We are in a series called ‘Seeing Jesus,’ going through the gospel of Mark together. And as we come to the end of Mark 3, we see a common thread running through these last few verses, and that seems to be this recurring idea of authority. Who is ultimately in charge and what does that mean? It is a great tragedy when someone has authority but doesn’t know they have it, or someone knows they have authority but doesn’t use it when it’s needed. No one wants to be lorded over by authority, but there are times when we long for someone to take charge! In Mark 3, we learn a lot about the authority of Jesus and about our authority in Christ through our union with Him. So let’s examine the central issue in the last section of Mark 3: who is in charge?

Anger is both constant and everywhere in our world today, from a daily drive down I-25, to social media posts, to families, and even between strangers out in public. So it’s easy to just skim over our passage this morning when it says: “And [Jesus] looked around at them with anger…” But we must stop in our tracks because this is the only passage in the gospels where the emotion of anger in itself is directly attributed to Jesus. There are other places where we see Him get angry over things, and Jesus gets indignant in two other places in Mark over situations of injustice. But only in this passage directly does it say that Jesus was simply angry at the people around Him. And so we ask, “What makes Jesus just purely angry?” One way to see Jesus more clearly is to see what made Him angry. So let’s take a look as we venture into Mark 3.

Last week we took a look at fasting as the first thing Jesus did after His baptism, and one of the first things that He addresses the misuse of when He began His ministry. We looked at the need to be as weak as we can be when we go into a trial, because the greater the trial, the more of God’s strength we need rather than our own. We saw that fasting helps us realize that God is unlike the food that He gives us. The more of food that we have the more full we become, but the more of God that we have the hungrier we get for more awareness of His presence in our life. The more satisfied we are in God, the more unsatisfied we are of how much we know Him and how close we are to Him. Fasting reveals again the hunger for God that has been dulled by constantly consuming at the table of our flesh and of the world. Fasting reveals that at our core, we have a hunger that can not be satisfied by anything else besides deep fellowship with Jesus. And that is the aspect of fasting that I want us to see today; fasting puts us in fellowship with Jesus because it is a form of suffering, and fasting puts us in fellowship with others who are suffering. And that makes Philippians 3 a key passage for understanding fasting in the New Testament.

Fasting during Lent is one of the longest enduring traditions of the church. It began as a way to prepare the hearts of those who were going to be baptized into the Christian faith on Easter. Protestants have an interesting relationship with Lent. Some see fasting during Lent as a call back into legalism that should be cast off, a lingering phantom from our break with the Roman Catholic church. For others, the modern revival of Lent and its call to give something up is a needed check on a consumeristic culture’s idea of just living to have every need instantly met. No matter how you feel about or practice this season of Lent, as we saw last week, Jesus had a chance to get rid of fasting in Mark 2 when he was asked about it but He didn’t. In fact, He strengthened the idea by assuming that His people will fast. It’s easy to read the Bible’s passages on fasting and think “why would I do that?” And because fasting isn’t something that most of us understand God’s heart in, it would be easy to just move on. But we don’t want to move on too fast. Jesus says, “When I am gone…then you WILL fast” and “WHEN you fast…you should do it like this.” So it seems like Jesus intends fasting to be some part of our Christian life between the cross and His return. So let’s read our passages from God’s Word this morning together and see what it has to say to us as followers of Jesus and to us together as the body of Christ.

Five years ago this Sunday, the first Sunday in March of 2020, was the last day that we would have public worship as a five-month old church. Without any warning on the following Sunday, we were told we could no longer meet; we would not see each other’s faces in person for another five or six months. What if I told you this morning as you came into the sanctuary ready for the joy of worship that we were going back to all of that, that I felt like it was best to just worship online, to not sit next to one another, to cancel Prayer Night and Connect Groups. We have come so far from those days just five years ago, and it would ruin all that we have if we tried to live like that again even just five years later. As we continue in the Gospel of Mark this morning, we see that that is what the religious leaders of the day were trying to get Jesus and His disciples to do. To throw off the newness of what Jesus was bringing and go back to the old way of living. Let’s quiet our hearts as we read our passage from Mark 2 this morning.

Join us this Sunday as we once again dive into Exodus 20 to look at the sixth commandment — You shall not murder. (ft. Colin Campbell, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

Join us this Sunday as we once again dive into Exodus 20 to look at the fifth commandment — Honor your father and mother. (ft. Colin Campbell, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

Join us in 1 Samuel 21 as we look at the foolishness of David and the surprising goodness and mercy God shows towards His chosen one (ft. Joel Stanton, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are presented with two options: bow to king Nebuchadnezzar’s idol statue or perish in a fiery furnace. The choice stands before them: will they value their lives more than God’s commands and acquiesce to Nebuchadnezzar’s demands, or will they obey God even if it means death for them? Join us this Sunday as we look at the God who steps in and intervenes in the lives of those who trust in Him (ft. Chad Donohoe, Pastor of Community Life at Deer Creek Church).

As more fires rage in L.A. there are stories of people having to flee at a moment’s notice; people being told they have only minutes to grab all of the things they cherish most. What would you grab in your house if you had to save something from the fire? That's probably an indicator of what you cherish most. We are going through a series on the Gospel of Mark, and Mark chapter 2 reveals to us what Jesus cherishes most; what He would snatch from a fire at a moment’s notice. Jesus cherishes people who are doubting and in need of mercy; that is what He would save from a fire. People are His treasured possessions.

The 18th century poet Alexander Pope once wrote: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” How do you deal with disappointment? As we live in this world, we develop expectations for life and we constantly approach God to fulfill those expectations; disappointment is the grief that we feel when those hopes and expectations go unfulfilled. In our passage this morning, the first thing Jesus wants to tell us is that the Kingdom of God has now come very near to where we are, and that the coming kingdom of God is going to change our expectations of how life works. What is the kingdom of God? A kingdom is simply all of the places where the king reigns. The kingdom of this world has been a place where sin, Satan and death reign; they are the temporary kings, usurpers to the throne, until the true king of this world returns. So the kingdom we live in now is characterized by shattered families, dead dreams, miserable work, and suffering and trials that turn our hearts and minds against the goodness of the true king rather than point us to Him. And now, Jesus says, the true king has come down. The king has set foot on the shores of this kingdom and is beginning to take it back; the first beachhead of the Kingdom of God has been established. But, surprisingly, the announcement of the kingdom comes mingled with disappointing circumstances.

We are starting a new series called “Seeing Jesus,” going through the Gospel of Mark together. Mark was written for one purpose: to help us to see Jesus. Mark is one of four gospels in the Bible, and at the time, a gospel was a new kind of writing. It wasn’t a biography, it wasn’t just a narrative, it wasn’t just a retelling of the life of Jesus. A gospel came about so that we could not just read about Jesus, but so that we could see Him clearly enough to see His uniqueness and beauty for ourselves and to let that seeing affect us. How did He talk? Who did He pay attention to and love? What made Him angry and disappointed? What made Him rejoice? We need to see Jesus clearly because our world sees Jesus in a myriad of ways; the political Jesus, the all accepting and tolerant Jesus, the angry Jesus, the distant Jesus. We need to go back to the gospels—to the testimony of those who walked and talked with Jesus—to see Jesus as He really is.

The New York Times published an article about New Year’s Resolutions a couple of weeks ago. And the idea now in 2025 is that making New Year’s Resolutions is actually unhealthy because it means you aren’t truly accepting yourself; it isn’t loving yourself well to admit that there are areas that you want to change. It seems like our culture has finally become too fragile to make New Years’ Resolutions. In all fairness, it can be defeating to simply build a wall of human resolve that hopes to withstand the storms of daily life. Busyness, unexpected turns, procrastination and bad habits batter our walls of resolution until they break down and we just feel worse. A resolution is basically a wall of our will against the storms of life; a line in the sand against the rising tide of life’s problems. And sand, the Bible says, is exactly the problem. Jesus says that a life that weathers the storms is not determined by the height or the thickness of the walls we build, but by the foundation upon which those walls are built. Resolutions are good, but we need a firm foundation to put those walls upon. Walls that are built on sand just keep sinking lower and lower so we have to constantly work to keep building them higher and higher. And lines in the sand have a tendency to be erased by rising tides of daily life. So what is the foundation? Join us in the gospel of Matthew as we learn that the firm foundation of our lives is hearing and doing the words of Jesus.

The last paragraph of Luke 2 records the only story of Jesus in His childhood within the New Testament. It is an extraordinary story of a child prodigy who amazes the crowds in Jerusalem with His wisdom and love for God. Then, this story ends with His return to Nazareth, where He will live in obscurity for nearly eighteen years before His ministry begins. Join us as we learn how this story can inform us what it means for Jesus to be human as we walk with Him through the ordinary courses of our lives (ft. Joel Stanton, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

When was the last time you got some good news? We are inundated with news these days, most of it not good, and in fact, most of it downright terrible. “Good” news is an interesting phrase because news is just the retelling of something that happened. And then only after we evaluate it in relation to ourselves do we determine if it’s good or bad. In Luke 2 when we meet the lowly shepherds keeping watch over their flock at night, an angel tears open heaven and makes a bold announcement. It is the same news that an angel just told Joseph in Matthew 1. For us it may be an old and familiar story, but for those shepherds and for Joseph and for Mary and the wise men who showed up from the East, it was breaking news of the best kind.

In our modern age of streaming movies and binge watching shows, .it isn’t often that we get to feel the anxiety of a cliffhanger ending to our favorite dramas. Rather than wait a year for the sequel to hit theaters, or even just a week for the next episode…, we can just hit “Play Next” and relieve our anxiety. To be fair, books are that way too though, and I confess on many an occasion flipping to the last page of a book when I just couldn’t take the suspense. But when we do that we miss out. The joy of the last page is not as deep when you have missed the suffering, the waiting, and the highs and lows of the story. And so it is with Ruth; today we come to the final page. We have covered over 10 years of loss, bitterness, joy, suffering, poverty, hopes raised and hopes dashed. And from day one we have seen God just below the surface of everything that has been happening; always present but never seen, except in the kindness and love shown by Ruth and Boaz. God only shows His face in this drama, as He even does today, through the actions of His people. So this morning we get to see the end of the story, which, like all good stories, is just the beginning of another, greater story that we get to remember every Christmas Eve.

Christmas comes with a lot of waiting. Waiting in line at the post office, waiting in traffic, waiting for packages to arrive in time, waiting for cookies to be done. No one likes to wait, particularly at Christmas. If there is something I really want and there is a chance that no one will get it for me, I have been known to just take matters into my own hands and buy myself the gift rather than wait on someone to give it to me. What about you, what do you do when you are tired of waiting? In the suburbs we often just power over waiting with our own means. When stuck in traffic, we pay to get in the express lane. When waiting at the airport we pay for PreCheck. When waiting for a package we pay to have it come overnight. But what about when we are waiting on God? When there are things we can’t just power over? It seems like to wait is to admit in some way that you are human. Advent is a time when we are reminded of what it was like to be waiting for our Redeemer. For about 400 years the world lay in sin and error pining with seemingly no word from God about what His plan was. When we are tired of waiting on God, the temptation is always to just take matters into our own hands. The temptation when waiting on God is to either sin or to get cynical. We are in Ruth 3 this morning; Naomi, Ruth and Boaz have all been waiting on God to get something they want. What will they do when it doesn’t seem to happen?

One of our family traditions around Christmas time is a Secret Santa. The idea of Secret Santa is that you draw names out of a hat and then you give a gift to that person on Christmas morning and it’s a surprise who gave it to them. One year, our kids were having a rough season of not getting along with each other, so we added a new element to the Secret Santa. In addition to just a present on Christmas morning, you had to secretly do kind things for that family member all through the month of December without them knowing it. It didn’t always work, but it did happen plenty of times. It was so fun to see someone come down and say, “My bed was made! Who did that?” or “My chore was done this morning!” Through the whole month of December there was this hidden undercurrent of kindness running through your life, and you had no idea who was doing it so you couldn’t give any credit to the one behind the scenes showing you kindness until the last day. The story of Ruth is a story of God at work behind the scenes, under the surface. Behind the scenes of love, behind the scenes of kindness, and behind the scenes of suffering and struggle. And that is where we pick up in Ruth 2.