A Jesus Worth Following

If you have your Bibles let me invite you to open with me to the book of Mark chapter 8.

We are going to begin reading with our last paragraph from last week’s sermon and then continue on through the end of chapter 8.

So look with me at Mark 8:27-33

Mark 8:27–33 ESV

27 And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” 30 And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him. 31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

That was last week’s passage now lets look at this week’s

Mark 8:34–38 ESV

34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Lets Pray

Jesus stunned his followers in Mark chapter 8.

He wrecked their presuppositions.

Their understanding of Jesus has been shaped by cultural expectations more than by Jesus’ own words.

They think Jesus has primarily come to establish the Kingdom of God by way of military conquest.

They think Jesus has come to defeat the enemy forces of the Roman Empire.

They see promises in the Old Testament of a new kingdom and a new world, but Jesus’ plan seems to be contrary to their understanding of God’s plan.

How can suffering, rejection, and death be a part of Jesus’ plan for ushering in the Kingdom of God?

That sounds a whole lot like losing and lot less like winning.

It’s so shocking, and so counter cultural to the disciple’s understanding of the good news…, that Peter actually stands up to oppose Jesus’ plan.

We looked at this briefly last week.

Mark 8:32–33 ESV

And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

Peter rebukes Jesus for his statements about suffering and death.

And Jesus rebukes Peter for setting his mind on the things of man rather than things of God.

This is so important for our own self awareness.

Peter, with good intentions, relied on his own cultural presuppositions more than he relied upon God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus.

Peter trusted man’s wisdom… while Jesus was calling Peter to trust God’s wisdom.

The crucifixion and death of Jesus was essential to the future victory of Jesus.

Jesus did come to establish the kingdom of God…, but the first enemy to defeat was not Rome.

The first enemy to defeat was sin and death itself.

It was through dying that Jesus would take humanity’s guilt and shame on himself.

It was through dying that Jesus would overcome death through resurrecition.

If Jesus had not paid the price through suffering, death, and resurrection…you and I would still be in our sins.

all of us would be on our way to eternal death… if Jesus, the eternal one, had not died for us.

To oppose Jesus’ crucifixion, was for Peter to stand in the very place of Satan, opposing God’s plan for salvation.

He had his mind set on the things of man and not on the things of God.…

But Peter’s perspective of God’s kingdom needed adjustment not just when it came to his perspective of Jesus.

It also needed to change when it came to how following Jesus would look.

After having corrected his disciples about his own destiny, Jesus now turns to the crowds who are following to address their assumptions about what following Jesus will mean for their own lives.

Jesus makes an unthinkable statement…

Mark 8:34 ESV

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

….

I'm assuming a hush fell across the crowd when Jesus made this statement…

or perhaps you heard the rustling and the squirming and the mumble of a very uneasy crowd trying to process what they just heard.

Jesus just said very clearly and without stutter or qualification…. “If you want to follow me, your going to have to be willing to die just as I am going to die.”

There is no way around the shocking and off putting nature of this sentence.

In fact, I would say that we have been too quick to soften the rough edges of this text.

We have been too quick to read Mark 8:34 and say, well of course we don’t really have to die for our faith, for us this verse means that we pick up our cross of having a bad day, or pick up our cross of having to live in this place, or work this job, or bear with this difficult person…

But there is no such qualification in the text itself, and the 1st century hearers would not have understood the cross to be merely figurative.

When we consider the symbol of the cross, we see in our minds steeples, jewelry, bumper stickers, and t-shirts….

When they considered the symbol of the cross they remembered vivid images of limp bloody bodies put on display as warning to anyone who would sin against Roman rule.

When Jesus said that following him would involve carrying a cross… he challenges all of his followers to a level of dedication, a level of commitment, a level of faith, that would follow Jesus even to the death.

This was not a hypothetical call to the original readers of Mark’s gospel.

As we have pointed out before, this gospel was first read in the city of Rome when persecution had begun to intensify.

The Roman emperor Nero had labeled Christian’s to be an enemy of the state.

Their narrow views of there being one God and one way to salvation made them an easy target and scapegoat for the emperor’s political purposes.

When the original readers read, “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”… they did not immediately apply this to minor difficulties in the Christian life… they applied it to the names and faces of those in their communities who had already died because of their commitment to Jesus.

In one sense this verse would have been comforting to those 1st century followers.

This verse meant that Jesus knew following him would include such persecutions.

In fact, this verse meant that Jesus expected his followers to endure such sufferings.

And furthermore, this verse means that Jesus affirms and in fact emphasizes that following him is worth even giving up physical life here on earth.

This is the truth I want you to walk away with this morning.

Truth #1 True Life is Found in Giving Your Life Entirely to Jesus

Read verses 34 and 35 again with me.

Mark 8:34–35 ESV

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Follow with me here…

There is a self that Jesus is calling you to deny.

There is an old you, a sinful you, an independent you, a self-determining you, a selfish you, that Jesus says the new you should deny if you want to follow Jesus.

That means that following Jesus will require you to deny yourself of things that the old you values.

That means that following Jesus will require you to replace your old values with the supreme value of obeying your new Lord and Savior wherever he leads and according to whatever he says even to the point of physical death.

But that is an insane calling!

Who would want to deny themselves?

Who would want to pick up a cross?

Who would want to surrender their own will like that to another… unless it was somehow eternally worth it…

Jesus is saying… it is eternally worth it.

There is a form of life that you must give up and give over to death in this world.

But there is a life that you cling to, a life that is preserved for you, a life that is yours even if you die, that is far more abundant and eternal then you could ever imagine.

In fact, if you give up your life here on earth by dying to self or physically dying at an early age… Jesus says…, “you will have gained life”

…A life worth dying for.

There are worse things then dying… among those, I think, is a life wasted… a life that gives itself to temporary pursuits and then passes by into nothingness…

Many of you in the hearing of my voice are wasting your life with things that have no eternal value at all.

You make money to spend money on yourself and your family.

You strive for better health, just to live a little longer, but to die just the same.

You strive for happiness and comforts in the very temporary Kingdom of God, while their is a robust, eternal, electrifying, eternal mission of God happening in the world that will impact people for the next billion years and more.

Jesus’ word to you this morning is simple, “if you keep working to save your life as it is, you will eventually lose what your striving to maintain…, but if you will give all that up for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the gospel , you will find life more abundantly then you can ever imagine both here and now and forever more.

It’s literally true life worth dying for.

Truth #1 True Life is Found in Giving Your Life Entirely to Jesus

It’s true, for most of us, that will not mean martyrdom.

That will not mean crucifixion.

For some of us some day, it might, but for most of us in this context, it won’t.

but what would denying Yourself and giving your life completely into Jesus’ hands look like?

What would following Jesus entirely mean for you?

I don’t know that I can exactly answer that for every person in this room… but I know that obeying his very obvious revealed word would be a good start.… I know repenting of your ongoing apathy, complacency, and perhaps even idolatry would be a great way to begin.

Jesus seems to think so too..

He goes on to further elaborate on the kinds of things you would have to put aside to follow him completely.

He references generally two desires of the old self:

- Firstly, material possessions and

- Secondly, the approval or praise of man.

Mark 8:36–37 ESV

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?

Truth #2 Following Jesus Means Prioritizing Eternal Souls Over Temporary Stuff

The language of verses 36-37 sound financial.

They sound like transactional words: profit, gain, forfeit, give, return.

Jesus breaks down all of life into the choice between a good deal or a bad deal.

He articulates what would be a bad deal.

It would be a bad deal to gain all the stuff that the world has to offer and in the process pay the price of your own soul.

Now when the Bible uses the word soul, it points to the deepest part of your personhood, your truest self.

Jesus warns that giving away forever your own soul in exchange for even the whole world… would be a very bad deal.

It is stunning to me how wrong we get this with our own lives and especially with the lives of others.

It is stunning to me how little value we place on the eternal soul of a person in comparison to the value we put on temporary stuff.

I see this even in how parents will treat their children.

It is frightening to me how many parents who will claim to be Christians, seem to care very little about the soul of their children.

It is frightening to me how high a priority parents will put on their child making good grades, doing well in sports, having a good social life, or having the material things they never had, but how little the parents will prioritize the eternal spiritual soul of their child.

I pray that I never care more about the things of this world that I can get or give to my children, over and against, their eternal souls being made happy in Jesus forever and ever.

How much time, money, and effort do you plan to sacrifice this year in order to maintain or accumulate more stuff In comparison to the time, money, and effort you plan to give to see your own soul and the souls of others be forgiven and forever joyful in relationship with Jesus?

There is an eternity on the other side of this life, and we can’t take our stuff with us, but what will be with us are those whom we loved enough to point them to Jesus.

What could you gain in this world that would be worth one soul?

What could you give in return for one soul?

Satan does his best work here in this country, not by leading us into the most vile of sins, but rather by distracting us with the most trivial of pursuits.

Eternity is what we must set our eyes upon as we follow Jesus.

I read a short biographical work on Jonathan Edwards at the beginning of this year.

He was used by the Lord in extraordinary ways, and one of the unique features of Jonathan Edwards was his continual awareness of the urgency of eternity. He wrote out over 70 life resolutions and reviewed them weekly so as not to waste his life.

One of his simpler resolutions reads:

“Resolved, that I will live so as I shall wish I had done when I come to die” - Jonathan Edwards

Truth #2 Following Jesus Means Prioritizing Eternal Souls Over Temporary Stuff

Verses 36-37 speak against prioritizing temporal possessions..,

but verse 38 rebukes a different kind of temptation

Mark 8:36–38 ESV

36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Truth #3 Following Jesus Means Living to Please God, Not Man

Jesus presents us with another choice.

He presents us with two audiences.

The first audience he presents to us is a world that is ashamed of Jesus.

He describes humanity in this broken world as an adulterous and sinful generation.

He describes a society marked by their unfaithfulness not only to one another, but to God.

We live in a world full of people cheating on one another, and cheating on the one true God.

Like adulterers consumed with selfish pleasure and passion, people all over the world move from one little god to the next seeking to satisfy their own cravings.

In Jesus’ context, we have seen that the pharisees and scribes are the ones that are ashamed of Jesus.

Jesus is not the messiah they were expecting.

He eats with sinners

He converses with gentiles

He emphasizes things like humility and sacrifice, not pride and victory

He advocates for heart change and repentance,

He is totally unimpressed with position, power, or outward religious purity.

To the Jewish elite of the day, Jesus was an imposter. He was a threat to their own idols, and he was to be done away with.

They were ashamed of him and his claims.

In the context of the original readers… It was the Roman empire that was ashamed of Jesus.

Jesus followers claimed that Jesus was the only one worthy of worship as opposed to the pantheon of Roman gods.

Jesus followers refused to participate in pagan parties and the drunkenness of the day.

Jesus followers refused to bow the knee to Caesar in worship.

Jesus followers were humble and unimpressive and their god was someone who had willingly died on a Roman cross.

1st century Rome was ashamed of Jesus and his claims.

21st century America is ashamed of Jesus and his claims.

Jesus claims to be the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through him.

Jesus teaches that we should deny ourselves rather than please ourselves.

Jesus tells us that every human being is sinful and in need of saving from an eternal hell where everyone will go lest they turn and trust the salvation Jesus provides.

Jesus teaches that any sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman is sin against a holy God.

Jesus warns against living for more and more money and more and more comfort.

Jesus warns against seeking the praise of people

21st century America is ashamed of this Jesus and all that he stands for.

This is the world we live in… and this world applies pressure upon us to join with them in their adulteries.

It applies pressure upon us to conform our lives to be in line with the cultural expectation.

It applies pressure of varying degrees.

In some settings, failure to conform may simply mean peer pressure and social isolation.

In some settings, failure to conform may mean persecution, the loss of property, and the loss of life.

Whatever the case, this sinful and adulterous generation in which we find ourselves applies pressure on us to be ashamed of the Jesus we follow in the same way that they are ashamed.

This sinful and adulterous generation urges us:

to keep Jesus to ourselves

to accept what they accept

to celebrate what they celebrate.

to be embarrassed of the truth

BUT Jesus very clearly warns us… that this sinful and adulterous generation is not the place we should find our approval.

Mark 8:38 ESV

38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

There is yet another audience whose approval we seek.

After Jesus, resurrection, he ascended back into the glory of his Father with the holy angels, and he rules from a heavenly throne room.

This is the court of appeal we will all stand before.

Jesus in all his glory and majesty surrounded by myriads of angels singing holy, holy, holy for all of eternity.

This is where Jesus is now, and it is in this kind of glory that Jesus will return.

We all will meet him there, or he will meet us here in all of his splendor.

And at that great meeting… your social standing here on earth will not matter at all.

The approval of your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family will not matter at all.

The fact that you were liked, unoffensive, and were able to avoid awkward conversations throughout your life will amount to nothing.

The only thing that will matter on that day, is not whether mankind approved of you in this life, but whether Jesus Christ approves of you in the next.

It is his final and eternal approval we seek.

but how?

How can we have confidence on that day that Jesus will not be ashamed of us?

Well this is the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ...

Jesus’ final and eternal approval of you is not performance based.

You do not have to be perfect to stand before him on that day of judgment

You don’t have to meet some level of righteousness or boldness to stand before him on that day of judgment.

Jesus actually came to walk in perfect righteousness and perfect boldness on your behalf.

His suffering and death on the cross was a substitutionary one.

He took your place so that you could stand approved forever and ever.

So what does Jesus require of you then?

Faith.

The opposite of being ashamed of Jesus.... is believing in Jesus.

The opposite of being ashamed of Jesus… is being affectionately desirous of Jesus.

Behind everything that Jesus is teaching in this paragraph is a genuine saving faith that believes following Jesus is worth it.

Why deny yourself?

Why carry a cross?

Why give up your life?

Why resist the pressure of this sinful and adulterous generation?

Faith.

We believe that Jesus really is God.

We believe that Jesus really has secured our forgiveness through his sacrifice.

We believe that the resurrected Jesus really has promised us eternal life

We believe that following him and leading others to follow him is worth it.

This is the kind of faith through which we are saved by his grace.

This is the kind of faith we seek to grow in for the rest of our lives.

Let me close with one simple question…Do you live as if Jesus is worth following?

Lets pray.