Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

In the second of two parts on the topic, Pastor J.D. addresses whether or not a Christian can be a socialist.

Show Notes:

Two ways socialism fails as a worldview biblically:

• Human depravity: all humans in power grow depraved.
  • The US has typically understood that it is better to keep power distributed via checks and balances. Government by its nature has incredible power, and when they are put in charge of everyone’s livelihoods, massive corruption is almost always the result.
  • Best to keep the economy free and let the market keep people fair.
  • If you assume everybody is depraved, the question is how powerful you want any one group depraved people to hold. I’d rather them hold a knife than a gun. So I prefer the way a free market keep’s people’s depravity in check to a group of government bureaucrats with much more expansive power.
• Second thing: Human dignity: God gave humans the ability to prosper. Government needs to get out of the way. When humans are given freedom and obstacles are removed, they prosper.
  • Governments don’t help people by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
  • So, bottom line: Government can help us play fair, but it can’t replace human initiative and should itself be held in check because government leaders are still human, and subject to the same vices they are trying to prevent in others.
• W hat does the Bible say? We always need to be careful, because terms like capitalism and socialism are terms developed long after the Bible, but there are certain principles that apply:
  • The Bible encourages human initiative—it certainly commends private property ownership, and it warns us against unchecked depravity.
• Economically: Time and time again, socialism has destroyed countries that embrace its ideology.
• A lot of modern socialists cite countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway as examples of socialism’s “success.”
  • But those countries don’t really have socialist systems – at least not fully. They’re more like welfare states, with some state-run entities (like health care), but those state-run entities are supported by an underlying market economy.
• We live in a fallen world... it will never be perfect. Socialism is a utopic vision. The free market is built on the understanding that until Jesus comes back all human structures, including economics, will be depraved, and the best way to keep depravity in check is to keep power distributed across people than concentrated in the hands of a few.

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This week, Pastor J.D. answers a listener question from Kelly who asked, “What Is the Occult? Is It Real?”

Show Notes:

• The occult IS real.
  • It can refer to different things... witchcraft, worshiping pagan gods, and attempts to communicate with demons and demonic forces...
  • It’s difficult to figure out the exact statistics, but a 2018 article in Newsweek cited studies that estimated there are about 1.5 million practicing witches in the U.S. alone...
  • Last fall, NBC News cited a 2014 Pew Research Center study increased that projection several times over in assessing that 0.4% of Americans identified as pagan, Wiccan or New Age.
  • Which may not seem like a lot, but even that number from 2014 means there’s been a significant increase in people who believe these things, and again, that’s just in America alone.
  • Other parts of the world and other cultures have deep ties to witchcraft and the occult — witch doctors are still very prevalent (and very powerful) in many parts of Africa, for example.
• Flirting with the occult is wicked.
• For many, they say worshiping Satan is a way of resisting unjust tyrannical authority—even in that, I can start with a point of agreement that many people have usurped religion to gain unjust authority, Jesus himself was crucified by those doing that. So even there, for the convinced Satanist, I can find a point of agreement to start from. Ironically, they are giving Satan credit for resisting that authority when he’s the one creating it. Satan filled Judas and the Pharisees. Jesus resisted.
• More often, Satan shows up in false religion...
  • Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:20: “I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.”
  • In other words, the sacrifices made to pagan gods were really sacrifices made to demons who were behind those gods.
• In America, he’s in materialism and power (angel of light)
  • Matt 6:24 talks about not being able to serve two masters. Our modern Bibles translate that word as “money,” but in older translations, like the KJV, they use the word “Mammon.” “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
    • Why did they do that? Follow this: Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and “Mammon” is the Aramaic word for money. The New Testament is written in Greek, so, when the Gospel writers wrote down Jesus’ words, they translated him from Aramaic to Greek. But for this one word, Mammon, they left it in Aramaic.
    • Why? ​​Well, when you are translating something, what kind of words do you not translate? Names. You don’t translate names, you transliterate them. The early church said the disciples wrote down this as a proper name because they understood that Jesus was not just talking about a THING here; he was talking about personal power. A demonic power. Something that comes into your heart with a will.
    • Satan has a unique power over money. It’s part of his domain. It’s not that you can’t have any of it—no, the world works on it and it has great power for good—it’s just you should realize that it will always be fighting to have you, to possess your heart. God and money will ALWAYS be pulling you in opposite directions.
    • You will love the one and hate the other; or hate the one and love the other. With demonic energy it beckons you, Christian, to transfer your trust from God to it. You may never verbalize it, but in your heart you’ll think: “I don’t need to trust God for the future; I have Mammon.”
• On the personal level, we find him questioning identity
  • Satan begins his temptation of Jesus with an attack on his identity because Satan knows if he defeats him there, he’ll be powerless against all other temptations.
  • In the great temptation, Satan is not out in the wilderness showing Jesus pictures of naked women or offering him drugs.That comes later. He starts by making Jesus question who he is and how God feels about him.
• Satan is in the desire cultivation business
  • Your enemy’s main tactic is not always to directly attack you. Sometimes he is just quietly and subtly cultivating sinful desires in you, reinforcing them until they become second-nature to you and you can’t escape them.
  • Here’s what ethicist and author Russell Moore says, “Sometimes the Bible uses the language of predator and prey to describe the relationship between tempter and tempted, but often the Scripture also speaks of temptation in the language of rancher and livestock. You are not just being tracked down—you are also being cultivated.”

Kelly, yes the occult is real and yes, we should resist it—even “mild” forms of it. We also have to recognize that our enemy is more often than not going to approach us in...

Show Notes:

• Matt: Today we want to talk about our second spiritual discipline. This time, prayer.J.D., there’s a lot to be said about prayer, and you’ve written books on it, you have several Ask Me Anything episodes on it, but I want to start with a listener question from Stephanie, who asks, “How does prayer ‘move the hand of God?’”—J.D.: Wow, strong start. Yeah, Matt, I have spoken a lot about prayer
  • Can’t do it enough
  • 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. We always want to be a praying church, but we set aside times throughout the year to really emphasize it in our church and our own lives.
  So, to Stephanie’s question, why do we do that? Why emphasize prayer? Does it really change things?
  • Let me give you three quick points about why we believe prayer “moves the hand of God.” First, the Bible makes it clear that God’s purposes are unchanging.
    • Verses like Numbers 23:19 are clear: God is not a man. He never learns anything new. He doesn’t wise up with experience or change his mind.
    • He knows the end from the beginning
  • So, it seems clear that God’s purposes are unchanging, but, like I said, we have to hold this in tension with another truth, which is that God’s plans are unfolding.
    • There’s a story in Exodus 32 says that God changed his course of action based on Moses’ prayer. But here’s the irony of the story: God is the one who tells Moses to go down and see the situation (v. 7). Moses didn’t know the people had corrupted themselves. God showed this to him.
    • Furthermore, the very thing that Moses uses to “change God’s mind” was God’s own promise. (And God, of course, hadn’t forgotten his promises.)
    • God had put Moses into a situation so that he would see the problem God already knew about, remember God’s promises, and petition God to change his course of action. Moses’ prayer itself is a result of God’s plan. God wants Moses to ask this, so he sovereignly puts him in a situation where he will ask for it.
  • But here’s the key: Our prayers are instrumental.
    • The text is clear: Without this prayer, God would have destroyed Israel. The prayer was instrumental in getting God to change his course of action. And that’s consistent with the pattern of prayer throughout Scripture. As I’ve heard it said, “Prayer moves the arm that moves the world.”
  Now, many people might ask at this point, “Well, what if Moses had refused to pray? Would that mean that they would not have been saved, and would that mean that it was not God’s will to save them after all? And what does that mean if I fail to pray for something God wants me to pray for? Does that mean that the thing that I didn’t pray about wasn’t God’s will after all? Or would God have just gotten someone else to pray it?” You may begin to feel your head aching. It’s understandable. Those kinds of questions are the wrong ones to ask about these situations. Scripture never teaches us to think about the will of God that way.
  • The 19th century Princeton theologian A.A. Hodge put it this way (my paraphrase): “Does God know the day you’ll die? Yes. Has he appointed that day? Yes. Can you do anything to change that day? No. Then why do you eat? To live. What happens if you don’t eat? You die. Then if you don’t eat, and die, then would that be the day that God had appointed for you to die?
  • “Quit asking stupid questions and just eat. Eating is the pre-ordained way God has appointed for living.”
  • So, when I wrestle with this, I tell myself to quit asking stupid questions and just pray.
  You see, however impossible it is for our puny minds to understand, God has sovereignly placed us in certain situations for the express purpose of praying his promises and “changing his plans,” so to speak. He wants us to employ divine power to create a different destiny than the one everyone is heading to. That’s why we say God’s Word is not just a textbook to be learned but a book of promises to be claimed.
  • Like Moses, we are supposed to say, “God, remember you said ...” Don’t just read your way through Scripture. Pray your way through it.
  • And trust in the Spirit of God to guide you as you pray, to show you where and how to extend God’s kingdom. He is willing and waiting and wanting to answer!
  • Fed by word/led by Spirit
  Matt: You mentioned praying through Scripture, which leads me to another question, this time from Sivad: “You mentioned praying through the Bible. This may sound silly but what does that look like?”
  • Not silly at all! There’s no other book that we “pray through.” At first, it see...

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.

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Pastor J.D. talks about how social media shapes us—whether we like it or not—and how we can participate in it in healthy ways.

A glimpse inside this episode:

Myth: the medium of communication is neutral, only content matters

Truth: Medium shapes the message and also you

• E.g. Brand Luther: the printing press forced writers to write on more common levels and shorter
• Blogs have made it even shorter; Twitter shorter still!

Our social media shapes our days in dangerous ways:

• Tony Reinke in Twelve Ways Your Phone is Changing You: the average person checks their phone 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives, twice in this podcast)
• Email every 5 minutes in the midst of whatever else they are doing. The problem is that it takes an average of 64 seconds to resume the previous task after you finish (which means that because of email alone, we typically waste 1 out of every 6 minutes in ‘transition’ back to the previous task!)
• Dis-traction: French word meaning “pulled apart” (drawn and quartered)
• I know of one Christian counselor who says that distraction destroys more relationships than just about anything else today. Distraction, he says, makes intimacy impossible, because, you see, in order for someone to feel intimate with you—be that a spouse, a child, or a good friend—they have to believe (1) that you consider them a priority in your life; (2) you have plenty of unrushed time available for them; (3) you are giving them your undivided attention. Busyness and distraction make those three things impossible.

Nothing ruins my day faster (in good mood with kids, open up Twitter, and they can tell I’m on edge even if I don’t say anything).

Accomplishes little: Everyone running the same direction getting the earth spinning again

Those are the negatives. On the positive: To disengage is to intentionally mute our witness.

• I saw Al Mohler say something about this years ago. He, as much as anyone, bemoans the ways that Twitter is not a format for nuanced and deep thought. But he also admitted, “There are people who won’t hear what we’re saying unless we say it in these formats. And I want people to hear this message.”

Some practical steps:

• Set a limit for the time you spend on social media.
  • Our phones, thankfully, now have the capacity to track and limit the amount of time we spend on various apps.
    • I found this out after I turned on my “screen time” app on my iPhone. I thought, “I have pretty good habits here. This will confirm that.” And after a couple days, when I looked at the numbers, I realized I wasn’t doing as well as I had thought.
    • Honestly, do you want to be spending 45 minutes a day on Facebook? Is that an investment of time you feel good about when you lay your head on your pillow at night? Probably not. So have your phone set a limit. You don’t have the discipline to do this by yourself. That’s fine. Neither do I. Use technology to save you from technology.
• Don’t use it as a crutch. John Piper wrote a great little article that asks why we are so drawn to turn to technology first thing in the morning and at the first sign of a lull. He gives 6 reasons.

1. Novelty Candy. We have (FOMO). We’re afraid that our friends are going to know something we don’t know. (Sociologists have classified a condition where you experience a legitimate anxiety of being too separated from your phone—it is called “nomophobia.” Not kidding. Without Jesus your FOMO will lead to nomophobia. But with Jesus you’ll have NoMoFoMo.)
2. Ego Candy (We want to know what people are saying about us, so we get on social media looking for likes and positive comments!)
3. Entertainment Candy (We want to feed on what is fascinating, weird, strange, wonderful, or shocking.) – Oh look, this woman in Oregon has an Alpaca that can do Calculus.
4. Boredom Avoidance (We want to put off the day ahead, especially when it looks routine to us.)
5. Responsibility Avoidance (We want to put off the respon...