Obedient to the Mission

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Tonight we’re going to be in Mark chapter 1. You know, last night, I overheard my wife telling her mother, I’m telling you way too much about the conversations with my wife and her mother, aren’t I? She said something about that at lunch today.

You told them about what I said. I said, I just said you were a sympathetic mom. I put you in the best possible light.

I overheard Charla telling her mom that she would like to have some blinds on the front of the house that were younger than her and I. Because the ones that were there when we moved in are not. And I peaked my head around the corner.

I said, just half joking, I said, would you like to have some blinds for your anniversary? She said, yes, and can I have a storm door for Christmas? And I thought, where have you been all my life?

I love this. There are three pallets of laminate flooring sitting in our garage right now because one thing I promised her when we bought that house was we will redo all the flooring. Now, it may take me the 30 years that it takes to pay off the house to get it all done, But we’ll replace all the flooring because it’s different in every room and none of it matches.

And none of it’s the same height or the same decade. And with it not being the same height, we can’t even use her Roomba thing that I bought her years ago. And so we’ve got all that laminate flooring sitting out there.

The problem is that I looked at the instructions for the laminate flooring. And now I like to think I’m fairly handy, but I don’t have a master’s degree in engineering. All right.

I’m looking at those instructions for the laminate flooring, and I’m trying to read them, and I’m getting the dictionary, and I’m trying to translate from Chinese, and I’m trying to do all this stuff to figure out what I’m supposed to do with this flooring, and finally just said, I don’t think so. And that’s when my mother-in-law told me that her brother-in-law, Charlie’s uncle, had just redone the flooring in their house with very similar stuff, the same kind of stuff. And I said, I need to get in contact with him.

See, me looking at the instructions, I know in principle what I’m supposed to do. The flooring is there. It’s supposed to go on the floor, right?

I get the concept. I even get the concept from the instructions. You’re supposed to saw some things off and you’re supposed to snap some things together.

But looking at the diagrams, it’s just not clear to me. I need to see it. I need the example, right?

I need to follow the lead of somebody who’s done this before. In Mark chapter 1, as we’ve not made it very far into the book of Mark, we might make it through there within the 30 years that it takes me to pay off the house too. But in Mark chapter 1, as we’ve gone through this up to this point, one of the things that I’ve talked to you about is Jesus’ obedience to the Father.

Now, Jesus as God the Son is co-eternal and co-equal with God the Father in every way. And yet within the Trinity, there’s this hierarchy. It’s really beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

There’s this relationship where He demonstrated obedience to the Father. And He did it not just occasionally. He did it not just consistently.

He did it all the time. We talked about that with His baptism. We talked about that with several of the things that He’s done up to this point in Mark chapter 1.

It was the obedience that Jesus exhibited. And that’s important for us because He’s the example for us to look to and follow. So we read the scriptures and we read the rules, we read the principles that are in there, and we know, like reading the instructions, we know that we’re supposed to follow them, we know that we’re supposed to do those things.

It’s not always easy, is it? Anybody have an easy time, 100% of the time, following and obeying what God says? No?

All right. I was going to say, if hands go up, you’re already lying, so I know that’s one of the commandments. It’s not easy to do.

but we look at Jesus and we have that example to follow. Now it’s still not easy to do but we’ve seen it in action and tonight I want to look at one additional story that happened early on in Jesus’s ministry and there are a couple of principles actually it’s a collection of a few stories that center around a similar theme but we can look at these stories and we can learn some additional principles that we can use that might help us a little bit when the rubber meets the road to actually be obedient to what God’s given us to do. And so we’re going to look at that in Mark 1 tonight, starting in verse 29.

If you can turn there with me in your Scriptures, in your Bible, please do so. There’s a link in your bulletin, and then the verses will be on your screen for you. But if you’re able to, once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s Word together, we’re going to start in verse 29, Mark 1.

29, and we’re going to read through verse 39 tonight. It says, Now as soon as they had come out of the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. But Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick with a fever, and they told him about her at once.

So he came up and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and immediately the fever left her, and she served them. At evening, when the sun had set, they brought to him all who were sick and those who were demon-possessed, and the whole city was gathered together at the door. Then he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.

And he did not allow the demons to speak because they knew him. Do you remember a few weeks ago that the demons spoke up and said, I know who you are, called him by name and called him by title, Jesus of Nazareth and the Holy One of God? This time he just right off the bat wouldn’t even let the demon open its mouth.

Verse 35, now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, he went out and departed to a solitary place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him. When they found him, they said to him, Everyone is looking for you.

But he said to them, Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also, because for this purpose I have come forth. And he was preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee and casting out demons. And you may be seated.

So Jesus was consistently obedient to the Father. And when I say consistently, earlier I said it wasn’t just consistently. You know, I can be fairly consistent at something and it’s still not be all the time.

When I say Jesus was consistent in obeying the Father, I mean every single time. You look at anything He did and it was done out of obedience to the Father. And not just His actions were obedient, but His attitude was obedient as well.

If you’ve ever raised a child, or actually if you’ve ever been a child, you know the difference between the two, right? You can outwardly be obedient, but inwardly be rebellious. I don’t know how many times I was told to do something as a child and outwardly said, yes, ma’am, and inwardly, because I’d have been knocked across the room if I’d done it outwardly, but inwardly I’m rolling my eyes.

And even today, we can do something that God says to do and we can do it grumbling about it the whole time. But Jesus doesn’t do that at any point. In every instance, He is not only obedient outwardly to the Father, But his spirit is willing.

He is inwardly obedient. And so he’s going about doing the things that the Father sent him to do. Carrying out the mission that the Father sent him for.

Jesus was on a mission. And so he taught. We see this leading into verse 29.

The last time we were together on a Sunday night, we talked about him casting out demons in the synagogue. He had been there teaching. And again, I think I told you this then.

I’m puzzled by how all these religious leaders were teaching for who knows how long in the synagogue. And there’s a demon right in their midst who’s not bothered by their religion at all. But Jesus shows up and begins to teach the truth of God’s Word and suddenly they can’t handle it.

They start screaming. There is a broad difference. There’s a wide difference between religion and the truth of God’s Word.

They are not exactly the same thing. So Jesus has gone and He’s taught in the synagogue and that’s where we pick up at verse 29 as soon as they had come out of the synagogue, they left there and this is how we know that Jesus and his disciples were Baptists because they left church and they went to go eat. Right?

That’s a joke. It’s all right. You can laugh at that.

They went to Peter’s house with Andrew and James and John, the five of them and whoever else were with them, they went. But when they got there, they found that Peter’s wife, his mother-in-law was sick with a fever. We don’t know exactly what kind of disease she had, But in that day and age, any kind of sickness you had was serious.

I mean, you couldn’t just run down to urgent care and get a course of antibiotics. You pretty much had to treat the symptoms as best you could and let nature take its course and pray that God showed favor to you. And so she was in a bad situation.

And Jesus came and He took her by the hand and He lifted her up and immediately the fever left or the fever broke, which is impressive in and of itself that Jesus was able to deliberately to heal her, deliberately to break her fever. That’s impressive enough. But it says after that, she got up and served them.

I don’t think Jesus made her do that. But if you’ve ever been sick like that, especially if you’ve been sick with a fever, you know it just drains the life out of you, right? You’re just exhausted.

And even once that fever breaks, I remember the last time I had a stomach bug and missed on a Sunday morning back in the spring. I knew when I was done being sick, I was sitting there in the bathroom floor, and I felt the fever break, and I knew, I don’t know how I knew this other than experience, I just knew, hey, no more throwing up, we’re done. But I felt like I wrung out sponge, okay?

I was exhausted. You’ve all been there. The thought of, it was all I could do to get up and get dressed in real clothes, because I knew I’d feel, I can’t just lay around in pajamas, I knew I’d feel better with some real clothes on, and go sit on the couch and watch church with you all.

Even when I was sick, I got dressed up for church. Went downstairs. But the thought of getting up and doing anything for anybody that day, that was out of the question.

And for a few days after that, I was just exhausted. You’ve all been in situations like that where you’ve been sick, and you know you don’t just get over it like that. I don’t think it was, I know you’ve been sick and probably need your rest, but we could use some refills over here.

No, she just felt good. Jesus not only healed her in the sense of breaking the fever, but Jesus restored her to perfect health. to where she got up and went about serving the meal. It’s incredible.

So he went and he taught the sick. He healed people. He cast out demons.

We see this again. As people showed up at the house, as people showed up wherever he was, word got out. Word got out.

They began showing up at the house. People that were sick and they were being healed. People that were possessed by demons were being set free.

He was doing all the things that the Father had sent him to do and then he would teach some more. So you will see through this that Jesus used that. Jesus wasn’t here to put on a religious magic show and draw an audience to seeing what incredible thing he’s going to do next.

He was using that as a springboard. Yes, he cared about the people. Can’t minimize that.

He cared about the people. Because if it was just about drawing a crowd, he could have done it in some other way. If I’m not mistaken, the Jesus of the Koran would make birds out of clay and then make them come to life, something like that.

The Jesus of the Bible, if he just wanted to draw a crowd, he could have done something else. But he cared enough about the people to actually meet their needs and actually heal them and take care of them. But he was also using that.

It wasn’t just a free clinic he was running here. He was using that as a springboard to be able to preach to them and share with them the cure for what ailed their souls. And so all of this, he was fulfilling the mission of the Father to come and preach the coming of the kingdom.

And as he does this, we see that he goes away for a bit to pray because he needed that time in prayer. And even then they come and find him and say everybody’s waiting. And he says it’s about time to go on to the next town then.

And it’s a puzzling response until you realize what he’s doing. Until you realize that all of this is just him being obedient. And there are really two things that I see in here.

There may be more, but there are two that I see in here that we can apply in our daily lives to try to help us be more obedient. Two things that Jesus does that I think we can learn from. The first thing is that He has prayerful preparation.

He wasn’t about to go out for another day, another action-packed day full of ministry, without spending some time in prayer, communing with His Father. It says in verse 35, In the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place, and there He prayed. Knowing that there was still work to do, Jesus made time for prayer.

And sometimes we think that, I just don’t have time to slow down and pray. I’m too busy. I’ve got too much to do.

That’s exactly when we need to pray the most. I haven’t read it, but if the book itself is as good as the title, it’s got to be a great book. But there’s a book out there called Too Busy Not to Pray. Again, sometimes when I’m less busy, I need to read the book.

But I like the premise of the title. So I find I start out with a list of things to do for the day and a list of things to do for the week, and it seems overwhelming. And one of those things is prayer.

I put on the list to spend some time in prayer because I know it’s too easy to go without it. And you can easily get to all the other things you need to do and say, well, I’ll pray later when I have time. And you’ll end up chasing that 15 minutes all day long until the day’s gone.

But somehow when you say the rest of that stuff can wait, I’m going to spend the time in prayer and I’m going to go to God before I try to deal with all this stuff and I’m going to prepare myself by dealing with Him. Somehow or another, the time in our day stretches to deal with all the rest of that stuff. Or God changes our priorities where we realize half the stuff on the list isn’t that important anyway.

Somehow or another, it just works better when we spend that time in prayer. But the reason for it is not even just pragmatism of saying you get more stuff done. The reason for it is that we need it.

We were created for fellowship with God. Just like we were created to need other things too. We are created to need food and water.

And we can push ourselves and say, I don’t have time for food and water. That’s going to go real well. I did that a little bit yesterday.

Had a lot of stuff I needed to get done in the yard. Six to eight weeks of running around keeping all the girls in my family healthy and taken care of with all the surgeries and childbirth and everything can lead to a lot of neglect in the yard. I about needed a machete to go out in my yard.

So I went out yesterday and I said, I’ve got all this stuff to do. Charlo reminds me all the time. It’s hot.

Drink water. I will. I will.

But I’ve got to go. Got to go. And I was running and going until about 1.

30 and I just hit a wall. I thought I was going to die. I had to come in and drink water and I was shaky the rest of the night.

See, I was created to need water. And I can try to deny that need and push on without it, but if that need’s not met, I’m not getting anywhere I want to be. Folks, we were created to need fellowship with God.

Now, Jesus was not created, but as the eternal Son of God who has always had fellowship with the Father, He wasn’t about to try to go on a day of ministry, on a day of fulfilling the Father’s will, without spending that time in the morning, first thing, fellowshipping with his father, preparing himself spiritually for all the things that he had to do with the day. He made it a priority. He found a good time and a good place and he went there to prepare himself in that way.

And that’s one of the things that we need to do. If we’re finding that we’re having trouble being obedient, and if we find that we’re having trouble being obedient to the father in both ways that I’ve already mentioned, both outwardly with the things we’re doing, but sometimes it’s even harder to be obedient inwardly with the way we feel about it. And if we’re finding that it’s hard to be obedient to the Father, the answer just might lie in our need for prayerful preparation.

Our need to not just make the relationship with the Father about all the stuff we’re doing for Him, but let the stuff we’re doing for Him be an outgrowth of the relationship. It’s no way to run a marriage to just say, here’s my list of stuff to do, here’s your list of stuff to do, we’re just going to make sure all the stuff gets done and become more like roommates. There’s no way to run our relationship with God either.

Where we focus on the stuff. No, Jesus went and focused on the relationship first. And if Jesus needed this time in prayer, no matter what anybody else around Him thought, because you see in verse 36, there were other people who thought there were much more pressing priorities. Why are you out here praying?

Everybody in town is waiting for you. No matter what anybody else thought, Jesus saw this as the priority. And if Jesus needed this time in prayer to prepare Himself, if Jesus saw this time of preparation with the Father as so important that it needed to come first, if Jesus needed it, what makes me think that I’m so super spiritual and so strong that I can do without it?

You see what I’m saying? If Jesus needed it, how much more do we need it? So again, if you find yourself having trouble being obedient or feeling obedient, go back and start by preparing yourself in that time with the Father.

Working on the relationship. Get up early if that’s what works for you. stay up late if that’s what works for you find a quiet place people have laughed at me in the past but I’ve said some of my best times with jesus have been have been at sonic but I’ve been known to say I’ll be back in just a little bit I’m going to sonic and some of those trips are just for me to go sit there and have a diet dr pepper and talk to the lord where nobody’s screaming at me and nobody wants anything find what works for you it may be your dining room table before everybody gets up in the morning.

It may be going to your car during your lunch break. Set aside some time to prepare yourself for what He’s given you to do by spending the time with Him. And then the other thing I see tonight in this passage that Jesus had that would benefit us in our need to be obedient to what He’s given us to do is He had fervent focus.

He had this laser-like focus. You could not distract Jesus. It’s one of the things I love that I see from Him throughout the gospel stories.

You could not distract him and get him off message or off mission. The woman at the well, I believe it was, tried to throw all sorts of theological red herrings at him. Well, what mountain are we supposed to worship on?

What about marriage? What about they throw out all kinds of things? But Jesus always came and focused right back in on her spiritual issue.

The very thing she was trying to distract him from. Now, this is important because I can be easily distracted. Many times I walk into my kitchen and say, what did I come in here for?

Charla asked me about an email from the school and it took me last night three hours to remember that’s what I was trying to do. I kept coming back to it to look it up on the computer and then something else would happen. I’m easily distracted.

Jesus was not. There were all sorts of things vying for his attention in these stories that we’ve just looked at. And I say these stories, it all happened in about a 24-hour period or less.

But there were all sorts of things popping up wanting his attention. When they found him, he’s out praying. When they found Him in verse 38, they said to Him, that’s His disciples, everybody is looking for you.

Everyone is looking for you. But He said, let us go into the next towns that I may preach there also. Because for this purpose I have come for.

Think about that for a minute. Everybody has come out to see what you’re going to do next. Master, you have drawn such a crowd.

Master, you are popular. The people love you. The people want to see you.

And He says, His answer is, Yeah, I think it’s time we move on to the next town. Again, that seems like such a strange thing that Jesus would duck out on the people that were looking for him until we clarify what exactly was going on here. Now, a lot of times throughout Jesus’ ministry, people were excited about the fringe benefits.

The people followed him after the feeding of the 5,000 because, hey, that’s pretty impressive. He’s making food appear out of nowhere and he’s feeding us. Youth ministers have known this trick for decades.

You throw out a bunch of pizza and you can get teenagers to show up for a little while, right? Jesus pioneered that. They showed up because they wanted to see what He was going to feed them or what He was going to say next, what He was going to do next.

It was a matter of curiosity. It was something that tickled their curiosity. The people were excited about the miracles and they wanted to see more.

Some of them wanted Jesus because they wanted to be healed and some of them wanted to see what He might heal today. What demon he might cast out? What might the demon say?

What’s it going to look like? This was the reality television of the first century. And people were looking for a show.

These miracles though, the reason for these miracles was not for Jesus to get famous. Jesus was not doing these things so that people would come watch his show. There was the matter of him being compassionate toward the people, but his main reason was for the opportunity to tell them about their even greater need.

which was their need to be made right with God. And so he had done that. And now the lure of fame and popularity was knocking at the door and most of us would fall for it.

They love you. They want to see you. You’re the head of Capernaum.

And Jesus says, no, I’ve already preached here. It’s time to go on to the little villages. I mean, this is the big city.

Jesus has made the big time as far as they’re concerned. In this line of work, he said, no, let’s go out to the little country towns where the people haven’t heard. It was time to continue His work, not what they thought was important, not what seemed exciting, but what the Father had given Him, which was to preach the kingdom to as many people as possible.

And He said, my work here is done for the moment. It’s time to move on. And folks, we can easily become distracted.

We can even become distracted by good things. I had a friend in Arkansas who said all the time that the good is the enemy of the best. He said it’s easy to. .

. What he meant by that is it’s easy to get distracted by good things even to the point that we ignore what the best thing is that God wants us to do. See, we think of things that keep us from doing God’s will as bad things.

But even good things can distract us. It would not have been a bad thing for Jesus to heal more people in Capernaum, would it? I mean, if Jesus was doing it, it’s not a bad thing.

He can’t sin. For Him to heal people and work miracles and bring glory to God would not have been a bad thing. But the best thing was for him to focus on the mission the Father had given him.

And his work there was done for them. So it was time to move on. We can get distracted to the point that we are not being obedient to what God’s given us to do.

And the way to get around that, the way to prevent that, is to keep reminding ourselves what he’s given us to do. I have heard the term mission creep so many times this week as we’ve looked at the debacle, the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan. And I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on politically.

It’s a tragedy to see what’s happening to so many lives there. But I’ve heard this term mission creep thrown around in discussions of what it is we’re doing there in the first place. Some of you who’ve served in the military are familiar with this term probably more than I am.

But it’s this idea that we start out going into a battle or going into a conflict and this is our mission. This is our stated goal. This is why we’re here. This is why we’re attacking.

This is why we’re occupying. This is why we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing. And mission creep is the idea that over time, that starts to evolve.

And where we were there for one reason to begin with, now maybe we’re there for another reason. Maybe we’re there for additional reasons. Maybe it transforms completely.

That’s why the discussion is, were we just in Afghanistan for counterterrorism? Or was it nation building? Was it both?

Was it something else? And how did that change over time? That’s the idea of mission creep.

Folks, we are susceptible to the same thing in our Christian service, in our mission of obedience to God. We can start out doing one thing that He’s called us to do and end up doing something else because we got distracted. We can end up even doing something else good because we got distracted.

Now, I’m not talking about God’s called you to another mission. That’s a different story. If God’s calling you to do this now, don’t let the fact that He called you to do this over here keep you from being obedient now.

But if what God has told us to do hasn’t changed, If God said do this three weeks ago, and we started out doing this, but now we’ve gotten distracted by every shiny object out here, that’s a problem. Jesus could have been distracted, theoretically, by the shiny object of popularity and fame and adulation. Or better said, I could have if I’d been in this situation.

But Jesus wasn’t. God the Son knew exactly what the mission was that He’d been sent there for. And when He was faced with the proposition of should I do this or should I do that?

Should I stay in Capernaum or should I go out to the villages? What was his answer? Look at verse 38.

Let us go into the next towns that I may preach there also because for this purpose I have come forth. His determining factor was not, does this seem like a good idea? Is this what I want to do?

Does this seem like it would work? When he went back to, what has the Father given me to do? Folks, that’s something we need to ask ourselves.

We need to ask ourselves that routinely. If we struggle with being obedient, if we struggle with staying in obedience, we need to ask ourselves, what is it that the Father has given me to do? Now, our mission may change from time to time.

Whatever the last thing is He’s given us to do, that’s what we need to be obedient to. That’s what Jesus was doing. What has the Father given me?

This is the purpose for which I’ve come for. And so tonight, these are the two things that I wanted to share with you, the two principles that I feel like we can learn from this passage from looking at Jesus’ example. When it comes to obedience to the Father, what are some of the things that are going to help us be obedient?

Jesus spent time preparing in prayer. Spent time working on the relationship and getting on the same page with the Father. And then He stayed focused.

He stayed focused. Asked Himself, what is it the Father sent me to do? And that’s what He did.

Now, as I say all the time, you and I will never be perfect on this side of eternity. We will never be perfectly obedient. But I think if we’ll follow Jesus’ example, Jesus’ example in these two areas.

It’ll help us be a lot more obedient than we would be on our own.