[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Lord, let at last thine angels come
to Abram’s bosom, bear me home, that I may die
unfearing.
Dear Saints, we think of today, of life
and of death. And maybe more specifically,
we want to think of our own life. I want you to think of
your life and your death. You are all currently alive. I’m just checking. And all
of you will die. What do we think of this? What would Jesus have us think of this?
Now, we know what the world wants us to think.
In fact, we are at grave danger, especially in our day,
of believing about life and death what the world believes about life and death,
and that’s this, that this life is all you’ve got.
You live, and you die, and that’s it.
That means that life must be protected at all costs,
that death must be avoided at all costs, and ignored and hidden also. The world, in
fact, understands that to love life is to fear death, and to be alive is to be
not dead. That’s what the world thinks. That’s what man thinks. And that’s what
Jesus rebuked Peter for when he said to him,
get behind me, Satan, your mind is not on the things of God,
but on the things of man, preserving life,
avoiding suffering at all costs, that’s not the Christian.
Now Jesus, you know one of the ways that we know
if we take the Bible seriously is it’s one thing
to agree with the Bible when it tells us
the things that we like to hear.
It is another thing to agree with the Bible
when it tells us things that we don’t want to hear.
I’m afraid today is one of those days.
We’re going to have to face the Scriptures square on,
and so I want you actually to look at the text,
the Gospel text from Mark 8,
because I want you to see it from the Lord
and not just hear it from me.
The text is probably in two parts,
well, three or four parts.
It’s a beautiful text.
The main thing, really, that captivates us
and first reading is this confession of who Jesus is.
Jesus, in fact, let me set it up this way.
Jesus has just healed a blind man.
We didn’t have this in the gospel reading,
but in the verses just before our text,
Jesus healed the blind man,
and it’s one of the strangest healings
that Jesus performs.
He takes the man outside of town,
and he spits on his eyes.
It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays.
But he spits on his eyes, and the man opens his eyes and he says,
can you see?
And he says, well, I see people walking around like trees.
Weird.
So then Jesus puts his hands on his eyes
and pulls them away again, and then says, what do you see now?
And the man says, I can see fine now.
And we wonder, why in the world is that there?
Why is that strange miracle for us?
I think that miracle is a little foretaste
of what’s about to happen.
Because Jesus says to the disciples,
who do men say that I am?
And it’s a kind of a crowd sourcing the identity of Jesus.
It’s like a poll to figure out who the people think.
And they say John the Baptist and Elijah
and some of the prophets.
And that’s like seeing Jesus like a tree walking around.
They’re close, but they don’t quite get it.
They know that Jesus is important,
but they don’t know how important he is.
But then Jesus says, who do you say that I am?
And Peter and the disciples, in fact, now see clearly who He is.
Peter confesses,
you are the Christ,
the Son of the living God, Matthew tells us.
He sees clearly who Jesus is, the office that He fulfills,
that Jesus is the one promised, the Messiah,
the one coming to deliver the people.
But then Jesus warns them that they should tell no one about Him.
And then, verse 31, look at this,
He began to teach them that the Son of Man, the Christ, must suffer many things.
They had expected, the Jews, the Pharisees, the scribes, the disciples themselves, had
expected the Messiah to come as a political figure.
To come and sit on the throne of David, to rule and to reign like the kings of old.
to throw off the Roman enslavement and the Roman rulers
and to restore to Israel their own political power.
That’s what they thought who the Christ was
and what he’d come to do.
But Jesus is gonna say, no, that’s not it at all.
You’re right that I am the Christ,
but I am not the Christ that you’re expecting.
I am a Christ of an entirely different sort.
That’s why he told them, don’t say anything.
Don’t go preaching that I’m the Christ
Because you’re not ready to preach it yet, you have to know something more about the Christ and here it is.
The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and the scribes and be killed.
And after three days rise again.
And he spoke this word openly, plainly.
I don’t think the disciples heard much after the word suffer.
They certainly didn’t hear anything after the word killed.
They had no space yet for the resurrection.
Even after Jesus was buried, they still weren’t believing the resurrection.
But they hear this idea that the Christ has to suffer, that the Christ has to die,
and Peter, can you believe it, Peter pulls Jesus aside to rebuke him.
Lord, no, this is not right.
All this talk of death,
this talk of suffering,
this talk of dying,
you’re not understanding.
I mean, it’s the audacity of Peter,
but this is the mind of man.
And even though Peter took him aside
to rebuke him silently,
Peter thinks,
well, I don’t want to embarrass Jesus.
I’ve got to correct him though
because all this talk of this affliction
and everything, this just is not fitting for his own mouth, Peter takes him aside, but
Jesus turns around and rebukes Peter, and not privately, openly, so that everyone hears
him.
When he turned around, he looked at his disciples, and he rebuked Peter, and he says now, perhaps
the harshest words that Jesus ever speaks.
Of all the harsh and hard words that Jesus preaches to the unbelievers, to the Pharisees,
to those who were buying and trading in the house of God, of all of the harsh rebukes
of Jesus, I think this is perhaps the harshest. To his own beloved Peter, he says,
Get behind me, Satan, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of man.
And this is a rebuke to us, because our minds also are set on the things of man. And what
What is that?
The mind of man wants to avoid suffering.
And the mind of man wants to avoid death.
You see, it’s not just the Christ who has to be rejected.
It’s not just the Christ who has to suffer and die.
It’s also the Christian, the follower of Jesus.
So here’s the hard part. Verse 34. When Jesus called the people to himself, with the disciples also, he said to them,
1. Whoever desires to come after Me, let him 1. Deny himself, and 2. Take up his cross,
and 3. Follow Me. Deny yourself, take up the cross, and follow Jesus.
This, if you can believe it, is the first mention of the cross in all of the Gospels.
I mean, this is the first time that the cross comes into the conversation.
And look whose cross it is.
It’s not even the cross of Jesus.
It’s your cross.
If we want to be Christians, we have to let go of ourself, forget ourselves, lose our
lives for Christ’s sake.
Now what happens in the next, in the next four verses, three verses perhaps, three or
four verses is Jesus is going to make an argument for us about what this means to deny ourselves
and take up the cross. You can see that each of the verses starts with the word for, and
the first and the last for, Jesus addresses our temptation, and the middle two fors, Jesus
is giving us the motivation. Here, look at the motivation. It’s in verse 36 and 37.
possession? For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his
own soul? For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” Jesus says you could spend
your whole life protecting and preserving your life. You could spend your whole life
gathering for yourself safety and wealth and possessions. You could, in fact, gain the
whole world. Be the richest man alive. Have a full bank account. Have everything at your
beck and call. Everything that you need. And when it’s all done, it’s all done. You lose
your soul. So there’s something else that we’re fighting for. We want to have a life
that never ends. And Jesus says that the only way to do this is, in fact, to lose our lives.
Look at verse 35, and this is maybe the hardest verse of all.
We wouldn’t believe it unless Jesus said it to us.
I mean, we think that to save our life means to save our life, to keep our life means to
keep our life, to preserve our life means to protect our life.
Jesus says that that is not the case.
The opposite is the case.
Whoever desires to save his life will lose it.
If you are spending your life trying to protect it, trying to keep it, trying to preserve
it, then you’re going to lose it. If you’re spending all your time and all your effort
trying to stay safe and to not die, in the end, it’s lost. The only way to have your
life in the end is, in fact, to lose it. Jesus says, whoever loses his life for my sake and
for the gospel’s sake will save it. That’s his promise. Whoever loses his life will save
it. So our life as Christians is not a life of preserving our life. It’s not the effort
to keep our life. Our life as Christians is spent in losing our life, in handing it over.
It all belongs to Jesus already. Your life, your body, your health, your breath, your
clothing and shoes and food and your sleep and your waking and your family
and your home and your possessions and your work and your savings and your name
and your reputation and your hopes and your dreams and your desires and
everything else. It belongs to Jesus, not to you. The only way to keep it is to
give it up. Now, we just have to hear this plainly because the world is telling us the
exact opposite. And the world, I mean, in some ways it makes sense to the world. Because
if you think that this life is it and you die and it’s all gone, then you have to fight
to keep this life alive. You have to think that life means not dying. You don’t have any
other choice. But we know more. We know that life is not the end. We know that to die is
to sleep and to awake to see the face of Jesus. We know that to depart this life is to be
with the Lord. We know better than that. We know that life doesn’t end when we die, but
it goes on in eternity with the face of Jesus. We know that one day He’ll stand on the earth
and He’ll call us up out of the grave and we will be raised to live before Him forever.
Remember, those who believe in Christ have this eternal life and the confidence that
comes with it.
The confidence to live not for life, but to live for Christ.
For the world to live is to not die, but for the Christian to live is Christ.
And to die then is gain.
It’s our victory.
history. It’s our conquering. In fact, our death in Christ is our hope and our longing,
the thing that we look for and pray for every day when we say, deliver us from evil.
Now Jesus knows that this is hard, and He knows that it’s going to be even made harder
because the world is going to want us to protect our life by denying Christ.
We talked about this in Sunday school.
We’ve been talking about it with the martyrs.
This is what they faced.
The martyrs of the early church, we remember these Christians who would go and stand before
the wicked tyrants, and they would say, deny Christ or you’re going to be put to death.
And they would confess Christ, and they’d be thrown to the lions or to the bulls, or
they’d be tied to the stake and lit on fire or put on this iron, well you know all this
stuff.
Heads cut off.
It was, you know, deny Christ and live, or confess Christ and die.
Jesus says, look at verse 38, whoever’s ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and
sinful generation, of Him the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory
of His Father with the holy angels. And that’s going to be the temptation, to preserve your
life by denying or being ashamed of Christ.
Now, I do not know, I do not know how this will come to each one of us. It probably will
not come in the shape of martyrdom. It probably won’t be such a clear choice for us as it
was for our brothers and sisters in Christ who gave their life in the early generations
of the church, but Jesus has promised us, and it will come. The temptation you will
face, and I will face, is to preserve our life or protect our life by denying, in one
way or another, Christ. And maybe it comes from the fact that if we confess too loudly
that we’re Christians, then we can’t get the promotion at work. Or if we confess too
loudly what Christ confesses
about creation or about marriage
or whatever, then we get denied
certain privileges or we lose
certain statuses or we start to
be considered shameful to the
world. That’s the way it’s
probably going to go for us,
that when we confess Christ we
are mocked and ridiculed by the
world who thinks that they know
better. But if you desire to
save your life, if you desire to
make things better and deny Christ in the process, then everything is lost. Whoever
desires to save his life will lose it. So we are called to this profound discipleship,
Following Jesus, whoever desires to come after me, deny yourself.
Take up your cross and follow me.
We follow Jesus in this life on the way of suffering.
We follow Jesus all the way to the grave.
But listen, Jesus doesn’t stop there.
On the third day, He promised it.
On the third day, He rose again from the dead.
And He ascended to the Father.
And He sits at the right hand of God on high.
And when you follow Jesus,
you will follow Him all the way.
All the way through the sufferings and troubles of this life.
all the way to your own death and grave,
and all the way up out of your grave
to be seated with Him in the heavenly places.
You follow Jesus all the way to life,
all the way to glory,
all the way to holiness and peace and perfection.
You follow Jesus all the way to heaven
and the new earth and the new heaven
where the righteous dwell.
You follow Him all the way.
because he has claimed you as his own,
marked you with the cross on your forehead and on your heart,
adopted you into his family by your baptism
so that you, dear saints, belong to Jesus.
And this means that your life has already been lost.
For you to live is Christ and to die is gain.
That’s His promise. May God grant us the Holy Spirit so that we believe it, in suffering,
in life, in death, and all the way to the resurrection. In the name of Jesus, amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord, amen.
