Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

This week, Pastor J.D. finishes a two-part series about Jesus’ return. The second question is: “What does it look like to live ready for Jesus’ return?” Show Notes: Let me give you four things that will change in you if you are in a state of readiness for Jesus’ return: Spiritual alertness How would you live differently today if you knew Jesus were coming back tonight? I talked about my church growing up, and it’s a little bit funny to poke fun at now… but one thing my church had that I think we’re missing: the earnest expectation of his return… What if you knew Jesus was coming back today? Wouldn’t it make you ask the question: Am I ready? Am I living today in a way that I’d be happy to see him tonight? It genuinely could be today… this may be your last chance to repent; last chance to share the gospel. Mission urgency If you know the world has an end, and it could be soon, doesn’t that rearrange your priorities Life is consumed by vacation, hobbies, possessions and bucket lists Listen, I’m not a guy who believes God never wants us to have things we enjoy, or that he’s not glorified by our secular work. But I also know life is painfully short, and when the master returns I want to have invested my talents to the fullest for his kingdom… and not be found sitting on them. There’s nothing wrong with a little R&R, hobbies or nice things. But many of us work just so you can go on vacation. That’s the end game. A disciple of Jesus takes occasional vacations so he can work more for Jesus kingdom. Are you investing the resources of your life with the expectation of his return? Hope in suffering Jesus’ return promises us that pain and suffering won’t last forever; all pain is temporary. There’s a Christian philosopher named Cornelius Plantinga who said, “The second coming of Jesus Christ is good news for people whose lives are filled with bad news. If you a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt or in the United States in the early 19th century; if you are an Israelite exiled in Babylon, or a Kosovar exiled in Albania; if you are a woman living in a culture where when your husband gets mad at you he can lock you up in a closet or threaten to have his buddies come and rape you… then you don’t yawn when somebody mentions the return of Jesus Christ.” I might add, if your son just died of cancer; if your marriage just dissolved; if you’re lonely; if your body is wracked with chronic pain—lift your eyes! It doesn’t last forever. It could be tonight. If your life just hasn’t turned out… “the promise of the second coming shows us the ‘good ole days’ are always ahead of us.” Power to forgive In Tim Keller’s book, Forgive,  he points out that Jesus gives you the power to forgive. I’ve seen people who really struggle with bitterness helped by grasping Jesus’ imminent return. When someone wrongs us, we want justice. So we run to the judgment seat of the world and we hop on it. We know what they deserve and we want to help them get it. “Go, God. Give it to him.” We want to be God’s adviser. But listen, we weren’t meant for that throne. It’s too big for us. And it distorts us. Have you ever seen how bitterness destroys someone? Someone is mad at someone else and it colors their whole disposition toward that person, where everything that person does becomes tarnished. Or maybe even they begin to be prejudiced toward whole groups of people. A woman who is angry at her husband thinks all men are bad; someone who suffers injustice at the hands one person in a people group thinks everyone in that people group is bad… We weren’t meant for that throne. The doctrine of the second coming helps us stay off of it because we know, he’s coming back; he will bring justice! And so I can endure injustice for the time being because he’ll set all things right. One thing we have to agree on: We ought to be expecting the return of Jesus anytime and we ought to live like it is 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 a question submitted from Brandon. He asked, “What’s going to happen in the ‘end times?'” Show Notes: I grew up in a church a little obsessed with the Second Coming. On our Sunday School walls we had posters with dates and pictures of dragons and names of politicians. We had our annual prophecy conferences (which were the best attended events of the year); For special Sunday night services we watched the Billy Graham movies about the Tribulation. We had our rapture board games and rapture bumper stickers, “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” And we made rapture jokes like there was no tomorrow. As a kid, I lived in perpetual fear of being left behind. If for any reason I couldn’t find my parents or they didn’t respond in the house when I called them, I’d run through the house yelling “Mom, mom” just sure I’d see her clothes had fallen neatly into a pile on the floor… I had this recurring dream where the rapture happened—this is not a joke—and I got lifted up to the top of the house and then as everyone else went on up to meet Jesus I would drop back down to the earth, revealing that my worst fear had come true: My faith in Christ wasn’t strong enough to get me all the way to heaven. And when the roll was called up yonder I’d be here. And then, when I was in high school, a little book came out that got instant popularity: 88 Reasons why Jesus is Coming Back in 1988. The guy who wrote it said, “Jesus said we can’t know the day or the hour, but he never said we couldn’t know within a 3-day window.” It was a big deal at my Christian school… “We’re going to sit here and wait.” Of course that day came and went. And then next year the author released 89 reasons Jesus would come back in 1989—he said he had  explained he had miscounted the Gregorian calendar, which, of course, happens to the best of us. I have since learned that some of how we approached this topic lacked some balance, but, if you’ll let me be charitable for a minute, there is one thing we lived with that I believe our generation is missing and that is the earnest expectation of his return My pastor would often end our services by saying, “Maranatha.” (The Lord is coming). And then he would say, “And it could be today.” And I really felt like that could be true. I know we have disagreements about the timing of Jesus’ return, and what phrases like “thief in the night” really mean—friendly disagreement, I hope. And I have my own convictions, as I’m sure you do. Instead I want to talk about something we all should have in common: And that is the need to conduct our ministries with the awareness that eternity is real and the Lord is at hand. Eschatology is a fancy word for the theology of the end times—might be the one of the most, if not the most, neglected doctrines in the contemporary church. Many theologians seem to find it embarrassing: the crass, uneducated uncle of Christian theology. But get this: the second coming of Christ is the most talked about doctrine in the Bible. In the 260 chapters of the New Testament, there are 318 references to it. (1 out of every 13 verses mentions it.) And for every 1 prophecy in the Bible concerning Christ’s first advent, there are eight that talk about his second. (We have a whole holiday celebrating his first coming but we barely mention the second.) Furthermore: Almost every moral command given in the New Testament is tied to the second coming at some point. My pastor used to say: “How can we call this doctrine non-essential? It’s in every chapter. Every command is tied to it. To miss it is to miss the whole hope and thrust of the New Testament: ‘Surely I come quickly. Even so come, Lord Jesus.’” I just want a emphasize real quick that there is a commonality all Christians should have and that is the imminence of Jesus’s return. There are basically four positions: Some Christians think he is coming back before… Pre-trib: Tribulation is a 7 year period in which the antichrist and Kirk Cameron do battle… Raptured out before. Post-trib, or “historic premillennialism”: that is the idea that there is a tribulation coming, God will continue to work in the nation of Israel, but the church won’t be raptured up before. The church will be raptured out afterward. The major problem with this one is that it creates problems for the imminence of Jesus’ return. Post-millennial and amillennial. Both of these takes a more metaphorical approach. These positions believes the church has replaced Israel, and all the promises toward Israel have been fulfilled and are being fulfilled in the church. For spiritual purposes, there are no longer Jews and no history for the nation of Israel. That’s a real problem for me as a Bible interpreter, but let me note the positives:. Preserves the imminence: Jesus could return whenever. Help you see the spiritual meanings behind the imagery of Revelation. (my experience vs. reading Beale) There’s one more beyond those and that’s pan-tribulationists: Which means, “I really have no idea, but I know it will all pan out in the end.” Maybe you are there? If you’re curious, I would say I am in the pre-tribulation camp. I would say 80% of the time.  I’m sympathetic to certain elements of the others, but I typically land on that side. I‘ll give you three quick reasons for that.  Unconditional and straightforward nature of the promises (2 Samuel 7:12–16; Genesis 12, 15, 18: actual nation, actual throne occupied by ethnic Jew, actual earthly kingdom). Much of what was promised has been fulfilled literally (Jesus the Jew on a throne), so I assume that what is left will be fulfilled literally. The way the book of Revelation was written Daniel 9:26–27. The 70 weeks are for “my people” Israel. Some things don’t make sense if Israel is not separate from the church. For example, Acts 1:6 Romans 9:4, Paul makes a distinction. “The people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises.” Romans 11:12, 23–24 So what do I mean by all that? The church is similar to Israel in that it is the people of God. Analogously the church is referred to it, as in many ways it fulfills spiritually the promises to Israel. But Scripture demands that their remains a future for the people of God, that is, Israel. For all my post-tribulation friends, you can stay and enjoy it if you want, me and Kirk Cameron are going on to heaven. Here’s the bottom line: There are various viewpoints regarding exactly HOW the End Times events described in the Bible will take place. I know what I believe, but there are very serious, scholarly brothers and sisters in the church who believe differently then I would about the timing of what will all transpire. But no matter what, we know that Christ IS going to return, and that we are to be perpetually READY. 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 submitted from Linda. She asked, “If God Draws People to Faith, Why Has God Not Drawn My Lost Family Member?” Show Notes: Linda’s question came in response to a message I preached at the Summit Church. I talked about John 6:44, Philippians 2:14, and John 1:12. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that you can’t say that Jesus is Lord unless the Holy Spirit gives you the power to say that. So that leads you to the question, “Why hasn’t God done that for this person that I love or the 950 million people in India?” This conversation has rules. Think of it like CrossFit. You have to obey the rules—otherwise when you start lifting heavy weights you’re going to get hurt. I want you to walk with me through them because I think they will help. A lot of this was systematized by John Calvin. I’ve always thought it was helpful that John Calvin identified his favorite verse as Deuteronomy 29:29. It says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that have been revealed belong to us and our children forever.” What this shows you is that there are secret things when it comes to theology and there are revealed things. The revealed things are where you and I live—they belong to us. So we have to ask, what is revealed about God’s desire for us to be saved? The first thing that is revealed is what we said right at the beginning: If you came to Jesus, it’s because he drew you. There’s simply no way to read the verses of the New Testament and not see that if you came to Jesus it’s because he put that desire in you and he drew you to himself. That is what is revealed. There’s another thing that’s revealed in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” So when I think about my family member that needs Jesus, I’m thinking about 1 Timothy 2:4. I’m saying “Lord, you’ve told me your desire for them to be saved. YOu’ve told me that my prayers make a difference. You’ve told me that you will bless me and generations after me and Lord I’m bringing those promises to you to be revealed.” In my mind, I don’t see how that and the truth that for someone to come to Jesus, God has to draw them to himself, I don’t how those two things can coexist in the same universe honestly. It seems like one cancels out the other, but Scripture presents both of them. We have to accept that people only come to Jesus because God draws them and God desires all people to be saved. I know some of you want a resolution on this. Well what if this was a secret thing that John Calvin was talking about? What I want to emphasize to you is that you have to play by the rules. When it comes to think about your own future, your own salvation, that’s where you’re supposed to bring those calvinistic verses in. Those verses are supposed to bring assurance. And when it comes to thinking about the lost, I apply the second one of those: that he desires all to be saved and prayer actually matters. One more thing to ask yourself, what if God’s sovereignty was to put me in this situation and to raise the concern in my heart about this person so that I will pray? What if that is his sovereignty expressed? I say that because of a story in Exodus 34 where Moses prays and as a result, God changed his mind. But then Exodus 34 goes on to say God won’t change his mind. When you put it all together you realize that God was the one who put Moses in the situation where he could see what was happening with the children of Israel, so that he would come to God to bring the request that would “change his mind.” In other words, God put Moses in a place to ask the question that would give God the opportunity to do what he wanted to do all along. So what if these people that are in my life who need God, what if the impulse to pray and share is God sovereignly moving in me so that they can hear and be saved? So here’s my final answer to Linda’s question: Applying the rules and the revealed things of Scriptures means this—you can trust that God is drawing them. You can trust that if they’re not coming, Jesus is lamenting it. You can trust that your prayers are changing things and God desires for them to be saved. He is going to work on your behalf. Don’t get stuck in the secret things. 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 submitted from Ruperto. He asked, “Is it ever OK to lie?” Show Notes: That’s a tough one. The easy answer is to say “no” as we point back to the ten commandments. Thou shall not lie—it doesn’t get more simple than that Matthew 5:37: “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” So Jesus seems to saying that there’s not a lot of grey here. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. But then it becomes a little bit trickier when we consider certain scenarios, even biblical scenarios, where lying doesn’t seem like it’s wrong. It almost seems like it’s the right thing to do. For example, in Exodus 2, Pharaoh had commanded all of the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn baby boy. When Pharaoh called the Hebrew midwives in to ask them why there were Hebrew baby boys still being born, they told him that Hebrew women were different than Egyptian women—that they were more “vigorous” and they’d all have their babies before the midwives got there, which meant they could not murder the baby boys, which was a lie.  Think about Rahab. She lied to the Jericho authorities when they came looking for the two Israelite spies that she had hidden in her roof.  She was called righteous. “By faith Rahab… did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.” Hebrews says that the proof that her faith was genuine was that she hid the spies. (Hebrews 11:31) But of course the problem with that is you start using that reasoning to justify all kinds of lies. You think “I don’t want to hurt someone” so you tell them a lie. You want to be “kind” to them.  If I tell them the truth, they’ll get hurt. If I tell them the truth, I’ll get fired and my family will go hungry. And that is sin. So, how do we interpret this? Well, there is a very important principle that we need to understand and that we also need to be very careful with, and I like how Paul Carter at The Gospel Coalition said this: There is a difference between a general principle and a recognized exception to that principle.  This is very similar to the call we have to obey our governments. Romans 13:1 says, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities… The authorities that exist have been established by God.” There is no caveat given here, and yet, the Bible also tells us that the very man who wrote those words (Paul) would “break the law” by continuing to preach the gospel when the governmental authorities told him not to. So was he a hypocrite? No! He was stating a general principle in Romans 13:1, with the understanding that there are exceptions. Those legitimate exceptions come—and only when—you are lying or disobeying government to prevent yourself from sinning/breaking God’s laws. Protecting Jews, or something like that. When someone else will use the truth to sin in a way that basically makes you complicit in it. Short of those very few, very narrow and limited exceptions, you should tell the truth and trust God with the results, good or bad, because our God is a God of truth and we glorify him most when we radiate truth like he does. 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, “How do I tell someone of another religion they’re wrong?” Show Notes: Great question. This can be one of the hardest parts of evangelism. If someone doesn’t have a religion, it can seem easier to tell them about Christianity and why it’s the only way to heaven. …But if someone is a devout follower of another religion, that can be more difficult. Well, first of all, there was a season in my life when every conversation I had was with a believer of another religion — that’s when I spent two years as a missionary in South East Asia which is a very heavily Muslim country. The role of relationship: You earn the right to be heard. Being a missionary is like paying down a mortgage. The longer you do it, you’re watching that balance shift from mainly interest to when you’re starting to pay down principle. You have to be willing to put in the time. You have to tell them the truth: Paul reasoned with people often proving to them that Jesus had to be the Christ so there is a role for truth telling even without the context of relationship. In Acts 20, Paul told Ephesians elders he was free from their blood because he had fully represented the word of God. The third thought is something I learned as a missionary: Look for the places in their religion that points to Jesus and show that. There was a very popular book that came out in the 70s called Peace Child. It’s about a missionary family, the Richardsons, who were going to minister to an unreached tribe that was pretty brutal… They idealized treachery, they were murderers, even cannibals. The Richardsons were living there and having real trouble communicating the gospel, until one day, right before a war, reps from the other tribe came and offered a “peace child” (one from each grows up in the other) And the Richardsons realized that this “peace child” concept was a redemptive analogy that they could use to communicate the gospel to the Sawi people. Finally, this goes without saying, but prayer. Never talk to people about God more than you talk to God about them. 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 in his recent sermon: “What stands in the way of ethnic unity?” Show Notes: First of all, Satan. The next several chapters of Ephesians are all about how the demonic powers aligned against the church. Satan hates this kind of unity, especially in the church. So, you can be sure he’s going to oppose it. Let me tell you how he might do this to you: He’s going to suggest stuff to you this week about it being too hard. He’s going to whisper into some of your ears this week that this is all about politics even though I have said literally nothing about that. So, be aware who your enemy is in this and resist that Satanic voice Second, pride. Whenever we talk about this, what makes it difficult is it cuts all of us down at the core of our pride Beware where your own personal pride kicks into gear. Church unity, Paul says, is built only on humility. Third, preference. Our cultural preferences are not wrong. We all have them. It’s just sometimes for the sake of unity, we set them aside to help someone else feel more comfortable. Vance Pitman: “The way to know you are part of a truly multiethnic church is that you often feel uncomfortable.” Many of us, he says, say we want a multi-cultural church but we really only want a multi-colored one, with a bunch of people with different colored faces all doing things our way. People sometimes say to me, “Well, I don’t like it when we do that in worship.” And I want to say, “Well, maybe this whole thing is not about what you like. If you want to be somewhere where it’s all about you, go pay $800 for a night at the RitzCarlton where it will be all, entirely, exclusively about you. But this church is about the glory of Jesus and the urgency of the Great Commission, and so when you come here, that’s what you should expect it to be about.” Fourth, naivete. One of the things that my friends of color tell me is that many of us in the majority culture don’t think we have a culture. Other people have cultures; ours is the standard against which all others are measured. Or sometimes we refer to other people as having ethnicities. I hate to burst your bubble, but white, Caucasian is an ethnicity and has its own cultural perspective. We have our own, particular views of conflict resolution, romance, parenting and child-rearing; money; dress; music; time; respectfulness; family and so many other things. Some cultural perspectives are different; some are wrong; and some are right. The least we can do is work hard to understand the cultural perspectives we all bring into this place. Fifth, poor listening skills. For a lot of us, when it comes to discussions like these, our poor listening skills really begin to display themselves. James in the Bible tells us that we should be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” and If there were ever a place for us to apply this verse, it is in this area. Yes, there’s a place for you to speak. “Be slow to speak” doesn’t mean “never speak,” it just means that you listen far more than you talk. So, that raises these questions. When it comes to talking about this stuff: Do you seek to understand more than you seek to be understood? Here’s the question: What if we had a church where people listened to each other like that–where we gave each other the benefit of the doubt in these situations? And before you come back at them with a solution, or a reason why their pain is illegitimate, to at least validate it and sit with them in it. That’s what love is. We don’t want to be a church that focuses so much on this relationship (vertical) that we neglect the pain of each other here (horizontal). Paul tells us the gospel compels us to bear each other’s burdens, and that starts with listening to each other. Sixth, ignorance of our history. Many of us in the majority culture have proven woefully ignorant of how the racial situation in our country came to be. We barely understand what things like the Jim Crow laws were or what kind of societal disparities they created. I DON’T mean we embrace revisionist history like the 1619 project or adopt CRT approaches to politics or education—those approaches are often as worldly and problematic as what they are trying to correct. That’s not what I’m suggesting here. But don’t let the existence of other revisionist histories keep you from reading things that challenge your own revisionist view of history, which is what a lot of us learned growing up. Of all people, Christians should be willing to embrace the truth, and it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that many of our ancestors were depraved sinners. That’s what our gospel teaches us! We should acknowledge the truth when it comes to things like the history of the church. All cultures, all of them, have wrong assumptions and moral blindspots, and one of the values of being in relationship is you can point out those blindspots. Some of my cultural assumptions may make me blind to injustices happening around me that I’ve grown comfortable with because they don’t affect me directly. Others should point those out to me. We need to be willing to listen to each other and stand against unrighteousness wherever we see it, whether or not those concerns are usually associated with “our tribe.” As we’ve said, in here, we don’t primarily identify with the elephant or the donkey, but with the Lamb—and he’s on the side of ‘all things justice’. Y’all, is there any wonder our society can’t accomplish this? Our society wants this, but they can’t achieve it. But, as Paul explains in Ephesians, what the law is unable to accomplish, the power of new life accomplishes in the gospel. 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 that was submitted by Jesse. She asked, “What does it mean to be “poor in spirit?” Show Notes: We all love the verse: Matthew 5:3. If you’ve grown up in church, you know it: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It sounds so poetic and idealistic… but I’m going to be honest with you. When I try to really get my mind around that verse, I don’t naturally like it. I’ve never wanted to be poor in spirit — I’ve spent my entire life trying to become anything but poor in spirit. I guarantee you also don’t really want to be poor in spirit. Maybe some of you listening really grew up poor, or went through a “poor season” (like college). When you’re poor, you feel helpless. It takes away your agency, your power, your freedom… it’s no fun! I’ve always wanted to be “capable in spirit” or “competent in spirit…” if anything, at least “middle class in spirit!” That’s just how we’re wired as people. So what does it mean to be poor in spirit and why do people say it’s so important? First, it means that you have no worthiness at all by which you can claim God’s blessing. When you come to God, there’s literally nothing about you that you can bring to God as a way of compelling him to bless you. Second, you realize that you have no ability to obtain God’s blessing. God only fills empty hands. God seems to have a way of bringing his people into a situation of helplessness before using them greatly. I think of the situation of Gideon and the Israelite army in Judges 7. God cut the Israelite army down from 32,000 to just 300… and even at 32,000, they would’ve been outnumbered 5:1 by the other army. And yet, God was making them totally dependent on him, and the Israelites won the battle miraculously without suffering any losses. At times, God creates in us a “poverty of spirit” so that we are reliant on him, and so that he is set up to perform a miracle. Every miracle in the Bible started with a problem that no person could fix… no problems, no miracles. Here’s a controversial sentence: in one sense, Jesus was the neediest person who ever lived. I don’t mean that he was sinful or didn’t have capability in himself, but that he demonstrated dependence on the Father. It’s why he was so often in prayer. He retreated to prayer to be able to obtain the resources of the Father. We have to understand how needy we are, but also how willing our Father is to help us in our need. God doesn’t delight in hurting us, but he delights when we trust him. So often, he’ll put us in the presence of a problem we can’t fix, and we’ve got no choice but to lean on him. When you’re flat on your back, you’re looking in the right direction. If dependence is the objection, weakness becomes your advantage. Scripture warns us to beware our strengths; not our weaknesses. A.W. Tozer said, “It is doubtful whether God can use a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply. It’s like Hudson Taylor said: “[God] wants you to have something far better than riches and gold—or personal charisma or talent—and that is helpless dependence upon him.” Dependence is the objective, so weaknesses become our advantage. 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 that was submitted by Annie. She asked, “How should a believer handle guilt from sinning?” Show Notes: That’s a great question. To be very upfront, there are sins in my life that I would love to leave behind in the rearview mirror, and it’s not from a lack of sincerity or fasting and praying or accountability, but there are sometimes that we fall back into patterns that run deep. And they grieve me. It was very encouraging for me to learn that John Newton, and this was published in the book Letters of John Newton, talked about how as an 86 year old, he thought by at this point in his life (and this was the guy who wrote “Amazing Grace”) he thought he’d be past some of the struggles of sin, but he said some of them feel harder and more difficult than ever. It was encouraging to me to know that there’s not anything fundamentally wrong with me — or that I’m not saved. I wrote a book several years ago called “Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart,” all about the assurance of salvation, which is something I struggled with for a long time. And for a lot of people, one of the biggest reasons for that struggle is because of this – the fact that we still keep sinning after we’re saved. And then comes the guilt… And the enemy (after tempting us to sin) whispers, “If you were a REAL Christian, you wouldn’t have done that. No way God still loves you. No way you have this whole ‘salvation’ thing right.” So how do we handle that? And how do we differentiate conviction over sin post-salvation from not really being saved? There are two big things I’d say here: First, ask yourself, have you truly repented? Repentance of sin always leads to some kind of change in behavior.  It’s like sitting down in a chair… You can tell the chair how awesome it is and how beautiful it is, but until you’ve transferred the weight of your body to that chair, you haven’t actually sat down and trusted the chair. Belief in the Bible always implies action. So belief in the lordship of Christ doesn’t just mean with your lips saying he’s Lord; it means you are transferring surrender and your authority from yourself to him. Sometimes that doesn’t look like victory. Sometimes, it looks like bitter struggle. The struggle against sin is proof of the repentance, and the very fact that you want to escape it is an indication that your heart is turned away from sin, and that you want Christ to be Lord of your life, and that is a kind of repentance. I don’t meant to imply that this change means a complete change of behavior where you never struggle with sin again — sometimes it’s a kind of sin where you’re entering into that struggle… but there is some kind of change. Here’s the second thing: Once you know you’ve truly repented, you have to embrace that God’s acceptance is the power that liberates you. It’s not the reward for having liberated yourself.  It’s only the assurance of his love enables you to overcome. I often try to break the spell (materialism, lust, etc) of sin as a way of proving I’m saved and earning God’s love. But the gospel truth is that God’s love is given to me before I overcome, and stays with me whether I overcome or not. And here’s the irony, only by believing that will I develop a love for God that enables me to overcome.  The irony of the Christian life is that the only ones who get better/escape sin are those that realize that God’s acceptance of them has nothing to do with whether they escape sin/ get better.  So again: God’s acceptance is the power that liberates you from sin, and not the reward from you having liberated yourself. So in the end, once you understand that truth – that there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more, and nothing you can do to make him love you any less – that’s when you begin to understand the depth and the beauty of the gospel. Of course, you SHOULD feel conviction over your sin – but not the kind that crushes you; instead, the Spirit in us uses that conviction to bring about change in us while reassuring us of his everlasting love for us. 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. welcomes back Pastor Tony Merida, author of Gather, to answer, “How do you find a good church?” Show Notes: J.D.: Every now and then on Ask Me Anything, I get the chance to sit down with someone who I think can answer a question a whole lot better than me, and that’s the case today. I’m sitting here with Dr. Tony Merida, the author of several books including his newest book, called Gather. Tony, the question today is, how should someone go about finding a good, solid local church? What qualities are underrated and which are overrated in looking for a new church? Tony Merida: The Reformers used to say there are two marks of a church: the right preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. Tied to the sacraments was church discipline. That’s not all there is, but those are two starting points by which, if you don’t have those, you don’t really have a church. If you don’t have the gospel, you don’t have a church. So the first question I’d ask is, what does this church believe that the gospel message is, and do they not just assume it, but preach it all the time? Is it the “main thing?” Beyond that, you might start with Acts 2:42-47. You have what seems like the “perfect” church. I think you can categorize what Luke describes in that church with four vital signs, so to speak. Biblical nourishment Loving fellowship Radical generosity Constant interaction (with each other) There’s also vibrant worship evident, and then there’s “word and deed” outreach — or mission. Evangelism seemed to be a daily thing. Those are some good starting points to look for in a healthy church. J.D.: So, you start with the right teaching of the gospel. How important is expository preaching? Tony: I don’t know that I would say it is necessarily expository preaching that is the absolute requirement; instead, I would ask, is the preaching substantive and is Christ exalted from his Word week by week? Or to say it another way, is there Word-driven preaching present? I don’t think you have to go through a book of the Bible at all times, necessarily, for it to be considered a Bible church (though I think a Bible-teaching pastor will eventually do a lot of that). I like to say expository preaching is the “meat and potatoes” of our preaching, but occasionally, we go out to eat. As far as community is concerned, it’s good to consider if the church is just a place where people simply come and go rather than thinking of the church as a people that we can serve. If I were looking for a church, I’d be in prayer. I’d do my research. I’d want to try to meet with pastors and leaders… It’s not easy. There’s a whole lot more to church than the website. 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 in his recent sermon: “How does the church achieve diversity?” Show Notes: We must seek to reach all people in the Triangle, not just one kind.  It’s clear from what Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 9 that he was focused on reaching different kinds of people in Corinth, not just one kind. You had Jews and people under the law; you had Gentiles and those outside the law. He was trying to reach them all. And that was HARD. Do you know how much easier it would have been for Paul to just focus on one kind of person? To go to one side of the city and plant a church focused only on reaching Jews, and then go to the other side and plant one that reached Gentiles? To the Jews, he said, I became like a Jew: Which means, I did Jewish things. I ate Jewish food. I listened to Jewish music. I entered into Jewish struggles. I wore Jewish clothes. He made all of these cultural adaptations to reach people.  Jesus died for all peoples at all stages of life. And to reach them, we all have to be willing to turn down certain things and lean hard into other ones, and, I’m going to tell you, that’s hard. It also means all of us are muted on some of our perspectives to keep from causing unnecessary division in the body. In 1 Corinthians 8-9, Paul was willing to be quiet, or muted, on secondary convictions he was fully convinced were right, because he thought the unity of the church and it’s evangelistic mission were more important than maintaining a uniformity of perspective in all things. We have people leave this church all the time because we don’t say exactly what they want on some political or social issue. We say too much about some issue. We don’t say enough. I’m not saying all perspectives are equally valid, and I’m certainly not saying we are ever muted or unclear about injustice or wrong—the sanctity of life; the evils of racism, equality under the law We see a great example of this philosophy at work in the early church. It’s such an important example, but so overlooked by so many when they read Acts. In Acts 15, Jewish and Gentile believers were so divided over a cultural issue that they could no longer worship together. Churches led by Gentiles were experiencing a “Jewish flight” and vice versa. So the church leaders came together to try to work something out. Their solution, however, at first, seems rather confusing. They basically said that Gentiles should (a) avoid sexual immorality and (b) avoid eating things that had died by strangulation (both of which were regularly practiced by Gentiles) (Acts 15:29). The reason for the prohibition on sexual immorality seems clear—stop going to prostitutes! But the prohibition on eating something strangled? Of the entire Hebrew law, that is the regulation they thought was essential to enforce? James explains the reasoning for these two regulations: “‘For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him …’” (Acts 15:21). In other words, in every city there were a lot of Jews; lost Jews—who needed to be reached for Jesus. And when Gentiles were in the parking lot barbecuing things that had been strangled, that would produce a major stumbling block for the Jews. The Apostles knew that if these unsaved Jews came into the church and Gentiles were in the back choking the gophers and throwing them on the grill, the Jews would not be able to stomach it. And then they wouldn’t get a chance to hear the gospel and be saved. The Apostles said, “Yes, you Gentiles have a right to eat choked gophers if you want, gross as it is, but we are asking you to forgo that right so that more unsaved Jews in your community can hear the gospel.” And then James, leader of the Jerusalem church, wraps it up by uttering one of the most important phrases in the whole New Testament for a church’s mission philosophy: “… we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles [or Jews] who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19 NIV).  Some of you are passionate about politics and which solutions are best for society—and I want to be clear: that’s a good thing. But in the church let’s not let a secondary, culturally-shaped perspective on the best strategies or candidates or particular interpretation of an event become synonymous with the identity of the gospel, because what’s when the gospel suffers and people stay lost. We do all this for the sake of the gospel, “that we might save some!” 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.