Refuge Audio Podcast

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve tried every option until there is nothing left but to cry out to Jesus? We all encounter experiences that exhaust our strength and resources until there is nothing left to do but cry out to Jesus. Thankfully, He is willing to be our last resort. In Mark 5:21-43, we encounter two daughters and a father who were desperate for Jesus to help them. Through their experiences, we learn how Jesus’ character should cause us to call out to Him as our first choice instead of our last resort.

In Mark 4 and 5, Jesus encounters two different storms. They were different from one another (one was an external storm, and the other was internal), and different from the typical storm clouds and thunderclaps. These two storms were satanic. The first was a storm that directly threatened Jesus and His disciples. The second was a tempest that had tormented a man to the point of unimaginable suffering. Jesus confronts the dark force behind each storm to bring peace.

Not everyone who follows after Jesus follows Him for the right reasons. Some look for His miracles—their interest isn’t in Him, His teaching, or the Word of God, but in what He could do for them. When they hear the Word of God clearly, they are accountable to it. That’s why Jesus said to “Take heed what you hear.” It’s great when people are attracted to Jesus—but if their focus is on what He can do for them instead of Who He is, they will not follow Him for long.

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.