Two Journeys

Jesus, in his kindness and compassion, repeated the miracle of feeding thousands of people.

Turn in your Bibles to the account you just heard read, Mark 8:1-10. One of the great challenges of our Christian lives is how prone we are to forget God's goodness to us in the past, how wonderfully He has provided for us, how completely and consistently He has met our needs. We tend to forget these things.

These lessons God has crafted over the years of our experiences, and yet we are prone with each new challenge in our lives to look at that circumstance as unique, somehow different than anything we've ever faced before. The one that's going to finally sink us this time, and we forget God's faithfulness over our lifetimes. In His amazing kindness, God patiently orchestrates days in which lessons are repeated and then repeated again.

We have the opportunity to learn from those lessons, God's faithfulness to heal your body when you're sick or injured. God's faithfulness to give you money that you might need for an unforeseen need time and time again. God's faithfulness in feeding your empty stomach day after day. You have to admit, dear friends, He has a very good track record in that over the many years and you can testify to it.

The Psalmist testifies in Psalm 103 where it says so beautifully, "Praise the Lord oh my soul, all my inmost being praise His holy name, praise the Lord oh my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. Forget not all His benefits.”

That's why the feeding of a multitude is repeated in the Bible, I believe. Two separate occasions in the gospels, the four gospels, six biblical accounts in all. Two in Matthew, two in Mark, and then one each in Luke and John. Six times the same lesson's repeated for us about the greatness of Christ in feeding the empty stomachs of a multitude of people. It seems like the Lord through the Holy Spirit thought we needed to hear this. We have Jesus feeding a multitude again.

The first point in your outline there is repeated repetition, which you would say is redundant. It's intentional. Again and again God teaches us the same lessons and this is a miracle repeated. This almost exactly parallels the earlier feeding of the 5,000 in Mark 6. There are a lot of similarities between the two accounts. It begins with Jesus's compassion. Mark 6:34 tells us that Jesus had compassion on the crowd because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

Here again, this account starts with Jesus' compassion. The location is described as a deserted place in both cases, isolated, distant from a population center. The same question is raised by the disciples as to how they're going to feed such a large crowd in such a remote place. Jesus asks the disciples the same question about their resources, the exact same question, "How many loaves do you have?"

In both accounts, there is the order to have the people sit down on the ground. In both accounts, Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, breaks the bread, and gives it to the disciples, to the people. In both accounts, there is a separate mention of the fish being dealt with as well, eaten as well. Also, in both times we're told that everyone in the crowd ate their fill. They were satisfied completely. Then both accounts narrates the broken pieces of bread and fish being picked up off the ground and collected in baskets.  Both accounts give the number of the men who are fed omitting the women and children, and both finish with the crowd being dismissed and Jesus and His disciples moving on to another place along the Sea of Galilee to continue ministry. They're both the same, just a couple of chapters apart.

 This has led some critics, hostile critics of the Bible, to point this out as a prime example of the slapdash work done by the New Testament writers.  These critics don't believe that these events actually happened, but these stories were fabricated and passed down, narrated and then woven together to make the myth of Jesus the God-man. They think we have these New Testament documents as a huge work of existing documents that were thrown together without any careful editing. The accounts of these two feedings are cited as proof of this.  Mark, without much thought, just found, I guess a scrap of paper on his desk and just stuck it in here, not knowing he was really recording the same event as before. That's what these critics do. 

There are some key differences between these two accounts. Obviously there are details here that are different. 4,000 people fed as opposed to 5,000, seven loaves as opposed to five, a few fish as opposed to two fish, seven basketfuls gathered as opposed to twelve.  On that last one, we have to note that the Greek word for basket was different in the two accounts. In the first feeding in the 5,000, the Greek word was “cofinos”, which is a smaller basket or container, like a pouch that you could probably wear on your belt, something smaller, enough food, let's say, for a single individual. In this account, the Greek word was “spuris", like a big hamper, much larger volume, two different words.

If these had been copycat accounts, I think you would've just harmonized those details or they would've been exactly the same. Not at all. These two feedings actually happened and they happened in a relatively short amount of time; Jesus said so. Later in this chapter, the disciples are going to bicker between themselves about having forgotten to bring bread with them on the boat. God willing, we'll talk about that next week.

Listen to Jesus' full answer. Look down at Mark 8:17-21,  “Why are you still talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? Don't you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’  '12,' they replied.  'And when I broke the seven loaves for the 4,000, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’ They answered, 'Seven.' He said to them, 'Do you still not understand?’”

Oh, there's no doubt at all that there were two different accounts. Jesus uses that as an example and we'll talk about that next week of how they should have learned by experience. The question comes to me, as it always does in the Gospel of Mark, we look at the Holy Spirit's intention in all of this. Why the repetition? Why do we have these two feedings that are so very similar? Now, at one level, this question doesn't even need to be answered. Jesus did lots of miracles over and over and over again.

There are only so many ways you can heal a crippled person or a blind person or a deaf person or a sick person. Generally Jesus touched them, maybe spoke a few words to them, healed them, and they went on their way. Basically it looked the same day after day. Scholars tell us that Jesus had about a three-year ministry and most of the days were alike, healing lots of people with a word or with a touch. Also, Jesus' teachings; we shouldn't imagine that He came up with new content every day. He taught essentially the same things, I think, day after day to the people. We have lots of different parables, lots of different sermons, but we do have some messages that are repeated for us. A very good example is what we know generally as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. We have the Sermon on the Plain, clearly a different occasion ed different location in Luke 6. Both of them begin similarly, "Blessed are the..." Et cetera, but there're actually significant differences between them.

There's some overlapping teachings that are repeated and some differences too. It must be that, day after day Jesus did a lot of the same teaching and covered the same ground. He did different aspects of His ministry multiple times, including this feeding, which He did at least twice. Let's go beyond that into a deeper issue. That is our need for repetition. We need lessons repeated. It just isn't the case that you hear it once and then you've got it for life.  It isn't the case that once I make a mistake and learn from it, I never make that mistake again. Would any of you like to raise their hands and say, "That's me to a core, I never make the same mistake twice." I don't think any of us would want to say that. We need the reminders, and the disciples' continual forgetfulness represents us. They stand in our place and they represent us. How do we look? Not great. These individuals had to be reminded of things again and again.  We have to go through experiences again and again to learn from them. We are dull and slow to learn like they were. We need this. The Bible makes much of the need for reminding, a repetition of doctrine. For example, the Book of Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law. God didn't say you had it once, you have it for life, but they needed the details of the law repeated right before they entered the Promised Land.

Jesus would warn His disciples again and again and again about His own suffering and death that was about to happen in Jerusalem and they still didn't get it. They still didn't understand. Their hearts were hardened concerning the need of Jesus to go and die. Then more in general, the New Testament writers speak about our need for reminders, our need for repetition.  Philippians is a good example: Philippians 3:1, "Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you." Paul there in Philippians says, "I have to write the same things to you again and again to keep you safe from your own sin." Then in the next chapter, very famously, Philippians 4:4, "Rejoice in the Lord always." Well, Paul, you already said that in Philippians 3:1, "Again, I will say rejoice."

We have in one verse repeated repetition of the same theme. Do you say, “I don't have to be told more than once to rejoice in the Lord. I know that Christ's crucifixion and resurrection is enough to make me joyful every day.” Do you have to be reminded again and again to rejoice in the Lord? Or again, Paul says earlier in that book, Philippians 3:18, "For, as I have often told you before, and now say again, even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ." He says, "I say these things to you guys again and again.”  Peter talks about repetition also in 2nd Peter 1:12 & 13, "So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body." Peter is saying, "It's part of my job to just remind you of certain things again and again."

Therefore, it's not part of my job as a preacher to come up with something new and fresh every time I get up here to preach. It's just impossible and it's not good for you either. It's going to be the same basic things that you've already heard in perhaps slightly different words. Why do we need this particular lesson repeated, this lesson on food, this lesson on God feeding our empty stomachs? I think this is vital because of some of the core flaws we have in our earthly condition.  This is a central issue in our lives. Will I get enough to eat? Will I get enough to survive or not? Ecclesiastes 6:7 says, "All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied." Everything you do is for your stomach and it never is done. Again, after the feeding of the 5,000 in John's account the next day, remember that the huge crowd came back for another meal. They wanted more. They wanted breakfast.  They're back for breakfast. Jesus said, "Do not labor for the food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you." Then He goes on in John 6 to develop the whole theology, "I am the bread of heaven. I am the bread that came down from heaven. If you feed on me, you'll live forever." He's not speaking physical. He's saying, "The words I have spoken are spirit and they're life,”[ John 6]. He says, "Stop living for your stomachs. Stop living for your earthly appetites.”

Then in Hebrews 12:16, we have a warning there, "Make certain that there's no one in your congregation who is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his birthright for a bowl of stew because that was what he was all about." As Paul says in that same passage, Philippians 3:19, he says, "I've often warned you that many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their God is their stomach."

Therefore, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount warns us in the whole passage on anxiety, "Do not worry, do not be anxious about your life, what you'll eat, about your body, what you'll wear." He says later, "So do not worry saying, 'What shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them, but seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well."

The overwhelming anxiety many have of having their bodily needs met must be met by faith in the future grace of God. God is going to care for me. He's going to meet my needs. With food and clothing we'll be satisfied, we'll be content and freed up so that we can seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and not be worried about our earthly bodily needs. We should learn from experience. God is faithful to His children. God is faithful to care for our needs.  Psalm 37:25 the Psalmist says, "I was young and now I'm old. Yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. I have watched God be faithful to His children year after year." Christ in His kindness and compassion does this miracle twice. The Holy Spirit in His kindness and compassion has the doubled miracle recorded both in Matthew's Gospel and in Mark.  In addition to the original feeding of the 5,000 in all four gospels, that's six accounts of Jesus' miraculous feeding of the empty stomachs of huge numbers of people. That's big picture. That's why the repetition. 

Let's walk through the account again. It starts with Jesus' compassion.  Look at Mark 8:1-3, "During those days, another large crowd gathered. Since they had nothing to eat, Jesus has called His disciples to Him and said, 'I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they will collapse on the way because some of them have come a long distance.'" Now, as we've noted before, Jesus' compassion is the most common emotional state ascribed to Him.

Again and again, we have descriptions of Jesus's compassion or descriptions of Jesus being compassionate. This one time is unique, both in Matthew and in Mark's gospel, this second feeding, Jesus speaks it about Himself here. In all the other accounts we're told Jesus had compassion on the leper or He had compassion on the crowd, something like that. Here He says it about himself, "I have compassion on these people."

Now, the Greek word in our account relates to Jesus's inner organs, His intestines, His gut, His stomach, the KJV says “his bowels”, that kind of thing. That's because we often feel things down here, right? We talk about having butterflies in your stomach. Or you talk about somebody's gut reaction or a feeling in the pit of my stomach, these kind of things. We have a sense that down here is where we feel the feelings.

Jesus is moved here with the compassion of suffering people. He describes himself as compassion, "I have compassion on these people." In this way, Jesus is a perfect display of Almighty God's compassion. We should never think that God the Father, the God of the Old Testament is the God of wrath and judgment and terror, the God of Sinai and Jesus is the kind and compassionate one that talks Him into being kind. The God of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament is moved with compassion again and again. For example, in Exodus 2 when God looks down on Israel in their bondage and He sees their suffering because of their task masters, and He was concerned with them. "He looked on them and was concerned about them," [Exodus 2:25]. When He invited Moses up into the glory cloud on Mount Sinai and He wants to reveal Himself to Moses in a very beautiful way, Moses says, "Now, show me your glory.”  He puts Him in the cleft of the rock and then He speaks these words, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithfulness." This is the first thing that God tells Moses about Himself, "I'm a compassionate God."

Even in that terrible book, maybe the worst book in the Bible, the book of Judges, that terrible cycle of sin that they go through when the Israelites are so corrupt and pagan in their worldview and in their lifestyles, no better than Sodom and Gomorrah, and God again and again sends them judgments in the form usually of Gentile invaders that come in and plunder them like the Midianites, et cetera.  They cry out, and they're in grief and anguish and they put away temporarily their idols and they cry out to God. God is moved with compassion for them. It says in Judges 2:18, "Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them, He was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived, for the Lord had compassion on them as they groaned under those who oppressed and afflicted them.”  Perhaps one of the most striking descriptions of this in the book of Judges, Judges 10:16.  There the people who have been unusually corrupt, very wicked. God gave them over and said, "Just run after the gods of the Gentiles that you've been following. Let them save you." There's condition. The Jewish condition got worse and worse. Then it says in Judges 10:16, "Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord, and He, God, could bear Israel's misery no longer."

It was harder on God than it was on them. He doesn't take delight in people's suffering; He takes delight in people repenting and turning away. He has compassion. We have again and again these statements of God's compassion. Psalm 103:13-14, "As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him for He knows how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust." He knows your stomach cyclically gets empty and needs food. He made it that way.  He knows how weak we are. He's compassionate. He knows what you need before you ask, or again, Isaiah 49:15 & 16, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born? Though she may forget, I will never forget you." Or again in Hosea 11:8,  “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?…My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”  It was compassion that caused God to send His son, His only begotten son into the world. That's why He sent Him.

Jesus spoke powerfully to the compassion of God towards sinners in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15:20, "While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him, and he ran to his son and threw his arms around him and kissed him." That's the compassion of Almighty God towards sinners.  Therefore, Paul calls God the Father of compassion. 2nd Corinthians 1, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles." Jesus is the incarnation of God's compassion. He's moved with feeling over other people's suffering.  Look at the account again, verse 1-3, "Since they had nothing to eat, Jesus has called His disciples to Him and said, 'I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they will collapse on the way because some of them have come a long distance.'" 

We have this huge crowd from all that area.  The Decapolis was a predominantly Gentile area. It seems that's where He is. Those people had never seen anything like what Jesus was doing. He was healing every disease and sickness among the people, effortlessly with a word. He was giving teachings such as they had never heard before, and they just stayed there. They just stayed there hour after hour, day after day, they didn't leave, and they were just so absorbed that they forgot their own bodily needs.  Jesus knew they'd been with Him three days. They hadn't had anything to eat. Clearly that statement, “He’s on the third day,” showed that He's not feeding them every day. It was not his top priority to feed their empty stomachs. He could have done it every day, but it's not until the third day that He even addresses this physical need for them. But He says, "I have compassion on these people.”  He knows their physical condition and without nourishment, and they're a long way, a long distance, maybe 10-15 miles from where they live, maybe more, if they don't get nourishment, they are going to collapse. The Greek word for collapse is that of a bow string coming loose, hanging loose on a bow. They'll just collapse to the ground if they don't get it. 

That's compassion.  You're stepping into someone's situation, thinking about their circumstance and what do they need for this situation. That is the nature of Jesus' compassion. He affects the feeding. The feeding affected. Jesus involves his disciples. He expresses His compassion for the crowd to them. He wants them to know His concerns and He wants to teach them to imitate Him in that compassion. Like the last time, He wants them to feel the burden of their hunger of the problem. 

Look at their response, verse 4, "His disciples answered, 'But where in this remote place can anyone get enough bread to feed them?'" I mean, do you ever wonder about that? Really? This is the question you're going to ask.  That's exactly what they asked back in Mark 6, "Have you learned nothing?" Again, the disciples represent us. We're just like that. They hadn't learned the lesson of the loaves and they're going to prove it. God willing, next week we'll talk about it, they bicker about not having brought bread. They don't get it. They're slow to heart. They're dull. Then Jesus takes inventory of what they have. Verse 5,”How many loaves do you have?" Jesus said. "Seven," they replied. Like last time, He wants the disciples to provide what they have as a physical starter for the miracle. As I said in the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus clearly doesn't need that. He created the universe “ex nihilo”, out of nothing, by the word of His power, the universe.

He doesn't need the starter kit of their bread and fish, but He wants to use it. I think that's instructive for us. We are drawn into the circumstance and we are called on to give what God's already provided to us to the situation. Then Jesus works out the logistics. Verse 6, "He told the crowd to sit down on the ground." Last time in Mark 6, the account goes into more detail than that. He had the people sit down in groups on the green grass, and they sat down in groups of hundreds and 50s.  This was, as I said last time, perhaps for crowd control and organizational logistics. He doesn't go into any of those details this time in Mark 8, "Then He gives thanks to God and distributes the result." Verse 6, "When He had taken the seven loaves and given thanks, He broke them and gave them to His disciples to set before the people, and they did so." The thanksgiving is essential, looking up to heaven, just like He did when he healed the deaf-mute.  Looks up to heaven. Everything comes from God. Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of the heavenly lights. "What do you have," Paul says, "that you did not receive?" Everything's coming as a gift from God. He just looks up and gives thanks for the loaves.

 Then somewhere in the middle of verse 6 comes the miracle. Do you see it? Look down at the text. See if you can see the miracle somewhere there in the middle. He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the people, and they did so. The miracles in there somewhere, I don't know where it is, but somewhere in there, barley loaves get multiplied. As I said last time, barley that never grew and was never harvested, never ground, and never cooked and never served, none of that. It just appeared ready to eat. It's a miracle. Then the fish comes along, the fish too. Verse 7, "They had a few small fish as well. He gave thanks for them also and told the disciples to distribute them." Again, the fish are  mentioned as a second act, and again, the fish flesh that Jesus created never grew or swam in the water. They were never caught by hook or by net. They were never sectioned and grilled or boiled or any of the things that people who like fish do to prepare it. As one commentator said, "They were created dead." It's kind of an interesting mind-blowing statement. The fish were created dead but not spoiled, right? Ready to eat. Then verse 8, "The people ate and were satisfied." The word could be translated they gorged themselves. They ate until they couldn't eat another bite like the fatted calf. They are full. It's abundance.

Then verse 8, the pieces are collected as evidence, "Afterwards, the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over." Now, again, the word for basket here, the Greek word is like a hamper. Even though there's fewer numbers of baskets, there probably might have been more leftovers this time. Then we have the count  in verse 9-10, "About 4,000 men were present. Having sent them away, He got into the boat with His disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha.”  We have 4,000 men, again, the women and children omitted in Matthew's account of the feeding, the 5,000 it says, "Plus women and children." So we have to imagine that's the same in every case. You have 4,000 men, plus women and children, a huge crowd. I don't know how many, 15,000 more, no idea, but a big, big crowd. This is an amazing miracle. 4,000 men, smaller crowd this time fed with more loaves. In my geeky math, it's like, "Oh, then this was an easier miracle then. Fewer people, more loaves." Don't think that way.  It's a miracle. This is how many people there were to feed, and this is what there was to feed them, and He used it and fed them. Dalmanutha is another name for Magadan. It's the region between Magdala and Capernaum. Magdala is the place where Mary Magdalene came from. This is effectively Jesus's returned to Galilee now into ministry. The cross is now less than a year away.  Jesus would finish His ministry there in the northern area of Galilee, and He would begin making his way down to Judea and to Jerusalem where He would die for the sins of the world. 

What lessons can we take from this second feeding? I would say not many different lessons than the lessons from the first feeding. Why should they be different? It's the same lessons. First and foremost, what does this miracle say about Jesus? It's simple. Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior of the world. Trust in Him for the salvation of your souls. That's what this miracle says. It's the same as all the miracles. “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of His disciples which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing may have life in His name.”

We should worship Jesus and trust in Him and believe in Him. Jesus created all things out of nothing. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made that has been made. Jesus is God and created all things. We should stand in awe and worship Jesus as they did at the end of Mark 7 when Jesus healed that deaf-mute and they said of Jesus, “He has done all things well.”

Beyond that, in the first version of this particular miracle, Jesus links their need for physical nourishment to His death on the cross, as I said in “the bread of life teaching.” Listen to John 6:47-51, "I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”  Jesus is calling all sinners to come to Him and feed on Him for life. That's not just once. Yes, it's instantaneous. When you trust in Jesus, the moment you trust in Him, you'll be born again and all your sins will be forgiven, past, present, and future. But that just begins a lifetime of feeding on Jesus. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. All of those words ultimately lead to Jesus as the bread from heaven. Feed on Him.

Next, I would say develop a heart of compassion like Jesus. We all tend to play the role of the priest in Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We see hurting people in the world and just walk by them. Don't be like that. Say, "God, I confess that I don't care about suffering like I should. I don't care about temporal suffering like I should.  People that are hungry, people that are hurting, people that are in disaster-stricken areas, people that have poverty issues even in our own city, I don't care like I should. I must confess that to you. Would you work in me a heart of compassion to meet people's physical needs?" We know that their spiritual needs are far greater because eternal suffering is far weightier than temporal suffering, no matter how bad it is. Eternal suffering is what awaits the damned.

We are told in scripture that many are traveling the road to damnation, and they're around us every day. They're heading toward eternal torment, and we should care. We should have compassion on them because they're like sheep without a shepherd. We should speak the words of life to them. We're called on to meet physical needs.  Jesus will say to the sheep, "I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick, and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me." That's physical ministry. We're called on to do that [ John 6], "as a vehicle to spiritual ministry." That's our desire.

Finally, Jesus prepares His disciples for world mission. This is a Gentile area. Jesus began, as we talked about the Syrophoenician woman's demon-possessed daughter a couple times ago, and Jesus said, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, but not ultimately to the lost sheep of Israel." Jesus will send His disciples out after His death on the cross and His resurrection to the ends of the earth.  Jesus cares about Gentiles. These are probably Gentiles. He wants to feed them and care for them forever. In Mark 16, He says, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." Again, in Luke 24, “This is what is written, ‘That Christ will suffer and rise from the dead, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem.’"

Today is a time for us raising money for missions. We should at least, be sacrificial about giving money. It's not a hard thing for us. We have been abundantly blessed. I've been here 25 years, raising money for Lottie Moon as part of what we do every December. I can't remember any more than one time that we didn't meet our Lottie Moon goal. It's grown year by year. Not every year has it grown, but it's at $150,000 now.  We can definitely meet that and more. This is my last year as a trustee of the International Mission Board. I can tell you all of that money goes to keeping missionaries on the field, so they don't have to come back and raise support. We have, I think a total of nine units. There were four that were sent out during the COVID year. We have nine units on the field, I think, by my latest count that consider us their sending church.Our giving keeps them on the field. Let's be faithful and give. 

Now, the time has come to prepare for the Lord's Supper. I didn't orchestrate that we would be talking about eating bread on the day we do the Lord's Supper. The Lord, for some reason, wants to link the feedings to this. I think the central lesson of my sermon today is repetition.  Jesus said, "As often as we observe the Lord's Supper, we consider His death until He comes." This is a repetition ordinance for us. 

I'm going to close this sermon time in prayer, and then we'll have the Lord's Supper. We invite anyone who has already trusted in Christ and testified to that by water baptism, and partake. If not, we ask that you refrain.  As you're doing, as you're waiting, ask the Lord to show you any sin in your life that He wants you to deal with it then partake with a commitment in your heart that you want to live a holy life. Close with me now in prayer.

Father, thank you for the time we've had to hear from you, hear from your written word, and we thank you for the power of the Word of God. We thank you also for the power of the ordinance of the Lord's Supper. Now as we turn our attention to this ordinance, help us, oh Lord, to learn its lessons and feed on it spiritually, even as we eat physical bread and drink the physical juice that we'd realize the spiritual lessons beyond it of the cross in the resurrection. In Jesus' name, amen.

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Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Mark 7:31-37 when Jesus healed a deaf and mute man with great power and incredible tenderness.

In Psalm 139, psalmist David celebrates the marvels of the human body, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." Among the marvels of the human body is its ability to gather information from the universe around us by our five senses, our sight, our hearing, our smell, our touch, and our taste. These are portals whereby the glories of God and creation flow into our minds and hearts.  In fact, I think that's part of what the psalmist David celebrates in this verse, not just that our bodies are marvels of creation, fearfully and wonderfully made, but also that God's works in the universe around us are amazing too. "Your works are wonderful, I know that full well," He says. How do we know it? Because we're able to see it and hear it and experience it, and it fills our minds and hearts with the greatness of God.

Now, of course, among the wonderful capacities of our bodies is the sense of hearing. We're going to focus on that this morning. The way that our ears are designed by God to receive pressure waves that move through the air, disturbances of the air, and how our eardrums vibrate with those pressure waves and interpret it as sound in fascinating ways. The ear itself physically can be divided into three parts leading up to the brain - the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.

The outer ear consists of the ear canal and eardrum. Sound travels down the ear canal, striking the eardrum and causes it to move, to vibrate. Then the middle ear takes over. It's a space behind the eardrum that contains three small bones called ossicles. This chain of tiny bones is connected to the eardrum at one end and to an opening to the inner ear at the other end. Vibrations from the eardrum cause the ossicles to vibrate, which in turn creates movement of the fluid in the inner ear.  Then movement of the fluid in the inner ear, cochlea, causes changes in tiny structures called hair cells. This movement of the hair cells then sends electrical signals from the inner ear up the auditory nerve, known as the hearing nerve, to the brain, and then the brain takes over and interprets these signals as sound.

By that amazing mechanism, we hear the beautiful sounds of the world around us. Even from within the womb, we heard the sound of our mother's voice, the sound of our mother's heartbeat. Then as we grow the sounds around us, of the world, around us, the sounds of nature chirping of birds, fluttering of leaves in a breeze, or the roar of the ocean or the beautiful sound of music are heard.

Music, what a gift. I just love music. The beauty of a chord progression. No one put melodies together, in my opinion, like Handel. I just love the way that he heard these beautiful melodies in his mind and then wrote them down. Or this skill of a pianist, a skillful pianist. Bach said, "Music is really easy. It's just a matter of striking the right note at the right time." So I've tried that. It doesn't work. I don't tend to strike either the right note or at the right time.  But I remember one time I was working as an engineer in Massachusetts and heard for the first time a Mozart piano concerto. I never really knew about them, but it was a classical radio station and it played Mozart's Piano concerto Number 8. The second movement, basically, paralyzed me. The company, didn't get any work out of me for about eight minutes as I was just transfixed by the way that Mozart wrote that music. It just floated through the air, into my ears, and captivated my heart.

And so it has been for all of you music lovers. There's a power to music, power to the progression of tones, the rhythm and frequencies, logic and order and beauty and power, emotion, all encoded in sound. But by far the most significant sounds we ever hear are the sounds of language. The sounds of language of, beginning with, our mother's words spoken gently into our ears from infancy, incomprehensible at first, but repeated again and again. So the infant begins to associate those sounds, the sounds of his or her mother's words, with experiences and conditions in the physical world, in life. Little by little language forms within their developing minds; it just seems to happen automatically.

I remember when my wife and I were missionaries in Japan, and laboring hard to learn the Japanese language. Back then, it was cassette tapes, and flashcards and a tutor and vocabulary lists and all that. The whole time our two older kids, Nathaniel and Jenny, were continuing their language study in English with no flashcards, no cassette tapes. Jenny was about one when we moved there, three when we left, with no tutoring, she was basically fluent in English. I wasn't fluent in Japanese, and it didn't seem fair. But there it is, in infancy language being encoded and imprinted in the minds and hearts of these developing little ones.

But imagine being born deaf or losing your hearing in the years or before the years when speech forms. Just the loss in general of all those beautiful sounds of nature is bad enough, bubbling brook, bird's sweet songs, the steady, soothing drone of a downpour, the mighty thunder of a waterfall never heard, but especially worse than that, no developing language. The inability to communicate the deepest thoughts of your own heart to others or receive in return the deepest thoughts of someone else's heart to you.

That is a tragedy of approximately 72 million people around the world, deaf mutes. It is certainly tragic. I don't minimize it to lose your hearing at any stage of your life. I remember reading about the anguish of Beethoven, who in his mihttp://www.thefieldschurch.org/mediafiles/uploaded/0/0e1840389_050904.mp3s began to suffer significant hearing loss, and he was a musician, a composer. It was a great anguish to him as that continued to get worse and worse, he became a social recluse, and only allowed close friends who knew his condition into a study. He communicated with them by a conversation book, which he would hand to them and they would write back and forth.

But by then, of course, Beethoven was well into his adult life, well into his musical training. He knew the sounds and frequencies of all the instruments in the symphony orchestra. He was able to hear them in his mind and continue to compose, which is still pretty amazing. But the level of tragedy is far greater, I think, for a baby that's born deaf or an infant who loses hearing in infancy and cannot develop language. That person becomes an island unto him or herself, sadly isolated, cut off, lonely, unsocialized, uneducated in many cases.

I was reading a early study done by a person in Ireland working with deaf mutes in the late 18th century. It was very early in the science of addressing the problem. He came upon an elderly mother there in Ireland who had two deaf daughters, grown daughters. They had not been allowed out of their house for over 20 years. They could only communicate with each other and with the mother in a very rudimentary way, and had no education and no skills beyond that of basic housework. Since their mother was elderly, the social worker was very concerned about the future for these young women. What was going to happen when the mother died?

That's the tragedy of deaf mutes around the world.The condition leads to a terrible form of isolation. It was into this isolation that Jesus, the compassionate healer, the compassionate savior, stepped  in one day, in one particular man's life. That's the study we're going to look at today.

So let's talk about the context. Jesus was in the Decapolis, look at verse 31, “Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis.” Jesus was taking the long way around to get back to his home base of ministry there in Capernaum, in Galilee. He went around the Sea of Galilee. He could have gone directly from Tyre and Sidon straight down to Capernaum, but He went around into a predominantly Gentile area.

Some scholars believed Jesus was training and preparing the twelve for their future mission to the ends of the earth, including in Gentile areas. That may well be, just as He went purposely through Samaria and got his Jewish disciples, the apostles, to be aware of the Samaritans, and their need for the gospel. Remember the Samaritan woman at the well in the village and his work there.

Decapolis was a Gentile region. It seems also Jesus wasn't ready to return to the mayhem and chaos of the huge throngs, adoring crowds, and the hostile enemies in Capernaum and the other Jewish cities there throughout Galilee. He wanted to let the heat under the pot simmer down at that point, cool off a bit, because it wasn't time yet. There was a timetable here. He wanted things to calm down a bit, it seems, because He's still a good ways away from the ordained time for His death.

So He goes to the Decapolis. The word just means “10 cities”.  It's a loose confederation of ten, essentially, independent, Hellenistic or Greek cities located south and east of the sea of Galilee. It was Gentile territory, as I mentioned. They were Greeks, who had settled there after Alexander the Great conquered that region with his conquest and then died suddenly, leaving a vast Greek empire. Greeks came and settled there, and there was a long history of warfare between these Greeks and the nationalistic Jews who lived in Palestine on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. There's a lot of history there.

When Rome conquered that part of the world in 63BC, all Jewish political independence in that area came to a decisive end. But there are still those Greeks living over there. We also come back to the ministry that we looked at earlier of the demoniac of the Gadarenes. Do you remember that story in Mark chapter 5 how Jesus had driven out a legion of demons out of what I called the most wretched man in the Bible, the most wretched condition of any human being in the Bible was that man?  Jesus, as you remember, had effortlessly drawn out or driven out 5,000 or more demons from this one man into a herd of pigs. They rushed down the steep bank into the sea and were drowned in the sea. Then the man was healed and fully dressed and in his right mind and begged to go with Jesus. He wanted to go with Jesus, yearned to be with Him. But Jesus wouldn't let him. He refused. Instead, He told him, "Go home to your family and the surrounding area and tell them everything God has done for you and how he has had mercy on you." So that was the man’s mission.

It seems like, I think, the man did his job. He went out as a beautiful missionary there in the Decapolis, Mark 5:20, “The man went away and began to tell them in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people in the Decapolis were amazed.” This may well be the fruit of that man's ministry. There was a huge crowd of Gentiles, it seems, waiting for Jesus and ready to see him do healings. Where'd they get that information? Probably from that man who went around.

People had known about the demoniac of the Gadarenes, and his terrible plight, especially his family, and they were amazed. They fully expected that Jesus could do something for anyone, so they brought this deaf man. We see this deaf man's terrible plight. They bring this suffering man to Jesus, verse 32, “There some people brought to Him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Him to place His hand on the man.”

I've already given you a sense of the terrible and tragic isolation of the deaf mutes. The International Mission Board divides up its worldwide mission into nine affinities, they call them affinity groups. They're roughly geographical. So you have the European affinity, North Africa and Middle East affinity, Sub-Saharan African Affinity, the Americas, which would be Central and South America, et cetera. They're generally geographical, but they're also somewhat linguistic and cultural as well.  For example, the IMB works in Montreal as if it were a European city, because it's more European than it seems North American. They just seem to know how to reach the French speakers there in Montreal better than the North American mission board would. That's how the affinities work. Australia also seem to be a European affinity even though it's not in Europe. It's just a cultural thing.

But what's amazing is one of the nine affinities is the deaf affinity, because a number of years ago it became clear that the deaf all over the world were people unto themselves. They weren't enculturated. They didn't mix in Central Asia or in Latin America. They just had their own unique set of circumstances, and even their own unique language, their ability to communicate by sign with each other. So they were a people unto themselves, and then they just basically met any definition that you could give of a people group. There is a deaf affinity. All over the world, the missionaries that are especially skilled to reach the deaf people, reach them in similar ways all over the world.

The issue there, of course, is the problem of speech development. So let's talk about that. What is speech? Speech is arbitrary signs that are assigned to physical realities or circumstances. Sounds that are assigned to them. There's usually no connection whatsoever to the sound that we assign to the thing. It's just a convention. That's what language is. For example, there's nothing house-like about a house. When you look at a structure with doors and windows and a roof it doesn't scream at you or whisper to you, "House," it's just something we say. So in French it's “maison” and in Japanese it's “uchi”. The reality is the same, but different sounds.

When an infant grows up as a deaf person, none of those arbitrary sounds can enter his or her mind, so they can't learn language in that sense. They're mute. This deafness and mutinous leads to a complete inability to participate in language-based communication. This led deaf mutes in Jesus' day to be seen as insane by their people, generally. Not much different than demon possessed people, which they're not. But because they can't communicate, they were seen that way. A very tragic situation.

Also, theologically, we need to understand, when God wants to reveal Himself to us, to communicate, He does it by revelation, I just used the word “reveal.” Theologians break it into two categories, general revelation and special revelation. General revelation is that which comes in by our five senses. Special revelation is always language-based. It's the Bible. It's the word of God.

If you haven't learned language, how can you learn theology, spiritual reality, and specifically, how can you learn the Gospel of Jesus Christ? It's a very significant problem, and that's the problem here. The deepest problem is the learning of the word of God. Without language, that revelation is impossible because it's all language base.

Romans 10:17 says, “faith comes from hearing.” It's based on language. You can't look at a rising or setting sun or feel the wind on your face and think Jesus Christ. That will never come into your mind. It has to be explained. It has to be preached. If you don't know language, you can't receive that. So into this quiet world of tragic and sad isolation for this deaf mute, Jesus came with great compassion and power. 

Let's look at Jesus' gentle power, verse 33-34, “After He took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put His fingers into the man's ears. Then He spit and touched the man's tongue, and He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh, said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’which means ‘be opened’.” First of all, you just need to understand, we've seen this before, especially with the last healing, the Syrophoenician woman's demon possessed daughter. Jesus didn't even need to be there. He didn't even need to go. He didn't say anything. He didn't do anything. He just drove out the demon.

So any of these physical things that Jesus does, He just chooses to do. None of them are essential. But He is communicating, and He's communicating first with this man. He's speaking a kind of sign language with this person, and it's very tenderhearted and loving. First of all, and just in general, just know the most common emotion ascribed to Jesus is that of compassion. That should engender within all of us as Christians, a desire to imitate Jesus in his compassion, to have an empathetic heart, to see the suffering of people around us, empathetically or compassionately.

Some of us are more compassionate than others, but all of us should yearn to imitate Jesus in compassion for suffering people. We see that compassion. Again and again, it is clear that Jesus felt deeply the sorrows and miseries of sinful humanity. It was compassion that led Jesus to leave heaven and come to Earth. It was compassion that led Him to become,  in Isaiah 53:3, “a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering”. Then a verse later, “surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.”

Look at Jesus and what He does. We see four gentle actions sequentially here that Jesus does with this tragic person. First of all, He takes him away, apart from the crowd. Remember there's always a huge crowd. Jesus wants time alone just with this one person. There's a very powerful “you and me” sense of relationship here. Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. And I no longer live, but Christ lived in me. And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me.”  You and me, Jesus, just the two of us. There's an intimacy here with just Jesus and this deaf person. He takes him away from the crowd, then He puts His fingers in the man's ears. Why does He do that? Again, it's not needed. He doesn't have to touch. But Jesus loved to touch when he healed, and I think he was identifying to this deaf person, the part of the body He's going to work on. He's working on the ears, he’s working on the hearing.

So He puts his fingers in there. Also, there's a connection between Jesus and what's about to happen to this person's ears, so the touch. Next He spit and touch the man's tongue. In my reading of the four gospels, there are three different times that Jesus uses His own saliva to do healings. He's going to do another one in Mark 8 with a blind person. Then in John 9, He spits and makes mud, and smears it on the blind man's eyes. It's very interesting. Usually, and I'll mention this in the sermon, God willing, next time when He spits in the man's eyes, that would be considered great insult, grievous insult, but with Jesus it's a matter of healing.He spits and touches the man's tongue. Again, in touching the tongue, He's identifying the part of the body He's going to work on, the ears, the tongue. This is what He's going to do. Next, He looked up to heaven. So there's a universal sense of the greatness of God above us. He's connecting all of this with God the Father who wants to heal him through Jesus, so these four actions.

But that all just sets up the moment. What's the moment of power? The moment of power is Jesus's word. God's word is powerful. So when He speaks, that's when the healing happens. When He speaks, the healing happens. This is the moment of power. He looked up to heaven, verse 34, “and with the deep sigh said to him, "Ephphatha!" which means be open.” This is one of the few Aramaic words transliterated for us and brought over into our language. There's a number of them, maranatha is one, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, [inaudible 00:24:08]. There's a number. It happens, but it's not common. This is one of the times.

Why did the Holy Spirit inspire Mark to give us this transliteration? The original word was in Aramaic, but it was transliterated into Greek, and brought from the Greek transliteration into English. That's a lot of work. For some reason the Holy Spirit wants us to hear the word. I don't know why, but I'm going to speculate.  The Greek word itself is interesting. It begins with an epsilon and E and then two phis, and the two phis are brought over, it's the fff sound, like that, two consecutive. Look at the word right there on the page. Have you ever seen a word like that? Phph, that's odd. That's four consecutive consonants, but it's dragged out. These are called aspirated consonants or aspirates. It takes air to say them. It's doubled like that. Not only that, Jesus does it with a deep sigh. There's all kinds of air moving here. Then after that comes a theta, which is another aspirated consonants. You got, ephphatha, like that. Why am I belaboring this moving of air? First of all, that's what sound is, which is what it is. It's pressure waves moving through air. But also, it reminds me of the theological significance of air and spirit and the movement of air in the Bible.

So here we go from physical over into the spiritual realm. We know that Adam was given life because God breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a living being. There's that breathing of life. Then again it happens in John 3 when He says to Nicodemus, "You must be born again. You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again." Then he gives an analogy. "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear it sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from and where it is going." That's what it's like with everyone born by the spirit. It's like the sound of the wind blowing, and then the person is transformed. They're born again.”

Or again, the image in Ezekiel 37 of the valley of dry bones, very, very dry bones. Ezekiel was told to prophesy to the bones, and the bones assembled the big rattling sound. Then he was told to speak to the wind. Now the Hebrew word for wind, “ruach,” also means “spirit” or “air”. It's an interesting overlap there. He spoke to the winds, and the four winds came and the breath of life came into these resurrected bodies. He was told to speak to the wind, and in came the air, the breath of life.

So we have all this breathing, or again in 2 Timothy 3:16, “all scripture is God breathed." Again, God doesn't have lungs. God doesn't have a mouth. These are anthropomorphic ways of speaking, so we can understand God's activities. God breathes out the word, and He brings it into our hearts and minds. That's why I think there's so much of this sighing and ephphatha, and why the Aramaic is brought over.

Look at the powerful impact. The iron gates of deafness were thrown open. His ears were opened, it says, and then, it says, his tongue was loosened. The chains of speech, the impediment is gone. There's a sense of freedom here. God did not create ears to be deaf or the tongue to be paralyzed or chained up. This is a picture of a work, a full restoration of God's original purpose for the physical body.  Probably the most amazing physical impact here is the fact that when this man's tongue was loosened, he began to speak plainly. The Greek says, “ortho” like orthodox or orthodonture. He spoke the right way. Everything he said was said or pronounced correctly, accurately, and that's with no speech therapy. All of the sounds that he needed to make to speak that language were immediately given to him in his mind, no speech therapy, instantly healed. I find that amazing.

It's just like the paralyzed man. The man hasn't walked in 40 years. He doesn't need any physical therapy, he's just immediately healed. That's amazing. Of course, this all reminds me also of the day of Pentecost as well when all the apostles were gathered together in the upper room and they're waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit to come. They're all there praying up in the room when suddenly — the sound of a rushing wind. That's the first miracle that happened; it was just sound, just the sound of a rushing wind.

And that sound gathered the huge crowd to around the house, because they heard the sound too, but they didn't see any wind moving. Then the tongues of fire came and separated, and they all began to communicate, to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Then the apostles go down and Peter leads the way and preaches the gospel to the assembled crowd. But they're from all over the world. They're from all over the Roman world. There's a miracle that happens that all of them heard the one message given by Peter in their own mother tongue. How do you explain that?

Pressure waves going through the air, hit the inner ear and all that, the same waves different, but? Was it inside the brain that the thing got translated? I don't know, it's a mystery. But they all heard the same message in their own native tongues. Acts 2:7-11, “Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya near Cyrene. Visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs. We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own language.’”  How awesome is that? 

Then we see the crowd's overwhelmed reaction. Look at verse 36, 37, “Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone, but the more he did so the more zealous they were to keep talking about it.” This is common. We have this from the beginning of Jesus' gospel ministry and Mark's gospel. The leper, remember he was told not to tell anyone, and he went out immediately told everyone. As a result, Jesus could no longer go into the towns but had to stay outside in lonely places.  And so we have all that. Some people have thought, “Ah, Jesus is using reverse psychology. If you tell them not to do it, they're going to do it all the more.” Don't think those thoughts, Jesus doesn't use reverse psychology. When He commands people not to tell, He wants them not to tell. If you're going to go with reverse psychology, this is the verse right here. This is the place, because the more He commanded, the more they did it anyway.

We do know that the prohibition is temporary, because the Holy Spirit decades later moved Mark to write this down and wanted this account spread all over the world. He wants everyone to know, now, about this healing. But at the time there was his prohibition. Look at their reaction. They're overwhelmed with wonder. The Greek words that Mark uses is “beyond all measure.” It can't be measured how astonished they are. It spills over, their amazement. They can't contain themselves. They say, and I love this, "Jesus has done everything well."Let me put it in more kind of the vernacular. Jesus is good at everything. I mean, there's nothing He cannot do. There's no medical condition He cannot heal. Everything He puts his hand to, prosperous.

How do we learn some lessons from this? This is another healing account. Let me begin by telling you my own unique challenge here. I thought about this yesterday. My task today is to use words reading an account you've probably read for years, and heat up your affections, so that you are more amazed at Jesus than you were before. More amazed at Jesus than when you walked in here. That's my task. I'm supposed to heat you up like a kettle until you whistle. That's my task. It's not easy to do, because all I get to do is just talk. And I'm talking about things you've heard before.  Jonathan Edwards in talking about preaching said this, "The things of religion are so great that there can be no suitableness in the exercises of our hearts, to their nature and importance, unless they be lively and powerful. In nothing is vigor in the acting of our inclination so requisite, as in religion, that means Christianity, and in nothing is lukewarmness so odious." Lukewarmness stinks to God. So the question I have to ask myself, because I'm in the same boat as you, and that all of you have to ask, “Why do my affections need to be heated up? Why am I not overwhelmed with wonder at Jesus? He's every bit as wonderful as ever he was.” Let me continue with Edwards. "I don't think ministers are to be blamed for raising the affections of their hearers too high, if that which they're affected with be only that which is worthy of affection, and if their affections are not raised beyond a proportion to their importance."

So I want to be sure that if I heat you up, you're heated up rightly and proportionally. "I should think myself in the way of my duty," Edward said, "to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with."

So that's my task, and this morning I said, "Who is equal to such a task? How can I do it?” All I can do is beg the Lord to send forth His Holy Spirit so that you would look at this account and realize, Jesus should be worshiped for this. He should be worshiped. We just get so caught up in the things of the world and the sins of life, and we struggle with these sins, and we forget to marvel at Jesus. So my first application to myself and to all of you is marvel about Jesus more than you did before. That's all. However you do that.

But beyond that, I want to talk about spiritual hearing. All of Jesus' miracles are pictures of spiritual healing. They are real miracles, actual miracles done in space and time, so also this one. The real deafness is spiritual deafness, unable to hear God speaking. Spiritual deafness is described in Psalm 135:15-18, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but they cannot speak. Eyes but they cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear. Nor is their breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.”

Do you hear that? Those who make the idols will be like them. They have ears, but they do not hear. So also this, Ezekiel 12:1-2, "The word of the Lord came to me, 'Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see, but do not see, and ears to hear, but do not hear; for they are rebellious people.”  And again in Isaiah 42:17-20, “Those who trust in idols, who say the images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame. Hear you deaf, look you blind and see. Who is blind but my servant and deaf like the messenger I send? Who is blind like the one committed to me, blind like the servant of the Lord? You have seen many things but have paid no attention. Your ears are open but you hear nothing.”

And then this from Stephen in Act 7:51, "You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears..." What does that mean, uncircumcised ears? "You're just like your fathers, you always resist the Holy Spirit." So people in sin are spiritually deaf. They cannot hear God speaking to them through the word of God. Therefore, Jesus, again and again, said this interesting thing, when he would especially tell a parable, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

What's so beautiful is Jesus has the power, spiritually, to put his fingers in your spiritual ears, the ears of your heart and say, "Ephphatha, be open." He can do that by the power of the Spirit, He can open the ears of your heart to hear God speaking. Matthew 13:14-17, “In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You'll be ever hearing, but never understanding; you'll be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ For this people's heart has become callous; they hardly hear what their ears, and they close their eyes. Otherwise, they might see what their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. For I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it."

What are blessed ears? How does Jesus put his fingers, spiritually, into the ears of your heart and say, "Ephphatha, be open," to your heart? How do you know that that's happened? One indication is 1 Thessalonian 2:13, "We also thank God continually because, when you received 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, among you who believe." That's how you know your ears are open spiritually. When you hear a faithful exposition from the scripture by anyone, not just me, anyone, you identify it as though God we're speaking to you. You know that God is speaking to you by this. That's when you know your ears are opened. That is spiritual hearing.

As Francis Schaeffer said of God, "He is there and he is not silent." Or again, Isaiah 1:2, “Hear, oh heavens, listen, oh earth. For the Lord has spoken.” Faith comes by hearing, it comes from hearing the gospel message. So as you hear the words of the Gospel of Mark, do you feel faith growing inside your heart? Do you feel or sense the reality of the greatness of Christ as we walk through the Gospel of Mark? Is that happening for you? Is that developing within you?

Not only does faith initially come by hearing, it grows by hearing. In Galatians 2, Paul says to the Galatian Christians, "Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now perfected by the flesh? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and work miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?" That's how you grow. The same way you begin your Christian life, you grow, hear, then hear with this with faith.  Or again as Hebrews 3:7-8 when the Holy Spirit says, "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart." You ought to pray that every time you have a quiet time, say, "Lord, as I'm reading the scripture today, let me hear you speaking to me today, and let me not harden my heart. Let me not harden my heart."

Those of you that came in here this morning as unbelievers, do you hear Jesus calling you now to follow Him? Do you hear Him saying, "Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest"? Do you hear Jesus say in John 7, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink." That's the call of salvation, to come to Jesus, who does all things well and to trust His blood shed on the cross for your sins. Do you hear Him? Do you hear His word and His Spirit speaking to you today?

Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for the time we've had to walk through this incredible text today. And Father, we thank you for the truth that is in it, how powerful it is. We ask, oh, Lord, that you please open our hearts and our minds and sustain us. Help us to hear you speaking to us through the ministry of the word. In Jesus' name, amen.

Jesus heals a deaf man with incredible power and tenderness, recconecting him to the outside world. Are our ears open to the gospel?

The post Jesus Heals a Deaf and Mute Man Mark (Mark Sermon 34) appeared first on Two Journeys.

Why do we exist? Is Salvation in stages? What is sanctification? All these questions and more are answered in this class.

The post Conforming to Christ: Class 1 appeared first on Two Journeys.

What does Paul's epistle to the Romans teach about the relationship between Adam and Jesus?

The post Class in Romans: Adam and Christ appeared first on Two Journeys.

In this episode, Paul sought to defend his life and preach the gospel of Christ before a maniacal, nationalist mob of Gentile-hating Jews

The post Acts Podcast 42: Paul’s Address to the Murderous Mob in Jerusalem appeared first on Two Journeys.

Learn about one woman's great faith, and Jesus’ greater compassion and power!

Usually when I begin preaching week after week as we're moving through the Gospel of Mark, I tell you to open in your Bibles to the text that you just heard read. I'm going to say, open your Bibles to Mark 7: 24-30. But I'm also going to urge you to put your finger over in Matthew 15:21-28 if you'd like, because I'm going to be moving back and forth between these two accounts. God in his grace gave us four gospels. The four gospels, all of them are perfect and three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic because they run over often basically the same material, but in different ways. My desire always is to accept them as an errant, as perfect and flawless and necessary and helpful. Sometimes, I just take Mark's account and just walk through it, and that's certainly fine.

Today, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to be harmonizing the account of this encounter with the Canaanite woman, the Syrophoenician woman from both Matthew 15 and Mark 7. This is a story of a mother's humble and persistent faith because of which Jesus unleashes unlimited power, great faith, and greater power. We're called on in the text to marvel at her faith and to learn from it, but even more we are summoned by the text to join her in falling at Jesus's feet and beseeching him by faith for every blessing that He alone can bestow. We're looking in two directions this morning as we look at this text. We're looking at the woman to learn from her faith and at the Savior to worship him for his wisdom, grace and power. Jesus is always the main point, always.

This woman is in a desperate plight. Her little daughter is demon possessed. The horror of that affliction is overwhelming and her spiritual condition is terrible. She's a pagan living in a pagan land, but she turns away from all of the idols of her paganism and her pagan heritage to Christ. She knows that He alone can save her daughter, and she cries out to him desperately and persistently for his mercy on her little girl. Some of you may be in a desperate plight yourselves this morning, not anything perhaps like this woman, but maybe you are hurting deeply in some affliction in your life and God brought you here to join with this woman and imitate her faith. Of course, you won't be saved at all from looking at the woman, ultimately. She can't save you, but Jesus can. This account calls on you to see Jesus, to drink in his nature, specifically his compassion and power anew and trust in him alone.

When I was a new Christian, a friend of mine, the guy who had led me to Christ, gave me a copy of a book that has continued to be precious to me. It was a devotional written by Charles Persian called Morning and Evening. Some of you have used it before. In Morning and Evening, it's throughout the calendar, January 1st, December 31st with a reading for the morning and reading for the evening. In that, he deals with this story twice. In the over 700 devotional that he gives, he deals with her twice. He spoke first in Matthew's account about the fact that in this encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus, "He did not answer her a word.” He began by not saying anything to her at all, just ignoring her, it seems. She's desperately begging Jesus to heal her daughter and He ignores her like she doesn't even exist. Spurgeon picked up on that and meditated on it, and I want to read from him and quote from him, extensively. 

 "Genuine seekers who as yet have not obtained the blessing may take comfort in the story before us. The Savior did not at once bestow the blessing, even though the woman had great faith in him. He intended to give it, but he waited a while. He answered her not a word. Were not her prayers good? Never better in the world. Was not her case needy? Sorrowfully needy. Did she not feel her needs sufficiently? Oh, she felt it overwhelmingly. Was she not an earnest enough? Oh, she was intensely so. Had she no faith? She had such a high degree of faith that Jesus was amazed and said, ‘Oh woman, great is your faith.’ See then, although it is true that faith brings peace, yet it does not always bring it instantly. There may be certain reasons calling for the trial of faith rather than for the reward of faith.

Genuine faith may be in the soul like a hidden seed, but as yet, it may not have budded and blossomed into joy and peace. A painful silence from the Savior is the trial of many seeking soul, but heavier still is the harsh cutting reply such as this, ‘It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs.’ Many in waiting upon the Lord find immediate delight, but this is not the case with all. A deeper sense of sin may be given to you instead of a sense of pardon. In such a case, you'll need to have patience to bear the heavy blow. Ah, poor heart. Though Christ beat and bruise you or even slay you, you must trust in him. Though he should give you an angry word, believe in the love in his heart. Do not, I beg you, give up, seeking or trusting the master because you have not yet obtained the conscious joy which you long for.  Cast yourself upon him persevering depend where you cannot yet rejoicingly hope.”

That's the lesson on persevering faith we learn from this woman. Her faith was great, but Jesus’ compassion and power are greater. What struck me when I was doing scripture memory in the Gospel of Mark , I came to this account, and thought of the phrase, "effortless power," on the part of Jesus. It first hit me in this account, effortless power, and I've used it for all the other miracles, but it started for me first in this encounter, effortless power that Jesus displays over the demon. In a split second, I mean, literally, split second, He drives a demon out without moving a muscle, without speaking a word. Look at verse 29 and 30 in Mark 7. “Then he told her, ‘For such a reply, you may go. The demon has left your daughter.’ She went home and found her daughter, her child lying on the bed and the demon gone.” That is simply astonishing.

One moment the demon was inhabiting this little girl, and the next moment after her statement, the demon had been evicted; not the demon will leave presently, no, the demon has gone. When? Now, a moment ago. How? By the power of his thoughts. As I said, Jesus just didn't move a muscle. He didn't walk over to her home. He didn't lay hands on her as He usually liked to do. He didn't rebuke the demon or speak any words to the demon. He did nothing but exert spiritual force on the demon, the force of his sovereign kingly power overall things, and the demon was gone. The demon had no choice but to be gone. So for me, this I think is the clearest example of effortless power on Jesus part. What effort physically did he make? None. It's just his kingly power. I've talked about it throughout the gospel of Mark.

At the beginning of the sermon, I've already laid out all my cards on the table. What's left to do? We've talked about the woman and how wonderful her faith is. We've talked about Jesus's effortless power. We could just pray and go home now, but I'm not going to do that. We're going to walk through the texts, both of them to some degree, and try to learn the details. I've already told you the point of the story. Let's walk through it. 

It begins with Jesus' strategic retreat. Look at verse 24 in Mark 7, “Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it. Yet he could not keep his presence a secret.”  Matthew 15:21, “Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” Why this retreat? The Greek word in Matthew is stronger than just “he went away”. This was a strategic retreat on his part, and the reason I think was to escape the building pressure in the Jewish country that would bring issues to a head too soon. Jesus had a strong sense of the timing of his mission. Everything had been planned out to the detail, especially his death. In John's Gospel, we have this repeated phrase. Many times they sought to arrest Jesus and kill him or take him away, but John tells us, “his time had not yet come.” 

Everything was timed out, but there's a human factor in this. The human pressures are mounting to a point of explosion. The pot's about to boil over.  You've got the huge crowds that are constantly pressing in, physically pressing in on Jesus for healing, depriving him sometimes even of air, and they want, in John 6, to take him away by force to make him king. They're going to take matters in their own hands and just make him king. You've got Herod Antipas, the wicked king that executed John the Baptist after that alluring dance done by that young woman, who would certainly have opposed Jesus and fought against him and perhaps incarcerated him and killed him as well. Most of all though, you've got the religious leaders, the Jewish religious leaders, the chief Scribes and Pharisees, who are increasingly hostile to Jesus, already plotting and scheming his death.

For all these reasons, Jesus had to get away. He had to affect a strategic retreat, but I think it was especially to focus on the twelve apostles. He wanted to spend time with them and shape them and mold them and prepare them for their future mission, even to the ends of the earth, including gentile areas. He wanted to pour into them and train them, away from those mounting Jewish pressures. He retreated to Tyre and Sidon. It's a Gentile area, as I've said. It's away from the Jewish nation, away from Judea and Galilee. Jesus would not be as well known there. Tyre and Sidon were notorious centers of Gentile wickedness. They were port cities known for trade across the Mediterranean and all the wickedness of the world just pooled there like a cesspool of wickedness. Ezekiel 28 openly implies that Satan was the king of Tyre. He's the power behind that economic throne.  Tyre's a perfect place for Jesus to retreat to. The Jewish crowds are not going to follow him there, and He would not be as well known there. 

However, this desperate woman found him anyway. Look at verse 24 in Mark 7, “He entered the house and did not want anyone to know it, yet he could not keep his presence a secret.” That brings us to this mother and her desperate plea, look at verse 25, “In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet.” Matthew 15 says she falls at his feet. Putting it together, where we go back a little bit in time with the beginning of the encounter, Matthew gives us more of the full encounter. In Matthew 15:22, she was crying out. It says, "Lord, son of David, have mercy on me. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession."

Who is this woman? It ways in Mark 7:26, the woman was a Greek, we're told born in Syrian Phoenicia. That's why she's called a Syrophoenician. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. She's a Canaanite. These are the very people of the land that the Jews under Joshua had driven out of the Promised Land, the ones that they were never supposed to intermarry with. The ones that are known for their paganism and their wickedness, that's who she was. This woman would've been a complete outcast as far as the Jews were concerned. She was a pagan woman, but she has this desperate plight. She says in Matthew's account, "My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession.”  The Greek there is intensive, as if the demon is thrashing this little girl around, beating her up, abusing her daily and the daughter is little. This tender little girl, powerless against this spiritual force, and there's nothing the mother can do. She makes repeated pleas. Mark gives us the sense that she's repeatedly crying out to Jesus again and again. She uses this Jewish term in Matthew, "Lord's son of David," so she seems to understand the significance of that title. Mark gives us a sense of her bodily position. Mark says she casts herself down before him at his feet, a position of abject weakness and a description also of majesty to Jesus by calling him Lord and throwing herself at his feet. She may be ready to worship him, but especially, she has nowhere else to turn, and yet she has no doubts whatsoever that Jesus has the power to heal her little girl.

Then, Jesus tests her faith and she passes the test. Back in Matthew, we get, as I said, Jesus's initial strange response that Spurgeon talked about. Jesus did not answer her a word,  He just ignores her. He acted like she wasn't even there. This is a picture of a basic theological fact. God doesn't have to listen to you. He doesn't owe you a hearing if you're a sinner apart from Christ. He doesn't have to listen to anything you say. He’s not under obligation. He does hear everything because He is omnipotent, but this is a picture showing that we don't necessarily have a hearing. We don't necessarily have access to the throne.

The disciples are shown in Matthew's account at this point with simple annoyance. That's all that's going on for them, straight annoyance. Matthew 15:23, “The disciples came to him and urged him, ‘Send her away for she keeps crying out after us.’" They don't want anything to do with this woman. Like any typical Jewish person of that day, they almost certainly would've disdain her, looked at her only as a noisy annoyance, no compassion. I don't read any compassion in them at all for her. Then, Jesus makes his first verbal response, lost to them, but it's certainly relevant to the woman. In Matthew 15:24, he answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."

Jesus there strategically borders his ministry, geographically, ethnically to the Jewish nation, but we know this is only temporary, but this is what He says, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." Next, the woman then presses in, and Jesus answers her directly. I mean, isn't she marvelous? She will not be ignored. She will not be denied. So beautiful, such a picture of persistent faith. Matthew 15:25-26, “The woman came and knelt before him. ‘Lord, help me,’ she says.” I mean it's not much different than Peter's sinking prayer, "Lord, save me." It's just that simple, "Lord, help me." Then He says to her, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs." Now, we must admit, this is troubling. This is a troubling statement. It's a difficult statement. It seems harsh. It seems demeaning to her as a human being. It seems so unlike Jesus, wouldn't you agree? It doesn't seem to be what He was about. He was very tenderhearted toward people who were in suffering situations, especially women.

There's some mitigating factors here. First of all, we don't have Jesus's tone of voice. We don't have his facial expression. We just have the account. The Greek implies that Jesus had a longer conversation with her. None of the gospels is exhaustively complete, and there's always more that went on than was recorded. There's additional things. It says, "Jesus was saying to her, ‘It's not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs.’" “Dogs” here in the Greek is not the term of a wild stray dog that roams around viciously attacking other dogs and attacking people and looking for garbage, picking through garbage. It's a different word. Seems to be more domesticated. Yet for all of that, I will admit, it still seems strange. It seems like a strange answer on Jesus' part. Why did He do it? Let's eliminate some possibilities. Just take some right off the table, not because of this, not because of this, not because of this. Let's walk through what it couldn't have been.

It's not because Jesus didn't care about Gentiles or God doesn't care about Gentiles. Not at all. At the very beginning of the Jewish nation, the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, God said in verse 3, "I will bless those who bless you, Abraham, and whoever curses you, I will curse and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." All the Gentiles are going to be blessed through you. That's from the very beginning. God had a saving purpose to our Gentiles. Then, in Isaiah 49:6, “God, the Father says to God the Son pre-incarnate, ‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.’" That's six centuries before Jesus was even born.

Again, in Psalm 67, the beautiful Jewish psalmist writes these words, "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, oh God. May all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy." I could multiply verses like this from the Old Testament. That's not it. After Christ's resurrection, He will send his apostles, his disciples to the ends of the earth to make disciples of all nations. There's no doubt about that. One of the earliest places they would go would be Tyre and Sidon, so much so that at the end of his third missionary journey, Paul on route to Jerusalem, stops and visits the disciples there in Tyre, many of whom knew about Paul and welcomed him warmly and loved him.

Second, it's not because Jesus lacked the power to do miracles in a Gentile land. Jesus was God omnipotent. There is nothing He cannot do. It’s not that He's not particularly good in Gentile or Jewish lands and a little bit weaker in Gentile land. That is not the case. Jesus is very good everywhere. That's not it. Clearly, Jesus is effortlessly powerful over this demon. 

Thirdly, not because ministry in Tyre would not have been effective or somehow a waste of time. Actually, quite the opposite. Jesus was charging Jewish cities with great sin because they didn't repent, seeing a river of miracles from him. In Matthew 11:21, He says, "Woe you, Chorazin. Woe to you Bethsaida,” [Jewish cities] "If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would've repented long ago in sack cloth and ashes.” The whole city would've repented. According to his sovereign strategic will, He didn't do those miracles in Tyre and Sidon, but they would've been effective in converting the populace.

Fourth, not because Jesus lacks mercy or compassion for her plight or that of her daughter. Jesus had the most perfect compassion of any human being in history. Again and again, the gospel speak of Jesus' compassion. Anyone who came to him empty and as a beggar went away full and rich and their needs abundantly met. 

Fifth, not because Jesus was weary or annoyed, wanted a vacation, a break, and gave her a surly answer based on that. Even when Jesus was dying on the cross, He was caring about other people. Bearing the sins of the world, drinking the cup of God's wrath, He's caring for John and his mother and the thief on the cross and the centurion at the foot of the cross. He's caring about other people. 

Six, not because Jesus was taking a break from ministry and didn't want to care for her needs at that point.  Seventh, not because there's only so much bread on the table and if He takes some of that, there won't be enough for the children. Not at all. I mean, it's like Jesus is a torch and he is lighting a thousand torches. His power is not diminished by doing miracles. It's not like there's only so many miracles to go around. He could do this forever and not because she didn't ask properly or with enough faith. She did very well in how she asked. Okay, why then?

There is a salvation strategy in order that's clearly laid out in the Bible to the Jew first, then to the Gentile. Jesus says it himself. "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." As He will say to the Samaritan woman, "Salvation is from the Jews." Paul says in Romans, "To the Jew first then to the Gentile." Paul's strategy was go to Jewish synagogues first and then when they rejected, to then go to the Gentiles. That was the redemptive plan. He was to come to the Jewish nation and the Jewish nation would reject him, and then He would go to the world. As John 1:11 says, “He came to his own and his own people did not receive him.”

Secondly, Christ hadn't died yet. The Gentiles are still on the outside. The barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, was still there. Only after He died would a curtain in the temple be torn in two from top to bottom. They're still on the outside, but after He died, Ephesians 2 says, "That by the work of Jesus, there is one new man out of the two." Out of Jew and Gentile, that one new man is the believer in Christ, follower in Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, but that hasn't happened yet. I think ultimately, number three, it's to test her faith, to test her faith and to put it on display. He was testing her to see, first of all if she would humble herself because God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. The Sermon of the Mount blessed are the spiritual beggars for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “If you'll beg me, knowing you have nothing to offer me, I'll give you everything, but if you're going to be prideful, I'll give you nothing.”

Imagine if this woman hearing this statement had bristled and said, "I'm not a dog. I'm a human being and you have no right to talk to me that way,” and spun on her heel and walked away. What would she have gotten from Jesus at that point? I'm telling you, nothing. Sometimes, God humbles us in prayer and tells us who we are, reminds us who we are and who He is and starts there. Also, I believe He's testing her to develop her faith, to get it stronger, to make it come on in the pattern of a physical therapist that strengthens weakened muscles by testing them vigorously, even opposing the motion, so the patient has to exert even more force, more willpower, more strength, thus, thus developing the weak muscle. Jesus seems to oppose her, fight against her, despite the fact that He clearly desires to give her what she wants.

Finally, ultimately, He wants to put her faith on display for all of us. We who are going to read this account, we're going to learn from her how to come to Christ and beg him. He puts her faith on display. This account puts her faith on display. What do you learn from her faith? What can we learn from it? First of all, faith has a basis. She comes to Jesus, I believe, because she knows who he is and what he's done. "Lord, son of David have mercy on me." Why does she even come to him? She's heard the miracle accounts, and faith has a basis. It is with us. The more we are immersing ourselves in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and indeed in the whole Bible, the stronger our faith in Jesus will get. Faith has a basis and we have more information than this woman ever had. If your faith is weak, get in the Bible. Find out more and more about Jesus. Immerse yourself in that.

We see also the reverence of her faith. She calls him Lord. She bows down. She falls at his feet. She worships him. She's submissive. She's reverent. She doesn't presume on him or demand from him. She knows that he's exalted and treats him accordingly. We see the confidence of her faith. There's no doubt in her mind whatsoever that Jesus is capable of doing this. That's why she's so persistent. We see the repentance of her faith. She says, "Have mercy on me." She doesn't deserve anything. She's asking for mercy. She can't demand mercy.

We see the persistence of her faith. Jesus puts up these roadblocks, and yet she's persistent. She doesn't give up. We see also the love of her faith. It's amazing. She has taken her daughter's condition as though it's her own. Now, you mothers are like, "Well, yeah, that's what mothers do," but still, that's another human being there, and what is she saying? "Have mercy on me. Lord, help me," and that's what happens with prayer. When you're interceding for someone else and they're suffering and you're not, the more you pray, the more your heart gets knit up with their condition and you start to love your neighbor as yourself. You start to love as though it's happening to you. Faith overcomes all of these obstacles and keeps persistent. Jacob wrestled all night with an angel saying, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." 

We see the humility of her faith. She says, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table," so faith takes its rightful place and says these appropriate things.  Remember, the centurion who had paralyzed servant? He said, "Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof." I love what John the Baptist said when he says, "I'm not worthy to stoop down and untie his sandals." I mean, the more you elevate that sense of the exalted majesty of Jesus, the fact the seraphim are covering their faces in his presence, the better you'll be in your prayer life. 

We see ultimately the reward of her faith. She gets what she wants. Her persistent faith was rewarded. Jesus unleashes effortless power, verse 29 -30,  “Then He told her, ‘For such a reply, you may go, the demon has left your daughter.’ She went home and found her child lying in the bed, the demon gone.” The healing is instantaneous. As we said, it's effortless. This is an amazing picture of the power of Jesus. Demons are vastly more powerful than we are, but Jesus is infinitely more powerful than all of them.

Is it just me? Maybe I'm just geeky this way, but I'm hugely into the timeframe here. It's like, when did that happen? "For such a reply, you may go. The demon is gone." What's the timeframe of that? I'm thinking half a second. That's amazing. God can do immeasurably more than all you ask or imagine. That's omnipotence on display. As Jeremiah said, "Ah, sovereign Lord, you made the heaven and the earth by your great power and your outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for you.” 

I would hope you'd be able to tell me what some of them are by now. I've been super clear right from the beginning of the sermon, but let's walk through some of these timeless lessons. Let's start with Jesus. What do we learn about Jesus, the majesty of Christ here? This woman had great thoughts about Jesus' lavish bounty. Let's go back to Spurgeon now. Let's listen to what Spurgeon says,

 "This woman had thought great thoughts about Christ. She thought, I know you are so generous a master of the feast that they're sure to be abundant bread on your table, that if even a crumb fell to the ground, that would suffice for me.”

Remember, for the woman having a demon cast out of her daughter is a very great thing, but she had such high thoughts of Jesus that she knew for him it was like a crumb falling from his banqueting table.

“Dear child of God, think great thoughts of Christ, thinking great thoughts of your sin alone will drive you to despair, but great thoughts of Christ and his atonement will navigate your troubled soul to its peaceful haven. Though your sins may be many and mighty, it is nothing for Christ to atone for them and remove them from you by His work on cross." [Spurgeon]

Think great thoughts of Jesus. Think great thoughts of his atoning work on the cross. I love what he said,"If you think great thoughts of your sins alone, you will despair. But if you think great thoughts of Christ, in light of your sin, you'll flee to the cross and find forgiveness." [Spurgeon] Effortless power. Nothing is too difficult for him. John 1:3, "Through him, all things were made and without him, nothing was made that has been made."

Isaiah 40:26, Speaking to the stars, “Lift up your eyes and look at these. Look at the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and his mighty strength, not one of those stars is missing." That's the power of God. It's the power of Christ. I cannot understand the power of Jesus in the invisible spiritual realm. I don't know how that works. That's okay. I don't understand gravity or magnetism either, and neither do you. Somewhere between the sun and us, there's nothing but vacuum, but the sun's exerting some force on us. I don't get that, I don't need to. Same thing in the spiritual realms. When Jesus thinks it, it's just done.

Is there any situation in your life that you're facing right now that Jesus cannot handle? You need to understand. I was talking to somebody right before worship. I had this thought. Effortless power means intentionality in your suffering. You realize that. Do you realize that like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, He could put a bubble of pleasure around you and you would live the rest of your life in that bubble if He wanted you to. He could take away all of your diseases. He could take away all of your inflictions, everything that's causing you difficulty. He could put a bubble of ease around you and in that bubble, you would move through this world of suffering until at last, it popped and you were in heaven, and you're like, "Pastor, I'm into that. That sounds really good." Effortless power. He could do that. He's not doing that. Why? He has purpose. He has a purpose in your suffering, all of it. How long it will last, how intense it is. There's purpose. We need to understand that.

Secondly, don't be discouraged about God's silence when you pray. As Spurgeon said, "Don't be discouraged. Don't be put off." Be like that woman. Press in. Pray more, not less. Ask more intensely. Keep praying and be like this woman. Learn the lessons of her faith. Make sure that your faith has a basis in the word of God. You're asking according to his will, and you're asking the Jesus of the Bible that you know and love. Be reverent in your approach to God. Understand how exalted He is and speak to him accordingly, respectfully. Be strength in your faith and growing confidence. Don't flicker or waiver, not certain whether He can hear you or not. Don't be like that. Be humble and repentant. Remember the Pharisee and the tax collector. The tax collector, the sinner, beat his breast and would not look up to heaven, but said, "Be merciful to me, oh God.” Be persistent. Don't give up quickly and wait on God until you have at last faith's reward.

Close with me in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the time that we've had to study this incredible encounter that Jesus had with this Canaanite woman, and thank you for the things that we can learn from it and pray that you would help us to put these lessons into practice for our lives. I thank you for Jesus' tenderness and thank you for his love, his concern for us as his children. Lord, I thank you for the way he dealt with her and the daughter, and I pray, oh Lord, that you would strengthen us in our faith and especially in our prayer lives that we would receive from you, obtain from you the reward of faith. In Jesus name, Amen.

The Syrophonecian woman's humble faith and persistence led to the display of Jesus's greater compassion and power in driving out a demon.

The post Humble Faith Unleashes Limitless Power (Mark Sermon 33) appeared first on Two Journeys.