Who Are My Brothers?

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

In preparation for tonight’s message, I did some research online this week about how one might stage an intervention if they had somebody in their family who needed an intervention. Because I don’t have any first-hand experience with this, so I needed to get familiar with the concept. And there are tons and tons of websites out there that will tell you how to stage an intervention.

You know what I mean? Somebody in your family has got a problem and you’ve decided it’s gone on far enough, so you’re all going to get together and intervene. So there are websites that will walk you through this step by step.

Now, I don’t know that they’re all equally reputable, but they’re out there. And there are all sorts of tools where you can find out if one’s even needed. You can do an assessment.

They’ve got questionnaires whether you or somebody in your family needs an intervention. And not to make too much light of it, but I discovered that I do. need an intervention on one of these questionnaires.

If you change drugs and alcohol to Kit Kats, I have a problem, right? And Charla, I’m assuming you’re watching. Please hide the kids’ Halloween candy before I get home.

I’m begging you. All right. They got all this candy at Fall Festival and it’s been disappearing slowly, but surely, or not so slowly.

But there are all these tools out there you can assess. And it’s not just substance abuse. There’s all sorts of that you can stage an intervention if a family member is struggling with a problem.

And these websites, like I said, they’ll give you step-by-step directions in how to figure out whether you even need to do this, how to get professional help, how to come up with a plan, how to set boundaries with this family member, how to follow up. They’ll walk you through it piece by piece. And I think it’s important information because it’s a challenging process.

It’s certainly not something that if you came to me and said, hey, we need to step in with a family member who’s dealing with this, it’s not something I would know off the top of my head how to do. And so it’s good that there’s that information out there, but I didn’t realize what an ordeal this was. And apparently there’s some show, because I kept running across clips of a show when I would Google intervention.

So some of you may be more familiar with this than I am and realize what an ordeal it can be. Now, the reason I went and looked up interventions is because in the passage we come to in Mark tonight, as we’re going through the book of Mark on Sunday nights, the passage we come to tonight in the book of Mark, that’s basically what Jesus’ family was trying to do was stage an intervention. Now, Jesus didn’t need an intervention.

Jesus was not, Jesus was in full control here. But his family, I think, had probably honorable motives, but they were terribly misguided about what they were doing. But they looked at Jesus and they saw what was going on.

They saw some of the events that we’ve been talking about in previous Sunday nights that were going on in his life and his ministry. And they thought, we ought to step in and do something. We ought to talk to him.

He’s got a problem here. And so when you understand from that perspective that that’s what they’re doing. They didn’t have the terminology for interventions back then.

But when you look at it from that perspective and realize that that’s what they’re doing, suddenly this story takes on some life that it wouldn’t necessarily have had if I’m just reading over. I told you one of the benefits of doing this study with you is that it’s forcing me to take what’s going on in Jesus’ life in the book of Mark, piece by piece, in order. And when you see how all these things fit together, The story comes to life.

It’s not just isolated bits of the text that we’re looking at. Tonight we’re going to be in Mark chapter 3. Mark chapter 3, we’re going to look at two sections of the text because there’s a section in the middle here in between them thinking, hey, we need to intervene, and them actually going and doing it, where Jesus has another run-in with the Pharisees, which we’ll talk about not next week because we won’t have an evening service next week, but after that we’ll come back and talk about his showdown with the Pharisees again.

But we’re going to be in Mark chapter 3. We’re going to start in verse 20. If you’d turn there with me in your Bibles tonight, if you are using a device, there’s a link in our bulletin that’ll get you right there.

It’ll be on the screen if you don’t have any of those available to you, and if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s Word, if you’re able to. Mark chapter 3, verses 20 and 21. Let’s start there.

It says, Then the multitude came together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. But when his own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of him, for they said, he is out of his mind. And we’re going to skip ahead to verse 31.

We’ll come back and pick up at verse 22 next time. Verse 31 says, then his brothers and his mother came and standing outside, they sent to him calling him and a multitude was sitting around him. And they said to him, look, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.

But he answered them saying, who is my mother or my brothers? And he looked around in a circle at those who said about him and said, here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and mother.

And you may be seated. Now remember what’s been going on up to this point. Jesus has been beginning his ministry.

He’s there to teach about the coming of the kingdom of God. He’s there to prepare the way to go to the cross. And this following develops as he uses miracles as a way to get people’s attention and draw them in so that they will hear what it is, the truth that he wants to share with them about God’s kingdom.

And this crowd has developed around him just because they want to see the miracles. They want to see the show. And so at times, Jesus will withdraw from the crowds.

We looked at that a couple weeks ago, where Jesus just left the crowds behind, not that He didn’t care. But Jesus had to gauge his popularity because they, Jesus knew as well as they did that they were looking for an earthly Messiah, somebody who was going to boot out the Romans and who was going to usher in a new golden age for Israel. They were looking for a political leader.

They were looking for a military leader. They were looking for somebody charismatic. And if they tried to put him in that position, that got in the way of him coming to be crucified, which was his ultimate goal was the cross.

And so Jesus would have to draw back from the crowds a little bit, and yet still the crowds would find out where he was, and they would pack in, and it says that the crowds gathered, and they were so dense that they could not even eat bread. And what I picture here is going to the football games when I was in high school. They had something called Moore War, where Moore High School and Westmore High School would meet up once a year and battle it out, and there would be something like, I don’t know, 20,000 people in the stadium for that game.

And if you made the stupid decision to say, I’m going to go to the concession stand, you might miss a whole quarter because you’re going to be in a line like this. You cannot move your arms. That’s what I’m picturing when it says they cannot eat bread. That’s the only reason I can think of why they can’t eat bread because they’re so densely packed in there that there’s no room to do that.

And so they’re here. Jesus is taking an opportunity to teach again. And the fact that these crowds are gathered around him, Jesus is having these disputes, these public disputes with the Pharisees.

And the crowds are crowding in wanting to see a show. And it just seems to his family to be a bit much. And so they come and try to intervene.

They think he’s lost his mind. They say that in verses in verses 20 and 21, or verse 21, he’s out of his mind. I’d never noticed that verse before, probably last year.

I think I talked to you about that song, Mary, Did You Know? And I told you, that verse makes me suspect she didn’t, because his family thought he was crazy. Maybe they thought he was crazy from being overworked, and so they decided they were going intervene and they showed up.

They showed up while he’s there teaching, while he’s there disputing with the Pharisees. He’s doing what he’s supposed to do and they show up and they demand an audience with him. And he uses that as an opportunity to teach them and teach those people who were following him about proper priorities in God’s kingdom, which is what we’re going to look at tonight.

And one thing we need to understand going through this is that Israel’s blood relationships were incredibly important to them. It’s no wonder that his family would show up. His family, I’m sure, was keeping close tabs on him.

Family meant more to them than it sometimes does in our culture. Their blood relationships were central to their national identity. I mean, they were the 12 tribes, 12 big families, and everybody knew what family they came from.

They were central to their personal identity, their spiritual identity. If you met somebody, you would say, I am so-and-so of so-and-so, they needed to understand where, to identify you, they needed to understand where you stood in the social order. And it was central to their spiritual identity as well, because they thought they had a close relationship with God just because of the family they were born into, just because of their descent, because they were Israelites, because they were descendants of Abraham.

That’s how they fit into the covenant. And so this idea of their blood relations and their kinship, That was central to everything they knew about themselves. Nothing seemed to matter more to the people of Israel than their family connections.

It was such a big deal. We see instances in the Old Testament where if a man died without having children, one of his brothers had to marry his widow and have children with her to carry on the family line, where those were legally the dead brother’s children. I mean, they took this stuff seriously. And so Jesus’ family felt responsible for him.

They showed up thinking he’s in over his head, he’s in too deep. They felt like they knew best what Jesus needed. And so they showed up.

It says in verse 21 that when his family, his people, so it may not be limited to just his family, but his people that could be his extended family, that could be the village where he grew up. When word got back to Nazareth, what was going on with Jesus, his family thought he was out of his mind. And they went to lay hold of him.

That means they went to get him. And when they went to get him, presumably they were going to bring him back. That was their intention.

And now in our culture, if the family says, you know what, the direction you’re headed is dangerous. You’re coming with us. Most people would say, who are you to decide that?

If I want to do this job, if I want to live in this city, if I want to run around with these people, that’s my business. And who are you to say anything about it? But in cultures like this one, if the family has spoken, that’s pretty much it.

And so they come to Jesus and they want to bring him home. They saw the audience flocking to him for a show. They saw the crowds there.

They thought Jesus had gone crazy and they came to take him home. And because of the importance of the family relationships, they thought they were entitled to an audience. To an extent, I think their hearts were in the right place, but they show up not caring what Jesus is in the middle of doing.

I mean, to us, that seems pretty bold. The Son of God is in there teaching, and you’re going to show up at the door. They don’t even come in.

It reminds me of the one year I was in Cub Scouts, and my dad didn’t get along with the Cub Scout leader. And I remember him showing up at the door of the meeting to pick me up a little early. I think there was a family emergency.

He didn’t come in. He stood at the door and said, you send him out. They don’t even come in.

They just stand at the door and they say, send Jesus out. And so somebody sends word that your family is standing out here. They showed up interrupting his teaching and demanding to see him with no real consideration about what he was doing.

What he was doing was not important to them because, again, they thought he was crazy. The family had decided. And it was the family.

It was the blood. It was the kindred. That was what was important.

And in a culture like this, the family was well within its rights to intervene. when they thought somebody was out of control when they thought somebody was off the rails it was expected that the family would step in as a matter of fact maybe not to this extent where the family controls what you do but I think we could we could stand in our culture to go back to that a little bit where the family steps in and keeps each other in line but that’s a that’s a message for another night but what I want you to understand is they they come from a different culture than we do and so it’s not just them showing up and saying, hey, we want to have a word with you. It’s one of those situations where when the family speaks, that’s it.

It’s over with. It was expected, I think, that he was going to go with them. And that’s what makes Jesus’ next question so shocking for the audience.

He says in verse 33, who is my mother or my brothers? Now, Jesus has not forgotten who his mother and brothers are. This is not confirmation of their theory that he’s out of his mind.

He’s asking a question as he so often did. He’s asking a question he knew the answer to, to set the stage to make a point, much like I do with my children. They have learned and we remind them all the time.

When we ask you a question in a certain tone of voice, we already know the answer, so don’t try to lie to us. Kind of like a prosecutor, don’t ask questions you don’t already know the answer to. He asked them a question he already knew the answer to because he was going someplace with this.

He was trying to make a point. And what his point was, his point was not that he was confused. His point was that our family connections do not connect us to God.

That’s sort of at the heart of what he says to them about his family. Jesus acknowledged that there was a close bond between himself and the members of his family, but when he asked, who are my brothers and my mother? He was pointing out that they didn’t really understand who that family was, that there close connection with.

There was a close connection between him and his family, but it wasn’t the family that they thought. It was his followers. It was those whose bond with Jesus was rooted in spiritual truth rather than physical birth.

Now, I want to be very clear here. Jesus never intended to diminish the importance of the family. This is not Jesus saying, turn your back on your family.

Some people will read that from when Jesus said, unless you hate your mother and father, you cannot love me. Jesus was not telling us literally to hate our parents or anybody else in our family. He was not, when he told Peter, or I may be mixing two stories up here, but when he told somebody, let the dead bury their dead and you come follow me, he was not saying, neglect all your family responsibilities.

When he said, you must hate your father and mother, what he’s saying is that you must love him with a love that makes every other love look like hate in comparison. And in saying, let the dead bury their dead, somebody was merely using that as an excuse to delay following him. It wasn’t saying that he couldn’t deal with his family issues, but Jesus, like the rich young ruler who wouldn’t give up his money, knew that that was what stood in between him and following Jesus.

And so he was pointing it out. When Jesus says here, who are my mother and brothers, he’s not saying the family doesn’t matter. There is simply too much in Scripture that emphasizes the family.

Their importance that they placed on the family didn’t arise out of a vacuum. It was largely rooted in what God had said in the Old Testament law about the family. Jesus isn’t here reversing the order that God set up.

Instead, he’s making a point that, yes, the family is important. As important as the family is, though, as important as it’s ever been portrayed in Scripture, there’s a spiritual bond that’s even more important. So yes, the family’s important, but these spiritual ties were even more so.

I was incredibly proud when each of my children were born. I was just in love with them. But one of the most exciting things in my entire life, with the older two so far, was when I was no longer limited just to seeing them as my son and my daughter, but also being able to call them my brother and my sister.

Because in Christ, we had a different bond now when the older two came to know Jesus as their Savior. And I look forward to the day when the younger three become my brother and sisters as well. The family is incredibly important, but there’s a spiritual bond that matters even more because it’s not the physical birth that connects us to God.

It’s not the physical family that connects us to God. My children do not get extra credit toward their eternal salvation because they’re a pastor’s kid. If your parents served in the church somewhere, if your dad was a pastor, your grandpa was a deacon, your mom taught Sunday school, that doesn’t get you extra credit in the kingdom.

That does not get you any closer to a relationship with God than anybody else. Now, you may have the benefit of being taught earlier on about how to have a relationship with him, but just the mere fact of your physical birth does not connect you to God in a special way. And that was a truth that Israel was going to have to learn as well.

That the lesson they should have learned from Abraham was not that it was their DNA, although they didn’t have that term then, it was not their physical birth and their physical blood descent from Abraham that connected them with God, because it wasn’t anything physical about Abraham that connected him with God. It says Abraham was justified by faith. He believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

For Israel to be connected with God, they weren’t going to come through Abraham, they were going to come to God the same way Abraham did through faith, an individual relationship with him. And so understand, and I’ve probably spent too much time on this, but some things I want to be very clear on. He was not saying family doesn’t matter.

This is not an excuse for Christians to go out and neglect their families. Family is incredibly important in scripture. There’s just a bond that matters even more.

And so it was a way of explaining to them how important this spiritual community was that he was building that would later become the church, how important it was that he was taking the single most important institution in their daily lives and saying, this is even more important than that. He looked around in a circle, verse 34 says, at those who sat about him and said, here are my mother and my brothers. When he refers to people sitting around him in a circle, this is not just the crowd.

These are his followers. These are the 12 and maybe a few others who were among his close followers. These were the people who were sitting at his feet to learn from him and trying to pattern their lives after him.

These are the people who didn’t just look at him as a miracle worker, but called him rabbi, called him teacher and master. These were the people who had already begun to devote their lives to him. And he said, these are my mother and my brothers.

And by the way, that didn’t have to exclude his physical mother and brothers because they could become part of this group as well. And later on, they did. Later on, they went from being skeptical about Jesus to believing him.

Two of the books of our Bible were written by half-brothers of Jesus who initially thought he was crazy until he rose from the dead. And then they were convinced. He looked around in the circle and he said, these are my mother and brothers.

This is the connection that matters. Jesus’s family and so many others around him, They believe they had a unique connection to God because of their physical birth, because of their genealogical background, because they were Israelites. But Jesus emphasizes something else here.

He emphasizes submission to God. He emphasizes obedience. I like the word submission, though, because we can be obedient on the outside without being obedient on the inside.

I know because I used to do it all the time as a kid. Fine, Mom, I’ll clean my room. Outwardly being obedient, inwardly just as rebellious as could be.

He looked at these people who were in submission to God’s will and said, these are my mother and my brothers. It wasn’t our family connections that connect us to God. Our submission to the Father, however, demonstrates our connection to Him.

He says in verse 35, whoever does the will of God is my brother and my mother and my sister. Whoever does the will of God. Who am I really connected to?

Who am I really bound to? He said, it’s those who do the will of God. What is his will?

Now, we could make this about a list of do’s and don’ts. We could make this about the law. But there’s too much clear teaching in the New Testament that says, God knew all along that we never could follow the law.

Galatians talks about the law being a schoolmaster that leads us to Christ. Galatians is the, I’m sorry, the law is the you must be this holy to enter in sign. Like at a theme park, you must be this tall to ride this ride, and none of us are tall enough. God’s will that we are expected to do is to repent and believe.

That’s what it means to obey the gospel. Because our obedience in the sense of just doing what the law says, doing good things, that’s not enough to make us his brother or his sister or his mother. None of us come into a relationship with God on the basis of our good works.

All the good works we could ever perform are never enough. Obedience is something that’s vital. Submission to God is something that’s vital in the sense of going out and following what he says. That’s vitally important, but it’s not a recipe for how to become a child of God.

It’s an indication of how you spot a child of God. So when he says, those who do the will of God are my brother and sisters and mother, he’s not saying the people who do these things become those things. He’s saying the people that do the will of God do the will of God because they are my brothers and sisters and mother.

That’s how you’ll know them. Those who received Christ as their Savior and consequently follow Him. Those who because of that relationship seek to live in obedience to Him, which by the way is only possible through Him because the Holy Spirit comes to take up residence inside of us.

Those who have a relationship with Jesus Christ and strive to follow him because of that relationship, we are demonstrating the relationship by that obedience. Whereas many in Israel, including some in the room that he’s talking to, the Pharisees, who I don’t think were sitting at his feet learning, but many in that room were only concerned with outward obedience toward God. Just checking off enough boxes so that they’re technically covered, but not really caring about demonstrating anything real about a relationship with God.

Instead, Jesus points to these people who are imperfect. We see some of these guys cut and run when he’s being tried. Peter denies him.

Peter curses denying him. Thomas doubted what he said about rising again from the dead. What they said they saw about him rising from the dead.

Many times we see in the Gospels, the disciples just don’t get it. These are not perfect men, But these are men who responded to his call to follow him and were learning what it meant and striving to do what it meant to follow him because they had that relationship with him. So what this teaches us tonight is that in the kingdom, it’s the relationship that counts.

It’s not somebody’s background. It’s not their family connections that get them right with God. It’s this relationship that we have with him through Jesus Christ that then shows up in obedience.

God wants us to do his will. when we do his will when we live according to his will it demonstrates the relationship that we have and for those in the room who are believers those within the sound of my voice online who are believers what that means for us is that we need to evaluate what we’re doing in our in our daily lives and ask ourselves if we’re prioritizing God and his will in our lives in the way that Jesus would expect his followers to do Jesus said if you’re my brother if you’re my sister if you’re it’s going to show up in your obedience to God’s will. Is our relationship to Him showing up in our obedience to His will?

Again, obedience and doing religious things is not how we get the relationship, but it’s a hallmark. It’s a sign that the relationship is there. So we as believers, we need to routinely check this.

I need to stop from time to time and ask myself, am I prioritizing doing His will? Am I seeking to do His will the way He expects a follower to do? And if I’m not, it needs to be fixed.

I’d say I need to fix it, but I’m not so good at fixing those things. More like I need to go to God and ask Him to fix it. But tonight, if you’re somebody who’s never trusted Christ as your Savior, God wants you to do His will too.

But don’t listen to that and think, okay, good, He’s going to give me a checklist here of things I need to do, and then I’ll be right with God. It doesn’t work that way. We’ve all sinned against God.

We’ve all disobeyed Him. And our sin separates us from Him. And no matter how much good we do, we can’t erase the wrong that we’ve done.

If I stand before a judge accused of murder, and he says, what do you have to say for yourself? And I say, but look at all the people I didn’t kill. Wasn’t that good?

I don’t get extra credit for that, right? I love that example. And some of y’all look shocked every time I say it.

I don’t get extra credit for that. If I just go and try to be good and do what the law says, I don’t get extra credit for doing that. I’m just doing what the law requires.

It doesn’t change the fact that I’ve broken it over here. So we’re separated from God, and no amount of good we can ever do fixes that. That sin had to be paid for, and it had to be punished.

And rather than let us try in vain to go through enough punishment or do enough payment, knowing we’d never be able to pay it off, The Father sent the Son, Jesus Christ, to be nailed to the cross, to shed His blood, and to die so that our sins could be forgiven, so that our slate could be wiped clean, so that we could have a relationship with Him. And then He rose three days later to prove it. And as I talked about this morning, He’s made this offer of forgiveness as a free gift.

We can have a relationship with Him simply because Jesus paid for it. God’s given us the gospel. He’s given us this message of good news that we can be forgiven.

And the Bible says that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. God’s desire is for each of us to come to a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. If you’ve never trusted Christ before, for me to say that God wants you to do His will, it starts with obeying the gospel, which means acknowledging your sin to a holy God, telling Him that He’s right and you’re wrong. He already knows it.

You already know it. Just be open and honest about what you already know. But acknowledge to God that you’ve sinned and need a Savior.

Confess that you believe Jesus Christ died to be that Savior, that He paid for your sins in full. Not just part of it so that then you could go and work off the rest of it through religious rituals and obedient deeds, but He paid for every bit of your sin so that you could be forgiven. And then ask Him for that forgiveness.

That’s the first step of obedience, is simply to believe the promise that He’s offered.

Powered by atecplugins.com