The Way of the Cross

Good morning. We are outnumbered, I think, today by the children. When I think that is a great thing that we can have so many children here. On fifth Sundays, we do things a little different. They get to join with us and see how we worship and watch us follow us as we follow Jesus. So, anyways, my name is Patrick. I'm one of the elders here. I'm the newest elder, and so this is my first Sunday. So bear with me a little bit as I get used to, like, how do you run the clicker and how does your voice sound when it's coming from behind you? And all these things that I'm not quite used to yet. So, anyways, I have been praying for this Sunday, and I hope that God teaches you guys something through his Word, not just through me. So there's a little extra noise when it's a fifth Sunday. It's okay. It's not a problem. I actually can't hear crying sometimes. I know Brian says that, and I was like, sometimes you're like, oh, yeah, I got to go respond to that. Anyways, I'll pray and we'll get started. Heavenly Father, we're so grateful to come and gather together today that we have that freedom to unite and say, you are worthy. We can sing songs like, you are the. You are the Lord. You can sing all in all, Lord, we pray that you would just be with us. Help us to learn from your word today. Amen. All right, so last week or previously on Mark, Brian taught us about the second touch. He had this discussion about when the healing happened. This is the only healing in the scriptures that happens in two stages. First, the stage is he's touched and his scales fall from his eyes and he sees partly. And then after that, he sees fully. And in the same way, there's this kind of layers of revelation, that healing, and then comes knowing and then becomes believing. So I'm just going to read that passage from last week. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. And turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, get behind me, Satan, for you're not setting your minds on the things of God, but on the things of man. Throughout Mark, we've kind of seen Jesus's authority as he teaches. He casts out demons, he heals, and it kind of comes to a climax here where we've heard this phrase from the different people, like, who are you? Like, you must be a prophet. You must be Elijah. Is this John who I've beheaded? People are very confused, but here very clearly, Jesus is proclaimed the Messiah. The Messiah is the word we translate as Christ, which mystically is they were imagining a king on Palm Sunday. We're celebrating a victorious king who's coming into his kingdom, but not like they thought. And that's kind of where they got tripped up. Peter got tripped up with this, that he's. Jesus said clearly in this passage, he's coming to suffer and die. And they can't imagine that. They can't comprehend that. They're thinking of this king that's victorious. And we'll see this week, as we're kind of talking about that, he calls us to follow him, not just when he's coming in victoriously, but follow him, even including his death on the cross. So the second touch piece, we'll hit on that again later in the sermon as well. So this week, I think it's really timely that we get a chance to talk through this passage about Jesus death, as was Palm Sunday. We're celebrating his triumphal entry. And then on Friday, we celebrate his death. And we can only celebrate his death because we know that on Easter, he rose again. All right, so let's go to the next slide here. All right, this week, then, what are the things of God? And we're going to kind of talk through a couple different things. The Way of the Cross, Die to Live. The Second Touch, part two. And then we hit that confusing verse at the end, which I'm only going to spend a little time on, but at least try and give a couple perspectives of what could that possibly mean in chapter nine. One. All right, so first, what are the things of God? All right. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. So that begs the question, then, as Jesus then turns and addresses the crowd, what is he actually talking about? What is he telling them next that explain the things of God? So in our context, like we just talked about, Peter had recognized that Jesus was the Christ they had. Then he had turned and said, I am about to die. I'm going to suffer. And they were really confused. So Jesus, after Peter had tried to correct him, he's now, in this context, gathering people around him and going to explain himself a little bit more fully. So let's read the first part of that passage again to kind of set our context. All right, Sorry. I'M going to read a lot from the Scripture today and hopefully that'll help me so. And calling the crowd to himself with his disciples, he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? All right, so we're starting out with a. A quote from James Edward, the commentary that kind of Brian and Ben have been quoting as we go through this passage. So the gravity of this teaching. I'll just read this and then we'll talk about it at the end. The gravity of the teaching is signaled by reporting that Jesus summoned the crowd. Jesus basically called the crowd to him. If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. In an apocryphal Gospel preserves this saying, as whoever would not take up his cross as I do will not be worthy of me. From the Gospel of Thomas. But the idea of worthiness is absent in Mark. And actually I'd add to Mark and Matthew, or, sorry, Luke and Matthew, which also record this event. This idea of worthiness is absent. That following Christ in self denial and even in suffering is a necessary means of salvation and not of being worthy or of becoming worthy by so doing. One cannot follow Jesus except on the way of self denial on the cross. So I think we need to hear that, that following Jesus and bearing your cross is not a race or a game, but just kind of an outcome of being changed. That change that happens in us when we accept Christ, that we then follow, but we don't follow to become worthy. And so I just wanted to like start that out as a thing. It would have been a little more confusing to disciples at their point in time, not fully understanding, not being a little bit blinded yet to what was going to happen on the cross. So eliminating the fact that this idea of following is a work to earn our salvation, we can then continue on in this text and hopefully that'll put us in a good place to hear the rest of the good news in this passage. All right, so what are the things of the cross? Part one, the Way of the Cross. So I love, I love this passage. Just a week before Easter. Being able to see the symbolism here as Jesus is telling us that we need to pick up our cross and follow him, knowing full well that he's basically alluding to the fact that he's dying on a cross, and the disciples quite don't quite understand that, but we get to look back and see this really clearly, that Jesus is saying, hey, I. I'm about to die, and I want you to follow me. And he even gives an example of the cross, which is a method of a painful death that they would have really well understood because this was a public way of execution that they would have seen in that time and been very familiar with. So what is Jesus asking his disciples and us? All right, anybody recognize this? Any kids? All right, anybody know what episodes it's from or what the chair is about? The relax. The relaxing chair. Yes. All right, we got it. It's Bingo's relaxing chair. In this hilarious episode called Barbecue, Bingo's family demands that she serve them by making a salad. And so she doesn't get to sit in her chair. She's always like, as soon as she sits down, she's got to get up and do something. I won't ruin all the fun. It's hilarious. You can watch it. But, uh, yes. So I think we sometimes get this mindset that we're, like, in this chair, and our life is this chair. We're always sitting here and, like, making the salad is whatever God asks us to do or other things in our life. And we see following Jesus as an inconvenience to us. And that is kind of what we see when we read this passage is like, oh, I have to follow Christ. I guess I have to go do that, Go out of my way and do these different things. I think instead, when we understand how Christ sets us free, kind of departing from the bluey example here for a bit. But when we understand how Christ has set us free, it sets us free to follow him. And the only way we can do that is if you give him complete lordship of our life. If my greatest deeds could not save me, then why do I keep trying now? So, like, if I could not earn my salvation, why do I think, like, good works or, you know, like, I'm earning any favor with God? Really what we're doing is we're just following and following him, following his example. Let's see here. All right, next slide here. Sorry, that was the blast bluey example. I wish I had more. They're so fun. All right, deny yourself. So this is the first part of the verse here. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, as this is not related to earning salvation. Then what? I think this is a daily example. I think we daily choose to die to self and we follow Jesus example in that way. We transition from being knowledgeable about Jesus to being followers of him. We make what he thinks is important, important to us. We try to orient our lives around him and follow that leader instead of trying to orient our lives around ourselves. As with all commands in the Bible, this would be impossible if it was up to our power and strength. But thanks be to God that He gives us the ability to follow Him. I'm going to read this Passion here, but this is from the vision statement or the. Sorry, the. Yeah, this is from the vision statement of Hope Community Church. One of the main visions of the Hope Community Church is to remove the barriers from following Jesus. And they quote the verse in Isaiah 57, 14 where it says, and it shall be said, build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people's way. And so a lot of the way we do church, a lot of the way we interact with people, is to remove barriers from following Jesus, to take things away, to not make a high barrier of extra things that stack on top of the Gospel. The only barrier that should be in the way of salvation is actually following Jesus. That choice is to deny ourselves and follow Jesus. And then after that, we encourage each other in following him. All right, next up. All right. This is really small. Okay. It's not too bad. Small for me. So there's a difference in view. I just kind of want to highlight it. Jesus's disciples, us and then Jesus on the bottom. So Jesus's disciples were shocked that Jesus was about to die. And we, on contrast, sometimes take Easter for granted. Jesus disciples understood what a cross was. That was a daily occurrence, if not, you know, common. A common occurrence for them versus we know the cross, but don't quite understand. We don't quite fully grasp what the pain and suffering was that Jesus was about to go for. For our sake, I hope on Good Friday we have a chance to reflect on that and understand how horrible that was that he went through for us and then us and we. So Jesus came to die, and then we sometimes think this is all about us. So Jesus came knowing that the only way he could bring us to God was to die. Jesus came to serve and to save, and we sometimes seek only to be served. And the bottom part there, the tagline is, what if Jesus death sets us free to actually live and follow him? I think that we get confused and we just want to slow down and say, all right, because of what Jesus has done. Now I am free to reorient my life around instead of myself being the center, Jesus being the sinner. And this verse makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way. All right, so even to death, I think, is a question sometimes we can ask ourselves. And so the next part here is die to live. I think we'll read the passage again. I think I. Yeah. All right, so I'm just going to highlight here in Mark this pattern that's used, this literary pattern by Jesus, for whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel will save it. There's that a B, a B pattern. I think it just really makes a lot of sense. When you read it, it's like, oh, yeah, of course. Like, if you try to save your life by yourself, you will lose it. When we look back at it, knowing what we know about the rest of the Scriptures, whoever loses his life for my sake, what is that concept of lose your life that Jesus is talking about? It's the concept of if we're following him and kind of giving up our preferences versus if we're following ourselves, which is that first section there, we lose it. So life in this context is referring more than to just our existence, but more along the lines of the soul. And, kids, we talk about soul a lot, but what do we really mean when we're talking about soul? That's one of the things, I think, that God has given us that makes us different from animals. It makes us different from the other things. It's given us some of his nature so that we're like him, that we can create and we can build, that we can kind of see, we can love these different things that make us somewhat like God gave us innate, like that way. So when every time in here it uses the word life, it could also be translated as soul. All right, we'll go to the next part of this here. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? It's clearly a rhetorical question. I think we sometimes try and answer these questions, but it's like, oh, yeah, of course. Nothing. Kids, do you always. Do you ever get a rhetorical question from your parents? Do you know what that means? No. A rhetorical question is a question that doesn't really need an answer because the answer is very obvious. So, like, did you eat all of your food? When you have food on your plate still, or have you finished your breakfast? You know, that's the question that's asked in our house. Sometimes Jesus clarifies this passage here a little bit further in Luke, which I think helps us understand what he's talking about more. So go to the next slide here. Luke, chapter 12, verse 16 through 21. And he told them a parable saying, the land of the rich. Sorry, it's different on the slides. And up there, I'll start over again. And he told them a parable saying, the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said, I will do this. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. Oh, two slats, here we go. And I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul is required of you and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So it is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich towards God. I think sometimes we get very much on this, like, I'm laying up treasure for myself, laying up treasure for myself. And we sometimes forget that that's not what ultimately matters. How can we go about gaining the. Sorry. How can we, instead of gaining the whole world, and see instead how easily the things of this world perish? So for whoever would save his life loses his life. What can a man give in return for his soul? The answer is, nothing we have can save our souls. Only Jesus can do this. Jesus offers us everything in return for following him. We exchange our sinful condition for being adopted into the family of God. God continues his work to make us more like Jesus. So an example. Who played outside yesterday? Did any of the kids. Okay, Lots. Lots. Did any of you? Were any of you responsible for changing the weather? Did any of you, like, I made it warm out? No. No. You could have chosen, even though it was a nice day outside, to go inside and pretend that it was cold. But that would have just made yourself miserable. I think it's kind of like that. We sometimes forget that, like, God made the day beautiful. And we can participate. We can choose to follow in that day, go outside and enjoy it, or we can, like, try and pretend it's not nice and just, like, huddle. I think in CS Lewis, he uses that illustration at the end where heaven is a beautiful place and the dwarves are just stuck in their brain and they're like pretending everything's awful anyways. So we have a choice in the matter. We can choose to stay inside and hide from this good day, or we can see that God gave us this gift and we can go and join in that. All right, so are we rich on earth, but poor in the things of God? We cannot save our lives. Jesus could have, he was the only one who could have, but chose to stay on the cross to save us. Jesus taught that we are to become like him, which includes persecution and sacrifice. That's that following him, even including death. So there's other passages that I didn't pull in that talk a lot about just like our Master is, we would expect the same thing. Jesus tells the disciples that they should expect to have persecution because if they persecuted the Master, then they would also expect to be persecuted following Him. So on this day of Good Friday, where we're kind of celebrating or sorry, on this day of Palm Sunday, we're celebrating with Good Friday. On Friday, Jesus follows through with obedience, including death on the cross to live out his love for us. All right, Second touch, part two. So this is harkening back to the previous thing. This is discussing this last verse, which I think is a little confusing. And I tried not to dive too deep when I was talking, looking through this. So last week, Peter saw Jesus as the Messiah, but then was blind to what the Scripture foretold the Messiah would do, that he was coming to die and then be raised again. All right, so this verse here, for whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him, will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels? This isn't our doing. I think we see the second touch that Brian thought about previously. We need Jesus to change us from being ashamed of Jesus to, to not being ashamed of Jesus. Jesus was not ashamed of us. It says that even though we were sinful in our nature before He. He came and came into the world to save us from that. We were unlovely and yet he loved us. Our sin did not keep him from dying for us. So Peter, who we thought last week made an awful wreck of himself, has got even further to fall. We'll see it later, later in Mark. And we talk about this a lot. He's going to deny Jesus and be ashamed of him in a sense of that, like, oh, I, I, I don't know this man. Like, I'm not. Couldn't possibly be this. But Peter receives forgiveness. So I Think sometimes we read this and we're like, oh, no. Like, once you're ashamed that Jesus was like, no, like, Peter clearly was repented and was able to move on from that. All right, I do like the parallelism in this next verse here we're talking about in Romans. So I have a section from Romans to read here about being ashamed. It's nice and gray there. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness, but what fruit were you getting at that time from the things which you are now ashamed, for the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end. Eternal life for the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. First we're set free. We did not do ourselves. We have this gift through Jesus. We can now then be free and unashamed in that union with Christ. And Christ himself is unashamed to call us his brothers because his death covers over our sin. I think that's some really good news that we get to celebrate. All right, So the last part, what is this all about? That last verse? That's a little confusing. I'm going to give a couple different options for what it could mean. And then what I think it is. Our senior pastor Steve Treicle used to say, like, if you put a rubber band gun to my head, I'll change my mind on this topic. I think that was. Maybe he grew up with rubber bands. I grew up with nerf guns. So if you point a nerf gun at me and corner me, I'd probably change my opinion a little bit on this verse, but I think we'll see here. So. And he said to them, truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power. All right, what is that talking about? I've got five things here. The first one's a transfiguration. Matthew, Mark, and Luke always include this passage just before the transfiguration. So every case, the three gospels where this passage occurs, it's first, Peter recognizing Jesus as the Christ, then this passaging about following Jesus, and then this phrase about, there are some here who will not see death until they see the kingdom of glory, and then the transfiguration. So that's the same pattern in all three scriptures. The resurrection of Jesus, that's another option. I think it's a full It's a partial coming. It's not the same. The third one is the day of Pentecost. It's God's glory in the sense that the Spirit comes and lives on earth and is becomes with man. The fourth one is Jesus second coming, which hasn't happened yet. That one, to me, I think, seems the least likely. I think it's some event that's really far in the future. The fifth one is the revelation of the Apostle John. This revelation is an image of the kingdom is coming. I think this one actually correlates better with the phrase at the end of. I think it's the Gospel of. I forget which gospel it's in. But Peter and John have this interaction right before Jesus ascends into heaven, where it's in John, because John says. Where he says, what if he was not to die before I come back? Sorry, I don't have the. I didn't write down the quote here. But right before Jesus ascends back into heaven, they have this interaction. And I think that's really referring to John's vision of the God of the revelation. All right, so I think actually the strongest case here is the first one, the transfiguration. It has a lot of context that would lead me that way. And it also has, like, very soon after and the pattern in all three of these gospels. So I hope that helps understand this passage a little bit. Go to the next one here. All right, so I put this slide up. I grabbed this from Core, the pastor at downtown. He had this. But we're kind of in this middle point right here. We've. You can't quite read it, but there's. At the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, it says, this is the Gospel of Mark. It talks about Jesus being the Christ, the Son of God. And then as we go through this, it becomes more clear each of these pieces. At the end, when he's on the cross, the centurion says, surely this was the Son of God. We just passed the Mark where Jesus is the Christ. He says he is the Messiah. And now we're leading up into his death on the cross. So I'm going to close with a quote here From James Edwards. Mark 8, 27, 9:1 is the continental divide between the first and second halves of the Gospel. It unites Christology and discipleship in a unique and symbolic relationship. It teaches that the proper confession of Jesus involves a new understanding of discipleship. When believers confess who Jesus is, they also inevitably confess what they must become. Jesus is not an objective datum that like a rock under a microscope, can be observed and examined in supposed neutrality. The statement you are the Christ imposes a claim on the one who says it. The Son of Man calls those who would know him to follow him. Jesus loved us too much to leave us where we are. We have this script flipped. We do not earn the right of being with God in the same way. We cannot earn any better standing. We are called to be faithful and follow Him. All right, so in Gospel application here, what area of your life are you denying the lordship of Jesus? We can take comfort from Peter's failings. Peter rejected Jesus, accused of being Satan, was the rock that Jesus built his church on, and one of three people to witness the transfiguration, which we'll talk about next week. We can remember that God knows us and knows that we are like grass. So that's the first one. The second one is there's no where. Do you see your past as a scorecard? There is no scorecard. Today is a new day. We are called to encourage one another every day as the day is new. Today, follow Jesus and pray for grace to follow Jesus tomorrow. And would you follow Jesus today? Being set free, we can now follow Jesus. It doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make us perfect every day. But what it is is part of what we call each other to act as believers. This is an excerpt from the Hope Statement of Faith. We believe that Christians should live for the glory of God and the well being of others. That their conduct should be blameless before the world. That they should be faithful stewards of their possessions and they should seek to realize for themselves and others the full stature of maturity. So after this we're going to have a time of communion. There's a gluten free option on my left, your right. If that's a dietary restriction for you, we have the cracker that represents Jesus's body broken. For you, we have the juice that represents his bloodshed. For us. We get to take these elements and know that he has brought us from death to life. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church, but if you. But we ask that you are a follower of Jesus, we would love for you to take these elements with us. The worship team can make their way up as I pray and then we'll worship together. We have three songs today for the kids, which is hopefully one fun. All right. Dear Jesus, we thank you that you are good, that you are gentle, that you know us, that you know that we cannot do this on our Lord on our own, that we needed you to reach down and change us so that we can, instead of hiding in the house on a beautiful day, come outside and see the glory and the wonderful nature of who you are and worship you. We pray that our hearts would respond to that. We pray that people would recognize that. And then once we've done that, we can turn and follow you, Lord, that you would give us the grace and strength to follow you, to encourage one another. In your wonderful name, Jesus, amen.