Westside Church

The health of your soul isn’t just a matter of being saved or unsaved. It’s the hinge on which the rest of your life hangs. It’s the difference between deep, satisfied spirituality and a restless, dispassionate faith.

The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others. As firmness of footing is a condition of walking and secure movement, so assurance of others being for us is the condition of stable, healthy living. There are many ways this can be present in individual cases, but it must be there. If it is not, we are but walking wounded, our life more or less a shambles until we die.

For good or for evil, the body lies right at the center of the spiritual life…one can immediately see all around us that the human body is a primary barrier to conformity to Christ. But this was never God’s intent.

What we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel. In short, the condition of our mind is very much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.

As we first turned away from God in our thoughts, so it is in our thoughts that the first movements toward the renovation of the heart occur. Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change. There the light of God first begins to move upon us through the word of Christ, and there the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to more and more thoughts tha can provide the basis for choosing to realign ourselves with God and his way.

What we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel. In short, the condition of our mind is very much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.

Mark highlights the growing unrest with the teaching and ministry of Jesus. On one hand his popularity grows and on the other he addresses controversial subjects. Confessing who Jesus is (part 4) does not always mean you will do what he says. The question his disciples must confront is will they follow him when things get hard or even confusing?

Mark contrasts what the religious leaders think about Jesus and what his disciples think about Jesus. In many ways, all of us are blind to knowing Jesus. Knowing who Jesus is does not happen immediately or a one-and-done decision; it is a progressive understanding of who Jesus is and what he came to do. Although we are all blind in one way or another, the difference between the disciples and everyone else is their openness to hear, to learn, and to obey. They constantly leaned in and asked genuine questions, not to trap Jesus, but to learn from Jesus.

Great villains make for great heroes. Before Mark tells the story of Jesus' showdown with death, he pits Jesus against all kinds of lesser bad guys - demons, sickness, hunger and storms to make the case that Jesus has authority over everything. For Mark’s persecuted readers in Rome, the message is clear - nothing could stop Jesus then, nothing’s going to stop Him now.