To See and Follow Christ Fully

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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Well, I want to begin our time today with a bit of a story. Not very often do I use personal stories as an illustration or an introduction, but it seemed fitting today.

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It was almost three years ago, so in December of 2019, that I went for a visit to my family's optometrist.

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I had been reading a lot over Christmas break, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot, a lot. And I just had this strange eye irritation that kept popping up.

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And so at the spurring of my wife, and husbands, we probably appreciate this, with my wife actually booking the appointment for me,

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I went to the optometrist so that I could see what was wrong with my eyes. As you normally do when you go through the optometrist, you go through all of the gauntlet of stations as you make your way through.

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There's that hot air balloon that zooms into focus. When you look through the lens, there's that eye puff test that you can never get quite right.

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At least I can't hold my eyes open long enough to get the puff. And eventually after I went through the gauntlet of tests,

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I walked into the optometrist's office, and the optometrist sat down in front of me and looked through that, what looks to me like a 60s contraption, that steel shutter device, and shone this bright light so deep into my eyes,

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I thought she could look into my soul. And as she looked, I got a sense just from some of her curious sighs that something was wrong.

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As she looked, there was a bit of a, hmm, hmm. And she started to ask me about my family history.

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I started to realize, ooh, there might be something really wrong. Asking me about multiple sclerosis and other pretty serious health conditions.

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At the end of it all, she explained to me that there was something wrong with my optic nerves, and it was likely that it was affecting my vision.

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And so they took me through another series of tests, and in the months and weeks that followed, they had me go through every test imaginable, ran me through MRIs and visits with specialists, and it really was a time that tested my faith in the sovereignty of God.

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But as I went through the whole process, at the end of it all, I suppose I'm still in the midst of it all, but at the end of that series of appointments, what they said to me was this, that there were issues with my optic nerve that causes me to have blind spots in my vision that most people do not have.

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And so when I look out at you today, there are parts of my vision that my eye does not see, but that my brain fills in the blanks.

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There's times when I read God's word, and I'm mindful that my vision is, part of it is gone.

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I hope that not all of it leaves, but there are parts that I cannot see.

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And my wife, probably that's her excuse for being a very helpful backseat driver, but I know

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Noah might remember this, there was a time when I was driving, and I almost drove our family SUV into an

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SUV -sized sinkhole on a residential street. I'm going to blame that on my vision, but don't worry,

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I'll drive you to Red Deer if we have to go next week. But it came to my attention that there were parts of my vision, parts of what

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I was seeing in front of me where I was in fact blind, even though I didn't realize it.

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Parts of my sight where I do not see things that are right in front of me, even though it ought to be very clear to me.

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And all jokes aside, I found it fascinating and a little bit scary that a person can experience some degree of blindness and not even fully realize it.

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And while this is certainly true of our physical vision, I want to suggest to you that it is even more true of our spiritual vision, or if I can call it our spiritual eyesight.

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In fact, if we were to sit down today, if I were to take each of you into one of those dark rooms like the optometrists have, and if we were to shine the pure light of God's Word into your soul, and if we were to look carefully at the condition of your heart, your spiritual eyesight, we would find that each of us, each of you in this room, have spiritual blind spots, areas in your life where you do not see clearly as you ought to see.

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We would find a heart, in some of you, we would find a heart that has been enlightened by the gospel, certainly, that has been diligently trained with the

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Word, but still less pronounced blind spots, fuzzy spots, blurred vision in certain areas.

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For some of you, we would find a great deal of light, but still dark spots that need to be illuminated by God's Word and God's Spirit.

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And then in others of you, I fear we would find complete and utter spiritual darkness.

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And oh, how dark is that darkness, that the God of this world has blinded your mind to keep you from seeing the light of the gospel and the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

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You may not even know it yet, but some of you in this room, even, may be wretched and miserable and poor and blind.

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Now, if I can be so bold as to ask, if we were to put you somewhere on this spectrum today, how is your spiritual eyesight?

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Are you clear -sighted? Are you spiritually blurry? Or are you spiritually blind?

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Do you have eyes that behold the glory of Christ with a rich understanding of him and his gospel?

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Or is your vision blurry and indistinct in areas? Today, we're going to find

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Christ ministering north of the Sea of Galilee. And this is the subject matter that we find in our passage today, interestingly enough.

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We'll see that there's an important interpretive key, even in the narrative of the passage. And today, as we study this last few paragraphs of Mark 8, as we find

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Christ healing the blind and teaching his disciples, our text is going to show us just how blurry the disciples' vision of Christ was, how much they didn't understand.

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And as our Lord teaches them, and as he corrects them on their vision, he's going to teach us,

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I hope, what it means to see and to follow Christ fully.

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That is my hope as we read this text, that each of us here would see Christ clearly.

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And as we learn here, follow him fully. So, we'll get into the text.

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We should already be turned to Mark 8, in verse 22. I'll read the first five verses together, and then we'll get right into it.

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So, Mark says, And they came to Bethsaida, and some people brought him a blind man and begged him to touch him.

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And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. And when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him,

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Do you see anything? And he looked up and said, I see people, but they look like trees walking. Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he opened his eyes, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

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And he sent him to his home, saying, Do not even enter the village. Today I want to show us these three categories of people,

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I think, that are in the world, or at least in this text. The spiritually blind, the spiritually blurry, and what

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I would call the spiritually enlightened, or the spiritually mature. I want to draw our attention first to the spiritually blind.

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Here Mark recounts an event that only ever appears in his gospel.

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It's one of two accounts that are only in Mark's gospel alone. We find this one and then the other in Mark 7 and verse 31.

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Both of them are very similar in that Christ does something unique. He uses his own saliva to accompany his healing.

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So in Mark 7, verse 31, it was the deaf and mute man that Christ healed, applying his fingers into the man's ears and saliva to his tongue.

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Here we find Christ applying saliva to another man's eyes. So we'll look at it together and see what can we glean.

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How does this inform our interpretation of this passage? So we first read in verse 32, that Jesus and his disciples landed their boat at Bethsaida.

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This was a small fishing community at the north end of Galilee, where the Jordan River met the

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Sea of Galilee. And we know that Bethsaida was a fishing community because of its proximity to the

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Sea of Galilee. And children, maybe you'd appreciate this, but the word Bethsaida, literally translated, means the house of the fisher or the house of fish.

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Doesn't that sound like an interesting place to see and to smell? Bethsaida, the house of fish.

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And so here Christ takes his disciples here. You'll remember that they had just been having a conversation in the boat about the nature of trusting in Christ.

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The disciples were anxious. They only had one loaf of bread. Despite being with Christ all of this time, they still had not learned to trust in Christ for his provision.

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And during that time, he warned them. He said, beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.

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And as we remember, if you do remember from last week, what he was warning them about was this. A warning to steer away from, to flee what was so clearly demonstrated in the life of the

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Pharisees, namely self -righteousness and faithlessness and in Herod, wickedness and ruthlessness.

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And in the midst of all of this, and in the midst of Jesus' rebuke in the form of questions to his disciples, if we look back to verse 18,

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Jesus asked his disciples this. He said, having eyes, do you not see?

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And having ears, do you not hear? And in essence, what he's asking his disciples is this.

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Are you blind? Do you have ears and yet you are deaf? Do you not yet understand who

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I am, that I can provide everything and anything? And it should come as no surprise that as Christ rebukes his disciples in the form of these questions about their own blindness and their own deafness, that he should land at Bethsaida.

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And who is the first person, at least in this account, that should approach him but a blind man seeking to be healed by Christ?

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And this presented Christ at least two opportunities that I can see. First, it presented

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Christ the opportunity to show this man great love and to heal him.

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But I think secondly, it presented him with a great opportunity to teach his disciples not only about physical blindness, but about spiritual blindness.

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And so in Mark's account, Jesus leads this blind man outside of Bethsaida, away from the crowds, away from the town.

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He applied this spit, this saliva to the man's eyes and laid his hands on the man to heal him.

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And we've seen in other gospel accounts that Jesus doesn't need saliva to heal anyone, does he?

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He can say a word and it is done. But here he chooses to use saliva on this man's eyes.

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Now, it begs the question, why would he do that? Now, if you lived in that time, there were

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Hellenistic healers. Those are Greek -speaking Jews that were almost like the itinerant preachers of today who would travel around and pray for the sick and the infirm.

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That was a common practice amongst those healers. And so maybe for this man, it was important for him,

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Christ knew ahead of time that there'd be a physical accompaniment of the healing. We don't know because the text doesn't say.

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It's also possible that Christ applies saliva to this man's eyes so that the disciples can see the nature of the healing that is about to take place.

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That it doesn't happen all at once, but that it happens in two stages. It happens progressively.

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Now, what is especially unique about this is that this man isn't immediately healed.

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In verse 24, after Jesus asks the man, Do you see anything? The man replies that he sees people.

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Isn't this interesting? He sees people, but they look like trees walking. This man would have certainly felt a tree in his life.

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So a blind man might know, to some extent, what a tree might look like, a tall cylinder -shaped object.

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But his vision was so blurry and so indistinct that he could not make sense of what it was that he was seeing.

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So we're told that Jesus again laid his hands on the man in verse 25, and the man, we're told, that his vision was, and note these words with me, was fully restored.

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And that he saw everything clearly. In a way that cannot even be matched by the most skilled surgeons and advanced technology.

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In the manner that they cannot repair my eyes now. Christ fully restored this man's vision.

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He went from being a blind beggar to a man with 20 -20 vision.

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Perfect eyesight. There's nothing that man has created that can even compare to what

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Christ has just done for this man. And as Jesus has done many other times, he counseled the man not to tell anyone, not even to go into the village.

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The purpose of this miracle was not to attract attention to himself, but to seek the man's good and to teach his disciples an important lesson.

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Now it begs the question, Why was it that this man was not immediately healed?

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Do you know the answer to that question? Why did Christ not immediately heal him, as he has with every single other person in the gospel accounts?

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I would suggest to you that a great deal of it has to do with the context. Now some would suggest that it was the man who was deficient in his faith.

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And because the man did not have enough faith, Christ was not able to immediately heal him.

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Now the text says nothing about that. And we know certainly from what Christ has just explained to his disciples, whether they have one loaf, or seven loaves, or zero loaves,

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Christ is able to provide for his people. And so I would suggest to you, it is not because of a lack of faith on the man's part.

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Now some, I've also heard, suggest that here Christ is teaching that sometimes when we, as modern

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Christians, are trying to heal someone, that it is progressive. I think in some ways this makes room for the faith healers, who really are no healers at all, in saying that, well, he's not fully restored, but partially restored.

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It's progressive. And haven't you ever read Mark chapter 8? No, I don't believe, again, that that is the context.

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I think that if we look at the context of the passage, when Christ asks in Mark 8 .18,

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Are you, do you have eyes, and yet do not see? And as he begins to unveil this,

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I think what he is doing is this. That he is showing here, that this progressive healing is a visible illustration.

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It is a parallel of the disciples' ability or inability, you could say the growing acknowledgement, the growing eyesight of the disciples, to see

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Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world. And so Christ heals this man in two stages, progressively, so that the disciples can see.

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That even if some are blind, there are some who can see people as if they are trees walking, and others who can see clearly, as if their eyes have been fully restored.

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It almost paints three different pictures of a person's spiritual condition.

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It's a dramatic picture of every person who lays their eyes on Christ. As each of us looks to Jesus, some are altogether blind to his glory.

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Others are able to make out his outline, but it's a fuzzy picture. And others come to him, seeing him clearly.

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Now, I said at the onset of this point that we would look at spiritual blindness, the spiritually blind.

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I want to take a moment now to characterize those who are spiritually blind. Now, some of you might contend, but we don't really find a person in this passage who is spiritually blind.

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What I would say is this, that the whole book of the Gospel of Mark, the entire book of Mark, characterizes those who are spiritually blind.

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As we've noted over and over again in our study, Jesus is always surrounded by crowds of people, crowds of onlookers, the rich and the poor, the elite and the despised, the

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Jews and the Gentiles, the religious leaders and the religious outcasts. And one of the repeated features of the

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Gospel of Mark is that the vast majority of the people in these crowds can be described with Jesus' words in Mark 8 .18,

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They have eyes, but do not see. Observe this with me. The most common, the most prevalent people group in relation to Jesus in the

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Gospel of Mark are not the clear -sighted. They're not even the spiritually myopic. They are the spiritually blind.

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And haven't we seen this over and over again? The crowds gather, and they flock around Jesus.

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But it is the individuals, it is the individuals who approach Christ.

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It is the individuals who receive the attention of Christ. It is the individuals who come to Christ by faith.

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These are the kind of people that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4 .4

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when he says, In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the

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Gospel and the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. We see it regularly used in the

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Gospel. For instance, in Mark chapter 12 and verse 40, sorry, John 12 and verse 40,

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John quotes from Isaiah 6 that God has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and he says, and I would heal them.

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And this is true of the vast majority of people today. And I would say with a great deal of concern, and I don't say this lightly, in fact, that this is true of many of those who call themselves even

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Christians today. We see over and again in the Gospels that it is very possible to be devoutly religious and yet completely blind.

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In Matthew 23, just as one example, Jesus criticized the most outwardly religious people of the day for their spiritual blindness.

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In that one chapter, he describes them in these ways. He says, they are blind men.

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They are blind guides. They are blind Pharisees. They are blind fools.

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And it's very possible that there are some in this room today who are spiritually blind to the glory of Christ.

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You're able to live in this world. You can keep a job. You can make friends. You can come to church.

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Some of you can even parrot the language. But every experience that you have with Christ, hear this with me, every experience you have with Christ is third -person.

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It's an experience you've heard of, but you've never actually known him and seen him for yourself.

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Like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and as Herod once did, you may see him, in this case on the pages of Scripture, and hear about him when the gospel is preached, even as I'm doing now, and yet in the same moment you are utterly aloof to him.

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And this is what it looks like if you're wondering, what does it mean? How is it possible?

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What does it look like for one to be spiritually blind? I would say this is a good example, not exclusively, not only, but it's this.

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You've never experienced the conviction of sin. You have never felt that your greatest need in all the world is the need of a

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Savior. You have no appetite for the word of God or a prayer to God because you have no appetite for Christ.

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He is neither your treasure nor your greatest hope. He is a story and a set of facts far removed from your deeply held affections and longings.

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Even now, you do not see him, and you do not care to see him. You are utterly blind, and you are impervious to the beauty and the majesty and the glory of Jesus Christ.

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You've never seen him. You've never truly known him personally, and you do not now follow him.

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If we were to ask those who are spiritually blind, as the

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Bible describes that individual, if we were to ask them in their own words to describe the splendor and the glory of Christ and his sweet and precious gospel, it would be like this.

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Imagine us taking a blind man into one of the most beautiful valleys in the

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Rocky Mountains and setting a canvas before him and giving him the most expensive paints that money could buy and asking him to paint the majesty of the

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Rockies. It would be like taking a blind man to the edge,

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I think, of this one place in Hawaii that has the most beautiful sunsets, to park him on the beach in the middle of the

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Pacific Ocean and with the widest array of colors of any possible palette to paint the hues of a sunset on the

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Pacific Ocean. There might be a lot of colors, but there would be no coherent image, and such is the same for those who are spiritually blind.

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The best you can do is repeat what it is you've already heard. And what a sad state of affairs that is.

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The words of J .C. Ryle well describe the spiritually blind. He says, The saddest road to hell is the one that runs under the pulpit, past the

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Bible, through the middle of warnings and gospel invitations, such is the path of those who are blind to the beauty of Christ, who have eyes and yet cannot see, and ears but do not hear.

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Is it possible that you are in this room? And that describes you. I don't want you to despair.

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We'll come to some exhortations for you at the end. The next category of people that I want us to look at is this, the spiritually blurry, those who have spiritually blurry vision.

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In verses 27 through 30, it says this, And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi.

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And on the way, he asked his disciples, Who do people say that I am? And they told him,

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John the Baptist. Others say Elijah. Others say one of the prophets.

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And he asked them, and what an important question this is, But who do you say that I am?

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Peter answered him, You are the Christ. And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

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After leaving Bethsaida, the disciples continued their walk, this time 40 kilometers north to the villages of Caesarea Philippi.

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It would have been a full day's journey outside of Jewish territory and deep into the heart of a spiritually blind and pagan world.

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Prior to the arrival of Christ and his disciples, Caesarea Philippi had been rehabilitated by Herod Philip, one of the sons of Herod the

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Great. And the name of the city acknowledges this. It's literally translated, Philip's Caesarea.

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And this was to differentiate it from a different Caesarea. If you're looking on your map in the back of your

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Bible, there's another located on the west coast of Israel along the Mediterranean Sea.

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And Caesarea Philippi was an important and a dark place in Jewish history.

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This was the location where Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus IV, defeated the nation of Egypt in 169

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BC before he threw the whole region into 20 years of brutal war.

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This is the same Antiochus Epiphanes who one year later in 168 BC would enter

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Jerusalem, march into the temple, and sacrifice a pig on the altar of incense.

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Caesarea Philippi was also home of worship for three false gods in that area.

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At the edge of the city, if you were to go to the base of Mount Hermon, there was a little grotto at the base, and one could go in there and worship the god

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Pan, who was, children, picture this in your minds, this grotesque false god who was half man and half goat.

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If you wanted to worship Caesar, a temple had been constructed for Caesar worship, and so you could offer your praise and adoration to one of the emperors of Rome.

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Or if you were wanting to worship one of the greatest and the oldest, or maybe you could say the worst and oldest of the false gods that tripped up the

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Israelites, you could find there the home of worship for the false god

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Baal. So, worship of three false gods all in one city.

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And it was here in front of the darkened backdrop of this wicked city that Christ would illuminate the minds of his disciples concerning his identity and his mission.

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So, during the journey, Christ turned to his disciples, and in verse 27, he asked this question,

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Who do people say that I am? Now, this was a great opportunity for the disciples to consider what the watching world thought of Jesus.

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Some said that he is Elijah. We would certainly recognize this is what Herod Antipas thought after he had killed, sorry, some said

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John the Baptist, and Herod Antipas believed this in Mark chapter 6, in verse 14, after he had killed

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John the Baptist. Others said Elijah. This would have been based on an interpretation of Malachi 4, verses 5 and 6.

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Others thought that Christ was the long -expected prophet who would come to the nation, as promised in Deuteronomy chapter 18.

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All of these, dear brother or sister, if you were put in that position, if we were to stand you in this room today, and then we were to do a survey of the room, who do you think this person is?

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I think all of us would be very flattered if someone said, Well, this is John the Baptist reincarnated.

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This is the prophet that the nation has been waiting for for thousands of years.

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This would have been a very flattering estimation of Jesus if he was a mere man, but he isn't.

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He wasn't. So in verse 29, Christ drills down a bit deeper.

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There is a better answer to this question. He asks his disciples very pointedly, and you might not realize it now or not, but there is going to be a time when each of us will have to answer that question.

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It's one of the most important questions in all of the world. The answer to that question, depending on your answer, heaven and hell hang in the balance.

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Jesus asks his disciples, But who do you say that I am?

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And this was the disciples' opportunity to make up their minds concerning Christ.

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They had been observing Christ's life and ministry for at least a year by this point. They had heard what others thought of him, and now it was time for them to form and to articulate their own judgments concerning Christ.

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But who do you say that I am? And you have to love the apostle

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Peter, right? For good or for bad. At least he was moving.

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I once heard someone say that God steers a moving ship. Well, Peter was a moving ship.

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And so Peter exclaims. He says this. And these words make the hair on my arm stand up.

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You are the Christ. In Matthew 16 .16,

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the evangelist there, he elaborates further. Peter said, You are the

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Christ, the Son of the living God. And this is, and our brother

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Steve pointed this already, this is the hinge, this confession is the hinge upon which the gospel of Mark turns.

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Up until this point, only God and demons have correctly identified Jesus. In fact, this is the first time that the word

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Christ is attributed to Jesus since Mark chapter 1 and verse 1 at the very introduction.

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Here, Peter gets the answer to the question right. Who is

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Jesus Christ? He is the Christ, the Son of the living

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God. And that one word, and we know it already, don't we? That one word,

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Christ, is just jam -packed with significance. It meant the

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Messiah. The long -awaited Messiah since Genesis chapter 3 when

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Adam and Eve fell in the garden and God promised that the woman would have an offspring and the serpent would bite that offspring's heel but he would crush

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Satan's head. It was the Messiah before them.

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Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, the Qumran community, this group of people, scribes that lived in and around caves and stored what we now know as the

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Dead Sea Scrolls. They had built up the tradition, partially accurately

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I would say, that there was one coming, a Messiah, who would usher in God's great eschatological kingdom.

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He would come and he would be king of his people. And here, Peter confesses that Jesus Christ is that long -awaited, anointed one.

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So, Peter got the question, the answer, right. But in verse 36, Jesus charged them to remain silent.

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Now, why would he do this? If this is the hinge upon which the gospel of Mark turns, why would

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Christ take such an important confession and say, you're right. Now, I command you to be silent with that confession.

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I think it's interesting. This is why sometimes as you do Bible studies, to study geography is just so important.

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Geography is an important part of a good Bible study. It would have been on their way from Bethsaida to Caesarea Philippi that Jesus and his disciples would have passed a place that was west of the pinnacle of Gamala.

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Now, the pinnacle of Gamala has a really important historical significance in that it was in that region that Judas the

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Galilean in A .D. 6, so a few years before this had taken place, that he had led a revolt against the

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Romans, resulting in widespread unrest in the area. After this account in A .D.

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66, so some 60 years later, it would be Judas the Galilean's sons who would again attempt to fulfill

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Jewish prophecy by taking up arms and fighting against the

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Romans, resulting in, again, another humiliating defeat. And this was indicative of the problem that Christ was trying to avoid when he commanded silence in his disciples.

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The Jewish expectation concerning the Messiah was that he would come as a military king and bring about political liberation for the

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Jews. And as much as possible, it would appear that Jesus did not want this

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Jewish misconception of the Messiah to get in the way of the purpose for which he had come.

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And what was that purpose? He will tell his disciples in a moment, but I will let us in on it early.

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It was namely to suffer many things and to die for his people.

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And so here we see that Peter saw

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Jesus for who he actually was, but as we will see in the coming paragraphs, Peter's spiritual eyesight was blurry.

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When Christ would reveal his divine mission, we'll look at that in verse 31, Peter would issue a demonic rebuke.

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He could not compute that Jesus as a Messiah would be a suffering

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Messiah who would place considerable demands upon his followers. Peter, I would suggest, had eyes to see

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Christ, but not the whole Christ. He had eyes to see Christ so far as his own presuppositions allowed, and then no further.

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And this was the problem. Peter had eyes to see a Christ of his own culture and of his own making, but not the

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Christ of the Bible. He had not read Isaiah 53, for example, into his

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Messiah. He was ignorant concerning all that his Bible had to say about this

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Jesus, this Christ, who was standing before him. And again,

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I would suggest, when we're talking about those who have spiritually blurry vision, there are many such people in the world and in the church today.

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They have heard the gospel. There are people in this room. They have heard the gospel.

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They have believed. But like Peter, their spiritual vision is blurry, and they can only see enough to make a positive confession concerning Christ.

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And because of their own ignorance of the Scriptures, they're blind to many of the precious truths concerning Christ.

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And some of you in this room have not just small blind spots, but massive blind spots concerning Christ.

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And the reason for that is this, because you do not know your Bibles. You have seen

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Christ, and you have believed, and by all accounts, you are a Christian.

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But because you do not know the Word of God, which reveals the

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Son of God, He is as indistinct to you as a walking tree.

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You know that the way to see Christ most clearly is to see

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Him in His Word, but you rarely open the cover of your Bible long enough to catch a proper glimpse of Him.

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You have not taken the time to inform your own soul concerning all of the benefits of Christ.

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Your view of Jesus and His gospel is one -dimensional. You understand the gospel, but barely enough even to explain to others.

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And sadly, the joy of your salvation has been tapped by your own spiritual lethargy.

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You have been sipping on the Scriptures when you ought to be feasting on the Scriptures. And instead of having 20 -20 vision and being mature in your outlook and in your thinking, you are childish and spiritually stunted.

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Now, some might ask, is there anywhere in Scripture that would actually describe a

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Christian in that way? I would say many. I'll take us to a couple of examples, but the author of the book of Hebrews, in Hebrews 5, verses 12 and 13, he says this to these immature believers.

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He says, For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.

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You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.

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Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3, and we know how immature they were in that first letter especially.

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He says this, But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants of Christ.

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I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. Even now you are not ready.

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There are some Christians in this room who are not ready for solid food because you have not even yet grasped a rudimentary understanding of Christ and his gospel.

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And because your understanding of Christ and the gospel is uninformed, you do not see

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Christ clearly, and I would suggest this, you do not follow him fully.

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And therefore Christ is robbed of his glory in your life. I remember several years ago being at my very first Christian conference.

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I don't think it was a particularly good conference. I didn't think the speaker was particularly helpful.

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That's just my observation of it. But he did ask one question that I think most of the people in the room felt very convicted by.

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It was a small enough room that there was interaction between the speaker and the audience, and he said this,

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Have you memorized one Bible verse for every year that you have been a Christian?

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I think he did a survey of that, and the vast majority of people said no. I think

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I had been a Christian for maybe two or three years, so the answer was a lot easier for me.

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But if you've been a believer in this room, have you even written 20 verses of God's Word on your heart?

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How about 20 chapters? At what point, brothers and sisters,

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I don't mean to condemn people, but at what point have we become so dull in our reading and studying of Scripture that we're not looking to see and to meet

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Christ every day in His Word? I once heard a story from Paul Washer who, in the early years of HeartCry Missionary Society, a young man called him on the phone.

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I think that was probably before the shocking youth message when you could just call the number and talk to Paul Washer on the phone.

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And the young man called and inquired about being a missionary with HeartCry. And Paul Washer asked him about his desire to go onto the mission field.

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And the man volunteered himself and said, I want to die in the jungle for those people.

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Now, Washer thought this was a bit of a peculiar answer, but he asked him, and listen to the wording in this.

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He says, how many hours a day are you reading your Bible? How many hours a day are you praying?

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He says, what are you doing to study and to know God and to prepare yourself to bring the gospel to a people lost in utter darkness?

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And incredulously, the man repeated himself. He said, maybe you didn't understand. I am ready to die in the jungle.

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And Washer responded to the man. He said, these people don't need you to die in the jungle for them.

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They need someone to bring the gospel to them. Those people on the mission field didn't need another

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Savior, one with a fuzzy picture in his mind of what it looks like to believe in and to follow

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Christ. They needed someone who knew the Savior, who had a clear view of that Savior, and who could paint a clear view of that Savior to others.

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They needed Christ, and a man who knew Christ well enough to proclaim him with clarity and with power.

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Do you know Christ like that? Or could it be true what the author of Hebrews wrote to that people, that by now you ought to be teachers, and yet you're still sipping on milk?

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Finally, the third category of a person that we find in our text is this.

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And this was a hard language to muster up, and so you can find imperfections,

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I'm sure, but the spiritually enlightened, or the spiritually mature, the spiritually clear -sighted.

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In verse 31, it says this, He rebuked

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Peter and said, Get behind me, Satan! For you're not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.

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And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.

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For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel's will save it.

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For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?

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For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the

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Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of the Father with his holy angels.

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In response to Peter's confession, we see that Jesus taught them in verses 31 and 32 plainly concerning himself, literally boldly, confidently.

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For the first time with his disciples, Jesus explained that his purpose was not to facilitate a military coup, or to usher in a sovereign

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Jewish nation, but his mission was to suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the

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Pharisees, the lawyers, and the Sanhedrin, to die and then to be resurrected.

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For the first time, Jesus went into detail about his glorious gospel.

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Jesus came to conquer not by mounting a horse and chariot and wielding weapons of war, but by wielding his own cross and being mounted to it with nails and dying in the place of lost sinners.

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Now we've already discussed Peter's faulty views. Here he rebukes Christ. And he doesn't rebuke him just in the most general of terms.

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It is the epitome of a stern rebuke. It's the Greek word epitomeo, and it's the type of rebuke that would only be reserved for those who were demons or demon -possessed.

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Christ turns that rebuke back on him. Peter, it is you that are coming at me with a demonic, with a devilish suggestion.

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And then to direct his disciples' minds onto the things of God rather than the things of this world, he follows up the unveiling of his own mission with the cost of following him.

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To be a disciple of the suffering servant, Messiah, it called for the greatest of devotion and sacrifice.

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If Christ was to suffer and to die, so too ought his disciples be prepared for a similar fate.

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In fact, to follow Christ would require that his disciples then and now would need to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him.

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Now this imagery of the cross, when many of us today think of a cross, we think of a cross on a necklace or the cross at the front of the church.

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The cross has almost become an item of artwork in our modern Christian culture.

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But this imagery would not have been lost on his disciples. The disciples would have known that every criminal who was to be crucified under Roman rule was to carry the cross beam of their own execution device to the place where they would die.

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And there they would be nailed to that cross and hoisted up where they would hang, baking in the hot sun until they suffocated to death.

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Many Jews under Roman rule would have been familiar with the cruelty of the

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Roman cross and stories surrounding its terrifying uses. For instance, in 71

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BC, the Roman general Crassus defeated a slave rebel named

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Spartacus. You might recognize that name. And taking him and his followers prisoner, he crucified

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Spartacus and six thousand of his men on the

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Appian Way between Rome and Capua. Nearly a hundred years later, after Mark's gospel would have been written and delivered, the emperor

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Nero would do the same to Christians. One historian writes of those events, he said, in their deaths they were made the subjects of sport.

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They were covered with the hides of wild beasts and fed to the dogs.

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They were nailed to crosses and set to fire and when the day waned their bodies burned as the evening lights.

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In his cruelty, the emperor Nero even offered his own garden musicians who would go out and serenade the onlookers of the spectacle.

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This is what it meant to take up your cross. In verses 35 -38 Jesus elaborates further.

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I'm not going to go into all of it in detail, but he says if any seeks to preserve his life, he will lose it. Literally lose his soul.

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Because no one can give all the world's riches in exchange for his soul. And anyone who is ashamed of Christ and of his words,

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Christ will be ashamed of when he returns with his angels in triumphant victory and great glory.

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So here we find that Christ gives us a clear picture of himself and then subsequently a clear picture of what it means to follow him.

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And what we see in all of this from Christ's teaching is that here to see

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Christ most clearly, you want to be in this room and you want to see

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Christ most clearly, it is to understand his mission, his gospel most clearly.

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It is to understand his humility when he came into this world at his first advent.

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To see him, think of this, not sating his sword with the blood of his enemies, but shedding his own blood on the cross for those same foes.

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Even us, it is seeing Christ accursed on that tree in your place, not because you deserve his help, but because that was your greatest need.

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It is seeing Christ with each of our names written in his wounds.

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As we sang earlier, till on that cross as Jesus died, the very wrath of God was satisfied.

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And now, there is no power of hell, and in Christ there is no scheme of man that can ever pluck you from his hand, till he returns or calls us home, coming with his angels in great glory, here in the power of Christ we stand.

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To see Christ most clearly now is to see him as he is portrayed in his word.

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Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, coming again.

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And then, brothers and sisters, if I can close with just a moment of application, to follow

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Christ most fully is to see him in all of his glory.

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Not fuzzy or obscured, not blurry, not with massive blind spots, but to see him with restored vision and to respond to his cross in thanksgiving by taking up your own cross and following after him.

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It is to see his gospel. It is to respond to his gospel and then to live in light of his gospel.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died, I think doing a very noble thing in seeking the execution of Hitler.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who was removed from Germany in the Second World War, he came back to try to establish the church.

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There are certainly many things wrong with his theology, I would suggest, but he said this, he said, when

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Christ calls a man, when Christ calls us, brothers and sisters, he bids him come and die.

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Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he said, I protest, brothers, by my pride, which I have in Christ Jesus our

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Lord, I die every day. There was once a man named

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Justinian von Weltz. He was a wealthy baron in the

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Netherlands in the 1600s when the Lord saved him and opened his eyes to see

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Christ. He saw that one of the greatest missions that he could fulfill was to see that the gospel would go out to the nations, that the

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Dutch were colonizing. And so he went to the political leaders of his day.

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He went even to the state church and he said, we need to bring the gospel to the world.

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He pleaded with them, we need to bring this Christ whom I have seen to the world.

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Now he was a wealthy baron with many estates and they just wrote him off. We will not take the gospel to the world.

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And they labeled him a dreamer. He became stigmatized as this crazy born -again

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Christian. But he was determined to go. And so he got on a ship at his own expense.

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He did away with his title as baron. He did away with all of his estates.

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He paid for his own ride on a ship to the Dutch New Guinea somewhere in South America.

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And once he got there, he died and filled a lonely missionary grave.

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He sought with all of his might to take the gospel, the glory of Christ to a lost people.

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And in the whole process of it he said this. He said, What to me is the title well -born when

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I am one born -again in Christ? What to me is the title Lord when I desire to be a servant of Christ?

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What to me is to be called your grace when I have need of God's grace, help, and sucker?

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All these vanities I will away with. And everything besides I lay at the feet of Jesus.

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My dearest Lord, that I may have no hindrance in serving Him aright.

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Dear brothers and sisters, trust me when I relay to you from the scriptures that there is nothing greater in this world than seeing

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Christ, believing in Christ, and then serving Christ with all of your heart.

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I think sometimes there's wisdom in considering our own end.

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In Psalm 90 verse 12 it says, Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.

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Discerning the few days that you have left to serve Christ in this world is a very wise exercise.

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Imagine that tomorrow you had a pain in your side, and maybe at the prompting of your wife, or your sister, or your mother, or your brother, you go to the doctor, and they find that you have a very aggressive form of cancer.

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And they say, Sir, or Madam, you have at most three months to live.

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In that moment, would you wish that you had given less to Christ and more to your flesh?

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Only a fool would wish for that. You would no doubt wish that if you could live this life all over again, if God could plunk you back as a newborn babe, you would wish no doubt that you would have given more to Christ, all to Christ.

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Oh, more to Jesus Christ my Savior. More of a life completely and unwaveringly devoted to His service.

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More of a life to eternity than to this world. More of a life sold out for the glory of Christ.

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More of your time devoted to drinking deeply from the well of God's Word. More prompt obedience, not tomorrow or in a few minutes, but now.

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More of a life lived before God with a clear conscience. More money given to His causes with a stockpile of treasure in heaven waiting for you.

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You would not have to fear His wrath as a Christian, but you would no doubt wish that you hadn't held back.

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Brothers and sisters, all of us to some degree have held back because we have blind spots.

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Because we have not seen Christ as all satisfying, as all glorious, as our present hope today and our future hope for eternity.

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Many of us are myopic. We are spiritually short -sighted with an eye to this world, as Christ said to His disciples, than to God and to the world that is to come.

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So brothers and sisters, I would exhort you, throw the rough beam of wood over your shoulder.

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March with it outside the camp. With Christ, feel its splinters and spend and be spent for your precious

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Savior. Give it all to Him. This is a great message ahead of a new year where we all kind of reset things.

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If you haven't been reading your Bible, read your Bible. If you've not been praying, if you've been neglecting that, seek the

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Lord's face in prayer. Give Him your all. I would venture to say that in 75 years the chair that you now occupy will be empty, and you will have given your account to God.

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Don't hold anything else back. Look at what Christ has done for you, and at Thanksgiving turn to Him.

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And if you're spiritually blind today, you need not stay in this condition. If you're like the blind man at the beginning of this narrative, come to Christ and ask that He would restore your vision.

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It says in Psalm 146 .8, The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.