God’s Miraculous Love Letter

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. This is how God sees us. He sees us like sheep who have lost our way. We don't even know where we came from. We don't know how to get back and we're confused. We're lost. So God continues, but I can't stop loving you. I'm going to come to find you. Y'all, the gospel is not that we came searching for God. The gospel is that God came searching for us. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist, J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. We've said this before on the program, but there's something special about receiving a thoughtful note, especially when it's coming from someone you love.

It's really an opportunity to present your unedited feelings without stumbling over your words or feeling embarrassed. Well, today pastor J.D. is looking at the greatest love letter ever written and guess where it's located.

Oh, you guessed it. It's in our Bible. Today's teaching is part of our series called The Whole Story, an overview of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

If you've missed any of the previous messages, they're available online at jdgreer.com. Let's turn to the book of Isaiah and dive into today's message titled God's Miraculous Love Letter. Faith, as I have told many of you before, has not always come easily for me. I always feel like as a pastor, it's supposed to come easy for me.

It's just supposed to be what I do, but that is not true. Throughout my life, I have wrestled pretty significantly with different questions of faith. Do I believe all these things simply because this is how I grew up?

And if I'd grown up in a different house, maybe I believe different things, or is this all just a fairy tale that we have made up together so that we can feel affirmed and secure? Just this week, I was reading in a magazine called The New Yorker, which is not a Christian magazine at all, but there was an article in it by an atheist who was explaining why he did not believe. It really caught my attention what he said.

Here's what it is. Extraordinary claims, he says, require extraordinary evidence. It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than 100 billion galaxies, each containing more than 100 billion stars.

And then he waited 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved in atmosphere, sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again for thousands of years. And you read that and you think, well, I mean, that's sounds really like it sounds like a significant question. Well, I want to explain to you that I believe that there are extraordinary reasons to believe. In fact, I believe these reasons are quite compelling for those who have ears to hear. You see the problem I'll go ahead and tell you that people have with what I'm going to present to you today is not that this stuff is not compelling in and of itself. It's that the implications of these things being true would lead to a number of conclusions that certain people find objectionable. Well, I just don't like how God rules the world.

And if this is true, then that means that there's a good God in charge. And I can't reconcile that, or I don't agree with this or that moral approach or something along those lines. So from the very beginning, many people approach these things with the attitude, this just can't be true.

It would just create too many problems. Now we're all inwardly biased, including me. So I would encourage you as much as you can to just hear what I'm going to present to you and consider it with an open mind. I understand that some of you doubt the Bible's message.

And I know that many of you feel like you have very good reasons for doing so. Now question for you as we begin is this, are you willing to doubt your doubts in the face of some pretty substantial evidence? And you pride yourself on being a doubter. What about doubting your doubts in the face of some pretty overwhelming evidence?

Are you willing to consider this evidence just for what it is without a bias, a preconceived bias against it, because you are not sure of what it would lead to? Let me just start this discussion with the CIA. When the CIA gives a double agent in the United States a means to identify themselves to the U.S. authorities, they use a number of layers of identification because they don't want any chance of getting the wrong person.

So for example, I read about one Soviet double agent who wanted to reveal himself to U.S. authorities. So they gave him these instructions. They had six different things he had to do. He had to go to Mexico City where he was, number one, to write a letter to the secretary and sign his name as I Jackson. Then he was number two after three days to go to the Plaza de Colon in Mexico City. And at noon, number three, he was to stand before the statue of Columbus, just looking up at it. Number four, with his middle finger placed in a guidebook. When he was approached, number five, he was to say it was a magnificent statue.

And number six, despite his Russian accent, that he was only visiting from Oklahoma. God's way of verifying his messenger was through giving layers of prophetic fulfillment. Nearly 25% of that Bible that you hold in your hand is prophecy. Prophecy means God foretelling things that had not happened yet, often in great detail. They almost all have to do with a rescue plan that God was commencing, a rescuer that God would send, who was called in Hebrew terminology, a Messiah. There are 322 direct prophecies specifically about him, not to mention the dozens of historical pictures and analogies that are embedded in scripture. We're gonna focus this morning primarily on only one prophet, that is the prophet Isaiah, because I think he is a great example of all the prophets together. His writings point us to the main subject of prophecy, Jesus, as well as give us a glimpse, a taste of the miraculous nature of prophecies. Now I am without shame going to take us through Isaiah's prophecies today in a little different way than we typically do things. I'm going to use the text of Sally Lloyd-Jones, Jesus storybook Bible, where Sally Lloyd-Jones summarizes Isaiah's prophecies in the form of a love letter that God wrote to Israel. I think that she just does a great job of capturing the entire message of the whole of Isaiah's message.

And I think that sometimes we adults can get so bogged down in the particulars that we miss the beauty of the whole. So we're going to use her kind of summary of it. Let me walk you through it now, a few different parts of it and explain it. And I'm going to put the references where she gets the things from out of the book of Isaiah, because literally just about every word in that chapter just comes from a verse. It's like she strung together a bunch of different verses. So here we are, let's start at the beginning. Your little flock says Isaiah, you're all wandering away from me like sheep in an open field. You've always been running away from me. And now you're lost.

You can't find your way back. This is the substance of the Bible's description of the problem. From the Garden of Eden onward, we've all been running away. And now Isaiah says, we're like sheep, sheep that every one of us believes we know the best way for us to go.

And so we choose our own way. Now, most of you probably don't have a great deal of experience with sheep, but those who do say that sheep are a particularly dumb animal. They walk right off of, right into harm's way. They, if they're in the mountain regions, they will step right off of cliffs and drop hundreds of feet to their death.

They will step into moving, fast moving streams and just drown. They got particularly bad eyesight. So they can only see a few feet ahead of them. They really nearsighted plus their heads hang down. You know how they kind of walk around, which means that they are not animals of forethought or keen insight. All they pretty much think of when they think about where to go is where's the next bite of grass. And when they look up because their heads hang down, all they can see is the, the hiney of the sheep in front of them.

And they follow that. There are layers of symbolism in that for the human race. Furthermore, when they fall over, the sheep become what they call cast, you know, like a beetle where you just kick your legs and you can't turn yourself back over.

So you have to flip them over or they'll die. Now, this is not a very flattering picture of us, but you have to admit while unflattering, it's pretty compassionate because this is how God sees us. He sees us like sheep who have lost her way. We suddenly don't even know where we came from. We don't know how to get back and we're confused.

We're lost. So God continues, but I can't stop loving you. I'm going to come to find you. So I'm sending you a shepherd to look after you and love you to carry you back home to me. Y'all the gospel is not that we came searching for God. The gospel is that God came searching for us. That book that you hold in your hand is not a collection of insights from enlightened men and women who had lofty thoughts about God. It is the story about God's relentless pursuit of rebellious people who didn't want anything to do with him.

And he said, I did this Isaiah 43, four. I did this because you were precious in my eyes and I love you. Y'all that word precious is not a word that I use a great deal because precious precious means that something is so valuable to you that you'd give up anything else for it.

There are very few things that I have that would be precious to me. My kids are precious to me, which means that if a doctor came to me and told me that one of my kids had a disease, the disease was fatal. And the only way for them to be cured was to get this medicine that was extraordinarily expensive and then insurance didn't cover it. And it was going to cost millions of dollars without even thinking.

I would give up everything I have to be able to get this medicine because my kids are precious to me. The God of the universe, Isaiah says, he looked at you, the rebellious sheep. And he said, you're precious to me. So I'm going to come like a shepherd to find you. In Luke 15, Jesus would describe that shepherd. He's talking of course about himself by describing him like a, like one who had a hundred sheep. That's a lot of sheep and discovered late one night that one of them was missing. Jesus said that shepherd, this shepherd left the 99 ones that he had to go after the lost one, which honestly does not make a lot of financial sense.

It does not make financial sense to put yourself back in harm's way for only 1% of what you have. The only way that you would do that is if each individual one was precious to you. You know, a couple of years ago we were at Disney World and the thing happens and may have happened to some of you parents for like two minutes, I lost one of my kids in that crowd.

I mean, you know what it's like? You had that moment where you're like, I cannot find them. I did not turn to Veronica and say, well, we got three more, you know, and we, we still got the majority of them. We're going to be fine. No, each one is precious to me.

So we, we hang on to the three and we went to find the one. Isaiah says, chapter 49, 15, he said, could a nursing mom forget her newborn child? Of course not. Can, would she ever have no compassion on the child she's just born? I've told you guys before that my wife, when we had our kids develop this, I mean, it was crazy X-Men kind of spidey sense, being in tune with our babies at the slightest whimper that I didn't even hear. She was out of bed and up the stairs. One of the dumbest things that I ever said in my marriage was, was that's amazing. Our baby's only two weeks old. And I think she slept through the night. Veronica said, the baby was up six times last night. You slept through the night. The baby and I did not.

God says Isaiah 49, 16. He said, you're even more precious to me than a, than a newborn child is to a mother. Well, the newborn mother would never forget. I will never forget. In fact, I know how many hairs are on the top of your head.

My wife, as in tune as she is with our kids, never knew how many hair follicles were on their body. God says, this is how I see you. And then God's continues through Isaiah. He says, I'm going to do more than just come after the sheep. I'm going to give up my life for the sheep. And Isaiah 53, four.

Y'all if leaving the 99 to go after the one didn't make financial sense, then this is just insane. And why would a shepherd give his life for the sheep? The life of a sheep does not equal the life of a human, right?

I mean, think about it. If you, I'm sure you love your dog. If your dog went tearing across the interstate and your 12 year old went tearing across the interstate after them, you don't get them back and say, that's so brave.

I'm so proud of you. No, you're like, you got to let the dog go because you're like, yes, we love the dog, but the dog's life does not compare to your life. The shepherd's life does not compare to the sheep's life. Why is the creator dying for the creation?

This is crazy kind of love. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. We'll jump back into today's teaching in just a moment. Here at Summit Life, our mission is simple, helping people go deeper in their understanding of the gospel message every day, and then empowering them to share it far and wide in their world.

Deep and wide, it's what we're all about. Does that sound like a path you'd like to see yourself on? You know, you can join that mission specifically as one of our monthly gospel partners. Gospel partners play a crucial role in helping us share the gospel boldly through radio, TV, online, and print resources. By committing to a regular monthly gift, you make it possible for us to not only air today's program on your station and others like it, but also to plan ahead for all that we believe God has in store for this ministry in the future.

And to thank you for joining the team, we'll send you a special welcome gift. It's Pastor J.D. 's book, simply titled Gospel. Sign up as a monthly gospel partner today by making your first donation at jdgreer.com or by calling us at 866-335-5220.

Thanks for your support. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. What's even more staggering, he has this love for people who don't even love him back. Now I've told you before that groupies are people who love somebody that'll never love them back. Some of you ladies watch how teenage girls today swoon over Zac Efron or Michael B. Jordan or Channing Tatum or somebody like that, get their pictures up on the wall, and you're like, sweet heart, give it up. He ain't ever even gonna know who you are. But you have a hard time being judgmental because you remember when you were convinced that you were gonna marry Donnie from New Kids on the Block, don't you? You were gonna put on your best pair of acid wash Jordache jeans and you were gonna go down to the concert, New Kids on the Block concert. And when you were standing there in the front row with the thousands of other girls, you were gonna scream as Donnie walked by, but your scream was gonna be just a little bit louder. And he was gonna turn and y'all were gonna make eye contact. And about halfway through the concert, a bouncer was gonna come up to you with this little note written from Donnie that said, you got the right stuff, baby. You're the reason why I sing this song. And you guys are gonna get married and y'all were gonna live happily ever after, right?

But unless your name is Jenny McCarthy, that never happened. Instead, you married Phil from accounting, a slightly overweight balding man who wears penny loafers and drives a minivan. And you're okay with that because as you got older, you realize it's just not wise to love people who are never gonna love you back. Y'all the most amazing thing in scripture is that we see God loving people, giving himself to people who don't love him back and coming after them relentlessly and then laying down his life for them.

What kind of love is this? Charles Spurgeon, the silver tongued orator, the British pastor of the 19th century who could say anything they said, he could put it beautifully. He said, if there's one subject that makes me back away from this platform, utterly ashamed of my poor feeble words, it is the subject, the love of Christ. The love of Christ is the most amazing thing under heaven, if not in all of heaven itself.

He says, I can't stop loving you. You've been stumbling around like people in a dark room, but into the darkness, a bright light is gonna shine. And that bright light is gonna chase away all the shadows like sunshine. You see, you don't have God in your life. Life without God feels like darkness. You're not sure where you come from. You're not sure where you're going, tragedy. You don't know how to deal with tragedy. You don't know how to open tragedy.

You don't even know how to deal with success. You just feel like you're lost. And he says, into this darkness, this light is gonna come, but it's not gonna be a light like you would expect. The light that is gonna show up, the sunshine is gonna come in the form of a baby. A little baby is gonna be born. His mommy is gonna be a young girl who doesn't even have a husband. He'll be born miraculously to a virgin. And his name will be Emmanuel.

Emmanuel, which means literally in Hebrew, God has come to live with us. He is also, Isaiah says, gonna be one of King David's children's children's children. In other words, he's gonna be fully God, God with us, but he's also gonna be the son of David, a very real human with a lot of real problems, a lot of real flaws, including betraying his best friend, sleeping with his wife and having him murdered. This Jesus is gonna be the son of both God and man, fully God and fully man.

Yes, somebody is gonna come and rescue you, but he won't be who anyone expects. He's gonna be a king, but he won't live in a palace and he won't have lots of money. He's gonna be poor. He's gonna be a king like nobody you've ever seen. He'll be a servant, but this king is gonna be able to heal the whole world. You see, like David, the shepherd boy, everybody's gonna overlook this king.

This king will not be one who amazes us with his power or wealth. In fact, he's gonna take the form of a servant and live like somebody who's poor, but his poverty and his servant stature is gonna enable him to do for us what no king has ever been able to do, and that is heal us, which is gonna help us, listen to this, see his true glory far better than any display of might or wealth ever could. Isaiah opens up the book of Isaiah with this vision of seeing God high and lifted up. Isaiah 6, I saw God high and lifted up, and the scene is exactly like you would think it would be. It's God, you know, on his throne and glory and angels and smoke and trembling and fire and fear, and Isaiah's on his face feeling like he's gonna die. Exactly what you would think of God high and lifted up. Isaiah only uses that phrase, God high and lifted up, one other time in the entire book of Isaiah, only one other time, and it's right before Isaiah 53. It's there in Isaiah 52 when he says God high and lifted up is gonna be shown in Jesus's death on the cross when he humbled himself and he died for sinners. You see, God could have been glorified by coming to earth to avenge the wrongs and to punish the criminals, but God said, there's a greater glory that I will get that doesn't come through smashing them, but comes from being smashed for them as I give myself in love to receive them. Athanasius, the early church father, used to say, so you can tell the strength of a flame not by its ability to burn upwards, but by its ability to burn downwards. The weakest flame, strike a match, the weakest flame will burn upwards, but if you're gonna have a flame that burns downward, that takes a blowtorch, it takes the flame coming out of a rocket engine.

You can tell the strength of a flame by its ability to burn downwards. He says in the same way, you can tell the true glory of God, not by his ability to create the expanses of the universe, but by his willingness to humble himself and die for people who had rejected him and turned against him. Now, y'all, if you reject his offer, he will come a second time in judgment. That is clear in Isaiah, but he would prefer, he would prefer to be glorified in saving you, not judging you, but you gotta make a choice. He will be glorified either way in your life, either through saving or through judging.

You gotta choose. But the Messiah that came said, I'm going to allow you to glorify God by demonstrating the extent of his mercy and his kindness in your life. And that's what he prefers. He will be a hero. He'll fight for his people, but he's gonna rescue them from their enemies.

But he's not gonna have big armies the way most heroes do. And he won't fight with swords. This Messiah is not gonna fight with weapons because this Messiah's aim is to heal and to save, not to avenge. God could have restored justice by just punishing all sin, but God wanted to not just restore justice. He wanted to make just and righteous people. So when it came time to wield the weapons, he turned them not on you who deserve them.

He turned them on himself so that in him, we could become righteous. Isaiah says, he's gonna make the blind see. He'll make the lame leap like a deer. He'll make everything the way it was always meant to be. But people, even though he does those things are gonna hate him.

And they won't listen to him. It'd be like a lamb. He will suffer and die, but he won't stay dead. I'll make him alive again. And one day, one day when he comes back to rule forever, the mountains and the trees will dance and sing for joy. The earth will shout out loud. His fame will fill the whole earth like the waters fill the oceans.

Everything sad is gonna come untrue. Even death is gonna die. He will wipe away every tear from every eye.

One day he will heal the whole earth and bring bring that existence that we have yearned for and crave for all of our lives. And we get a glimpse of that, by the way, in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. One day, God will do to you and me and the entire earth what he did to the body of Jesus. Y'all, two thirds of evangelical believers, I mean, people in churches like this one, two thirds of evangelical believers do not believe that we'll have actual physical bodies in heaven. I guess they think that we're floating around up there, you know, on clouds playing harps, wearing diapers, toy bow and arrows.

I don't know what you think, but it's not true. Jesus had a real body. In Jesus's body, we're gonna be raised like him. Plus, plus the Bible describes where we're headed as the new heavens and the new earth.

New heavens and new earth means like the old, but a lot better, right? I mean, you know, if you tell me you got a new car, cause you drove a 1983 Toyota Corolla, and I go out there in the, you know, thing and I'm looking for a new car. I'm not looking for a jet.

I'm looking for a helicopter or a horse. I'm looking for a car like your Toyota Corolla, but a lot nicer. Well, in the same way, we've got an old heaven and old earth that's been crushed and broken by sin. God is gonna put us in a new heaven and a new earth that has not the slightest trace of sin in it, which means that all that we love and enjoy down here, there's a much better version of over there or up there or down here, wherever it's gonna be, music, food, nature. There's gonna be a heavenly Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon we see now has been cursed by sin.

What's the real one gonna look like? He's gonna wipe away every tear and he's gonna make all the sad things come untrue. Now that phrase, sad things come untrue. That's not from the book of Isaiah. That's actually a quote from J.R.R.

Tolkien from Lord of the Rings. And there's a great little phrase because what it means is not that God's gonna make us forget everything in the past. What he is going to do is he's going to heal every hurt. And he's going to show us how God used even those hurts to weave something so beautiful and so glorious and filled with so much joy that while we remember what happened in the past, there's not an ounce of pain that goes along with it because it's been swallowed up and the glory and the beauty of what God has done. Y'all, what an incredible story.

What an incredible story. But like Isaiah laments, nobody believed him. Nobody believed him.

Why? Why did they not believe him? Well, it's like Sally Lloyd-Jones ends the chapter. She says, it seemed probably like a fairy tale. Like it's too good to be true. It's just now it's a story you make up to make yourself feel comfortable.

And we all know that fairy tales don't come true. Let me, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay. C.S. Lewis was a literary scholar at Oxford before becoming a Christian.

And C.S. Lewis wrote this essay on fairy tales and myths in the process of becoming a Christian in which he explained, listen to this. He says, all of mankind's myths and fairy tales, they all follow a pattern. And that is because they are expressions, listen, of a yearning deep in our hearts. All these fairy tales follow a pattern, not because our hearts are making them up, but because they are hungry for the very thing they were created for.

You see what he's saying there? All these fairy tales follow a pattern because there's something behind them that we're yearning for and we almost know is true. No matter what book of the Bible we're studying, it's all about Jesus and his work on the cross. It's all God's love letter. And when you start to embrace the reality of God's amazing love for you, it changes everything. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. You know, one of the most important things to me as a mom is that my kids grow up with a love for God, His word and His church. And I found that some of the most important, meaningful gospel conversations often come when we're having fun together as a family, talking and learning about the Lord. And that's why this month we've created a brand new Summit Life designed kids activity book for all of our gospel partners and anyone who supports Summit Life financially. It's full of creative, joyful activities for your kids, grandkids or church kids to enjoy.

And along the way, they'll learn more about God's word and the gospel with pages full of kid focused games, word searches and coloring pages. We'd love to send you this resource as our way of saying thanks when you donate to support this ministry or when you become a monthly gospel partner this month. You can give right now by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again Wednesday when we continue reading and embracing God's miraculous love letter. That's next time on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.