For many, Easter has become a celebration of the beginning of Spring. Bright colors, flowers and eggs, humans dressing up in terrifying rabbit costumes…all the things you would find out in nature. But Easter has been celebrated for almost 2000 years as much more than just the coming of Spring, more than just new life after Winter. At its heart, Easter is the celebration of new life after death, the celebration of resurrection. New life comes in Spring only to die again next Winter, but Easter heralds an eternally lasting change. The Bible says that death no longer holds sway over the risen Jesus, and that is the same life that God offers to us in Him. The glory of Easter is not just the coming of Spring and not even that just Jesus alone was raised from the dead, but that in Him, in His resurrection, we can be forgiven of our sin, we can die to what is old and corrupted and be made completely new, raised to new life with Jesus.

It is hard to go back and imagine the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross. Good Friday is good because the pain that Jesus bore meant our joy and our freedom from sin and death. The cross brought a redemptive element to suffering that was not there before. But it is easy to forget the real pain of the cross for Jesus. Much has been said about the physical pain that Jesus endured for us. The Roman cross was reserved for only the worst of criminals, among whom Jesus should never have been included. Jesus started His ministry standing in a long line of sinners waiting to be baptized, and He ended His earthly ministry in a line of crosses, between two of the worst criminals executed that day. The cross was designed to be the slowest death possible; it was designed to combine all the ways our body could die. Suffocation, blood loss, dehydration, shock; it combined all of our physical pains into one. And it had one purpose: to punish a criminal to the maximum amount of pain that his body could handle before dying and to make sure he paid well for his crimes against the supreme authority of the Roman Empire. It was a physical pain that few could imagine. But Scripture points to another pain of the cross that we can easily overlook amid the gruesome physical torture that Jesus went through. That is the mental and emotional anguish of soul that each one of our sins drives into the heart of our Father that now were laid on Jesus at the cross.

Today is the Sunday that we call Palm Sunday. As we approach Easter Sunday, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus—the joy and triumph we want to get to—we first need to remember all that Jesus went through to get to the other side of that grave. What road did He first have to travel to be raised for our salvation? For our resurrection into eternal life in Him?

In Mark 4, Jesus has such a large crowd gathered that He has to teach from a boat, and Jesus does something strange. He doesn’t just start sharing propositional truth about Himself; He has a captive audience of thousands and He chooses to tell a story, a parable. A parable was a certain kind of teaching that placed an earthly story alongside of a heavenly meaning. Parables are the most striking feature of the teaching of Jesus; He used them more, and in a different way, than anyone else before His time or since. Jesus uses parables as a sort of spiritual test of heart for whether people want to hear His message about the kingdom of God and what that means. The test wasn’t whether they were wise enough or clever enough to pull that heavenly meaning from the story, but rather: would their lack of understanding make them curious and drive them to Jesus to know the meaning, or would the story just further harden their hearts and make them walk away? Jesus uses parables as a sign of judgement for those who are not interested in Him and as a sign of hope for those who are. 

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).