds me of the story I've told you before. I love to tell about the little bird that's flying south for the winter. You know, the little bird gets a late start.

He slept late that day until all his friends left him because he got a late start. He got caught in a snowstorm by himself. So as he's trying to make his way through the snowstorm, it was so bad that ice formed on his wings and he crash landed and he thought, here I am, my wings are frozen and I'm going to die. Well, along comes a cow and a cow drops manure on him.

And he thinks, well, this just went from bad to worse. I mean, my wings were frozen and now I've got a cow that just dropped manure on me. But then he realizes the manure was warm and it thawed his wings and he was going to be able to fly again. So he shook the manure off and he flapped his wings and he started to chirp and sing.

And he got so excited as he was singing that he got the attention of a cat who came along and ate him. And I told you that you can learn three lessons about your life from this story. Lesson number one, not everybody who drops manure on you is your enemy, right?

Lesson number two, not everyone who digs you out is your friend. Lesson number three, when you're in manure, sometimes it's helpful for you just to keep your little chirper shut and just wait it out because God might be up to something awesome, okay? That's what the psalmist is believing in Psalm 91. All right, so we experience the fulfillment of this Psalm, first of all, in how God uses our pain to grow us in the knowledge of God.

Secondly, in His promise to use all things for good in our lives. Thirdly, we experience the fulfillment of this Psalm, number three, in the resurrection, in the resurrection itself. As Christians, we recognize that this life is really just a prelude to an eternal life, a life in which, Revelation says, Revelation 21, 4, He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for all the former things have passed away.

We are going to a place where the worst pain we go through is going to seem like some brief birth pain that is swallowed up in the joy of new birth. This Psalm is ultimately literally fulfilled in that resurrection that we look forward to, a place where there are no more stubbed toes and no death by pestilences, which is what makes one feature of this Psalm absolutely amazing. And that is the analogy of God protecting us under His wings like some kind of mother hen because it shows us how committed God was to protecting us from all harm.

Because we know that on the cross, God literally covered us and shielded us so that the harmful elements that we have brought in ourselves ultimately would not destroy us. I heard once about a major fire that hit Yellowstone National Park. After the fire, left all these charred remains there of the part of the forest, these two firemen were walking through the destruction and they noticed on a tree stump, a rather macabre site, there was a charred bird, a charred bird sitting completely upright as if nothing had happened. One of the men knocked the bird over and underneath this rather large bird were these three little chicks.

This mother bird had protected her babies from the fire by taking the fire in their place and shielding them from it so that they would not be destroyed by it. This is what God did on the cross. He fulfilled this Psalm in a way that probably the Psalmist would never even have been able to explain.

He shielded us. He put us under His wings and He took all those harmful elements in our place, which guarantees us that He is now working all things together for good and that ultimately this whole story is going to end for us in glorious resurrection just like Jesus' story ended that way. That's the logic of Romans 8 is that if God didn't spare His Son for you when you were His enemy, of course He's going to work in the pain in your life to bring it about for good.

He wouldn't have done the first thing if He wasn't also going to do the second thing. Jesus' resurrection is the promise of what is to come for us, a resurrection in which every phrase of Psalm 91 is going to be literally true in your life and that promise is supposed to redefine how you see everything on earth because when you believe that, it'll change the way that pain feels here. It doesn't mean it's not painful.

It just means that when you grieve, you still grieve with hope. Remember that movie The Sixth Sense? Well, the thing about that movie is that you can never watch it the same way twice. If somebody didn't spoil it for you to begin with, you were totally like blown away at the end when you were like, by the way, spoiler alert, I'm about to ruin it for you.

So if you haven't seen the movie and you want to go watch it, just close your ears for the next 30 seconds, okay? And so when you get to the end, you find out He's dead. He's been dead the whole time.

You're like, whoa. Now try to go back and watch the movie a second time and it's totally ruined. Everything is different when you know that He's been dead from the beginning. You can't see the beginning the same when you know the ending.

That's how we are to go through life because we see from the beginning that Satan and all his powers are actually dead and Jesus is alive and they're harmless and He's victorious. And what that shows me is that in whatever I go through, nothing can separate me from God's plan for my life and that means that even in the worst moments of life, I could walk on broken glass and die hard. See what I did there, okay? All right?

All right. But there's one more way that we experience the fulfillment of the Psalm in our lives. We experience it lastly, number four, in moments of deliverance. Moments of deliverance. It is true that the primary and ultimate fulfillment of this Psalm is experienced in the previous three things that I've given you. Increasing your knowledge of God and how all things work together for good according to God's plan and then the resurrection. It's true. But I don't want to overlook the fact that God sometimes gives us manifestations of this deliverance in our day-to-day lives right now.

Here's how I knew this, okay? King David prayed in Psalm 27 13 after talking about the goodness of God and all these same things. I love the last verse of Psalm 27. He says, I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. In other words, it's not just a sweep by and by where I'm going to talk about the goodness of God.

I want to see it now. In fact, he would go on in Psalm 30, just a couple of Psalms later, he would go on to say, can the dead praise you, God? Can dead men proclaim your faithfulness?

No, not on earth they can't. I want to praise you now. I want to be a testimony to my generation of the strength of your right hand. So let me experience your mighty deliverance now so I can tell everybody about it.

Because once I go to the grave, I can't tell them about it, so let me experience now so I can put you on display. The Apostle Paul experienced moments of this kind of deliverance and he uses language to describe them that are reminiscent of Psalm 91. I would suggest to you that he probably was thinking of Psalm 91 because he borrows language from it. He says, 2 Timothy 4 17 and 18, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me so that I might fully preach the word and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion's mouth. There it is. The Lord will rescue me from every evil work, all of them, and will bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom.

Right? I know that I experienced the goodness of God. Almost every person I know on the front lines of ministry has stories about how God has supernaturally protected them in amazing ways, ways that often sound like Psalm 91. You are listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We'll get back to our teaching in a moment, but right now let me shout out a very special group of people, our gospel partners, who give so generously and faithfully to this ministry every month. It's not an exaggeration to say that they are the financial fuel behind everything we do, including broadcasting this Summit Life radio program right here on your station. We call them gospel partners because that's exactly what they do.

They are actually partnering with us to help make the gospel known around the globe. This month, we are sending all of our gospel partners our exclusive set of 20 Christmas cards to help highlight the artistry and creativity of the season as we celebrate our Savior's birth. There's nothing quite as meaningful as a handwritten note, especially this time of year.

So we intentionally left the inside blank for you to write a special message to those you love. Take advantage of this opportunity to be a light during this holiday season by contacting us today. To join with us as a monthly gospel partner or to give a special one-time gift, call today.

The number is 866-335-5220, or you can always visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now let's finish up our teaching series. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. Let me share one with you from a man that is very important to our church. As a man that is deeply revered here, his name is Sam James. Sam James is the founder of our church. He founded it in 1962 when he was waylaid on his way to the mission field. His son had a heart defect.

His son was one year old, so they had to come here to Duke Medical Center. And while they spent a year here not knowing what else to do, he planted a church. And that church is the one you're sitting in right now.

So he works with this core group for nine months. He preaches one sermon at this church on its launch day. And then he got on a plane that afternoon and went to Vietnam where he was a missionary for the next 40 years.

Think about that for a minute. A missionary in Vietnam in the 60s. Well, while he was there, he said, I tried as much as possible.

This is in his book, Servant on the Edge of History, which I would highly commend for you. But he said, while I was there, I tried to stay mostly in Saigon because that was where most of the pro American or people that were friendly to us was, and that's where I did most of my work. But he says, on occasion, I would get messages from people that were up north about things that God was beginning to do there. And he said, one particular one, I kept getting this message from this lady, and he gives her name, who wanted me to come up to this region because there was a lot of people there that were interested in the gospel.

But that would be very dangerous because the communists were terrorizing that area. He said, but as I prayed about the matter, I just got the sense that God wanted me to go. So on Christmas Day of 1965, I called the local police and they said that they hadn't had any reports of communist activity for several weeks in this area.

Their only advice to me was make sure you travel during daylight hours. Before starting out for this trip, he said, I got up early in the morning about 4 a.m. so I could do most of my driving. Early in the morning, I got up and I did what I always do. I read the Bible and the Psalm for that morning that I was supposed to read was Psalm 91.

So I read Psalm 91, got in my car and started to drive. He said, I drove for several hours out to the Vietnamese countryside. He said, I just had this feeling of peace and safety as I just passed rice paddy after rice paddy.

He said, I got within two miles of the village. When I came around the curve, and he said, I was horrified to see a roadblock that had just been set up. He said, about half the road was covered in this big dirt pile that was probably 15 feet high. And on the other side of it were a bunch of soldiers in vans dressed in camouflage. He said, I immediately recognized as a communist the Viet Cong that had set up this roadblock because that was the way they did it. He said, what they would always do is they would get a group of cars stopped. They would force everyone out of their cars. They would preach communism to them.

And then they would rob them of all their valuables. He said, often the soldiers would shoot those that they didn't like, people they thought that would be a problem. He said, almost routinely Americans would be executed. He said, so this wave of fear swept over me. He said, my body began trembling, trembling almost uncontrollably. He said, my foot was shaking so badly that I couldn't keep it on the brake pedal. He said, I was chastising myself because I was thinking about my wife and my kids back home. And I said, I never should have made this trip. He said, I've never felt as much fear as I felt at that moment. So I was looking at this, I could make out all these, these camouflaged communist troops scattered in the brush. So I looked in the rear view mirror and I saw that four or five cars had pulled up after me.

I knew there was no way out and that the soldiers were going to make their move at any minute. He said, suddenly Psalm 91 came back to my mind. He said, and I remember the first verse that I read, he who dwells in the secret place of the most high will abide under the shadow of the almighty. I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. Surely he will save you from the foul or snare.

You shall not be afraid. He said, I realized that my terrible panic was the result of not really trusting God's perfect will. He said, I know that God guides my life down to the details and that absolute surrender combined with absolute faith brings absolute peace. He said, and suddenly sitting there in that car, my whole body went relaxed and this incredible peace settled over me. He said, I looked to my right at that moment and I saw no movement among the soldiers hidden in the bushes.

So then I looked to my left and I saw this little path, this little path that the farmers used to drive water buffalo to and from work in the fields. He said, so with all these soldiers over here, I just slowly turned my wheels to the left in the direction of the path and I slipped my car into its lowest gear. He said, I began to work my way down this path. He says, I was expecting at any minute to hear the rattle of machine gun fire and to see my back window open up.

He said, but it never came. He said, no other cars moved, nobody following me. He said, I got to this pathway where it went around the field and I hit the gas pedal.

I veered into this thick banana grove, well past the roadblock. He said, I went all the way around the other side of the roadblock, came back out and going into the village. He said, I stopped the car when I got into the village.

I felt so weak. He said, I could only rest my face on the steering wheel and thank God for his deliverance. He said, I went over to this place where I was supposed to speak that day to these people that were gathered. He says, and at the moment I stood up, he said, there was a series of really heavy explosions that shook the ground, followed by gunfire and the exploding of grenades. He said, I looked back over and where this roadblock was, all this thick black smoke was towering into the sky. He said, I expected that they were going to cancel the event. He says, but in the midst of all these explosions that were shaking the ground, he said, everybody just sat there waiting on me to speak and they wanted me to...they were just oblivious to the violence. He said, so I began to preach.

And he said, he said, numbers of students, large numbers of students expressed an interest in following Christ. He says, when the service was over and the clouds of smoke had cleared, the gunfire stopped. He said, the communists were gone.

Some of the older students offered to escort me back past the roadblock. He said, when we got there, we learned that what had happened is a contingent of South Vietnamese soldiers had come there and opened fire in the Viet Cong. The two sides had engaged in a battle and the cars and the people that were there were caught in the crossfire. He said, there were bodies strewn all over the road.

The first three cars, remember his had been second, had been burned and destroyed and their occupants killed. He said, it's ironic that Psalm 91, Psalm 91 gave me the calmness that settled my nerves to think about what I should do. God used my faith in his providential will to be the gateway that helped me see that there was a way out of this and to open me a path of escape. Now I share that, but I do not want to imply to you that every time, does that mean God will every time enable you to avoid the explosion of the Viet Cong?

No. But it does mean that you are, listen, indestructible until your work is done. And it means you can walk into the roadblock with a sense of peace because I know that they cannot harm me and they cannot stop me because when God wants to do it, I am immortal until my work on earth is done. And sometimes I'm going to see manifestations of that because God likes to show it to you so you can tell other people about it. But regardless, you can live with the assurance that God is going to work all things out perfectly in your life for his good plan.

Y'all just like he said. One of my favorite all-time books is called Shadow of the Almighty. It's a book whose title comes from Psalm 91. It's the journals of Jim Elliott, who was another missionary who was one of the five missionaries that was slain on the beaches of Ecuador in the 1950s.

The book was published by his wife later, Elizabeth Elliott, many years later. Shadow of the Almighty, the title is ironic. The title is ironic because the way that Jim Elliott died was having his heart thrust through with a spear, which if you remember was one of the very things that Psalm 91 promised wouldn't happen. Elizabeth called the book Shadow of the Almighty because she was utterly convinced, she said, that the refuge of the people of God is not a refuge from suffering and death, but it's a refuge through suffering and death and a refuge from final and ultimate defeat. In this book, she quotes Jim Elliott, which I actually said earlier with a quote, I am immortal, Jim Elliott used to say, until my work on earth is done.

The same is true of you. You are immortal until your work on earth is finished. There might be some painful chapters along the way. Listen, if you hold on, you're going to see that God was working all of it together for good, just like he promised. Some of these chapters may indeed be very painful, but to pick up the Jim Elliott story later, a few months ago, I told you I was listening to a talk by a guy named Steve Saint, who was the son of Nate Saint, who was one of the other five missionaries that was murdered there with Jim Elliott in the 1950s.

And Steve Saint was just a young boy, very young boy, one or two years old when his father was killed. And I told you one of the most remarkable stories of grace that I've ever heard. He talked about how he was in an early teenage years that he and his mom and the other four widows that whose husbands had been killed went back into that very place where these people had murdered their husbands, and they took up residence among them, and they led them to faith in Christ. And this is the amazing part. He said, I had the privilege to lead to Christ and baptized Minkai who was the man who killed my father. And we adopted him into our family as my kid's surrogate grandfather to replace the man that he had murdered all those years ago. In the talk, as he is describing all this, he makes the statement.

He says, why is it? Why is it that we insist that every chapter in our lives has to be good when God promises only that in the last chapter, he's going to make all the other chapters make sense? I realize you might be in the midst of this situation, but don't you see from Psalm 91 that in eternity, God is going to do all of this with your story and you'll be able to, from the perspective of eternity, look back and say that angel kept me from even so much as stubbing my toe.

Yeah, I may have actually stubbed my toe, but spiritually in the big scheme of things, not one accidental thing happened and God overturned it all for good, just like he said. So I want you to take Psalm 91 and I want you to memorize it and I want you to read it and I want you to quote it when you're afraid. And I want you to quote that Psalm in its greatest expression, which is nothing can separate you from the love of God. And not one accidental thing will ever happen that all the promises of God are yes, and you will march in triumph and victory for all the days of your life from now and forever. God is working it all together for good, just like he said. You're listening to Summit Life and the final message from our series titled Help.

To hear it again or to catch up on previous messages, visit us online at jdgrier.com. Now folks, Christmas time is here. I know Thanksgiving is next week, but let's be real. We've all been thinking about Christmas already. And this month we have a special featured resource for all of our gospel partners and financial supporters. It's a set of gospel centered Christmas cards. You know, a Christmas card can go a long way. You can truly brighten someone's day with a handwritten note telling them how much they mean to you. Don't wait until it's too late.

After all, we want you to get them out in time for Christmas. We'd love to send you a set of these cards as our way of saying thank you for your donation of $35 or more to this ministry. To give, call us at 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220. Or you can always give online at jdgrier.com. While you're on our website, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, get ministry updates, information about new resources, and Pastor Jadie's latest blog posts delivered straight to your inbox. It's a great way to stay connected with Summit Life, and it's completely free to subscribe. Sign up when you go to jadiegrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, inviting you to join us again next time as we begin a brief two-part series on the life of Esther. You won't want to miss it. Have a great weekend of worship, and we'll see you here next time for Summit Life with Jadie Grier. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Jadie Grier Ministries.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-11-22 10:19:55 / 2024-11-22 10:31:08 / 11

Get The Truth Mobile App and Listen to your Favorite Station Anytime