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The Gospel Fulfills (Mark 1.9-20) · Mercy Presbyterian Church

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good afternoon.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to welcome you again to Mercy.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Rob Heron, and I'm the pastor here at Mercy.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're here and you are familiar with Mercy or generally with the church, we want to welcome you.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are here because you are curious, we want to welcome you.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you're here because you're curious about a new sign popping up on Holbrook, maybe you live in the neighborhood.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you're curious about what a church plant like this is like in its second week of existence, and maybe you're here that you are curious about the claims that Christians make.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're here and you're curious, I'm so glad you're here.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: We are here to proclaim what God has made known about himself.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we're also here every week to openly investigate what God has said about himself and to make the case every single week that what God says is good and true and beautiful.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say God has made himself known, when I say God has said, I'm talking about the Bible.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: As Christians believe that the Bible is not merely a book, we believe that the Bible is God breathed.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: That in the pages of the Bible, God has spoken to us, and he still speaks to us through the words in the Bible because he is the living God.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's essentially that's very important to the church because it means that God hasn't left us in darkness.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, God has breathed out these words so that we would know him, receive him, enjoy him, trust him, love him.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because what is made known most of all in the pages of the Bible is God's great love for us.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so we, as God's people, gather together every single week to be about our first order of business: listening.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not primarily listening to me, but listening to God's word.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so my job is simply to restate, to re-proclaim what God has said about Himself, so that we all would listen and believe.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we all would be strengthened to proclaim it ourselves, and so that we would then learn together how to embody the beauty of God's word together, to one another and to our neighbors.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so with that in mind, I'm inviting us today, this afternoon, to look and listen to God's word as we continue in our series on the Gospel of Mark, which we're marching our way through this fall.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Last week we focused on verses one through eight and learned together how God prepares our hearts to believe the gospel.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this afternoon, I'm inviting us to look at Mark chapter 1, verses 9 through 20.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So let's give our attention now to God's word.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open, and the spirit descending on him like a dove.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And a voice came from heaven, You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Repent and believe in the gospel.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately they left their nets and followed him.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is the word of the Lord.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: The grass withers, the flower fades.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Will you pray with me now for the teaching?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Merciful God, we humbly submit ourselves, asking you as children to our 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, but as seed sown in good ground, let it bring forth thirty, sixty hundredfold, according to your purpose and for the sake of your kingdom.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Give your spirit to open our ears to hear, eyes to see, hearts to trust, and direct our hearts through your word to Jesus Christ, so we might believe and have eternal life in Him.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: In this we ask, Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of your Son, amen.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think a story is as good as its ending, and that's probably a little bit overstated, but there's a lot of truth there.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: A story is only as valuable as it wraps things up, as it completes itself, as it comes through on the promises that it's built up.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: A story is only as valuable as it lands the plane.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then you probably had the experience of watching a movie and you like the entire thing.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get to the ending and the ending feels off, or the ending feels incomplete, or just not satisfying.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to not feel like the entire story is now defined by unfulfilled promise.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that even more so describes our experience with stories when they just don't wrap up at all.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Mary Lee and I were watching a show a little while ago that had three seasons, a three-season run, and then it just was unjustly canceled.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so now it's this story that's incomplete, unfulfilled forever.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: When I was working for a campus ministry at Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, I knew a group of students there, and this group of students decided they were going to make a full-length movie with elaborate costumes and props.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this movie was going to be an origin story of former LSU head football coach Ed Augeron, which is the most random thing they could have possibly made a movie about.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the kind of thing that App State students would get up to.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that they were doing college riot.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the name of their movie was Kid O, the Ed Augeron origin story.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so many students were involved, and so many students started talking about this other group of App students wandering around the campus speaking in Louisianaic Cajun accents, that the school paper did a long-form article about this movie.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: What they discovered is that making a movie takes a long time.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so they just graduated, and the the promise of the article, the promise of the story just was unfulfilled.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still in a group thread with these students, and once a year, one of them will text the rest, hey, are we filming this weekend?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which really just drives in the knife, reminding all of us that just out there in the digital clouds, there's all this unedited footage of from outstate students of the Ed Augeron story, kiddo.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that this promise, the story's promise is just going to be unfulfilled forever.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the point every story has within itself this ingrained longing for its own fulfillment.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's just part of the DNA of stories.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Stories are meant to be complete.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's if that's true of stories that we create, then it would make sense that it's true for our individual stories, for our own lives, the stories of our lives, because we experience our lives as stories.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a beginning and there's conflict and there's a hope of a good ending.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's true of our individual stories, then it would make sense that the story of the world, which contains all of our individual stories, would bear a longing for fulfillment.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Our own stories, our own lives, have this longing to be fulfilled, to be complete.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: That resolution, the story of the world, has the bigger story, has this longing to be fulfilled.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And for sure, what good fulfillment of the story of the world or history, what that looks like, depends on individual perception and culture.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's different ways of understanding what history wrapping up well would look like.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: But from any conceivable perception, as we look at the world story, it just looks like a story with a bunch of loose threads.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: A story with potential that just never seems to get met.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And again, if that's the case, then it's certainly true that we experience our own individual stories as stories with these loose threads.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Stories that yearn for fulfillment but just never seem to come to full fulfillment, or at least not yet.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe our lots feel like stories that just don't seem like they're gonna come to an ending that's meaningful at all.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they do come to an ending, it's not gonna be an ending that delivers on our hopes.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how can we have hope that our own stories will come to some kind of fulfillment, much less the story of the world?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where what Mark tells us here is so magnificent and so large, because what he tells us is that the gospel fulfills.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel fulfills.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I want us to see this afternoon.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want to do is to help us grasp what it means that the gospel fulfills by looking just at two themes: story and author.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: If we look at story and author, we'll understand more how the gospel fulfills.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And just forecasting, we're gonna spend a decent amount more time on the first theme than on the second.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So don't be put off by that.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So first let's look at the theme of story.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll start by speaking more directly to the kids in the room.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every week, I want to speak more directly to you who are kids so you can better understand what I'm saying, so you can better understand what the Bible is saying.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So if in any sense you think to yourself, hey, I'm a kid, then I'm speaking to you.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I want I want to ask you just this question.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Pick out a story from a movie or a TV show or a book or a Yodo card that you really, really like.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Pick out a story that you really like.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have it?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you one that I like that I think that you might also like: Kung Fu Panda.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love that movie.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I love Kung Fu Panda.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you: who is the main hero in Kung Fu Panda?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the main hero in Kung Fu Panda?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the main hero in the story that you pick?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: The main hero in Kung Fu Panda is, of course, Poe, Kung Fu Panda.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And Poe is an unexpected hero, but he is still the hero.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He goes from being just good at making noodles to being a kung fu master.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's unexpected, unlikely, but you know that he's the main hero of the story because if you took Poe out of the movie, the movie would make no sense.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: The promise of the story would not actually come to any kind of fulfillment.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The story is complete because the main hero is at the center of it.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And as good of a character as Master Monkey is, he's not the main hero of the story.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Poe completes the story because he is its hero.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is what I mean when I say that the gospel fulfills our story.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Without the gospel, our story is incomplete.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel is the announcement of who Jesus is and what he has done.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the gospel completes the story because Jesus is the story's hero.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel completes the story because Jesus is the story's hero.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I'm talking about.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what story specifically am I talking about as we get into the text?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about the story of the Bible.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And as Mark jumps into the action of this book, he introduces us to a hero, not just of this book, but to every book of the Bible.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that Jesus is the main hero may not seem obvious to us at first.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when we understand what Mark is saying about Jesus in light of the story of the Bible, it's obvious.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Mark doesn't introduce Jesus by saying, look, the hero, or by describing Jesus' muscles.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: What he does is he shows Jesus is the hero by showing how Jesus is the fulfillment in what he says and what he does, and just himself, of a very specific story.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: The story of Israel.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way to understand the story that the Bible is telling without understanding the story of Israel.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the Bible story, God chooses one ancient people to be his people.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: He makes promises to be with them, to show them his love, and he gives them a mission to bring the light of his presence into the darkness of the world.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: But God doesn't choose Israel because they are the best.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: He chooses them exactly for their heart stubbornness, so that he can display before the world the beauty of his faithfulness and his mercy.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the story of Israel itself is a story of a people who continually receive from God with one hand his favor, but with the other hand slap God in the face.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why Israel so badly needed a hero to be what it could not be, what they could not be.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if we keep that in mind, we see how the beginning of Mark shows how Jesus is the hero by showing Jesus fulfilling the story of Israel.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: So look there, starting at verse 9.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Where Mark jumps into the action.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: We were introduced to John the Baptist in the previous passage, and John says his whole purpose is to prepare the way for Jesus.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: When John baptizes people, he gives them this ceremonial washing.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing that, he's marking them with the promise of a Messiah, the promise of a savior.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so why is Jesus marked with this promise when he is that Savior?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus isn't baptized because he needs a savior.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so the reason must be that Jesus is being baptized on behalf of the people that he came to save.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: That has to be the reason.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' baptism, Jesus is set apart as the one who would not only rescue Israel from all its sin and its failure, but also that he would be the one who would fulfill Israel's story to bring it to completion.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And verses 10 and 11 show that Jesus was the fulfillment of Israel's story in the sense that where Israel failed, Jesus succeeds.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: But even more than that, Jesus would be more and achieve more than Israel could ever be, or could ever achieve.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when Jesus comes up out of the water in verse 10, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And a voice came from heaven, you are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so the veil between what is seen and heaven is torn open.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And God gives the clearest visible declaration that he is not only with Jesus, but his spirit empowers him in a perfect way because Jesus is himself God.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: He is the Son of the Father.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the Father from heaven makes the clearest proclamation that Jesus not only is close to him and knows him and knows his presence, but Jesus is his son in whom he delights.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why does this matter?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' baptism, we are told that our baptism marks us with the story of Jesus.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And when we put our faith in what baptism signifies, Jesus and his work of salvation, his story becomes our story.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: His story becomes our story.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning, Jesus' story now becomes a defining feature of your story.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' victory becomes a defining feature of your story.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when you belong to Jesus, the voice from heaven that Jesus received at his baptism becomes the defining word about you.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: The sentence that defines your whole life in belonging to Jesus becomes, you are my beloved son or daughter, and with you I am delighted.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it matters.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: But Mark moves on to show how exactly Jesus fulfills the story of Israel.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can see in verses 12 and 13 his brief description, how Jesus begins his ministry.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is a really obviously brief snapshot of events, and Mark does that throughout the book, and yet it is profound.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the first thing we notice is that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, drives Jesus out into the wilderness.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that Jesus was compelled against his will, but that Jesus needed to go to the wilderness.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's tempted there by Satan, God's enemy, our great enemy, and he's hanging out with the wild animals.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Angels minister him, minister to him.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And these may seem like disconnected description of events, but Mark doesn't have to say, this should remind you of X.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: This should remind you of this part of the Bible.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because he knew that his original audience would, in hearing these brief descriptions, would make all sorts of connections back to the story of Israel.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: When Jesus goes into the wilderness, it's like a lived-out retelling of Israel's wandering in the wilderness for decades.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when Jesus is tempted but resists the lies of Satan, it's a vivid reversal of Israel's failure in the wilderness to trust and worship God alone.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus stands against hostile spiritual opponents and prevails where Israel failed.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when we get to the detail about the wild animals, it's not clear exactly why Mark saw this as relevant, but it's at least possible that we're meant to picture Jesus out in an environment where there are both spiritual Satan and natural wild animals, hostile forces set against him.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, where Israel was overcome by the world, Jesus is protected by his own spiritual servants who minister to him, and he overcomes the world.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And proving that Jesus is the true king of the world, king over every part of creation.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so just with these, with very few words, Mark is showing us so clearly that Jesus is the one who perfectly fulfills Israel's story.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, why does that matter?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: If what Mark says here is true, then Jesus is the only one who not only fulfills Israel's story, but the human story.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because the story of Israel is the representative story of how all our hearts stubbornly again and again turn away from God on our own.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the story of Israel is the representative story of how God again and again turns toward us with compassion and with grace.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is no, there is this link between the story of Israel contained in the Bible and the story of the world.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that if we want to know that there is any kind of hope for this world, there must be a fulfillment.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: There must be hope for Israel.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so without Jesus, it's not just the story of Israel, but it's the entirety of human history that's heading toward a cliff.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: But because Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel's story, we see that God really is working in the world.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's not absent from the world.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: He really does have a purpose that he's working out in history.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: He really is working out all things together for a good purpose.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And because Jesus has done what he's done, he affirms the entirety of the story of Israel contained in the Bible.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the Bible and you read through it and you're thinking, what is this doing here?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' life and his work, it affirms that every part of it mattered, and it matters because all of it was used by God to prepare the way for Jesus, to prepare the way for our Savior.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also true that Jesus' life as a fulfillment of Israel's story actually affirms your story.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: It affirms every part of your that every part of your life, every part of your story, it actually matters to God.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: None of it is wasted, none of it is meaningless.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even the mundane stuff.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus came to live a perfect story, but a fully human story.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: He slept and he ate and he sweated just like I'm doing right now.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: He suffered in all these ways.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus' life, is God's blessing on the meaningfulness of your life.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Every part of it really does matter to him.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesus didn't just uh come to affirm the meaningfulness of our lives, he came to fulfill Stories.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus came into this world to fulfill your story.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: He came to live out the story that you and I have not lived.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: He perfectly loved God and neighbor.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he did this so that his story would become yours.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever puts simple, even weak trust in Jesus, God treats that person as though they had lived Jesus' life, as though they had lived that perfect life.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus came to die on a cross, living at the end, alienation from God that we bring on ourselves, so that your story became his story at the cross.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now that tragic ending for God's people is like pages ripped out of a book and shredded up and thrown into the trash, done away with.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus' story is the fulfillment of the deepest longings and your story and my story.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: The longing to be accepted and loved, the longing for our lives to mean something, the longing for you to not be defined by your biggest failures and sins.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus' story is not only the fulfillment of your story, but it's even bigger than that, it's the fulfillment of the human story.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: The fulfillment of all the deepest longings in history, the longing for evil to be overcome, the longing for real hope in the face of death.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every loose thread is tied up in the gospel for you, for me, for the entire world.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the gospel fulfills.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: The gospel fulfills.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: It fulfills in the sense that Jesus is the completion of the Bible story and the human story, even your story and my story.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing I want us to see.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that way the gospel fulfills.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let's look at this second theme even more briefly of author.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: What would happen if the author stepped into his own story?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: When Stan Lee was the creator of most Marvel characters, Marvel Comics characters, when he was alive, he was frequently inserted into Marvel movies.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that you would have a Spider-Man movie, and then Stan Lee would be some random person standing on a street corner.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when Spider-Man swept through, Stan Lee's eating a hot dog and the hot dog gets knocked out of his hand.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Something like that.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: But when that would happen, Stan Lee was just playing a random character.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: He would, the Spider-Man would never turn back and say, sorry, Stan Lee.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And people around Stan Lee wouldn't bow down and worship him as their creator.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: But with Jesus appearing in the story, the author of the story is stepping onto his own pages.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that, of course, changes everything for the story itself and for every character in the story.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 14, we find out that John the Baptist has been arrested, but he's done his job.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's prepared the way for Jesus.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: We read, proclaiming the gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Repent and believe in the gospel.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: So remembering that Jesus is the author of the story, what is he saying?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying a lot more than just something important is about to happen.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying the author has stepped onto the page.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the climactic moment of the story has arrived.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: God's kingdom, which is the sum total of every promise of God, it's here, Jesus says.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because the author is on the scene.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Keeping that in mind, Jesus' call to repent and believe in the gospel, that too, it has to mean way more than simply stop doing this and start doing that.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Stop believing this and start believing that.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: May include those things, but even more than that, what Jesus is talking about here is nothing less than each of us having our stories invaded by the author of the entire universe.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And as he invades our stories, our entire lives are transformed from being isolated, unfulfilled narratives into being contributions woven into the story that God is telling.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus is talking about here.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: What does that look like?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: We get an example in the lives of Jesus' first followers.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: You see, they're starting in verse 16.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is fascinating.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus calls these two brothers to leave their entire business behind, radically transforming their entire lives.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: He invades their stories.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And yet at the same time, he does this in a way that incorporates their stories into his mission.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: He tells the fishermen, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: He makes them fishermen in service to God's mission.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus doesn't say, leave your nets behind because fishing is worthless.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he doesn't just say, follow me.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: He adds these words that, in a way, weave their stories into his story.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: The brothers, they remain fishermen, but in an entirely new way.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're still Simon and Andrew, but they're also entirely changed because they now belong to Jesus.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not told specifically what made them choose to leave their nets.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're compelled, these brothers, or James and John, to follow Jesus.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're just told in verse 18 that immediately they left their nets and followed him.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: So why follow?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're responding to the voice of the author, calling them to be part of the great story, to have the deepest longings of their stories fulfilled.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they respond to his voice.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: They believe the gospel, which is the announcement that the author has stepped onto the page to secure the best ending.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does it mean for us to follow Jesus?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to follow Jesus?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: It means having your entire life transformed as God invades your goals, your desires, your purpose, your morality, your everything.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it also means the fulfillment of the deepest longings in your story.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is what God's author power does.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: He transforms and he overhauls, but he also at the same time renews and brings out what was always meant to be.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Following the voice of the author is the way to be transformed, to become who you really are.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Following Jesus doesn't necessarily mean that you need to leave your job.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: You need to leave your work, but it does mean that every part of your story now belongs to Jesus.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your work, your family, your relationships, your money, your mind, your soul.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: God intends to invade every single portion of it.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he also intends to weave your story, all its pain, all its good, all its just mundane, to weave every part of it into his story of redemption.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So why should you follow him?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: We all share the desire, no matter what the particular shape of your story is, for our lives to be going somewhere, for our lives to mean something, have some reason in the end.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we all have this shared desire, even if it's buried underneath cynicism and sorrow, that in the end this world is going somewhere.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then in the end, some good will come of everything.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so the invitation is to follow Jesus because your longings are not an illusion.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Your longings are not an illusion.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: They are pointing you to Jesus, to the voice of the author.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: So follow him because the gospel is the best part of the best story.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: He came into this world to live, to fulfill all the good that you long for.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: He came into this world to die, to bear the guilt of all our stories, yours and mine.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he came into this world to rise from the dead so that the history of this world is itself now in him, a narrative of hope.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So come and follow him.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you that the gospel is the truest fulfillment.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Teach us to hear it, to believe it, to lay it up in our hearts, and to follow Jesus with all our lives.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so we ask you that you would, by your grace, enable us to want you to invade every part of our story so that you might transform our stories and that you might uh renew us with the hope that at the end you will fulfill the deepest longings of our story.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: A day is coming when every thread will be tied up, every longing met in Jesus.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so we thank you and ask all of this in his name.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.