Going Deeper

Tell me about a time when you got more than you bargained for?: Like you went to the dentist for a cleaning and they discovered more.... or perhaps you had a parent teachers conference and you thought everything was going to be ok and … it wasn’t?

Story: Having Good Grades, but Teachers said I was distracting, and disruptive. :/

Today we are continuing our study of the book of Mark.... and Mark is known as a what? Gospel.

Gospel means what?______________________________

Last week we talked about the Call… and how one call can literally change our entire lives. We saw the first 4 disciples who answered the call of Jesus and Jesus simply asked them to follow Him, and they do. They didn’t know everything about Jesus. They didn’t know what would happen or where they were going, but they knew that they needed Jesus.

This is the same thing with us when Jesus calls us. We don’t necessarily know everything about Him. But we know that we are tired of living our lives for us and we see that Jesus offers us a new life, a new beginning, and so we begin to follow Him. Because Jesus offers to forgive us of our sins and restore us into a relationship with the Creator of the universe… and so we say yes.

But what we begin to find out is that:

Main Idea: Jesus asks us for more than we want to give, but gives us infinitely more that we ever dared to ask or think.

Someone Read: Mark 2:1-5

We should Bring the Hurting to Jesus.

A group of friends bring one of their friends that is sick:

Why is this so important?

Friend may not know the truth.

Scared to walk alone.

Or unable to.

Jesus actually tells us it our main Mission for our life! Matthew 28:19-20

We should see Jesus for who He truly is.

Read verse 5 again: The Paralyzed must be thinking what? That’s not what i asked for.

But in fact Jesus knows something the man doesn’t know—that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition. Jesus is saying to him, “I understand your problems. I have seen your suffering. I’m going to get to that. But please realize that the main problem in a person’s life is never his suffering; it’s his sin.”

If you find Jesus’s response offensive, please at least consider this: If someone says to you, “The main problem in your life is not what’s happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you’ve responded to that”—ironically, that’s empowering. Why? Because you can’t do very much about what’s happened to you or about what other people are doing—but you can do something about yourself. When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It’s not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be—it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it’s rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It’s saying, “I will decide exactly how I live my life.” And Jesus says that is my main problem

Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep. Jesus is saying, “By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you’re not going deep enough. You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart.”

The paralytic is thinking that only if i could walk again then id be happy…

Jesus is saying youre mistaken… give it a mo th two months… then youll be back.

What do you long for that you think will make you happy?

The roots of the discontent of the human heart goes deep,

Cynthia Heimel wrote this about celebrities: Discontent: Some of the most wretched people she knows.

Then Heimel added a statement that took my breath away: “I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.” You know what Jesus is saying to the paralyzed man? I’m not going to play that rotten joke on you. I’m not going to just heal your body and let you think you’ve gotten your deepest wish.

Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us i building out identity on something besides Jesus.

we have made that wish into our Saviour.

And if you never quite get it, you’re angry, unhappy, empty. But if you do get it, you ultimately feel more empty, more unhappy.

C. S. Lewis put this so poetically in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There’s a boy named Eustace, and everybody hates him and he hates everybody. He’s selfish, he’s mean, and nobody can get along with him. But he finds himself magically on a boat, the Dawn Treader, taking a great voyage. At one point this boat pulls in to an island, and Eustace wanders off and finds a cave.

For many of us we are like the paralyzed man and like Eustace. We want Jesus to stay on the surface and fix only a little bit, but He wants to go deeper.

The fact that we thought getting our deepest wish would heal us, would save us—that was the problem. We had to let Jesus be our Savior.

We should Worship Jesus for What He Does.

Read Mark 2:6-12

what is Jesus saying when he says “Your Sins have been forgiven?”

What is easier saying that or healing someone?

Why does Jesus then heal him? To prove/show/

You see, at this moment Jesus had the power to heal the man’s body, just as he has the power to give you that career success, that relationship, that recognition you’ve been longing for. He actually has the power and authority to give each of us what we’ve been asking for, on the spot, no questions asked.

But Jesus knows that’s not nearly deep enough. He knows that whether we’re a paralyzed man lying on a mat or a struggling actor or a former struggling actor who’s become a celebrity, we don’t need someone who can just grant our wishes. We need someone who can go deeper than that. Someone who will use his claws, lovingly and carefully, to pierce our self-centeredness and remove the sin that enslaves us and distorts even our beautiful longings. In short, we need to be forgiven. That’s the only way for our discontent to be healed. It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie—it will take a Savior. Jesus knows that to be our Savior he is going to have to die.

Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish—until he has shown you that it was for him all along.

Jesus asks us for more than we want to give, but gives us infinitely more that we ever dared to ask or think.

Have you said, “Yes” to walking with Jesus?