Two Journeys

The Holy Spirit produces a culture of bold, loving evangelism in local churches leading to many conversions through prayer and obedience.

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Paul instructs believers to glorify God by willingly submitting to governing authorities that he has put in power to rule and administer justice, and to trust God.

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In Revelation 5:1-14, witness the Lamb who was slain be pronounced the only one worthy to open God's scroll and hear the new song of heaven praising the infinite majesty of Christ.

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The Great Commission commands us to spread the gospel. Join Jesus in his ongoing mission to spread this incredible news of eternal life!

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Salvation only started when Jesus died on the cross, and it doesn't end there. Join Jesus in his ongoing mission to spread this incredible news of eternal life!

As we come to the end of the Gospel of Mark this sermon... next sermon, there'll be one more summary at the end, God willing, we really come to the point of everything. We come to the point of it all. There is a purpose and a reason why God created the universe. We believe in eternity past, that the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit before anything was created at all, existed in perfect fellowship, in a loving fellowship, one with another. It was not out of need at all that He created the universe but out of a sense of generosity that He might create a context whereby He could reveal Himself to sentient beings, angels and humans who would be able to know and appreciate His glory and be delighted in it and be happy in it and have fellowship with Him. That is why God created the universe.

But sin intervened, stepped in. Adam sinned on our behalf. And we all fell in Adam, we all sinned in Adam.  We became what Isaiah 9 calls “the people walking in darkness”, the people who do not see the glory of God, do not understand it. But God sent His son to be the light of the world, and He has rescued us out of the dominion of darkness. He's given us spiritual eyes. The eyes of our hearts have been enlightened, if we're Christians. We have seen the glory of God in Christ. We have been saved, we have been redeemed, and though we see only a little of that glory... as it says in one Corinthians 13, "We see through a glass darkly," someday we're going to see it clearly face to face, and that brings us great joy.

But why are we still here? Having come to salvation, having received the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith, having received the forgiveness of sins and adoption, why are we still here in this sin-cursed world?  I believe that part of the answer to that is we are here for the glory of God in the salvation of others who have not yet crossed over from death to life. We're here to be witnesses. We're here to become fishers of men, that we will be instrumental in the hands of God to draw people out of Satan's dark kingdom. That is part of the reason why we're still here.

I also believe we're here to grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ to become more and more conformed to Christ, to be like Jesus more and more in our minds, in our hearts and our lives to grow in holiness. Those things are not different from each other. They are conformed together, that we begin to see other people the way Jesus did. When He looked out at the crowds, He saw that they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, and His heart went out to them, and He said, "The harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out labors into his harvest here." That was His heart when He saw them and He saw their true spiritual condition.

The text you just heard read is one of five different versions of the Great Commission given to disciples at the end of the life of Jesus on earth. He commands us, His church, His people to go into all the world and preach the good news, the Gospel to all creation and to put people who hear that message at the fork in the road. If they believe and are baptized, they'll be saved. If they do not believe, they'll be condemned. That's the text we're looking at today, that’s the calling.

We come to the point of Jesus' mission, why He came from heaven to earth. Jesus came into the world to save sinners, period. That saving work of Jesus Christ was only begun during His time on earth. When He died and rose again, it only began. The blood of the Passover lamb that dreadful night, the night of the 10th plague in Egypt had to be shed, but then it had to be painted on the doorposts and the lintels of the house for the angel of death to pass over. The redemption by the Passover lamb had to be accomplished and applied. Also, Jesus' blood, having been shed, then has to be spiritually applied to sinners all around the world. That is the purpose of Jesus' continuing mission in the world, the application through the Holy Spirit of God, the application of His shed blood to individual sinners for their forgiveness. That is the work that we are about here at First Baptist Church.

The unifying message of Mark’s Gospel, it starts Mark 1:1, “The beginning of the Gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” essential to the Gospel message, is the identity of this person, Jesus Christ, declared to be the Son of God. The whole Gospel of Mark unfolds details and dimensions of that truth, that Jesus is the Son of God.

The NIV has the phrase, "The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Other translation simply say, "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."The word “gospel” means “good news”. The word in English accurately translates the Greek grammar in the simplest sense of, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What does that “of” mean? It's either the good news from Jesus or it could be the good news that Jesus proclaimed, “of" meaning “origin” there;  the message that came from Jesus or, as the translation says, it could be “about”. It's the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In the end both are true. This is the Gospel that Jesus proclaimed, but it is also the about Jesus Himself.  It is marvelous then to think of Jesus not as merely the messenger of a message we now take on and proclaim, the good news that Jesus proclaim, but that He actually is the good news itself. He is the good news. He is the Gospel.

In another place in Matthew 13:44, He said this, "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hit it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field." A treasure box hidden in the fields. I believe Jesus is that treasure, and I believe He is worth selling everything you have in your life so that you can buy that field and own the treasure.

Paul said in Colossians 2:3, "In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." When you open up that treasure box, that box hidden in the field, you're going to find all wisdom and all knowledge. But wisdom and knowledge are not the only treasures you're going to find hidden in Christ. We also find perfect love. We find total forgiveness of sins. We find reconciliation with Almighty God. We find access to the throne of God. We find a promised eternal inheritance in heaven for each one of us who have believed. We find, in that treasure box, resurrection from the dead and life forevermore, and infinite other treasures besides.

Christ is infinite and immeasurable treasure, most of it hidden from our minds in this world. We'll never get to the 1,000,000th of a percent of the treasure that Jesus is in this life, and therefore I believe in a eternal education, in the glory of Christ, in heaven. Forever and ever and ever we'll be learning how glorious He is. We'll never stop. Jesus is the treasure hidden in the field.

The Gospel, the good news, is not merely a message that He proclaimed, He is the good news. His incarnation is good news. His perfect, sinless life, perfectly fulfilling the two great commandments, the only man that's ever done it in history, is good news. His astonishing miracles are good news. His astounding teachings, unlike any teacher had ever lived, is good news. His fulfillment of all of those Old Testament prophecy, fulfillment of prophecy is good news. His substitutionary death on the cross, giving His life as a ransom in your place is good news. His bodily resurrection from the dead, defeating death forever for us is good news. His promise to return to earth someday and establish an eternal kingdom, the kingdom of God is good news.

Christ's mission to earth began in His life on earth almost 2,000 years ago, but it continues. Mark starts with a statement, “the beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  The Holy Spirit's not just saying through Mark that Mark 1:1 is the first of 679 verses that will come in the Gospel of Mark. This is the beginning. I think it's more than that. Rather, it's that Jesus' mission to earth was just beginning with His short, His brief life on earth. It was just starting. Jesus Himself had more work to do even at the end.

Luke makes the continuation clear in Acts 1:1-2. There, he says, "In my former book, Theophilus," [Gospel of Luke], "I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach." I love that word, “began”. That was just the start, [Gospel of Luke] of all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day He was taken up to heaven after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles He had chosen.  In our text today, if you look at it, Mark makes it just as clear. Look at verses 19-20 of Mark 16, "After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was taken up into heaven. And He sat at the right hand of God. Then, the disciples went out and preached everywhere," listen, "the Lord working with them or worked with them, confirming His word by the signs that accompanied it." There's Jesus up in heaven continuing His work at the right hand of God. This is just the beginning, the beginning of the Gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus is continuing His saving mission to sinners in this cursed world.

What does Christ command of the world? There is a command given to the world shortly after that initial statement in Mark 1:1. He gives this command, Mark 1:15, "The time has come. The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news." That is a command given to the world worldwide. "The time has come. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel." That's the command He gives. It's the command of the Gospel. From Almighty God through His only begotten son, Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the church messengers to the world, this command is given, “repent and believe.” The Gospel is good news to be believed, but it's also a command to be obeyed. It is a command from God to sinners that they must obey.

Paul picks up on this in Romans 1:5, "Through Him, and for his namesake, we," Paul and the other apostles, "we receive grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience of faith." Or one translation has “the obedience that comes from faith." Faith produces obedience to the king, to God, the king.  Again in Acts 17:30, Paul preaching there says, "In the past, God overlooks such ignorance," idolatrous pagan religions, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent." This is a command from God to repent.

When I meditate on this and consider myself and my role as an evangelist, I realize I'm an ambassador from almighty God and I'm going to a rebel, I'm not going there begging and pleading and sniveling, I'm going there as a messenger from God, the king who's commanding that sinner to repent. That doesn't mean you have to be mean or harsh or have an angry look on your face, none of that. But the fact is we are messengers of a God who is telling sinners to throw down their weapons of rebellion against His kingly rule. He's commanding them to repent. It's a command. These two commands of the Gospel, “repent and believe.” Those are the two basic commands of the Gospel, repent and believe.

What does that mean? Repent literally means to “think differently.” That's the meaning in the Greek. It's the meaning also in the Latin that is the basis of our English word, “repent”. It means to think differently, have a different mind, a change of mind resulting in a change of life, a radical transformation of how you think, resulting in a transformation of how you live. That's what repent means, “to turn away from sin to God."

“Believe” means, I think, “to see with the eyes of the heart”. I believe that faith is the eyesight of the soul by which we see invisible spiritual realities. It is the ability to see invisible things and to know that they're true. The invisible truths of the good news, of the Gospel, believe that Jesus is the Son of God, though you have never seen Him and you don't see Him now. Believe that He died on the cross in your place for your sins, though you didn't see any of that. Believe that He rose from the dead on the third day, though the only evidence you have for that is written in the pages of this book. You've never seen it, but you believe that it's true and that He offers full forgiveness of sins to any who will repent and believe. That's what it means to believe the Gospel.

The reason for this is there's a sense of urgency. The time has come and the Kingdom of God is at hand, meaning it's right here. There is no time to waste. Time is of the essence. There's an urgency here. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:2, "Today is the day of salvation." We don't know if we'll be alive tomorrow. As James says, "You don't know what tomorrow will bring." You don't even know if you'll be alive tomorrow. The Kingdom of God is at hand, coming. It's right here. It's not distant, it's right here. God, the king here, and He's calling on people to repent. Time is essential. Salvation is eternal, eternity in heaven, a place where there is no more death, mourning, crying, or pain; free forever from those things, an eternity in a world like that, a glorious world.

But on the other hand, an eternity of condemnation for those who do not believe, who do not repent and believe. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. Condemnation, Jesus taught, is terrifying. No one in the Old Testament ever taught so clearly about hell as Jesus did in His teaching ministry. He was very, very clear about hell as a place of eternal conscious torment. Mark 9, "If your hand caused you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell where the fire never goes out." Five verses later, "Where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched, where existence is upheld by the sovereign God, and so also is the fire that brings about torment." If people say it's just a metaphor, it's like the reality is worse than the metaphor. It's terrifying. Jesus came from heaven to earth and suffered and bled and died on the cross so that people who believed in Him would not have to experience that eternal conscious torment. There is an urgency in this Gospel work. We're surrounded by people who are on their way to hell, surrounded by people who are on their way to being condemned justly for their sins.  That's what Christ commands of the world. 

What does He command of us, His church? As I said, there are five great commissions, so-called, that have essentially the same message, but they're all different from each other. It's beautiful how Matthew's version is different than Mark's version, which is different than Luke's version, which is different than John's version. And it's different than the version given in Acts 1:8. They're all different, and they all contribute something, but they tell the same basic message.

Our version here, Mark 15: 16, Jesus said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." He commands us to go and preach. Those are the commands given to the church, to go and proclaim the message. The proclamation of that Word, the proclamation of the words about Jesus, His life, His death, His resurrection, and the theology of salvation wrapped up in Jesus' mission, those words are the power of God for salvation to sinners who believe. Our job is a words task. It's not the only thing we do, but fundamentally, the call here is to proclaim words.

Paul says in Romans 10 very plainly, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." The universal statement to every human being in every context. "Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved." How then can they call on the one they've not believed in? Before they call, like the verse tells them to do, they have to first believe in the Lord Jesus. And how can they believe in one of whom they have never heard? You need the facts about Jesus before you can believe. And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? That's the work of the church, to give them the facts they need to be saved. And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.”

According to Scripture, we have been sent. Jesus said in John's Gospel, "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you." We are sent. Then a few verses later in Romans 10:17, it says, "Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ." Our task is to proclaim the words of the Gospel to lost people in the hope that they will repent and believe those words and be saved.

The extent of the Great Commission is to go into all the worlds and preach the Gospel to all creation. That's Mark's version, all the world, all creation. Matthew's is probably the most famous of the five great commissions. Matthew 28, 18-20, "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I'm with you always, even to the end of the age." In Matthew's version, it's “all nations,” go and make disciples of all nations, with the end that having become a disciple, they obey all the commands. It's a comprehensive life obedience, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. This is going to happen in all areas of human history. "And surely I'm with you always, even to the end of the age," all nations, all commands all time.

In both Matthew and Mark, baptism is an essential sign of discipleship. Mark says it in verse 16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved." Matthew 28 says, "Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit.”  A disciple is a learner, a follower of the master of Jesus, the great teacher. We're disciples. We follow him and not just cognitively agreeing or assenting to his teachings, but with our lives obeying and following his pattern. That's what a disciple is. But in order for that, we have to be obedient to the master, we have to be obedient to the king, and so an initial test of obedience is water baptism. We don't believe that water baptism is essential for salvation because a thief in the cross was not water baptized. Paul says, "God did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel." If water baptism were required for salvation, he would never have made such a careless statement. It's not water baptism that saves. However, having been genuinely saved, justified, forgiven, it is a first step of outward visible obedience to the commands of God, a willingness to do this simple thing. The word “baptism” means “to immerse or plunge in liquid.”

To all my friends that think that sprinkling is baptism, it isn't. The word means “immerse”, and so it's a plunging into a vat of liquid, like a garment being dyed or a ship being launched or something like that, it's a plunging in liquid. For us, water baptism is an immersion in water as an outward and visible symbol of an immersion in the Holy Spirit that Jesus has done first. We are baptized by Jesus through the Spirit into one body through our faith in Christ. That baptism, real baptism having already happened, we then do the symbolic water baptism as an outward and visible sign. You don't have to be water baptized to be saved, but no, you can't refuse to be water baptized and think that you are saved. That is a clear essential first step of obedience. That's what we're called to do. The church, we, the members of this local church, and Christians worldwide are called to this great and glorious work. Go and proclaim. Make disciples. Baptize them, teach them, do the work of the great commission. That's what we're called to do.

How has Christ's church obeyed? The church has been overwhelmingly and stunningly and gloriously obedient for 20 centuries. That's how we've gotten to this point in which there are hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. It says it right in our text. Look at verse 20, "Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere." It is very easy for us to be discouraged about our failures.  I was saying to the staff this week, we were talking about it, it's like massive step down when Jesus said, "As the Father sent me, I'm sending you." The “me" is the only begotten Son of God who the Father chose and sent. He's sending people like you and me. It's part of God's plan to use weak, fragile, sinful, even vessels like us to do this Great Commission.

Weak, fragile, sinful, broken people have done incredible things for 20 centuries to spread the Gospel as far as it's gone. In the first three centuries of church history, many unnamed, unknown Christians were willing to risk their lives under the oppressive Roman Empire to spread the Gospel and permeate that part of the world until the Emperor Constantine thought it, at least politically expedient, to declare himself a Christian. Whether he was genuinely converted or not, I don't know. Find out. If you get up there to heaven, you see Constantine, you'll know. But the point is that the Gospel had made such progress at that point that he thought it was at least beneficial. Many of his centurions, many of his soldiers were Christians. It's an incredible, spiritual conquest of the Roman Empire in three short centuries. And since that time, the missionary drive has only continued and expanded.

Over the last two centuries in particular, it's been stunning how much progress missions has made. The Gospel spread through the Indian subcontinent, led by William Carey and others, spread through Burma led by Adoniram and Ann Judson and others, spread through China, led by Hudson Taylor and Lottie Moon and others, through Africa, led by David Livingstone and Mary Slessor and many others, through the steamy jungles of the Amazon, led by Cameron Townsend and Jim and Elizabeth Elliot and others, even to Erie and Jaya, led by Don Richardson and Mark and Gloria Zook and others. What an incredible story, the spread of the Gospel.

The Holy Spirit has indeed come on the church and empowered the church and enabled us to be His witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Yet for all of that, we must admit tons of failure as well. Church history is a mess. I'm being honest with you. Battles with cults, battles with false doctrine, battles with decades of indolence and laziness. The Crusades, Ralph Winter calls, the most misguided conception of the Christian mission in history.

That's big picture. What about individually? Do you not often feel like a failure in this topic? Isn't it easy to feel like a failure when it comes to witnessing? I do. When I look at the tens of thousands that live in the immediate proximity here, and I realize the level of unchurchedness and lostness coupled with high education rates and wealth, prosperity, and then others that don't have those educations or wealth; we're surrounded. They've lived near our church; now they live maybe a little further away from our church, but they're lost. There's darkness there. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and discouraged. But this is exactly what Acts 1:8 is all about. You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you need that power. This is the call. Mark 15:16 is the call to our church now. This is what we're called to do with the rest of our lives in part.

Christ confirmed His word. Look at verse 19 and 20. Marvelous. We see Christ's sovereign power, which is essential to the spread of the Gospel. “After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was taken up into heaven and He sat at the right hand of God. And then the disciples went out and preached everywhere.” The Lord worked with them and confirmed His word by the signs that accompanied it. What a beautiful picture this is. Jesus ascends, goes through the clouds, the cloud hides Him from their sight. He goes into the heavenly realms, He passes through the heavens, He goes above the heavens. He sits down at the right hand of Almighty God far above the heavenly realms. And Jesus said, "Therefore," in Matthew 28:18, "all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me by God."

Or again in Ephesians 1:20-23, "God raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one that come." It's hard to believe that Ephesians 1:21 is actually an understatement when it says, "Far above all rule and authority." Infinitely far above them. That's the great power of Jesus at the right hand of God. God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.

This authority, Jesus' authority, to rule all things is essential to the spread of the Gospel over 20 centuries because every step of the way, the advance of the Gospel has been opposed by Satan and his demons and by human enemies of the Gospel. It's been a bloody advance, it’s been hard. The church is portrayed as taking enemy territory. He said at Caesarea Philippi, "On this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prove stronger than it." The idea of gates is “we're storming the gates.” We're taking enemy territory. When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe, but when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and he divides up the spoils. That's Jesus plundering Satan's kingdom. We're part of that. But it's a dangerous, dangerous journey. And Jesus' sovereignty is essential to it.

He's able to control the minds and hearts of the movers and shakers in every era of history. Proverbs 21:1, "The king's heart is like a water course in the hands of the Lord." He directs it whichever way He pleases. He's sovereign over even tyrants who hate the Gospel. He's able to direct their decisions. He says to the church at Philadelphia in Revelation 3: 7-8, "What I open, no one can shut. And what I shut, no one can open." Isn't that a great statement? “I know your deeds.” He said to the church of Philadelphia, "Behold, I have placed before you an open door which no one can shut." That's an opportunity for that church of Philadelphia to go through that door into Gospel fruitfulness. That's the sovereignty of Christ. 

The nations, there is nothing before Christ's power. Isaiah 40: 15, "Surely, the nations are like a drop in the bucket. They're regarded as dust on the scales. He weighs the islands as though they were fine dust. He sits in throne above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in. He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of the world to nothing." Jesus, therefore, is at the right hand of God. He is exerting his authority to spread the Gospel of salvation in every generation.

The Holy Spirit, the third person of the trinity, delivers that power. The Holy Spirit is the delivery agent of the power of Jesus from the right hand of God down to earth. It is the Spirit. It is by the Spirit that Christ actively works in this present evil age to win sinners and spread the Gospel. He said in John 16:7, "I tell you the truth. It is for your good that I'm going away. Unless I go away, the counselor will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And the spirit works that power in us. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes in you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria to the ends of the earth."

Let's be honest, we are weak, we are frail, we are fearful, we are selfish, we are lazy. Peter's failure, the night that Jesus was arrested, is proof that we are all essentially frail and weak. In just a matter of a few hours, he went from that confident assertion, “even if all fall away on account of you,” to denying he even knew who Jesus was.

Furthermore, the parable of the Good Samaritan depicts the priest going by and seeing the bleeding man by the side of the road, and he just keeps on going. The Levite does the same thing; sees the bleeding man by the side of the road, and he just keeps on going. How can we not, when reading the parable of the Good Samaritan with tears and brokenness, see ourselves in those two? Oh, Heaven forbid that you would ever say, "I thank you, God, that I'm not like the priest or Levite in the parable of the good Samaritan." Don't say that. Say, "Oh, God, show me how I'm like that."

Especially spiritually, people are broken and beaten down and bleeding by the side of the road spiritually because of their lostness, and we know them. We work with them, we live around them, we shop with them. We are surrounded by that brokenness and that lostness. How can we just walk by on the other side? But that's our nature, isn't it? It's our nature. We need to be honest. It is our nature to be priest or Levite. Only the Spirit enables us to be different. He will enable us to be different. Again and again, He'll enable us to care, to cross over that road, to bend down, to say something to somebody, to ask what's going on in their lives, to get involved in the mess, to get involved in the brokenness, and to win people to Christ. And we will. And we're going to tell the story for all eternity in heaven. It's going to be an awesome story. It's going to be an awesome story.

But in the meantime, there's so much sorrow. Jesus wept over Jerusalem's lostness. Paul wept over the lostness of his own Jewish nation. "I speak the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit." Paul said, "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish, for I could wish that I, myself, were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people. I would do it. I would lose my own salvation if they could be saved." There's that yearning and that brokenness.

Jesus works and works and works and is by His Spirit to make us care about lostness, to care about people on their way to hell, and He moves us. He exerts power, conquering our fears. But He didn't just work in us, He works in them. He powerfully works in lost people, convicting them of their sins so that they can be saved. It says in John 16:8, "When the spirit comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. And He will give them the gift of repentance in faith." The Spirit has the power to do that. It's nothing the person can do for him or herself. The change is so radical, it's like a heart of stone being removed and a heart of flesh being put in. You can't do that to yourself, but the Spirit can. As Ezekiel says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I'll put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws."

As we're doing this witnessing, we're hoping that the Spirit will do that miraculous regenerating work that only He can do. It's not something we can do. The Spirit works repentance, the Spirit works, faith, and the Spirit calls to His sheep, unconverted elect. But the day has come, the day of salvation has come for them. And it says beautifully in John 10, "My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life. I call them by name, and they follow me." That's a beautiful work, isn't it? Don't you want to be there when that happens? Don't you want to watch it happen as somebody who is walking in darkness crosses over into the light and with tears coming down his or her face that Jesus is my Savior, He's my shepherd? How beautiful is that?

The text says that Jesus confirmed His word by signs of the Spirit. Verse 20, "The Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it." The Lord worked with them. What a majestic picture of cooperation. As 2 Corinthians 5 says, "We are, therefore, Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God." We're, again, working together with Him, then “…  implore you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” This sovereign power of Christ is working in us. By the grace of God, we are what we are. And His grace to us will not be without effect. "We're going to work for the Gospel," as Paul said, 1 Corinthians 15.

Concerning signs and wonders, it's very clear that that happened in the apostolic age. Look at verse 17 and 18, "These signs will accompany those who believe. In my name, they will drive out demons, they will speak new tongues, they will pick up snakes with their hands. When they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all. They will place their hands on sick people and they will get well." Those things all happened. That's not fiction, it's not myth; those things happened. We have a record of it in the book of Acts, many of them, except the poison part. But I'm sure that happened too, it's just not recorded. Paul testified to it as well in Romans 15: 18-19, “I will not venture to speak about anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done by the power of signs and miracles through the power of the Spirit. From Jerusalem all the way around to the Balkans, to Illyricum, I fully proclaimed the Gospel of Christ.” Miracles following everywhere, healings, speaking in tongues, all of those things, even the serpent thing. Amazing.

The miraculous signs confirm the truthfulness of the Gospel. In Acts 8: 6-8, “Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ there. And when the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they paid close attention to what he said. With shrieks, evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics and cripples were healed. There's great joy in that city.”

The signs also showed that Satan was being driven out of his throne in people's hearts. Jesus sent out 72 evangelists during His mission, and they returned full of joy. Luke 10: 17 -19, "The seventy-two returned with joy and said, 'Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.' He replied, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you.’"

I've been thinking about that verse. This morning, we sang about martyrs who died. What's that whole, “nothing will harm you” thing? The martyrs weren't harmed by their death, they were ushered from this sin-cursed world by great sacrificial service, both to God and to sinners, into eternal glory and a martyr's crown. Do you think up in heaven they're thinking they were harmed by their martyrdom? They were not harmed. People were benefited because Tertullian said, "The blood of those martyrs was seed for the church,” and by their willingness to die to themselves, and even physically die, new Christians came.

What is our part in this work? Obviously the most important thing anyone listening to me right now can do is make certain that you, yourself, have been saved, that you, yourself, have repented and believe the gospel for the forgiveness of your sins. Nothing's more important than that. The time has come. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.

But let's say you've already done that. What now? What is our work? Our work is to share the gospel with near neighbors and distant nations. This sermon and next week's as well, we're going to lay out specifics for FBC's members.

The elders of this church are all unanimous that the single greatest area of growth for our church is faithfulness and fruitfulness in evangelism. We want to see far more baptisms happening in a year than we do. We want to see those kind of baptisms that happen in this pattern saying, "I was lost, I met so-and-so from this church, and now I'm here today to testify to my faith in Jesus." I want to hear that. Don't you? I want to be part of that. That's our calling. That's what we're called to do, to be fishers of men. We cannot sit comfortably in this beautiful sanctuary, hearing the Word of God week after week and not pay the price to share it with the thousands of lost people that are around us throughout the week. This area is going to grow. Estimates say we're going to add about half a million people in this region over the next 25 years. Most of those will be lost, unchurched. That's our field to work. This is our area to work. This is what we're going to be held accountable for on Judgment Day. We're called on to do evangelism.

What is evangelism? Max Stiles says, "Evangelism is teaching the Gospel with the aim to persuade.” Teaching. We're going to teach concepts about people. We're going to explain theological truths to people who don't understand them. We're going to teach. What are we going to teach? The Gospel. God, man, Christ's response. We're going to say things about God, that He created the ends of the earth and that He's a king and a ruler, and He makes laws. We need to follow them. That man, that we are created the image of God for a relationship with Him, but we have broken His laws and we're rebellious against Him, and we stand in danger of eternal condemnation. Christ, that Christ is the Son of God. He came and lived a sinless life, He died on the cross and rose again. And response, repent and believe, as in Mark 1:15.

We're going to teach the Gospel to people with the aim... We're going to have an aim. We're going to focus on winning, lost people to faith in Christ. It's intentional. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the loss. We have to have an aim, a purpose, and we're going to persuade. We're going to win people. We're going to persuade them to repent, to turn to Christ. We're going to use argumentation, we're going to use proofs, we're going to use passion, we're going to use persuasion. We're going to plead. I've never really pled with a lost person before. It's in Acts 2. I do a lot of airplane evangelism. I have yet to be broken down and, with tears, beg a lost person to cross over. Now, I think I probably would get arrested. But there is that passion in our hearts of pleading with people to be saved.

Our goal is a culture of evangelism. What does that mean? A culture of evangelism. Max Stiles speaks of communal evangelism where it's a church-wide focus. We're going to hold one another accountable. We're going to strengthen our mutual resolve in evangelism. We're going to learn from each other. How do you do it? How do you do it in the workplace? How do you do in the community? How do you do hospitality? We're going to learn from each other. We're going to rejoice together in successes, and we're going to cry over failures and setbacks. We're going to bond through shared experiences in intense situations.

What is a church culture? Isn't culture like shared ideas, shared language, shared behavior patterns, shared experiences, shared expectations? That's what a culture is. A culture of evangelism is motivated by love for Jesus and His Gospel. It's a culture that's confident in the Gospel as the power of God for salvation. We don't need gimmicks, we don't need entertainment, we don't need smoke machines. We don't need any of that stuff, we need the Gospel. We trust in it. It's a culture that understands the danger of this present evil age. A culture that sees people clearly, a culture that pulls together as one, especially in prayer, a culture in which people teach one another what the Gospel is. What is evangelism? What is conversion? How can we best share this Gospel message? That new converts are taught these things, and then they're sent out as messengers themselves. It multiplies. A culture that models evangelism. A culture in which people who share their faith are celebrated and learned from in this church. A culture that knows how to affirm and celebrate new life. A culture that does ministry that feels risky and is dangerous. A culture that understands that the church is the chosen and best method of evangelism in the world.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the chance that we've had this week, and God willing that we'll have again next week to look at our responsibility in the Great Commission. Help us, Lord, to be faithful. Help us, oh Lord, to be courageous. Help us to be humble and admit our weakness and our failure. Help us to help each other. Help us to ask each other how you're doing in evangelism. Help us to be involved in the summer's “Let's Go program” of going out on Wednesdays and sharing and being trained and doing prayer walking and doing prayer meetings and just being involved. Help us, oh Lord, to be more fruitful and faithful than we've ever been before. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

John begins his epistle establishing his authoritative witness of Christ’s life and then urges Christians to walk in his holy light, confessing sins to God.

The post Class in 1 John: Christ is the Light of God, So Walk in that Light appeared first on Two Journeys.

In Revelation 4:1-11, seeing God enthroned in the center of thunderous heavenly worship compels us to center our lives, loves and obedience around him on earth as in heaven. 

The post Revelation Episode 5: A Heavenly Throne and Heavenly Worship appeared first on Two Journeys.

In Revelation 3:14-22, Jesus turns his fiery gaze upon the lukewarm Laodiceans to urge them to repent of their unbelief and believe in him for salvation.

The post Revelation Episode 4: Letters to the Churches- Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, Part 3 appeared first on Two Journeys.

The eyewitness testimonies of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his great commission to spread the gospel are essential for a robust Christian faith.

Turn in your Bible to Mark 16. We'll look this morning at verses 9 through 20. "If all the sorrows of God's people could be poured into one vast pile, what a mountain they would make. How varied our distresses, how diverse our depressions. But brothers and sisters, if Jesus will meet us, all the sadness will fly away. Just give us His presence and we will have all things." That's how Charles Spurgeon began a sermon on Mark 16, Jesus’s personal encounters with His church. He said there, "Jesus had a deep desire to be with His people." I actually believe that's the overarching purpose for everything He did in His incarnation, His atonement and His resurrection, that we could have an intimate, eternal love relationship with Almighty God, that we could have a close fellowship with God.

We come here week by week at this church for an encounter with the living God; at least I hope that's why you come. That encounter with the living God is, by the ministry of the word of God and by the spirit of God, so foundational that encounter we have week by week is a belief that the Word of God, the Bible is the Word of God that as we read it, we're reading God's words to us. As 1 Thessalonians 2:13 says, "When you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe." God says in Isaiah 66:2, "This is the one I esteem. He who is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at my word."

We have a desire for an encounter with God through the ministry of the Word. This is foundational to our salvation. Saving faith comes from hearing the Word of Christ, and so we have to be confident that the facts we have about Jesus's life are true. Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. We will not call on someone that we've not first believed in. We will not believe in that person if we've never heard of them, we don't have information about him. Where does that information come from, except ultimately through the Bible.

I believe with all my heart, my conviction about this is marrow deep. It's been that way for over twenty-five years as I stand in front of you week by week that I lift up this book, and I believe that it's an encounter with God through the actual words of God. I've sought to unfold that verse after verse, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, book after book. We have an encounter with God through the scripture. I believe that with all my heart.

This morning we have an unusual task before us. The last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark in everyone's Bible for fifteen centuries was believed to be the word of God without question, but in the last centuries, come into serious dispute. Most of you holding actual Bibles in your hand, not your smartphones, but actual Bibles in your hand can read some notes on the page. I got the pew Bible, so I'll read you the note here. In our pew Bible, some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16: 9-20. Some of your Bibles put a line there between verse 8 and 9, and it's like the road-out sign, like the bridge- out sign and you should stop reading or something; there's that sense. Or they'll put it in a different font or something like that.  You're scratching your head, "Well, what do I do with that information?" Behind that is the question, the burning question based on how I began this sermon. Are these verses actually the word of God or not? That's the question in front of you. Can I preach Mark 16, 9-20 as the actual word of God?

When you have an English Bible in your hand, you have received the benefits of two different categories of scholars that have done their work before you ever got that Bible. Those sciences, those scholars immerse themselves in these two sciences to deliver to you your English Bibles. The first are the scientists of text critics, text criticism, and the other are Bible translators. When the text critical experts have finished their work, they give their work to the translators. Then the translators, when they've finished their work, give the English Bible to us, so preachers like me get up and we receive the benefits of those scholarly works. This, I think, is a beautiful picture of the body of Christ; people who devote their lives to different callings and then serve the entire church. The text critics, their job is to give us a reliable Greek New Testament that then they can hand over to the translators, and the translators do their work in bringing it across from the Greek into good readable English.

We in the English language are lavishly blessed with translations. When I was a missionary in Japan, they only had two translations. One of them was harder to read for the Japanese people than the KJV is for us in English and the other was a Roman Catholic translation. That's it. That's what the Japanese Christians have to read. In the English language, we get a new scholarly translation about every five years on average. They just keep coming,  we are rich in translations. But as we come to this sermon this morning, we have to do a little text criticism first.

Now, I know it's Mother's Day, and you're like, "Really, pastor? Text criticism on Mother's Day. All over the Southern Baptist Convention, there are these pastors preaching wonderful Mother's Day sermons, and our pastor began his sermon on text criticism.” But I don't see any other way. I need to be able to defend that I should be even preaching this, and I do think that I should.

What is text criticism? There are two basic issues that arise when it comes to the New Testament. The first is we don't have the original manuscript of any of the 27 books of the New Testament. We don't have the actual book of Romans, we don't have the actual Epistle to the Corinthians, 1 and 2 Corinthians. We don't have the actual book of Revelation. We don't have the actual Gospel of Mark.

Secondly, the copies that we do have in the providence and the kindness of God don't perfectly agree with one another, so you have to study those copies and compare them and develop a science called text criticism where you can get behind the actual physical copies you have to a Greek text for all 27 books of the New Testament. That's the issue. That's what text criticism is all about.

Why don't we have the originals? God, in His goodness and His wisdom, decided that we should not have them. God saw to it that they would be destroyed, all of them. We see this at the very beginning of the written word of God. The original written word of God was the Ten Commandments, as you remember, written on tablets of stone by the finger of God. You remember what happened to those? Moses chucked them down and they were shattered into a bunch of pieces. Then a second copy of the Ten Commandments was made, and so began that journey, that process of originals being destroyed.

Or again, in the time of Jeremiah when Jeremiah wrote what is the longest book in the Bible through a scribe, Baruch. Anyway, there was at that point then only one of the book of Jeremiah on planet Earth. The scroll was delivered to the wicked King Jehoiakim who, as he was reading it, cut it line by line and burned it, so much did he hate the message that was coming from the Prophet, Jeremiah, whereupon God told Jeremiah through his servant, Baruch, to write it again. And I believe Baruch complained bitterly about having to do it, and he was warned about that. “Baruch, wherever you go, I'll let you escape with your life. Stop complaining and pick up your pen." Therefore, we then had the second copy.

But it gives you a sense that the word of God is behind the actual physical thing. It's there. God knows it. And so the original being destroyed doesn't mar that. God is able to deliver His word to His people, and so it has been every original copy of the 66 books of the Bible has been lost forever.

I think it's possible that Phoebe may have carried the only copy of the book of Romans in her baggage to the church at Rome. Imagine knowing what lay inside that scroll and all the church history, including Martin Luther's conversion, the Reformation, all that in this one letter in your purse, if indeed it was. And I don't know for sure he did... or she did, but that's the original.

Why did God do this? Because our hearts tend to be idolatrous. We tend to worship physical things. Remember the story of the bronze serpent, which God commanded Moses to make. In the course of time, it became a focus of worship, an idol in the Jewish nation. Instead, what we have is an array, a multiplication of handwritten copies of each of the 27 books of the New Testament. And the same Holy Spirit that inspired the 27 books of the New Testament originally has marvelously and wonderfully overseen the process of that copying and that collating and that protection of those manuscripts, so we have a richness of manuscript evidence for the 27 books of the New Testament.

The work of text criticism, the science involves a job most of you would not want to do. Picture little scraps of papyrus or parchment or whatever floating around. They're in libraries and repositories all over the world, and they're in climate controlled labs, and there they are. It's a fragment of a chapter and a half somewhere, and it's written in a very archaic Greek script that you're skilled to translate. You do that work, that’s your life work. You're comparing that fragment to another, and you put the whole thing together in the course of time. That's how we get our Greek New Testament, which then is the basis of the translation that brings us over into English.

Amazingly, in the goodness of God, He has given us 25,000 handwritten copies of portions of the New Testament. 25,000. That's an astonishing treasure trove. By way of comparison, in second place of all ancient literature is Homer's Iliad, which has 643. That's incredible. The New Testament has almost 40 times as much evidence as Homer's Iliad. There are only 250 existing manuscripts of Plato's writing. The New Testament has 100 times that number. Not only that, but the New Testament manuscripts start chronologically amazingly close to when it was originally composed. There's a very short time gap from when that original writing happened to when we have the earliest evidence.

There are 25,000n Greek manuscripts, 5,600 of which are most important. The oldest is a tiny portion from the Gospel of John called P. 52, Papyrus 52, dating from around the year 100 AD to 150 AD. The Gospel of John- since John we think died toward the end of the first century- that's within one generation of him being alive. That's incredible. The Bodmer Papyri, which contains portions of John and Luke, date from 175 AD to 225 AD. The Chester Beatty Papyri contains portions of all four Gospels and the book of Acts dates from the early 200s. Keep in mind, during the first couple of centuries of church history, the Roman Empire was set against Christianity and persecuted Christianity and burned Christian scriptures and destroyed them, so it's amazing any of these survived at all. But the small time gap between when we know the New Testament was written and the earliest manuscripts is amazing. The time gap on Homer's Iliad to the oldest of his manuscript is 17 centuries.

After the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the persecution ended and there were many, many, many more copies of the Scripture than ever, paid for being written. Again, keep in mind the printing press didn't exist, so everything's handwritten copies, and they started to proliferate at that point.

The oldest and most significant of all the ancient manuscripts is called the Codex Sinaiticus because it was discovered in 1844, discovered to the western academic world. It'd always been there, but it was discovered to the academics in the west in the year 1844 at a monastery on Mount Sinai. It has been called one of the most significant books in the world. It is a bound book. That's what a Codex is. It's a bound book like our Bibles containing the entire Greek New Testament, and it dates from the middle of the fourth century.

The other significant ancient book is the Codex Vaticanus, which is in the Vatican. It also dates from the fourth century and contains the entire Bible. It may actually be a little older than the Codex Sinaiticus, and it's generally considered the oldest Bible in the world. How valuable would that be having the oldest Bible in the world?

It's basically based on those two manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, that the modern text critical movement started in 1881 by two scholars called Westcott and Hort. Not only do we have the 25,000 handwritten copies or 5,600 Greek copies in the New Testament, we also have a stunning level of quotations by the church fathers, scholars who have lived in the first centuries of the Christian Church and quoted the New Testament extensively. There are almost 20,000 quotations of just the Gospels in the writing of the church fathers. You can basically put the New Testament together from quotations of these ancient scholars.

All in all, we Christians have an embarrassment of riches that give us a high level of certainty that we know what the original 27 books in the New Testament said in the Greek. So things that skeptics say, not knowing at all what they're talking about, "Oh, the Bible has been changed by a powerful church over the centuries," just isn't true.

Scholar A.T. Robertson says, "We can ascertain the original Greek manuscript of the 27 books of the New Testament within 99.9% accuracy level." Even more significantly, any differences, they're so insignificant, they just have to do with spellings word order, things like that, or repetition from other gospels that are brought in, things like that, they don't change anything. There is literally not a major or minor even detailed point of Christian theology hanging in the balance on a text critical issue, which is encouraging.

How does it work? I'm not going to bore you with the eighteen rules of text criticism because I found them boring. As I shared text criticism stuff with friends and family and people over the last three or four weeks, I realized people don't talk about this too much today. Time to move on. But basically, the way it works is the older manuscripts are given priority, the higher quality manuscripts given priority, the more difficult reading is given priority. For example, when it says, "No one knows, not even the son or the angels," “not even the son” is in some of them but not in others. You're not going to introduce that, you're going to actually take that out. The more difficult reading they tend to think is the more original. That's how it works.

Now, let's apply all this to Mark 16 in the long ending, verses 9 through 20. The two oldest books, the two oldest codices, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, don't have verses 9 through 20. They're not there. Interestingly though, the Codex Sinaiticus has a big blank space after verse 8, before Luke 1:1. Scratching your head. Maybe he just never got to it. We don't know. It's just there's a blank page there. Vaticanus has no such page; it goes on from 16:8 right onto Luke 1:1.

There are 1,653 Greek manuscripts relevant to the section that we're looking at today. That's a lot. 1,653. All but three have the long ending, 9 through 20, and one of them is a little bit strange. Basically, you're looking at these two codices and that's it. At this point, I'm like, "All right, sermon's over, let's pray because it's not Scripture." But I don't think so. I think what you're doing is you're pitting two sciences against each other to some degree. Not the science of translation at this point, it's the science of text criticism versus the science of church history because for fifteen centuries, every Christian on earth thought this was Scripture. John Calvin did commentaries on this. Martin Luther preached sermons on this. The Puritans, John Owen, all those scholars thought this was Scripture. All of them. Jonathan Edwards thought this was Scripture. Charles Bergen thought this was Scripture. They didn't even question it, and apparently, it didn't do them any harm. That's my approach here. I don't think this is going to do us any harm.

You may think we're going to become a snake handling sect because I'm preaching this sermon. We're not going to do that. They also argue not just from the codices, but there are internal translation issues. There's certain vocabulary that they find. There are internal reasons, they say. For example, Mary Magdalene seems to be being introduced for the first time in verse 9. And I get it, I get all those things. But I find that there's similar problems in other passages that they don't question whether it's Scripture, they just have to solve the problems, and so it is with this. I'm going to venture forth with great courage and preach Mark 16: 9 through 20. I memorized the Gospel of Mark, and it so far hasn't done me any harm in memorizing it.  I think it's going benefit as well.

I also find it interesting that some scholars who believe that verses 9 through 20 are not inspired Scripture, they won't even comment on them in their commentaries, they won't preach on them in their sermon series and all that. Some of them love the way it ends at verse 8. Look at verse 8. This would be what they think is the actual ending, the inspired ending to Mark 16 in verse 8. "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid." End of Gospel of Mark. They love it, they’re excited. They think, what a great way to end. I don't think it's so great. John MacArthur, for example, says, "The word “afraid" is a very common reaction to Jesus' life and miracles of ministry," and he goes throughout the Gospel of Mark to show that he thinks it is a perfect ending to Mark because they're stunned and amazed and bewildered and don't say anything to anybody about Jesus.

I would say you're missing two very important things if you stop at verse 8. You don't have any personal encounters with the resurrected Christ in the Gospel of Mark. None. And you don't have a Great Commission. I think those things are valuable, so I think we should go ahead. I believe that God, in His providence for fifteen centuries, allowed Christians to think this was Scripture. I think because of redundancy, there's nothing in these verses that you don't see covered in other places. There's no shocking new things except one little detail, and therefore I think it's going to be helpful.

Let's talk about encounters with the resurrected Lord. Dear friends, isn't that what you want? If you're a Christian, isn't that what you want? Don't you yearn to see Jesus? Don't you yearn for your faith to become sight? Would that not solve all of your problems? Would you not be instantly transformed to be the perfect person you've always yearned to be? "Because when you see Him, you'll be like Him because you'll see Him as He is." [1 John 3].  Aren't you yearning for that faith to become sight?

We're not going to get that probably today unless you die and go be with the Lord and you'll be delighted to see Him face to face. But what we get now is a ministry of the Word. These personal encounters are vital to our faith in the resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15 bases its entire proof of Christ's resurrection on Scripture's prophecy but also personal eyewitness encounters with Jesus. Again, in all of the Gospels, in Matthew and Luke and John, you have significant personal encounters with the resurrected Jesus, by the apostles especially. They're the most important because that was their job description.

Jesus says to Thomas in John 20: 27, "Put your fingers here. See my hands. Reach out your hand. Put it in my side. Stop doubting and believe." Jesus saying to the Eleven in the upper room in Luke 24: 39-40, “'Look at my hands and my feet. It is I, myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.' And when He said this, He showed them His hands and His feet.” Eyewitness testimony to the bodily resurrection was foundational to the of the church. 1 John 1:1, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at in our hands of touch, this we proclaim concerning the word of life." We must have these eyewitness accounts of encounters with the resurrected Christ.

Mark would be the only Gospel without them.I think that verses 9-20 gives us those beautiful personal encounters with the resurrected Christ. It begins with Mary Magdalene, but then it continues with two other unnamed disciples and the eleven apostles. Mary Magdalene, verse 9, "When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, He appeared first to Mary Magdalene out of whom He had driven seven demons." Now, then she, in verse 10, 11, “…went and told those who had been with Him and who were mourning and weeping. And when they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen Him, they did not believe it." Mary Magdalene gets a personal encounter with Jesus. It's marvelous. It's very much described in John 20, the encounter He has with Mary. The loyalty and the kindness that Jesus shows toward a woman who's not going to be a significant leader in the life of the church but who dearly loved Jesus and who is yearning for that encounter with Him. When she realizes He's who He is, she falls to His feet and grasps His feet. Then she goes and tells those who have been with Him and were mourning and weeping. We see this overwhelming sorrow on the part of the disciples. They are grieving over the death of Jesus and they're bewildered by it.

It's the very thing Jesus said, what happened in John 16:20. He said, "I tell you the truth; you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but then your grief will turn to joy." He likens it to the pain of childbirth in a mother who's giving birth. Then when the child is born, she forgets her grief because of the joy that the child has brought into the world. Jesus says, "You're going to grieve. Grieve."

But worse by far is their unbelief. That's the problem here; not their grief, but their unbelief, their lack of faith. They clearly are not expecting a resurrection and they doubted the testimonies. This lines up with Luke's account in Luke 24: 9-11, "When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”, they don't believe.

Then in Mark 16: 12 -13, we have the additional appearance to two unnamed disciples. This parallels with Luke 24, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In Mark 16: 12-13, it says, "Afterward, Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country. These returned and reported it to the rest, but they did not believe them either.”  In Luke 24, it says, "The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were kept from recognizing Him," stopped from recognizing Him. Somehow, He looked different than usual. I think He looked just like an average person, an average traveler on the road at that point. It seems pretty consistent that Jesus has to choose to reveal Himself or they won't believe in the resurrection. It is very important for us to realize it is by the sovereign grace of God alone that we believe in the resurrection. Hallelujah. So it is even then with eyewitnesses, He has to reveal himself.

With the two disciples in Luke 24 on the road to Emmaus, when He broke bread with them, their eyes were open and they realized it was the Lord. Here in Mark 16: 12-13, it's greatly simplified. The net result was unbelief again on the part of the eleven apostles. Their report was no more believed than that of Mary Magdalene and the women. Finally, in verse 14, the eleven apostles, "Later, Jesus appeared to the eleven as they were eating. He rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen Him after He had risen.”

The primary job of the apostles, as we see in Acts 1, is to be eyewitnesses testifying to the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus to the rest of the world. All of our faith is hanging on the apostolic eyewitness accounts of Jesus. It's also beautiful to see the massive transformation that occurs in these eleven apostles after the post-resurrection appearance, which went on for forty days. He gives many convincing proofs that He's alive, and then even more after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. At that point, they are transformed.

Despite Jesus's repeated warnings of what would happen, and despite the Old Testament Scriptures that predicted it, they were immersed in doubt at that point. Matthew 28: 16-17, "Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted." Some doubted. In Luke 24:38, Jesus said to them, "Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your mind?"  Of course, the most famous is Doubting Thomas in John 20: 24-25, “Now, Thomas, called Didymus, one of the twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came so the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into His side, I will not believe it.’“ He's an apostle saying these things.

But they could not, they would not continue in their unbelief, in their doubt. Look again at verse 14, "Later, Jesus appeared to the eleven as they were eating. He rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen Him after He had risen." Stubborn refusal to believe. Other texts translate it as hardness of heart, like their hearts are twisted, they're unyielding, their refusing.  But it would not continue that way. The rebuke from Jesus was the beginning of their transformation, their healing. He got to work on them over the forty days. Acts 1:3, “After His suffering, He showed himself to these men and gave them many convincing proves that He was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”

The combination then of these personal encounters with the resurrected Lord in His resurrection body, the careful instruction He gave them from the Old Testament prophecies plus the power, the outpoured power of the Holy Spirit and the day of Pentecost move this band of doubting apostles to being those who turn the world upside down for God,  who transform the world for God. They would become unshakable in their faith that Christ was risen. They had no fear of death. They believed with all their hearts that death was defeated. They would become resolute and courageous, bold and direct in their proclamation of the gospel. They would be unquenchable in their fiery zeal for the glory of God and for Christ. The truth through Scripture and personal encounter, plus the Holy Spirit, led to a changed world through these men.

In verse 15 and 16, we have the Great Commission, Mark's version of it. Look at it. "He said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.'" This is the great final work that Christ has entrusted to the church. There are five versions of the Great Commission. They're all different from each other. There's one in each of the four Gospels and there's one in the book of Acts.

Mark's version, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation," focuses on the verbal proclamation of the Gospel message in the entire world, "the good news.” The good news is that Almighty God is reconciling the world to Himself through Jesus Christ, not counting people's sins against them. Sins have been fully atoned for by the shed blood of Christ. Christ has been raised from the dead, so death is defeated. God Himself is ready to be our treasure. He's ready to be our father, the lover of our souls. God is the Gospel, God is the good news. God is the treasure hidden in the field. God is the pearl of great price. The glory of God is our inheritance for all eternity. That's the good news. 

Go into all the world and preach that good news to all creation. This is not going to just stay in Jerusalem, this is going to spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, and it says, "Preach to all creation." It's a fascinating expression. Certainly it means to all people, people in all nations, all individuals within those nations. No one is exempt categorically. Male and female, rich and poor, old and young, slave and free, Jews and Gentiles, barbarians, Scythians; it does not matter. To all people preach this good news.

Should we preach to the trees? It says, "Preach to all creation." It's  an interesting question, as I pondered it. These are the kind of things I do when I write sermons. Should we preach to the trees? But interestingly, creation is personified in Romans 8: 19 -21. It's given a mind and an intellect and feelings and a choice. It says, "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed." The creation is waiting for us to be glorified. "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to the decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."

Take a minute. Put your finger here at Mark 16 and go back to Isaiah 55, one of my favorite chapters in the book of Isaiah. This is an extended version, Isaiah 55: 1-2, "Come all you who are thirsty. Come to the waters. And you who have no money, come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me and eat what is good and your soul will delight in the richest of affair." Verse 6 and 7, "Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, and to our God and He will freely pardon."

Look at how it ends. Look at verse 12-13, speaking to the messengers, speaking to the apostles, the missionaries, the evangelists of this message. "You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn bush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briars, the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord's renowned for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed." There in Isaiah 55, the trees are pretty excited, and they're clapping their tree-like hands, I guess. I know it's all poetry, I know it's all image, but it is absolutely true that the physical creation is in the chains of decay and the bondage to futility until our salvation is done.

Go back to Mark. It says, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." With that comes the promise and the danger. Verse 16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. It is by faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that salvation comes." Salvation from what? Salvation from hell, salvation from damnation, which is mentioned in the rest of the verse. That's what “saved” means. We're delivered from a great threat, and that threat is eternal torment in hell. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

Now, the command to be baptized as part of the great commission, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit. It's an outward, invisible sign of an internal transformation worked by Jesus through the Spirit, the baptism of the spirit that comes on us, which converts us and makes us Christians from within. Then that having been done, then we do the outward invisible sign of water baptism to show what has happened in our hearts by Christ and by the Spirit.

Baptism is not required for salvation. Some people look at this and think it teaches baptismal regeneration. But we know the thief on the cross was not water baptized. We know that Paul says, "I don't even know who I baptized in Corinth, for the Lord did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel." No, if baptism were essential to salvation, he would never have said that. But it is the beginning of an obedient life as a disciple to King Jesus. When He tells you to be baptized, you should be baptized in water. He's going to ask you to do much harder things than that after that. It's just a simple way of testifying publicly to your faith in Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, rejection of the Gospel is eternally devastating. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. Earlier, Jesus had made it plain what hell was about, it is eternal conscious torment. Mark 9:48, "Where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched." Unquenchable fire; that's hell.  The great joy of the Gospel is this: There is, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. No hell for us. Praise God. Praise God.

There will be signs that will accompany the spread of the Gospel. Verse 17 and 18, "These signs will accompany those who believe. In my name, they will drive out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up snakes with their hands. And when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all. They will place their hands on sick people and they will get well.”  The strangeness to some people of these verses has tended to lend skepticism about the long ending of Mark. Scholars that reject this as Scripture say, "Mark doesn't use the word “signs” anywhere else," they'll say. But Luke definitely uses language like this when the 72 went out on their practice mission and came back and they had driven out demons, and they're thrilled about it. Jesus answers them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I've given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you." [Luke 10:19].   The book of Acts speaks of lavish signs that were done as the Gospel spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria toward the ends of the earth. Acts 2: 43, "Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles." Paul says specifically in 2 Corinthians 12:12 that miraculous signs mark an apostle. "The things that mark an apostle, signs and wonders and miracles, were done among you with great perseverance." The book of Hebrews says in Hebrews 2:4, "God also testified to the gospel by signs, wonders, and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will."

In that apostolic era, these signs did accompany the preaching of the Gospel as it spread everywhere. They actually did drive out demons, they actually did speak in tongues. Paul actually did shake off a poisonous snake into the fire and didn't die. They actually did lay their hands on sick people and they were healed. Now, admittedly, there is no record of anyone drinking deadly poison and not dying anywhere else in Scripture, but my feeling is, based on the veracity of the rest of this, that probably happened too.  It is well known that this passage gave rise to interesting sects of Christianity that did do snake handling, and we understand that. But we need to understand as we study also in the book of Acts, Jesus is not commanding that these things should be done and saying that they will be done in every case by every disciple for twenty centuries. He's not saying that. He's just saying these signs would accompany the spread of the Gospel, and they did.

It finishes in verses 19 and 20 with the Lord's heavenly power predicted and fulfilled. "After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was taken up into heaven and He sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere and the Lord worked with them and confirmed His word by the signs that accompanied it." Isn't that a beautiful picture? The clear implication is Jesus’s ascent from earth through the sky, through the clouds, and up into the heavenly realms to sit at the right hand of God is for the purpose of spreading the Gospel all over planet Earth. He's at the right hand of God and is exercising all authority in heaven and on earth on behalf of the church and the spread of the Gospel. 

Beautifully, Mark says, "He's working with us. We're co-laborers with Christ who's at the right hand of God." How awesome is that? The text says that Jesus confirmed the message by the signs. We see this again and again in the book of Acts, as when Philip preached in Acts 8:6 in Samaria, "When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they paid close attention to what he said.”  How beautiful is it that we are co-laborers with Christ? He's working with us in completing the Great Commission. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5:20, "We are, therefore, Christ's ambassadors. As though God were making his appeal through us, we implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God."

The next two times that I preach from Mark, I'm going to focus on verses 15 and 16 and exhort our church to be more active than ever before in evangelism.

First, stand in awe of and drawn near to the resurrected Christ. Christ has risen. Whatever problems you carried with you here today into this sanctuary, cast them on the resurrected Christ and know that He is your future. He's your present by the Spirit. He's your future. Someday, you're going to see Him face to face. He deeply yearns that you see His glory and be with Him for all eternity, so draw near to Him in faith.

Secondly, just stand in awe of God preserving the copies that are behind the Bible that we read so that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this thing wasn't changed over twenties centuries by a powerful church. We are actually reading what the Holy Spirit wants us to read. We're leaning on scholars to do it, we're thankful for their labors, but praise God for His faithfulness in overruling that.

Thirdly, this week, find an opportunity to share the Gospel with someone. Let them know of your own salvation, of your faith in Christ. Talk to them about Christ as a savior from sin and death and hell and the joy of Christ's resurrection from the dead.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we do thank you for the power of the Word of God. Thank you that we can trust in its reliability and its faithfulness. We thank you that it presents to us a glorious, crucified, and resurrected savior, Jesus Christ, and that we can put our faith in Him confidently and trust in Him for the forgiveness of our sins. It's in His name that we pray. Amen.