Our Message and Our Mission
Mark 1:14-20
[Imperatives in this sermon:
1. Help people discover that the God who made us, the God who loves us, is powerfully real, powerfully present, powerfully relevant to the living of our lives.
2. Be sure that God is present in and through our lives.]
Scripture
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."
Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men." And immediately they left their nets and followed him.
And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
How I Got Into and Out of a Box
Through classes, commentaries, and fellow students at Vanderbilt Divinity School, intentionally or unintentionally, I was taught that Jesus and faith sometimes produced psychosomatic benefits and that these beneficial results were described as supernatural miracles by prescientific people. I was encouraged to believe that Jesus did not really cast out demons because there are no such things, but he calmed people down so that the demons they only imagined no longer disturbed them. I was taught that, when we speak of God, we are using human pictorial language to describe the basic realities of life, and we are to use this language to bring fulfillment to people. In other words, faith was reduced to therapy, and God was reduced to a therapeutic tool that we create and re-create in our own image to serve goals of our own choosing.
And thus prepared, I was sent out to minister in the name of a God who didn’t really do anything for us that we could not do for ourselves. I was never fully comfortable with this reduction of the faith, but I did not have an alternative to it. I graduated from seminary in 1974 and inflicted my inadequate training on those who chose me as their spiritual leader, such as Bethany Christian Church, Jackson, TN, and Pulaski Heights Christian Church, Little Rock, AR. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was not the first such leader they had experienced, and so I did not do fresh damage, but just re-plowed the old damage.
Beginning in December 1978, God began to show me that he still does all the sorts of things that are described in the Bible. I was a slow learner, but, over the next ten years, I saw people I knew miraculously healed and experienced a significant healing myself. I saw monetary and material needs miraculously supplied, complete with God’s unmistakable signature. I saw in others and experienced in my own life what could only have been the work of the Holy Spirit, revealing things that otherwise could not have been known. On several occasions, I received dreams, visions, and words from God that supplied essential guidance. God was breaking me out of the rationalist box I had allowed to be built around my spirit.
I began a thorough re-reading of the Bible from the perspective that I didn’t need to explain away any supernatural reality. I found that the Bible came alive for me. The ways I preached and taught dramatically changed. Congregations began to notice that I really believed in the God I proclaimed. They began to trust that they could expect results in their lives that were beyond their own abilities to achieve, that they could ask for supernatural help, that they could even talk about their religious experiences of a supernatural God. The main point of all that I was learning is that we do not need to be using our minds to explain away God: God reigns!
Jesus' Central Message
Interestingly, the main point I was learning was also the main point that Jesus spent his ministry demonstrating. When Jesus introduced his public ministry in Galilee, he expressed his central message as, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news.”
The time is fulfilled…
The people of God had just come through a period of several centuries when God, as a corrective against abuses of religious experience, had withdrawn the active work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit began to speak and to act again with the conceptions and births of John the Baptist and Jesus. Then there was another waiting period of about thirty years before the Spirit would fully show himself in the public ministry of Jesus. Jesus was saying that the time of waiting is over. The time for moving ahead in God’s power has arrived.
The kingdom of God is at hand…
The kingdom of God means the reigning power of God. For those with eyes of faith, the kingdom of God would begin showing up and become available through the ministry of Jesus. Jesus wanted people to know that they could be born of the Spirit so that they could see and enter the experience of God’s reign. Perhaps it had seemed that impersonal fate was in charge of their lives. Perhaps it had seemed that personal evil was in charge of their lives. Jesus was saying, “No! God is in charge of your lives, and you can experience that truth.”
Most specifically, in Matthew 12:28, Jesus said, “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God (the reigning power of God) has come upon you.” Where the signs of the kingdom are breaking out, then the kingdom is present, demanding a response.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;
Repent and believe the good news….
Repenting is not about making a long list of our sins and feeling sorry for them. Repenting is about making a U-turn, changing our whole way of thinking, living, and trusting to fit with the message of God’s reign. Repenting and believing are not different things, but just two sides of the same coin. We are not just repenting away from sin; we are repenting toward faith. We are repenting toward believing the good news of the kingdom of God and staking our whole lives on it. Faith in the kingdom is to be the foundational conviction on which we build our lives.
The Message Becomes a Mission
The central theme of Jesus’ ministry was, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe the good news.” Jesus lived in the power of God and then took that power with him as he walked amidst the crowded streets, across the dusty harvest fields, or along the teeming seashore. He took the reigning power of God into encounters with grieving widows, demoniac men, untouchable lepers, disreputable drunkards and prostitutes, self-satisfied religious leaders, struggling fishermen, enemy soldiers, revolutionary bandits, corrupt tax collectors, in short, into encounter with everyone he met.
When Jesus set out on a preaching mission, it was for the purpose of proclaiming the reign of God. When he healed people, it was to show God’s power to overcome disease. When he forgave people, it was to show God’s power to overcome sin. When he exorcized or delivered people, it was to show God’s power to overcome evil. When he challenged people to love their enemies, it was to show God’s power to overcome oppression. When he challenged people to give generously to the poor, it was to show God’s power to overcome scarcity. Everything Jesus did demonstrated the kingdom of God.
To the discouraged, Jesus brings encouragement. To the enchained, he brings liberation. To the dead, he brings new life. The point of all that he does is to show that the reigning power of God’s love is available in the midst of our lives.
When God's Reign Was Most Hidden and Most Clearly Revealed
Now, let’s be honest: the reign of God is often hidden in our experience. Jesus knew that. He said that it can be hidden like a mustard seed in the soil or like yeast in the flour, but it still does its work and becomes visible in time. The reign of God was never more hidden than when Jesus, the agent of the kingdom, was crucified. It looked like evil had won out. But the kingdom was never more clearly revealed than when God began to make death work backwards by raising his Son Jesus from the dead. Death, the last enemy of God’s reign, was thus revealed as ultimately defeated, and the kingdom of God, as ultimately victorious.
Calling Agents of the Mission, the Original Disciples and Us
As agent of the kingdom of God, Jesus called disciples. A disciple is a person under the discipline of a master-teacher. Jesus called disciples to become student missionaries under his direction.
We know from John’s Gospel (and last week’s sermon) that Andrew was previously a disciple of John the Baptist. It would not be surprising if his brother Simon Peter and fishing partners James and John were as well. John tells us of Jesus’ first acquaintance with the fishermen. Luke tells us that Jesus demonstrated his ability to fill their nets miraculously. Mark reports that he calls them from the nets and boats to follow him; they are to be apprenticed under Jesus to become fishers of their fellow human beings, bringing them into the experience of the kingdom of God.
When Jesus sent out his disciples to expand his ministry, he assigned them to preach the good news of the kingdom of God, and he gave them the same power he had to heal and deliver people.
Jesus wants us to have the same ability to engage in kingdom ministry. He will enable those of us who believe in him to demonstrate the reigning power of God as we proclaim the good news. This is not for our own glorification. It is so that people who are overwhelmed by the power of Satan, seduced by his glitzy temptations, intimidated by his worldly clout, undermined by his insidious reasoning, may have an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the otherwise unseen kingdom of God, and, thus, be delivered from Satan’s deceptions.
The goal of our ministry is to help people discover that the God who made us, the God who loves us, is powerfully real, powerfully present, powerfully relevant to the living of our lives. We can carry out this ministry only if God is powerfully present in our own experience.
Let me hasten to point out that the power of God’s reign is just as evident in extraordinary love and generosity as in miracles of healing and provision. Our job is not to decide for God how he will show his power, but to be willing instruments of whatever way he chooses to use us to show his power.
Decision Time
The four fishermen were working in a family business that involved catching, preparing, transporting, and marketing fish. I am sure that it was not easy for them to lay down their occupation and follow Jesus. It is likely that their businesses and all who were supported by their businesses sorely missed their labors.
Sooner or later, mission involves sacrifice. Jesus did not do a soft-sell on his mission. He demonstrated the reign of God and then challenged those who beheld the divine power to decide how they would adjust their lives to serve the kingdom. It does not always involve laying down occupations. Sometimes it involves transforming those occupations. Sometimes it involves how we use our leisure time.
Jesus comes to us today and awakens us to his supernatural presence. He wants us to venture forth in faith as apprentice missionaries. How will we respond?
Jesus wants us to respond by believing that God’s reigning power is at work in the world around us, that we can pray for the ability to see it and for the courage to join the action. If we will do that as a whole church, there is no telling what great thing might happen that would not happen otherwise.
You are welcome to use our resources in your work for Jesus. You may use them without charge so long as you are not charging others for the use to which you put them. We ask that you give published credit to the author and to www.Christviewmin.org for any such uses and that you leave the copyright notice attached. If you find material on this site helpful, please consider supporting Christview Ministries through donations and by buying resources from our Christview Ministries Store. ©Copyright 2006 Christview Ministries
All Rights Reserved