If you prefer to listen to an audio version of this message, click here: Beginning the Journey
Today we begin a new journey together, a journey through the
Gospel of Mark. I am entitling this series “Following Jesus” because forms of the
word “follow” appear some 22 times in the New Revised Standard Version of the
Gospel of Mark.
I have often had people who want to follow Jesus ask me,
“Where do I begin?” As with most endeavors in life, it is good to begin at the
beginning. That is how Mark opens his Gospel, by telling us it is: “The beginning
of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God.
2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my
messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And
people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were
going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing
their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s
hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild
honey. 7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more
powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the
thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water;
but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
I believe that in these
opening verses of Mark’s Gospel we are told how to prepare to follow Jesus.
Those steps of preparation are summarized in three key words, and the first
word is repentance.
But before we get to
that word, let’s take a closer look at how Mark leads into this. Mark says that
this is the beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The
word for “good news” in Greek often referred to some significant event that
made a change in world history, like the birth of the Roman Emperor Augustus.
The good news Mark is about to tell us is also world-changing because it is
about Jesus whose name means “Yahweh is salvation” or “Yahweh is victorious”.
The word “Christ” is a title and is a translation into Greek of the Hebrew word
“Messiah, which means “anointed one”. The Messiah was the long expected king of
the Jews who they hoped would deliver them from foreign domination. Mark also
lets us know from the get-go that Jesus is the Son of God—another Messianic
title among the Jewish people of that time.
Mark goes on to tell
us that God sent a messenger ahead of Jesus to prepare the way for him and that
messenger was John the Baptist. The focus of John’s message was repentance. He
preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
What is repentance? The word literally means a change of
mind. Repentance is a change of mind that results in a change in direction.
Behind this word lies
the whole story of the Exodus which was very familiar to the Jewish people in
John’s day—the story of how the Israelites were rescued from slavery in Egypt
and passed through the Red Sea on their way to the Promised Land. However,
instead of just telling about the Exodus as a story, John turned it into a sort
of drama. He was telling his listeners that they were the cast. They needed to
leave behind Egypt, come through the water and be free. John was telling his
people that they were looking in the wrong direction and that it was time for
them to turn around, to repent, and start following God.
What does repentance look like? It looks sort of like John’s
lifestyle. John was a man who truly embodied his own message. His life was a
protest against the lifestyles he saw all around him.
How so? Well, first,
John lived out in the wilderness.
William Barclay
informs us,
Between
the centre of Judaea and the Dead Sea lies one of the most terrible deserts in
the world. It is a limestone desert; it looks warped and twisted; it shimmers
in the haze of the heat; the rock is hot and blistering and sounds hollow to
the feet as if there was some vast furnace underneath; it moves out to the Dead
Sea and then descends in dreadful and unscalable precipices down to the shore….
John was no city-dweller. He was a man from the desert and from its solitudes
and its desolations. He was a man who had given himself a chance to hear the
voice of God.
Writer, theologian,
and one-time Harvard professor Henri Nouwen once broke away from his busy
schedule to live for six months in a monastery. Here is what he says about why
he did that:
I
realized that I was caught in a web of strange paradoxes. While complaining
about too many demands, I felt uneasy when none were made. While speaking about
the burden of letter writing, an empty mailbox made me sad. While speaking
nostalgically about an empty desk, I feared the day in which that would come
true.
In
short, while desiring to be alone, I was frightened of being left alone. The
more I became aware of these paradoxes, the more I started to see how much I
had fallen in love with my own compulsions and illusions, and how much I needed
to step back and wonder, ‘Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating
affirmations and rejections of my little world?’
I believe, along with
Henri Nouwen and many others, that the quiet stream of contentment is found in
Jesus. Periods of solitude are crucial to discovering it. I wonder: do we give
ourselves a chance to hear the voice of God? Do we have enough quiet space in
our lives to hear God whisper to us? Part of the problem with our contemporary
lifestyle is that it is too fast-paced. It is too busy. We don’t have time for
each other, let alone for God. I believe that part of living a life of
repentance involves saying no to the hectic pace of the world and carving out
time for God, time for quiet, time for silence. We may not be able to live in
the desert like John, or go to a monastery for six months like Henri Nouwen,
but by God’s grace we can carve out a few minutes every day to spend time alone
with God, to read Scripture, to pray.
Secondly, John lived out a protest
against the world of his day in what he wore. He wore a garment woven of camel’s hair and a leather belt
around his waist. These clothes were reminiscent of the clothing of the
prophets of old, like Elijah. John did not dress like the fashionable orators
of Rome or Greece. He dressed like one who was close to the great simplicities
of life, like one who avoided the softness of luxury.
John also lived out a protest in terms
of what he ate.
He followed the simplest of diets. He ate what he could find that was edible
out in the desert—locusts and wild honey. I wonder: do we live simple lives, or
are we constantly trying to fill our lives with luxuries that never satisfy?
John also lived out a lifestyle of
repentance in that he was humble.
He said that he was not fit to be the slave of the one coming after him, that
is Jesus. It was the job of a slave to stoop down and untie a guest’s sandals
when that guest entered a house after a dusty journey on the dirt roads of
Palestine. John said that he was not fit to do even that for the one coming
after him. And he was not exaggerating; he truly believed it.
Chuck Colson described the turning point in his life in a
book entitled, Born Again. Colson was
a lawyer who served as special counsel to Richard Nixon. After the Watergate
story broke, Colson went to meet with a friend of his, Tom Phillips, president
of Raytheon, at his home in the Boston area. Phillips shared with Colson how he
had decided to follow Christ at a Billy Graham Crusade in New York City where
my father had introduced him to Graham. Then Phillips confronted Colson about
how wrong the whole Watergate thing was. He said, “Chuck, I don’t think you
will understand what I’m saying about God until you are willing to face
yourself honestly and squarely. This is the first step.” Then Phillips reached
for a book—Mere Christianity by C. S.
Lewis—and he read Colson the chapter on The
Great Sin. Lewis wrote,
In God you come up against something
which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know
God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not
know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is
always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are
looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
Colson said, “Suddenly I felt naked and unclean, my bravado
defenses gone. I was exposed, unprotected, for Lewis’s words were describing
me. As he continued, one passage in particular seemed to sum up what had
happened to all of us at the White House:
For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats
up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Do we live lives of humility, simplicity and solitude? That
is the life of repentance in a nutshell, and repentance is the first step we
must take as we begin to follow Jesus.
The second step we must take is described in this passage
with the key word: confession. In
Mark 1:5 we read, “And people from the whole Judean
countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were
baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”
What does it mean to confess? The word
“confession” means “to say the same thing”. In other words, to confess is to
agree with God in his estimate of us when he says that we are sinners.
I love what Rick Warren says about this in his
book, The Purpose-Driven Life: “The
first building block of a deeper friendship with God is complete honesty—about
your faults and your feelings. God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, but he
does insist on complete honesty.”
Silent confession to God is often easier than
confessing our sins out loud to one another. But sometimes confession of sin to
one another is essential for healing. Often it is very helpful to confess your
sins to another brother or sister in Christ who is more mature than you.
Sometimes we just need to unburden ourselves before another human being who can
give us perspective on our situation. So often we feel alone in our sin, like
no one else has faced the temptations we have faced. But when we confess our
sins to a more mature brother or sister in Christ they can help us to see that
our temptations and sins are not uncommon. That mature brother or sister can
also pray for us and assure us of God’s forgiveness. I know this from
first-hand experience. I met with a priest every month for four years for
confession and spiritual direction. Furthermore, as a pastor I often have
people confess to me, and it is a joy to assure them of God’s forgiveness
through Christ.
That is why we have a time for confession of sin
in our worship service every Sunday. We need it. And we need the assurance of
God’s forgiveness.
The third key word when it comes to preparing to
follow Jesus is baptism. John
preached a baptism of repentance. He baptized people in the Jordan River. He
said, “I have baptized you with water; but he [the one coming after me] will
baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Baptism was a common rite for a non-Jew to
undergo when he or she wanted to become a Jew in the first century. What was
radical about John’s baptism was that he was asking Jews to be baptized. William Barclay explains, “John had made the
tremendous discovery that to be a Jew in the racial sense was not to be a
member of God’s chosen people; a Jew might be in exactly the same position as a
Gentile; not the Jewish life, but the cleansed life belonged to God.”
In John’s ministry, baptism was a visible sign
that a person had decided to change his or her life, give up a selfish way of
living and turn to God. However, John contrasts his baptism with the baptism
performed by the one coming after him.
What is the baptism of the Holy Spirit? Baptism simply means washing. So to be baptized with the Holy
Spirit means to be spiritually washed with the Holy Spirit of God just like
being physically washed with water.
In our study of Acts, we saw how Jesus said, in
Acts 1:5, “For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized
with the Holy Spirit.” The Church initially received the baptism of the Holy
Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. We read about this in Acts 2. However, today,
every believer in Jesus already has the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In fact, we
cannot believe in Jesus, we cannot confess and repent of sin without the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter
the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5) And
Paul says, “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to
Christ.” (Romans 8:9) Paul also says, “But when the kindness and love of God
our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done,
but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and
renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus
Christ our Savior.” (Titus 3:4-6)
So, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is something
we receive when the Holy Spirit first comes into us and makes us followers of
Jesus. It is not a second work of God’s grace that we must wait for or work
for. It is the gift of God’s grace. Without this baptism, we cannot confess, we
cannot repent, we cannot follow Jesus.
However, the Bible also talks about the filling of the Holy
Spirit. In Ephesians 5:18, Paul commands Christians to be filled with the
Spirit. We all need fresh doses of the Holy Spirit every day. Furthermore, we
need to repent and confess throughout our lives as Christians. These are not
just descriptions of how we begin to follow Jesus, they are descriptions of how
we continue to follow him as well.
More than 37,000 runners competed in the 2012 London
Marathon. Wilson Kipsang, from Kenya, won the race in an impressive two hours.
Simone Clarke took more than three times as long, but her finish was, I think,
more impressive.
Simone was a 39-year-old epileptic. Simone suffers about
four seizures per day, and so in 2012 she needed someone willing to train and
run with her. Her friend Tally Hall agreed to run the marathon with her, and
help her if she had a seizure while running. However, none of their training
runs prepared them for what was to come.
On the beautiful spring morning of the London Marathon,
Simone and Tally joined the tens of thousands at the starting point, and took
off as the gun sounded. For the first seven miles, everything went well. It was
at mile eight that pain from an ongoing stomach problem triggered Simone’s
first seizure. Tally caught Simone and got her safely to the ground. Simone was
unconscious for thirty seconds before Tally could rouse her. Then, remarkably,
Simone woke, got up, and started running again.
Over the next 18 miles, Simone had 19 more seizures, each
time collapsing and losing consciousness for 30 seconds or more. Each time,
Tally caught her, eased her to the ground, and protected her until she regained
consciousness. Each time, Tally helped Simone up, and they continued.
“By the time we got to 15 miles,” Simone said afterward, “I
was in tears because I was so annoyed we had lost the pace. But by that stage I
had already had lots of (seizures), and I was still standing, so I thought,
stuff it, I’m just going to finish it.”
Simone and Tally crossed the finish line in 6 ½ hours.[1]
I think that story provides a beautiful picture of what
following Jesus looks like. We may fall down countless times in our journey,
but that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether we get back up each time we
fall and continue the journey with the help of our constant companion who comes
alongside to help us: the Holy Spirit.
[1]
Dave Bolin, Gadsden, Alabama; source: Aidan Radnedge, “Epileptic runner Simone
Clarke: I had 20 fits but I still finished the marathon,” Metro UK (4/25/12)
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