Hardness of Heart

Mark 3:1–6 ESV

1 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. 2 And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. 3 And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” 4 And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. 5 And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Pray

Introduction

Hardness of Heart. That is the title of the sermon today and that is the crux of what we will be dealing with in these verses that I just read.

We live in a world that is increasingly hostile to our Christian beliefs. Over the years, I have had many jobs from working in restaurants to working for the sheriffs office to spending many years in construction. I can remember early on after I was saved that the guys that I worked with would challenge many of my beliefs. This would be a precursor to being told that what I believe is wrong and that because I believe the things that I believe that I am a hypocritical bigot. I worked in construction most recently before becoming a pastor. Even there, where a lot of the people had some sort of underlying belief of Christianity, if you were one who didn’t cuss, get drunk, and do drugs, you were considered some kind of radical Christian.

I am friends with someone who works with a Christian organization in the schools. This organization has to have a teacher sponsor for them to be able to come into the school. For a teacher to be a sponsor, they have to sign off on a statement of beliefs that they intend to uphold this standard and will believe these things at a minimum. Recently, they had a teacher whose application got denied because of their view on homosexuality. They believed that homosexuality was not a sin that needed to be repented of but it is a way that people are born.

But I am not pointing out anything to you that you have not seen yourself. We have entire denominations of people who claim to be followers of Jesus that are veering more and more away from Jesus. Why is this happening? It is happening because of the hardness of hearts. When the bible says things, they do not take it literally. When Jesus speaks, they do not listen. Many of them are like the Pharisees and Herodians here in our passage that are looking for a way to crucify the Jesus of scripture to make a way for some sort of cultural Jesus that has an agenda.

There is one very simple truth in our passage today that I want you to leave here with. Main Point - If we are like Jesus, we will be hated.

As we work our way through these verses, we will focus on what Jesus calls the hardness of heart and how hard hearted people act.

Hard Hearted People Have Malice but Christians don’t

We transition into a new scene here from the grainfields that Jesus and his disciples were in right before this.

Mark 3:1 ESV

1 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand.

We have already seen Jesus in the synagogue in the book of Mark. Back in chapter 1, Jesus went to the synagogue and was teaching. While he was teaching, he was confronted by a man who was possessed by a demon. Jesus then removes the demon from this man. Now, in our scene today, things are a little different. It doesn’t say that Jesus was teaching. It just says that he was in the temple. Jesus regularly went to the synagogue just like all the devout Jews.

Even the man that we see in this scene is different. Unlike the man with the demon, this man does not confront Jesus. He is not possessed by a demon either. This man has what Mark calls a withered hand. This word “withered” means dried up. This means that it is not functional. He could not use his hand for anything. Could not write with it, could not work with it, could not pick anything up at all with it. It literally means that his hand is unusable.

Mark 3:1–2 ESV

1 Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. 2 And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.

Who was watching Jesus? Of course it was the Pharisees. They are keeping a close eye on Jesus. And this verse tells us why. Because they want to accuse him. What are they trying to accuse him of? Right here, they are trying to accuse him of breaking the Sabbath law again. Just like we saw last week in the text right before this. They have standards that are wrong that they are trying to hold people up to on the Sabbath. And by doing this, they are letting people suffer. They do not care about others. And in this moment, they had one thing on their minds. To accuse Jesus of something. They had malice towards Jesus.

Have you ever been accused of anything that you didn’t do? It isn’t fun. Especially when you are the only one who thinks that you are innocent. Many of us probably can remember back to the 1996 Olympics that were held in Atlanta. My mom even took us as kids to watch the torch being carried. You probably cannot tell me a lot of the outcomes of the games themselves, but I am sure that you remember what happened on July 27th, 1996 at Centennial Park. There was a bomb that went off that killed 2 people and injured 111 others. It was one of 4 bombing committed by Eric Rudolf and I can remember watching the news after they caught him several years later in the mountains of NC.

But what I am getting at with this story is that he was not the first suspect. In fact, there was a man by the name of Richard Jewell who was originally accused of the crime. He was never officially charged with anything. But like a lot of people in our day and time, he was considered guilty for some time in the court of public opinion. There were people who had extreme malice towards him. And because of this, he was never able to live a normal life.

Being accused of something can be life altering. Jesus was continuously accused by the Pharisees. They had malice for Jesus. They wanted to discredit him and stop him from continuing his ministry. Think about it like this. Because of Jesus, their credibility would suffer. The last thing that the Pharisees wanted was for their image to be tarnished. So what better way than to catch Jesus doing something that God would never approve of. Well, at least this radicalized God that they had in their heads. So they continued to try to accuse Jesus, even though he displayed the power of God. This did not matter to them. What mattered to them was their image and their credibility.

In our world today, we run across hard hearted people. We would categorize these people into non-Christians. And this is because they do not hold to the teachings of Jesus. And believe me when I say that there are a lot of people that would call themselves Christians that fall into this camp. They read the words of Jesus and refuse to obey them, yet say that they are followers of Jesus. They are not. In fact, I will be a little bold today and say that they are in opposition to Jesus by promoting lifestyles of sin that do not center around repentance.

But they also come in the form of people who openly have hatred towards Christianity of any form. And they have a malice towards Christians This is why we as believers must be striving to live lives of devotion to Jesus. We must be committed to growing in our Godliness and our love for others. We must be intentional in killing the sin in our lives. To keep ourselves from being open to any sort of malice in our own hearts. Because hard hearted people have malice. But Christians do not. If you are feeling any sort of maliciousness towards someone today, I want to call you to repent and turn to Jesus. He is the one who can change your heart.

Hard Hearted People are Self-centered but Christians aren’t

Jesus is being watched by the Pharisees to see what he is about to do. And now Jesus takes action.

Mark 3:3 ESV

3 And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.”

Jesus makes a call to this man that sounds somewhat familiar. Remember that he called his disciples in a similar way. He tells them to follow him. Here, this call is somewhat different because they are not on their way anywhere. Instead, Jesus was going to use this man to display his greatness. He tells the man to come to him. I am thankful that we have a savior that looks at us, even when we seem useless and unable, and he calls us to him.

Mark 3:4 ESV

4 And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.

He calls the man to him, but then turns his attention to the Pharisees. He knows what is about to happen. He knows that he is going to heal this man and that this will provoke the Pharisees. So before he even does it, he questions them. “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?”

Jesus knew that they were so consumed with their hatred towards him that they did not care if this man was healed. Jesus was doing good for this man. He had no use of his hand, and Jesus was going to heal him. Now, naturally the answer to the question that Jesus asked them was that it was lawful for someone to do good and to save life on the Sabbath. The Sabbath did not restrict you from doing these things. But they were silent. They had no answer for Jesus.

Mark 3:5 ESV

5 And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

Just try to picture this scene in your head for a moment. He looked around at them. Almost like they had circled around him just waiting to be able to take him into custody for what he is doing. But he had silenced them. They had no answer for the question that he had asked them because they knew that ultimately, they were in the wrong. Now, did this change their opinion of Jesus? No, they still hated him and still wanted him to be killed for what he was doing. He is making them look bad and he is proving them to be wrong in these instances.

So he tells the man to stretch out his hand. Not to reach out his hand but to stretch it out. This hand that was useless, and he could not move it. But Jesus tells him to stretch it out. And he does. And it says that his hand was restored. I used to think that when Jesus told him to stretch out his hand, that he was just lifting up his hand to Jesus. This picture of Jesus touching the mans hand and healing it. But there was no touch. Just like God speaking all of creation into existence, Jesus brings this mans hand back to life. The words of Jesus had power. And the Pharisees are witnessing this once again.

This man’s hand, a hand that he once had no use of, was now useful. Could you imagine the image of this man at the feeling of this restoration. He could feel this hand becoming strong again. He could feel his hand actually stretching out as Jesus told him to. He knew that he could go back to work, and be a provider for his family again. Just think of all of these emotions that he was having. As believers, we can relate it to our own healing. The healing of salvation. Our souls being healed. Think back to your salvation and the moment of relief that you felt when Jesus saved you. You no longer had this burden of sin on your life. This man no longer has a burden of a useless hand. He felt freedom from his limitations. We feel this same freedom from our sinfulness when Jesus heals us.

I want to go back to the emotions of Jesus though. It says that he was angry and that he was grieving at the hard heartedness of the Pharisees. This here, is the only instance in the New Testament that says that Jesus was angry. No other place gives Jesus this emotion. This is not Jesus sinning in anyway. This is not the anger that I feel toward my daughter when she doesn’t clean her room or when she continues to argue with me. That is sinful anger. What Jesus was feeling is what would be called “righteous indignation”. Clint Pressley defines this as what a good man feels in the presence of stark evil.

This is the holiness of Jesus being displayed. He is angry because these men were hypocrites. They were saying that people should disregard scripture and listen to what they had to say. Maybe you know hypocrites. Maybe you have been in a church that someone like this led the church. They disregarded scripture and their word was the rule. This goes back to last week when we talked about legalism. Legalism and lordship do not mix.

But not only was Jesus angry at them, he was grieved at their hard hearts. Why does it grieve him? It is because they knew the scriptures, they led people in instruction and worship. Yet, they did not know God and they would be eternally damned in Hell because of this. All because of their self centeredness.

This is why we must protect our hearts. We need to keep ourselves from becoming hard hearted people. Now, I believe that people who have repented of their sins and believe the gospel cannot in any way be able to have a hard heart towards Jesus. But what we can have is a hard heart towards other people. In our culture especially, it is easy for us to look down towards people who don’t have it together like we do. The ones who are addicts, struggling financially, homeless. Well, if they just would get a job or quit eating out all the time or just quit being lazy, then they could be like me and have it all together. Sounds very Phariseeical to me. We are actually called to do the opposite.

James 2:14–17 ESV

14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? 17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

We have been blessed by God so that we can serve others. And why do we serve others? We serve others so that we can share with them the hope of the gospel. Since I said the word gospel, I want to tell you what the gospel is and how to respond to it.

(gospel presentation) (repentance and belief)

Belief in the gospel gives us power to not be self centered, to be able love others in a way that we want them to come to faith. We must protect ourselves from becoming Pharisees in this sense. Hard hearted people are self centered but Christians are not.

Hard Hearted People Hate Jesus but Christians Worship Him

As we come to our last verse, we see this conspiracy take another step.

Mark 3:6 ESV

6 The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

These men just witnessed a miracle. Jesus took the hand of a man who had no use of his hand, and restored it. He healed him. And it infuriated the Pharisees. They were threatened by Jesus and they knew that they needed to neutralize this threat. They knew that they had to kill him. This is the beginning of the process of Jesus going to the cross.

Here we see this scene that really defines “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The Pharisees and the Herodians hated each other. But they had a common enemy, Jesus. The Herodians are followers of Herod, therefore they were followers of Rome. Their fear would be that this proclaimed messiah would take the throne away and rise to political power. They too knew that they needed to neutralize this threat to the throne. So they were willing to team up with their enemy to take care of this. These men hated Jesus. They hated the displays of Godly power that he was doing. They hated the questioning to the teaching of the Pharisees and correcting them. They just hated him.

So they conspire with the Herodians to kill him.

In the weeks ahead, we are going to be looking forward towards Easter. Easter is when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. But we cannot have the resurrection without the death. This death of Jesus came because of the abuse of power to get Jesus in the position that the people turned on him and sent him to the cross. The cross is a reminder of what Jesus endured on our behalf.

I used to work with a guy that would comment on the death of Jesus on the cross sometimes. He would jokingly talk about how if it weren’t for the Jewish people murdering Jesus that he would have been able to continue to do good and have a long ministry. And I think a lot of people think this way that do not see redemptive history throughout all of scripture. God began the process of redemption in Genesis. He continued to use events and people in order to point his people to Jesus who would come and die for them. They had the whole sacrificial system that was never enough in order to point to Jesus, who would shed his blood and it would be enough. They were continuously pointed to the coming Messiah.

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus was never a plan b. Jesus did come because Adam failed, because Abraham failed, because Moses failed, or because David failed. But those aren’t the reasons that Jesus had to come. Jesus was always the redeemer. He has always been plan A. The Pharisees didn’t know it. The Herodians didn’t know it. But they were part of the plan. Jesus had to shed his blood for the forgiveness of sins. And the cross was the most despicable, humiliating way for him to do that. It was their hatred that aided in sending him to the cross. If they had not hated him, he would not have had the avenue to go to the cross. But ultimately, it was not the Pharisees that sent him to the cross. It was our sin.

We are the reason that Jesus went to the cross. It was my sin that sent him there. I am the one who Jesus went to the cross for too. If you have repented and believed that Jesus is Lord, then while he was hanging on the cross on Calvary, he had you on his mind. These hard hearted men hated Jesus to the point that they were going to kill him. But because of his death, we have the resurrection. And because of the resurrection, we have hope. And because of hope, we can worship. There is no one else who has ever been or will ever be worthy of our worship. Only Jesus.

Hard hearted people may hate Jesus, but if you have been bought by the blood of Jesus, you do not hate him but you worship him.

Conclusion

If we are like Jesus, we will be hated. I made this statement at the beginning of the message today. We have seen the response of the Pharisees and the Herodians to the ministry of Jesus. We have seen their hatred towards him. So the question for us today, have you ever been hated because of your faith in Jesus? I am not talking about people being mean to you on facebook because you shared a bible verse. Yes that is someone being mean, but they are hiding behind a keyboard.

I am talking about us walking in society in our every day lives. At work, at the grocery store, at your kids or grandkids ballgames. Have you been living out your faith in Jesus and been persecuted? Have you ever been sharing a story of something that God has done in your life and gotten a nasty snarly look from someone? Have you been very kind to someone and invite them to church and they tell you how stupid you are to believe in Jesus? Have you ever shared the gospel with someone and they cuss you out and spit in your face?

This is the kind of faith that we are called to. This is not some form of radical Christianity. This is normal Christianity. But we have gotten soft in our world today and we are not willing to be bold in our faith. Think back to the reformers like Martin Luther, William Tyndale, John Knox, and John Calvin. What would our world look like today if it were not for men like this who were willing to endure criticism, ridicule, and even death because of their faith? We must be bold witnesses in the world around us. We are called to build the kingdom and impact our community. We cannot do either one of those if we hold onto our faith and not be willing to be bold in sharing the gospel with others. We must stop looking down on people and think that they do not deserve salvation like we do. We must not have a hardness of heart.

So as I end today, I want to remind us of the gospel that gives us new life in Christ. If you have never come to a true saving faith, this is the gospel that you need to believe. And I am going to tell you how to respond to it. For the believer, this is the gospel that you do believe. I want you to be reminded of it and let it stir you up into being bold in your faith.

Gospel presentation

Response to gospel (repent and believe)

You don’t have to come down front, you don’t have to raise your hand. But if you have come to a saving faith, I want you to let me know. Catch me after service, text me, call me. Do what you need to do to let me know so that we can walk with you in your faith.