We don’t often think of being sick as an act of grace. Whatever we may call it, praise God for building into our bodies a system of getting rid of unclean things that have gone into us. Be it the normal everyday way we do that or when our stomach needs to grind into reverse gear. But what about the things that make not our stomach sick, but our heart sick? What about the things that fatally contaminate our hearts, minds and souls, and separate us from eternal life? How do we get rid of those things? Stomach sickness seems worse than heart sickness because we immediately feel it. But unlike heart sickness can we get rid of stomach sickness quickly; sickness of our soul is harder to perceive. We often don’t feel it until we have hurt others, hurt God, or slowly destroyed ourselves over a lifetime until we reach the final day of judgement. Jesus says it’s time to talk openly about what is making us really sick, and the diagnosis isn’t good.

Jesus walking on water may be the most famous of His miracles. It is also one of His hardest miracles to believe if you are a skeptic, and with good reason: it defies the laws of nature. Mark also records that the disciples knew it defied the law of nature and that they didn’t believe it at first either. C.S. Lewis said this about miracles: “Men became scientific only because they expected Nature to behave according to certain laws. And they expected Nature to behave according to certain laws only because they believed in a supreme Law giver…Belief in miracles, then, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible if there are laws of nature and we have come to know and expect what they are.” Why did God choose to work this miracle in that moment and what did He want his disciples and us to see? That is what we will look at today in Mark 6.

Our passage in Mark 6 this morning is about a miracle that Jesus did to provide for thousands of people in dire need. But really, it is a text about the giving of two things that we often feel like we don’t have enough of: our rest and our resources, our margin and our money. God has ordained that His kingdom will spread through our generosity to Him! Jesus asks a boy to give his food, and asks the disciples to give their little remaining margin, rather than Him providing it all out of thin air because God is interested in making disciples and not simply consumers of His grace. He is interested in cultivating the fruit of compassionate, eternal and generous hearts in our lives as disciples of Jesus.

The saying goes that ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ Initially, familiarity with one another is what deepens our love and deepens our connection. If we continue to honor each other, familiarity leads to even deeper respect and love. But as we become more and more familiar with someone, there is also a temptation to let pride set in. And once pride sets in, pride erodes familiarity into contempt. And we lose respect for the person or thing that we have come to know so well. In Mark 6, Jesus comes to His hometown with the best news that humankind has ever heard, that God has come as one of us to save us from sin and judgement. And so far that message has been well received in all the towns He has been in. When Jesus demonstrates His authority in other towns, people ask, “Who is this?” But when He comes to Nazareth, they don’t ask that question; they assume they know who He is and they ask questions that reveal their bruised sense of pride at being called to repent by one of their own.

In Mark 5 we see two very different people coming to meet Jesus. Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, desperate and undignified throws himself at Jesus’ feet. In order to keep his daughter alive, he has to put her life in the hands of Jesus. At that time, sickness was mostly attributed to some grievous sin on that person’s part, or not making the proper sacrifice, or not getting rid of your uncleanness in the right way. So the community is thinking, “What must he have done to deserve that?” But in spite of that shame he doesn’t approach Jesus in secret or at night; he comes to what was one of the biggest crowds in Jesus’ ministry in full view and throws himself at his feet. Human desperation is usually, by necessity, undignified. But he knows enough about Jesus to know that Jesus will meet his desperation with compassion. The other person is nothing like Jairus at first glance: unknown, invisible, forgotten. She is alone because she was considered unclean for 12 years. She was poor and penniless, and rather than ruling the house of worship, she was banned from the house of worship. She has so much shame on her that her plan is not to throw herself at Jesus’ feet but to secretly blend in, just barely touching the edge of his robe. These two show that faith is the hand of the soul that reaches out to touch God and be healed of our unbelief and our sin. Faith is that hand that takes hold of Jesus as the only one who can heal and save.

A common interpretation of Jesus calming the storm in Mark 4 is, “if you have faith, then Jesus will get you through the storm to the other side." And that’s true. But when we look at this story in Mark 4 together with the beginning of Mark 5, we see something deeper and more foundational to that truth. When my oldest son was 14, he signed up for an introductory flight course out at Centennial airport. The last day of the course was my 14 year old getting to fly the plane himself, and they said I could go up with him. Which I felt like could mean that his last day of class would be my last day on earth. My son did an amazing job. And as the flight went on I was able to relax, because no one would let either I or my son fly a plane without having a certified pilot up there with us, the one who has complete authority and control over the plane, it’s flight path and all of its systems that keep it in the air. The only way I was ok letting my son fly the plane, letting him ‘cross the lake to the other side’ so to speak, was that I knew that the one who had complete authority and control over that plane was sitting in the pilot’s seat. That is what is being put on display for us to see in our passage this morning.

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).