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Hearts Prepared for the Gospel (Mark 1:1-8) · Mercy Presbyterian Church

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Again, welcome to Mercy Presbyterian Church.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: You may have been here previously for our test service, but this is the start of our weekly services.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so the first thing I want to say is it's just really a joy to be with you, to be here for the start of our services, to look forward, to look ahead with hope to what God will do here in the future.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And also I want to give a special thanks to Christian Church of Fountain City, which is the building that we're in right now, and Dick and Judy Smelser.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Pastor Smelser is the pastor of Christian Church of Fountain City.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it has been such a joy to get to know them.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so grateful for their hospitality and their generosity to let us worship here and to have what I feel and really believe is a true partnership in the gospel, which I hope that uh serves God's purposes here beyond us.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: But you may be here because, again, you're familiar with mercy, you're familiar with the church in general, but you also may be here because you're curious in some way.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: You may be curious about a new sign that popped up on Holbrook.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: You might be curious about what a church plant is like, something like this, but sometimes not.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's different.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: You might be curious also just about the things that Christians believe.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are here because you are any kind of curious, I'm really glad that you're here.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are here every single week to proclaim what God has made known about himself and what he said, but also every week to openly investigate what God has said.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: That we can make the case every week that what God says is good and true and beautiful.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say God has made himself known, or when I say that God has said, I'm talking about the Bible.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Christians believe that the Bible isn't merely a book, but that it is a book that is God breathed, that the words in it have been spoken by God Himself.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they continue to speak to us because they're the words of the living God.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so what this means for the church is that God has not left us in darkness.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's very important.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And said God has given us his own breathed-out words so that we would know him and receive him and trust him, enjoy him, love him.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because what is made known most of all in these God-breathed words is God's great love for us in Jesus.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so we as God's people, we gather every single week to be about our first order of business.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just listening.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Listening not primarily to me, but to God's word.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And my job then, my job is to simply restate or re-proclaim what God has said so we would listen and believe.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so that we would then be strengthened to proclaim it ourselves, so that we might learn together to embody the beauty of God's word together to one another, to our neighbors, and in some sense to the world around us.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so with all that in mind, I'm inviting us to listen this afternoon to God's word as he speaks to us in Mark chapter 1.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel of Mark is what we'll be going through all this fall, going through it slowly and deliberately.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: But in particular, we're looking this, I almost said this morning again.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a hard habit to break, y'all, this afternoon at Mark chapter 1, verses 1 through 8.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: So let's give our attention now to God's word.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem are going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey, and he preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the word of the Lord.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: The grass withers, the flower fades.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Would you pray with me now for the teaching?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Merciful God, we humbly submit ourselves to you as children to a father, asking you as children to a father, that the seed of your word would be sown among us, and let it take such deep root that neither the burning heat of trials cause it to wither, nor the cares of this life choke it.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But as seed sown in good ground, let it bring forth thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold according to your purpose, and for the sake of your kingdom.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Give your spirit to open our ears to hear, our eyes to see, our hearts to trust, and direct our hearts through your word to Jesus Christ, that we might believe and have eternal life in Him.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so this we ask, Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of your Son.
• 5:12
  unknown: Amen.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was a younger man, but I was not young enough for this to make sense.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh relax, it's nothing incriminating, but it just reveals how little street smarts I have.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was a number of years ago, I was a younger man, young-ish.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was going, I bought an unpainted wooden bench, and I wanted to stain it.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I had never, at this point in my life, I had never prepared paint or stain to do anything with at that point in my life.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not ever.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had my wooden bench and I bought a dark can of stain.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I opened it, I had my brush, and I thought to myself, that seems to cover the preparedness checklist.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I dipped my brush into the can, as is, and I applied it to the bench, and I looked at it, and I thought to myself, that doesn't look quite like I thought it was going to look, but I'm no expert.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you just need to add more stain to it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I slathered on another coat of this stain, and I thought, this doesn't look at all like I thought it was going to look.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you just need to give it a couple of days to dry, and then you can come back and look at it, and voila, it'll be perfect.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: I came back, it looked even worse.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was blotchy and uneven, it was bad.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's because I hadn't prepared the can of stain at all.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'd done nothing with it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I just popped it open and thought that it was ready to go.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: But with a can of stain, if you don't prepare it, then all of the color, the pigment settles down mostly to the bottom, and you do a bad job.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: For this can of stain to be prepared, it needs to be stirred up, it needs to be shaken up, it needs to be disrupted.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Disruption is absolutely necessary for the preparation of the stain.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: In this book of the Bible that we're beginning to look at this afternoon, the Gospel of Mark, it's a fast-moving book.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it moves quickly to put our focus on Jesus, who he is, and what he's done.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But not before Mark makes it very clear to us that if we want to understand what he says in this book, our hearts need to be prepared.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if our hearts are going to be prepared, then that means they need to be shaken up.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: They need to be stirred up.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Our hearts need to be disrupted if we want to receive and believe what Mark tells us in this book.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Disruption is absolutely necessary for the preparation of our hearts.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark's book, which he wrote very close to 2,000 years ago, is called the Gospel of Mark because it's his account, it's his rendition of the gospel, which means the good news of who Jesus is and what he's done.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark makes clear in the very first section of his book that people believing the gospel starts with people having their hearts prepared to believe, which means having their hearts disrupted.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so as God invites us to believe his word today, this should be our prayer.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to do today is to help this become our prayer as we look at this text by looking at three themes.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Purpose, place, and person.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Purpose, place, and person.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as we look at these three themes, our hope will be that this prayer, Lord, prepare our hearts, will continue to be more and more our prayer.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So first let's look at this theme of purpose.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: What is the purpose in Mark of all this preparation?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that necessary at all?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And let me start out by trying to illustrate this, especially for you who are kids in this room.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Every week I want to be able to speak at some point very directly to you who would say that you're a kid in this room to help you understand what I'm saying to better help you understand what the Bible is saying.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're thinking about yourself and saying, hey, I'm a kid, and I'm speaking to you right now, what is the most thirsty that you've ever been?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: What's the most thirsty you've ever been?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The most thirsty I've probably ever been is when I went to this big week-long concert festival that happens here in the state of Tennessee once a year, usually in the month of June.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very hot, kind of like right now.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I went to this concert festival and it was very hot, and there was one band in particular that I wanted to see.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I showed up to the stage where this band was going to play two hours before they went on the stage so that I could be front row.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I forgot to bring a water bottle there with me to the stage.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this as soon as I started to feel the thirst kind of growing, I realized that the crowd was packing in behind me.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so if I left to get my water bottle, I was going to lose my spot.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, faithful fan, I stayed.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And four hours later, after the sun had just baked me into oblivion, I was soaked, sweat, wet, and I was the thirstiest, the most dehydrated that I have ever been.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I stumbled all around that part, feeling half alive, looking for anything.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: I almost jumped myself, threw myself into basically the tiny little man-made pond that the people at this festival created for them to bathe themselves.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was that thirsty.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Found a water bottle, and I never tasted water so good.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's the most thirsty you've ever been?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: If I offer you a cup of water right now, you might say, sure, if you like water, but you're probably not that thirsty right now.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: But imagine you've been outside on the playground playing for a full hour in a hundred degree heat.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: What if I offer you a cup of water then?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: If I offer you a cup of water at that point, you will be so prepared, so ready to say, yes, yes, give me the water.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I'm saying.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is actually what it's like when God prepares our hearts to know and trust Him.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Becoming thirsty, we could say, prepares you to see how much you need water.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: You always need water.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: You need water to live.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's when you're thirsty that you begin to really see and feel I need water.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: I depend on water.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: In something of a similar way, God wants to prepare us for himself, to know him and trust him.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so he has to get us to the point where we actually see and actually feel we need him.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And getting into the text of the Bible, this helps us understand the purpose of the first character in Mark's gospel, John, who is called John the Baptist.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 1, Mark introduces what his book is all about.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the start of his book is a start, the record, his record of the gospel, which is the good news of Jesus, who he is and what he's done.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And throughout this book, Mark is making the case and giving evidence that Jesus is the Christ, meaning the one sent by God and empowered by God to save God's people.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark, throughout this book, he's making the case that Jesus is truly the Son of God, the Son of the Father.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: God himself just as much the Father and with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what this book is entirely about.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, when Mark begins his gospel, a book that's fully about Jesus, he makes clear, he clarifies what the beginning of his gospel is.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: His gospel begins with this section focusing on John the Baptist.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 2, John provides this quote from the biblical prophet Isaiah.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually a combination of a verse from Isaiah and a verse from Malachi and a verse from the book of Exodus.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what it says: Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord and make his path straight.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a prophecy, it's more than a prediction, it's a promise that Mark says is about John the Baptist.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: John's whole purpose was to be the messenger that went before the Messiah, the one who would prepare the way for God Himself to show up.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so John might seem a bit unnecessary to us, kind of a sideshow.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't Mark just fast forward to the scene where Jesus shows up?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: John's purpose was to help people understand their relationship to God.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so their relationship to Jesus.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: John's purpose was to prepare people to receive and trust in God, which meant John's purpose was to be a disruptor.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Everything about John was disruptive.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: From what he said to what he did to what he ate to what he wore, he was disruptive.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that was his purpose: to disrupt people so they would see clearly that they needed a savior.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And John, in many ways, was summarizing everything that had come up to this point before him.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of everything in the Bible before him was to prepare, prepare God's people, prepare their hearts for Jesus.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But John also signals something to us about us.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Our hearts need to be prepared for the gospel.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because my heart, certainly, and your heart too, is not a neutral object.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about our hearts, we're talking about the seat of our desire.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And our hearts aren't neutral because they're filled with desire.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not actually enough for the message about Jesus to be true.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Even if the gospel is true, our hearts in a left alone state will continually refuse to believe it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because the gospel is an announcement that, if believed, means that you no longer belong to yourself, but belong to God, body and soul.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: So what if I don't want to belong to God?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what John's purpose teaches us.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Left alone, our hearts will continually reject the gospel, not because it's untrue, but because our hearts are naturally and comfortably delusional.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Left alone, our hearts do not see or feel the truth that we need God, and we need him to rescue us.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so God's intention is to disrupt us, to shake us up, to stir us up lovingly, to prepare us to believe the truth.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so John's purpose helps us pray this prayer.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first theme, the purpose.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where John does his work is very important.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it is just itself the where disruptive.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So see there in verse 4.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say more about baptism in the next point, but it's worth dwelling on the detail that John is the voice crying out where?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: In the wilderness.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: He prepares God's people for Jesus by bringing them out to the wilderness.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why does that matter?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: In the story of the Bible, the wilderness is both the place where God's people experience their desperate need, and it's the place where they receive God's perfect care.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Both of those.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier in the story in the Bible, the wilderness is where God brings his people after rescuing them from slavery and misery.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the wilderness is also the same place where these people just rescued forget God's goodness, wandering around, bringing misery on themselves.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: The wilderness is a place where God speaks to his people and says, Here's who I am.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I promise you.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the wilderness is the place that God sends his people when they again and again and again refuse to listen to his voice, this trustworthy voice.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So in the prophetic book Hosea, God makes a promise to bring his people out of misery.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: God speaks in terms of a husband drawing his wife back after an awful celebration.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so here's what he says.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, for behold, I will allure her, her being his people, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her there.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when John invites people out into the wilderness, he's demonstrating how important place is to God's work of preparing hearts.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: God prepares our hearts by disrupting us, by bringing us to the place where we experience our desperate need from him, and where we experience and receive his perfect care.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: If we want to know God, in other words, the best place to go is the wilderness.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: If I wanted to take my wife to a place where I could remind her of our connection and our love, I might take her to a few places.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I could take her back to Athens, Georgia, where we met.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a Tennessee exile living in dog country, and I could take her on the path or the route of our first date.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: We could walk up downtown Athens, Georgia, to Trappies Pub and get that good pimento cheese.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I could take her to Cancun, Mexico, where we spent our first week as a married couple.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we could sit under umbrellas, on the beaches, comfortable.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where I would not take her is to the wilderness.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: As in, taking my wife to the literal wilderness would be the literal worst place I could take her to try to remind her why she fell in love with me.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hot sun, wild creatures, bugs, that would be the worst place to prepare her for reconnection and some kind of loving remembrance.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: So why would God bring us to the wilderness to prepare our hearts to receive him?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: God brings us to the place where we learn our need for him.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's there and only there that we learn to depend on him.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the essence of what it means to know God, to have a right relationship with him.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, if it's not clear, I'm not talking about us traveling to a specific place.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about getting in your car and driving out to Nevada.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about the situation or context in which our hearts are prepared to believe the gospel.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this beginning of Mark makes very clear we are we are more prepared to trust God as we are made more aware we are in need of Him.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: We are not made more prepared to trust in God the more comfortable we are, but the more aware we are of our need for His controlling power.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this is true if you've always found it difficult to place your trust in God, or if you feel like you've never trusted Him.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: If that's the case, then the issue is definitely not.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: You need needing to make moral improvements in your life.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: As though it would be easier to have faith in God if you got some things right first, if you made some moral investments in your life.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, the thing that holds us back from trusting God is our refusal to declare moral bankruptcy.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if this is true, if you have been learning for many years to trust and follow God, over time we subtly begin to believe that the big barrier in the way of feeling connected to God is my lack of discipline or my lack of spiritual skill or that life is messy and chaotic, or it just feels like I can't get my hands around things, or just I'm not getting anything right.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But listening to what God teaches us here in Mark, what he is, what is he doing to prepare your heart for him?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: In light of that, what might he be doing to prepare your heart?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: How is God inviting you to a place of disruption, to the wilderness?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you've never put your trust in God, consider this.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Consider that it's not points of moral weakness or moral failure that have held you back.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Would you consider reevaluating those points of moral weakness?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: What if you tried viewing them as the places where the truth is shining through the most clearly?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: You really do desperately need God.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And He really does perfectly care for you.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So when you feel like you've messed things up badly, consider that God is in that place compassionately disrupting your heart from its own delusions.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so in that moment, you can pray, Lord.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare my heart.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Prepare my heart to trust you.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And for any of you who have already believed, what might God be doing in your life right now to disrupt you?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Take you to the place of the wilderness.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: All of us, I would say, crave feeling in control.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this passage invites us to pay attention to the places where your control is being disrupted.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, your life may actually feel a lot like some kind of wilderness where things feel out of control, or your need is becoming uncomfortably obvious, and things are just not easy.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Would you consider that these points of just wilderness experience are critical opportunities for God to remind you what is most true in your relationship with Him?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because God delights to use these places, these opportunities to draw you back where you can relearn your need from Him, for Him, and you can relearn His perfect care for you, that He has cared for you, that He will continue to take care of you.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: When you're in the wilderness, it's just the right place to pray.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare my heart.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Prepare my heart all the more to receive you, to know you, and trust you.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've seen John's purpose leads us to pray and the place God invites his people, the wilderness, prepares us to pray, Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's look at the third theme, person.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: In the scope of the whole New Testament, John the Baptist is kind of a big deal.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: He is impressive.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's the one actually who makes famous the practice of baptism.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty impressive.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And call him John the Baptist.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: As impressive as John was, his baptizing did the opposite of draw attention to himself.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you look there at verses four and five.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: John was proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a couple of pieces of evidence that John's baptism wasn't about making himself a big deal.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Baptism, just in itself, is an act where God publicly marks someone with his promises.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when Mark tells us that this was a baptism, especially of repentance and for the forgiveness of sins, it would have been clear, it would have been clear that John was being an instrument for God to mark people with his promises, forgiveness.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that sign would call people to repent or turn back to God, who alone can forgive.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: So as much as John, I mean, he drew some attention to himself by what he wore, he wore a leather belt around his waist and his diet, he ate locust and wild honey.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: He pushes attention away from himself to another person.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you can see there in verse 7.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: John is saying, I'm not the Christ.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: I am not the point.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just the pointer.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not the one you've been waiting for.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm preparing you for the one you've been waiting for.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then John then distinguishes between sign and reality in verse 8.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: I baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: John's baptism is very important, but it was still just a baptism, just like every other baptism.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a washing with water.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so its power wasn't in the person receiving it or the person giving it.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Its power was in God's promise and the person to whom John was pointing, preparing the way for.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: The person whom Mark is all about, and the person that all of existence is all about.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Garbage art sounds like an insult to an artist, but in the case of Vic Mounis, the term is accurate and actually a really good thing.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: So Vic Muniz, he is an artist who takes objects, individual objects that are discarded and unrelated to one another, aka garbage.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he brings them together in these beautiful collages.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And one of his most, one of Mounis's most famous works was in a landfill where he took all these discarded, individual, unrelated objects and he put them together to form this really incredible and stunning portrait, this collage with a face of a woman.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: All these objects would have never seemed to have actually fit together, but they fit together as they point to this one person.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: In God's hands, this is what everything in creation and everything in your life is doing.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's all pointing to this one person, to Jesus.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark begins with John the Baptist because John summarizes really the entirety of the Bible.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: That everything that came before him, everything was about pointing to Jesus.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And even beyond that, John's whole mission was to actually display what is true of everything, that everything in existence, everything that exists, exists to point to Jesus and to bear witness to him.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: That it's all for him.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which shines a light on why John came telling people to repent, to turn back toward God.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because we we all miss the point over and over again.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: We all take people and things and stuff and we treat it as though it all has meaning in itself, by itself.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is meaningful, but it's only meaningful as everything is bent toward and meant to point us to Jesus, to point us to his goodness, to his kindness, to his power, to his control, to his salvation.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And because our hearts have comfortably clung to this delusion that we can have life by itself and have meaning in it without him, Jesus came to disrupt our hearts.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he didn't come to disrupt our hearts by condemning us.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: He came to go on the cross and be condemned in our place.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: He came to wake us up, to stir us up, to disrupt us.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: But he came to do this, winning our hearts, showing us his perfect, loving care.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Though all things belong to him, he came to give us every perfect thing, and even more than that, to give us himself.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as we study the book of Mark, God's aim is to prepare our hearts to hear and believe the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and our hope should be that we would believe this gospel and believe it more fully so that we would see everything, the good and the painful, and even and especially those things that make known to us our desperate need for a Savior.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is meant to point us to the goodness and kindness and power of Jesus and seeing Him to trust Him.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because He loves us, He came to disrupt our hearts.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And because He loves us, Jesus comes not only bringing good news, He comes to prepare our hearts to believe the good news, to receive it.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so this should be our prayer today.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, prepare our hearts.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you for the gospel.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Teach us to hear it, to believe it, to lay it up in our hearts, to follow Jesus in all our lives.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: You take this word and by your Spirit help us to apply it in our lives for our good and your glory.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.