Gospel-Centered Change, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The Gospel doesn't change you through external pressure. It changes you through internal transformation.

How does that internal transformation happen? By abiding in the news of His love. The Gospel saturates you with the reality of His love.

And guess what happens? Your heart begins to love Him, 1 John 4.19. We love Him because He first loved us. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. You know, our journey with God begins when someone explains the Gospel to us, how Jesus died for our sins and rose again to bring us new life. And as we believe that truth and begin to grow in our faith, we start to wonder, okay, now what?

What do I do next? But today, pastor J.D. Greer explains that true growth in the Christian life doesn't come from doing or learning more things. Growth happens when you plunge deeper into the full Gospel message. And whether you've been following Christ for several days or several decades, there's always a longer and deeper path to follow. Pastor J.D.

titled today's message Gospel Center Change. So if you have your Bible, I want you to pull it out, and I want you to open it to John chapter 15, verse 9. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.

What an astounding statement. Think of the Father's love for His Son, what that must be like. It's eternal.

It's divine. It's God, the perfect Father's love for His perfect Son. You parents love your children. The love that you have for your children is a pale reflection of the eternal love of the Father for the Son. That is the love that the Father, that Jesus loves us with. And Jesus says, make your home in that.

Make your home in that. Abiding means resting in His love. Abiding in Him is not so much about things that you are to do for Him as it is resting in His thoughts about you.

These things I've spoken to you that my joy might be in you and that your joy may be full. Verse 12, this is my commandment that you love one another is I have loved you. Greater love is no one than this than someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do whatever I command you. By the way, I've tried this verse on my friends and it doesn't work. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

It works for Jesus, not for me. Jump down to verse 16. You do not choose me, but I chose you. I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, He might give it to you.

Verse 17, these things I command you so that you will love one another. All right, here we go. This passage shows us, first of all, number one, this passage shows us what spiritual change is. Let me just make sure, let me summarize this in case you didn't totally get it.

Here we go. What spiritual change is? Spiritual change is the life of Jesus coming into you. God had told Adam and Eve that the day they ate of the forbidden fruit that they would surely die. If you've ever read Genesis 2, you'll notice they didn't drop dead the moment they ate the fruit.

So you're like, well, what happened? Did they not die? Did they not keep His word?

No, their bodies began to die, but immediately their spirit, that part of them that was alive in God, died. And the result was their heart began to desire the wrong things. No longer did they desire God's glory, they desired their glory. No longer did they put God first, they put other things first.

No longer were they God-centered, they became radically self-centered. And that was spiritual death. So that you and I are now in a condition where we choose sin because that's what's in our hearts, it's what we desire.

Right? I mean, you may have heard this phrase before, but we're not sinners because we sin, we sin because we're sinners. Spiritual death is at work in our heart and so we just choose that. So the point is, any change that lasts has to happen on the desire level so that we begin not just to do right things again, but we begin to desire right things again. Which leads me to number two, and that is how spiritual change happens. How spiritual change happens is by abiding in Jesus' love for you, by making your home in it. In the gospel are all the resources necessary for spiritual growth. And by abiding in the gospel, dwelling in it, we change. You see, the gospel is not a list of things that we're to do for God. The gospel is the glorious good news of what God has done for us. It's not a list of behaviors to be adopted. The gospel is an announcement to be believed.

It's not good advice, it's good news. So by resting in the news of God's love given as a gift in Christ, that's how the life of God flows into us. That's how the Holy Spirit is released inside of us. Let me show you this really quickly from a couple other places in scripture just so you don't think I'm making this up. Colossians 1 verse 6, this was Paul, the apostle Paul talking.

I love this. In the whole world, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing just as it does also among you. Here's the point, here's the question. When Paul thinks about gospel growth, what's he talking about? Is he thinking about more people in the world getting saved?

Yes. But he's also thinking about the church that is already saved growing deeper in the gospel. What's it mean for the Summit Church to grow in the gospel?

Does it mean that we grow and expand and reach more people? Absolutely, that's growth in the gospel. But it also means that the members of the Summit Church grow in their understanding of the greatness of God, what links God went to to save them, and how great and good God is. That is growth in the gospel. And in fact, I would tell you that until we're good at that part of the gospel, we'll never be really effective at the other parts.

Because it's as we are convinced of the power of transformation in our lives that we have the confidence to go into the homeless, the orphaned, the prisoner, the young one, mother in high school dropout and declare the freedom of Christ to them. That's growth in the gospel. Give you another example, 2 Peter chapter 1. Peter, what he does in this passage, 2 Peter 1, the Apostle Peter gives you kind of a list. It's like a pyramid of spiritual growth. He says, add your faith virtue, add your virtue knowledge, add to your knowledge self-control.

Then he adds two or three other things on top of that. I remember the first time I heard this passage taught on. I was sitting there and a guy actually used an overhead projector to teach it. You all remember those overhead projector, flannel board, overhead projector, eight track tapes?

That was my childhood. So he has this overhead projector and he puts up a picture of a spiritual pyramid. And he says, here we go. We got the different levels of spirituality, faith, virtue, which is being nice to people, according to him. Knowledge, which in our tradition always meant learning more doctrines about eschatology, you know, the rapture.

Then on top of that was self-control, which for a guy was always interpreted to the filter of sexual lust. Okay. And then he said this, he said, I want you to figure out what level you're on and then make a resolution to go home this week and climb up a level.

I was like, Oh, where am I? Faith? I'm not that nice to people. I'm kind of a self-centered jerk. I knew that at 13. Then, you know, on top of that was not, I don't know much about the rapture. Then there was like, you know, beyond that, there was self-control.

I'm like, Oh, these things are all an issue. I don't know where I am, but that's not the point that Peter was making. He wasn't giving you a to-do list to climb.

I'm giving you a ladder to climb. In fact, if you read down, you'll see about verse nine, he says, if these things are not developing in you naturally, you've forgotten the gospel. So in other words, the way that you begin to climb that pyramid is you remember the gospel.

You think about the gospel because as you dwell on and abide in the gospel, faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, brotherly love, all those things begin to grow in you as naturally as roses on a rose bush because you are alive and there is life at work in you. You see, there are two kinds of growth. Let me summarize like this. There's two kinds of growth.

There's mechanical growth, which is growth externally, growth by external pressures. Give you a really easy example of this. I've done enough marriage counseling to recognize this scenario pretty quickly. You get a couple that comes in and one of the two has dragged the other one in. Sometimes, not always, but maybe usually, the wife has dragged the husband in because the husband has no interest in having a good relationship. The wife has finally though dropped the hammer and said, I'm leaving you. So the husband in desperation comes with her to sit in front of the marriage counselor and she begins to list out her complaints and the most unusual response takes over this guy. He blubbers.

Sometimes he cries. He makes promises that he's going to change because he doesn't want her to leave. Now, in actuality, all his promises to change have nothing to do with a new love for her or a genuine repentance. It's that he doesn't want her to leave. So what happens almost invariably is he will change for a period of time until he thinks there's no longer a threat of her leaving and then guess what?

Bam! Back to the way that he was because he wasn't changing genuinely. He was changing because of external pressure. Well, see, in the same way, religiously, people change sometimes for all the same reasons. Fear of punishment. They're not genuinely in love with God. They just don't want to go to hell. They don't want God to curse them.

Maybe pride. It's like, well, this is what good Christians are and this is why. I can't tell you how many times I hear the phrase, that's how I was raised. This is just how we are.

We're better than everybody else. This is how I was raised. So, you know, it's pride. It's like, this is what I am. It might be a desire for something else. If I obey God, then he's going to bless my life, give me a stable marriage, take me to heaven.

Right? It's using God, not loving God. That's mechanical change.

It's external pressures from the outside. Here's another example. This is, I'm your pastor, this is what I do.

I sit around all day long and I think up analysis. Metal. How do you change metal?

Okay, well, there's two ways, right? One is you could heat metal up and if you heat metal up, then you can forge it into a different shape. But if you don't do that, you just try to bend it, what happens? Well, one of two things.

Either you bend it like this and you let it go and then it snaps back to what it was, or it breaks. When people begin to change religiously, that doesn't come from a change internally in their desires, one of those two things happens. As soon as the external motivations are gone, bam, they go back to the way they were. Which is why sometimes when God disappoints some people, a dream doesn't turn out, they get mad at God and they leave God. And they're like, God, if you're not going to give me this, I'm not going to follow you. That was part of the deal.

I did this for you, you did this for me. They were never following God for God's sake. They were following God because God was a better means to some in. Or they break spiritually. They just get to a point, they're like, I hate this. I've been drug to church and always feel like I got to do this.

I just, I want to be this over here. They leave their husband, they leave their wife, they do all this stuff. That's just the real them coming out because they had all this pressure on them and they broke spiritually. The gospel changes you in an entirely different way. It doesn't change you through external pressure. It changes you through internal transformation. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Nowadays, we hear lots of thoughts on how to be more holy, but learning to be holy doesn't come from working on various aspects of your character. Instead, it comes by focusing on Christ, the true source of holiness. It's time to develop a better understanding of the gospel message and its implications for your life.

And even more, it's time to replace empty religious practice with gospel centered transformation. We'd love to send you an eight session Bible study, including DVD video teaching and study guides. This comes as our thanks for your gift to the ministry today. Reserve it right now by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or visit us online at jdgreer.com. Thanks for being with us today. Now let's get back to the final moments of today's message. Here's Pastor J.D.

And how does that internal transformation happen? By abiding in the news of his love. The gospel saturates you with the reality of his love, specifically the announcement about what God did for you in Christ.

And guess what happens? Your heart begins to love him. First John 4 19, we love him because he first loved us. We love him because why? Because we made a decision at church that we were going to start loving God. No, you can't decide to start loving something. We love him because our heart got captivated by God and we begin to love him naturally. It just began to flow out of us because we were changed.

You following this? The example I used a few weeks ago is, as I said, if you were out running an errand and when you got home, there was a friend of yours sitting on your porch and said, while you were out, somebody came that you owed a bill to and I paid the bill for you. And I asked you the question, I was like, what would your response be to that person?

The answer depends on how much they paid. If they paid some undue postage, then you slap them on the back. You're like, thanks. You're a great friend.

Appreciate you doing that. Right? If they're like, no, well, actually the IRS had finally caught up with you. You owe 10 years of back taxes.

It was $160,000 and they were going to take you to prison. At that point, you don't slap them on the back and say, thank you. You fall at their feet and say, command me.

Right? When we are overwhelmed with what God has done for us in the gospel, our heart begins to grow in love for him. Y'all, so many Christians go off on this point. If you listen, you'll hear all these alternate ways that Christians put forward for strategies for change.

That a lot of churches that you and I grew up in, the emphasis was on the rules. This is how you're supposed to live. This is what you're supposed to watch. This is what you're supposed to listen to. This is what you're supposed to say and not say. This is what you're supposed to drink and not drink.

Smoke and not smoke. Anybody grow up in a church like this? Now, I'll be honest with you.

I don't have problems, just to be clear, just so I'm not inconsistent. I don't have problems with guidelines for how Christians ought to live because face it, we all have them, don't we? I mean, even at the most relaxed church, I feel like our church is pretty relaxed. Even at the most relaxed church, it's generally understood girls should not come to church in bikini tops and guys should not come in Speedos. Fair? So there are guidelines, but we understand that. But do you look at us and say, well, you bunch of legalists?

No. The problem at the churches that some of us grew up at was that the emphasis was on the list of rules and on things we were to do for God and not on what God has done for us. Because I don't care how good, how lenient, or how strict the rules are, when the focus is on what to do for God, it will never bring change into your life. Change only flows from standing in awe of what God has done for you. Some churches say, well, the way that you change is by doctrine.

You got to learn more. So churches are like big classrooms where you get stuff full of knowledge. Some say, no, no, no, it's not that. It's the radical obedience.

It's just crazy amounts of generosity. That's how you really change. Others say, no, it's through this like spiritual baptism. You get filled up with faith and the Holy Ghost and have all these spiritual gifts. That's when your Christian life hits hyperdrive right there. I love what Paul says. This is one of my favorite little three-verse segments of Paul. 1 Corinthians 13, verse 1.

Look at this. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, spiritual gifts, oh yeah, that's a pretty good one. When you can sit around and converse in an unknown language with an angel, that's varsity. But I have not love. I'm a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. If I've got prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge. In other words, not only do I understand everything there is to know about systematic theology, I also understand mysterious things. I can explain Calvinism.

I can tell you exactly what it is. That's what Paul's saying here. And I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but I have not love. I am nothing. If I gave away everything I have and I delivered up my body to be burns and have not love, I'm nothing.

Now again, face it, Paul's list is varsity here by anybody's standard. Right? I mean, spiritual gifts and great faith and radical obedience. When the offering plate goes by and you pull out a match and light yourself on fire, that's radical at a whole new level.

Agreed? See what Paul said? Unless those things are flowing out of a heart of love, it is worthless. And love in the heart cannot be produced by any of those things. Love in the heart is produced by something different, something radically different. And that is that we begin to love him because he first loved us. Love in our hearts for God will only be produced by a felt knowledge of his love for us.

Love in the heart for God is produced by a felt sense of the love of God. Every time I walk into the Christian bookstore, there's like a new strategy that I see. You ever notice this for Christian?

If you just get this down, then your life is different. I was doing one the other day and they're like, oh, the mega church is the problem and I got this religious show and everybody's talking. And so we need to do away with the traditional church altogether and go to missional communities. Now, you know me well enough to know I am all for getting the audience out of the audience and into the ministry. We say that all the time here, but I read these books and I'm like, I don't think they get it because it's not a new strategy that's going to produce change in their hearts.

I don't care how good the strategy is. It's the gospel. You can live in a commune with the apostle Paul one-on-one for five years. That's not going to produce change in your heart. Standing in awe of what God has done for you, that's what restructures your hearts.

You see, here's why. Sin at its core is a worship problem. It's a worship problem. It's radical self-centeredness. You worship yourself, not God.

Guess what? If sin begins as a worship problem, if the way into sin is worship, then the way out of sin is worship. The worship of your heart's got to be changed. That's why religion can't do that, because religion can't change the worship of your heart. It's like John Owen the Puritan used to say, religion trims off the fruits of sin, but it doesn't pull out the roots of sin.

That takes something altogether different. That's why I told you we need to be set free, not just from sin, but from religious substitutes for the gospel as well. That's why the most important central element in what we do here is the gospel. That's why I told you you hear it in every sermon. Charles Spurgeon, a famous British pastor, he said that at the end of every sermon, he plowed a trough back to the gospel. I used to think that what that meant was that at the end of whatever he was talking about, you know, he's talking about this every year, he takes a hard left turn and goes toward the four spiritual laws.

Here's how you'd be saved, because that's just important. That's what I thought it meant. But that's not what he means. Think of the image of a trough.

A trough is something water flows through, right? What he was saying was, no matter what I'm talking about, marriage, generosity, self-control, no matter what I'm talking about, the power to do whatever it is I'm saying is going to flow from the cross of Jesus Christ. The water of life flows to the trough that I plow back to the gospel, because that's the place that power comes from. I'm going to read you this, Kevin DeYoung, and then I'm going to show you what we're going to do in this series. I'm going to do this quickly. Listen to this.

Kevin DeYoung. No doubt some Christians need to be shaken out of their lethargy, but there are also a whole bunch of Christians who need to be set free from their performance-minded shackles. I promise you that some of the best people in your churches are getting tired.

They don't need more statistics and more stories about how bad everything is in the world. They need to hear about Christ's death and resurrection. They need to hear about how we are justified by faith apart from the works of the law. They need to hear the old, old story once more, because the secret of the gospel is that we actually do more when we hear less about all we need to do for God and hear more about what God has already done for us. The gospel produces in us what no amount of religion ever could, a desire for God. I want to introduce you to a gospel prayer that I have learned to pray, something I wrote over the last three or four years that I pray literally every single day that just saturates my thinking in the gospel. Here are the four phrases of the gospel prayer, and I would encourage you for every day of this series, every day of this series, to pray these four phrases and just see what happens.

Here they are. In Christ, there's nothing I can do to make you love me more, nothing I have done that makes you love me less. Gift righteousness.

If you really believe that, your whole mentality would be different this morning. If you lived perfectly all week long, God would not love you anymore, and if you messed up worse than you've ever messed up before this Friday, he doesn't love you less because it's gift righteousness. It's what God earned for you in your place and gave you as a gift. This goes to war against works righteousness.

Number two, you were all I need today for everlasting joy. It's one thing to know that God accepts you fully in Christ. It's another thing for that to be the weightiest reality in your life, where you say, I don't need the approval of people. I don't need the nicest car, the nicest house, the raise, the job. Those things would be nice if I got them, but you know what?

I don't need them. You are all I need. Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy. That goes to war against my idolatry. First one goes to war against my works righteousness. Second one, my idolatry.

The third one, as you've been to me, so I will be the others. That's radical generosity, right? As God has poured himself out for me, now I'm going to pour myself out for others. Number four, as I pray, I'll measure your compassion by the cross and your power by the resurrection.

That's two different things. That's audacious faith because when you start seeing the world through the lens of how God feels about them as expressed by the gospel, then all of a sudden you begin to pray these crazy big prayers. The other thing that leads you to is reckless faith, audacious faith and reckless faith. Reckless faith, what I mean is this, is when God doesn't answer your prayer and you're disappointed, you don't doubt his love for you because that was expressed to you at the cross. Your compassion is measured by the cross, your power by the resurrection, and so when you don't do what I think you should do, then I'll trust the God that was revealed at the cross, even when I can't see it right in front of me. Reckless faith, I want you to pray there's four things daily. Saturate yourself in the gospel, and I want you to watch the transformation that will happen in your heart. Are you ready for God to transform your heart today? Then keep plunging deeper into the gospel in your own daily life and in your local church, and as you join us each day here on Summit Life. If you are new to our program, you picked a great time to join us. We are just kicking off a brand new teaching series called Gospel, and it's a study that's absolutely central to our mission as a ministry.

We actually have a couple of resource options for you this month. The first is based on something we call the gospel prayer. This prayer is all about our identity in Christ, and to help these truths sink in, we have a simple book of the gospel prayer catechism.

A catechism is a summary of Christian principles in the form of questions and answers used for instruction. So we're sending a copy to all of our gospel partners this month for their ongoing monthly support, and we would love to have you join that team of regular givers. We're also featuring Pastor JD's gospel video curriculum that goes along with our teaching series. Each session begins with a video from Pastor JD, and then based on that teaching, you'll open your study guide and Bible and work through the questions and prayers.

For a gift of $50 this month, we'll send you the DVDs and five study guides to get you started. Call right now. Our number is 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220, or you can always give online at jdgrier.com. Pastor JD is also a bestselling author. His books include Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart and Gaining by Losing, as well as Gospel and His most recent book, Just Ask. You can purchase a copy of these books as well as other biblical resources from Summit Life when you visit us online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Bidevich, and next time we'll discover how the gospel is revealed throughout all of Scripture from beginning to end as our series called Gospel Continues. So be sure to listen next week to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.