Refuge Audio Podcast

Join us Sundays at 10am as we worship the Lord and continue our study in the Gospel of Mark. We gather in person at 912 W. St. Germain Street, St. Cloud, MN; online at https://live.refuge.mn; or on the radio at 96.1 FM (St. Cloud) and https://refuge.fm.

Jesus wants to be with us. So much so that He has appointed us to be with Him forever. Everything else is out of the overflow of that fellowship with Jesus—everything else becomes secondary. God didn’t save us so we could just do amazing things for Him. He saved us so that we could enjoy fellowship with Him—forever! Our identity, purpose, and worth in every season of life comes from this fact—Jesus wants to be with us and He has appointed us first and foremost to simply be with Him.

During His ministry on earth, Jesus regularly withdrew from the busyness of life and ministry to ask His Father what He should do. Fellowship with His Father was so essential to Jesus that He prioritized His time so He could just be with His Heavenly Father. If Jesus needed to do this, how much more so us?

The Herodians, the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Saducees…there were many groups who saw Jesus as their enemy. In Mark 2:18-3:6, we observe three interactions Jesus had with some of these people, who weren’t really enemies from Jesus’ point of view. Although they came at Him in the craziest and pettiest of ways, Jesus didn’t consider them His enemies. To Him, they were hurting people who hadn’t yet found the courage to confront what was really going on in their hearts. Jesus didn’t take it personally. Instead, He gently led them again and again to God’s word and to God’s work.

Jesus once said, “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” This statement confounded and upset the religious leaders of His day. They thought they were already righteous and that the Messiah would come for them, not sinners. They failed to see that Jesus really had come for them too—but something needed to happen in their hearts first. They weren’t really righteous—they only thought they were.

We often look at the week between Palm Sunday and Good Friday from the perspective of the Son and rarely from the perspective of the Father—and almost never from the perspective of both. But don’t forget that the Son and the Father—the two of them—went together. To truly appreciate this perspective, we turned to Genesis 22 to understand what God the Son and God the Father did together.

Palm Sunday is the day we remember Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. A day foretold by prophets, a day for celebration, and day for weeping. It was a day that Jesus was concerned—not for Himself, but about us. In this study, we considered what Jesus was doing and what was happening one week before His resurrection and a few days before His crucifixion.

In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul writes about the right motives for ministry. He wrote so well about this topic because his motives were often scrutinized. There was a number of ways Paul could have handled this criticism, but he chose the most direct way—by addressing it head on in such a way that helped this church—and us—see the right motives for life and ministry.

Grace, authority, power. These are the qualities of Jesus we’ve observed so far in the Gospel of Mark. In Nazareth, people marveled at His gracious words. In Capernaum, people were astonished at how Jesus taught with authority. And He demonstrated His power when He healed Peter’s mother-in-law. He is able to do everything with all power and authority. And He is also willing to do it with all grace. Not just for those in Nazareth and Capernaum. He is willing to heal YOU and cleanse YOU of the debilitating, disfiguring, and disgusting effects of sin. All He has to do is say the word and you will be clean. And yet, as we see in our study, He is willing to do so much more.

The life that Jesus invites us into is a life of asking—for anything and everything! Nothing is too small or too big to ask God for. Once we understand that we can (and should) ask Him anything (and to keep asking until something changes), we find joy in a life of asking, obedience and love.