Last week I said that we were entering a stage of Jesus’s ministry in which there was a transition. It was a transition from Him primarily preaching and ministering to the multitudes, to His ministry primarily being focused on the disciples. Jesus knew that it would be less than a year until He is taken away from them, and they must continue to carry out His ministry. And so He wants to prepare them for His departure. But there is another transition in His ministry, and that is that He is slowly but inexorably heading for the cross. In this

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I want to emphasize something about Mark’s gospel as we continue in our verse by verse study of it this morning. And that is that Mark is not writing a biography of Jesus, he is not writing a history of Jesus Christ nor His ministry. But Mark is writing the gospel. The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. The good news is God’s plan of salvation for His people, brought about and manifested through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now I emphasize that point because understanding that helps us to discern

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Last Sunday we looked at the passage in Mark where Jesus rebuked the Pharisees because of their hypocrisy.  These religious leaders cleaned the outside of the cup, so to speak, but the inside was full of corruption.  They publicly made a great show of  following the traditions of men, which presumably had their basis in religious law, but inwardly they broke the commandments of God.  And so Jesus taught the disciples that it was necessary to have a clean heart, for out of the heart proceeds all evil. Now a clean heart or a new heart speaks of a spiritual

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How to walk on water, Mark 6: 45-52 As it is our practice to preach through the Bible verse by verse, I rarely have much opportunity to preach messages that are of a more instructional or motivational nature. Many pastors tend to preach nothing but motivational type of messages, like “How to have your best life now.” Or “You are very powerful.” Or “How to find success in life.” Those are actual messages from pastors that purvey the prosperity gospel, which is very popular. And Lord knows, I would like to be popular. So as I prepared for todays sermon,

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Today we have come in our study of Mark to a story that I’m sure is familiar to anyone who has been to church for any length of time or to Sunday school. It’s one of the favorite stories of the Bible that is often taught to children. It’s the story of Jesus feeding the 5000. And there is plenty to consider and learn about Jesus even if the story is told in a straightforward, simple retelling. On just a rudimentary level, even a child can understand that the Lord is compassionate and is able to do miracles. But this

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Tertullian, who lived as a Christian preacher and theologian in the second century, is credited with the expression, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” He wrote this phrase in a treatise which he sent to the governors of the Roman Empire, in to hope to quell the persecution of the early Christians. What he was basically saying is that the blood of Christians is a seed which multiplies the converts to Christianity, so rather than their persecution stopping Christianity, it causes the church to flourish. That’s a counterintuitive thing to consider, that persecution makes the

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The Bible teaches us that to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God is the basis for our salvation, the means by which we become a child of God, for receiving eternal life. In John 1:12-13 we read, “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, [even] to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Believing in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the means by which

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