Pastor J.D., Are You a Calvinist?

Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

J.D. Greear

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pastor J.D. answers one of his most asked questions and talks about the non-negotiables of the Christian faith in contrast to some particulars where it’s okay to disagree.

A glimpse inside this episode:

* Theologians have argued about this for 2000 years.
* “Calvinism is not an issue to me until it becomes one to you. But when it becomes one to you, it becomes one to me, and I’ll probably take whatever side you are not.” -Pastor J.D.

* What someone believes about the finer points of Calvinism is not usually the issue; it’s how they believe it. We may have trouble achieving absolute clarity together on every one of the “five points,” but we can be absolutely clear on the fact that the Bible condemns a divisive and uncharitable spirit over something about which gospel-loving Christians have historically had trouble finding complete agreement.

* John Calvin’s favorite verse: Deuteronomy 29:29.

* God chose to keep some things hidden from us. Type A people like me hate that. But it’s for our good. We must never go farther in our theology than Scripture allows.

* Elevating your doctrinal system too highly makes you a fundamentalist.

* You start to believe that God’s graces are only found in your narrow little camp.
* Calvinists seem especially prone to this.

* Anti-Calvinism can be just as bad. (Remember: Luther, Spurgeon, Whitefield, Judson, and Carey were all Calvinist! Calvinism doesn’t kill evangelism!)
* Christians should “cross-pollinate.”

* I’m not saying I’m a doctrinal relativist. Some things are non-negotiable (bodily resurrection, salvation in Christ alone, etc.)
* Reading broadly takes humility. Isn’t that a good thing?
* Eat the fish, spit out the bones.

* The gospel—not the 5 points of Calvinism—is the center of our faith. If you believe in the loftiness of God’s glory, that salvation belongs only to God, and that God is sovereign over the world, and that he that has begun a good work in you will see it through, then you and I can stand in alignment, even if we parse some of the particulars differently.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lifeway Leadership Podcast Network.
0:05.0	You're listening to Ask Me Anything with Pastor J.D. Greer.
0:09.2	Honest questions, quick answers.
0:11.3	I'm your host, Todd Unzicker, and this is where J.D. Greer says, ask me anything.
0:20.3	Oh. All right. Ask me anything with J.D. I know if J.D. was in a big room of people, and he said,
0:35.6	ask me anything. I know what the number one question would be.
0:38.9	And so we're going to start the podcast off with this. Pastor J.D., are you a Calvinist?
0:44.5	Okay. So we'll just start with the deep end of the pool. Yeah, actually, I do get asked this
0:48.3	question a lot. And I actually take it as a compliment because I feel like hopefully the way that
0:51.7	I'm preaching, I feel like there certainly are elements of, you know, what we traditionally call Calvinism that seem to be in the Bible.
0:57.2	And there are things that are, you know, are non-Calvinists that are called non-Calvinists.
1:01.4	And so I actually take it as a compliment.
1:04.0	I, you know, I always say that Calvinism is never an issue to me until it becomes one to you. And then when it becomes one to you, then I am on the opposite side of whatever you are, because I just don't feel like it's a central thing.
1:14.8	First of all, I go back to what my dad told me when I was, first of all called into ministry.
1:19.5	That's right. My dad is not a professional pastor, just been a businessman all of his life and he said, I was wrestling with these things. And he said, son, I'm just going to tell you.
1:29.3	He said, you know, guys a lot smarter than you have been thinking about and writing about this for the
1:33.9	last 2,000 years and they haven't come up with consensus. I don't think you're going to figure it out in
1:38.5	your years in seminary. So it's probably wiser for you to devote time to the things that you know God wants you to do than trying to figure out the things that are probably beyond your grasp.
1:48.6	Later, I discovered that my dad's counsel was a lot like what Moses said in Deuteronomy 29-29,
1:55.2	which happens to be John Calvin's favorite verse I've heard, where Moses said,
1:59.9	hey, the secret things belong to the Lord
2:01.7	our God, but the things that are revealed, they belong to us and our children forever.
	...

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