The Bullpen with J.D. Greear

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**The Bullpen with J.D. Greear**

Every sermon starts with more than can fit into a message. For years, Pastor J.D. Greear has filled his sermon notes with extra illustrations, questions, insights, and rabbit trails that never made it into the final sermon. He calls that section of his notes “the bullpen.” Now, those ideas are coming out of the bullpen. In each episode, J.D. sits down with a few others to unpack a recent message, go deeper into Scripture, wrestle with difficult questions, and explore implications there wasn’t time to address from the pulpit. Along the way, they’ll also tackle important issues and questions happening in the world through the lens of biblical wisdom. No scripts. No polished talking points. Just honest, free-flowing conversations about Scripture, the gospel, and how they apply to real life. The Bullpen is a resource from J.D. Greear Ministries designed to help you go deeper in your understanding and love of the gospel.

Latest Episodes:

Is Christian Celebrity All Bad? Nov 01, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. discusses whether a certain level of “Christian celebrity” can be helpful, or if it is always hurtful.

Show Notes:

I don’t think the idea of a Christian celebrity is categorically, across the board, a bad thing. It’s always been a part of Christianity in some way, even going back to the apostles. I think of men and women like Billy and Ruth Graham, Elisabeth Elliot, John Piper, and so many more who have taken their “Christian celebrity” and made tremendous impact on the kingdom. I think it’s wrong to seek celebrity, but sometimes God does raise up a man or woman for a particular task at a particular time, and they may become well known. In fact, some level of “Christian celebrity” is inescapable and inevitable.
I do think it can be dangerous—both for the people that are lifting this person up and for the man or woman that is being lifted up. For Paul, in 1 Cor. 3, he recognizes that he and Apollos as two “celebrity Christians.” He says there is danger in relying on a particular person more than you do on God, and viewing them as the primary source of your spiritual growth can be devastating.
It’s also dangerous for those of us in ministry. If in my quest to serve the body of Christ, my name becomes known, I should treat that as a necessary evil. But if I begin to thrive on that and feed off of it, that will always let me down.

God didn’t make us for the stage. He made us to be servants.

Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question!

As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast!

Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Is There Such a Thing as “Unanswered Prayer”? Aug 16, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. talks about the pain of unanswered prayer and the realities of prayer for the Christian.

A glimpse inside this episode:

This is a tricky question. I’ve often heard that behind every question is a questioner. When we’re dealing with unanswered prayer, the Bible has a lot to say. But the heart of the questioner matters a lot here. More often than not, when someone asks me about unanswered prayer, it’s not an academic question for them. It’s a question coming from a place of deep hurt. They asked God for healing in their life—and it didn’t happen. They asked God to reconcile a relationship—but the other person still left. They asked God to work in their kid’s life—but it’s been years and there’s no sign of that child returning.

So first off, I want to say, when it seems like God isn’t answering prayer, that’s legitimately painful. It makes us question God’s goodness. It makes us wonder if he’s real. Those are the kinds of doubts that all of us, at one point or another in our walk of faith, deal with. I’ve wrestled with them. Every great saint has wrestled with them. So if you’re in that spot, don’t despair. Walk through that difficult question with God.

And here, I think, is the best road forward: If we’re walking in fellowship with the Spirit, there isn’t technically any such thing as unanswered prayer. (Now, this is different than the way God responds to those outside of Christ: He may hear them, but he hasn’t promised to.) With believers, though, the Apostle John reminds us, “This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14–15). If we are walking with God, we can be sure we have his ear.

Whatever your situation, whatever your request, if you are God’s child, he’s listening.

Now, does that mean he says “Yes” to everything you ask? Of course not. At times, since God’s wisdom is so much greater than our own, he re-directs our answer. Or he sometimes tells us to wait. Or sometimes he simply says, “No.”

But saying “No” doesn’t mean he’s being cruel. As Jesus taught, a good father gives his children food like eggs and fish, not dangerous animals like scorpions and snakes (cf. Luke 11:12–13). The point is that even earthly parents withhold things from their children—but that withholding is a result of their love, not a lack of it.

Sometimes the exercise of God’s love means he gives us what we would have asked for if we knew what he knew. (I think I first heard that from Tim Keller.) What feels like unanswered prayer is actually God answering according to the wisdom and love of the Father.

Learn more about Just Ask.

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How Do You Set Up Your Own Prayer Life? Aug 09, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. shares some practical ways to cultivate a habit of prayer.

A glimpse inside this episode:

I have a 15-15-15 pattern. (15 minutes Bible reading, 15 minutes prayer, and 15 minutes in a devotional of some kind.)

When it comes to prayer itself, I’m a big believer in helpful mnemonics. The one I always use is: HEAR (hear, examine, apply, respond). Also, ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). It’s roughly based on the Lord’s Prayer, but it identifies the key elements in a way I find helpful. (There’s a kid version of this that’s also great, and much simpler—WITH, “wow, I’m sorry, thanks, help.)

What else? Ooh, here’s a big one: Set aside time for it. I don’t know anyone who really excels in prayer who doesn’t have a devoted daily time for it. That’s not the only time they pray. But it is the anchor. For me, I have a designated time every morning and every evening in which I meet with God. And while I pray at many other times throughout the day, I find the rhythm of my morning/evening prayer times incredibly helpful in cultivating a heart of prayer.

Here’s another one: I read Scripture with an eye toward prayer. So as I read a chapter of the Bible, I take special note of promises or instructions. These help provide direction for me as I pray, becoming the promises on which I ground my requests and the instructions that become my requests. Another way to think of this is that we shouldn’t just read through our Bibles. We should pray through our Bibles. 3000 promises!

Here’s one last tip I picked up from Tim Keller (though it goes back to Martin Luther, and probably beyond him): “Riff on” the Lord’s Prayer. While it is good to recite the Lord’s Prayer, “riffing on” it means we take each phrase, personalize it, and apply it to our circumstances.

Just start! Set a time.

Learn more about Just Ask.

Episode Sponsor:

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Can We Change God’s Mind in Prayer? Aug 02, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. discusses the title of his newest book, “Just Ask: The Joy of Confident, Bold, Patient, Relentless, Shameless, Dependent, Grateful, Powerful, Expectant Prayer.”

A glimpse inside this episode:

Why is your new book called Just Ask?

I wanted to communicate the simplicity of prayer. We are supposed to come to God like children. Children don’t think about how they approach, whether they are using the right words, or whether their parents are pleased with them. They just ask. And that’s the beginning of learning to pray. We are a people of great need and he is a God of great willingness, who is ready to hear us whenever we come to him.

In Scripture, Jesus promises, “You have not because you ask not,” and “Whatever you ask in my name, I will give it.” Or consider God’s word to Jeremiah, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and incomprehensible things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). It’s an invitation. It seems like the entire thrust of the Bible is, “God is here. Just ask.”

This idea isn’t new to me, of course. I think the book that first opened my eyes to this was A Praying Life by Paul Miller. His influence is all over this book, but the biggest thing I learned from him was this idea of relating to God as a dad. We get so paralyzed trying to figure out if we’re doing prayer right. But the moment we shift our thinking and realize, “We’re basically just toddlers and God is a good father,” it changes everything. I mean, when I think of the way my kids approach me, it’s almost silly. They don’t seem to have a category for “interruption.” They walk in and just begin, mid-stream, regardless of what I’m doing. And they come with the same level of seriousness whether they’re talking about a scrape they got on the playground, a kid who is bothering them at school, or a new idea they have for building a time machine out of Amazon boxes. I’m their dad, so of course they would come tell me what’s going on.

There are a lot of ways approaching God is different than my kids approaching me. But we need to recover that sense of relationship and ease and simplicity. If you feel stuck on where to start, be like my kids: Just start. Just ask.

Here’s what we need to know about sovereignty: Sovereignty helps us understand why events have happened the way they have. Sovereignty gives us confidence that God’s purposes will win out in the end. He’s in charge. He’s got this. But never in Scripture do we see God’s sovereignty moving people away from prayer. If anything, God’s sovereignty is a motivation for prayer—because you know what God wants to do and you know that prayer is the way God acts. It’s like John Wesley said, “God does nothing on earth except in response to believing prayer.”

Learn more about Just Ask.

Episode Sponsor:

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What is the Best Bible Translation? And What’s the Difference? May 24, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. explains the differences in the creation of Bible translations.

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Is the Loss of Cultural Christianity a Good or Bad Thing? May 17, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. talks about the celebration of post-Christian culture within the church and whether or not that’s a good thing.

A glimpse inside this episode:

Distinction is good–but only those who have lived in a privileged Western lifestyle would ever say something like that. The loss of human dignity that comes from a crumbling Christian worldview is devastating. Sin corrupts.

Rebecca McLaughlin who we just spent a few weeks hearing from:

Many of the reasons secularists claim to oppose Christianity are actually rooted in Christian soil. The idea that human beings are equally, morally valuable, the idea that the oppressed should be cared for, the idea that men and women are equal, the idea that unborn babies should matter, the idea of racial justice an unity… all of these things come to us out of the Bible.
There’s an Israeli atheist historian named Yuval Noah Harari who wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. One of the things he’s clear about in that book is that Christianity is the idea that we think that human beings are equally morally valuable. When you think of something like human rights, apart from Christianity, that’s a figment of our imagination.
Just as chimpanzees and hyenas and spiders have no human rights, why would humans have rights apart from a biblical worldview where humans are made in the image of God?

So, what is our attitude toward culture?

Two extremes: Assimilation or separation? You have a third choice—transformation.

Hard to think about this without pulling in a classic book by Richard Niebuhr: Christ and Culture.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic book, Christ and Culture, has influenced or at least informed the discussion, notably among Western evangelicals, since it was published in 1951. Niebuhr proposed five models, which he labelled as: 1) Christ against culture; 2) Christ of culture; 3) Christ above culture; 4) Christ and culture in paradox; and 5) Christ the transformer of culture.

Carson: Culture and Christ Revisited. First two aren’t even biblical.

When it comes to engaging culture, Carson rightly argues that one size doesn’t fit all: Christians have different cultural concerns in 21st-century North America than in 19th-century Northern Europe or the killing fields of Cambodia or present-day South Sudan.

How can we impact our culture?

One of the things I told our church was that you can’t make a difference unless you are different. One of the ironies of Christian history in our country — around the mid 20th century, as our culture began to change its opinion on orthodox Christian teaching and Christian morality, changed right along with them. They said things like, “If we don’t change our old-fashioned, outdated views on these things, we’ll be so offensive to our culture we’ll lose all influence.” And yet, those churches and denominations that did that–they’ve been the ones that shrunk the fastest. Today, their numbers are incredibly small and they’ve become altogether irrelevant.

Episode Sponsor:

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Is Personal Suffering Still a Primary Objection People Have to Christianity? A Conversation With Rebecca McLaughlin, Part 4 May 10, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. and Rebecca McLaughlin discuss Rebecca’s new book, The Secular Creed, as she helps to disentangle the beliefs Christians gladly affirm from those they cannot embrace.

A glimpse inside this episode:

Today we come to the end of our special series with Rebecca McLaughlin. Rebecca is the author of Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. If you haven’t read this book or have it on your shelf as a reference, you’re really missing out. She also recently released 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity. So get it for your middle or high schoolers. And lastly, her newest book that was released last week: The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims.

This was originally recorded as a long-form conversation, but we’ve split it up into four question and answer segments. Today, Pastor J.D. and Rebecca spend a few minutes talking about the topics of her newest book: This so-called “Secular Creed”. We’ve all seen the yard signs our neighbors have that make broad sweeping statements that leave us with only all-or-nothing belief options. Things like: Love is Love and Gay Rights are Civil Rights… when the real truth is a bit more complicated. Rebecca helps us disentangle the beliefs Christians gladly affirm from those they cannot embrace.

But that’s not all, they will also turn the table completely to end their conversation by talking about personal suffering because when we’re talking about defending and understanding our faith, suffering is still the primary objection people have to Christianity.

Episode Sponsor:

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What Does a Faithful Christian Witness Look Like in a Politically Polarized Time? A Conversation With Rebecca McLaughlin, Part 3 May 03, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. and Rebecca McLaughlin discuss several complex questions on topics like same-sex attraction, race, and politics.

A glimpse inside this episode:

We are in the middle of a very special series of episodes for you. For the past few weeks here on Ask Me Anything, we have guest Rebecca McLaughlin joining Pastor J.D.

Rebecca is the author of Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. If you haven’t read this book or have it on your shelf as a reference, you’re really missing out. She also recently released 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity. So get it for your middle or high schoolers. And lastly, her newest book that was released last week: The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims.

This was originally recorded as a long-form conversation, but we’ve split it up into four question and answer segments. Today, Pastor J.D. hits Rebecca with several tough questions. Rebecca will spend a few minutes answering: How can evangelical churches be safe places for people who find themselves attracted to the same sex? And also, how do we use this racially polarized moment as an opportunity for the gospel? And lastly, what does a faithful christian witness look like in a politically polarized time?

Episode Sponsor:

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Where Are Christians More Shaped By Our Culture Than the Bible? A Conversation With Rebecca McLaughlin, Part 2 Apr 26, 2021

Show notes

Pastor J.D. and Rebecca McLaughlin discuss some areas of life where Christians have been more shaped by culture than Scripture.

A glimpse inside this episode:

We are in the middle of a really special series of episodes for you. Starting last week (so go back and listen to last week’s episode if you haven’t already), and for three more weeks, we have guest Rebecca McLaughlin joining Pastor J.D.

This was originally recorded as a long-form conversation, but we’ve split it up into four questions and answers. Today, Pastor J.D. and Rebecca will spend a few minutes talking about some of the areas where we may have been more shaped by our culture than by Scripture — specifically diving into racism and homosexuality. Rebecca has a lot of wisdom to share with us today as well as pieces of her own story that you don’t want to miss towards the end.

Episode Sponsor:

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How has defending faith changed in our current culture? A Conversation with Rebecca McLaughlin, Part 1 Apr 19, 2021

Show notes

We have a really special series of episodes for you. For the next four weeks, we have guest Rebecca McLaughlin joining Pastor J.D. Rebecca is the author of Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. If you haven’t read this book or have it on your shelf as a reference, you’re really missing out. She also recently released 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity. So get it for your middle or high schoolers. And lastly, her newest book that was released last week: The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims.

This was originally recorded as a long-form conversation, but we’ve split it up into four questions and answers. Today, Pastor J.D. and Rebecca will spend a few minutes talking about the traditional approach to defending our faith versus current questions people are asking. What’s the solution to thinking differently?

I will warn you, though, that there are significant Harry Potter spoilers here. So if you haven’t read the books or watched the movies over the past 20 or so years, it’s about time you know how it all ends.

Episode Sponsor:

Let BELAY help your church live its mission in your community by helping you juggle less and accomplish more. Visit belaysolutions.com/lifeway for your free download.

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