Sermon Tone Analysis

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

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

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.

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…

….

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.

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.

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.