Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

This week, Pastor J.D. answers the question, “How do you handle it when a Christian leader falls?” Show Notes: Unfortunately, I think we can all think of a Christian leader that we’ve looked up to and respected who has fallen—either morally, disqualifying themselves from ministry, or denouncing the faith altogether.  There are few things quite as devastating as when you look to someone as your spiritual hero and they fall. Sometimes it’s someone you’ve seen from a distance whose teaching had a big impact on you and sometimes it’s someone who is up close—maybe not everyone has heard of them but they’ve had a big impact on you. This raises questions like, “Were they always a hypocrite or was this a moment of weakness they got in? Is everything they ever taught a lie?” Sadly I can name several men that I’ve looked up to in ministry who have disqualified themselves from ministry.  There was a book that was written by Paul Trip called Dangerous Calling, which is about the danger of being called into ministry and the irony is if you open up the cover and see the names of the men who endorsed the book, they were all really good friends of mine and all of them except for one have fallen. So I asked Paul Trip about this and he said, “There are two things—number one they lose peer community. By peer community, I mean the kind of people that look into your life and call stuff out. They don’t work for you. They’re not impressed with you. They can speak truth to you. Most of those people community around them but not peer community. The second problem is something that compounds the first—they forget the power of indwelling sin. They think that somehow their success in ministry or how much they know moves them beyond that initial call to follow Jesus and die to yourself.” I can tell you that even after being in ministry for over 25 years, the fight between the flesh and the spirit never goes away. It never gets easier. The raging of my flesh against God is as real as it ever was. So when that happens and it effects you personally and you’re dealing with that disappointment, there’s a few things I try to remind people. At their very best, they were still very flawed and they were never designed to be your savior. They were only to point to Christ. Now, hopefully they will point consistently to Christ by their life, but there are just a lot of figures in the Bible who started that way and then disappointed. Ultimately, the Christian leaders you look up to you are not there to be the object of your faith. They’re just a means to point you to put your faith in him.    Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. answers a question from one of our listeners, Brennan: “Should evangelicals participate in Lent?” Show Notes: This one is going to be one of the classic, “yes, no and it’s up to you” kind of answers. First of all, if you’re not familiar, Lent is the practice that some denominations observe by setting aside the 40 days leading up to Easter (actually, it technically ends on Holy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter) to devote themselves to prayer and fasting. Traditionally, Lent is started on Ash Wednesday, which is where participants signify the start of lent by drawing the cross on their foreheads with ashes. People usually fast from something during during this time… “giving ____ up for lent.” Let me start by saying that I do not really observe lent, and lent is not part of our Baptist “calendar.” However, there is certainly not any harm that necessarily comes from observing lent—and in fact, I strongly believe that more Christians should set aside periods of time in their lives where they devote themselves to fasting and prayer. Part of the resistance to this is that there is a certain stream that teaches that these rituals earn merit with God and only in doing these are you filling yourself with grace—a sacramental approach where participating in these rituals fills you with grace. And the counter to that is our righteousness has been gifted to us through Christ and there’s nothing we can do to add to it—this is not directly commanded in the Bible so why do we need to do this? What I want to say is there is a value in attaching yourself to the historic Christian calendar. Many Christians have approached this with the right spirit for many years. I’m all for more time spent in prayer and fasting, and if doing that with the global church is helpful, then that is great. At the Summit Church we do things a little differently. For the past three years, at the beginning of the calendar year (usually January/February), we have what we call 21 Days of Fasting & Prayer. Each year it’s been an incredibly powerful time both for me personally and for our church. Sometimes when people fast, they don’t really understand why they’re doing it. This happens with Lent, too. People think that because they are hungry, God will listen to them. The gospel would say, “No, God’s attention to you, his love, is not conditioned based on how hungry you are.” Fasting is really about putting yourself in a position to hear from him. It’s less about getting you in a position where God likes you and more tuning your heart to the Father’s.  To make sure we’re clear, the commandment of God is that we pray and fast often, but the exact form of the, the calendar in which that happens, isn’t subscribed.  Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, listen in to Pastor J.D.’s thoughts on revival that he shared at a recent Summit Church staff meeting. Show Notes: There are two ways God sends revival: “All at once” and “over time“ Rick Warren has said that Saddleback has never had a revival, only a ‘vival’ While Saddleback isn’t a perfect church, there’s a lot of evidence of genuine spiritual awakening but it didn’t happen in one service that extended for eight days. It happened through faithful preaching, teaching and disciple making. It’s important to be aware that God is the one who chooses how he sends things. To quote Tim Keller, the definition of revival is, “The intensification of the ordinary operation of the work of the Holy Spirit, occurring mainly through the ordinary ‘instituted means of grace’— preaching, pastoring, worship, prayer.” During these seasons God’s glory gets heavier, sin becomes more real, Jesus’ love and presence become more “felt.” And lots of people get saved. So we get up every day and we do those four things listed out: preach, pastor, worship and pray. My encouragement to you is, don’t force anything, or assume it has to look just like somewhere else. Almost none of Jesus’ miracles happened the same way: Sometimes he speaks, sometimes he spits on the ground—it’s all in different ways. You can not reproduce a miracle. You keep on doing what he has called you to, and God will work. We can long for revival and not assume anything BUT there are a few things that these kind of awakenings always have in common: Prayer—the evidence that God is on the move. I was reminded of this recently in Psalm 71. David, as he got older, saw his main job as “proclaiming your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.” I’m not older, but I wanted to share this. I want the next generation of the Summit church (leaders that we’re raising up), to know in the depths of their heart that God is faithful and he answers prayers. The second characteristic is always confession of sin. There’s a greater awareness of your sinfulness. It starts in the church. The few revivals I’ve had a privilege to be a part of always start with the leaderships’ sensitivity to sin. The final characteristic is having an openness to the Spirit. We just join God in what he is doing. Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. finishes the Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, Essential Christianity. The final question is, “What is the difference between being religious and being spiritual?” Show Notes: This is a really important question because the fastest growing category in the United States is “spiritual but not religious,” which I talk about in my book, Essential Christianity. Simultaneous to this growing interest in spirituality, there is also a decrease in trust in religious institutions and historic traditional religious belief systems. Just listen to talk shows, Hollywood, sports starts and you will hear the message of “I have a religious side to me—I really want to commune with the divine, but I’m just not part of organized religion.” So for Christianity, the world’s largest religion, it sounds like it’s pretty bad news… but it might not be. I think there is a good and bad version of the “spiritual but not religious.” The bad version is, “I want religion on my terms. I’m not really interested in God or anybody else in telling me what is right and what is true. I don’t want morality dictated to me by anything. I want to find truth within me.” It’s a toxic, self-actualization way of thinking and it’s everywhere. The good version of it is that a lot of the formal religious structures including ritualism and authority structures are being questioned. Jesus taught something entirely different from those things. Jesus focused not on religion but on a relationship (loving God with all of your heart, loving your neighbor as yourself, the gospel is a gift of grace that you receive). So, detaching from an unhealthy dependance on religion can be a good thing. One of the thing that surprises people when they read through the Bible for the first time is how central a relationship and communion is with all of Christianity. If you look back at the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve walked with God. God led them out in Exodus and led them with a plow by day and a pillar of fire by night. When Jesus came they called him God, with us, Emmanuel. Now with the Holy Spirit he is God in us.  Jesus went so far to tell his disciples that if they have the choice between having him, Jesus, with them or having the Holy Spirit inside of them, they should choose the Holy Spirit if they really understood what the Holy Spirit could do for them. All of that to say that the experience with the Spirit is supposed to be so incredible that it really defines all of Christianity, which is ironic that a lot of people think that you now choose between spirituality and religion because, at least in the Bible, they really are one in the same. You cannot have a relationship with God and not commune with his Spirit. This leads a lot of people to say, “What does the Holy Spirit do exactly?” In Romans, Paul identifies several things: The Spirit enables us to believe in Jesus. The fact that you are convinced that Jesus is Lord and submit to him is all produced by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit produces the life of Christ in us. Throughout Romans 8, Paul keeps saying the Spirit is life. In Romans 5 Paul says the Spirit sheds abroad Christ’s love in our hearts, which means he gives us a felt sense of God’s presence and his love. Paul says the Spirit prays for us with groanings that can’t be uttered. The main things that the Spirit does is he sheds abroad Christ’s love, communicates Christ’s presence, and he fills us with the spiritual fruits—the love, joy, and peace that characterize life in the Spirit. So if find yourself saying, “I want to be spiritual and not religious” I would actually say that’s not a bad place to start as you turn toward Christianity because Jesus, in many ways, was the opposite of religion. It was religious people who were most against him. The New Testament describes really knowing God as fellowship in the Spirit. For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. continues our Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, Essential Christianity. The fifth question is, “Is downplaying the sinfulness of homosexuality necessary to reach the next generation?” Show Notes: I had one good friend tell me I should leave the topic of homosexuality out of the book, since it can be so hard for some people to swallow. I recognize that sometimes, there are issues that you want to time when you bring them up when you’re sharing the gospel with someone. In the end, I decided to put in a small chapter about what Christians have historically believed on this. First, because that’s a pretty significant part of the book of Romans (which the book is based on), when Paul talks about the evidence of our rebellion against God. If anyone is reading along in the book of Romans as I go through this, they’d have a big, glaring question about this topic. That’s a big reason why I don’t think downplaying homosexuality is something we can do anymore. When trying to reach the next generation, this is one of the top things they come into an evangelical church thinking about. The world says there are only two options: affirmation and alienation. Because of that, they don’t give any moral authority to those who they believe are “alienating,” and because of that, I believe I have to show them that the Bible offers a third option: you don’t affirm the behavior but you do affirm the individual as made in the image of God and worthy of love and respect and protection. Leaving the subject out was going to be counterproductive in my book, and I believe it’s the same situation with our churches: the next generation is coming in with their own narrative about what I believe, so I have to address it head-on. There are also a couple of biblical problems that lead me to believe downplaying this topic is not helpful (which I wrote about in an article posted on The Gospel Coalition). First, removing the offense of the cross will also divest it of its power. Repentance, properly understood, is offensive—but repentance has always been at the center of the gospel message. Second, we know from the Bible that Jesus was full of both grace and truth… not just one or the other. Truth without grace leads to fundamentalism and judgment. Grace without truth leads to acceptance amongst people, but not to repentance before the Father. Jesus was full of both, and the two together are the power of God. For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. continues our Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, “Essential Christianity.” The fourth question is, “Can anyone actually know they will go to heaven?” Show Notes: I’ve talked about this before, but if there were a Guinness World Record for the amount of times someone asked Jesus to save them, I’m pretty sure I’d hold it. By the time I was 19, I’d “become a Christian” about 5,000 times. Every time my church gave an invitation to pray a prayer to “accept Jesus,” I did it right away. One year my church had a goal of 300 conversions and I think I fulfilled that goal all by myself. I know that sounds neurotic, but I just wanted to be sure that I was saved. I was plagued with questions like “Last time I prayed that, did I feel sorry enough about my sins?” and “Since praying the prayer, have I followed Jesus closely enough?” I knew the Bible said that we were “saved [by] faith,” (Ephesians 2:8) but I wanted to know: what was the faith that saves, and how could I be sure I had it? I’ve since found that a lot of Christians have these same questions. Ask 20 different people what “faith” is, and you’ll likely get as many different answers. Some think of it as a general sense that God is real. Others think it means sincerity in religion. They say, “I’m getting more serious about my faith.” Some think having faith just means adopting a positive, hopeful outlook on life. Others think it just means that at some point you prayed the infamous “sinner’s prayer,” asking Jesus into your heart. So here’s the question we want to consider: what is the faith that saves, and how can we know that we have it? In the book, I used the example of Abraham. How was Abraham saved? He was saved by faith. And his faith was credited to him as righteousness. The faith that saves is believing God’s promise and resting on it. The only difference between our faith and Abraham’s is that Abraham looked forward, believing God’s promise to send salvation; you and I look backward, believing he has sent it. Christians trust God to keep his promise to them just as Abraham trusted God to keep his promise to him. If we believe that God has forgiven our sins in Jesus, just as he promised (v 25), then, like Abraham, our faith is credited to us as righteousness. That’s the faith that saves. We know that faith doesn’t exclude effort, but it does exclude earning. In other words, we’ll never earn our salvation – but saving faith shows evidence (fruit) in the life of the believer. As Martin Luther said, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” You know, preachers often ask people the question: “If you died tonight and God were to say, ‘Why should I let you into heaven?’ what would you say?” The question has become a cliché, but it’s actually a good one to consider. What would you say? Many say, “Well, because I was a good person.” Or “Because I tried my best.” “Because I was a sincere Christian and always tried to live out what I believed.” But faith that saves always starts its answer with “Because Jesus…” It would never start with “Because I…” Why? Because any answer that starts with me is going to reveal faith in my work, not faith in his. The faith that saves is the faith that leans all its hope for heaven, and for life, on Jesus Christ. How you answer that question, then, is how you can know whether you have the faith that saves. This is how the younger, sinner’s-prayer-praying, baptism-junkie J.D. could have stopped worrying about whether he’d prayed some prayer well enough or felt sorry deeply enough or gotten committed to Jesus strongly enough to be saved. I could have rested in the fact that he did what he said he did. This is how you can live with a confidence undiminished by unchosen circumstances or unsuccessful Christian living, free of anxiety about how this life will go and what will happen to you in the next one. Why should God let you into heaven? “Because Jesus died and rose to take my sins and give me his righteousness.” This is my answer. What’s yours? For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. continues our Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, Essential Christianity. The third question is, “If God is real, why doesn’t everybody believe in him?” Show Notes: Like we talked about in our last episode, there is abundant evidence for the existence of God. So then, why doesn’t everyone believe in him? The truth, Paul says, is that we suppress it because we think we want a world, a life, without God. This means that the question, “Is there even a God?” is one that we answer more with our hearts than our heads. The problem is not that the evidence is not there; it’s that our hearts don’t want to see it.  The philosopher William James, who many regard as a forerunner to 20th-century postmodernism, said that in determining what we believe, more important than evidence is (to use the title of his most famous lecture) “The Will to Believe.” What we believe, James explained, is less determined by the evidence itself than by what we want to believe. Postmodern philosophy patted itself on the back for this great discovery. And it was a great discovery.  But Paul got there two millennia earlier: “For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:21). Or Rom. 1:18… we suppress the truth with unrighteousness. In other words, our heads are controlled by our hearts. It wasn’t that we couldn’t figure out the truth about God; we didn’t want to figure it out because we didn’t really want to know it. The flaw was not in the evidence but in the hearts considering that evidence. So in a sense, we know, but we don’t know, because we don’t want to know. We suppress the truth that is evident to us because we don’t want it to be true. We want to be the center of our story, making the rules…  We’re the point. Our comfort is the priority. We know best. Our way is better. Our will is supreme. Humanity’s suppression of truth, Paul explains, manifests itself in two forms: an irreligious form of suppression and a religious one. Irreligious suppression: Atheism (or agnosticism)  Listen, I’m not saying there are not people genuinely convinced that they are atheists. I’m saying that according to Romans 1 that atheism is driven by a subconscious desire not to know. We know but we don’t know because we don’t want to know. Everybody in their heart knows the truth, but we don’t want to admit it to ourselves so some of us convinced ourselves  there is no God. We don’t like the thought of an all-powerful, ruling God, so we suppress the truth. Which is why a lot of the great atheist-intellects of the last 100 years who have become Christians—people like T.S. Elliot, W.H. Auden, C.E.M. Joad, C.S. Lewis, A. N. Wilson (by the way, ever notice all the really smart people go by their initials)—have all said, “What brought me to faith was not some new argument or evidence. I just admitted to myself that I always knew there was a God.”  When I am sharing Christ with someone, I often will ask, “If you come to see these things are true, are you willing to change your life in response? “Because a willingness to follow the truth is a prerequisite to knowing the truth.”  Religious suppression: Idolatry When we suppress the truth of who God is through religion, we change the object of our worship into something we can control.  The false gods humanity has worshipped all have one thing in common—they exist to serve us. We worshipped, but our main question was how to get God into orbit around our lives. But the most basic truth of creation is that we were created for God and his glory—he is at the center. But we wanted a God who would serve us, be our divine butler, and so we reimagined God in that form. Anthropologists have noted that all peoples in all place worship… even if you’re not religious. We can no more turn off worship by not being religious than we could turn off our sex drive by not getting married. When you say, “What about those that have never heard?” the truth is that everybody’s heard. God showed it to us and revealed it in us. But we suppress that knowledge of an all-ruling, all-sovereign God because we don’t want it to be true. And for that reason we all stand condemned. So our denial of God’s existence, according to Paul, is not the faulty conclusion of a genuinely confused mind but the subconscious desire of a heart that is resistant to God. Denial is not the only fruit, however. Some of us willingly acknowledge God’s existence, but we then distort him into “images” that cater to our sinful hearts. This is Paul’s explanation for the multiplicity of religions in the world. We took glory from the real God and assigned it to new versions of him that we preferred over him. Furthermore, we manifest our resistance to God’s glory through disobedience—we do what we want instead of what God wants even when we know what he wants. We’ll get into that more in the next chapter. Denial, distortion, and disobedience: three bad fruits of a heart that is resistant to God’s power, glory, and authority. For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. continues our Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, Essential Christianity. The second question is, “How do we even know there’s a God?” Show Notes: This new book, Exploring Christianity, looks at 10 key words in the book of Romans to help us explore the truth behind Christianity. In Romans 1:19-20, Paul makes it clear that God has made himself and his existence undeniable. He says, “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made.” Now (like a lot of the book of Romans), there’s a lot of meat there, but Paul’s basic claim is that God has made the basic truths about himself known to every person who’s ever lived. He’s left his fingerprints in various places, if we have eyes to see them. Philosophers helpfully grouped these fingerprints into four primary categories, and then unhelpfully gave them complicated names. I’m going to use those complicated names, but don’t let them trip you up. The concepts are pretty simple. I figure if we can memorize the name of our $14, 16-ingredient drink at Starbucks, we can learn these. And, if you happen to find yourself in a philosophical discussion about the nature of God at the Waffle House late one afternoon and drop in one of these multisyllabic masterpieces, it’s sure to increase your standing in the debate. These are four ways that the apostle says God reveals himself in creation: The Cosmological Fingerprint This one goes back all the way to Aristotle. It’s the question of why there is something rather than nothing, and where did the original something come from?  If the world began 14 billion years ago with a Big Bang, where did the materials that caused the Big Bang come from?  You can’t keep going back in infinite regress into nothingness.  Eventually something has to come from somewhere. “Nothingness” can’t just explode.  In his book God Delusion, Richard Dawkins admits this is a problem. He says, “Darwin’s theory works for biology, but not for cosmology (or, ultimate origins).”  And, “Cosmology is waiting on its Darwin.”  In other words, he thinks that while they have explained how life took shape on the earth, he admits they still have no idea where life itself, or the materials that produced life, came from. We need a theory, he says, as to why anything exists, because it is self-evident that nothing x nobody can’t equal everything.  But don’t worry,” he says in the book, one day we’ll find it. (Which is a textbook example of a blind, hopeful leap of faith.) The Teleological Fingerprint Not only do we have the question of why there is something rather than nothing, but our creation appears to be very finely tuned. The more we learn about this, the more amazing it becomes.  Scientists say that life on earth depends on multiple factors that are so precise that if they were off by even a hair, life could not exist. They call it the Goldilocks principle: things are “just right” for human life.  The makeup of the atmosphere is very exact, yet it’s the difference between life and death. If some of those levels were even slightly off—for example, if the level of oxygen dropped by 6% we would all suffocate; if it rose by 4%, our planet would erupt into a giant fireball. And we’d all die. Or, if the CO2 were just a little higher or a just  little bit lower (say, 0.01%), then the earth would either become an oven or have no atmosphere at all. And we’d all die. Or this: The water molecule is the only molecule whose solid form (ice) is less dense than its liquid form. Which means that when it freezes it floats. If ice did not float, it would sink to the bottom and the whole ocean would eventually freeze from the bottom up and… we would all die. Or the distance of the earth from the sun: If we were 2% closer to the sun, the planet would be too hot for water to exist. And we’d all die.  And then there’s tilt of the earth, which is set at an ideal 23.5 degrees, which we’ve learned is perfect for temperatures and tides and such. You’ve probably never thought about it, but if it was was not tilted, temperatures would be extreme and we’d all die. At least the humans.  One more for fun: We’ve learned that if Jupiter wasn’t the size and in the orbit it is, astronomers predict that there would be 10,000x the number of asteroid strikes right here on earth, and we’d probably all die.  Jupiter is like the Luke Maye of planets, setting picks on asteroids so the earth can get open for the 3-pointer of life. Without it, our planet would be pummeled with asteroids and life could never exist. Then we put up our telescopes and pull out our microscopes and we find the same complexity in the cell and atomic structure:  Even the most basic DNA strands are incredibly complex, enough so that Francis Collins, head of the human genome project, says “How could a cosmic accident ever result in something of this digital elegance of a DNA strand?” It’s like thinking an explosion in an ink factory could inadvertently produce the collected works of Shakespeare. And just so you know, these are not the conclusions of seminary grads doubling as amateur scientists. The late Stephen Hawking said in one of his later books, The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many (precise ratios), like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron… The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time You say, “Well, maybe we’re just lucky. In a universe as big as ours our planet was bound to exist somewhere and we just happen to be on it.”  But scientists say that the odds of a planet like earth existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all ‘just happened’ defies common sense. It’s like tossing a coin every second and having it come up heads for 10 billion years in a row. So, yeah, you can speculate that this part of the galaxy was just really, really lucky, but is that the best and easiest explanation for what we see?  It takes an anti-God bias to arrive there–it’s usually that people have some other problem that follows from a God creating it all that makes them look at the evidence that way. One scientist said; The greatest miracle of all time without any close second, is the existence of life on our planet!  The Moral Fingerprint The very fact that we have moral feelings suggest the presence of a divine law giver. This week I parked in parking garage and every few feet was a sign: “Keep your parking ticket with you.” Someone, somewhere, was going to ask for it!  Sure enough: the restaurant; and kiosk on the way out…  In the same way, feelings of guilt and moral obligation point to a Divine Lawgiver to whom we will give account.  Feelings of guilt and moral obligation are common to all people in all cultures.  And here’s the other thing: they are not present in any form in the animal kingdom.  We all know cats, for example, seem to derive some pleasure from playing with a mouse before they eat it. Yet you never find a cat sniveling under the bed later feeling bad… That’s not just because they are exceptionally evil. It’s just in their nature. If a lion mauls a human, you never find him in the woods later wracked with guilt (Oh, what have I done?)… They don’t feel guilty for acting according to their natures. Yet, we do. Doesn’t the fact that we all have feelings of guilt point to the fact that we are stamped with the image of some Divine Lawgiver, who has implanted in our hearts his sense of right, and truth, and love? Even if we stop believing in God, we can’t shake this idea that we’re going to be held accountable one day. One of my favorite illustrations about this is from Franz Kafka’s The Trial… Kafka intended that to be a picture of the human soul going through life. You have a voice inside you telling you’re guilty.  Doesn’t that point to the fact that one day we’ll face the divine law-giver who has stamped his image and his requirements on our hearts? The Desire Fingerprint He has shown the truth about himself to us, Paul says, and he has revealed it IN US.   There are things in our hearts that tell us we are more than just accidental biology— Like our longings for love and meaning and eternity.  The atheist philosopher Albert Camus said that we long for “love without parting,” but that a universe without God gives us only “the conscious certainty of death without hope.”  Camus called this “the Absurdity of life.” He said life was one long, tragic, absurd comedy, as we seek things from life that life simply can’t provide.  C.S. Lewis had a different answer: A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.  I am not saying that these are proofs of God, but rather evidences of his existence—divine fingerprints. Sure, a fingerprint can be forged, but you’d need a compelling reason to believe it was forged before you wrote it off. In Romans 1, Paul is not so much concerned with building out logical proofs of God as he is pointing us to divine fingerprints which should be easy to recognize and reasonable to accept. Paul’s point is that it takes an agenda not to hear the voice of God speaking in creation, because the voice is sufficiently clear. For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. begins a new Ask Me Anything series based on his new book, Essential Christianity. First up: “What Is Christianity, In a Sentence?” Show Notes: I get asked questions like this a lot because there’s so much misunderstanding about what Christianity is or isn’t. So, I’m going to give you a sentence that I think defines Christianity in a sentence, but first, let’s talk about why so many are confused about it, and why there even seems to be a growing animosity towards Christianity. This new book, Exploring Christianity, works through 10 key words in the book of Romans to help us explore the truth behind Christianity. And we start off with the gospel announcement that Paul makes very clear in chapter 1.  Now, this book is not a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Instead, it uses the major talking points of Paul’s letter to construct a framework of Christian essentials. I’m asking, “If Paul were writing the book of Romans today, to people living in a 21st-century Western post-Christian culture rather than people living in a 1st-century Roman and Jewish culture, how would he write it?” So, what is the gospel announcement that Paul starts the book with? He says the gospel is good news about:  who Jesus is what he’s done what he brings Based on that, here’s a workable definition we can use, then, from this point forward: God, in an act of grace, sent his Son, Jesus, to earth as a man so that through his life, death, and resurrection he could rescue us, reign as King, and lead us into the eternal, full life we were created to enjoy. That’s the one sentence I’d say we can sum up Christianity with. Let’s break that down: God…  The gospel begins with God. God exists, and he’s been moving and speaking throughout history. That’s already a big claim, and we’re only one word in! How can we know he’s there? What is he like? How do we know when he’s speaking to us? I don’t want to “tease” too hard, but we do get into that more in the book. …in an act of grace,… That word “grace” means “undeserved kindness.” Grace, properly understood, is what makes Christianity different from every other spiritual approach. Grace is the entire basis of the gospel: the melody line around which all other Christian truths are played. …sent his Son, Jesus,… Or, as the apostle John explains it, God himself became a man and dwelt among us (John 1:14). More on the what and why of this later. …so he could rescue us… The most important thing about Jesus is not what he taught but what he did. Paul’s letter to the Romans, in fact, speaks very little about what Jesus taught and a whole lot about what he did. It’s not what he taught that saved us, but what he did. The symbol of Christianity is not a lectern but a cross. Christianity is, in its essence, a rescue religion. Which, of course, raises the questions: Why do we need rescuing? And how can a man who lived 2,000 years ago have done something then that can rescue me today? Those are great questions, and we get into them in the book. …reign as King, and lead us into the eternal, full life we were created to enjoy. The gospel is not just about what Jesus came to rescue you from, but what he came to rescue you for: the full, eternal life that we were created to enjoy. As Paul explains, the gospel restores us to the life we were made for all along (the subject of chapters 7 to 10). This is what a lot of Christians, as well as non-believers, forget, but it pulsates through almost every chapter of Paul’s great letter. For more from Essential Christianity, order your copy today! Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

This week, Pastor J.D. answers the question, “Should Christians watch Game of Thrones? (or anything with nudity?)” Show Notes: This is similar to our questions on music, but I do think it’s more specific. I’ll talk about nudity specifically, but let’s expand it a little bit to shows that have various kinds of sinful things in it. First of all, we’ve got to realize that we are in the world. God knows that, and we are supposed to have an awareness of the culture that we’re in, and where it has needs and where the culture is making mistakes. Paul said to be “simple” when it comes to what is evil, but even he demonstrated a familiarity with the culture—like the poets, for instance—even though sin was laced through their work. Another thing to realize is that God created art and entertainment for his glory, as a way of relaxing. Comedy, entertainment, drama and suspense that I can read, watch and listen to may not be specifically about the Great Commission, but it’s serving a God-glorifying purpose because God created us to enjoy art and to participate in his creation. The enjoyment of art is not by itself a sinful or wasted enterprise. Sometimes, there is a place in the arts for the fact of sin because it’s part of an overall redemptive thing that I’m trying to teach. But when it comes to acting and those types of things, like John Piper says, there’s a difference between depicting sin as an act and actually sinning in doing the depicting. But revealing nudity (or taking God’s name in vain, I believe) creates a situation where the actor is not only depicting sin but is themselves sinning while doing the depicting. Their body is actually being exposed, or God’s name would actually be blasphemed. Jesus said that to fantasize about having sex with someone makes you guilty (in God’s eyes) of the sin, and Hollywood skin and sex are meant to arouse. I read an article a little while ago by John Piper, specifically about Game of Thrones. He said that first of all, Jesus died to purify, and the Bible from beginning to end makes a radical call for holiness. Jesus talked in the most extreme terms about pursuing good. Some would say that watching these things will help them be more relevant to lost people, but at what cost? That relevance is never worth more than your personal holiness. Piper says that nudity is not make-believe. If you’re going to value the modesty and self-control of women, you’re not going to do something that celebrates and puts that kind of thing on display. It’s hard to say, “I weep with repentance at Jesus’ death,” while laughing (or intentionally enjoying) the kinds of things that put him on the cross. Piper says prolonged exposure to these things affects us. Lastly, he says there’s no great film that needs nudity to add to its greatness. So, how much is too much? What’s the right balance? Well, there’s no way I could give something that just applies to everyone. I will say, there’s a difference when something has sinful stuff in it and when its central focus is to celebrate and affirm sin. Like Kevin DeYoung says, yes, people are wired differently—but those who say that these things don’t phase them at all may not really know themselves as well as they think they do. And if looking upon what God has forbidden has no affect on you, I’m not sure that’s a good thing after all. VidAngel is a service that my family uses from time to time, with some options that will cut some of this out for you. Overall, if your conscience is troubled, that’s a sign that you should just not watch something. If in doubt, it’s probably safer to not watch something. If you feel like none of this bothers you—just take a week to really pray about some of this, and ask God if it’s really OK, and if it really helps you enjoy more fullness in your relationship with him. Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question. As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast! Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.