ReFOCUS with Jim Daly

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J.D. Greear: I said, "If you give me 20 minutes and an open mic and it's televised, I'm definitely talking about Jesus." And she said, "Oh, I don't think he's really that controversial." I said, "Well, I don't feel like you and I are talking about the same guy."

Jim Daly: That's Pastor J.D. Greear talking about an opportunity to share Christ in his community. His evangelism spirit is infectious. I love it. He spoke with me at length about how we as Christians need to testify to the truth while expressing God's love and grace, which for some reason becomes difficult for us. We've got to learn that ability to not make it a competition, but an invitation.

Welcome to ReFOCUS with Jim Daly, a podcast production from Focus on the Family. J.D. has written a great book called *Everyday Revolutionary: How to Transcend the Culture War and Transform the World*. He's the pastor of the Summit Church in North Carolina. His church is located in a region where there's a blend of conservative and progressive influences, so he's worked hard to reach people of different political persuasions with the truth of the gospel.

You'll hear about how he's led his church to rise above political polarization to make a tangible difference in their community. J.D. doesn't hold back from calling out sin in the culture, but he's also committed to serving marginalized and hurting people, which brings him a lot of credibility. In fact, in this discussion, he'll share about a lesbian woman who told him he preached the most loving anti-gay sermon she'd ever heard. Here's that energetic and inspiring conversation I had with Pastor J.D. Greear on ReFOCUS with Jim Daly.

Pastor J.D., thanks for joining me with ReFOCUS. It's good to have you back.

J.D. Greear: I'm always honored, and it's always a pleasure.

Jim Daly: I'm thinking about this great book, *Everyday Revolutionary*. There's so much occurring in the culture right now. We're looking at the conflict in Minneapolis and Portland, authority, and government. There's not always the right things being said in that environment. I wince sometimes when the president is saying something.

From a Christian perspective, politics is not the arena that we typically flourish in because it's fraught with conflict and agendas and people trying to accomplish something. How do you as a pastor raise the bar to say there's more important things going on here? It's not all fight. We need to look up a little bit. What would you say?

J.D. Greear: Historically, Christians seem to have made two opposite errors when it comes to politics. One is there are some ages where they just get totally disengaged. They want to create their own little commune and focus on the church. We forget that role that God gave us as salt and light in our community. It's a really important part of our witness, whether we're thinking historically or in the present day. Our societies are better because believers are in them. We can only do that because we engage in good politics.

Good politics is just a way of loving your neighbor. You can't say you love them with your mouth and then not help work to make our society more just and more equitable. The other side is for every mile of road, you get two miles of ditch. If the ditch on one side is disengagement, the ditch on the other side is where we begin to wed political power and Christian hope together as if they're going to end up at the same place.

That is something that the Bible not only warns us against, but Jesus and the apostles seem to demonstrate a resistance to it at every possible turn. There are multiple places you can find in the New Testament where there was this gravitational pull to take this and turn this into activism. Jesus and the apostles resist that. In the book *Everyday Revolutionary*, I discuss a couple of those more in depth.

Just to give you a high spot, the Apostle Paul would have had numerous moments to speak about the reforms that Rome needed in its government. He definitely called out sins and he called for righteousness, but I would have loved to have read one of the Apostle Paul's manifestos for how to set up the Roman government. Instead, he said there's a church-building aspect that is the primary emphasis of the Great Commission. That church-building aspect is something Christians have to make the primary thing and let the salt and light influence that we have be the thing that results from our witness and not necessarily be the tip of the spear for it.

Jim Daly: When I look at the culture wars, as we refer to them, those that initiated that—Jerry Falwell, Dr. Dobson, Chuck Colson—were born in the 1930s. Chuck Colson was 1928. All of them lost a lot of things in the culture. Bible reading in public school and prayer in public school, those underpinnings were taken away during their lifetime, which I think sympathetically gave them energy to say we are doing the exact wrong thing if we want virtue and values in the culture.

We're eliminating children learning about those things, and we're going to reap the whirlwind because of it. In part, they're right. We do not teach those kinds of values and virtues anymore. I think I better understand them today.

J.D. Greear: I have a lot of respect for everybody that you mentioned. In fact, I was raised in that environment and still consider myself to be a part of that tribe. Public sin in high places is a reproach to any people. If we love people, we will speak out. Whether it's the loss of gender and those kinds of understandings, or whether it's the destructive things that socialism brings in or critical theory brings into our community, Christians need to be speaking out because that's part of being salt and light.

Where it goes wrong is error is often truth out of proportion. What our enemy does is he wants to shift the emphasis. I would say that for Christians it goes wrong in two or three ways. The first one is when we confuse the mission of the church as an organization and the mission of Christians as the organism of the body of Christ. What I mean by that is the church as an organization, people like me that are representatives of the local church, our bandwidth is supposed to be reserved for preaching the gospel, making disciples, and proclaiming things that are very clear in Scripture.

For example, gender. We are to love the poor. Christians might disagree on the best means for taking care of the poor. I don't feel like it's my role as a pastor to get involved in the secondary and tertiary things in ways that divide Christians and say everybody who believes in Jesus will embrace this marginal tax rate or will believe in this number of refugees getting into our country. I limit myself to the things that the Bible speaks clearly on.

The other side of that is there are believers in the church. They should be figuring that stuff out. They should be figuring out what the gospel and the biblical worldview has to say about healthcare and about global warming and those things. Abraham Kuyper is the guy that I'm drawing this distinction from. The church as an organization limits its messaging to what the Bible says clearly and where you have clear chapter and verse. It avoids things that Christians might in good conscience disagree about because our primary responsibility is to make disciples. That's where we go wrong is confusing the two missions.

Jim Daly: I love that clarity. It's so important right now because it feels like we're even being pulled into discussions that I'm not sure I'm equipped to have or that are the right biblically-based discussions to be having with people that may not appreciate what immigration policy is or those kinds of things.

Let me ask you this. Another interesting insight that I've thought a lot about and I so appreciate your book is the early church. They're sitting in Rome, an authoritative conquering band of people. The Roman Empire was huge. They probably had no sense of a democratic vote. They weren't voting for the next Caesar. They were told who he was and you better honor him and bow to him and treat him like deity. That's the environment they were in.

Today, when we live in a democracy where Christians have the absolute right as citizens—like Paul when he was being beaten saying he's a Roman citizen and they were fearful because they broke the law since you couldn't do that—how do we wield the right attitude in that environment? Everyone in this republic has the right to persuade, to move the ball in the direction they feel would benefit the country. How do we do that as Christians in a way that feels right and not like we're either overstepping the political environment or underserving what God would want us to do with our citizen privilege?

J.D. Greear: That's an excellent question. It's Os Guinness that points out that you can't quite equate what the apostles and their early church is doing in the Bible with where we are in the United States because we have privileges they did not have. We have a representative democracy, and we have levers to actually change the government that Paul didn't have. I actually think what behooves us is that we be very involved in the political process as a way of loving our neighbors. If we don't, I actually think it's not only a civic failure, I actually think it's a sin against our neighbors.

We need to speak out for righteousness everywhere. Christians need to be very involved in the most minute details of the government. We need believers serving in law and in healthcare and all the different dimensions of it. Where I would give a caution is when we begin to think so much as if political power is the answer to our society that it causes us to fail in being a proper witness to Jesus Christ. Let me use one example.

If your political calculus is Party A is better than Party B for the government, therefore I will never speak out about the sins of Party A or the failures of Party A because it might hurt their chances of being re-elected. If there's a political leader who says things or does things that are just very offensive to Jesus, to people, to the Bible, and you're like, "Well, I'm not going to say anything about that because that's our guy."

Sometimes politics is choosing between the lesser of two evils. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and no evil should be associated with the name of Jesus. The third commandment is not to take his name in vain, which means never to associate anything with his name that's not worthy of it. I might believe based on all the factors this is the better choice, but I'm going to be crystal clear in the messaging of who Jesus is and the difference between that and what a particular political leader is because ultimately my primary responsibility is to give testimony to Jesus, not to save the country. Saving the country is the result of the church being the church and exalting the name of Jesus, not the latter.

Jim Daly: It's so refreshing. God is for us. He's for everybody he's created. It's shalom that he's expecting the church, his peace, to bring to a chaotic world. There is so much chaos in the world. Look around right now. It's how do we tap into that divine wisdom to say and do the right things to bring that peace of God to a hurting community, a city, a state, a nation.

You wrote in the book about Christians feeling forced to either be bold and bigoted—and I even bristled at that. It's a great word phrase, but bigoted is such a loaded word when you think about it in the context of race. But it's being applied in all different directions, sexual identity issues, the transgender issue. If you don't affirm me, you're a bigot. We love you, we just can't agree with something that's directly in conflict with God's design for human sexuality.

Then you say or the other option—so you could be bold and bigoted or gentle and compromising. Experientially for me, that's a nice place to be. People love you when you love them in a way that's gentle and compromising. I confess that. But this is my battle. I've been leading Focus on the Family for the last 20 years, and I still wake up every day saying, "Lord, give me wisdom today," because I'm either over here or I'm over here. Lord, where do I need to be? Help me.

J.D. Greear: I know this is going to sound like a paid advertisement right here, but I've been listening to Focus on the Family for years. I actually think you do a remarkable job of demonstrating the gospel balance that the Bible calls us to. Our world says when it comes to the homosexual or the transgender issue, the only two choices are affirmation or alienation. Those are the only choices. What Jesus would demonstrate is something that was neither.

The Apostle John describes Jesus as full of grace and truth. Not grace or truth, or not that he had a grace mode and a truth mode on a little toggle button that went back and forth. He was full of both of them at the same time. I've always heard that grace without truth is liberalism. Truth without grace is fundamentalism. Neither of them are the gospel.

Jesus was so full of truth that people killed him for the clarity that he spoke with. Yet he was so full of grace that sinners longed to be around them. Jesus' crucifixion was a joint project of the secular left and the religious right. I'm not saying they're morally equal. I'm just saying that both of them hated Jesus for different reasons. They hated him for his clear speech about truth. They also hated him for how he loved people and drew sinners in close. We as believers will be offending both sides of our society when we're living in and modeling out the love of God like Jesus did.

Jim Daly: When we have that attitude toward the sinner, I've always felt hypersensitive to that because that's what Jesus said. The two neon billboards of the New Testament is salvation through Christ and Christ alone, and don't become a Pharisee. Those things are blazing in the New Testament. Yet we are so prone to lean into that as believers, into that Pharisaism. I think it exists in deeper ways than it did even then and we don't call it out.

Why is it such a proclivity for us as human beings, as Christians, to do that comparison? "I'm living it well. I'm not having an affair. Therefore I'm a better person than you." And that's where the Lord would go, "No, you're a sinner saved by my grace." Why do we fall into that trap even with everything written down over hundreds of years for us? We're the generation to be most pitied. We've got the Scripture. We've got 1,400 ways to read it. And we still can't live up to that standard to love sinners. What is happening?

J.D. Greear: One of the most important bite-sized cultural analyses of the age we live in was given by the late Tim Keller. Of all the things he said, this might be the most important and most penetrating. He said our society is a picture of the prodigal son, both of the prodigal sons in the story. We recognize the first one as a prodigal, but we don't recognize the second one. But he's every bit the prodigal the first one was.

The first one was the prodigal by throwing off the laws of God, throwing off the household of the father, and running to the far country. We're used to condemning that kind of lawlessness as sin. He said but you have to notice that the second son, the older son, was also outside the house. He was also estranged from the father. There is an irreligious way of separating yourself from God, and there's also a religious way of separating yourself from God.

One separates himself from God through lawlessness, the other through Pharisaism. The church culture I grew up in, similar probably to yours, I spent my whole life getting warned about the ditch on the left side of the gospel road. Nobody ever told me about the ditch on the right side. It is possible to believe all the right things and to do all the right things and still be alienated from God because you are alienated from your sense of his mercy in your life and your love for other people. I think that's an important and timely message, that the gospel is different than just pulling the right lever at the ballot box.

Jim Daly: It is so critical that as we mature in Christ, we get that balance so that the world will benefit from that example that you can have a difference of opinion but still care genuinely for somebody and love somebody, hopefully into the kingdom. That would be the goal. Pastors in the country carry such a burden. I'm sympathetic to that. My brother is retired now, but he was a pastor. He said, "Jim, just never talk to a group of pastors and expect them to do something for you and Focus. They've got so much on their plate."

In that context, you tip your toe and I've talked to a number of pastors about this. You talk about divorce. You talk about abortion. Many of my pastoral friends are saying that has so much pain in the church. One in four women in the church may have had an abortion. Divorce is running still 35 or 38 percent within the Christian community. These topics are very tender. I've got to be very careful that I don't offend. Why don't you hit that one and I'll move it to getting involved in a social issue?

J.D. Greear: It's a very wise tension that as a pastor I feel this. One of the rules we have in our pulpit is we say "no drive-bys." A drive-by is a quick, cheap, passing comment that is just a blanket condemnation. In the ultra-conservative context I grew up in, we did this all the time. It's like you're throwing red meat to the faithful and just lampooning the people on the outside. I just don't hear Jesus doing that.

Every time Jesus talks about sexual sin in the Bible, every time Jesus talks about it, there's a tenderness in it. There's a personal thing in it. I'm not saying that he was muted about it. I'm not saying that he was controversial. I'm just saying that when he deals with the adulterous woman in John 8, when he deals with the polyamorous woman in John 4, you're looking at somebody who is seeing her first as an individual and entering into her pain and then speaking to her as a person and not as a voting block.

The other aspect is if we're faithful, then we've got to speak to the most controversial parts of our broken culture. If not, we're not doing our job. John the Baptist put his finger in Herod's face and spoke out on a socially acceptable sexual sin that Herod was involved in and lost his head over it. Jesus' verdict on John was not, "John, you blew it. You had this incredible platform. You should have preached grace and love." No, he said John is the greatest prophet ever to live.

When it comes to calling out these things, I've got to do it and I've got to do it boldly, but I'm also going to do it like Jesus did it, which is I'm not treating you as a voting block I'm trying to minimize. I'm not speaking in tribalistic terms. I'm speaking to you as a person as a savior, Jesus, who is calling a sinner home.

Jim Daly: That is really convicting in a positive way. Speaking of a pastor dipping his toe into the local politics of things, there was a school initiative on the ballot. You encouraged your congregants to get in and vote because we're talking about our children. Unfortunately, schools are being dragged into the political arena because of the agendas that are being fought over in the public school, whether they teach LGBTQ stuff to third and fourth graders.

I've got a few friendships in the LGBTQ community. What is refreshing in some of those relationships that I have is they will admit, "Yeah, we shouldn't be doing that to third and fourth graders." But it's like this locomotive that nobody's in control of. It's a movement. Again to your point, not everybody in that camp would be in agreement. You are going to have people in the LGBTQ community who don't agree with that. They may be few and far between, but they are there. In that context, when you as a pastor dipped your toe in this arena, said we need to be engaged, be involved, what happened?

J.D. Greear: The tension is we try to connect the dots wherever the Bible connects the dots. Politically what we'll do is we preach the value, we preach what the Bible says, but I'm not going to connect all the dots and therefore you vote for this candidate or pursue this policy. I let people do that, particularly when it comes to any area that a Christian might see it differently. We stick to what the Bible says clearly.

In this case, there was a measure that we just knew would really set kids back. It seemed to us fairly clear that there was just nothing redemptive about it and that it would lead to a lot of destruction. Our elders prayed through it and just said out of love for our neighbors, we need to mobilize our people to get out and vote against this because we thought the morality issues were sufficiently clear in it.

We did it and, as you can imagine, it did not go over well. The media was just like, "Oh, this church is just a political operative place and we should remove their tax-exempt status." I had people dropping off stuff on my doorstep that was threatening. I look back on that issue and I'm tempted to think, "Okay, would it be better to avoid controversy?"

I always come up with no. God puts you in different times and places to speak out. You've got to be very cautious, like Jesus was, in not encumbering yourselves in questions that are not essential to the movement and the message. But you do have to speak to righteousness and sinfulness in our community because that's part of why God put the church here.

Jim Daly: Charlie Kirk—this is almost like a sensitive subject now—my observation, I didn't know Charlie, we're actually working to get him on the broadcast at one point. I watched some of the clips on YouTube of Charlie Kirk. Just as an example, I felt like the political end of it was a bit strong, very directive. But over time, I felt like his conversations on campuses were very rooted in Scripture, very biblical.

I just remember a 20-year-old woman who was struggling with feeling transgendered. He said one of the most beautiful things to her. "First of all, very few people if any are going to tell you what I'm about to tell you. But before you put chemicals in your body to try to change your gender, could you get help for your mind to see if loving people around you could get you to a place where you actually could embrace your God-given body rather than being at war with it?"

I thought that is so wonderfully stated. It's rooted in love, it's rooted in reality and wanting to help you be in a better place in your mental health, your physical well-being. I had more connection with what Charlie was expressing after seeing a lot of those reels on YouTube and watching those interactions compared to earlier years. But here's the example. He is a John the Baptist. He did go to Herod in terms of confronting the culture and somebody assassinated him for speaking that way. What were your thoughts on the approach?

J.D. Greear: I want to acknowledge that Charlie Kirk's stated goals were political. We need organizations like that that are led by Christians that are here to get in the minutiae of politics. That means that he has a freedom to speak with conviction on certain things that I just as a pastor, I would say I'm not going to use my bandwidth to get involved in that question because I'm a representative of the church itself.

I want to acknowledge that distinction, that he has some freedom to get into the minutiae that I just don't feel freedom of. In *Everyday Revolutionary*, I explain that distinction between the church as organization and the church as organism and how Jesus and the apostles consistently seem to recognize that distinction and pull back. There's a story in Luke 12 where Jesus is confronted by a brother who wants him to get involved in the nitty-gritty of the inheritance laws.

Jesus says, "Man, who made me a judge over you?" Jesus wasn't saying like, "Hey, I don't have an opinion on this matter or there's no righteousness." All he was saying was, "That's not my calling." For me to get involved in this would take me away from the one thing. We need Christian judges who are helping to think about right attitudes toward inheritance laws, but that was different than Jesus and the apostles' mission and as somebody who represents the institutional church, I feel that restraint.

I've seen all the clips. One of the things that made Charlie so appealing was he was one of the few people that could stand in one of the most secular places in America and with clarity and humor and winsomeness, he could speak truth. You saw an entire generation, especially of young men, who were saying, "That kind of clarity, that's what I'm looking for because this forced woke ideology and this whole thing that's being shoved down my throat, I know that that's not true and I need that." There were other times that he spoke about sin and about sinners in ways that I didn't feel like were very reflective of the Jesus that I preach and the Jesus that I read. As a representative of the church, I have a different approach on some of those.

Jim Daly: I appreciate your bandwidth there to say we're called to certain things. We certainly need Christians in Congress, in the White House, in the judiciary, because they bring a perspective that's a good perspective. Here's the difficulty. Within the Christian community, we need to give some grace to those who are working in those spaces who are trying to bring clarity and they're saying things that as a pastor, I may not say in the pulpit, but I'm glad he's saying that on a college campus.

Maybe again even with attitude, I probably would turn down that attitude a little bit. We tend to want to fine-tune everybody's engagement, but God bless him and others who are engaged. At least that's happening. Let me pull back something. I want you to finish that story because you talked about people dropping stuff off at your house. There's more to that I wanted to make sure we caught.

What I like about what you've done, for example—I was involved in a church that did this years ago—what can we do practically in our community? We adopted a school and did work at the school. You did a lot. I would say you guys in your church, when you adopted this school, you did a lot more tutoring. I want to hear about that. That investment in doing something in community allows you to weather the speaking of the truth in the community because it brings respect. Speak to that dynamic, what you did with the mayor in Raleigh-Durham, how you translated that into action, and how that reverberated back into, "Okay, but they're a good church. They do good things."

J.D. Greear: One of the people that exposed me was a liberal professor on one of our local universities who what the kids call doxxing, where you put somebody's private information out there. She put my personal address out there, and that was what led to people coming to my house. I wrote her and just said, "Hey, I know we disagree on a lot of very important things, but I feel like this has gone beyond civil discourse." I offered to meet up with her for coffee and she agreed.

We get together and I was expecting to come in and it be like me going on the Rachel Maddow show or something. I thought it was about to get really ugly. She apologized and she cried. Then she told me, she said, "I have to tell you that after I published your address, something happened that totally changed how I was thinking about you and your church."

She said, "I have a neighbor who's a single mom and life has really treated her hard. This woman cannot stop talking about how your church has loved and blessed and taken care of her and there's nobody that she could imagine taking better care of her than your church has." She said, "If that is what you're like with people like her, then maybe what you're saying is—even though she finds what we say offensive—maybe I recognize that there is a heart of love that is something that I cannot deny."

When she said that, I felt a small amount of, "Okay, this is what I want our church to be in our community." I want our community to say about our church, "We may not believe what those crazy people at Summit Church believe, but thank God they're here because if not we'd have to raise our taxes. Who would take care of our single moms? Who would take care of our foster kids?"

One of the people I use in *Everyday Revolutionary* is Daniel because here's Daniel who is so bold in speaking the truth that he ends up in a lion's den. Yet he is so beloved by the king who threw him in the lion's den that that king stays outside the lion's den all night long weeping and hoping against hope that Daniel will make it through the night. How do you become like that in our society?

I don't think Darius was weeping because he was going to miss Daniel's prophetic diatribes. I think he was weeping because he was like Daniel was our friend, and Babylon is a better place because Daniel is here. That's how I want to be in our community where, yes, we will preach an offensive message where it's offensive, but what they cannot deny is that nobody loves them and cares for them more than the representatives of Jesus Christ.

Jim Daly: That is the goal. When you look at Daniel or anybody else, there is a calm, cool, concreteness to the character of Daniel. You're right, I don't think he went out of his way to offend. Where it impacted him, he was firm and gave the reasons why and people loved him. In the culture, you go back even to Charlie or others, Jordan Peterson and others that are cracking the culture in different ways in different places, Joe Rogan, he's no spiritual man, but there is something happening where a bold truth is now being embraced, especially like you said by young men. Describe those characteristics that we as Christians should have and possess so that we can develop ourselves into those people that others will listen to.

J.D. Greear: Rather than giving you a series of adjectives, can I give you a word picture? Sheldon Vanauken was led to the Lord by C.S. Lewis, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to brag about. Sheldon Vanauken said that when he came to Christ, he described that last moment where he came to Jesus like the leap of faith that we've all heard about. You're leaping to this cliff that's solid, as Jesus.

He said but what nobody ever talked about was the fact that the cliff that I had been standing on, secular humanism, was crumbling underneath my feet. I wasn't only leaping to something, I was leaping away from something. What we're seeing right now with Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, is you're seeing a lot of people acknowledging this cliff called secular humanism that we've built our lives and society on, it doesn't hold.

It leads to crazy, insane questions about transgenderism and child abuse that masquerades as kids' rights and all that kind of stuff. When we preach, we preach with grace, we preach with truth, but we preach with a confidence that God's word provides something better that deep within the heart of every man and woman they yearn for.

They yearn for God's shalom, his world that he is building, and just by proclaiming righteousness, I'm inviting them into that world. Now we have to do it with grace because grace is every bit, in fact, in John's description of Jesus, he puts grace before truth, which means Jesus led with grace. It ought to be characterized by bold truth and tender grace.

Jim Daly: My wife was a vet technician, went to UC Davis pre-vet. One of the tactics a vet will use to get horrible tasting medicine down the mouth of a dog is to wrap it in hamburger or something that is tasty, something that he likes. Grace is the thing that allows a human heart to open up, especially that crusty human heart, and then that medicine that may not taste so well that is nothing but truth and it has a poof, the first whiff of that can get you. But you need that grace to wrap the truth so that when you digest it, you can actually understand what the word is. Is that a fair explanation?

J.D. Greear: That's it. We have to acknowledge that even when you do that right, like Jesus did, sometimes they'll still hate you. We don't make the world's applause of us any kind of thing. But you're right, it was Jesus' grace that made the sinners come around him and then he was able to speak truth because they knew it was wrapped in grace.

Jim Daly: You did such a beautiful job of this when you gave a message where again I'm applauding you going, "Wow, you spoke about LGBTQ issues from the pulpit." I think other pastors could take a little lead from you here. But you didn't hold back, you spoke the truth. But there was a lesbian or a lesbian couple there when you gave that message. Did you know that when they were sitting there? Did they catch your eye, or how did that come about? What happened?

J.D. Greear: The first exposure to the story was one of the two lesbian partners had come to our church and she'd met with me and basically she'd become a Christian. She was trying to figure out how to dissolve the marriage because that was like a scrambled egg she was trying to figure out how to untangle. We prayed for her lesbian partner for several months and the lesbian partner wouldn't come to the church.

In fact, the lesbian partner convinced her, she said, "Hey, if we want God in our lives, let's go to this really liberal affirming church that has the rainbow flags because there they'll give us God and they'll accept our lifestyle." The lady that got saved went to the church together and she said after three weeks, "I looked at her and I said, 'God is not in this church. And we've got a choice and that is we can either be in a place where God is and they don't accept our lifestyle or a place where they accept our lifestyle but God is not.'"

She kept coming to our church and eventually she took a business trip and her lesbian partner came because she didn't want her wife to know, "Hey, I'm actually checking out the church." That was the one week in probably four or five years that the whole subject matter of the sermon was on homosexuality. I'll talk about it when it comes up in the text, but this the whole sermon was on homosexuality.

She thought, "I knew it. That's all they ever talk about. They're obsessed with us." She pulled out her notebook because she was going to write down all the hateful bigoted things I was going to say about her and the homosexual community and I was going to show my lesbian partner who goes here what you really thought. She said after 10 minutes, "I looked down at my pad and I didn't have a single thing written down."

She said, "And I looked up and I had tears in my eyes and I said," and she used a cuss word, I won't use, she said, "this is the most loving anti-gay sermon I've ever heard in my life." Then she looks at me and she has tears in her eyes and she says, "I know that I need Jesus in my life and I've seen it in my former partner. Can you show me how to find Christ?" She came to faith in Christ and we got the privilege of baptizing them. It's just been an incredible story. What occurs to me through that is it was a mixture of truth and grace. We didn't dilute either. It was full of truth, full of grace, because that's where the redeeming power of Jesus is only when you're holding both in tension the way that Jesus did.

Jim Daly: It's just a good reminder. In some ways I feel for those churches that are relenting on cultural issues. Whether that—you can fill in the blank, most of it's on the sexual orientation stuff—but there's other incidences in church history where churches relented on other things. I think one of the core things there is you don't have to give up for the real faithful individual even in that community who's looking for that relationship with God.

That had to be a breath of fresh air for both of them to express to you that idea that we'd rather be in a church where God was present and being taught rather than in a church that just accepted us and our sin and didn't confront us. It reminds me of a quote where someone said it's better to be hated and be who you are than to be loved and be something you're not. We have to be real, have to be truthful.

Another story is a man named Brian that you encountered who accused you of being extremely dangerous toward the LGBTQ community. How did it play out for you?

J.D. Greear: Crazy story. He actually didn't make the accusation. He saw the accusation, which is what led him to check me out. He worked for the Writers Guild in Hollywood in California. Long story short, his boss got fired and he said protocol is when you get fired from the Writers Guild, security comes, walks you out, clears your station immediately. He said for whatever reason they didn't do that and my boss's station sat there for three days untouched until her boss called me and said, "Would you clear her station?"

I go up and I get ready to clear it out and I notice that on her screen she had opened several dialogues with the LGBT community because she was preparing a piece. She was writing a piece about activism and part of it was the Christian intolerance of this kind of stuff. One of the chat rooms, there was a group of people and they were talking about J.D. They were saying that they'd been at a conference where I spoke and the compassion and the respect for humanity that I showed even as I preached against the sin of homosexuality, they said that I was the most dangerous kind because I didn't seem like an angry bigot, I just seemed like somebody who loved them but was really convinced of this and they're like, "He's the worst kind."

That led my friend Brian to check this out because he was living as a homosexual and so he was like I need to find this out because he was also very interested in Jesus. He started to listen, looked me up, started to listen to sermons. God started to work in his life. He becomes a believer. Flies out all the way cross country, first I ever hear the story, he stands in front of me and says, "I need to tell you this story about how I became a Christian and God used essentially this message of grace and truth to meet me where I was."

He said, "I want to thank you for not backing down from speaking truth about the sin of homosexuality, but I want to also thank you for at least attempting to exemplify Christ in doing it," because that's what drew him to the gospel. That's what wins people to Jesus. It's not just political declarations of truth, it's the fullness of truth and fullness of grace as we see lived out in Jesus.

Jim Daly: What a great label, J.D. Greear, most dangerous Christian in America. I like it. I like your style. I do want to pull that mayor story back because you had that discussion with the mayor. It led your church to getting more involved in community. Just describe that little bit in more detail and the mayor's response, who I think was a more liberal person if I remember correctly.

J.D. Greear: I always describe the mayor of our city at the time, he was a little bit to the left of Mao Zedong was the platform he ran on. Basically, I was preaching through Acts and I got to the phrase in Acts 8 where it says that as a result of Philip's ministry, there was much joy in the city because of the message he preached and the works that he did. So I just asked our congregation, "Do you all feel like there's much joy in our city because of our presence?"

Acts 9 talks about a disciple by the name of Tabitha who made coats for everyone and when she died the community gathered at her bedside and wept. I was like, "Do you feel like our community would weep if our church died?" Our leadership felt like the answer to that was no. We did a pretty good job of handing out inviter cards to our Easter services but were we really loving the community in a way that they would miss if we were gone?

So I met with the mayor. He graciously took a meeting with me and I said, "Mr. Mayor, tell me the most broken parts of our city." He rattled them off. He said the homeless, the orphan, the prisoner, the unwed mother, and the high school dropout. I jotted them down and I said, "Well, I don't really have experience or a solution in any of these, but I promise you the Summit Church is going to pray about these and see what we can do."

That started a whole litany of different things, some of which you referred to. We've taken on schools and having our people go in and tutor and renovate classrooms and praying over the school at the principal's invitation for the end of year test. One of the schools we got involved with had this dramatic turnaround. We end up baptizing the principal and a couple of the teachers from there and I still hear stories 15 years later.

It was this dramatic turnaround where they went from being one of the worst ranked schools in our county to being they got this top achievement award. In the newspaper, they did an article on them and the principal who had gotten baptized at our church was like, "Look, I got to give credit where credit's due." She said, "Yes, we've done a lot of great things at the school, but the people at the Summit Church they brought in," and she used the phrase, "glory of God" or "presence of God into our school."

Well, the mayor calls me up next and says, "Hey, I want you to speak at our city's annual Martin Luther King Jr. rally." Now where I live in Durham, North Carolina, that's a big deal because the racial issues are still pretty poignant. I'm not your typical candidate for a MLK Jr. rally, just for the record. So I was talking to his assistant and I was like, "So what does he want me to talk about?" She said, "I don't know, you'll have 20 minutes."

I said, "I can talk about anything I want for 20 minutes?" She said, "Yeah, just don't be controversial." I said, "Well, ma'am, if you give me 20 minutes and an open mic and it's televised, I'm definitely talking about Jesus." And she said, "Oh yeah, I don't think he's really that controversial." I said, "Well, I don't feel like you and I are talking about the same guy."

Anyway, I got through it and got ready to speak there and like I said it's televised, all the city county government officials are there. I gave honor to the accomplishments Martin Luther King Jr. had made in our community and then I just used the majority of my time to talk about Jesus and what he who he was and what he had done. I asked the county manager on that day right before I spoke, "Why did I get invited?"

The county manager gave me the most direct answer. He said, "It's because all of those things that your church is doing." He listed off those five areas. He said, "I'm not even saying you guys are doing a great job in any of them, but you're there. You're there and we couldn't think of anybody that would better reflect the spirit we want to see honored on this day than your church and what they're doing." To me again, that's a small thing, but it's a win.

Jim Daly: I think the church generally is at this fork in the road. We can and need to continue to talk orthodoxy, speak truth to culture, to us, to ourselves, to the church. We need that. We need to be able to speak truth. But I think in our culture today, we kind of sit there and it's fairly easy, it's much easier to talk at people than it is to do toward people.

I think that example of getting and rallying people to get up, to get engaged with community, to actually help a child read better, do math better, learn, have a clean classroom they can come into, fresh paint, we can deliver that in the church in such a dramatic way. And yet I feel like we're not willing. We're kind of comfortable sitting and speaking truth. How do we excite the body of Christ and pastors included to do those things so that we can speak truth?

J.D. Greear: I hope you won't take this as a cheap shot or a shameless plug, but the whole middle section of *Everyday Revolutionary* is written to answer that question. It's a job description for the everyday revolutionary what you can do whether you go to work every day teaching third graders or whether you sit on the corporate board of a billion dollar multinational company. I identify five things that every disciple of Jesus is supposed to be involved in.

They won't make sense now, I'll list them, but I would need to dive into them. You got to be creation fulfilling, you got to fulfill the shalom of creation. It's got to be holiness reflecting, showing the highest standards of who God is. It's got to be excellence pursuing, done for the name of God and with all the excellence that belongs to that redemption displaying, just shows the generosity of Christ and then mission advancing. Those are things that you can do in your neighborhood or you can do at your workplace and I think that's where we would start as disciples of Christ and everyday revolutionaries.

Jim Daly: In that regard, I keep saying, "Let's end with this." But your dad, this is a good add-on to this because again you know this as a pastor, people turn to you and say you're a pastor and then they proceed to tell you all about whatever. I like the attitude whether you're working as a baker, a machinist, a dentist, a doctor, whatever you're doing, we as Christians are to have that attitude to do this unto the Lord, to have such high standards and to conduct ourselves in such a good way. Tell the story of your dad and how he embraced that.

J.D. Greear: My dad never been paid for ministry in his life, but he was a plant manager of a textile factory. I remember he used to go for the end of the third shift, all the first shift, and then part of the second shift. He would do that so he could walk the floor and just talk to people and pray for them. 900 people, just pray for them and be involved in their lives.

And he was the plant manager. Yeah, and then there was a particular lady that just really had problems with management and so my dad was her nemesis. He just asked God for ways that he could really show kindness to her because he thought her complaints were illegitimate. God gave him a couple pretty dramatic ways that he could do that and she just responded with bewilderment.

Like, "After the way that I've organized people to protest you and be angry at you, why would you show me this kind of kindness?" He just had a chance to say, "Hey, listen, my life was impacted by an act of extraordinary generosity and it shapes how I approach things." He ended up seeing this woman come to faith in Christ. 35 years later, she still follows our church—she doesn't live here, but she follows us—she checks in with my dad because of the impact that the gospel had on her.

Jim Daly: That really proves the point. Living a good life, think about what that means. I love it that you've written it down for us and we can get a copy of your book, *Everyday Revolutionary*, to help frame that and to know those things that we need to be thinking about, concentrating on, and doing, which is very helpful. Thank you, J.D., for being with us. This has been another good exchange. I so appreciate it.

J.D. Greear: I'm honored. Thank you.

Jim Daly: Well, I'm so grateful for leaders like Pastor J.D. and so many others who are faithfully serving the Lord and speaking the truth in love. The culture needs Christians who are fully engaged but who resist being drawn into the simple debate winning and losing and then from that letting anger and bitterness build up which then really prevents that expression of the heart of Christ.

I think of Ephesians 4 verses 31 and 32 that says let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. There's spiritual guidance directly from Jesus. But when we serve hurting people like J.D. is suggesting and how his church is doing it, it cracks open hearts to hear and receive the gospel.

To learn more about being a Christian witness in the culture, get a copy of Pastor J.D.'s book, *Everyday Revolutionary: How to Transcend the Culture War and Transform the World*. When you make a donation of any amount to ReFOCUS, we'll send you a copy of the book as our way of saying thanks for supporting the ministry and all those proceeds go right back into helping produce programs like this one.

If your faith has grown through these discussions, which I hope it has, please consider giving back to the podcast so we can continue to grow and reach more listeners. We're a nonprofit ministry and we do rely upon your donations. Now for the Inbox segment, here's a voicemail from Shelly who comments on a previous episode of ReFOCUS.

Shelly: Hi, this is Shelly calling and I want to thank you for the Joseph Dallas I think it was about he used to be a homosexual. I liked the answer to the question that the lady had about her son coming out gay. My son came out at 38 as gay and he divorced his wife. They had three children and he's now married to a man and thankfully we're all doing well. Even his ex-wife and her new husband get along with us with everyone.

What I want to stress is the loving part for us as Christian parents is to reach out love because I heard a broadcast before like if we reject our children how we throw them right out into the gay community and they never feel the love of Christ. Anyway, I cry easy. Anyway, I love my son and I do love his husband. I know people don't call them their husband because two male, but it's a whole lot easier loving these guys, showing them Christ's love than it would be to think evil of them. I see the good in both of them and I'm very thankful that my son's children still love their dad.

Jim Daly: Wow, that is heartfelt and I so appreciate that vulnerability, Shelly. For those of us that haven't experienced it, it's easy for us to cast a stone in that direction. But I think when we're standing before the Lord and we're saying two things, in my opinion, just for the illustration: "Lord, I tried to love those around me as much as possible so that they could see you," versus, "Lord, I tried to hold them accountable to your standard."

I think that's the Lord's job, not our job. I appreciate that heart, I love your heart. Don't shrink from truth, but in that mixture that your son knows that you love him, you care about him. Because guess what? So does the Father. He cares about him. Sometimes we get that attitude where if they are diverting from the straight and narrow that God somehow pulls his love away. That's not it at all. It's just that the wrath is there that they're in sin and not coming back around, but loving them is the way to go.

Thanks for that heartfelt voicemail. I'm going to send you a copy of my book, *ReFOCUS: Living a Life That Reflects God's Heart*. If you have a question for me, please send a voicemail or send a note in the contact form. The links are in the show notes. Next time on ReFOCUS, NFL on CBS host James Brown shares about his family and modeling integrity every day through his Christian faith.

James Brown: I don't go around trying to—I said this earlier—to beat people over the head with the Bible. But we are to share the love of Christ lovingly, truthfully, and winsomely.

Jim Daly: That's coming up on the next ReFOCUS with Jim Daly.

Guest (Male): Josh experienced a traumatic childhood, and today he wants to help other families thrive.

Guest (Male): I've partnered with Focus on the Family for quite some time now because they were instrumental to hope, to help.

Jim Daly: I'm Jim Daly. Let's transform our nation one family at a time with your monthly pledge at focusonthefamily.com/families.