Episódios
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Audio of A Walk to Remember
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And then Paul tells us four things that characterize and marks this emerging family likeness, a life that is pleasing to God, in verses 19 through 12. Do you remember the four things? A life that is fully pleasing to God is a life that is first "bearing fruit in every good work." Secondly, it is "increasing in the knowledge of God." Thirdly, it is "being strengthened with power for endurance and patience with joy." And finally, it is a life that is "giving thanks to the Father." How do you live a life that is fully pleasing to God? In what does the family likeness consist? It is a life that is bearing fruit, increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened, and giving thanks. That was last time.
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I picture myself almost as though we were walking past Paul's room and his door is slightly ajar and you can hear him on his knees pleading for the Colossians in chapter 1 verses 9 through 12. We're eavesdropping on the apostle Paul at prayer. And we get a real sense, don't we, of the heart of this man for these Christians whom he has never met personally. Here are his priorities. These are the things that burden him as he thinks about them. I suppose if you were to eavesdrop on my prayers you might see some very different priorities. I would be, I think, ashamed for you to hear the worldliness and the self-centeredness of the priorities that so often burden my heart. But not so with Paul. His priorities listed in this prayer, as I hope we'll see, if we will take them in and make them our own, will not only change our prayer lives but will change our Christian lives in a thoroughgoing way.
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A Well Grounded Assurance
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One of the ways we are going to do that on Sunday mornings is by considering together the message of the apostle Paul as he wrote to the Colossians; the short letter of Paul to the Colossians. So we’ll be pausing in our on-going studies in Mark’s gospel. We’ll come back to it again, God willing, in the new year, and we’ll be focusing beginning today on Colossians. So do go ahead, if you haven’t done so already, and take a Bible, turn to Colossians chapter 1. We’re focusing on verses 1 and 2 in this introductory sermon just to sort of set up the message of the letter, and we’re going to see how, in these few verses, particularly as Paul addresses the Colossians, we’re going to see how he speaks about their identity, about Christian identity, in four ways. There are four relationships that define our identity as Christian people.
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Before we read it, let me remind you a little bit about the portrait of Jesus’ ministry Mark has been painting for us so far. It’s surprising ministry, actually, because the people we expect will respond to Christ don’t seem to want to know Him at all. And the people we have every reason to believe will have nothing to do with Jesus are flocking to His ministry. So you’ve got Jesus in the synagogue for worship and there’s chaos. The Pharisees, who are the religious elites, really serious ones about following the law of Moses, they’re horribly offended at Jesus for what they consider to be His rejection of the Sabbath Day. The scribes, the theologians, the experts in the law sent down from Jerusalem to examine Jesus’ ministry and report back, they conclude that He is demon-possessed. Even His own family, His mother and His brothers, they decide – they’re closest to Him of all people on earth – and they decide that He is insane. The people that ought to have responded to Him, that we have every reason to expect, humanly speaking, will immediately understand and respond well to Jesus’ ministry, don’t seem to understand or respond well at all.
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and we’ve come to the third chapter, Mark chapter 3, and to a pair of passages – really they’re connected passages – that teach us about Jesus’ family; show us something of the inner family life that was our Savior’s during years of His earthly ministry. We began looking at some of this material last time. We were introduced to Jesus’ family in verses 20 and 21. They’ve heard about some of the kerfuffle surrounding Jesus’ ministry in Capernaum. They’ve really begun to be concerned that Jesus is finally gone ‘round the bend and has some sort of episode, a breakdown perhaps, something like that. And so they’ve made the journey down to Capernaum from Nazareth to put a stop to all this nonsense; it’s sort of an intervention on their part. They’re there to seize Jesus and bring Him home.
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In verse 20, if you’ll look at it, you’ll see Jesus has gone home. So in the passage prior to this, He was on retreat with His friends, His disciples, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And then, He was up on the mountainside calling twelve to Himself whom He appointed as apostles. Now He returns home. He has a base, we might say, in the city of Capernaum, and that’s where He has gathered again. And now that He has come back, word has spread; it seems to have become a common enough occurrence at this point in His ministry, and a great crowd have gathered and are pressing in upon Him making many demands of Him.
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Let me list the three themes that we will be considering together in these verses this morning so that as we read it in a few moments you’ll have a sense of where we are going. First of all, I want you to notice in verses 7 through 12 how Mark sets up a contrast with the passage we considered last week in verses 1 to 6. There is a simple contrast here designed to reveal the real power of the Gospel. A simple contrast that reveals the power of the Gospel. Then secondly, we’re also going to notice that at the end of the first passage in verse 12, and again at the end of the second passage in verse 19, there are some sinister agents that appear. There’s demonic powers; there’s a note about Judas Iscariot. And yet, both are made to serve a broader purpose as Mark tells the story about Jesus. Both indicate truth about Christ so that sinister agents are made to serve Gospel ends, you see. So first, we have a simple contrast that reveals Gospel power. Secondly, sinister agents that serve Gospel ends. And then, as we look at the list of the twelve apostles, the men that Jesus called, these rather ordinary, frankly often quite messy, confused, contradictory, ordinary men, these twelve men. This is a point for which I am personally very grateful – how strange people make Gospel servants. Strange people make Gospel servants. Praise the Lord, right?
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We are dealing this morning with the last two in a series of five stories that Mark has gathered together to account for the growing tension and conflict that is taking place between Jesus and the religious establishment, the Pharisees, as Jesus began His ministry. You will remember how we saw, three, four weeks ago, the Pharisees were offended when Jesus pronounced forgiveness of a man who had been paralyzed. “No one forgives sin but God,” they reasoned, “therefore, He must be blaspheming,” never for a moment considering Jesus might be the God who forgives sin. They were offended. They were offended again when Levi, the tax collector come disciple, has a great party to celebrate his conversion to Christ and brings all his tax collector and sinner friends and Jesus is right there in the thick of things celebrating with him. They were offended. And they were offended when they realized that they were fasting, like any good Pharisee should, that the disciples of John the Baptist were even fasting, but Jesus and His disciples didn’t fast. They were offended.
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We are continuing to work through Mark’s gospel; we are at the eighteenth verse. This is now the third, fourth, of five episodes that Mark recounts together like this to explain the escalating friction, conflict, between Jesus and the religious establishment of His day – the scribes and the Pharisees. Back in chapter 2:1-12, Jesus has healed a paralyzed man and in the course of His engagement with him, pronounced forgiveness. The Pharisees were outraged because the only one who may forgive sin is God alone. There is an implicit claim to deity in Jesus’ words and so the Pharisees called Him a blasphemer. And then as we saw last time, in verses 13 through 17, when Jesus invites Levi who is a tax collector, an outcast, friend of tax collectors and sinners, to become a disciple of His and then goes and enjoys a celebration, a party at Levi’s home, the Pharisees are outraged because this is not the kind of behavior one expects to see in a devout, religious, observant rabbi that they think Jesus is claiming to be.
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If you were with us a few Sundays ago when last we looked together at Mark’s gospel, you will remember how with the healing of the paralyzed man, which is the story in the opening twelve verses of Mark chapter 2, a controversy begins between Jesus and the Pharisees. The Lord Jesus pronounced a word of forgiveness over the paralyzed man and the Pharisees were deeply offended. They considered Him to be blaspheming because in their logic only God can forgive sins. Their logic broke down, of course, because in their spiritual blindness they could not perceive that Jesus, the Man, was also the living God against whom we have sinned and to whom belongs the prerogative of forgiveness. And so they were deeply offended.
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So Psalm 120 to 134 is a section in the Psalter, in the Psalms, that’s often called “The Song of Ascents.” Each one of the psalms has the little title at the beginning that says, “A Song of Ascents,” and there’s fifteen of them in total. We’re just going to look at one of them today; Psalm 121. And there’s three lessons that we’re going to learn from this passage. Let’s jump right into it. The fact of the ascent, the peril of the ascent, and the keeper of the ascent.
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This is a passage that is honestly quite hard for us to understand in our relatively clean, relatively healthy, relatively affluent time and place. We have no sense of the horror that an infectious skin disease like leprosy evoked in the days when Jesus ministered in Galilee. And so one of the great dangers, as we read this passage, is to read these six verses and to see Jesus performing a sweet, kindly act as He makes this sick man all better. "Isn't it nice." When in fact, this is a deeply shocking text for a number of different reasons.
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You might say that this part of the chapter reads a bit like a sort of a journalistic documentary, you know, as the camera follows Jesus across the course of one whole day; one twenty-four-hour period. If you trace back to verse 21 for a moment you will see that the passage we considered last week begins on the Sabbath morning. And then, verse 29, He went directly from the synagogue where He sees accustomed to have gone every Sabbath, verse 29 tells us He went directly to the home of Simon and Andrew. And then notice the events that follow in verse 32. They take place at Simon’s home after sundown. So now we’re into the evening of the Sabbath day. And then, Jesus, while it’s still dark, very early the next morning, retreats to a desolate place in verse 35 for prayer. And so you see how it goes. It’s morning all the way to morning – a twenty-four-hour period; one whole day in the life of Jesus.
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Mark, in this opening chapter, you will remember, is introducing us to the ministry of the Lord Jesus that was beginning in the region of Galilee. In verses 14 and 15, we saw a marvelous little summary of the content of His preaching. He told all who heard Him that “the kingdom is at hand.” The King has come. The kingdom was breaking into the world, invading the world with the arrival of Jesus. And in verses 16 to 20 of chapter 1, that we considered together last time, we saw how the King and the kingdom calls people to a life of discipleship, to life under a new Master sent on a new mission. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
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And in some ways, you could say that the remainder of chapter 1 is an explanation of how that works out, what it looks like, what are the implications of this Gospel that has broken onto the scene of history good news in the person of Jesus. What will it mean for our lives? And so in verses 16 through 20, we see what it looks like, what it will do in the hearts and lives of two sets of brothers – Simon and Andrew, and James and John – as Jesus calls them to Himself. And all I want to do is consider verses 16 through 20 under two simple headings. First, Jesus’ call, His invitation to come to Himself. What does that mean? What’s involved? What are the implications? The call. And then secondly, the cost. If you answer Jesus’ call, His invitation and summons, what will that involve for your life? What will change? What is the cost involved that you may need carefully to consider? So the call and then the cost.
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Today, however, we begin to consider Jesus’ ministry itself in a more direct fashion. And it’s fascinating, I think, I wonder if you’ll agree, that when Mark sets out to describe Jesus’ public ministry, the first thing he does is give us a summary of his preaching. Here’s why I think that’s important. As we read through Mark’s gospel and we ask the question, “Why did Jesus come? What does it all mean?” Mark wants us to pay attention to the way Jesus Himself answers that question. He answers that question for us in His preaching. In other words, the message Jesus proclaims helps us understand the significance of the ministry that He fulfills. As you read over Mark’s account, it would be relatively easy to accuse Mark of imposing his own perspective on the life of Christ, of manufacturing the significance, a significance that Jesus did not claim for Himself. Or perhaps you could accuse the church of doing the same down the ages since these early days in Palestine. And Mark here, in verses 14 and 15, short-circuits all of that by anchoring everything else in his account about Jesus’ ministry by showing us Jesus’ message. Here is what Jesus is all about. Here is the significance of His coming as Jesus Himself explains it to us.
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