Mark 3:31-35 (August 28 2022)

So our text this morning is

Mark chapter 3, verses 20 and 21, and then 31 through 35.

If you're new here, we're just going through the gospel of Mark, kind of one paragraph at a time, one chapter at a time, and so these are the verses we come to this week.

We save verses 20 and 21 from last week because it deals with Jesus' family, and verses 31 through 35 also deals with Jesus' family, and so we're putting those two together in today's sermon.

But let's read Mark chapter 3. I'm going to read verses 20 and 21, and then 31 through 35.

We covered verses 22 through 30 last week. So here we are, and God's word says this.

And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

This is the word of the living God to us this morning. I want you to imagine yourself as Jesus' family.

Specifically, I want you to imagine yourself as one of Jesus' siblings. You've heard reports of Jesus' activities.

Some of them were true, some of them were likely false. Maybe the things you heard are embellished, but you've heard all sorts of reports of what

Jesus has been doing. You've seen him come home to Nazareth only to rebuke his former neighbors so strongly that they wanted to kill him.

You've heard about him casting out demons and working miracles. You've heard about the massive crowds that have been closing in on him.

You know that the religious leaders, the scribes, the Pharisees, have left Jerusalem to come to find him and to stop him.

You've seen and heard that they've been watching him to trap him. That they have colluded with the government to assassinate him.

And he's been accused, as we saw last week in verses 22 -30, of being in league with and doing miracles by the power of Satan himself.

What would you think? And what would you do? Well, his family thought, we see in verse 21, that he was out of his mind.

They thought he had gone mad or he was acting foolish, that he was going to get himself hurt or maybe even killed.

And so what did they do? They went out to seize him, to get him. Now assuming the best motives of his family here, they were just wanting to get him to safety.

You get the crowds closing in so much, we see in verse 20, that he can't even eat. The crowds are closing in so much that he had a getaway boat when he was teaching by the sea.

So maybe they wanted to get him to safety. Assuming the worst motives, they wanted to stop him.

Regardless, they came to get him. And when they got to him, a crowd was sitting around him.

And his mother and his brothers called to him. They sent someone inside to call to him to come out.

And his answer is astounding. He says, who are my mother and my brothers? And looking about those who sat around him, these.

These are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

It's astounding because of the role of the family in this first century, Middle Eastern context.

Family was a huge deal. You see, you protected the honor of the family name.

You prioritized family over all other relationships. Your family was your primary identity marker.

Now that kind of culture still exists in that part of the world. Honor killing still exists where brothers defend the honor of their family name if someone defiles their sister, for example.

You see the remnants of a strong family culture even here in Traveler's Rest.

I remember the first time I preached here and Mr. Tate introduced me. How did he introduce me? He told you who my parents and my grandparents are.

And in this high family culture, Jesus has the audacity to ask, who are my mother and brothers?

Now he's not confused. And he's not dumb. He's not forgetful even.

He knows who his family is. So what's going on? Well, in verses 34 and 35,

Jesus is reorienting our understanding of family. And he is pointing to the reconstituted family of God when he says, for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

He's reorienting our understanding of family. He is pointing to the reconstituted family of God.

So in light of this passage, I want to ask three questions this morning. I want to ask and answer three questions.

One, how does one enter the family of God? Two, what characterizes the family of God? And three, what is the relationship between the natural family and the spiritual family?

So let's take that first one first. How does one enter the family of God? Well, to answer this,

I want to draw attention first to the relationship between today's passage and last week's passage.

So what we have, if you take last week's verses and this week's verses, verses 20 through 35, what you find is what some people call a sandwich story.

And what I mean by that is in verses 20 and 21, you have verses about Jesus' family.

In verses 31 through 35, you have verses about Jesus' family. And sandwiched in the middle is verses 22 through 30 that we saw last week about Jesus' confrontation with the scribes.

And so Mark's going to do this several times throughout his gospel. It's a common way in the

Bible to highlight something, to draw attention to something, usually that thing in the middle. And so we saw last week that Jesus, He was warning the scribes that they were about to go too far.

That there was going to be judgment against Israel for breaking covenant and rejecting God's Son. Now the good news, of course, is that God is establishing a new covenant in Christ's blood.

Now from Abraham until Christ, the family was primary in God's covenantal dealings.

Now it's not that anyone in the Old Testament was saved by their bloodline. It's always been salvation by faith.

At that point, faith in God's promise of sending a Messiah to come. And Gentiles, of course, were saved in the

Old Testament too. But family, specifically the family of Abraham, was at the forefront of the administration of that covenant.

But Jesus, as we saw last week, is signaling a shift. The Old is passing away and it will be done with the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

And the New is coming. You enter the family of God. You enter the people of God, the kingdom of God.

Not by earthly birth, but by new birth. You enter the family of God not by earthly birth, but by new birth.

This is what Jesus tells Nicodemus in John chapter 3, is it not? Let me read to you from John 3. Jesus answered him when

Nicodemus came to him by night. And he says, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?

And Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the

Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the

Spirit is spirit. New birth is a gift of the

Holy Spirit. Then Jesus says in verse 35, That it is the one who does the will of God who is his brother and sister and mother.

And so the one who does the will of God is in the family of God. But what does it mean to do the will of God?

And again, John's gospel is helpful for us. It makes explicit what that means.

John chapter 6 verse 40, For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the

Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

Catch that? The will of God is firstly that you believe in the

Son. Now in a few moments, we're going to come back to that phrase and see what else is bound up in that phrase to do the will of God.

But for now we note that entrance into God's family is by faith in Jesus Christ.

This means that no one is saved by their grandmother's faith. You, personally, must look on the

Son and believe in him. No one is saved because they come from a good Christian family.

There are many benefits and blessings that come from being raised in a Christian family, but still you, personally, must look on the

Son and believe in him. And so I ask you, do you believe?

Do you have faith? Have you been born again? Or are you relying on family blood rather than Jesus' blood to get you to heaven?

Now don't be offended at the question. I'm new here. I don't know all your stories. I don't know your history.

I do know this. I do know that it's possible to find lost people sitting on church pews for decades.

And I know that none of us here want that. And so I ask you, do you believe? This also has application for our families.

This also has application for our friends, for those that we love. We can give ourselves false assurances about someone's salvation based upon the fact that they had a good raising or that they grew up in church.

But do they believe? Do they have faith? Have they been born again?

Do they love Jesus? And how would you know? Well, the answer to that question, how would you know, is found in the answer to our second main question of the sermon that I want to ask and answer.

And that is, what characterizes the family of God? What characterizes the family of God?

There's probably a lot of answers we could give to that question. That is, the

Christian life doesn't just boil down to one single thing that Christians are known for. And so today,

I want to emphasize that which Jesus emphasizes in our passage here in Mark 3 this morning.

And that is, obedience. What characterizes the family of God? Obedience. Verse 35,

For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother. Now we said earlier that to do the will of God is to look on the

Son and believe. And here we expand our understanding of that phrase. We broaden it to include what

Jesus says in the Great Commission. Teach them to obey everything that I have commanded.

And so the family of God is characterized by obedience to all that God has commanded.

So just a survey from the New Testament. Keep yourselves from idols. Abstain from sexual immorality.

Put away bitterness. Put away malice and anger. Raise your children in the fear and instruction of the

Lord. Honor your parents. Do not worry. Rejoice. Give thanks in all circumstances.

Be zealous for good works. Do not neglect meeting together. Count the answers of others as more significant than your own.

Do not fear. I could go on. I saw one list this week when I was studying that listed 1050 commands in the

New Testament alone. Now, you might think that all of this talk about obedience to commands sounds like legalism.

I want to disagree. Because according to Jesus, it doesn't sound like legalism to obey

God's commands. It sounds like love. John 14, 21.

Jesus says, whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

Did you catch that? The one who has my commandments and keeps those commandments, who obeys those commandments, that's the one who loves me,

Jesus says. A few verses later in John 14. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.

You see, love for God and obedience to God are intertwined in the

Scriptures. They go together. The Bible ties them together. And so how can you tell if someone who says they are a

Christian actually is one? Well, we look at their life. Is it characterized by obedience to the commands of God?

Now, I want to be clear here. I don't mean perfection. We're all going to battle corruption.

The corruption of the remnant of our sinful nature until the day that we die.

This is why earlier in the service and every Sunday we take some time to focus on the gospel and to confess our sins to God and be assured of His mercy to us in Christ Jesus.

Because none of us are going to be perfect. So we're not talking about sinless perfection. We're not talking about complete sinlessness.

But we are saying that obedience rather than disobedience should increasingly be the rule for our lives.

It should increasingly be the pattern for our lives. And disobedience should increasingly be the exception to the rule.

And so, does obedience characterize your life? Does obedience characterize your loved one's life?

And if not, why not? Could it be that they've not looked upon the Son and believed?

That they've never been born again? If that's the case, I want to encourage you. You need to pray for them because it's

God who saves. And you need to speak to them and tell them the message of salvation, the gospel.

Because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ. Because those in the family of God are those who do the will of God.

Those who love Jesus are those who obey Him. Now for our third question,

I want to switch gears for just a minute. And I want to ask the question, what is the relationship between the natural family and the spiritual family?

Specifically, is Jesus here when He says, whoever does the will of God, that's my mother and brother and sisters. Is He teaching the dissolution of the natural family?

Is He negating the importance of the natural family? Is He dishonoring His mother?

Is He disrespecting His brothers? Do we no longer have duties and obligations to our natural families once we join the family of God?

These questions arise when we read passages like this. And it's kind of what it seems like it's saying on first reading.

And then you take into account passages like Luke 14, that whoever does not hate his own father or mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

I mean, what do we do with that? Well, a good principle of figuring out what the

Bible says about something is to look at what else the Bible says.

And then take the things that are really clear and then help us understand the things that are less clear.

And so when we do that, we still find in our Bibles the command to honor father and mother in both

Exodus and Ephesians. We find commands to fathers to raise their children in the discipline and instruction of the

Lord. We find that Jesus provided for the care of His mother while He was hanging on the cross in John 19.

We find 1 Timothy chapter 5 where a widow's relatives bear the primary responsibility to care for her so that the church will not be burdened.

In that same passage, we see that Paul says that adult children are to show godliness to their own household by making return to their parents.

And that if anyone does not provide for his relatives, especially his own household, Paul says he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

We find in Matthew chapter 15 where Jesus rebukes a common practice at the time where adult children would take what they had saved up to care for their aging parents and they give it to the synagogue instead and they call it a sacrifice.

And Jesus rebukes that practice. And so we put all of these things together. I don't think we can say, we cannot say that Jesus is doing away with the natural family or that our natural families do not matter or that we no longer have duties and obligations to our families.

We do. You see, grace doesn't destroy nature.

Grace restores nature. That is, grace makes it possible to obey God in our natural families.

Grace gives us the ability to do those commands, to honor our mother and father, to raise our children in the fear and instruction of the

Lord. It enables us to do that. It doesn't destroy nature, it restores it.

And so our natural families still exist and still matter. And so you can think of it this way, in Galatians 3 .28,

talking about salvation, Paul says there's neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.

Salvation is open to all. Yet, after salvation, we're still either male or female, we're still either slave or free, we're still either

American or Chinese or Russian or whatever nationality that we are.

Those things stay the same. And so I am saved, but Mike Burns is still my dad, and Shannon Burns is still my wife.

Now to all of this, you might think, well, duh, I mean, of course it still matters.

Nothing's new here. And good, if that's your reaction. But, we need to know that there is an assault upon the family and the culture that we live in.

And we need to know how Jesus' words relate, so that we can defend the truth.

We can't assume it. We need to be able to defend the natural good of the natural family and not write it off as unimportant.

And at the same time, we need to realize that the Gospel, it really does reorient our lives.

And it reorients our loves and our affections and prioritizes them. It reshapes and orders our loyalties.

And so in a perfect world, the relationship between the natural family and the spiritual family would be seamless.

But you may have noticed we don't live in a perfect world, do we? We often lack wisdom.

We sometimes feel like whatever decision we make, we're conflicting something somewhere. And so what do we do when the natural family and the spiritual family collide, or the interests of the natural family and the spiritual family collide, or at least appear to?

What do we do? Well, the first thing is to know that there's a sense in which water is thicker than blood.

You've heard it said blood's thicker than water. Well, there's a sense in which water is thicker than blood. And by water,

I mean baptism. That our spiritual ties are ultimate and they trump our natural bonds.

The Gospel reshapes our loyalties and affections and ultimate things. It unites us with all believers in all places, throughout all times, and for all time.

And so this is very real and very important. But as we said, the natural bonds do not just disintegrate.

And so what do we do when these loyalties conflict? I read a good rule of thumb this past week. And that is that we prefer the natural relations in matters natural and prefer the spiritual relations in matters spiritual.

And so that Matthew 15 passage I mentioned a few minutes ago is a good test case for us. You see, caring for aging parents is a natural duty.

And therefore, it didn't matter that they donated the money to the religious work of the synagogue.

They were still bound to their natural duty. And so Jesus rebuked them. They were to prefer the natural in things natural.

But at the same time, the Gospel may very well divide families on spiritual matters. So when we lived on the mission field, we knew plenty of believers who had to choose between following Jesus or still being accepted in their families.

They had to choose between following Jesus and being disowned by their father, or maybe even hurt by their father.

They had to choose Jesus or Dad, Jesus or family. And this choice was about ultimate loyalty.

This choice was about worship and faith. Were they going to follow Jesus or were they going to continue to follow

Islam? It was a spiritual matter. And so in this case, they were bound by spiritual duty to Christ and His people, their new spiritual family.

Let's bring this closer to home. One recent phenomenon that I have noticed is often older parents are being discipled by their adult children to accept all sorts of things, especially sexually deviant lifestyles.

And so they begin to affirm things God hates because they don't want to rupture their relationship with their adult children or grandchildren.

They begin to lie about what God has said or ignore what God has said or kind of paper over and cover up what

God has said because they don't want to push their kids away. Here, in matters spiritual, our duty to God must supersede our natural desires.

We must love what God loves and hate what God hates no matter what. That is our spiritual duty.

And so who are my brothers and sisters and mother? Those who do the will of God.

Those who love the Word of God and obey it. I want to end by making mention of two ditches we could fall into and encourage us not to fall in either one of them in this question of natural and spiritual families.

One ditch would be to minimize or destroy the natural family. And so this happens and has happened in our culture in varying degrees of causality and seriousness by no -fault divorce, abortion, pornography, fornication, cohabitation, chosen childlessness, homosexuality, and that list could go on.

That's just a sampling. But you have to not be paying attention to know that we live in a culture that does not value the natural family.

So you've noticed staffing shortages in places, you've noticed supply chain issues that come from that.

One of the reasons for that is that we're entering into a people shortage.

Birth rates have been declining since the 1970s. We've been well below replacement level birth rate for quite some time and we're now seeing the fruit of that.

You see, one way evangelical churches have responded to this ditch to minimize or destroy the natural family, one way churches have responded to that is to accommodate it.

Emphasizing the spiritual family over and above the natural family even in matters natural. And so we want to avoid that ditch.

We love the family and we promote it as a good. Another ditch, however, is to overemphasize the natural family.

This happens when family relations take priority over all else even in spiritual matters.

This happens when late days and travel ball and brunch take priority over Lord's Day worship, or when the children's preferences rule everything, or when those without spouses or children are made to feel less than in the church community, or when hospitality and care for the non -family church members or neighbors is neglected.

And that likewise could go on. We want to avoid that ditch.

And so what's the solution? I believe we need family -friendly churches and church -friendly families, church -friendly church members.

So how does that look when we talk about family -friendly churches? One of those ways is we welcome children into the worship service here at First Baptist.

We love to hear the noises and squirms of little kids in worship. We're glad for that.

We want them to look around in church on Sunday mornings for a couple of decades and see the worship of God's people.

We want them to look around and know, this is my God and these are my people. We belong here.

We belong to God. We belong to these people. We want to leave margin in our church programming so that families have the time to give to training their children and have the margin in their schedules to give to hospitality.

We don't want to run families ragged with program upon program upon program in addition maybe even to other activities they have in the community.

Yet we want to come alongside parents in partnership in their primary responsibility to disciple their children and disciple their young adults.

And so we'll do things like midweek family fellowship that we're starting on September 14th. Lord willing, we're going to get our

Sunday school started back this fall. Details on those coming. But we'll have opportunities to come alongside parents in that.

Provide resources for family issues. And basically we want families to know in whatever stage you are, whether little kids, teenagers, kids are out of the house, you have adult kids, whatever stage, we want families to know you're welcome here.

We're here to bless you, to be blessed by you, and that belonging here is feasible for you.

But we also want to encourage our families and all church members to be church friendly. So what does that look like?

Well, it looks like prioritizing Lord's Day worship as a baseline commitment. That's the cornerstone of our weekly schedule and we're going to build everything else around that.

And we'd be committed to following Jesus alongside others in the church. Loving one another, forgiving one another, serving one another, bearing one another's burdens.

Making the church a part of the rhythm of our lives. You don't need to take part in everything that's on the church calendar, but it would be good to be part of a

Sunday school or it would be good to serve in a ministry area. It would be good to take part in our

Wednesday night program. In other words, consider the church as you orient and set the rhythms of your life.

And let's be a people together. And then lastly, if you're single, or maybe you're a widow or a widower, or your family resides a few states away, you're a college student, maybe they're several hours away, and for some other reason you feel like all this family talk maybe isn't applicable to your situation,

I would just simply disagree. Because Jesus says, whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

You are in the family of God. You are in a position here to bless others and be blessed by others here in the family of God.

And so the encouragement to all of us is let's be a people who do the will of God.

Let's pray together. Our Father in Heaven, Lord, I pray that we'll be a people who do

Your will. So if there's anyone in here who has not looked upon the Son and believed, Lord, I pray that You would move in his or her heart right now to turn from their sin and believe in Christ.

Lord, I pray for those who may be thinking of loved ones, maybe children, maybe friends, maybe cousins, maybe parents, maybe grandparents, whoever it is, they're thinking of someone and they don't know if they're saved or not.

Lord, I pray that You would work in that person's life and I pray that You would work to give opportunity to speak the gospel to them.

Lord, I pray that we would be a place where families are welcome and You would bring families here and we would go out and get them sharing the good news.

Help us to love our families well. We have people in here in all sorts of different stages of life and so that's going to look differently, but Lord, help us to love our families well, to do those duties and obligations that Your Word tells us that we have.

Help us to honor our parents. Help us to disciple our children and everything in between.

And Father, help us love our church well. Help us to love one another and serve one another faithfully.