Take Up Your Cross

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Turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Mark chapter 8, the Gospel of Mark chapter 8.
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We will continue the series begun on the last Lord's Day and on Wednesday evening looking at the testimony of the
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Gospel of Mark to the grandeur and glory of the person of Christ. Before we look into his word, let's once again ask his blessing upon our time.
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Our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity you give to us now to enter into your presence through your word and your spirit.
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For we would ask that you would write upon our hearts your truth, you would protect us from distraction, Lord, that you would be honored and glorified in everything that takes place.
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We pray in Christ's name. If you were not with us on the last
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Lord's Day or on Wednesday evening, we are looking at the Gospel of Mark in light of the constant refrain found in our society, even within what calls itself a
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Christian scholarship, that we have in the Gospels very different pictures of Jesus.
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Now, there is no question that the emphases, the audience, the intentions of each of the writers will be unique to themselves.
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We are not trying to say that Mark and John have the same audience, the same vocabulary, the same style, the same context.
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We're not trying to make each one of the Gospels just a bad copy of each other in any way, shape, or form.
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There are differences, and we can learn from those differences. But what we're being told today in the general population, not just in scholarship, but because of the availability of the
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Internet and the fact that there is a tremendous amount of information out there, we are being told in the schoolroom.
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We are being told in the marketplace. We're being told on the park bench that what we have in the
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Gospels are contradictory views of Jesus, so that in John you have a very elevated view of Jesus, but that must mean it comes much later and isn't historically accurate.
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And in Mark you have just a human Jesus, just a prophet, just a person who was seeking to do the best he could for God, maybe was sent by God in some sense, but merely a human prophet.
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And we began looking at Mark's testimony in the first two chapters on the last
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Lord's Day, and we began to see that there is a tremendous amount of information that is found in the
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Gospel of Mark that would contradict the thesis that what you have in Mark is some low view of Jesus in comparison to John with a high view of Jesus, and Matthew and Luke are somewhere in the evolutionary process in between the two.
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Now, let me just mention by word of apology, and I'm using that term in the classical sense, not saying
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I'm sorry to be addressing this, please forgive me, but further defense of taking our time to look at something like this, that just again in the past literally few hours,
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I was reminded again of how prevalent in the cultural context in which we live is the need for us as believers to know the word and to be exposed to this type of thinking and to be prepared to give an answer with the hope that's within us.
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That is, I was directed once again, it's nothing new unfortunately, but for many years
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I've been aware of the fact that there are those who would accuse us of abuse of the
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Bible by pointing to certain passages in the text of the
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Bible and saying, see, if you just really knew the Scriptures, if you just weren't so bigoted, if you just weren't so closed -minded, then you would see that the
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Bible does not condemn the things that you say it condemns. Now, we know that in our day and hour, one of the primary focuses of attack upon our faith is that in regards to the
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Bible's teaching about sexual morality and ethics, the nature of marriage, God's command to be able to create man and male and female and the roles that each is to play, etc.
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etc. And so it has become very popular for people to present the argument that Jesus actually blessed same -sex unions in that he healed a same -sex partner of someone and they point us to the story in Matthew and Luke where a person comes to Jesus and says, my
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Pais, which anyone who's learned the the Greek language knows is normally translated as child because it can be a male or female, just depending on which article you put with it, or a servant, depending upon the context.
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And in fact, Jesus is even called the Pais Tuthayu, the child of God or the servant of God coming out of the
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Old Testament, but unfortunately today, because of the internet, on major internet websites, the argument is being presented that, well, what this term actually means is a young homosexual.
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Now, there isn't a single lexicon on the planet that says that, but all you got to do is quote someone who claims to be a
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Greek scholar and they'll just repeat this over and over again. And how many people are there in our society that are just looking for something like this?
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They want this to be the case and they'll use it to silence the testimony that we might give to the fact that God has created, as Jesus taught so clearly in Matthew chapter 19,
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He has made us male and female. He has assigned these roles to us. This is how we know what is true and what is false.
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And so we see the necessity. Once again, no matter how much we'd like to avoid it, no matter how much it would be, it would be nice to be back in the 1950s, wouldn't it?
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You know, Ozzie and Harriet and so on and so forth, and that there wasn't any internet and if people were saying these things, and they were, most of the folks in our churches wouldn't be hearing these things.
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It would be nice to be back there, but that's not where we live any longer. And so we need to be aware of these things and we need to, first of all, in our own souls, in our own minds, be settled on the falsity of these claims.
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But then once we are settled upon that, we need to ask ourselves the question, am I settled upon that simply because I'm more comfortable with that, simply because that's what
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I'm used to, or am I settled upon that because that truly is the testimony of the Word of God, and I know that well enough to be able to express that to someone else.
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So much of the testimony that is going to need to be born in the next generations in our land will need to be done, not by someone who still has the freedom and the ear of many people through media or through forms of media, but by you.
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As our freedoms of speech become ever more constricted, the speaking will need to be done more and more by individuals one -on -one.
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That's what's happening to the persecuted church or all around the world today. The Christian witness in Iran, the
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Christian witness in Iraq or Pakistan takes place one -on -one.
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Believers in their lives sharing with others. We're headed that way, and that means that that responsibility will be yours.
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Mine as well, but right now I can speak to thousands of people at one time. Right now
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I can still go on television in Britain, and I can still do things like this.
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But what happens when that will no longer be our opportunity? How will the witness take place then?
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It will take place from your mouth and your knowledge of the Word of God. And so I offer that as an apology, again in the classical sense, a defense of why we take the time to look at this text.
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And certainly we're going to look at what what Mark 8 .34 and following says. And I could just do a sermon about that.
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But what I want to do is I want to talk about what it says and then make application to the challenges that are being made against our faith.
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And hopefully in the process encourage you to know the Word, encourage you to recognize the truthfulness of what you've been taught.
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But then especially to encourage you to be able to give witness to that truth as you have opportunity to do so.
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So just a little bit of the background in Mark chapter 8. We have similar text what we had in Matthew chapter 16, just a few
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Wednesday evenings ago, and we looked at that. We have the testimony concerning who Jesus is. Peter taking
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Jesus' side, saying no, no, no, when he talks about his coming death, so on and so forth.
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And it is in that context then, the beginning of verse 34, we have speaking of Jesus, he called together the crowd, together with his disciples, and he said to them, if anyone wishes to follow after me, he must deny himself and pick up or take up his cross and follow after me.
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For whoever wishes to save, it's literally his soul, will lose it.
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But whoever loses his soul for my sake and the gospel will save it.
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For what benefit or what gain is it to a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?
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For what will a man give in exchange, as something in exchange for his own soul?
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And then Jesus says in verse 38, for whoever is ashamed of me and my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation, the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his father together with the holy angels.
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This, our text for this morning. Now, let's make sure we know what the text says before we make application.
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Jesus calls the crowd together with his disciples. Now, this is interesting to me because Jesus has been telling people to don't tell anybody that I'm the
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Messiah. And he's been in places where there's so many people around him that he could hardly teach and people could hardly get to him.
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But here, Jesus is the one doing the calling. And he's calling the crowd together with his disciples and he wants to say something very clearly and very strongly to them.
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Now, these would be people who would think that they do want to follow after Jesus. These are potential disciples.
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And I would point out that Jesus' approach to them is pretty much exactly the opposite of what is suggested in most seminaries and Bible colleges today.
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You don't start with this kind of stuff. But Jesus does. He doesn't follow after the methodology of today.
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And there would be people who would say, well, that's because he was in a different culture, in a different context. We need to be so much more culturally sensitive.
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Well, I understand we need to use language that people will understand. I mean,
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I'm not standing up here in a powdered wig, am I? That was very popular at one time. There were great godly men who preached from a pulpit wearing a powdered wig.
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That might get in the way, just a little bit, of especially the younger generation listening very seriously to what
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I have to say. So I'm not saying we need to erect artificial barriers and make sure that we just are as far out of the mainstream as possible.
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But at the same time, it seems to me that there are many people today who simply don't trust the
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Spirit of God and the Word of God to do what Jesus and the apostles taught the Spirit of God and the Word of God would do.
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And we've replaced those things with methodologies, traditions, programs, entertainment, and all sorts of other things in the process.
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Notice what he says. If anyone wishes to follow after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow after me.
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Now, I cannot imagine in the context in which
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Jesus made these statements any less attractive way of starting a discipleship campaign.
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I cannot imagine. This goes against everything. This is so counterintuitive that it should catch us.
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Now, again, we all know this verse. If you've been to church for any period of time, you know this verse.
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But the problem is, you may know this verse in the context of today and take up his cross.
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I've been watching some of the Olympics, and I've never quite understood it, but Olympic runners, they'll wear necklaces.
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That would just drive me insane. And some of them, they'll wear crosses.
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And I'm like, don't you ever get stuck with that thing? Every little bit of extra weight just doesn't seem to make much sense to me at all.
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But there are people, and they love to have their crosses, even when they're out there on the track. And we think of it like that.
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Take up your cross and follow me. That is not how anybody who heard these words would have understood them.
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Nobody. Nobody. Nobody was wearing crosses back then. It would have been somewhat similar to running around with a syringe around your neck to represent the way in which people are executed today.
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Or maybe a noose, if you go back a number of generations, or an electric chair, or something along those lines.
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Because when people heard this, when people heard Jesus say, take up your cross, that was, well,
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I'll be perfectly honest with you. In polite conversation, people didn't even like to use this terminology.
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They didn't even like to talk about this. There were ancient writers, I've mentioned before, that would not even use this term because it was so vulgar.
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Because the death that it represented was so heinous, and so disrespectful to the person who was executed in that fashion, that it was just, you know, proper people wouldn't speak of such a thing.
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And so when Jesus says, take up his cross, he is literally saying, if you want to follow me, you need to follow me where I'm going.
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And where I am going is to a cross. Where I am going is on a death march.
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They had all seen the condemned criminals carrying their crosses to the place where the
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Romans were going to strip them, and nail them to that cross, and leave them there to die an agonizing death over a number of days.
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They knew what it meant. They knew what the death march was. It was meant to be a place where the
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Roman citizens anyways could express their opprobrium, their vile hatred of these people who had supplanted
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Roman authority. And people would be spit upon and mocked. And what
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Jesus is saying, if you want to follow me, you join the death march. You deny yourself, and you take up the instrument of your public execution, and follow me.
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That's not how most churches today are presenting discipleship of Christ.
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In most churches today, that's not what's being presented. I said most, not all. In most churches today, let's be honest, in the
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United States, you entertain. You try to make people feel comfortable.
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You don't use terms like repentance, or wrath, or judgment, or sin. You try to ease folks into the most comfortable form of maybe putting something in the offering plate as possible.
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That's not how Jesus does it. Jesus says we are to deny ourselves.
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Well, that makes sense when you think about it. If you're going to be my disciple, then you can't be constantly putting forth your own rights.
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You can't be putting yourself first. The central religious dogma of our humanistic society,
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Jesus says, put it away. Deny yourself.
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You don't put yourself number one. You don't follow after Christ to get prettier hair and straighter teeth.
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You don't follow after Christ to get the nicer car and the nicer house and the ease of life. Deny yourself.
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You can't be putting forth yourself at the same time you are seeking to walk in the steps of Jesus Christ.
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It's Him, or yourself. You either subject yourself to His Lordship, or you subject
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Him to your Lordship. There isn't any other way. And a
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Christianity where your Lord and Jesus is your servant is an abomination, and the world knows it.
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The world sees it, mocks it, and yet loves it. Oh, they love people who do that.
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They know the people who don't really believe that the Bible is the Word of God. That's why they want to put them out front.
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It's an act of mockery. A mockery of the Lordship of Christ. If you desire to follow after me, deny yourself, take up the instrument of your public execution, and walk in my footsteps.
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Now, there's no question that this is exactly what Jesus means, because the rest of the verses make this clear.
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For whoever wishes to save his life, literally his psuche, his soul, will lose it.
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But whoever gives up, loses his soul, in behalf of me and the
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Gospel, will save it. Now, there is the great contradiction.
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There are so many contradictions in Scripture concerning what the world thinks the
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Gospel should be, over against what it really is. The world thinks the
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Gospel should be wise. It should be something where only the wise can think through it, and finally get to the end of this long, complicated syllogism.
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And ah, there is God. And the world would love to have that kind of, we'd like to see the
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Christians, you know, giving us this kind of worldly wisdom. And what does Paul tell us?
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Well, the Gospel is to them that are perishing foolishness. It's foolishness. To us who are being saved, it's the power of God.
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Well, it should be something that, you know, Jesus came that we might have life, we might have it more abundantly, right? Yes, but we have that life through what?
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Death to self. Death to our desires. Death to our lusts.
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And yet, even death to our dreams, if they are not what God would have us to experience to be what
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He wants us to be as His servants. And so you have all these contradictions.
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You want to save your life? You've got to lose it. If you're willing to lose your life, not for you and not for your own self -aggrandizement, but for me and the
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Gospel, you will save it. So you save your life by losing it.
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And you lose your life by trying to save it. That's the whole idea. But I hope you do not miss what
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Jesus says. Simply losing your life, that's not difficult to do.
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I mean, I came that close to trying to do that just this past week.
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I was coming down South Mountain, and I was coming down South Mountain very fast. It's a hill, you know.
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And when you're on two wheels going down the hill, you can go really fast. I was coming around a pretty sharp corner, and I come around the corner.
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What do I find? But I find a little SUV in my lane. He's not in his lane.
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He's in my lane. Because he's passing a cyclist going the other direction, and instead of waiting, looking around the corner, decides,
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I'm going to go around now. So I've got no place to go. He turns hard that way.
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I brake real hard. I skid a little bit. I get to the point where I've sent a message to my brain to my entire left side.
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Look out. This is going to be bad. I don't know how I missed that vehicle. I was so close,
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I could memorize the part number on his rear light. I mean, it was, wow.
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But somehow, I got through it. I survived. Dying isn't difficult to do.
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We have an amazingly large number of ways in which we can somehow manage to do this. What's being said is that if you try to save your life, the only way to do it is to lose it.
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Well, what's the point? Well, obviously, we know, we have the rest of Scripture to tell us, but actually,
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I don't think most people would have any difficulty understanding what Jesus is saying. I mean, everybody wants to save their life.
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I mean, when I came around that corner, the first thought in my mind wasn't, Oh cool, I murdered him. That wasn't my thought.
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I didn't want to hit that thing. I didn't want to break any bones. I didn't want to be in the hospital. I didn't want to kill myself.
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I did everything in my power to avoid and somehow was successful in so doing. So, did
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I violate this? No, that's not what Jesus is talking about. Our lives are gifts.
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We are created by God. God has the right to dispose of us as he sees fit.
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And the only way for us to really know life is if he is the one who is guiding our life.
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And you see, if I don't have God's priorities, if I don't live for what he would have me to live for,
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I'm not really living. And so, when I deny myself,
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I need something to live for. That's the great tragedy of secular humanism in our day.
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What's there to live for? I wonder how many athletes there are after this evening, well actually right now, in London.
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The closing ceremonies are taking place, I think. And they've got their gold medals.
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And they're on their way home. And they're depressed. They trained and they trained and they trained.
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I saw a woman in the, I think it was the 5 ,000 meters or the 10 ,000 meters. I forget which one it was. It was one of our runners, as I recall.
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She got tripped. Somebody behind her hit her foot. Have you ever watched those people, those running in a crowd like that?
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I'm just sitting there going, I'm just waiting. Someone's going to trip somebody else and they're all going to fall down on top of each other and no one's going to win this thing.
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And she got tripped. And she just laid on the track sobbing all those years for this one race.
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I know she's depressed. They almost had to pick her up out of the track to get her out of the way. But I bet you there are people.
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They've got gold around their neck. Did it make them happy?
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Did it take away the difficulties in their lives? Did it heal marriages, heal relationships between parents?
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No, it didn't. They thought it would. It was great for a little while, but now what?
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We have to have something to live for. God made us that way.
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If we were just animals, then you could be fulfilled by just simply fulfilling every lust you have.
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But everyone who's ever tried it knows it doesn't work. It doesn't work. There's something more.
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And the great tragedy of secular humanism is it robs us of any meaning in life.
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You have to come up with your own meaning. You have to cobble something together and it never really does it, does it.
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You see, when we deny ourselves, when we die, when we lose our lives, that's so that we can actually realize what's most important.
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What does Jesus say? If we lose our souls for Him and the
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Gospel. Now, some might translate His Gospel because I think that would be accurate. We already saw it last
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Lord's Day that Jesus defines the Gospel, the very Gospel of Jesus, the Gospel of God, the Gospel of Jesus.
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It's all the same thing. And we saw how that's relevant to our overarching inquiry here.
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But you see, the world cannot begin to understand this element, that we would be willing to deny ourselves our desires from the world's perspective, our happiness, our comfort, the things they value the most.
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We would be willing to sacrifice those things for Christ and His Gospel.
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Because His promise is, if we're willing to do so, our souls will be saved.
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The world doesn't understand that. That's foolishness to the world. It's a guy who died 2 ,000 years ago.
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Different culture, different time. Are you really still this foolish? But that's what
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Christ calls us to. And He asks a rather obvious question.
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What good is it if you gain everything this world has to offer, but you lose your soul?
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What good is it? That's a question we should be asking not only the world around us, but really as believers we should be asking ourselves that question.
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Because is it not true, brothers and sisters, that almost every single time that you and I look back upon our lives and we see sin, we see failure, we see where there were things we should have done that we didn't do, and we see that there are things we shouldn't have done we did do.
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Isn't it always because we loved ourselves and our desires rather than Christ and His Gospel?
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Because remember, Jesus called together the crowd together with His disciples.
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So these words aren't just for those outside. They are for us as well. I mean, sin should be foolishness to us.
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I mean, if we really, really understand who Christ is, if we really, really understand what the
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Gospel is, how brief this life is, how foolish is it for every one of us when we sin?
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When we demonstrate that we still love ourselves more than we love
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Christ and His Gospel, what can we gain?
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What can anyone gain if you lose your own soul? And what will a man give in exchange for his own soul?
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I mean, what could you possibly possess? What could any act of rebellion, any act of satisfying our own lust, what could that possibly, how could that be as precious as our own soul?
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This is one of the reasons that as believers, we really must consider well how easy it is for us to slip into apathy.
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Just skating along. Hey, I'm doing as well as the world around me.
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This is really the foundation, the theological foundation of Paul's exhortation to believers later on.
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Whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord. We of all people should be those who demonstrate that we're not just in this world to get as far down the road as we can and get a nice retirement account and take it easy.
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We should be seeking to be the best that we can be at whatever God has gifted us to do in service of Christ and His Gospel.
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We should be desirous of being used by Him. I'll confess, people know me when anyone, especially in the younger generation, but anyone, around me goes,
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I'm bored. I have one response. Some of you know what it is. I haven't been bored since 1978.
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And I haven't. And you shouldn't be either. If you're a servant of Christ, are you telling me there's nothing you can do to serve
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Him and His Gospel today? I mean, do you really know the
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Word of God that well? Have you really memorized that much Scripture? Not some more prayer you can do?
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Not some service to somebody? I'm bored. Really. You know, if you really live the
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Christian life, it's a rather exciting thing. And it's a rather demanding thing. It really is.
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Remember, Jesus is saying these hard words to the crowd. And we know how well that worked in John 6, remember?
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What will a man give in exchange for his soul? But then we have these sobering, sobering words in verse 38.
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Whoever would be ashamed of me and my words.
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Now, I don't think there's any major difference between Jesus saying my words and my
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Gospel. Because they're pretty much the same things. But it is interesting to me that He doesn't just simply say me.
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There's so many people who like to say, Oh yes, I'm a Christian. I like Jesus. There's a real popular political
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Jesus out there these days. But it seems like the popular political Jesus never said anything. People like to say they follow
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Jesus, but for some reason what He taught, not so popular. Jesus doesn't allow that division.
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You can't divide Jesus out from what He taught. If you don't like His Gospel, then be honest and say you don't like Him.
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For whoever would be ashamed of me and my words.
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And folks, if you don't see in this next phrase a description of where we are today, you need to wake up.
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In this adulterous and sinful generation.
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It's literally in this generation, the adulterous and the sinner. Now how is
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Jesus' generation adulterous and sinful? Well, we might look at that generation and compare it to ours and go,
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They weren't nearly as bad. I mean, certainly there's been a lot of sin in every generation.
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It's really easy for us to go, Boy, I remember the good old days. Something tells me if we asked
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Pastor Fry if there was any sin back when he was in his twenties, he might go, Yeah, I think there was. And yeah, we may be less shamed about it now.
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I mean, now it's ridiculous. There's certainly a degradation, but people were sinning.
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They just may have covered it up a little bit more. There may have been a little more hypocrisy. The fact of the matter is,
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Jesus' generation were a people who claimed to be good, but they weren't. That's why they were adulterous.
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They claimed to be faithful. They weren't. They claimed to have a relationship to God amongst the
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Jewish people, but they loved the things of the world and their worship wasn't true.
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So they were adulterous. They were sinners. A description of a generation.
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And when you're in a generation that is marked by unfaithfulness and sin, it's easy to be embarrassed about the
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Gospel. And that's where many of us are today, and especially our young people. Especially the young people.
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We all feel it. You all feel it in the workplace. When you don't laugh at the jokes, when you don't join in, when you purposely walk away so you don't have to be a part of that, or if you can't get away because you're sitting there working, you don't laugh, you don't join in, you keep your head down, you keep your work going.
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People see that. Come on, join in, man. Who are you? Holy Joe? We all know what it means.
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Jesus said, whoever would be ashamed of me and my words.
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Are we ashamed of what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 19? One man, one woman. God designed it that way.
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You can't redefine that. If you do, you're rebelling against God. He won't bless it.
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Oh, how dare you? The looks, the frowns. But whoever would be embarrassed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the
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Son of Man, he's going to be embarrassed too about Him.
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Because see, there's a day coming. There's a day when the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with all the holy angels.
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There is a day of judgment that will come. And you need to realize that is a far greater day than any day where you're called upon to be faithful to the testimony of Christ in this adulterous and sinful generation.
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See, what's the point? You've got an adulterous and sinful generation. They're going, ah, mock the
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Christian. Which is worse? To be mocked by them? To be ashamed.
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The Son of Man ashamed of you when He comes. In the presence.
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He comes glorious. He has the very glory of the Father. And all the holy angels.
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Which one's a little more important? The mockers today? Or the shame one would feel before Christ at the very judgment itself?
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Do we keep these things in mind? Do we think about these things? If you are not absolutely assured of the fact that there will be a day of judgment, and that God's going to set everything right, if that's just sort of a, well, that's what we say on Sunday, but I'm really not sure.
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I don't know. Then a text like this really isn't going to come to your mind and be of assistance to you in those situations you might face.
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But if you are convinced that Jesus was telling the truth, if you follow after Him, if by the
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Spirit you are convinced of the truthfulness of Jesus' words, then obviously, we need to have our minds focused upon that day.
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Not today. Not in the sense that we overlook what we need to do today, but in the sense that we have a set of priorities that is based upon eternal truths.
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That eternal truth includes the reality of judgment to come. And we do not want the
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Son of Man to be ashamed of us. We, therefore, cannot be ashamed of Him.
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Now, there's the text. I think that is a fair reading of the text. I think it's a fair contextual reading based on the original languages and all that wonderful, fun stuff.
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But what does it have to do with our overarching theme? Well, I hope that by now we've established it so well that you are catching the things as we are looking at them.
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Once again, ah, the Jesus of Mark, just a human being. He's out of control at the cross.
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There are circumstances around Him he can't understand. He's just a peasant teacher from Galilee.
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That's all Mark wants us to understand. Really? Jesus calls
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His disciples together. He exercises authority here. He makes
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Himself more important than the individual dreams and aspirations of anyone who would be
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His disciples. He says that they must deny themselves and follow after Him.
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What arrogance! If what we are told is true and Jesus is just simply a peasant preacher, because He's making
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Himself the center here. Take up your cross? What do you mean?
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It almost sounds like Jesus knows what's coming. That Jesus knows where He's going. But the point is
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He makes Himself the very center of following after God. Oh, that sounds very exclusivistic.
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In fact, He says that if you want to save your life, then you need to give it up for Him and the
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Gospel and His words. Again, what prophet of the
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Old Testament would ever have said these things? Who would have followed Isaiah had he said these words?
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Give up your life for me. Listen to me. The message of me,
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Isaiah. Of course not. But then notice what
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He says. We have this phrase, He's the Son of Man again. I hope you're marking that.
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I hope you're marking, Son of Man. Remember, the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.
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It's the Son of Man that in the next chapter, remember Wednesday night, is standing with Moses and Elijah.
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This is my beloved Son. We're going to see it again this evening in its fulfillment in Mark 14.
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But here's the Son of Man. And when the Son of Man comes, that's the judgment.
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And every Jewish person knew. The final judgment. That's when God is vindicated. God's the one that does the judging.
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The Son of Man? He comes in the glory of His Father?
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He actually claims to be able to bear the glory that no created being could ever bear as their own.
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I mean, Moses was just in the presence of that glory and his face glowed. But God had to cover
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Moses in the cleft of the rock as the glory went by. Jesus comes bearing that glory.
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How can any merely created being be what is being described here?
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It just doesn't make any sense. The Son of Man comes in the glory of His Father, and He's distinguished from the holy angels.
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He's not one of the holy angels. He's not included in that group. Jesus, one of the holy angels, comes.
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The Son of Man who's one of the... No! Again, the same distinction we see elsewhere where you have the
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Father, the Son, the angels. And so, when we look at this text, we have to ask ourselves the question, how come there's so many people with PhDs after their names running around telling us that Jesus in Mark is just simply a human being?
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He's nothing more than that when we've already seen in the four times we've been together that we've seen so much clear evidence.
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What this tells you is that in modern scholarship today, you've got traditions.
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And you have big names. And you believe what the big names have to say if you want to get a job, if you want to get tenure, if you want to get published.
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You believe what the big names say, whether it's truthful. We need to learn to demythologize scholarship.
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I don't care how many letters a person has after their name. If you can't read the text and follow its outlines and listen to what the author is saying just simply so you can be in the in -group, well,
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I don't have a whole lot of respect for your scholarship at all. And nor should I. So we see how this text is directly relevant, but I want to close by making application.
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Brothers and sisters, think about your coming week. In how many ways will you be tempted to be embarrassed of Jesus and His words?
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Think about it. Make plans ahead of time. You know that person at the office, that person at school, that person in the neighborhood.
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Will you be tempted to be embarrassed of the Son of Man? The glorious Son of Man who says
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He's going to come upon the clouds of heaven. And what will you do to prepare yourself so that in that moment, by His grace and by His Spirit, you will glorify
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Him. You will give an answer. You will act in such a way.
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You will behave in such a way that will bring honor and glory to Jesus Christ. So when
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He comes, He will not say, I am ashamed of you. He will say, well done, thou good and faithful servant.
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Think upon that. Our glorious Heavenly Father, we know that the day is coming when
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You will bring judgment to bear. And Lord, we long for that day. You say righteousness is the foundation of Your throne.
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We are thankful for that. But Lord, we can only be thankful for that because You've changed our hearts and You've saved us.
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You have forgiven us of our sins. You've done so justly because of the work of Christ. Lord, if there be any in the sound of my voice this day that have not bowed the knee to this glorious Lord Jesus, may they do so.
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May by Your grace You reveal Him to them in their need. But Lord, for each believer here this day, within the sound of my voice,
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Lord, may we take to heart our Lord's command to deny ourselves and take up our cross.
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May we know what that means. May we live a life in this coming week that shows that the life we want to live is one that glorifies
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You. May we not be ashamed. May we bring You honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name.