On Your Mark...

All right. Well, again, good morning and welcome to Hope Lowertown. Those of you who don't know me, my name is Brian. And if I haven't had a chance to meet you, I'd love to be able to do that after the service. And this is a fun day because we are kicking off a new sermon series. We finished our summer series and now we are walking through the Gospel of Mark. We don't really have an end date set of like, hey, we are going to for sure be done with Mark. We're kind of leaving it open ended. So if we want to slow down, we can. And so all four of our churches are going through this. And fun fact, Hope North Lakes. Paul Stiver and Allison. Their church is this. Today is officially their first day. So we are no longer a church of three. We are now a church of four, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Really, really excited for them. So Paul, I don't know what he's starting off with. If I were he. Is that right? If I were him, anyways, I would start with Mark. This is a great. This is a really great book to start a church on. When we started, does anyone remember what we started with? We started with Tulip. We started with like the throes of Reformation stuff. It was the 500 year anniversary and I wasn't gonna miss my chance to do that. Hindsight probably could have done something a little better, but it was a long time ago. Here we are now, eight years later, we're gonna go through a gospel. We've never done this before. We've never gone through a gospel. And so I am thoroughly excited to do this. So today's sermon title, I don't really have a story, but I've titled this on your Mark. You get it? Yeah. You're welcome. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that. And there's two reasons for that. One is one, you're gonna see this as we go through this. Mark loves to use the word immediately. It's his favorite word. He uses it 41, maybe 42 depending on the Greek root, but 42 times he uses the word immediately. Right. So he's just constantly showing the speed at which and the urgency and rapid action of Jesus's ministry. Because when you think about all of this, all the span of the entire gospel, or all four gospels that we have are just three years really of the life of Christ. I also called it entitled this on youn Mark because we have a lot to cover and we're gonna do that in a very short amount of time. It's one of the. My favorite things to do is to start a new book or new series because there's just so much research that I get to do and read. And then you take dozens of hours worth of material and information and you gotta go, here it is in five minutes. Okay? So there's a lot more that I'm not bringing to the table. And all God's people said, amen, but this is one of those things that we gotta do this. So let's just jump into it. Let's look at all About Mark. And so we're just gonna spend some time unpacking kind of the overall genre and everything about Mark. So who is Mark? Was he a disciple of Jesus? What's going on? No, he was not a disciple of Jesus. He actually was. Maybe you've read it and you could read about him in other passages that his name is John Mark. He is a cousin of Barnabas, not Barabbas. Very different cousin of Barnabas, who, if you remember, we went through the Book of Acts and we see Barnabas. And he is the. He's titled that. He's given that nickname as Son of Encouragement. And so that's John Mark. And he is. He's not a disciple of Jesus. He most likely never even met Jesus. But he hung out with the apostles. He hung out with and was a disciple and was taught under Peter, who was an eyewitness, obviously, of the. And so we would call Peter a primary source, which, historically speaking. And when you're writing, that's a big deal. So when you are interviewing somebody who was there. So when Luke is interviewing Mary, the mother of Jesus, that's a primary source. She was there. She knew Jesus. She touched Jesus, she birthed Jesus. That's a primary source. It's a really big deal. Peter's the same way. So John Mark. And we're gonna read this. And this is also. There might be. Every once in a while when you study a book, there's differences. Sometimes the commenter will be like, we don't really know who it is. We don't really know what happened there. We don't know what date. Mark is pretty much almost all consensus with who and when and what and why, which just makes life a little bit easier. And because we have early church fathers and historians who write about this. So esibus. Sure, we'll call him that. He says this, though. This is from the second century. So this is just maybe 50 years after removed from Mark. But he says this. Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down Accurately, though not in order, which we'll talk about in a second. Whatever he remembered of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had neither heard the Lord nor followed him. But afterwards, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of the hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses. Okay, so we'll get into that a little bit here. But he's a Gentile, John Mark. He's a Gentile. He's most likely Greek, and he is writing to a Gentile or Greek audience in that time in Rome. That is where Peter is. Peter's Jewish, and he starts the church in Rome and, excuse me, in Jerusalem. But he is now writing, John Mark is writing to the Gentiles and the Christians in Rome, which. The whole thing. Now, when we look at the genre, this is really, really, really, really important. It might not seem like a big deal. You're like, okay, it's a biography on Jesus. Yeah, that's really important. It is a biography. There are several of you who are lawyers in this room, and this matters because you would want it, right? When you're like, if I want a historical account, I want it to be as literal. I want it to be like listening to a legal deposition. I want it to be as, this is it. And if you use that word and you tell it that way, then it must mean exactly what you wanted it to be. That word. That's not how biographies work. And so if maybe you've ever been reading your Bible and you've gotten to some passage of the New Testament, you go, wait a second, didn't Mark say it that way? But then Luke says that it was something else that happened. What's happening here? Why does it seem to be. Why does there seem to be contradictions here? So finishing that quote there from this second century historian says, so Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them for he made it his own care not to omit anything that he heard, nor set down any false statement therein. Well, why would we need that clarification? Why do the early church fathers need to say, hey, there are maybe, as you read, maybe some contradictions, but there's no errors. Why would they have to talk about that? A lot of, you know, I've been listening to this podcast that I absolutely love, and I can't get enough of it on Deceptions, but there's a whole thing on gospel contradictions. And so I want to quote this guy, Michael Leona, that's what he does. Okay, if you skip down that quote there, this is just kind of his bio that I found on Wikipedia. He uses Greco Roman biography to explain apparent discrepancies in the Gospels. Okay, so this is the guy, he wrote a book on this to say, let's look at other Greco Roman biographies and see how do they compare to the New Testament biographies. And he says, it's the same thing. Everyone does the same thing. And we know this. How do we know this? Because we can look at ancient writing techniques that are found not just in Mark, but other biographies that are not in our Bible. Other biographies written about other people. And so there's a specific writing style that was taught. Again, how do we know this? Because we have these books and we have a lot of copies of these books. They're compositional textbooks. Everyone remember doing writing composition, and you're like, no, that was actually a lot of fun. No, it wasn't. But they taught the same thing back then. There was writing, composition, how do you write? How should you write? And there was a style that was adapted all the way thousands of years ago. And we know this based on Theon, who wrote in Latin, and Quintilian, who wrote in Greek. And they have these preliminary writing exercises. And they would say, hey, I want you to. You need to write in this way to save yourself time to add emphasis, whatever it may be. And so they say in their early books that every form of writing, even history and historical accounts, including biography, you use these techniques. Everyone uses these techniques, and you. It's a type of shorthand, if you will. And Mark is obviously no exception of that. So this guy, Michael Lacona, he has these three aspects that we see. And so I just want to touch on those real quick. One is transferal, that these are, again, these kind of shorthand writing techniques that were taught in the schools that Mark would have also had taught to him and that we see all the other gospels employ as well at some way shape or form transferral. This transfers the action or words from one person to another or another recipient. All right, we see this. We're actually going to see this next week. We're going to see that in the Gospel of Luke, for example, that when Jesus is baptized, the voice from the cloud says, you are my beloved son. Well, then when you read it in Matthew, it said, the voice says, this is my beloved son. You're like, is that really that big of a deal? Well, you could read that and say, see, there's a contradiction. There's an error here. And if there's an error here and who the voice is talking to, then this is all gobbledygook and we can just throw everything out. Well, that's not how it is. There's an emphasis that's being added. Who's being addressed. And in one text it's Jesus, and the other text, it's the crowd. But the point remains the same. And this is a common thing that was done in that time. Another thing that was done was displacement. And this would be transferring one part of the story to a different part of the story. This would add emphasis, clarity, dramatic effect. Everyone does this when you watch a movie, right? You kind of hold out and all of a sudden, aha. This key moment, right? If the Sixth Sense started out with, hey, just so you know, this guy's dead and he can see ghosts the entire time, then you'd go, what? Well, that kind of. That would not be a good movie, Right? But it is, right? So kind of the whole point. So displacement is something that happens. We see this in Mark, where he says that Jesus cleansed the temple. This whole scene that he does, and then on Monday, he returns to the temple. Whereas Matthew says it happens all at once. Well, which is it? Well, there's displacement and transferral that's happening here. And that's okay. It was part of the technique. The last one is compression, which is something that I do not do. Well, where you just, hey, let's get to the point, right? Let's compress the story. Let's simplify it. And so they would take some that developed over time and shorten it to get to the point, to get the point across. This happens in Luke where you see Jesus curses a fig tree, right? So you never bear fruit. They leave and they come back to the fig tree and it's withered. Whereas in Matthew, he curses it and it dies in the spot. Right. Well, which is it? Yes. The answer is yes. Right. The whole point is it was compressed. There's no contradiction here. All right? This was completely normal of ancient biographies, and they are completely reliable. No one disagrees with that anymore. Now, why? Right. Again, to emphasize the main teaching point. Some details might be different, but the main point, the teaching point, the emphasis is never changed. That never, never changes. So moving on here, let's look at the date again. Not super important necessarily, but we're looking at maybe 50 to 60 A.D. but what people will say, the. The kind of the. The nerdy term is the primacy of Mark, meaning that Mark was written most likely, first. We just Found we, like, I, like I was an excavator out in the Middle east and found a, like a manuscript. Someone that was looking for a script found a very old ancient text of the Gospel of John. And so now all the nerds are like, maybe John's the first. Okay, maybe it was, but doesn't really matter. But what we do have is that Mark was written clearly before Matthew and Luke because Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source, even though Luke, he would have been similar to Mark where he traveled with the apostles. But he uses Mark and so does Matthew. They quote Mark but then they change. They actually fix the poor Greek that Mark uses. And they fix it, but in different ways. And there's a whole nother Q document that we don't have anymore that most likely Mark and Matthew used, but not Luke. We'll get into all that. It doesn't really matter other than it shows there's a lot of people who meticulously cared for a actual recording of the history of who Jesus Christ was and that what we have is good and reliable and true. So let's now get to the text. Okay, all of that, all that information. And now let's get into where we're actually going to be. Starting in Mark chapter one. We're just going to be looking at one through eight. I have that on the printout for you. And let's just get into this. So it says the beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son. Good news. That's where we get the word gospel. Gospel in the Greek, big $10 word here for you this morning is euangelion. And then. And so that's where our English word is evangelical. It's kind of, we just kind of Englishized a Greek word. Evangelical in the literal form is someone who teaches and preaches the gospel. That's what it means. I share the gospel. I'm an evangelical. And that is what good news in the Greek? If you were to turn to the Greek, it would say Euangelion. Right? That's what this is. It's the good news. It is the gospel about Jesus, the Messiah about the Christ. Messiah just is the Christ in Greek of the one who's going to come, who's going to set Israel and all nations free from their sins. The Son of God. If you have your Bibles open, your heading shouldn't read the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Luke, it should say the Gospel according to Mark. Okay? Do you see the difference there? Because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all preaching the same gospel. It's the gospel of Jesus Christ, period. It's the gospel, but they're showing it from their perspective, their standpoint, an emphasis on who Jesus was. And they maybe even have a different emphasis. So this is the good news that Jesus taught according to Mark, that he wrote down. Now let's get into the text a little bit deeper here. The reliable prophet. When we look at Mark, Chapter one, verse two, we read this phrase as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet, I will send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way. It's interesting here because that's a direct quote from Malachi. But Isaiah the prophet here is just saying, hey, prophets, all the prophets are saying this, that Isaiah, Malachi, Moses, Jeremiah, they're all saying the same thing, that there's going to be this reliable prophet who's going to come and prepare the way for the Messiah. So that's the, that's who we got to look for. This reliable prophet's going to come first. So Mark quotes this. I will send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way. A voice of one calling in the wilderness. Prepare the way of the Lord and make straight paths for him. So some reliable prophets going to set things up for the Messiah. If you rewind just a couple years, as far as Mark's concerned here, because it starts off here with John the Baptist. There is what's called the intertestamental period that you have the Old Testament and the New Testament, but there's 400 years in between. And a lot happens in that 400 years. There's this, this Maccabean revolt, right? There's Matthias and Judas Maccabeus and they, they start a revolt and they kick out the Romans that were in control of them at that point and they establish Israel as a kingdom again. Their little brother Simon is made king. They get killed by the Romans and all this stuff, but they were looked up to as some kind of messiah. Why? Because they set their people free from the Romans at the time Simon is set up as king. But then the religious leaders and the people time say, hang on, let's write a constitutional document which we have copies of. Not me personally, again the nerd. Somewhere else. They have copies of this constitution. And what is it? What does it say? It says, hey, you are king, Simon, you are the king. However, there's an asterisk. And the asterisk is when a reliable prophet shows up and points us to Jesus or not to Jesus, well, Yeshua, to the Messiah, then you have to Follow him and you as king, need to help the nation, unite the nation to follow after the reliable prophet that will eventually point us and prepare the way of the Messiah. Okay, so all these prophecies, the nation of Israel knew that even when they started establishing a document, they said this is still true. And now what is happening here? The Gospels unanimously are saying that reliable prophet, it's John the Baptist. It's John. So the Gospels are using Old Testament prophecies to say that this reliable prophet is John. So now let's look briefly at Jewish Jesus. Hopefully this will make sense. All right, I'm going to. We're going to just fly through this, but. And I want you to just kind of take note, just take mental note, because this is going to come up in the rest of the book. And I want to keep these kind of Jewish sects, different versions of being Jewish, the same way that we have denominations in the United States or in the world of Christianity. Think of this as different Jewish denominations. Same thing. They believe in the same thing. They just do it in a different way. Okay, so what's happening here? Let's just start. I kind of tried to make a graphic of this. The circles don't mean anything. The colors don't mean anything. It was just to try to help visualize this. There's the Sadducees. Who are the Sadducees? Maybe you've heard that word before. If you've read the Bible, you maybe have heard who the Sadducees are. They're descendants of the Zadokites, which supposedly. It's the same word. We just pronounce it differently. The Sadducees, Zadoky. I'm not sure how that happened, but it did. Okay, these are descendants of the Zadokites. Who are they? These are the priestly, the temple priests. These are the ones who have authority. Right? This is a theocracy for a lot of Israel's history. So if you are a priest, you have some kind of authority in that culture, and that's these guys. They take the tithe, they take a temple tax. They're wealthy. At this context within the First Testament and the biography here of Jesus, they are in relationship with the Romans because they control the temple and therefore the religion and therefore the peace. And the Romans say, hey, we want to keep you guys in check. Jesus, most of his arguments and kind of the big things are gonna be against the Sadducees, that he's gonna say, you've got some problems when he goes. And he does. Goes into The Temple and flips the tables. His accusations are against the Sadducees. And ultimately the Sadducees are the ones who have the power and the authority, working with the Romans, who end up being the ones responsible for the execution of Jesus on the cross with the Romans. Okay, that's the Sadducees. Let's go out another ring. And we have the Pharisees again, someone that you might be familiar with. The Pharisees, though, were not temple priests. They were not descendants of Zadok or Aaron. They were just common people. Common people who said, hey, we can't live in the temple all the time. There's no way that the law was meant to say, you have to be and live in Jerusalem at the temple. We have jobs, we have things that we need to take care of. All over the place. There's gotta be something else. So they kind of developed their own pious way of worshiping God that was very attractive to common people. And so you have these Pharisees that would go out and you, you. And if you. You know Jesus and if you've read the Bible, you'll. You'll know. You'll hear Jesus kind of attack the Pharisees. Woe to you, you Pharisees, you hypocrite. Now who? But what is he doing? You'll never hear Jesus attack the law of Moses. He will always go after what and how they taught it, the interpretation of it. He will say, you have heard it said. Why? Because the Pharisees had these extra teachings, the Mishnah and the Talmud that weren't written down yet at the time of Christ, but they will be shortly after. Very common. They had these extra writings, and Jesus says, you have these extra teachings and you negate the actual word of God and Moses. Let's not do that. Let's not be a Pharisee and be Pharisaical or say, hey, this teaching or this thing, the way I interpret the passage trumps actually what the point of the text is. Okay? So you'll hear Jesus say, you have heard it said. And again, he doesn't attack the law, but he attacks the interpretations of the law. And the Pharisees are gonna say, these oral traditions, the mission of the Talmud, are equal and on equal footing as Moses, as the prophets. And so Jesus is gonna say, no, I disagree. Okay, moving on quickly. We got the Essenes, or Essenes, smaller group, and they might be well known for the Dead Sea Scrolls that get kicked out and into the wilderness. Just kind of a crazy story. They have a guy Named the Teacher of Righteousness. We don't know his real name, but he was called the Teacher of Righteousness and he writes a zadokite. He writes the Sadducees who are in control of the temple. The high priest alchemist at the time and he says, hey, you know how our calendar as Jews, it's based on the lunar calendar, it's 354 days out of the year and every couple years we gotta add a month to kind of shift everything back, right? What if we use the solar calendar and we just made it right? And alchemist, the high priest of the Sadducees didn't like that. And they slaughter the Essenes and they get kicked out into the wilderness and become just a super devout religious group saying, hey, we are the people of Righteousness. The Sadducees are evil and they eventually are going to die out, right? So that's, that's just who they are. But we have the Dead Sea Scrolls thanks to the Esseans, which just helps us with our, how we get our modern day Bible. Then we had the Zealots. If you have read the New Testament, you're going to be introduced to a guy named Simon the Zealot. The Zealot were just people who wanted political upheaval and fairness. And they did it through assassinations. That if you were, whether it was you were Jewish or Roman, if by killing you would help Israel become an established nation again, well then your head was on the chopping block and that's who the Zealots were. Jesus wanted nothing to do with the Zealots. Obviously if you read the teachings of Jesus, he was not a Zealot in any way, shape or form. And so that's who the Zealots were. The last group that I think gets overlooked a lot, one of these, this, this sect, this denomination of Judaism is the Baptizers, right? So there's this last group that were called the Baptizers. Now there's not a whole lot written about the baptizers. Obviously we get the most information about who they were based on our New Testament. But Josephus, he was an, an old 1st century Roman historian and, and before he became an atheist, he was a baptizer. He, he was taught under a guy named Banas B A N N A S and so he was taught as a baptizer and he said, I don't think I believe any of this stuff. I'm gonna do my own thing. And so that's what the Baptizers were. But Let me just say this. What was unique about the baptizers compared to the Zealots and the Esseans and the Pharisees and the Sadducees? Listen to this. They call people to personal piety. Not necessarily just like the Pharisees. There was some overlap there for sure. But say, I'm going to call you to personal piety, but towards all of society, all people, all nations, not just Jews and Israelites. And they started to ask the question, how do I treat my neighbor? Sound familiar? It should. So this is a very popular movement. It starts to gain a lot of popularity early on, obviously, most, most. Mostly because of John the Baptizer. He was a Jew and this was a Jewish movement. So as we read in the text, and so John the Baptist, John the baptizer. A lot of times you read that and you go, oh, I'm Baptist. John was Baptist. Look at that. A little different, okay? But that same word, baptizo, it's the same thing. So you have John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him confessing their sins, and they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. Why the wilderness? Why are they going out in the wilderness? There's this huge city right here. Why not? Why not? Because there's symbolism happening, saying, hey, just the same way that Israel had to spend 40 years out in the wilderness purging themselves of generational sin, we needed to do the same thing. We need to get back to what it really means to be a follower of God. And we're gonna do that symbolically in the wilderness, not in the city of Jerusalem. And then why? Why the Jordan River? Why is he doing that? Romans built the Jews baths, ceremonial washing basins and baths where they could ceremonially cleanse themselves. And John says, no, no, we're going to go out to the Jordan river again, symbolically saying, we're starting over, that there's something else that's happening. And this reliable prophet is saying, let's look. Let's look to Yeshua. Let's look to Jesus the Messiah. And something's different now that I'm gonna be baptized. I have a quote here from the guy, this guy named George Athos. He's a professor at Moore Theological College in Sydney. And let me just read this. John, in his teaching, teaches ethics. His baptism is symbolizing a completion of repentance. To be a good Jew, you ask God to forgive you of your sins and acted ethically towards your neighbor. And, and you capped it all off by this ritual washing that symbolized the washing away of your sins, but also the ritual cleanliness that was demanded by the law. Okay, so the Jews had this ritual cleansing they would do. They'd wash their hands, they wash their body, all these different things they would do to ceremoniously say, I am now cleansed of my sin or defilement or whatever it may be. And now John in the baptizer movement says, hey, that's great, but now we're going to do one baptism once forever for all to symbolize you have been washed, your sins have been forgiven, and Jesus obviously is going to show up. We're going to look at that specifically next week at the baptism of Jesus. So what kind of Jew was Jesus? Well, you only got two left. In the nineteen nineteen seventies, in the seventies, in seventy A.D. the temple's destroyed. The Romans destroyed the temple, so there's no longer any need for the Sadducees. They lose all their power and authority because the temple no longer exists. The Esseans are slaughtered and they're kicked out. The Zealots, they're destroyed by the Romans. You're left with two groups of Jews. You've got the Pharisees. And when you study who they are and what they teach, that is modern day Jewish Orthodox is the same thing. Their descendants are the Pharisees. Their teachings are what the Pharisees taught. And then the other sect that survived was the baptizers. That Jesus was a baptizer. He was a disciple of John the baptizer. He was a cousin of John the baptizer. And he teaches one a life of repentance and renewal. And so that sect of Judaism lives on, but through the early church and through Christianity. So Jesus is Jewish, but his heritage goes to the baptizers. So what happens here? Just a final point. We're going to see this baptism of the Holy Spirit. And Mark chapter one, verse six says this John wore clothing made of camel's hair with a teacher. Sorry. With a leather belt around his waist. And he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message. After me comes the one more powerful than I. This is the reliable prophet saying someone is coming. The straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. John is the reliable prophet, pointing to prepare people for the one who would change the nation. Who would change everything, who would flip the world upside down. Even John didn't fully understand what in the world Jesus was doing. And Jesus shows up and he says, I am the king. I am the king of the kingdom of God. Not of this world, not of this physical place. But something else is going on. I am the royal figure. Follow me. We read in Galatians, chapter three says this. So in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. For all of you were here, it is baptized into Christ. This once for all, symbolically in Christ, that my sins have been forgiven and you have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free. There's neither male nor female. You are all one in Jesus Christ. And so, just like thousands of years ago, we still practice this ritual cleansing. Not one in accordance to the law that needs to be done over and over and over again and again, as every time I need to eat some food, I need to wash myself. Not like that, but once for all. Because that was fulfilled in Christ. And now we follow after the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world who is sacrificed in a similar way once for all that there used to be a time where a priest needed to make a sacrifice and sacrifice an animal day after day, again and again, likewise. No longer. No longer is that the case. That day after day do we have to do this ritualistic cleansing to wash away our sins. It was done once for all our sins are forgiven, period. And these baptismal waters that we get to even witness today, it's not washing away sin. It is an outward expression of an inward reality. The inward reality is I am a follower of Jesus. He has forgiven me of my sins. And now I'm stepping in and I'm externally saying, I'm now cleansed. I'm cleansed by Jesus. He's the only one who could possibly do this for me. That's what I believe in. And so we symbolically die his burial and death and be raised to walk in newness of life. This was a common thing. It was a common practice. Now when we get there, and very explicitly in Mark and in Luke, that we have the Ethiopian eunuch who shows up and he believes in Jesus. And then his first response is, why shouldn't I be baptized? It's because the baptizer movement was a big deal and people knew what baptism was symbolically to say, I believe that now I need to go get baptized. It was a first step of obedience. So in gospel application, I know there was a lot of stuff I know Just a lot of head knowledge. Right, I get that. And yet there is something deeply profound about who Jesus is and that this reliable prophet is pointing us to Jesus the King and the Lamb, who's gonna take away the sins of the world. It's beautiful. So in gospel application, as we just read there in Galatians, in the end of Mark 1:8, you are clothed with the righteousness of Christ and are baptized with the Holy Spirit once for all. John is saying, hey, I'm doing this thing with water. That's all I'm doing. I'm dunking you in the river. And we're popping back up and it's the symbol. But now Jesus shows up and he says, yeah, but now my Holy Spirit is actually going to be here. It's not just, just the water, symbolically of a new life in Christ. It is now the Holy Spirit that anyone who puts their faith in Christ is baptized with the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer who puts their faith in Christ. That's very different. So, and it happens once for all. And so we get to, in this moment, have a chance and a time to remember. To remember when Jesus says it is finished, to remember when he says, I am the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world, to remember his baptism once for all. And that we get to participate in that. And so just likewise, as Jesus taught, as you take these elements, you do this in remembrance of me, that as often as you gather together, I want you to do this. So we do. We take the cracker that represents his body that was broken for us, the juice that represents his blood that was shed for us, that allows us to approach the throne room of God and Yahweh on high and say, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And he says, yes, your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more. We get to do that today. We get to remember, and we're gonna remember it later together as well. Out at the beach. Let me pray. And the worship team's gonna come back up and they're gonna play two songs. And so if you're a follower of Jesus, I'd love for you to take these elements with us. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church, but if you say, yeah, that Jesus, I follow that Jesus, I follow the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. Love for you to take these elements with us. The worship team will play two songs and then I'll come back up and dismiss us. Let me pray, Father. Thank you again just for the opportunity to be here. Thank you. That we can take something just as simple as the Gospel of Mark and just these eight verses, and that we have the history, we have the technology, we have the resources and the scholarly aspect to be able to dig in with logic, with Logos, with the words, and really dig in and say, this is trustworthy, this is true. And just as John the Baptist, the reliable prophet, pointed us to Jesus, now we have those same words and testimonies of Mark who point us to Jesus and say, he is it. He is the Messiah. Maybe different than what we all want and what we expect, but he's here and he's good and he can save us from our sins and he is king. I pray now that as we sing that again, you just be honored and glorified, that as we take these elements and remember the finished work of Christ on the cross that we're building up to for years in the Gospel of Mark, just thank you that we have a chance to do that and can look to the reliable word, your word, and we do this in the name of Jesus. Amen.