Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 1, 2016 | Route 66 - Mark

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May 1, 2016 | Route 66 - Mark · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: How are you this morning?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Mulvaine Building, College Avenue Building Online.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you here.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you're visiting, we are in a series that's lasting, well, I guess 66 weeks at least, because it's called Route 66.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a journey through the Bible, through the 66 books of the Bible, one book at a time.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: This morning we come to the second book of the New Testament, the second gospel, which is what's the name of it?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Mark.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I love that name.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Name my oldest son Mark, which means hammer.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I propose to do is this.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've selected eight famous verses from this book, and I'll read them.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Love for you to say them out loud with me.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Love for us to sort of read them together.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you know them by heart, say them, and then I'll pray and we'll get started.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the first verse, a very famous verse from Mark, Mark 8, Mark 8, 36.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Together, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his very soul?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Famous verse in Mark 10.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mark chapter 10, 43, whoever would be great among you shall be your servant.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two verses later, even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Many is a Hebraism, a sort of a that means everybody.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Gave his life a ransom for everyone.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then a couple of famous verses you're familiar with, the first and second great commandments love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Love your neighbor as yourself.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then a famous verse, Mark 13, 31, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then the book closes with this famous commission, Mark 16, 15.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: He said to them, Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we uh come to you thanking you for the gospel of Mark and asking you that we could I could speak and we could hear clearly this morning what it is that your Spirit would say, not just all the churches, but to our church, to Topeka Bible Church, and to all of us who care about your word this morning.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I start with the story of uh Eugene Dover, and he was on his deathbed, and he knew that his time was near, and he waited until the nurse came and his wife and his daughter and his two sons.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point he said to them, So, looking at one of his sons, Ben, he said, I want you to take the houses in Clarion Woods.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Harry, I want you to take uh the offices uh over on Topeka Avenue.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sylvia, he said to his daughter, I'm gonna give you the apartments over at Misty Glenn.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sally, my dear wife, he said, I would like you to take all the residential dwellings off of uh Wanamaker.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the nurse blown away by all this, and as Eugene uh slips away, she turns to his wife and she says, Mrs.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Dover, your husband must have been an incredibly successful man to have accumulated all this property.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Sally looks at her and says, He said, property?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: The schmuck has a paper route.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that we all one thing that I love that story, one thing that we all know for sure and understand is that successful people are the ones who own the big houses and the office complexes, while the schmucks are the ones who serve up their newspapers, right?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, until we get to this gospel, because one of the questions that God is asking us this morning, I believe, is whom do you admire most?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Who do you honor?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Who's on your pedestal?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's been 200 years, but the famous Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote famously, show me the person you honor, and I can tell by that symptom better than any other what you are yourself.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: For you show me the kind of person you long to be.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Down through the centuries, the pedestals, uh uh humanity has filled its pedestals with a variety of different people, especially with statesmen like Pericles, Washington, Lincoln, Churchill.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, unfortunately, with people like Nero, Hitler, and Stalin.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: At other times, uh humanity has idolized its orators or musicians, sometimes its poets.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: In during the Industrial Revolution, the heroes of our culture were the great industrialists and the inventors.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Today the big money goes to, as you know, the professional athletes and the entertainers.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Quite interesting.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that the uh top ten list of the most popular, most admired by teenagers list in America is primarily pop musicians with a scattering of movie stars and professional athletes.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that is important for us sitting here for Christians is that what we oftentimes miss but should see, is that the heroes that we choose, as Carlisle says, the people that we most admire have a way of turning around and molding us and shaping us, and we need to recognize that if we're not careful, we can allow society to define our heroes and our virtues for us.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Someone said that our society is a little bit like uh uh Macy's display window where pranksters got in at night and switched all the price tags so that the next morning things that are that are uh worth really, or that are really honestly truly valuable go for almost nothing, and things that have no value at all go for huge prices, and our society, they say, is a little like that.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's easy in a society like this, in a society like ours, to get all confused about this and to choose our values and our heroes the way society does, and perhaps never more true than in this election year, 2016, when one of the candidates almost deliberately positions himself as a greater success, smarter, better looking, and so forth.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm better looking than you, my model wife is better looking than your frumpy wife, I'm smarter than you, I have more money than you, I'm more wealthy than you.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Someone said to me, Jim, why is it that we we end up with only two candidates for president in America, but we have 50 for Miss America.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why couldn't we have more this year?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and but the real point is that uh uh if you simply Google Donald Trump's name at any particular time, including this week, you will find that there are a number of leading articles and leading magazines and newspapers across the country every single week, including this week, by none other than David Gergen, who refuses to be either Republican or Democrat, asking the question, how uh why is Donald Trump so arrogant?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that a young person could be confused today by thinking, and this is, and I speak this knowing that a number of you support Donald Trump, but and this is not a political statement.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I have happen to know people in our church who support Donald Trump, who, like everyone else, are sort of embarrassed every time he comes out and says, look, my wife's better looking than your wife, I'm smarter than you, you know, and so forth.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And a young person in a society like ours could be confused in thinking that the real values that are important are success and money and fame and looks and so forth.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And those of us who are Christians need to be extremely wary of this, for you and I know that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, God's ways are not our ways, and we might need to readjust our virtues and our heroes away from what our society thinks is most important.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So then we ask, well, what are the heroes that heaven admires?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: What are the virtues that heaven recommends?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And no place in the entire Bible answers that question more clearly than the place we stopped at this morning, the Gospel of Mark.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: For unlike the Gospel of Matthew last week, which presented Jesus Christ as sort of a superhero, as the promised Messiah King, we come to the second gospel, the Gospel of Mark, and find that we have a totally different view of the Lord Jesus.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: As Mark tells his life story, he positions him instead as the suffering servant.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, his book, very simply, as I've put on the back of your study sheet, falls into these two parts.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus came to serve, chapters 1 through 11, Jesus came to suffer by giving his life, chapters 12 through 16.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ask, well then why is it that we have such a different view of Jesus, perspective presented in the second gospel?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to that question really is the answer to the question, who was Mark and who is he writing for?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get back to just five minutes of history for a second.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Mark was a young man who grew up in an upper middle class home in Jerusalem, his mother Mary, they they had a large house, it seems, because they the church meetings in Jerusalem would meet in their house.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: He had a cousin much older than him named Barnabas, who was extremely wealthy.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so one night, I believe it was Mark's house, in which Peter came, delivered from jail when he was about to be killed.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Angel lets him out, knocks on the door, and the servant, for Mark was upper middle class, that a servant named Rhoda, she goes to the door and so surprised that the prayer is getting answered, the church is there praying for Peter that she doesn't open the door.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's just a funny story.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So as Mark grows up, he may be upper middle class, but he sees that the church is getting persecuted.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says that the church, God's people are suffering.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: He goes on a missionary journey with Paul and his cousin Barnabas, and he gets sick and homesick, perhaps, up in what we call Turkey, and he comes home.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Goes on another missionary journey with his cousin Barnabas, because Paul doesn't want to quitter around anymore.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: But Mark finally grows up, and his hero seems to be Peter, and it seems to me that he goes to Rome with Peter in about 60 AD.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Rome is the greatest city in the world.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: It has that famous Colosseum, it has a huge circus Maximus, but it also has a tyrant on the throne.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Caesar Nero.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Nero lives a long time and he's now getting strange.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's getting scary.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: He invites the Roman senators to his house some nights for big banquets.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And between the main course and dessert, he names a couple of them and he says, I want to give you an invitation.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Caesar, they say.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give you an invitation.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is true.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give you an invitation to commit suicide by dawn tomorrow.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they always do.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: For if they don't, he will send his troops to kill not only them, but everyone else in the household.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's how strange, how crazy Nero is.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter is there in Rome.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are 40 or 50,000 Christians we know in Rome at this time, and Caesar's leaving them alone because they're good citizens.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're helping out, and you know, they're working hard and so forth.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're good people.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're they're flourishing.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's the churches struggle a little bit, being half Gentile, half Jewish, and they're trying to get along with each other, but everything's going well, and Peter's there, and he's kind of a leader.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark, the younger Mark, is hanging around his hero, and Peter is telling him stories during these three years.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's telling him stories about Jesus, and he's and he's and he's telling him stories about Jesus that Mark later will put in his book.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, something happens.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Great Fire of 64, 64 AD.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the insiders whisper that Nero himself started the fire.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to get rid of half of Rome and rebuild it and build stuff that he liked, gardens and amphitheaters and so forth.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the fire is raging, but firefighters work hard, and in a week they they put out the fire.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then strangely, it starts up in another part of town, and half of the town of Rome burns down.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And now the whispers are going around in the streets.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: We saw Nero's own palace servants torching your business.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the whispering's going around town, and Nero, being shrewd like a fox, knows he needs to do something, and so he picks a scapegoat.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: He looks over and he picks 50,000 people who are sort of set apart from everyone else, and he says it's the Christians who did it.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to invite everybody into the Circus Maximus.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Fill it, 100,000 people this weekend.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, we'll kill these Christians in front of you.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that weekend the crowds pour in.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And all they've heard all week, because Nero controls CNN and all the major networks and every media organ, all they've heard is that it's the Christians who did it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so he brings in Christians and he releases wild animals, and to the entertainment of spectators, they're torn apart.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so as this starts happening every week, week after week, the Christians by the thousands start fleeing below ground to the catacombs.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you ever get to Rome, I hope you'll go outside of town a few miles and go down to the amazing miles and miles of catacombs.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the Christians hide out there and they worship there.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And after a while, Nero gets smart, and his soldiers go down into the catacombs and they start dragging them out, and again and again, they drag them into the Circus Maximus, and wild beasts tear them apart, and there's blood everywhere, and cheering spectators.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've never seen Fox's Book of Martyrs, it was the most read book in the first thousand years of church history behind only the Bible, telling stories of horrific martyrdom by Christians in Rome.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter was one of the first people to get martyred.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I take it that as he was drug away, he said to uh he said to his disciple, he said to young Mark, Mark, you need to write a book.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: You need to write those stories of Jesus I've told you.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: You need to write this for the people who are suffering, people who are being persecuted, need to let them know that Jesus did, he suffered just like this as well.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark did that.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we have the Gospel of Luke, which had our Gospel of Mark, which has things in it you find in no other gospel.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Say in chapter 1, just the second story, Jesus, you've heard the story.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's in all the gospels that he's tempted, he's out in the wilderness, Satan's tempting him.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: But only in Mark do you find this one line, Mark chapter 1, verse 13, that Jesus was not only tempted by Satan, but he was surrounded by wild and hostile beasts.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that word would have been a comfort to families that had lost their loved ones who were torn apart in the arena by wild beasts.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is in this gospel we find the details of that story of John the Baptist, who was uh who was innocent but brutally beheaded for no good reason, other than the entertainment of spectators up north, just like the Christians at that time were being brutally killed.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were being many of them burned alive, they were being doused in oil and stuck up on crosses to light the thoroughfares at night.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they were killed in gruesome ways simply for the entertainment of spectators.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, Mark, we have this strange line: everyone, meaning everyone in the church, is going to be salted with fire.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's gonna go through the fire.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they say, we are.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like all of us, so many of us are getting burned.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's why Mark even tells the story about his hero, Peter, who denies Jesus.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: He tells stories in this book about Jesus' brothers and sisters denying him and wanting to arrest him, and even Peter, his friend, turning him in because Nero had offered rewards in Rome to family members and friends who would turn in their brothers or sisters, or parents or friends who are Christians, so that they could be killed.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of people Mark was writing to.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was writing to Roman Christians facing persecution.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why this book is different than the book of Matthew.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's why he's presenting Jesus as someone who came to serve, as someone who came to suffer and give his life.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: You see the difference between Matthew, the book of the superhero, the promised Messiah King, and the gospel of Mark, the Savior who came to serve and to suffer.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take both of these, uh, each one really quickly, talk about Jesus, and then let me draw applications to us.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: On the service thing, you'll notice in the first paragraph on your study sheet, I mentioned that someone called Mark the Go Gospel, because 42 times, more than all other times in the New Testament entirely, you have this word immediately sometimes translated, excuse me, straight away or right away, and instantly, or without delay, or pronto, or at once, or forthwith, or promptly, or straight off.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the point is that unlike my service and your service, where sometimes we'll do it but a little reluctantly or a little slowly, my I think what this is about is not just that Mark is the USA Today, fast-moving gospel, easily the shortest, very quick moving, no long sermons, no long doctrine, just tell it and hurry, hurry, hurry all the time.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Part of that may be the crisis in Rome.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I think part of it is that we're we're supposed to see that Jesus was just itching to serve.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: He could hardly wait to serve.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't drag his heels, he wasn't reluctant.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: You see, he wasn't slow about it.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: I just listed the verses in chapter 1 that include this word immediately.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: 110, immediately coming up out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens over.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: 112, immediately the Spirit drove into the world.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately he called James and John, 120, 121.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately on the Sabbath day he entered into the synagogue and taught.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: 129 immediately entered the house of Simon.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: 131, he healed a girl and immediately the fever left her.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: 143, he immediately warned a man whom, out of whom he'd cast a demon, and immediately sent him away.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm convicted by this because I have learned to serve, though it is my wife's gift, not mine.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I do my best to allow her as many chances to serve me as I can possibly afford her, because I know she loves it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I've learned I need to serve occasionally, but I tend to drag my feet.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: I tend not to be an immediate servant.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you find the climax of sort of this theme at the middle of the book where we find the key verse that the disciples are on the way and they're headed up to Jerusalem, and Jesus is plowing on ahead of them as fast as she can go, and they're astonished by this.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're bugged by this.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're going, why are you in such a hurry?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: The last half of the book, by the way, is about the last seven days in Jerusalem.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is in a hurry to die, okay?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just amazed.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and they're afraid and they're amazed, but Jesus is leading the way, and then he decides to take the twelve aside, and for about the third time, he decides to tell them, listen, I'm going up there, but I'm not going up there to sit on a throne.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going up there to die, to suffer and die for sins, okay?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't like this.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: The two previous times he'd tried to do this, they rebuked him.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: They said, No, it's not gonna happen.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, you know, we need a little more positive attitude here, you're not gonna attract very many followers with that negative kind of talk.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, if you got your Bible open to Mark chapter 10, 35, you'll see they just ignore him.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: They don't even listen.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And two of his disciples sort of interrupt him, James and John, they go, Hey, listen, we've got a request for you.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: We'd we'd like to know, listen, when you get on the throne, can we sit one of us on the left and the other on the right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: First dibs.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: We ask first, you know, can we sit up there in glory with you, you know, have the best seats.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I imagine Jesus may, if he was omniscient, I mean if he was thinking omnisciently at this point, he may have thought ahead a week to when he would be up on a cross and have someone on his right, and have someone on his left.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Two thieves.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because his response is you know, I have no idea what you're asking for.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be, you want to be with me, you want to be on my right, you want to be on my left.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I'm all about serving, suffering, and dying at this.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Point.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: They look at him like, what?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Listen, whoever desires to become great among you, Mark 10, 43, shall be your servant.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: For even I, the Son of Man, came not to be served, key verse of the book, but to serve, to give his life a ransom for many.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way, that's the way Jesus is presented in this book.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he starts out.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: The very first story in chapter 1 is Jesus standing in line to get baptized by John the Baptist.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And going off into the wilderness and being attacked.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wild animals, Satan, and so forth.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, and then the book ends by him being sold as a slave, as a servant.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: 30 pieces of silver.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, it's one thing to serve, it's another thing to be treated like a servant.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever noticed that?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll serve you, you know, I'll let you go through the potluck line first.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: But don't act like I should.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she, you know, as they always do, she walks over.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I just know this because I've heard it.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but anyway, so she comes over to this lady sitting in first class and she says, Would you like something to drink?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lady looks straight ahead.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: She says, I'm sorry.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Would you like something to drink?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Lady look straight ahead.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: She thinks, I didn't say it clearly enough.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: She starts a third time.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: The husband leans over, the husband says, I'm sorry, my wife does not speak to servants.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Steam starts coming out of her.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: The true test of a servant is how you react when someone treats you like one.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't handle that well.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll serve you in a minor way, of course.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Reluctantly, just don't treat me like a servant.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but Jesus gets treated like a servant from start to finish.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: He not only serves, he then gets treated like a servant, he gets sold for a slave's wages.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, isn't that astonishing?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And when he's hanging on the cross, imagine you walk up to him, go, whoa, whoa, I've just read the book of Luke.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've read the Gospel of Luke.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're King of Kings, you're Lord of Lords, Messiah King, so forth.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you come down from there?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know you got the power.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you come down from there?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Just kind of glow a little bit, show everybody who you really are.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Get back up if you want to.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus, if you'd done that, I take it, the Gospel of Mark would have said, I didn't come at this time.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: For that reason.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't come to be served.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I came to serve and to give my life a ransom.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: For you.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: For everyone.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, I just say, wait a second.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I know the whole glory thing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're supposed to be glorified.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: All of this is about your glory.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's why you created a thing so so.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what are you gonna get?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: What are you getting out of this?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see that you're getting much out of this, glory-wise.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: His answer from the Gospel of Mark would have been listen, let me just say that again.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not here to get anything out of it at this point.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: I just came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life a ransom for many.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's chapters one, uh chapters one through eleven, as Jesus came to serve, and he came to serve her to the serve to the extent that he would actually give his life up.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's an extent of service I am utterly unfamiliar with, but I want to draw some conclusions for the Lord's table.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Two questions that this book presents us with.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, what is your decision about this kind of a savior?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't ever, if you're just still wondering, you're seeking, you're questioning, you're wondering, is this the kind of a savior you want to trust?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: What is your decision about this Jesus?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: There is this interesting decision, these three choices that Mark gives us in chapter three.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: He says there's really only three choices.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's very C.S.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Lewish.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: What's your decision about?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he tells these two stories back to back in Mark chapter three.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus casts out a demon, and the demons look up and they go, You are the Son of God.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: But shortly after that, Jesus' brothers and sisters show up, his own family members, and they say, uh, this guy, our own brother, he's out of his mind.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: We need to move him out of here.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is embarrassing.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Option number two.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is the family option.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's out of his, he's soft in the head.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, the scribes and Pharisees, the theologians, the Bible scholars come up from Jerusalem and they say, you know what?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Casting out demons can only be done if you've got inside knowledge, inside power, inside track.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: Only the spawn of Satan can cast out Satan.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's option number three.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mark goes, you know what?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: You've really only got those three options.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the son of God?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is he soft in the head, or is he the spawn of Satan?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or to put it in more modern language, is he Lord, Looney, or Lucifer?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which should remind you of the famous trilemma in C.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's mere Christianity.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is he liar, lunatic, or lord?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: C.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, the Oxford professor, saying either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman, or something worse.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: But let's not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't left that open to us.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't intend to.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: My question is, what's your decision about Jesus?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the first question Mark asks you this morning.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the other question he asks is, okay, say you've decided that Jesus is your Lord and Savior.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: What is your decision about standing with him, following him as a servant who gives up your life for others?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: For this book does not give you the option simply to admire Jesus as this kind of a person.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus himself turns to you and says, if you try to hang on to your life, you're going to lose it.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you give it up for my sake and for the sake of the good news, you'll save it.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to be willing to give up your life and you need to serve to that extent.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever of you wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, will you and I simply go beyond trusting Christ and admiring Him to actually standing with Him, serving with Him to the extent that we might even give our lives for others?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's a tough question, isn't it?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: I want to challenge you about this serving thing.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm giving it a lot of thought myself.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in the last, who knows, maybe five years of regular Sunday pulpiteering here.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're elders have been talking about this for some time.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I took this book called Halftime by Bob Buford out in the Colorado Mountains earlier this year, spent hours every day.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was wonderful.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Reading this book and thinking about uh thinking about my life and what I will do when, you know, how I can serve the Lord, because I don't believe in retirement.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the subtitle of this great book, if you ever have a chance, read the book, Halftime, I know I'm a little beyond halftime.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Subtitle is From Success to Significance, in which he says, I understand that the first 40 years of your life, you need to work towards success.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: He owned a cable TV company and all this other stuff, Bob Buford did, but he realized at age 40, 45, he needed to move from success and providing for his family and all this to significance, to making a difference in the world.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so he gives great advice about how to do that and how to pray about that and so forth, but it's all about how are you then going to serve?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because you'll never have a significance unless you give your life serving.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, recently I read something that has really affected my thinking as well.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to challenge you with this.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: One of the greatest business thinkers of the last 50 years, his name is Peter Drucker.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter Drucker advised nonprofits and prophets for decades about this, and he said something fascinating.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: He said, We've been really surprised in America.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: We used to think that retired people would be an amazing and inexhaustible store of service and volunteer service for the church and for the society.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have found that is not true in America.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: What we have found instead is this that people who, while they are working, if at age 45 they start parallel serving at age 45 and get intensely involved in that at age 55, those are the only people we find who at age 65 and 75 are really serving other people in our society.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: So my challenge to you is if you are 40, 45, if you are that age, you need to start thinking, how am I going to stand with Jesus and serve as Jesus served?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know our values in society are entirely upside down.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you go work with teen gangs in LA, you'll earn$2,000 a month.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you teach them in their schools, you'll earn maybe four or five thousand dollars a month.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you do a documentary on them for TV, you'll earn$15,000 a month.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're an actor, carry an Uzi submachine gun and in the movies go in and shoot them all dead, you'll make a million dollars a month.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: The values in our society are topsy-turvy.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: But heaven says the value we have is the value of service.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: The heroes of heaven are the servants who give their lives as a ransom for many.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: I came across a moving story.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love Melody and I love Downton Abbey, and come across a story of a maid, a servant, who joined 15 other servants a hundred years ago.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: In Downton Abbey days, her diaries were discovered over in England.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only thing we know of this girl named Beatrice Christopher, who at age 18 signed on to join 15 other servants at a at a fine mansion 100 miles southwest of London called Kingston Lacey at age 18.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: She fell in love when she was 18 to 22.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then sadly for her, when she was 22, it was 1914, and her beau, her lover, he went off to war.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he fought for four years in World War I, and just before the end of the war, having written love letters back to her on a regular basis, as a soldier, he fell in love with a girl he met in Holland, and he wrote her a goodbye letter which broke her heart.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: We know this from her diaries.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And four years later, at the age of 30, she died of tuberculosis and a broken heart.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I tell this story, I tell this story because in her diary, she wrote, she composed and wrote a little poem which has made the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: A poem about servanthood, a poem, a simple poem that goes like this.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know I am only a servant girl, and I'm not ashamed to say I belong to the ranks of those who toil for a living day by day.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second stanza goes, I belong to the lower class.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the phrase we often meet.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's some who sneeze at a servant girl as they pass her on the street.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the poem ends with this simple, simple phrase You could offer me no title I would be more proud to own and stand as high in the sight of God as the queen upon her throne.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of the title of servant, and Beatrice Christopher had the same value system as heaven does about servants, that there is no title on earth higher at this present time than servant, and only those who serve, who stand and serve with Jesus Christ will join him as kings and queens upon his throne.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why waste your life?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why wrap it up in big houses and office buildings?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's nothing, nothing wrong with having a nice car and having a big house unless that's where your identity is.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, your identity instead must be that today I do not work for the big houses and apartment complex and for what maybe in this political campaign would be defined as success.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I work to be a servant.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: I believe in a Jesus Christ who is Lord and Savior, and I will stand with him, I will walk with him, I will go to the cross with him as a servant willing to give my life for other people.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for this book and thank you for Jesus, his servant who came for us.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as we sit around the table with him now, give us a sense, a love for the Savior of ours who served us.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.