The Great Shepherd

Please remain standing for the reading of the word. It'll be in Mark 6, verses 33 through 56.

Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them.

When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

He began to teach them many things, and when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, this is a desolate place and the hour is now late.

Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat. But he answered them, you give them something to eat.

And they said to him, shall we go and buy 200 denarii, worth of bread and give it to them to eat?

And he said to them, how many loaves do you have? Go and see, and when they had found out, they said five and two fish.

Then he commanded them all to sit down in the groups on the green grass. So they sat down in the groups by hundreds and by fifties.

And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to sit before the people.

And he divided the two fish among them all. They all ate and were satisfied. And they took up 12 baskets full of broken pieces and then a fish.

And those who ate the loaves were 5 ,000 men. Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, where he dismissed the crowd.

And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea and he was alone on the land.

And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about fourth watch of the night, he came to them walking on the sea.

He meant to pass them by, but when he saw them walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all had saw him and were terrified.

But immediately he spoke to them and said, take heart, it is I, do not be afraid. And he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased.

And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

When they had crossed over, they came to the land of Jacintari and more to the shore. And when they got out of the boat, the people immediately recognized him and ran about the whole region and began to bring the sick people on their beds to wherever they heard he was.

And wherever he came in the villages, cities of the countryside, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and implored him that they might touch even the fringe of his garment.

And as many of them touched it were made well. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this gather of believers as we come together to give you praise and worship.

Worship the almighty name of Jesus. Father, I ask that you give Pastor Josh courage as he preaches and teaches this piece of scripture unapologetically and with boldness.

Father, strengthen your people this morning. Convict us of our sins. Call us to repentance. We love you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Amen. After an Easter break, where we looked at a different text,

I think that it's very important for us to get back in context and mark this morning because you miss a lot of what this very famous story is about if we lose the context.

So if you'll remember, two weeks ago, we had kind of a parenthetical story where Jesus had sent the disciples out by twos to all of the cities around and then a parenthetical about John the

Baptist and Herod and Herodias. And at the end of that story, we're a little disjointed there. At the end of that story, the disciples come back to Jesus and they're reporting what has happened.

And now we pick up the story there. And so what I wanna look at it by way of introduction in this text is that this is obviously an extraordinarily important story.

This is the one, this is a miracle that's recorded in all four of the Gospels. You're probably more familiar with the

Matthew or the John account of it. As Mark has said last night, it's because Mark thinks this is the most popular one of them, not that John or Matthew.

But this one is one that's a little bit different. There's some peculiarities to it that we're gonna look at. And by way of memory, with a big block of text that you just heard read,

I want to think, and look, I admittedly forced one of them. I am a Baptist, okay?

So I've got five Ps for us to look at this morning and they are describing the shepherd. And I think what you can't miss in this text is what

Mark is wanting to do is Mark is wanting to point us to the reality that Jesus is the greater

Joshua in this text. That's what he's doing. So you're gonna see a motif of shepherds and rest and pasture and all that kind of thing.

And then we're gonna see the bread and the meat that will point at a greater reality but points back at something from Israel's past.

So the five Ps that I want you to remember, and we'll go through them in order, is that as Jesus is the great shepherd, he shows his shepherding through his promise or the promise of his coming, his prophecy, his provision, his power.

And then finally, we look at the end that he is the shepherd who binds and heals. He is the physician. So first, the promised shepherd.

So I want you to look, if you got your Bibles open, which you should, at Mark 6, we're looking, starting at verse 33.

And I gotta set up the geography, right? So the disciples are very tired. They've been going into these cities, walking.

They've enjoyed hospitality from the cities who would keep them. And then they've dusted the dust off of their shoes from the cities who would not show them hospitality.

And they come back and they're exhilarated. They've been on a mission trip and they've seen a lot of harvest, I think. And as they come back, they're very tired.

They're very tired. And so we see a theme here that Jesus looks out and the disciples are saying, we need some rest.

We need a break. And so Jesus sends them to a desolate area. He's like, okay, so we're gonna go rest and regroup.

Jesus is God though, and he knows what's waiting for them in the desolation. And what's waiting for him is a huge crowd, a multitude, a huge amount of people, about five times the size of any of these cities or villages that would be dotting around this north edge of the

Sea of Galilee. This is a multi -community gathering. Everybody, everybody is desperate to hear the words of Christ, to see his miracles, to be around him.

And we get a notable thing in verse 34. When Jesus went ashore, he sent them out. When he goes ashore, he saw a large crowd and he felt compassion for them.

That is a gut -wrenching sympathy. He feels in his bowels, that's what that word means, that there is hardship for this crowd.

He feels terrible for them. And he feels a responsibility and a pull for them.

And he says the reason is because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And so now begins the parallels.

Here's what we need to think about and here's what Mark wants us to see, is that the sheep without a shepherd would be an allusion to what

Moses described the people of Israel with as he was about to die and as he was trying to name a successor.

Somebody's got to keep these people together. Now, if you remember the story of Exodus, the people are really not all that together, right?

They're out in the wilderness, they've been punished by Moses, their federal head. He struck the rock and they've been punished by staying in the wilderness.

They do not get to come into Canaan and see the promised land. And so they are a group of people that is stick together, as a friend of mine would say, almost by a lick and a prayer, all right?

They don't know what's going on. They don't have faith. They've been fed by God, but they don't really trust.

And Moses is seeing this group of people. It's like, man, they may just turn tail and go right back to Egypt, God, if you don't help me here, if you don't send somebody.

And so we pick up the story in Numbers 27. You'll notice right away why I'm reading this text.

Verses 15 through 18, it says, then Moses spoke to Yahweh, saying, may Yahweh, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation who will go out and come in before them and who will lead them out and bring them in so that the congregation of Yahweh will not be like sheep which have no shepherd.

So Yahweh said to Moses, take Joshua, the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and lay your hand on him.

So right away, here's what we see. The people of Israel who are gathered on this north shore of the

Sea of Galilee, they are people who are scattered and leaderless. They have no king. They are occupied by the

Roman Empire, which is an evil, pagan empire, polytheistic, and their religious leaders have utterly failed them.

We've seen in the temple, right, the religious leaders are money -changing them, stealing from them, placing heavy burdens on them that they won't lift a finger to carry themselves.

And this is the state of Jesus' people when he comes to this shore in these little fishing villages.

And he looks at them and he says, what is going to happen to this people? They have no shepherd.

They are scattered. They don't know what to do. Everyone that they've placed their hopes in has failed them, and it seems like God has abandoned them because we've had 400 years of silence since the last prophet.

And then John the Baptist, great hope. Don't forget the context, right? Why is this here parenthetically?

Because the great hope, John the Baptist comes like Elijah. And in a manner of speaking, John the Baptist is

Elijah. He comes as a forerunner, talking about the kingdom of God is at hand.

The ax is laid to the root of the tree of all these people who are oppressing you. Judgment is coming. If they don't repent and come into the kingdom of God, they will all die.

That's what John the Baptist is saying. And then John the Baptist gets snuffed out by another enemy of the people.

And so once again, there's this idea, this people that they maybe weren't that bound together anyway, they have been trodden down and oppressed for a long time, and they find themselves again leaderless.

They are scattered. As Jesus comes up to them, he is going to show a mighty work that the unwashed masses are gonna understand more than the apostles who have been embedded with Jesus every day.

It's an interesting thing. But as we see, Jesus has been promised. And so what

I was telling my dad this morning, kind of the key to understanding this text, is I think that when we look at God's provision for the people in Exodus, when he was giving them the manna every morning, and when he was giving them the ravens to eat, right?

When it was coming and the quail, and they were eating the meat and eating the bread, that was actually a type, or in another way of thinking, a real metaphor for this event.

So the manna and the meat was showing that there was going to be a breaking of bread and a multiplication miracle in the time of the great prophet, just like Moses, the greater prophet, just like Deuteronomy 18 said, that Jesus is here, but also that this itself, this multiplication, is a sign and a type of an even greater event, which is gonna be when

Jesus blesses and breaks the bread at that table, at the Lord's table, where he is going to offer himself as the bread and the meat.

He is going to be the one that sustains his people, and it's no longer gonna be from gathering up manna from the ground.

It's gonna be gathering up every morsel of the word of God that Jesus gives to his people, as he explains in John 6, which is in context with this story.

John 6 comes off the heels of this beating of the 5 ,000. And so Jesus has long promised, and I think we often miss that in our church today is because we have really thrown off a lot of the

Old Testament. And so what we do is we read the New Testament, and we lose its history.

We lose that it's pointing to something that had been long promised. This shepherd is the greater

Joshua. And as we'll see, Joshua led his people into Canaan, and he led them in by the authority of God, and he led them in with the sword, right?

Joshua, the book of Joshua, is a book of conquest. It's a book of a scattered wilderness people who is living off collected bread off the ground, who comes in and destroys all of the empires of Canaan because God had promised that to them.

He brings the sword, and he binds the people together. And as he leaves the scene, he gives them an admonition that you should teach your children.

Do not serve the other gods of this area. Don't synchronize with them. Hold to the one who gave you the land.

And Jesus, embedded in all of this, he's going to preach the same message. The message is you should trust in the

God who has given you a shepherd. You should not look at the other gods. You should not lose faith.

You should not lose heart. God has promised this, and it will surely be done. And this promise comes in the manifestation of this shepherd.

And so as a church today, we have to understand that we are a church scattered in America.

We are a church scattered. We should have compassion for the Christians, and I do often. I think my wife gets sick of me saying this,

I have great compassion for the pew sitter. I do.

I think that there's a wash. If you're on social media, you kind of see like Protestia does a lot of videos of church services going on.

I saw one last week of a guy riding around on a roller coaster on the stage. I'm sure some people saw that.

And we think how, you know, we in our serious bubble sit here and think, how can somebody stand that?

And here's how. We have a people that are scattered and they need a shepherd.

And I think when there's a vacuum and people need a shepherd, there is a vacuum and that creates an opportunity for shepherds to come in and start to bring people their way.

And that's why it's about the money. It's about the riches. But Jesus doesn't, look at what he does.

He doesn't use the people to enrich himself. He feeds the people. He is a shepherd who feeds the sheep.

And that's very important, but I get ahead of myself. So he is the promised shepherd. He was long promised even in the time of Moses that he was gonna come on the scene.

And what does he do when he sees this people and his response, his guts are moving. He feels this compassion deep in the center of his body.

And he thinks, what do I do? And in verse 34, we pick it up. He says, what does he do? He's the prophetic shepherd.

How does he feed them? He begins to teach them many things. He begins to teach them many things.

What did this scattered people need more than anything? They needed a shepherd who would teach them what

God says. And Jesus is the prophetic shepherd. He is the prophet shepherd. All the other prophets before pointed at this prophet.

This prophet is the culmination and the fulfillment of all the prophecies of the

Old Testament. In fact, we know from the New Testament that all of those prophecies find their yes in Jesus.

He is the perfect fulfillment of all of them. And so when he sees this people, this ragtag group, what he comes to do is he begins to teach them many things.

He's teaching them of the prophecies in the past. We know this. This was Christ's ministry is that he was teaching what all of the

Old Testament meant in light of him coming on the scene. They didn't have the book of Mark.

They didn't have Ephesians. They had the Old Testament. They had the Old Covenant.

And so he opens those scrolls and look, he is the word. He had the whole thing memorized, right?

And he's teaching them all of those scriptures. And they've never heard anything like it before because they are scattered.

Many in our country today have not heard the word of God proclaimed as it is written.

There are hucksters and well -meaning people who are ignorant who come in and they unknowingly twist the word and they give people faulty doctrine.

And faulty doctrine has consequences in life. We need a prophetic shepherd. Now look, a good elder is not

Jesus. And I am certainly not, right? But the idea here is this.

We have been given the revelation of God in the word. And the elder, he strains like the ox threshing out the grain and he strains in this word for one purpose.

And that one purpose is to cut this straight and to draw straight lines out of the text so that the people can hear and understand and know how it applies.

Because it's not a seminary lecture. It is an application. It is a fiery revealing of the beauty of God's word that's laid out like a feast for the sheep to come and eat.

And that is the joy and the challenge of being an under shepherd. And Jesus shows us the way. He gathers his people and he gives them the word.

That is the need. Jesus says, he gives a warning to this crowd in John 6, 29.

He says, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Is that not the culmination of all the promises of the

Old Testament? All the Old Testament could be boiled down into preparation historically to believe the one that God sent.

And the people over and over and over in the Old Testament do not believe the one that God sent. That's why the

Israelites are in exile. That's why they are taken over by their empires. That's why they do synchronize with the idols of Canaan and they're worshiping

Baal over and over again. It's because they do not believe the one that God has sent and God keeps sending over and over.

He sends even prophets who he tells the prophet, they're not gonna listen to you, but you tell them anyway. You tell them anyway, because there is a judicial reason for them to know.

And there will always be a remnant. And there will always be a people that this seed finds fertile ground and it starts to grow and it produces 30, 60 and 100 fold.

It will always happen. So don't be discouraged, brother and sister. Don't be discouraged. When we look out and we see a people scattered, do you know what causes them to unscatter?

The word of God. And it will happen. It will not return void. The word of God is lifted, living and active and powerful.

The word of God never fades away. The grass withers, the flower fades. The word of God stands forever.

The people don't understand the prophecy, but the apostles really don't understand the prophecy. In fact, in John 6, 26 and 27,

Jesus tells them that they only want the loaves and the fish. They're not longing for the right food.

He says, you're working for food that perishes, but you need to work for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give to you.

On him, the father God set his seal. Remember, he was promised. God promised to send him.

God did send him, and he is the prophet. And the crowds frustrate the disciples.

We see that in verses 35 and 36. The crowds are pressing in, and they wanna hear, and the disciples just wanna lay down.

They're tired. They're tired, and he's like, the disciples are like, it's getting late. It's getting really late.

Can you send these people away so they can eat, and we can lay down a little while? Jesus, please, you're wearing us out.

So what does Jesus do? Well, he is the provider, and here we get to the climax of this story.

He answers and says to them, you give them something to eat. Look, we lose it, right?

He's sitting here, and he's talking, probably 15 ,000 people, probably 15 ,000.

You fill up Bud Walton, all right? And you run up, and you see these five flatbread pieces of naan, all right?

And you got two fish, and Jesus, you feed them. And the disciples are like, they answer sarcastically, do they not?

They say, shall we go and spend 200 denarii on bread? That's 200 days of work.

Shall we go spend all the money that we don't have to feed these people? Shall we do that?

But notice the blindness, right? Notice the blindness. And this goes to something we've been talking about. We can't will ourselves out of blindness, right?

We are working out, whether we are with it or not, we are working out the purposes of God every single day.

God's in control of everything that happens, and Jesus will provide for his people, and he does it with meager things.

So I spoke highly of the office of elder, right? I did, and it is a high office, but at the same time, understand that the life of an elder is to carry a surpassing message in a very weak jar.

And so when I look at my life and I look at my ministry and I look at the two men that we're talking to today that we're talking about elder candidacy and growing in the job of being a pastor, one of the things to understand is that you're not first in the kingdom of God, you're actually kind of the dumpiest vessel who draws greater glory to the message inside because God uses the weak things of the world to shame the wise.

And so it is that if Jesus had had a multi, if everybody had brought a Baptist potluck in here and everybody's like, oh yeah, it's time to eat, let's all provide whatever we can.

Look, that's not a bad ethic, but that's not the category we're talking about here. And everybody brings what they can. There's no glory to God in that.

That's like, oh great, we figured it out ourselves. And the disciples' first reaction, remember where they've been.

They've been in the storm where Jesus was asleep, and Jesus spoke to the wind and it stopped. That's where they're at.

And Jesus looks out on the crowd and he says, you feed them. And they say, how are we gonna do that? We can't do that.

They don't understand. They don't understand. What they see, what they see, is there's five pieces of bread here and two fish.

There are 15 ,000 people. Lord, I have faith, but you gotta be kidding me.

What's he do? Well, he commands them and he doesn't say, well, get out, you are faithless. Get out of the kingdom of God.

He doesn't do that. What does he say? He gives them a task. I think of so many literary examples.

I won't go there this morning, I don't have time. But he gives them a task and he looks on them and he says, here's what you need to do.

I want you to divide them into 50s and 100s and have them sit down. And Mark notes, sit down where?

Mark is the only one, on the green grass. On the green grass. Does he make you to lie down in green pastures?

He does. But the disciples are given a thing and to their credit, to their credit, they don't understand, like why, why are we entertaining this?

But they do, they divide them up in 50s and 100s and that should keep the thread going that we understand. What was

Jethro's advice to Moses when Moses was being overrun with his job dealing with the people of God?

Jethro told him, divide them into 10s, 50s, 100s, set judges over them.

You cannot do it all, Moses. And so Jesus authorizes his disciples to break them up into these groups of 100s and of 50s.

That would be, in Moses' time, to dispense the law. And there we see this changing, right?

What is Jesus going to dispense? He's not going to dispense law, he's going to dispense grace.

And that's what the new covenant is about. Because in Jesus' time, what he's doing here is the old is passing away.

Remember, Mark told us that you can't put new wine in old wineskins.

It will burst. Jesus is mirroring Moses and Joshua, but there's a new covenant that is coming onto the scene, and this new covenant is a covenant of grace.

And what he's going to do is he is going to dispense provision and food for them, not judgment.

That's what Moses was doing when he let them down, when he set them and broke them down. And so we see then that he takes it and we see the amazing economy, the amazing economy of when

God authors a feast. Now think about this. If they had done it in human ways, if they had all gone out and bought what they could to bring it back, it would not have been like this feast.

Because when God authors a feast, there is no scarcity. Do you understand? Friends, it is so important for us to understand this in the kingdom of God, because the scattered church of America has operated for years off of a theory of scarcity, and the scarcity is this.

There's a limited amount of Christians. We need to compete for them. Let's get them all, right?

Oh, you build a church over there, we don't want to be too close to that, we might cannibalize. Or we'll bring a bigger, badder church like Walgreens and CVS and park it right across the street so we can start getting your people.

And for too long what we've done is we have operated under the economics of scarcity. Here's the thing, when Jesus talks about the mission, he says the fields are white, and there's not enough people to go gather them.

And in our bubble, especially in our camp, I think what we do is we look out and we think, how are we gonna run a church?

There's not enough Christians out there, because the only Christians are really Calvinists, right? Let's be real, okay?

No, not true. There are a lot of people out there who are scattered and leaderless.

And when God authors the feast, what happens? Did they all just get enough to where they were satisfied and now they can listen some more?

No, no, no, no. Do you ever wonder in this story why there's so much extra and how much food was there here?

How much food? How much food to feed all of this multitude and then to have all of this left over that they carry on for the next place?

They pack it up and they bring it on because they're gonna eat for a while based on this.

When God offers the feast, he does not give meagerly. It's not zero -sum gain in God's storehouses, because God is not dependent on the scarcity of materials.

Think about this. Think about what's happening. He is breaking up this food. He's the one that caused the wheat to grow in the first place, and he's the one that watered the wheat with the rains from the sky.

Do you realize how dependent on God farmers are? We can't grow anything without God's grace causing the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked, and the righteous and the wicked are fed with the grains that are grown from the soil that God keeps in perfect balance, and it doesn't even take any thought from him.

He set it in motion. It's happening. He's governing it, and too often his people look and we say, just a couple of fish here.

What good is that? Maybe you can eat, teacher. No, no, no. No. He gives a bountiful plenty that never ends.

As we were looking at Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's a table at the end of that book, and it's called

Aslan's Table, and the idea of the table is that it's filled with this tremendous feast at all times, and to come to this table is to eat the most delightful things you've ever seen in your life, and you eat as much as you can, as many people as they want to eat as much as they can, and then there's just more that comes.

There is not a scarcity of resources in God's kingdom. He lavishes on us. Think about it.

He gives water that quenches thirst forever, and he gives food that never ends. We're not gonna be in glory someday in the new heavens and the new earth, worrying about whether our crops are gonna grow or not.

We're gonna wonder what to do with all the extra. That's what it's like in God's kingdom. Do we see

God? Do we see God rightly? That's the question, and I think when we look out, it's easy for us in a scattered world.

It's easy for us to look at the church and to look at what God's doing and think, man, we're so far gone.

It's hard. We look at politics. We look at the degeneracy and the craziness that goes on in the world, and it's easy for us to focus on that and to think, man,

I think God's just gonna blow us up like Solomon Gomorrah. What hope is there? And friends, we see wrong.

We see wrong. There is a harvest out there. The laborers are few, and the laborers are empowered by the spirit of God anyway.

Remember, Jesus is the prophet that God set his seal on. He is the authentic one. Jesus seals us in the

Holy Spirit. We are the authentic ones, not that we're great warriors, but instead, we are ambassadors making our appeal, and we have all authority given through our king,

Jesus Christ, who has authorized us to do this, and the question for us is when we look around and we're going, how's it gonna happen?

How the world is so lost when we think to ourselves, there's no good churches out there. There are, there are a lot of good churches out there, but when we think, there's no good churches, what are we gonna do?

And I think, I ask the question I've asked often, who's building this thing anyway? Guys, I'm gonna tell you, in two years,

I have no idea how the things that have happened here have come to place. All I know is that Bart and I, when we met, we prayed at the very beginning.

We prayed, Lord, would you make us a house that never seeks our own way, but that we pray to you, and we understand that we're like feeble sailors holding up a cloth, hoping that God would fill it up with the wind, because we can't make the wind blow.

But as John three, he says that God makes the wind blow, and the wind comes from where it will.

So it is with the spirit of God that he goes where he will, and he saves here, and he condemns here, and he saves over here, and he stirs up people's hearts, and guys, we are always one millisecond away from this whole thing turning around.

We should be happy. We should be joyful, because even if we lose, even in defeat, in this pocket,

God's victory marches forth, and that's what this should show us, that the greater Joshua is here.

He comes, and he's not depending on the manna from the sky, but God has come to live among his people, and he splits up the bread, and he gives it to his people through his disciples.

That shadow is greater here, and then we look at the power. So we've seen his promise, we've seen the prophet, we've seen his provision, and now we're gonna look at his power.

Immediately, after this feeding, immediately, he made his disciples go in the boat and go ahead of him.

What? He's trying to send them to rest. They need rest. But he himself, he was sending the crowd away, and bidding them farewell, he left for the mountains to pray.

Why does Jesus pray? Because he is the prophet, because he shows us the way, and because he was perfectly submissive to the

Father in all things. Jesus' job and his mission was to do the will of the

Father, and Jesus sought the will of the Father by going into the quiet places after he had fed them, after he had shown,

I am the shepherd, and he goes to the mountain, and he prays, and I think he's praying for his people, and I think he's praying because his guts are stirring, and he has compassion for his people, and then he looks, and he sees out.

Man, they're struggling out there. The wind's blowing off those pesky heights again. Here we go again.

But Jesus is working on a timeframe, right? Because John gives us a detail that the reason he does this, the reason he goes to the mountain to pray is because he knew that the people were going to come and take him by force to make him the king, and Jesus is truly the king, but his job was not to deliver the

Christians in that time from Roman oppression. Oh, believe me, he would deliver them from Roman oppression, and in fact, he would take the vehicle of the

Roman Empire and push his kingdom out with the roads that they built because that's the kind of king he is.

It's not about toppling and demolishing and leaving nothing. It's about taking everything and bending it to his will and his purposes.

That's what kind of king he is, but that time has not come, so he goes to pray, and as he's looking, he's going to gather his sheep.

He sends them away to rest, and he looks, and they're straining, and they don't have the faith yet. They don't understand because we've been here before.

Repetition is the key to learning, but sometimes repeating it twice is not enough. The disciples are out in the storm, but Jesus is not with them this time.

They don't understand the dominion of Jesus' kingdom. They didn't learn the lesson.

He was asleep before when he calmed the storm. Now he's not in the boat with them, and they are straining, and they're afraid as these winds are whipping around, and so what does

Jesus do? Well, there's a terrible song that's based on it, but what he does is he walks out on the water, and this even was promised.

Job 9 .8, who alone stretches out the heavens and tramples down the waves of the sea?

I'll tell you who, Jesus Christ. Did Jesus create everything?

Oh, yes, he did. Does he trample down the waves? He tramples them down with his feet, and he tramples them down with his word.

Job 38 .16, have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? You know who has?

Jesus. Jesus walked in the recesses of the deep. Jesus knows every trench in the ocean, every creature in there.

He knows every single particle on the earth because he created it with his thought, and it works to his good purpose.

So what does Jesus do as he's walking out, and we'll spare Peter here. Mark does not see fit to show us

Peter's lack of faith, and so we'll skip past. Maybe someday we'll do another gospel, and we'll get there, but as he's going and he's looking, they're terrified.

It's a ghost. I mean, what would you think? We have to have sympathy for them, right?

What's happening out here? And he says, take courage, it is I. Do not be afraid, but we have to stop here, and we have to look at ourselves, and we have to look at them.

Their fear of unnatural events is amazing in light of what just happened. Now remember, we've seen multiplication miracles in the

Old Testament. Elijah multiplied the jars, right? There was foreshadowing of this moment, and what the people, what the disciples have seen is they've seen

Jesus feed a great multitude, bigger than any five of the cities around, okay?

And he feeds them all, and now they're afraid in the windstorm again, and they see him walking on the water, and they're like, that can't be true.

That can't be happening. They don't understand yet. Repetition is the key to learning, so what does

Jesus do? He shows his power over nature again. He got into the boat with them, and the wind stopped.

What a picture of a shepherd. Is this not the shepherd who goes after the one who's wandered away? He sent them away, and then he goes after them when they are terrified in the midst of the water, and he gets into the boat with them.

I gotta tell ya, I think that would've scared me to death too. It's hard to imagine the thought process.

It's hard to imagine a man walking in the midst of this churning sea. It's not like he was walking in your grandma's pond.

These waves were crashing, and they were struggling against it, and he's just walking in the middle of it, completely unconcerned, unafraid.

Maybe more astounding than being asleep while the boat's about to capsize. Amazing thing, but then we see this thing, and this is important, this is important.

Our more charismatic brothers and sisters need to hear this word, right? Signs and wonders do not provide faith.

They do not. Faith comes from God, and the means that faith comes from God is by hearing.

Faith comes from hearing. Who will hear if we don't preach? How will they hear if they're not taught?

Signs and wonders do not provide faith. When he gets in the boat with them, and the wind stops, what would you think?

Jesus, you control it, you showed us again. Sorry we missed it, but you did it again.

Wow, no, that's not what they do. That's not what they do. They are utterly amazed, utterly amazed.

They're gobsmacked. They can't believe what's just happened. Why? This is one of the most cutting things

I think we've read in Mark. They had not gained any insight about the lobes, but their heart was hardened.

When we talk about hearts being hardened, we're almost always talking about people who reject

God. We're talking about Pharaoh. We're talking about Herod. We're talking about the bad guys.

And it's easy for us to think, yeah, God hardens their hearts for his glory so that he can show his righteousness in destroying those who are wicked doers, right?

Evil doers. No, but here we see that the disciples, we know that they were unable to take insight from the lobes because their hearts had been hardened.

Why would you harden Peter's heart? Why is John's heart hardened? What's going on here?

Well, I'm gonna tell you. I think this is a good take on it, and it's something that I have some personal insight into.

It means that more teaching is required. See, this slowness, the slowness of the disciples, it provides a foundation.

It provides a memory. It provides a trust. And in hindsight, when they look later and they see the risen

Lord and he ascends, it provides built -in humility, doesn't it?

Do you understand? And for us, thousands of years later, it provides verification of this scripture.

What purveyors and authorities of a religion would write of their own faithlessness in the holy book?

Would Peter allow, he's the pillar, right? He was the number one apostle.

He was the one, his confession is what the church is grounded on. In any other religion, would he be shown to be faithless on the water, going beneath and not trusting his

Lord? What room for lack of trust is there in a false religion for people who are in the presence of God and don't believe and then they become the heralds of this faith?

And so for us later in hindsight, what we see is that the claims of the Bible are verified by the very witness of the people who saw it because they write truthfully.

And our heroes of the word, our Davids and our Abrahams and our Solomons and our

Peter, they are men. They're just men. They're men who failed.

They're men who lacked faith at times. But they're men that God used to show his goodness, to show his patience, to show his forgiveness.

And I will confess that this kind of not gaining any insight is easy for us to see today.

I've seen, really just in the last few months, I've seen things happen.

I've seen people turning back to Christ. I've seen church partnerships.

I've seen people that are seeking the mission and the vision and are serious.

And I will confess that I have often prayed and I've confessed to my wife, I didn't believe

God would do it. How much does it take to see before you understand that God's in control of this?

See, it's not that the disciples were superheroes and it's not that they were so hopeless.

It's that God was doing something that was greater than them. And so he shows their weakness with this hardening that they don't understand.

They're not putting two and two together. They should have. We know they should have in hindsight, right? They should have been on the storm and when they saw

Jesus, oh yeah, we're fine. He can stop this with his thought.

We're good. They didn't think that. They couldn't believe. When they see the feeding, they should have thought Jesus the shepherd has come and he's gonna feed us all.

Not with the earthly food because that kingdom didn't last in Canaan, right? Joshua's kingdom, it did not last.

They're out of that. That king is gone. Jesus is bringing in a new kind of kingdom. And so church, while we are impatient in growth, we're impatient waiting for signs while not getting insight, we become blind to the works of God.

That's hardening. And there are still Christians who are hardened today. That doesn't mean that we're lost forever.

It does mean that we're being taught. And it does mean that as we look back that we learn from the lesson because the apostles, do you realize there's none of this when they see the risen

Lord, right? What we see from them in Acts is their lives are forfeit. They don't care about losing their lives because they've seen the risen

Lord and all of these lessons that were buried in so deep now come out and they realize when

Peter is confronted by Jesus on the shores of the lake and Jesus asked him, do you love me? Because Peter denied him three times and Jesus asked him three times, do you love me?

And Peter's not afraid anymore. Feed my sheep. Because he needed that lesson because failure hits us right in the jaw and it's easier to remember when we've been punched in the face with the pain and the hurt of failure.

It's easier for us to remember that than our successes because in our successes, what we try to do, glory hogs that we are, is we try to think, yeah, it was because I'm pretty talented.

It was because I said the right thing right there. It's because I'm very persuasive. Obviously that person would be saved.

Did you hear the rhetoric that I expressed in that sermon? What a jewel that was that I polished up.

No, no, no, no. That's not the way the kingdom of God works. We remember from our failures and we're humbled by our failures.

Even the apostle Paul had a thorn in his flesh so that he would stay humble because God used him greatly.

Do you realize Paul needed to be pretty humble? I think. There was a lot of success in Paul's ministry.

And so he had a thorn in his flesh. Let's look at the last. We've seen his promise. We've seen the prophet.

We've seen the provision. Now we've seen the power. Let's end here, the physician. In another stinging lesson to the disciples, these crowds on the beach, they have more faith than the disciples because what they think is,

I don't even have to touch him. I'm gonna grab anybody sick that I know and I'm gonna carry them out here and if I can just touch the hem of his robe, they're gonna be saved.

They have the faith of the woman with the issue of blood. We've already seen this.

And so the message of Christ is going out and the faith of these masses is put in contrast with the deeper, the deeper but untapped faith of the disciples.

See, the disciples' faith is not gonna be based on signs and wonders. It's gonna be based on the teaching that they heard of which first fruits was the men at the road to Emmaus that we looked at last week.

But here's the thing. Here's for us today. We see what God's done. We've seen our failures.

Do we have to have a superficial faith that really, in a way, grabs onto the hymn that says if I could just be in the presence of Christ, everything would be healed?

Or do we have like a hardening that leads to this long term thing? Why not both? Why not desire to be in the presence of Christ to touch the hem of his cloak but also to have this deep well of faith that anchors us down and keeps us from shifting with every changing wind of doctrine?

We should have both. We should pursue and plead while also praying and seeking insight into the things we've heard and seen.

We should do both. The explosion of the church was the combination of both of these things in Acts.

It was the healing ministry of the apostles but that was just to bring the crowds around because what kept the crowds and what made the faith grow was the preaching of the word.

It's always been that way. And friends, it always will be that way until glory. People will not have faith unless they hear.

And so I ask you, do we have faith in the great physician? There are those who are sick among us.

There are those who have family members who are sick who are afraid. And it's natural to be afraid.

But Jesus is the healer. Jesus is the physician. He is the one who can bind us up.

Just like a shepherd tenderly takes that sheep aside and he binds him up and he doctors him.

That's what Jesus does with his church. So the question really is, do we trust it? Do we trust it and do we long to be in his vicinity?

See, we should have the long -term sleeping faith of the disciples that's based on doctrine. That is what's great about our heritage is that we drill deep into doctrine and it is an anchor and I love it.

But we should also learn, we should desire to be in his presence. We should desire to be among the people of God.

Those are the means that he's given us. So here, what do we need? We need to make disciples.

We need to strengthen families and we need to replicate across the countryside. In order to do that, we need men to lead in the church.

How are we gonna get them? We're gonna pray, we're gonna trust and we're gonna go to work.

We need men to follow in the church and to lead out in the world. Not every man who's of Christ who has this desire, not every one of them needs to be a pastor.

We need men who lead in other spheres, in other areas. We need families that produce these leaders.

We need women who demonstrate the godliness of Sarah and Ruth and Phoebe and Abigail and Mary and so many others and that happens through obedience, it happens through faith.

We should pray for that. We need children who obey their parents and will live long with many blessings.

We need the courage to do those things and most of all, most of all, we need to pray to God that he would build his church here and that it will be a harvest of disciples to grow the kingdom in a land with a bunch of scattered sheep in Northwest Arkansas.

And the question for us is do we believe that he will? Have we gained insight from the things that he's done before or are we still hardened?

Let's gain insight. Let's look at his promises and realize that it's not on our power, it's in the power of the one we serve and he will do it.

He will do it and if he doesn't in this area, we will still live faithfully and we will trust in his plan as we sang.

We are gonna trust in his plan and in his provision because he is our shepherd and he will make us to lie down in green pastures and we will fear no evil because he is guarding us on our right and our left side as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

He is making a table for us to sit at amidst his enemies. He will protect us and he will save us and he will heal us.

Let's pray. Lord, your promises are vast and a people who has limited sight and limited vision,

Lord, we often, we read these stories and we hear these promises and the first thing that we often think is doubt.

Lord, would you purge us of doubt? Your spirit is not a spirit of fear but your spirit is a spirit of comfort.

Lord, you comfort your people. You have sent the comforter. It is better that you went because you sent the comforter.

And so, Lord, we live with your Holy Spirit indwelling us today and we often take for granted the great promises that you have enacted on your word,

Lord, that you have given your people rest, you have brought us into your pastures. Lord, there's a tension because we are not there in final consummation yet but we still do walk in your pastures.

So, Lord, I pray for your church here. I pray that we would trust in the words that you've spoken,

Lord, that we would not look at what our eyes can see but we would trust those greater things, those invisible things that you've promised that are more real than the things we see with our eyes.

Lord, will we trust that you will bring a great bounty of harvest and Lord, we pray for that in our area that we would be ministers of the gospel,

Lord, that we would be instruments in your hand that the lost of Northwest Arkansas, that their hearts would be changed or that they would be taken out of the domain of darkness and into the domain of light, that they would be turned from slaves of sin following the prince of the power of the air into sons of light and sons of glory.

Lord, use us in that. Help us to be bold and courageous as we administer your gospel.

And Lord, we pray for a great harvest. Lord, we can't enact that but we pray that we would be faithful workers.

Lord, grant us that. Give us that fire, give us that desire and Lord, give us wisdom and discernment as we go out.

Lord, grow your church through new converts. Lord, I pray that there would be an awakening of people in Springdale and the rest of Northwest Arkansas, that people would repent of their sins and that they would place their hope and their faith in you.

And then we will glorify your name together as the crowds did, but with a greater word that you showed us through the revealed scripture.