6-20-21 Come to the Mountain: Mark 3:13-19

The Gospel of Mark  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented   •  47:46
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Good morning! We’ll see how this goes today, but someone said they wanted a joke last time, so here are a few. Who is the greatest baby-sitter mentioned in the Bible? David -- he rocked Goliath to sleep. Why was Goliath so surprised when David hit him with a stone? The thought had never entered his head before. If Goliath came back to life today, would he like these David and Goliath jokes?1 No, he already fell for them once. Terrible, yes, I know. Let’s just pray before we start today. Father in Heaven, we ask you to bless this time. We give You all the glory and honor and praise in this place. Jesus we come to honor You and glorify Your Name. We say Jesus, that “You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power; For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created.”2 Fall on us today, Holy Spirit, as we surrender our hearts, our minds, and our wills to You. Help us walk the Holy-Spirit formed pathway that you have for us, and help us grow in grace and maturity in Christ. Thank you for Your love and provision for us, Father, and we invite you here. Anoint Your word, we ask, in Jesus’ Name amen. If you will, turn with me to Mark 3:13-19 NKJV and we’ll jump right in. “And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him. 14 Then He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, 15 and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons: 16 Simon, to whom He gave the name Peter; 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom He gave the name Boanerges, that is, “Sons of Thunder”; 18 Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananite; 19 and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him. And they went into a house.” 1 2 Culbertson, Howard. Clean Bible jokes, puns, humor and trivia. http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/trivia.htm. Accessed 17 6 2021. Revelation 4:11 The Called | 1 To give you the quick overview, Jesus has left the sea after preaching and healing the multitudes, and He goes up a mountain and calls His disciples to come to Him. He then sends them out to start preaching. Now, He was probably sending them out with a similar message Jesus had, which was to repent of sins and turn to God. That’s what Jesus was preaching before His death and resurrection. They weren’t preaching the cross yet because Jesus hadn’t gone there yet. And then we get a naming of the 12 disciples or apostles. Now, verse 13 says that Jesus ‘went up on the mountain.’ I want us to talk a little about mountains this morning. Mark 3:13 NKJV “And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him.” Have you ever heard the term ‘mountaintop experience'?’ In Christianity, that term usually refers to a time where you have a deep, life-changing personal encounter with Jesus, where He speaks life to you, performs some sort of heart surgery, tells you clearly what to do or how to do something, or gives you some other deeply personal and deeply affecting interaction with Him. Some examples could be the day you were saved, the day God called you to something specific, or a time when you were refreshed and totally renewed in worship. There are a lot of possibilities. These mountaintop experiences are important in our lives. Sometimes, biblically, mountains symbolize struggles and obstacles, but they can also often symbolize ‘holy places’ where significant events take place. God called Moses to his work on Mount Horeb (or mount Sinai), which is sometimes called ‘the mountain of God.’3 So Mount Horeb and Mount Sinai are the same mountain. So this mountain that Jesus goes up and calls for His disciples to come with Him is the same place where God met Moses before sending Him out as the deliverer of the 3 Brand, Chad, et al., editors. Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, P1156. Nashville, Tennessee, Holman Reference, 2003. The Called | 2 Israelites. It’s also the same place where God gave the Israelites the ten commandments. The disciples are about to have a mountaintop experience with Jesus. And, as we’ll see, it’s similar to the one Moses had when he was on mount Sinai. Moses’ mountaintop experiences with God are a type for us to look at. But Jesus wants to give you mountaintop experiences with Him just like Moses had them with God and just like the disciples had them with Jesus. You see, when Jesus goes up on the mountain, He calls you and me (His disciples) unto Himself. He calls for us to come and join Him there. And Jesus calls you to join Him because He loves you and He wants you with Him. Mark says that Jesus, when He was up on the mountain, called those people to Himself that He wanted. God wants you! Jesus wants you! In Foursquare, we take the view that God wants everyone . He wants every single person on this earth to respond to His loving call, to come to Him on His terms by way of the cross and to be received into a loving relationship and significant purpose in Christ. Jesus wants you today. And He is calling you to come to Him on the mountain. God called Moses from the mountain, too. Exodus 3:1-6 NKJV “Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” 4 So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then He said, “Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is The Called | 3 holy ground.” 6 Moreover He said, “I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.” God called Moses unto Himself while Moses was working his normal job, going through life, doing errands for his family, tending his sheep. And while he was doing those mundane, daily things, he saw something strange, beguiling, intense, and holy and he stopped to take a look at the burning bush. Last week, we talked about taking a step back from our daily grind, or withdrawing, to look in the face of Jesus, to get time with Him and to listen to His voice. God still puts burning bushes in our pathway today if we’ll stop and look. By that I mean that Jesus is here now, working in our lives day by day creating miracles, signs, and wonders if we will choose to turn aside and look. And God creates these burning bush moments in our lives so we’ll stop and look at Him, so we’ll stop and listen, and so we’ll go out on His mission. And He creates these burning bush, or mountain top moments for you and me because He wants you. I need to stress this today, and if you remember one thing from the message, remember this - Jesus wants YOU. Mark 3:13 NKJV “And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him.” When it says that Jesus called to Him those He wanted, you are included! Jesus wants you! This is a big deal. I want you to try to understand the gravity of the fact that Jesus, the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, the One who conquered death and hell, the One who rose victorious from the dead and is all-powerful over everything and perfectly holy, true, and righteous, wants you to come to Him and be with Him on the mountain. As we realize all that God has waiting for us as we respond to His call, we gain the strength and courage we need to carry on in every situation. Jesus bought the The Called | 4 whole field with His blood to purchase each one of us. We are His treasure. We are God’s inheritance as the riches of His glory and His inheritance in the Saints.4 Jesus is deeply interested in you and wants to be close to you. He has plans for you, to give you a hope and a future, He knows you inside and out and cares for you, He has accepted you already into His arms and joyfully supports you in your christian walk. God is eager to give you everything you need to grow in Him and enable you to fulfill His call, and He’s never absent or too busy for you. He’s never mean, cruel, abusive, controlling, or manipulative, but He has come to set you free from bondages of the world, the flesh, and the devil so you can make Godly choices and grow in His grace.5 I’ll say it again because it’s very important you understand; Jesus wants you. Jesus goes up on the mountain. And He calls the people He wants to come to Him because He loves them, wants to give them purpose, and wants them to be fulfilled at a deep spiritual level. He wants them to come into a new life bursting with spiritual energy and vitality that overflows into the physical realm as well. And in the next simple statement the gospel writer makes, we see a response from the people who know they are loved, who know they are wanted, who have heard Jesus’ call from the mountain. They come. Our response to Jesus is always very important. When Jesus calls, they come. Mark 3:13b DLNT “And they went to Him.” Will we choose to go to Jesus, to respond to His call in our daily lives, in our jobs, our work, our relationships; will we go to Him with our pain, with our prosperity, with our blessings, our questions, our lack and our overflow? Will we go to Him on the mountain as He calls our names? 4 Hayford, Jack. “The Hope of His Calling.” Sermon #1122. Gateway Legacy Library, 11 September 1977, https://app.gatewaylegacylibrary.com/legacy-library/4/sermon/2371. 5 Anderson, Neil T. The Steps to Freedom in Christ, P13. Bloomington, Minnesota, Bethany House Publishers, 1990, 2001, 2004, 2017. The Called | 5 If you do choose to go to Him on the mountain, something will happen to you. You won’t stay the same; you will be changed. You’ll be changed by looking into the face of God, into the face of Jesus Christ. And after you’re changed by looking into His face, you’ll be sent out on a mission in His Name, with His power and His authority as you keep responding each day to His call. If you remember the story, Moses was afraid at first to be with God, to look towards Him on the mountain when the bush was burning. But after He knew God personally, after His experience with the Lord, Moses changed and His relationship with the Lord changed, too. Early in Exodus, Moses is scared to look at God. Exodus 3:6b AMP “Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.” But after Moses responds and moves forward in obedience, goes through the plagues of Egypt and the trials and tribulations of the wilderness, he comes back to the mountain with a changed attitude. You see, we don’t actually live day by day on the mountaintop of spiritual experience. If you do, great. But that’s not most of us. We actually live in the valley of life with all of it’s difficulties and drugeries. But when we come back to God’s mountain, after we have obeyed the voice of the Lord, we will be able to speak to Jesus face-to-face in the same place where He called us in the beginning to come to receive His new life and new refreshment. At the end of Exodus, we see that the way Moses interacts with God is different; He’s not afraid to look at God anymore. Exodus 33:11 AMPC “And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” There's a progression illustrated here; God calls, we respond. God sends, we go, God speaks, and we listen. God offers friendship, and we walk with Him. Let’s see how this spiritual progression takes place in Mark with the disciples. Mark 3:13-15 NKJV “And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him. 14 Then He appointed The Called | 6 twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, 15 and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons.” Jesus goes up on the mountain and calls the disciples to Himself. And they choose to come. Then Jesus gives them power to go out and help others have an exodus out of bondage; in the same way God commissioned Moses to go help the children of Israel gain freedom, Jesus commissions us, His disciples, to help others find freedom from demonic, worldly, and fleshly oppression. How do we help people get free? By preaching the gospel, the good news (did you ever notice the first letters of gospel are GO?). Then along with the good news, we pray for people so Jesus can heal them of their sicknesses and diseases, and we cast out demons when we encounter them. As we interact with others, we show them the love of Jesus by giving people what they need practically, both on a spiritual level and a physical level. Jesus does this for us. He fulfills us, He brings us to Himself where we can have an encounter with Him, a mountaintop experience, and then He sends us back down into the valley to continue the mission He started. And who God calls, He equips. Just like He equipped Moses to speak to Pharoah by giving him Aaron to help, He gives us the help we need to be fruitful in His mission. Hebrews 13:6 NKJV So we may boldly say: “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?” Now, our mission in the valley isn’t always easy. Sometimes we encounter resistance in ourselves. In others too, but discipleship starts with us. I don’t know who said it, but I like it; you can’t disciple a demon, and you can’t cast out the flesh. In other words, sometimes, there is demonic resistance to the gospel of Jesus, but God has given us the ability to overcome it by the blood of the Lamb and word of our testimony (Revelation 12:11). And sometimes our fleshly desires are really strong and we need to just bite the bullet and do what God says in obedience. We The Called | 7 need to obey and teach others to obey the word of the Lord. We use the fancy word ‘discipleship’ for that; but it simply means learning how to obey God in all things the way Jesus obeyed His Father God in all things. I think, just like the disciples, we sometimes get carried away with the fact that we have all the tools we need to live a victorious life and bring others to Jesus. What I mean is that Jesus gave his disciples power to heal and power over demons in His Name. But having power itself was never the end goal. The goal is to let everyone know that Jesus wants them, He loves them, and He calls them to Himself on the same mountain He called you and me. That’s why Jesus told His disciples, Luke 10:19-20 NKJV “Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. 20 Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” Jesus puts the deliverance and healing ministry that disciples are able to walk in now in perspective by directing their attention to the most remarkable of all miracles; salvation. The greatest miracle of all is a changed heart that comes to God at His call, that grows in relationship with and obedience to Jesus day by day. This doesn’t minimize, negate, or take away miracles of healing or exorcism or say they don’t matter in the lives of people - of course they do! But the human preoccupation with power must always be balanced with the priority of people. This takes us back to one of our themes in Mark - Jesus cares about people, cares about their hearts, and cares that they come to Him and learn to walk with Him. Having power to move in signs, wonders, and miracles is helpful, needed, and is a major part of it, but it’s a byproduct of a close walk with Jesus. Jesus wants you to come to the mountain with Him. He has called you and me to Himself so He could fulfil our deepest human needs by way of relationship with Him. Paul prays that we would know how amazing this is, the hope of His The Called | 8 calling. Ephesians 1:18 NKJV “the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” There's a lot here to unpack But I’m not going to go into all of it today. However, one thing the hope of His calling means is that you can have high hopes for the future. The Amplified Bible says that we now can cherish the fact that we have the divine guarantee, the confident expectation that God will move us forward in His plans as we choose to go to Him in obedience. As we realize what God has for us and how He is working things out for our good and His glory, we’ll want to obey Him more and more and walk with Him more and more. As we obey Jesus in the little things, we’ll find all of the big things fall into place and God’s great and glorious plans for us, plans to make us who we were created to be, come to fruition in His timing. And so we have high hopes in Jesus. Paul prays for wisdom and knowledge for the church, for you and me, so that we will know the ‘hope of our calling,’ that’s related to the eternal nature of the great and precious promises you have in Jesus Christ! And also the greatness of His power, which is available to us as the body of Christ in the world. And when Jesus brings His disciples up to the mountain with Him, He wants them to understand the promise, the hope, the future they have in Him as well as the power that comes with full obedience to His word and His ways. The call and the commission are walked out by the power and the promises. In other words, His power and His promises enable us to fulfill His call and His commission. And today I want to reiterate the point that you have been the one called by Jesus Himself. You have been called up to the mountain with Him so you can be His hands and feet down in the valley. You have been given His power and His promises to share with others in need. And by His grace, like Moses, as you obey The Called | 9 His word day by day, you will bring others into freedom, into His kingdom by salvation, and come back to the mountain to speak with the Lord, Your dearest friend, face to face as a man speaks to his friend. Proverbs 18:24b AMP “There is a [true, loving] friend who [is reliable and] sticks closer than a brother.” That’s Jesus. And He offers you His friendship with each new day. And even here in the story, we’ll see Jesus start the process of turning His disciples into people of the promise, people who become everything Jesus has called them too. Mark 3:14 ESV “And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach.” Now apostles literally means, ‘sent out ones; special messengers, or commissioned ones.’ People come to Jesus with their brokenness, failure, and pain, and Jesus turns their lives around and sends them out as His ambassadors, His emissaries, His representatives, empowered by the Holy Spirit. But I want to focus on the word, ‘appointed’ right now. Because I think the meaning has been a little lost over time. ‘Appointed’ here is also translated ‘ordained,’ but it really means to make something, or to do something. Why does it matter? Because it means that Jesus is the One making you and me into His sent-out ones. It means Jesus is the One that does the heavy lifting as we come to Him in simple obedience. To paraphrase with us as the object with other greek definitions; Jesus makes us into people who can go out and preach the gospel; Jesus is the author and the cause of us going out to preach and help others in need, Jesus is the One who produces and shoots us forth as branches of Himself, the True Vine, Jesus is the One who has declared us His children, His brothers and sisters; Jesus is the One who has performed His promise to empower us to do His will. The Called | 10 God calls, God equips, and God brings the increase and does the healing, casting out of demons - all of the hard work. It’s simply ours to obey, to come at His calling, to surrender to His leading and His promptings, to look into His face day by day and follow His example of love and service. Hebrews says that God will “equip you with every good thing to carry out His will and strengthen you [making you complete and perfect as you ought to be], accomplishing in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” Hebrews 13:21 AMP And the call today is to simply let Jesus do his work in you, making you complete and perfect as you ought to be. God is the God who both shows us his will and equips us to do it. He never gives us a task without also giving us the power to accomplish it. When God sends us out, he sends us equipped with everything we need.6 Even Jesus’ own examples, perfect and powerful as they are, cannot in themselves enable us to follow in His footsteps. We need more than an example. The writer calls on God to make possible the outworking of this truth in the lives of His people. To attempt to live the Christian life with the purest doctrine and the best examples, but without God’s direct power, just won’t work. We not only need to know God’s will, we need to have His power. We need the God of peace to equip us in every good thing to do His will. And He gives us that power by His Holy Spirit falling upon us. The thing we must contribute to the Christian life is willing yieldedness, complete surrender, and a quickness to respond. All we have to do is open and direct our wills and let God’s power work through us.7 Jesus is calling you and me today to simply come. Come up the mountain with Jesus, come into submission to the Holy Spirit. Respond to His invitation and receive His empowerment by baptism with the Holy Spirit. If you’ve never been 6 Barclay, William. The Daily Bible Study: The Letter to the Hebrews, P298. Edinburgh, Saint Andrew Press, 1976, 2002. Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/read/367617098/New-Daily-Study-Bible-The-Letter-to-the-Hebrews#. 7 MacArthur, John. THE MacARTHUR NEW TESTAMENT COMMENTARY, P691. Chicago, Illinois, Moody Press, 1983. Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/read/314658681/Hebrews-MacArthur-New-Testament-Commentary#. The Called | 11 baptized in the Holy Spirit to receive Jesus’ empowerment for ministry, that’s available to you at any time. And as you follow Jesus in simple obedience, He will send you out to others with the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the message that brings hope, healing, and grace right in your circumstances, in your moments, and in your days. The Called | 12
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