going to be reading versus 14, 328, it's a few paragraphs, and try to see the big picture about Jesus tonight. I wonder if you would agree with me that as we think about questions, the answer we give to the question moves us in a direction. First, you answer the question where am I going to live? And then you chose where you live, and you actually physically move, but it has shaped who your friends are, it has shaped how much money you have, it has shaped how far you live from other family.
The answer you give to a question shapes a direction. Every time we answer a question, it does. I want you to consider this tonight. How we answer the question of who is Jesus is the most important question that we can ask, and it will move us one way or the other.
Why did Jesus come? Why did he come? In the Gospel of Mark, people that answered that question in one of two ways. They answered by other responding in love to him, or they want to kill him.
You simply cannot ignore him. And so as we look at God's words tonight, ask the question, who is Jesus? Why did he come? And what will be your response?
We'd like you to hear his word from March after one beginning verse 14. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and believe in the Gospel. Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea, but they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.
And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zevidhi, and John, his brother, who were in their boat men into the nets. And immediately he called that, and they left their father's evity in the boat with the hired servants and followed him. And they went into Capernaum.
And immediately on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority and not as the scribes. And immediately there wasn't in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. But Jesus rebuked him, saying, be silent and come out of him. And the unclean spirit convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice came out of him.
And they were all amazed so that they questioned among themselves, saying, what is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him. And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.
Amen. This is God's Word. May he write it on our hearts tonight. What does Mark tell you about Jesus?
How do you answer the question? Why did Jesus come? Mark says he's a king. Jesus says, the kingdom of God has come.
And if the kingdom is arrived, well, of course, the king has come. And I want to highlight three things about this king. The king's message in verses 14 and 15. The king's disciples in verses 16 through 20.
And the king's power in verses 21 through 28. I want you to consider in the first place the king's message. The king is the king who came to bring what? To bring joy.
That's what you find in verses 14 and 15 when Jesus comes out in his public ministry to proclaim the good news of God. And it invites us to repent and believe in the good news Jesus says. And that word gospel there comes from two Greek words. And the law meaning news and the prefix meaning joyful news that brings joy.
There is good news and bad news. The Bible would say to you, the bad news is you are so lost that it took God stepping down out of heaven onto the earth to find you. But the good news is you are so loved that God stepped down out of heaven and onto the earth to proclaim you. Then this word gospel or good news was not kind of the everyday sort of newspaper news that we think of, but rather history making news, life shaking news.
We have an example of a copy of a work called the beginning of the gospel of Caesar Augustus. They wrote a gospel about Caesar Augustus. It's about his birth and his coronation. Why?
Because it's big news that there's a season named Augustus in Rome. Or another way this word is used is with regard to victory. We know that when Greece was invaded by Persia and the Greece won the battle of marathon, they sent heralds or runners for which we get the idea of running a marathon. But runners or evangelists, bringers of good news who went to Sparta and various cities to announce essentially we have fought for you and we have won for you and you are free.
You're not slaves. You're free. That's gospel. Something has been done in history done for you that changes your status forever and sets you free.
And so I want to say friends we've got to appreciate how distinctively different Christianity is from other religions and philosophies. You'll find lots of advice in various religions about how you want to live your life so that one day you can hope that God will accept you. But Christianity comes to bring you news that brings you great joy because what has needed to be done has been accomplished for you to be right with God. Listen, this is so vital that we understand this.
You'll hear in contemporary Christian circles. Sometimes people say, here's what you need to do to enjoy the gospel. Here's what God calls you to. God calls you to surrender all.
And when you finally surrender all, then you will have life, then you will have peace, then you'll have a sense of joy. Oh friends, that is not the gospel. The gospel does not call us to surrender all in order to gain something by putting God in our debt. The gospel is Jesus has already surrendered all over to the Father's will so that you could benefit by His surrender.
Oh friends, this is earth shattering news. It's designed to free you and make you feel free that everything God expects of you to be right with Him. Jesus has already accomplished for you by living for you, by dying for you. But we can't think about this too often friends.
It's so vital. Listen, I say that because there are all kinds of places in your heart as you get to know yourself as a Christian where you will find that you don't love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Every moment of every day. That's what we confess to our confession of sin.
Father in heaven, I have a love to you that way. Though the Bible would say, this is the way you should love God. Oh friends, we will find in our hearts, a little bit of our goodness. We will find places that need to be visited by God and come under His salvation, come under Jesus' Lordship so that as it were His rule in right over us, He's saving mercy for us, can expand in our hearts and shape our hearts.
But there isn't a Christian who has surrendered all yet to live in this world. Jesus alone has done that for your salvation. Now that doesn't mean the Bible says so you just don't even respond to Jesus. You can just ignore Him the rest of your life.
No, Jesus says, look, this is good news. What I'm doing for you now, turn away from thinking you can depend on yourself and believe in me. Rest in me. Receive me.
This is what it means to be safe, to look to Jesus, to be right with God, to look to Jesus alone. And Jesus says, here I am a Savior of my people. I am also the King of my people. And it is good for you that I am.
Friends, I'll remind your two friends as He comes to be the King who says that He is both Savior and Lord. He isn't simply one or the other. And you and I don't make Him Savior. He is Savior.
Neither do you and I make Him Lord. He is Lord. He is both. And when He captures you for Him, He is both to you.
And what you will find as a Christian is that over time the influence of His salvation, the implications of it, the influence of His Lordship will begin to more and more influence your heart and shape your living. But listen, if there isn't any joy for you in Christianity, you may not yet understand Christianity because Jesus came to bring good news. That's the first thing. That's His message.
Now the second is about His disciples and He shows you that He has come to be a gatherer bringing about a new kind of community with the most unlikely kind of people. Notice in verses 16 through 20, He goes out to find His followers and calls them to follow Him. And you know that the prestige of any kingdom depends in part, at least upon the competence and excellence of its ambassadors, right? In our own day of global communication and travel that may seem slightly less important because we can form opinions about other places through watching CNN.
But 200 years ago and back, an ambassador was perhaps the only way we knew anything about a distant kingdom. And so in opinion would be formed. This country's ambassador represents its nation, right? So therefore, his manner of dress, his pattern of speech, his choice of food must somehow represent the nation for which he is an ambassador.
Ambassadors are vitally important. So here's the question, who would you expect Jesus to call as ambassadors for His kingdom, the kingdom of God to the kingdoms of this world? You would expect him to call the best educated, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most influential, the most well respected. You would expect that because this is the kingdom of God we're talking about, and you would be wrong.
Who does he call? He calls commercial fishermen, who are in the blue collar workforce. And it's not that they're unintelligent, but they're unschooled in their day. They're relatively uninfluential within the circles where that matters.
They're not the elite of society. They're not the religious leaders of society. But God, Paul says in first Corinthians 2, God shows the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the strong. Why does He do that so that no one can boast?
No one can say to God, God needed me. I'm indispensable to the work of the kingdom. I'm an indispensable representative of what God is really. Nobody can say that.
We can say God wanted me, God loved me, God delighted to bring me into a kingdom and make me as a ambassador, but He doesn't need us in that sense. Nobody's indispensable. He chooses very unlikely people. Maybe you've experienced that yourself.
Now, why is he doing that? Why is he gathering these people into a new kind of community? Well, you remember all the way back in Genesis 1 to 3, it tells us that we were built to live in a perfect kingdom where relationships were perfect between God, the king and His people. We were all supposed to get along.
We were all supposed to enjoy community together, but we chose to be our own king, to be Lord of our own lives, and we walked away and life began to unravel. Life became about me versus you, Adam versus Eve, us versus them. Let's gather over here and prove our superiority by not letting them gather over here. Yeah, let's make them gather over there.
Brilliant idea, right? This is the history of the world. In short, tribalism, nationalism, racism. I'm going to have just people like me around me.
And Jesus came to create a new kind of church, a new kind of community that exists not for its own sake, to confirm the fitness of its own members, but that exists for the sake of others. So Jesus says, follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men to include others in the new community. I want to say this to you about the church. The church is not a club looking for the prettiest with the best family.
We're not checking the number of Facebook friends you have to see if you have enough to be worthy of us. The church is the one institution in all the world that invites everyone to belong, and in which everyone shares this one common belief, item belonging, but Jesus had mercy on me. Change your mind, Jesus is saying. Change your mind about things.
My kingdom isn't against the world, but it is for the world. It's not a kingdom of the world, but it is for the people of the world. I'm going to make you a fisher of men together. Do you have eyes to see people the way that Jesus sees people?
Do you welcome people as Jesus does, or do you write them off and expect only certain types of people to be interested in him? Or more importantly, do you expect him to only be interested in certain types of people? Listen friends, no one is beyond his reach. He gathers the most unlikely to be his ambassadors.
That's who he calls to be his disciples. Now the last thing I want you to see, verses 21 to 28, is the king's power. This is a king who has come to be a warrior, and he has come to fight and conquer evil. He has a message which is designed to bring joy.
He gathers a new kind of community with unlikely disciples, and he came to do what? This message tells you, he came to fight the spiritual forces of evil at work in this world. Red a man the other day who said, every culture is characterized by stories and legends of a true king who will come back and defeat evil, who will slay the dragon, who will kiss us and wake us up out of our sleep of death, who will free us from the tower prison, the true prince who will put everything right, and the Bible is saying to you that Jesus is that true king. First John chapter 3, verse 8 says that the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
He came to crush the enemy. What's interesting in this passage where Jesus goes into the temple and he encounters, in the religious community, he encounters one who is possessed by these unclean spirits, is that it tells you nothing about what he taught. It doesn't give you the content of his message. It just tells you that he said be silent and come out and these obey, these spirits obey because he has a kind of authority, a kind of power that nobody else has ever had.
Now listen, we need to say something about this topic because it might make us scratch our head a bit. I can't begin to say all that the Bible says about the subject of unclean spirit beings and how these beings were inside this person. But I do want to say this to the skeptics who would look at this passage and say, well, look, these are just really old fashioned, ignorant, traditional people who just didn't know better and they confused disease with spiritual forces of evil. The very next passage tells you that Jesus is one about healing people of disease.
They make a very clear distinction between people who had disease and people who had unclean spirits. But still, some people would say, Agus don't know about unclean spirits. I mean, an invasive presence of an alien influence bent on evil. Isn't that the stuff of science fiction?
Isn't really the earth just popular with human beings? A devil? Really? A prince of darkness we might ask?
An organizer, instigator of worldwide evil? That's just too tough to believe, some people would say. We might respond. Is it really?
Is it really too difficult to believe in the face of hundreds of centuries of humans slaughtering humans of genocide, mass serial murder of abuse, of economic slavery? You'd argue against the existence of real evil in a world where that happens. The Bible says that there are unseen advocates of real evil. And here you have in this text an unclean spirit making use of a human.
And what it is doing is I would argue not so much bringing evil where it doesn't exist but rather stirring up and magnifying evil that's already in the heart. Listen friends, you and I need to think about something much more difficult than alien by alien being outside of us, not from other planets. But alien outside of us spirit beings dwelling in us to do evil. You and I have a much bigger problem than that.
We have the problem of our own heart, our own heart's evil. And you know how this works? I think the Lord of the Rings captures how this works in our experience. There's a character in the Lord of the Rings and it is the ring itself.
And that ring has a distorting and perverting effect on all who touch it. Right? It turns things that are good or whole and into shadows of their former self. So for instance, elves turn into orcs and kings of men become ring rates and Smeagull the Hobbit becomes dolom over his long exposure.
It takes a trade or a dream or a hope, a desire, even good desires and makes them obsessive and excessive for evil purposes. So Smeagull's love for the beauty of the ring turns him into an emaciated skeleton of his former self. Boromir's patriotism and love of country is warped into lust for power and domination because it becomes a husk of the man he was, the nobleman. Frodo in his willingness to serve and accommodate the needs of others becomes under the influence of the ring self-indulgent and self-pitying.
And in the end he refuses the assistance of his friend Sam, though he had started out giving his life for the assistance of others. Kings who are meant to rule and govern bring order and peace are devoured then by their lust for power and become weightless shadows of the men that they were. This is all the influence of the ring evil twisting and perverting and distorting the one in its grip and that friends is a danger to us all because you don't have to have an unclean spirit being alive in you to know that deep down in your heart something has turned in on itself and you are not what you ought to be. Love in your experience has become self-absorption.
It has in mind the admiration of beauty has become the lust to possess. The desire to be loved has become the lust to be lusted after. Enjoyment in our experience becomes addiction. The noble desire to work is abused into workaholism.
There are all kinds of ways and even good things in our experience get corrupted and why it flows from our heart there's something not right. And what Jesus demonstrates in this text is a determination to deal with spiritual evil and to rid them from our lives and he has authority and power to do so and that is good news. There is for you friend there is no pit you have dug for yourself by your sin. There is no pit so deep.
Jesus isn't deeper. Poor Tenbun once said the highest sin and the deepest despair together cannot baffle the power of Jesus. The great backdisperacher C. Exvergence said if you are sitting here in the midst of despair that you think Christ cannot reach captive to a sin that you do not think he can take the minion over.
Then I tell you today that the one who casts out demons heals epileptics and paralytics instantaneously is here for the healing of your soul. Oh friends Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil to release us from the fear of death that holds us in slaying to release us from the just punishment of our sin before God to release us from the dominion of sin so that it's no longer a king and thrown in our experience that rules and commands. He has cut it off at the knees. He's freed you and he's made himself your lord and he is in mastery over you and he wants to spread into every area of your life his rule and his reign so that you will taste that freedom that he has promised to you that freedom you will experience in all its fullness and delight in heaven itself when even the very presence of evil will be read from your experience forever.
This is what Jesus has come to do to set us free. That is a beautiful thing and the irony the irony of it all friends as we prepare to partake of this table the irony is that in order to free us from the power of evil Jesus himself had to experience weakness in the hands of evil men who would seek to do him evil in crucifying him and this meal before us displays he did in powerlessness go to the cross to be killed and he died but God raised him from the dead and seated him above all things to help you to free you and to teach you to walk with him. Oh friends this meal that we partake is a meal of joy come to this table with joy Jesus has done it all to rescue you he has called you to himself and do his new community he has promised your everlasting freedom from all evil that is promised to you let's look to the Lord in prayer.