Prayer and Priorities

If you have a Bible and hopefully you do, go ahead and open up with me to Mark 1:35. We will be finishing chapter 1 tonight so that is exciting. When it comes to your life, what are your priorities? What are the things that you believe are the most important for your life? Not so much, what is on your bucket list to accomplish before you die, but what is it that is absolutely crucial to you? What are the things that you could hypothetically say, “If I did not have this, it would not matter what I do have?” Now chances are, the older you get and the more mature you become, the more significant your priorities will be. Right now at your age, you might say that your priorities are doing good in school, video games, finding a date to prom, or getting into a good school. Those things are temporary priorities and I might even struggle to call them real priorities. When you get older, your priorities might turn to family, and family very well might be a priority now. It may be your children or your spouse or your job and those are great things to prioritize as long as they do not take the place of the ultimate priority of our lives which I am sure that you are all going to assume is the Lord and you would be correct. Your spiritual life and your relationship to your Heavenly Father, is the greatest priority that you have and then the greater your recognize that priority in your own life, the greater you will recognize the need for that priority to be in the lives of your neighbors. The next question then is this: Did Jesus have priorities? He’s the Son of God, He was certainly very busy but did Jesus ever focus on priorities? What do you think those priorities were? As we are going to see in these verses tonight, Jesus did have priorities. What were those priorities as we will see in these verses? He prioritized prayer, He prioritized quality, and He prioritized compassion and those will be the three things that we will look at tonight and then we will seek to understand how those three priorities can become our priorities. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer and then we will read Mark 1:35-45

Mark 1:35–45 NASB95

In the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went away to a secluded place, and was praying there. Simon and his companions searched for Him; they found Him, and said to Him, “Everyone is looking for You.” He said to them, “Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for.” And He went into their synagogues throughout all Galilee, preaching and casting out the demons. And a leper came to Jesus, beseeching Him and falling on his knees before Him, and saying, “If You are willing, You can make me clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be cleansed.” Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. And He sternly warned him and immediately sent him away, and He said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the news around, to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to Him from everywhere.

Jesus Prioritizes Prayer

How do we know that Jesus prioritized prayer? What is our giveaway? Well right at the beginning in verse 35, we see that Jesus, very early in the morning, while it was still dark, gets up and leaves Peter’s house and goes away to a secluded place to be alone with His Heavenly Father in prayer. What I want you to notice and I can’t remember if Wayne mentioned this last week or not, but everything from verse 21 to 38 happens in the span of 24 hours. In about 24 hours, Jesus has taught in the Synagogue, cast out demons, healed Peter’s mother-in-law, and if that was not a full enough day, we saw last week that in the evening, after the sun had gone down, a very large crowd gathers which brings the sick and the possessed to Jesus. For the entire evening it seems that Jesus heals the sick and casts out demons. This is a long day isn’t it? Even for Jesus, in His human nature, this is an exhausting day. Look at it this way, if practically the entire town of La Crosse showed up to your door one night after a long day of work, wouldn’t you feel pretty tempted to say, “Look, I’ve had a long day and I can’t do anything for ya right now. Maybe come back tomorrow and with one or two of you, we can work something out.” That seems like a human response right? But is that how Jesus responds? No! He healed and He cast out demons. We read in verse 35 that Jesus got up and He goes to a secluded place to pray. This is not the first time and this is certainly not the last time that Jesus will remove Himself from a popular location to seek out time with His Heavenly Father. Luke says in Luke 5:16 “But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.” Jesus prayed before He chose the 12, Jesus prayed after He fed the 5,000, Jesus prayed before the cross! So much of Jesus’ life can be focused on His capacity to pray! Here’s our next question, Why do you think that Jesus so often left to be alone with God the Father in prayer? If Jesus is God, is He just talking to Himself? Why would Jesus place so high a priority on prayer? There’s three reasons that we will rush through and the first is that Jesus depended on His Heavenly Father. John 6:38 Jesus says, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” Jesus prayed because He depended on His Father’s Will to do the ministry that His Father sent Him for. John MacArthur wrote, “Jesus’ prayer life was more than just a model for His disciples to follow. It was an essential part of His obedience and submission.” The second reason is that Jesus loves Heavenly Father perfectly and wants to spend time with Him. The third reason and MacArthur mentioned this, is that Jesus desired to give us a model of how we are to pray and that is what we are actually going to spend YC Week looking at this year, Lord willing, as we look at the prayer life of Jesus and the model that He shows us. We’ll look at Christ’s model of prayer in the Lord’s Prayer, we will look at Christ and the power of prayer, and we will look again at the High priestly prayer as we see it in John 17, and the prayers that Jesus offered in the garden of Gethsemane and while on the cross. Jesus throughout His entire life recognized the importance of communicating with His Heavenly Father. He placed a high priority on this, so the question for you all is, what kind of priority do you put on spending time with the Lord in prayer? How many of your issues in life do you think would begin to work themselves out if you took time to be with the One that created you and saves you? Do you have a place where you can be alone with God? Where is that place? What is it about that place that makes it special? If you don’t have a place to do that, why don’t you and what could you do to prioritize time alone with God? Do you recognize that the greater your reliance on the Lord in prayer, the more time you spend with Him, the greater your life will be? How so? Because the greater your communion with God, the more likely you are to see His beauty. It is like spending quality time with the greatest spouse you could be with because your eyes are set squarely upon that person. Blaise Pascal, an old French mathematician and scientist said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Are you able to remove yourself from the noise of the world to spend time with God? Are you able to sit disconnected from all the distractions that are around you and spend time with the Lord? Just look at Jesus, if anyone had an excuse to be distracted in life it was Him. Just look at the 24 hours that He just had and just look at the mission that He was on and tell me that you could spend any moment in prayer free from distractions! Yet here we see Jesus as our ultimate example, one who was closer to God the Father than any has ever been but He took the steps to make sure that He would spend time with His Father in prayer. So what is it in your life that is distracting you or preventing you from seeking out this much needed time with the Lord?

Jesus Prioritizes Quality

The next element that Jesus prioritized was quality. He prioritized the quality of the relationship over the quantity of relationships and we really see this happening at two points. The first sign of it that we see in these verses is when Simon Peter and His followers search and find Him and they say to Him, “Everyone is looking for You.” Now if you were looking to start a movement or to take over a nation as the new King, this is exactly what you want to hear right? Everyone is looking for you because they are amazed at what you are doing and they can’t get enough of it. But what does Jesus say? Look again at Mark 1:38 “He said to them, “Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for.”” I’m sure if you were Peter and Andrew and you just saw what the last 24 hours looked like, you were saying, “Why on earth would we leave? Look at the impact here! Look at the crowds! The entire city is coming to you!” But Jesus says, “No, that’s not what I’m here for.” Why did Jesus need to go to the other towns? Well first off, it’s because their were people there that He needed to see. They needed to hear the Gospel too, they needed to be healed, they needed to be warn of the judgement that was to come. The message of the Gospel and the healing power of it was to be for all people, not just for one town in one place at one time. In Luke 4:43 the emphasis on this is even stronger: “But He said to them, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose.”” This begs the question then, what was Jesus’ primary purpose in coming? Miracles were secondary, healing was secondary, they certainly related to the primary but they were not the primary. Why then did Jesus come? He came to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to seek and save the lost! That’s why He came the first time! He did not come to set up an earthly kingdom at that time, He did not come to elevate His own status or grow in popularity, He came to proclaim the Gospel! What we see Jesus saying in Mark 1 and Luke 4 is the very thing that He would say later on in John 10:15–16 “even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. “I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd.” Jesus is saying to Simon, Andrew, James, and John in Mark 1 that He has to go to other places because there are sheep there that He must bring into the fold. Do you understand that if you are a Christian, it is not because you as the sheep sought first the shepherd. No, you are a Christian because God took the initiative and He came to bring you first. There is no drawing near to Him if He does not first draw near to us. One of my favorite sermons that I have ever read was George Whitefield’s sermon on the conversion of Zaccheus in Luke 19 and if you are unfamiliar with the story, Zaccheus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he. He climbed into a sycamore tree for the Lord He wanted to see. And when the Lord had passed that way He looked up into that tree and said Zaccheus you come down because I’m dining in your house today. In Whitefield’s sermon, he emphasizes how it is Jesus that sees Him and calls Him first. He emphasizes that how could Christ have missed him? He has had His eyes on Zaccheus for all eternity! The reason that Christ leaves Capernaum to go to throughout Galilee is because there were those that the Shepherd has had His eyes on for all eternity. It was not the number of followers He was after, it was the quality of their following. If you had to put a number on a scale of 1-5 of the quality of your relationship to Christ and the quality of how you follow Him, what would you rank it? And why would you rank it in that way? I mentioned also that there was a second element as to why Jesus had to go to the other town and it comes down to the reason why the people wanted to see Him. They didn’t necessarily want a Savior, they wanted a miracle worker. They did not want a Heavenly King per say, they wanted an Earthly King. All through the Gospels we see this happening where the people are ready to take Him by force and make Him king of Israel. Yet we know that is not the kingdom that Christ came to set up. We also see this in Christ’s interaction with the leper where we see Jesus tell him something that seems odd to us and we see it throughout the Gospel of Mark. After Jesus heals him, we read in Mark 1:43–44 “And He sternly warned him and immediately sent him away, and He said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”” Why do you think Jesus tells this man to not say anything about what happened to him? Sinclair Ferguson gives us the best answer when he writes, “The reason He did not want the man to speak was because He knew how easily His miracles would be misunderstood; they would gather a crowd of followers who were interested in Him exclusively because He could do signs and wonders. Jesus wanted people to see that His miracles were signs of the kingdom of God, and that it was submitting to the reign of God, not being a spectator of wonders, which really mattered.” You see it is here where I believe we see one of the great reminders that Jesus cares not only about who we worship but cares how we worship. Yes we must worship Christ alone but we must also make sure that there is quality and substance to our worship. The world does not need disobedient evangelists. We see our Lord tell the leper not to do something and he immediately goes out and does it. He may have had good intentions but good intentions become bad intentions when they stand contrary to the perfect way of God. Throughout all of these verses, perhaps the clearest priority that Jesus has towards these people is compassion so let’s quickly talk about that.

Jesus Prioritizes Compassion

Where in these verses that we went over tonight do you see the compassion of Jesus? You see it in His willingness to spend the entire day and most of the evening healing people, you see it in His casting out of demons, you see it in His desire to go to other towns so that they can hear the healing power of the Gospel, and you see it in how He healed this leper yet one of the clearest signs of His compassion is right in the middle of verse 41. The leper comes to Jesus and he begs Him to healing and the Man who cast out demons with just a word does not do that to this leper. Instead in the middle of verse 41 we read that Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him and it is only after He touched him that Christ said, “I am willing; be cleansed.” Why is this so significant and how is that such a great sign of compassion? Well we have to think about what it was like to be a leper in the 1st century. These were people that were the absolute outcasts of society. These were people that were forced to live in the wilderness, forced to live away from people because there was such a fear that even just a touch from one of them would bring a death sentence to the person that they came into contact with. No self-respecting rabbi, Pharisee, or leader would ever be caught dead in their vicinity, let alone touching one. No rabbi would dare touch one of these people because of the fear that they would become ceremonially unclean and defiled. These were people that likely had not experienced human affection or human touch in years. Do you know what it is like when you miss someone for a really long time and you finally get to see them and that first hug, that first kiss, that first moment of compassion seems to make up for what seems like a lifetime of separation? Here we see Jesus, the only One that is pure and undefiled willing to touch those that are unclean and defiled. In this moment we see what Christ came to accomplish in action. He came to take our impurities and sin on Himself and to give us His purity and sinlessness in exchange. John Calvin said, “When he took upon him our flesh, he did not only deign to touch us with his hand, but was united to one and the same body with ourselves, that we might be flesh of his flesh. Nor did he only stretch out his arm to us, but descended from heaven even to hell, and yet contracted no stain from it, but, retaining his innocence, took away all our impurities, and sprinkled us with his holiness. By his word alone he might have healed the leper; but he applied, at the same time, the touch of his hand, to express the feeling of compassion. Nor ought this to excite our wonder, since he chose to take upon him our flesh, that he might cleanse us from our sins. The stretching out of his hand was therefore an expression and token of infinite grace and goodness.” What we see happening here is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Have you recognized the compassion of Christ for you? Have you seen the great love that He has for His sheep? I’ll tell you what, everything really changes when you finally come to the understanding as a Christian that Christ does more than just tolerate you, He actually truly loves you. Have you recognized that you are a sinner that is in need of grace and the healing touch of Christ? Have you recognized who you are but more importantly, have you recognized who you need to become? I read this great book last week and one of the authors John Starke mentioned that we have two selves, an authentic self and a vulnerable self. Starke said, “The authentic self says, ‘This is me; you must accept me as I am.’ The vulnerable self says, ‘This is me; take me and transform me.’ The vulnerable self comes in the form not merely of confession but of repentance. It looks not to self for power and affirmation, but to divine help and deliverance.” What we see in this leper is there was an authentic side to him. He knew he was unclean but he did not go to Jesus just saying, “Here I am, take it or leave.” No He goes to Jesus as a vulnerable person and says, “Here I am, transform me into who you want me to be because I am powerless to do it on my own. If you will for it to happen, it will happen.” Which self do you find yourself falling into the most? Is it authentic or is it vulnerable? The Gospel message is not a message that seeks to reinforce what you already are, it is a message that seeks to remake what you have always been. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer.