Mosaic Boston • Jamaica Plain

This week's passage in Mark shows Jesus' humanity and deity. Jesus commands the disciples to head across the Sea of Galilee. Which brings them through a terrifying storm. While Jesus brought them into the storm, he was also the only one that could bring them though. Listen this week as Community Pastor Bill Hopkins helps us see how sometimes Jesus brings us into to difficult times but also brings us through them.

In this week's passage, Jesus commands us to "Listen" fifteen times. He's definitely trying to tell us something. While we can hear words, it's harder to listen. Listening requires us to be more attentive. We’ve all had moments where we were hanging on every word of the conversation in front of us. This week we want to do that with Jesus' teaching. We get to eavesdrop in on a conversation had over 2000 years ago and see ourselves reflected in it. Join us this week as we gaze into four illuminating parables in Mark chapter four.

Today we’re going to see a pressing crowd around Jesus that included the devout, the needy, and his own blood relatives. Yet, no matter their close proximity to him, Jesus did not consider them his truest family. Jesus defined his truer family in an expectedly unexpected way. Join us this week as Pastor Ivey looks at the truest family found only in Christ.

We’ve all experienced the shock of entering a new culture. Maybe it was a new school, a new city, a new church, a new neighborhood, or even a new family. The religious authorities were shocked at the new culture that Jesus was initiating. In Today’s passage, Jesus defines a new kingdom that shatters all the categories of the old and turns society on its head. Today Pastor Ivey asks the question: Which kingdom do you live in, the old dead kingdom of the Pharisees or the new kingdom of Christ?

There is a video quality problem with this week's message that starts at about 7 minutes. The content is all there, but the video becomes blurry.

Life is full of surprises. Some are good and others aren't, but the greatest surprise is when we encounter Jesus in a life-changing way for the first time. This is the greatest most completely sublime surprise of our lives. Today Jesus surprises us by being a physician, but not the type we may expect, and definitely not the type of physician those following him expected.

Anyone can call themselves king, but they better be able to back up their position. If someone is a real king you’d expect to see some tangible signs. In this week's message pastor Ivey explores Jesus' authority as king. He proved that his title wasn't a sham. He was a new type of human and a different type of king. He held more power and greater authority than any that had come before.

The Bible is a cohesive story with Jesus as its main focus, and in Mark, we’ll see a book that is rich in history and background. Mark didn’t write his gospel in a bubble. He was a part of a culture and a tradition. In week one we look at a king that enters to rescue us, the failed rulers, his kingdom which will make all wrongs right, and a call to give everything up and follow him.

In this final message of Rhythms, we look at fasting. While strange and mystical, we come at fasting from the perspective that it is voluntarily refraining from food in order to sync our hearts up with God’s. Imagine that God is going about life at a certain rhythm. The last thing we want to do is have a competing rhythm. Our goal is to change our rhythm to match God's. We want our desires and passions to sync with God's. Fasting is a tool to help us do that.

When we think of spiritual rhythms we probably think of things like prayer, fasting, worship, and reading the Scriptures, but we may not think of generosity. Yet, over and over again, the scriptures point out our need for a rhythm of generosity. Most of us are where we are because someone was generous to us. For the Christian, Jesus is the paradigm of generosity. Now that we've been shown some much generosity, it is essential we are generous.

The question isn’t whether we are going to be worshipers. Rather, it is, what are we going to worship? To worship anyone or anything less than the all-powerful, all-knowing God, we sell ourselves short. But what does true worship look like in our daily discipline? Pastor Ivey Rhodes brings us the message this week to discuss the life rhythm of worship.