Now What?

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Sermon by Josh Rice from Mark 16:1-8.

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And when the Sabbath passed, Mary Magdalene and Mary, Mother of James and Salome bought spices that they might come and anoint him.
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And very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?
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And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, wearing a white robe.
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And they were amazed. And he said to them, do not be amazed. You are looking for Jesus the
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Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen. He is not here. Behold, the place where they had laid him.
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But go, tell his disciples and Peter, he is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.
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And they went out and fled from the tomb, from trembling and astonishment, were gripping them.
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And they said nothing to anyone, and they were afraid. Pray with me.
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Father, thank you so much for your word. We thank you for the preaching that's about to be presented.
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And Lord, we ask that you would bless it, and bless it abundantly. Lord, would you stab our hearts with your double -edged sword, that we would be quick to be challenged, or encouraged, or repent?
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Lord, would we hear what's spoken, and would we act on it quickly? We praise you in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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So today we end the Gospel of Mark. I will tell you that I've joked before, but it's not a joke.
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My favorite book of the Bible at any given time is the one that we're in. It's been a true blessing to be in this book, to be in this gospel.
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The honest answer to when Bart and I were talking, this would have been in February of 2024, where are we going?
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And we had a list, and we narrowed it down to Mark. And a lot of the talk was, well, it's shorter.
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And I'm kind of embarrassed by that by now, but I want to be transparent about it and say that the
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Lord works in amazing ways. You're not going to go wrong with any book that you select, but this one has been timely.
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And so by way of introduction, this is as the end of a series. I want to talk about where we've been, and then where we go.
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Because this last chapter of Mark is all about where we go. Mark says more at the end of his gospel by not saying anything.
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It is a strategy. It's an extremely effective strategy. And he leaves his gospel on a cliffhanger.
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And we'll talk about that. The title of this sermon is, what now?
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Or now what? I can't remember which way I went. Now what? The joke sermon title was a nerd sandwich, because we're going to do some textual criticism in the middle of this thing.
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And it is fitting to end Mark on a sandwich, because there's been so many of those, the three -parters.
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So if we look back at Mark, we would look in verse 1, and we would see that this is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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I want you to note that in your mind. It's going to be very important today, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Mark immediately, like the other gospel writers, he uses John the Baptist. And he talks about the herald, that the coming
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Son of God, he's on the way. That John the Baptist was the one who was promised in Malachi, who was going to herald the coming of this
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King, of this Son of God, that we were going to leap like calves in the stalls, because of this light that was coming.
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And John the Baptist is on the scene. And then we see Jesus teaching with authority in the synagogue. We see him casting out demons, exerting his power over Satan from the very start.
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His power over Satan being so great that his enemies accused him of being in league with Satan.
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And Jesus gives us these words that ring out for us today. And that is that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
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Satan would be ridiculous to try to diminish, or to show his own power by diminishing his own demons.
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That's not how battles are won. And so over and over again, Jesus will be teaching about the unified nature of what he's bringing.
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That his disciples, although they're blind, although they don't see the whole picture, they stay with him.
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They are faithful in as much as they are given faithfulness. And we see these three groups of people start to emerge through Mark.
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And they are brought into vivid color today. We have the hard -hearted enemies of Christ.
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Those are the ones who hear the gospel, who will not accept it, who are hardened, taken away.
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Then we see the soft -hearted disciples of Christ who are still partially blind. And I think that that reveals to us that that's where we are.
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We like to think we're not, but we're partially blind. And the scary thing about being partially blind is that we don't know what we don't know.
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There are sins that nestle in among us. There are thought patterns. There are ways that we live life that are not honoring to Christ.
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And yet they sit and they go unnoticed in our blindness. And so we learn from Mark that we should pray about our blindness, that we should ask for sight.
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And then we get the glory of Christ. And fittingly, that's where Mark ends his gospel.
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So as we look, we see the foundation of the Christian faith, and that is the fact that the tomb is empty, the fact that there is no one there, that there is no stinky body, that there was no need to anoint the body with spices because the body is alive.
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There is no need for burial and bombing. There is no need to be afraid.
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And yet the end of the gospel of Mark is all about fear. And there's a reason for that.
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Because if we get nothing else out of this gospel, what I want to get, church, is that we should not be afraid.
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And I want you to look back and think about the patience that Christ displays over and over again with his disciples.
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And I was having a meeting and talking with Corey on Friday. And one of the things that we talked about that kind of came up in our discussion was that Jesus does not respond to the stupid things his disciples say by cutting their heads off.
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What he does instead is he never quelches them and never pulls them back. But instead, he launches them forward.
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I remember in chapter 10 when James and John, they come to Jesus and they ask which one of them is going to sit at the right and the left side of him when he comes to his own.
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And we would think, boy, you guys are dumb. Like, maybe you should learn a little humility first. That's not what
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Jesus says, though. Jesus says, are you ready to be baptized with the baptism that I am going to have?
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And they say, very stupidly, yes. Yes, we are. So what would you do?
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Would you say, boys, boys, boys, you don't know what you're talking about. You're not ready.
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And we might, in our temptation, say you never will be ready. But what Jesus does is he says, you will be baptized like I am.
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And I think what we get out of Mark is that this whole Christian life is powered by the power of God.
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In our blindness, we start to think that we're doing stuff. We start to think that we are adding holiness.
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And a verse that came to mind this week in a situation was, are we so foolish to think that we are going to complete by the flesh what
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God began in the spirit? And that question resounds for us today, because Christian, Christian, you will complete nothing in the flesh.
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You will complete in the spirit. And the good news of the gospel is that Ephesians 2 10 reminds us that the completion of what
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God has started in the spirit is completed in the spirit because we are no less than Jesus' workmanship, that he has laid out the deeds before us.
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So we simply walk in them. We walk by the power of Christ. But if you're not in Christ, then indeed you offer nothing to God.
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And you haven't even started the work in the spirit because you live by the flesh. So the resurrection of Christ brings us to a fulcrum of history.
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It brings us to a dividing line. People are divided, and there is no way around it. It is a good division because it honors
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God and it glorifies God, that those who rebel against him, who hear his gospel and respond, remember in the parable of the sower.
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There are four ways that people respond. One way, the good way, is that we respond in faith by the gift that God gives us through his grace and that we will grow into plants that yield 10, 30, 100 -fold.
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That is the Christian life. The worst case scenario for you Christian is that you grow and yield 10 -fold, which is a productive life of a crop.
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But for the other three, for the other three, they end in destruction. And so the resurrection of Christ should be terrifying news.
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And it was indeed terrifying to religious leaders of the day and to the Roman guard because it didn't happen naturally.
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It happened very supernaturally. So let's look at our text this morning, the first eight verses, and what we see to begin with is we see two women who have come to anoint
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Jesus for burial. It was a very Jewish thing. They didn't embalm. They covered the outside.
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They would put spices on the outside to keep the stink down. And Jesus, as was prophesied, was buried in a rich man's tomb.
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This would have been like a cave that would have had a tremendously huge stone rolled across the front of it.
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That would have taken many, many men to move this stone. And so the two Marys have come. They've been waiting.
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We get the sense, again, by what Mark doesn't say, he draws once again the sense of urgency, that these women were waiting for the
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Sabbath to pass. Remember, killed on Friday, and then the
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Sabbath starts at that 6 PM, and then they wait overnight. And then on Sunday morning, you can see as they get up at first light, they are ready to go out and to anoint their
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Lord. They don't know how they're going to do it. They don't know how it's going to come about. But they know that they are ready to prepare him for burial.
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And why do these Marys want to prepare him for burial? Because they love him.
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Because they love him. And they do remember some promises. I do think there's an undercurrent of almost not daring to hope for it, hope.
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That there's an idea that maybe something is going to happen here, but I don't want to count on it, because how could that be?
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How would it be possible that our Lord could ever come back? He's in the tomb, so we better come prepared.
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We're going to anoint him for burial. And they ask this question, who's going to roll away the stone?
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It's an impossible task for these two women. So do you think they're going to come ask the Roman guard nicely, hey,
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Roman guard, will you please roll this humongous stone out of the way so that we can put spices on our
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Lord? Look, the Romans are not the good guys in this story. If you remember back to last week, the
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Romans were vicious. They tortured. They were gleeful in their opposition to Christ.
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And yet the Romans have also, at the behest of the Supreme Court of the Jews, the Romans have guarded the tomb.
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Because they've been warned. This guy, now remember the insanity of this, right?
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The charge against Christ was that he threatened sedition by tearing down the temple in three days.
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But then the Sanhedrin show their knowledge that their claim was a lie by saying, someone is going to come get this body.
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Now, why would they think that? Because they understood that he prophesied his resurrection. They are liars.
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They are filthy liars. And that's what they did in trial. They deserve what they're going to get and what
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God promised in Mark 13. They deserve it. And it was truly coming for them. But these women, they are impatient.
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And they ask, how are we going to do this? But yet they go anyway. They walk to the tomb.
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And then this garden, what they find is something that the other gospel writers, particularly John, they give us this picture that it all began in a garden.
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And it all ends in a garden. The old world has passed away in this garden. And as creation groans for its consummation, this is the beginning of the beginning.
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See, the resurrection of Christ ended the old way. And the curse of Adam starts to be reversed. And this is the beginning of the beginning of redemption, where Jesus' life rolls away the curse.
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And it begins in a garden. And we find these Roman soldiers, the highly trained Roman guard, are quaking with fear as the stone is rolled away.
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And there's been an earthquake. There is trembling. And they see an angel of the Lord in the form of a young man has rolled away this storm with what is obviously a supernatural earthquake.
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And it is a terrifying event. Imagine for the women going to anoint a body.
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And what you find is an angel with beaming light who has obviously sat there, rolled the stone away. And you see a bunch of professionally trained military men quaking on the ground in fear.
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The women, it shows us that they are amazed. They are utterly astonished.
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And maybe the best translation we can get out of the Greek would be kind of awkward for us. It would be, affrighted greatly.
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They are very afraid, very, very afraid. But we see once again in the gospel that they are afraid of the wrong thing.
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Over and over again, we will be tempted to be afraid of the wrong thing. So they are astonished at what they see.
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How are these guards laying on the ground? How is all of this happening? What is this young man doing here?
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He doesn't look like a human being. What's going on here? And the answer is very simple.
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He's risen. You're looking for the right person in the wrong place.
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Did the Lord not tell you what was going to happen? He said to look for him in Galilee, right?
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This was what he had said. And so once again, we see the partial blindness of the people who love
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Jesus and are following him around. And they go to this tomb because that's the natural thing to do, isn't it? Remember this, if you get nothing out of this first part, the
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Christian life is not natural. It is natural in the sense that we were created to be in fellowship with God, and we broke it.
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But it's unnatural in the sense that there is no way that we can make that right. The Christian faith is completely supernatural.
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It is a regeneration of the Holy Spirit. Nicodemus didn't understand it, and many today don't understand it, that Jesus has to change you into a new creature.
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So the women are looking for the right person in the wrong place. He said that he would rise again on the third day.
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So why are you using your natural senses to discern the prophecy? That would be the question that would be asked of them.
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And it should be no wonder to us that they are afraid. What should they have been when they came to the tomb? They should have been elated.
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This word should not have been greatly affrighted. What the women should have had is confidence, hope, faith, and then aggression.
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And that's where Mark's going to leave us, because he tells them something. The young man of God, the angel of the
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Lord, tells them, go tell the disciples, but especially this one disciple.
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Go tell the disciples, but especially Peter. And that's a peculiarity of Mark.
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In Mark's account, he gives us much less on this than the others, and I believe there's a reason for that. But he does give us something extra, and that is that this angel tells the women to go tell
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Peter and the disciples. Why Peter? Well, we know why, don't we?
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But let's wait on that, because that's where I want to end today. And so where Mark ends his gospel, we have these women fleeing from the tomb because there's no life in there, death is defeated, and they are greatly afraid.
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And he leaves us with a cliffhanger, doesn't he? Let's look at verse 8. And they went out and fled from the tomb.
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For trembling and astonishment were gripping them. Don't miss that. Greatly affrighted, fear gripping them.
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And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Now remember, I would draw your attention,
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I know nobody remembers, it's not a discouragement of being a pastor, it's just the way it is.
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Back in Easter, we looked at the road to Emmaus, and we saw Jesus in Luke's account walking with a couple of disciples, and they didn't know who he was.
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And they went in and they had dinner with him. And we see this idea that there is a natural sense that people have, and they cannot see the promises of God in nature.
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Nature shows us a lot of things, but it does not show us the gospel, it does not show us the supernatural things that God has done.
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And so these women, as Mark ends his gospel, I know you see more there. We're going to the nerd part of the sandwich very soon.
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They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The end. That is the end of Mark's gospel.
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They're afraid, they didn't say anything, fear gripped them. So the wrong kind of fear, friends, don't miss this, the wrong kind of fear leads to closed mouths that should be open.
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Could there be a more clear pronouncement on what has happened to the church in our lifetime?
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We've sat by, we've accepted leaven in the loaf, the leaven of unrighteousness.
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We are afraid of conflict, first within our body, but then even more, we tremble and quake at the power of the sword that our magistrate wields or that the world wields, and we cower, and our mouths stay shut because we have to be wise, right?
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It may not be prudent to speak of the power of God, it might get us hated.
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We'll come back to that. Verses 9 through 20, we have to talk about them. They are in your
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Bible. If you notice, they probably have brackets, and then if you will look after verse 20, there's even another set of brackets in there.
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So here's the deal. Let me set the table for us. This is the nerd part, okay?
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If you don't know about this, this could be interesting. If it's not interesting to you, then at least you'll have heard it at some point.
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So here we go. This is the biggest textual variant in the New Testament. The other big one is in John 8, with the woman who is accused of adultery.
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I don't think that's Scripture either, but this one is what we're talking about today. So I want to lower the temperature of the room, and first of all say that there is no doctrinal distinction whether this is in or out.
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It does not change any doctrine of the New Testament. And so what we should learn to do is to not fight over things like this.
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We should argue over them in good faith with brothers and make our arguments based on history.
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And many, many scholars do believe that 9 through 20 or 9 through 19 or certain parts and variations of this longer ending are actually
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Scripture. And I'm not going to go to war with them. What I will do is give you a couple of arguments for why
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I'm not preaching on it today, the main reason being that I am convinced that they are not Scripture. So 9 through 18 are one ending.
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19 and 20 are another ending. And then the end of 20 is another ending.
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And if you look at the way the Bible is transcripted to us, a lot of people don't know this, okay?
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When I was a kid, I just thought that the Word of God beamed down to human beings and we just had it, and we've always had it.
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And that's not the way it works. What happened is that these are ancient documents where the thing that they are written on, the paper that they are written on, it decays over time and it gets destroyed.
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And so what happens is these documents, what we call Scripture, has been copied many, many, many, many times over the years, okay?
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And those copies, some of them get destroyed. We have fragments of some of them, and then we have larger codexes or big collections of others.
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And in the midst of this, what you should understand is this should not make you question the legitimacy of the
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Scripture. In fact, it should make you be extremely confident in the legitimacy of the Scripture because I will tell you this, and this is very true, we are more confident about the fidelity of Scripture than we are any other historical writing, and that is a scientific observation, not a religious observation.
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We have more attestation to the accuracy of Scripture than we do to any other ancient writing there is, many of which we just accept as fact.
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Historical documents, the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Bible is more, more sure than the
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Odyssey or the Iliad. And nobody questions the accuracy of those documents. The reason that people question the accuracy of Scripture is a religious question, not a scientific one, not an archaeological one.
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And so the way this came about is that the Scripture was written in tons of manuscripts that were passed on.
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Some of these manuscripts decay, but they get copied over and over again, and there become these things called textual variants, right?
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There is human error in making small mistakes in the copying. The vast majority of these textual variants are things about whether we call him the
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Lord Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ the Lord, that sort of thing. There are thousands of textual variants that are just like that, okay?
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And then there are a few textual variants where we have different manuscripts that don't necessarily agree on contents of certain pieces.
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They're never affecting doctrine, none of them do. They don't affect doctrine, okay? But we have one here.
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And so what I will posit to you and what I'm going to argue is that the longer ending of Mark is not stuff that's untrue, but it is stuff that is not the inspired
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Word of Scripture. It is a good window into church history, a very good window into church history.
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And so we're not having a dividing line here, but this is my argument, and here we go. I'm going to go through them in how many points?
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Eight points, eight points, very quickly. All right, point number one, they are not in the earliest and best manuscripts of the
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Gospel of Mark. If you're a nerd and a super nerd, I'll give you it. The earliest and best manuscripts that we have for the
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Gospel of Mark are the Codex Sinaticus and the Codex Vaticanus, all right?
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So those codexes, and indulge me here, all right. In Sinaticus, all of the books that are in Sinaticus, when they end, they end, and they're in three columns, okay, written in three columns, and when one letter ends, it has a mark on it, and then the next book starts in the very next column.
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At the Gospel of Mark, it ends with about one and a half columns, and that whole page is left blank for the other two columns, so it's not there.
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The marking at the end of that book is different from the other books, and these longer endings fit exactly in the space that's left in the
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Sinaticus, so here's what that means. That means the scribe that's writing in that codex, he is looking, and he goes, there is this ending.
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There are these verses. I'm going to leave room for them in case someone gets better information about the authenticity of these scriptures, because I don't believe that they are authentic.
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There's questions about them, so I'm going to leave them out, but if there is greater evidence at some point that show us this, then
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I'm going to leave room for it in the codex, and so there it is. That's our argument. It's not in these two.
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Now, if you line up all the manuscripts of Mark, you will find that these verses are in more of them than not, but these two codexes are very good.
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They're very early, and we put a lot of weight on them. Church fathers, point number two. Church fathers like Jerome and Eusebius reported that nearly all
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Greek manuscripts in their day ended at verse 8, okay? So they were early, and they were doing a lot of textual criticism, and they reported that most of the manuscripts in their day ended at 8.
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There are multiple, point three, there are multiple stylistic and grammatical anomalies in this section that are not in the rest of Mark.
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Now, I find that to be somewhat weak, but it should raise your eyebrows. Does it seem disjointed?
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Does it seem like it comes out of nowhere? That's the one in John 8, okay? Does it seem like it's written in a different way?
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I would say yes, yes, and yes. Now, could an author write in a different way and use different words that he's not using in the rest of the letter?
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Absolutely. So I do not put a huge amount of weight on this, but we're starting to build a case, okay?
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Point number four, the connection is disjointed, and it's uncharacteristic of transitions in the rest of this gospel.
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It just kind of feels tacked on. Number five, the markers that indicate scribes knew something was up with this ending, and it ended in five variants in textual criticism.
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So these 12 verses, there are five variants. They could never really be agreed on, okay?
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They were in and out, parts of it were in, parts of it were out. Point number six, we normally take the harder variant as the authoritative one.
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By harder, I mean it's harder for us to understand. Why would he write it this way, okay?
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It makes us have theological questions. So usually, the idea is, if it causes a problem for Christianity, scribes would feel a tension to try to paper over that, to take a different variant.
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So when a scribe writes down something, and they're copying, and they're like, whew, that's kind of difficult to reconcile, we usually take that as being the more authoritative thing because it shows that it's an original source.
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So we favor that as authentic. Now get this, this whole book ends, look at where it ends, let's read back at eight.
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They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid, the end. That's a pretty hard take, isn't it?
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That's the end of a book, that's the end of the letter. Point number seven, the longer section mirrors
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Luke's gospel, which is evidence of synchronizing. The scribe gets in, and he ascribes facts to what
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Luke was writing, especially with the snake, which would be out of Acts that Luke wrote. Remember that Luke and Acts were one book, one huge book that is the majority of the
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New Testament. It's the largest section of the New Testament. And so there is evidence that a scribe was taking what we knew from Luke and putting it on here to smooth out the end of the letter.
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Now finally, I'm going to end with this in transition, so the nerd part's about over. All right, verse one, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the
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Son of God. The beginning of the gospel, not the whole story. And is this the beginning?
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Because remember, from the beginning it was, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of God is here.
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Now we know the kingdom of God is here because the resurrection is the kingdom of God on earth.
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Everything changed with the resurrection. And so we are asked the question, now what? If I've convinced you, great.
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If I've not convinced you, that's okay. We can, I don't know, sit together over tea and strumpets and talk about it if you want to, but I'll push that appointment off for about three or four months because I don't really want to talk about it right now.
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So that's where we're at. If you, with me, agree that verse eight is the end, then we're going to proceed that way right now.
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And that is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and what Mark does is he leaves us with a question, now what?
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What's going to happen? And what you have to understand is very definitively, the audience of Mark's gospel understood very well what happened, and that should encourage us.
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Because it ended, his story ends with fear and are they going to say anything? They didn't say anything.
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Are they going to obey what the angel said and go tell the disciples and Peter? And the answer is we know, yes, they did.
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Yes, they did. So he leaves us with an abrupt ending on purpose. He is writing about the beginning and he is witnessing the outflow that changed everything.
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See, Mark is the traveler alongside Paul and Barnabas. He has seen the spread of the gospel and he has seen the action of the apostles in starting the church and then witnessing in the synagogues and everywhere else.
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And everywhere they went, the world was turned upside down. They met fierce opposition. See, us in our
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Christian bubble, Christian bubble, we meet no opposition unless you go on campus or unless you go to the abortion mill or unless you start talking about people's sins.
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And then you will meet great opposition. See, Mark saw that those who were very afraid are not afraid anymore.
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And so there is an outflow of the events of Acts that start to show us he leaves it on a cliffhanger to embolden the reader to see you are even hearing this in Rome right now because they told.
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That's where Mark was likely written, was in Rome, the center of this empire that was about to crush
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Jerusalem, that was the center of all power on the earth. And we are seeing this Christian religion start to bubble and grow.
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And it's the first fruits of it. He leaves us on a cliffhanger because history is going to be filled in by those who see the power of Jesus over the nations that Mark himself didn't see.
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He would have died and the Apostle Paul would have died and the Apostle John would have died not seeing
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Christ's power consummated over the nations. And yet we sit here today in a place that they had never conceived of.
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They didn't know this place existed, right, in Arkansas, United States. And we sit here today to worship the risen
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Savior because of what happened after the resurrection. It was not a false thing.
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It was an event that changed the world. And half a world away, millions of people sit this morning worshiping the
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Lord Jesus Christ because the women did tell the disciples and Peter.
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And then Peter went right at them. And I encourage you this week, if you get extra time, to read the beginning of Acts and try to recognize
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Peter in the first five or six chapters of Acts. Try to recognize him based on what we've seen in Mark.
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See, that's the story that Mark knows. And he knows that the reader is going to fill in the blanks.
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What did the women do? They did what the angel said. Where does the story of the apostles go? Well, James and John, will they be baptized with the baptism that Christ said they would, as all of us must be?
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Yeah, and then Paul would later write, taking up the mantle that we are crucified with Christ, that we are all baptized with the baptism that Christ was, because there's no way to be saved otherwise.
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We will all be resurrected just as he was, as our bodies grown. Peter's confession, will it actually be the rock that the church is built on?
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You are the Christ. Where would we go? You have the words of life.
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And today, that is the confession of the church today. That is the one thing that all of us have in common, whether we're charismatic, whether we're stodgy reformed, whether we're some other kind of reformed, whether we're
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Presbyterians, or Lutherans, or the good kind of Anglicans, or anything in between. The big box, non -denominational, whether it's smokes and strobe lights, all of it.
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If there is this one confession, and that is that you have the words of life, where will we go, if not to you?
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That is the thing that binds all Christians together forever. It's not about petty infighting and squabbling.
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It's about, do you have the confession? And if you don't have the confession, you have nothing. So the readers of Mark would answer, and they would fill in the gaps.
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What did Peter do? Did it actually happen? Jesus said that he would build the church on this rock.
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Did he do it? And they saw first fruits. But we see later fruits today.
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It's an amazing thing, isn't it? The way that we take things for granted that we should never take for granted. It's a miracle that we sit here today.
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Do you understand? You could be doing the thing with your day off that you like to do.
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And it would make a lot more sense to the world, because the world thinks it's extremely weird for us to come in here and to sing old songs and to worship a man who died 2 ,000 years ago.
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That's weird, isn't it? Unless there is truth that a man rose from the grave and that that tomb was empty.
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And that is a historical fact that can't be covered over. Because if they could have covered it over, they would have.
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Because the Sanhedrin immediately went behind closed doors and said, and passed the story around. His disciples paid.
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They paid the people to say his disciples stole the body. But he was seen by hundreds of people.
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And the man who denied Christ in front of a girl will not deny
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Christ again in front of the most powerful people in the world. And a man who saw the risen
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Savior on the road to Damascus would stand in front of the tyrant Nero. And in fact, he would appeal his rights as a
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Roman citizen over and over and over again so that he could raise through the courts, preaching the gospel to every
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Roman magistrate until he could get to the emperor himself and point his finger and say, you answer to God.
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That is Paul. Did James and John, did they get baptized with that baptism?
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Well, James, he started the Council of Jerusalem that sorted out the whole circumcision mess that we read about in Galatians.
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What happened? Will the women say anything? Of course they said something.
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And then what they said ignited a fire that the devil has not been able to put out. And the harder he tries, the faster it grows.
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And he has been trying pretty hard in America for the last 50 years. And that should give us great hope,
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Christian, because we do not fear. We do not fear the enemy, because Jesus is not of him.
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And he will destroy him and conquer him. As he promised in the Gospel of Mark, remember, that the kingdom will grow like a mustard seed.
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It will start very small. That was God incarnate in a humble beginning in a manger.
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Not how we would write the script for a king coming to acclaim all of the cosmos, is it? But he comes in a manger, and that kingdom begins very small with a few roughneck fishermen and zealots who hear of this gospel.
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And they follow this man around, not by their own power, not by their own ingenuity, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. They follow this
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God -man around. And they are afraid. They are very afraid. And so the tomb is empty.
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And they're still afraid. But then what happens? The Holy Spirit comes upon them, and they're not afraid again.
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They're not afraid. The mustard seed grows to the extent that they could have never imagined in those days.
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Can you imagine Peter, or John, or James seeing what has happened 2 ,000 years later?
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Incredible stuff. The kingdom of God is established by the death of its king, but it's initiated by the life of its king.
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It keeps growing in power through the gospel. Even today, the good news is that the king has had victory over sin and death.
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And we should fear neither of those things. And those are the things that we fear the most, is it not? What are you afraid of,
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Christian? We're afraid of death, aren't we? We're afraid of sin. We're afraid of the devil.
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There's a lot of talk in politics these days about demonic powers going on, and people are demons, and a lot of this stuff is happening.
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And Christians, we can start to feel the heebie -jeebies from that, can't we? We can start to feel, oh, demons, oh, no.
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Was our Lord afraid? Were his apostles afraid of the demons? No, because they could cast them out, but even the ones they couldn't cast out, how are we told that the power of Satan is destroyed?
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Prayer. Have we neglected the greatest tool in the arsenal of the
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Christian today? The answer to that, to ask it is to answer it. Yes, we have. Why is the church in the position that it's in in America?
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Because we trust in our own piety, in our own holiness, and we neglect the nuclear store that God has given us in power of prayer, because the prayers of a righteous man avail of much.
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That is not a nice thing to say that gets printed on a coffee mug. That is the power of war against the enemy.
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If the men of God will bow on their knees and pray for the power of God, we will see it unleashed in our time, and that will not make us healthy, wealthy, and wise, but it will make us obedient, humble, fearless.
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It will make us out of the way as the power of the gospel, which is the true power to salvation, as it shows forth and flourishes.
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What else did Mark leave us with? The simple message of a risen Lord from two terrified women.
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It also starts the avalanche that ends the whole old system. The gospel is unbound while Satan is bound.
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And there is no going back, no going back ever. So for them, what now?
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For them, it's to walk in obedience, to not let man stop you from giving this news and from testifying of the power of Jesus to save, and the power of the church to stand against the tyrants and to remind them of their authority that is given by God itself so they should be deacons who administer good and punish evil.
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The church has lost her prophetic voice because we are afraid. It's really that simple.
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So what about them? They should not be afraid. What about us? We should not be afraid. And let me ask you this morning,
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Christian, are we afraid? Is there evidence? Is there evidence that we as the church have been bold and fearless, or is there evidence that we have been afraid for a long time?
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Obvious, right? So then the next question is, what are we afraid of? What are we afraid of?
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Guys, we are a weak generation. We are afraid.
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We are afraid of somebody writing something nasty about us on social media. We are afraid to confront our friends with their bad behavior.
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We are afraid to mix it up in the public square because the fear that infests us and that holds us down is the fear of man.
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We have to go back a bit. What were the women afraid of? What were they afraid of?
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It says that they were trembling. It says that fear gripped them. They were afraid of something they didn't understand.
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They see the angel. They don't understand what's going on. They don't understand how this could have possibly happened.
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Their fear is much more excusable than our fear because we live in the light of the fully realized canon of God.
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We have his full revelation in front of us. We can read it. We understand all too well what the angel of the
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Lord was doing there, don't we? Do I need to exposit that for us this morning? No, I think we understand.
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Miraculous things were afoot, and God's messenger came to roll the stone away and to give marching orders to the women.
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That's what was going on. It's not a problem of understanding for us. It's a problem that we understand all too well the forces that are arrayed against us, and we understand not enough the power that we have through the gospel.
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What are we supposed to do? Is our message so much different? Go and tell. Go and tell.
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Go and make spiritual friends. And as we'll look at very closely next week, go and set in order.
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Set your house in order. Set your church in order. Set your community in order.
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And the church has advocated that task because we are afraid. And so first and foremost, we should pray that we would not be afraid anymore.
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And to see the power of Christ is to not be afraid. What are we going to do? What about us,
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CBC? Do we leave Mark unchanged? I hope not.
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I hope not. I feel an aggression that almost makes me come out of my shoes.
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I feel impatient. I feel like the time is ripe and that there is white out there to go harvest, that they are ripe for the harvest.
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Who's going to go? Can we, in this small place, be the ones who say,
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Lord, send me? Even if, like Isaiah of old, even if the answer is you're going to go and speak and no one's going to listen to you, will we still go anyway, is the prize at the end worth it?
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We should remember our blindness, CBC. We should remember it. Because we're not better than James and John and Peter.
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And they were blind as they walked with the living Lord. We should remember our blindness and we should pray for sight.
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We should pray that we would see our own sins. But let's, for once, think about somebody other than ourselves. How much of our prayer is like, oh,
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Lord, help me with my sin, help me with my walk, help me with my family, help me with my job, help me with my money, help me with my church.
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Come on, now. What was the Lord's prayer like? Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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Give us this day our daily bread, our daily bread. Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
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We've forgotten how to pray. We are navel gazers when we go before the
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Lord of the cosmos and the Lord of the universe, and we pray entirely about ourselves and our own little corner.
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How about we think bigger? Is the Great Commission, go ye therefore and think about yourself entirely?
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And whenever you've had enough time doing that, maybe spend 1 % of your time thinking about somebody else? No, I don't think so.
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The Great Commission is far greater than that. It's about the nations. It's about the law of God.
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It's about the gospel. It's about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the Son and the
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Father. So what do we do? We remember our blindness, we pray for them, we think about someone other than ourselves.
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We do not make coffee mug verses and make everybody think, oh, we're OK. We know what we're doing. We're holding people at arm's length so they don't start asking those other questions because when they ask those questions, the blindness starts to get stripped away.
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And we like being blind because we think in our blindness that God is ignorant of our sins.
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We think in our blindness that we've got a cute little pet that we're nursing at home and that nobody cares.
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And God does care. Did you know God doesn't really care about your feelings?
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He cares about your heart. He cares about what you're doing. Faith without works is dead.
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So what do we do? We have to remember the basics. We have to grow in them.
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We don't accept mediocrity. I've been a Christian for 30 years. I can't tell you how that happened. It was crazy.
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No, we don't accept that. We have to give an answer. But also, we grow from those things into more advanced stuff.
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Do you get that? Milk. You are saved by grace.
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Christ died and resurrected. And the Holy Spirit has regenerated you. And you are to walk in God's commands.
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Milk. Meat. Courage. Faithfulness.
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Witness. Outward. The civil law.
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The law of God. How are we discipling our kids in every way? How are we handling what's coming into their minds?
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How are we handling what they're going to go do? Meat. What if we just drink milk all the time?
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Would you follow me? If you had breakfast with me, and I got a sippy cup of milk and drank it, I was like, look,
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I just can't take any other food. It's just milk. I love milk. And everywhere
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I go, I have a little ring on the top of my lip with a milk mustache, because all I'm doing is drinking milk. It is a distasteful picture, isn't it?
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Understand that when the authors of the New Testament say things like that, particularly Paul, he is making fun of you.
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You got to eat something. Babies drink milk. And then we kind of graduate from it, don't we?
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I mean, we even look weird if somebody gets a milk carton for lunch and starts drinking it when they're 40 years old.
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It's kind of weird. Grow in the advanced stuff.
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So how do we do that? Let me give you three things to walk with. And then next week, there's going to be a lot more of this. So here we go.
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Number one, boldly disciple. Quit thinking that you are not equipped. You are equipped.
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You've been called to it. And God will give you the gifts to do it, because he has commanded that you do it. God does not pull the football out from under us and laugh at us when we fall.
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If he tells us to do something, he gives us all the tools for righteousness to do it. Make disciples.
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Number two, this is super critical for us. I'm talking to all of us, but women,
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I'm especially talking to you. Avoid knee jerk, smoothing it over.
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When something goes wrong, avoid the instant. And men, you're acting like women when you do this.
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So don't do it. I've been so guilty of this so many times. Avoid when conflict comes going, oh, that's
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OK. It's all good. Don't do that. We can't have real relationships, because we're not honest with each other.
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Live in the conflict for a half second. You will survive. Did you know the worst thing in our lives is not conflict?
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The worst thing in our lives is sinning. Embrace the conflict for just a bit, and you will have a brother or a sister who is closer to you at the other side of it.
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It's the truth. No matter how many times I've seen it happen in my life, I still want to avoid the conflict.
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Finally, when we walk with this, let me bind you with this. We live in the power of the resurrection. That is not a spiritual platitude.
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Since Jesus has risen from the dead, he owns the power of death. It is completely defeated.
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So why are we afraid of it? When we die, we live. If men kill us, then we are robed in righteousness in heaven, singing praises around our
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King in unapproachable light. Our fathers who have gone before us this morning, they are in a better place than us.
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And I don't say that as a platitude. I say it is a reality. They ran the race, but the race is still there to be run for the people that came after them.
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Our times speak of the need for bold, decisive action. And the only way that bold, decisive action is going to happen in the church is if we live in the power of the resurrection.
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We have forgotten the resurrection to talk about the death of Christ. You will hear three to one amount of sermons about the crucifixion of Christ, as you will about the resurrection of Christ.
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It is the resurrection of Christ that is the power of the Christian faith. If he did not resurrect, then we are to be pitied above all men, because we have no religion.
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It's a religion of death, just like all the rest of them. But he did rise again.
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And so you do not have to be afraid, because our God has defeated fear, death,
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Satan, and sin. It's true. Believe it. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you for your power.
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Lord, it's a word that we run away from. We are afraid of the power that you have instituted through your resurrection from the dead, that you have resurrected not merely to live and survive, but to rule.
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So Lord, all the kingdoms of man are under your feet. Lord, all those things that look so powerful that we are so afraid of,
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Lord, you have bound them, and you have exposed them to open shame. You laugh at them.
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And yet, Lord, your people tremble, just like the two
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Marys at the tomb, Lord. We tremble, and we are greatly affrighted. And Lord, we know that you command us not to fear, that you command us to walk in boldness, making disciples not on our authority, but on your authority.
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So Lord, I pray that we would. I pray that we would not be defined by a spirit of fear, but we would be defined by a spirit of gratitude and courage.
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Lord, it is the thing that we need. We need dependence on you through prayer, and then through that prayer, we need to have courage.
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Lord, we so seldom see it. Lord, I pray that you would give it to us, and that we would not bandy it about as an invention of ourselves,
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Lord, that we would know that the Holy Spirit gives us the fruits of the Spirit, and that is love, joy, peace.
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Lord, when we have those things, there is no law against them, and we act with courage and boldness, because if you are with us, who can be against us?
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Lord, help us to believe it. We say it. Help us to believe it. Help us to have a faith that walks, not a faith that affirms verbal propositions.
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Lord, be with your church here. May you start something out of something so humble,
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Lord, not that we would be glorified, but that you would be glorified by the weak vessel here carrying the power of the gospel.