Let me start today by posing a hypothetical situation to you. If you were able to live a truly exemplary Christian life, a life of ministry, a life of righteousness, a life that pointed people to Christ – if that was something that not only your friends said about you, but also more importantly something that God said about you, how would you expect your life to turn out? Wouldn’t you think that for such a person, there would be the proverbial “showers of blessings?” Wouldn’t you expect at the very least, a long life, all your financial needs met,

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  I’m going to try to tackle two sermons in one this morning. I should perhaps have broken the text into two messages. But somehow I felt that the faster pace of Mark’s gospel lends itself to a faster paced exposition. We can spend a lot of time on historical details, and so forth, and not place the proper emphasis on the principles being taught. And I don’t want to teach you a prolonged history lesson this morning. But I want to present what I think are life changing principles in regards to the gospel of Christ, which I believe

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Today we are looking at a tale of two daughters. Two females, both referred to here in the text as daughters. One is older, having been sick with a serious ailment for 12 years, and one who was only 12 years old, being sick unto death. Mark doesn’t give us insight into why these two daughters are connected in this way, but it is evident that they are connected for posterity by the very chronology of the events described. There are two separate events recorded here, but the second plays out in parentheses, so to speak, after the first incident

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There is no doubt that we live in an age when occult practices and an interest in the occult has skyrocketed. One look at the cable television lineup and popular movies shows an unprecedented resurgence in the popularity of occult themes such as witchcraft and vampires and so forth. A couple of days ago I read an article from the New York Times called the Season of the Witch. I want to read a few excerpts from this article by a woman named Michelle Goldberg, just to illustrate the current popularity and acceptance by the culture of demonic practices today.

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As we come to this passage before us in our ongoing study of Mark, we find that the Lord Jesus and His disciples are at the end of a very long, tiring day. Jesus has been teaching and healing all day long, and the crowds were pressing against Him, and thronging Him to the point that He could not teach, so He had entered into a boat by the shore and taught them in parables. Now we spent the last couple of weeks talking about these parables that Mark records for us. And I don’t want to go back over

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In this chapter, Mark has given us a small collection of parables which Jesus taught during His ministry. Last time, we looked at the first one, which is the parable of the soils. Today we will look at four more. Parables are physical illustrations of spiritual truth. Pastor’s and teachers today often make use of illustrations as an attempt to help people understand a biblical principle or doctrine. However, that is not really the purpose of a parable. Notice in vs.11,12 that Jesus indicates a different purpose in using parables. He is not necessarily trying to illustrate truth more clearly,

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  Today we come to what many commentators believe is the first of the parables that Jesus taught. And as we see in the story, the crowds have become so large, and there was such a desire for healing and to see miracles that people were being crushed, and so Jesus got into a boat just off shore so that He could teach the people. The point is, that He wanted to teach them the truth of the gospel of the kingdom. Healing had it’s place, and miracles had their place, but that was not the primary purpose of His

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Today we are picking up where we left off in Mark’s gospel last time. As you will recall, Jesus called certain of the disciples away with Him to a mountain, and there He commissioned 12 of them to be His disciples. These were to be the men who would be closest to Him, to whom He would have intimate fellowship. He called them apart from the crowds, from the multitudes, from the world to Himself. They would become closer to Him than even His family. They would in fact be His family, even the foundation of His body, which is

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When US presidents leave office, it is very common today to hear news commentators remark about what that president’s legacy will be. And the presidents themselves seem to be very concerned about it. So they go out of their way to enact certain legislation or reforms or do certain things in order to establish a legacy that will be viewed favorably by future generations. Before the engines have cooled on Air Force One, they usually have written a book or two, a biography and spent millions preparing their library. In contrast to the self aggrandizing actions by the most powerful

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The nature of the gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the character and nature of Jesus. Jesus is the exact representation of God’s nature. Hebrews 1:3 says, “[Jesus] is the radiance of His glory (speaking of God) and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” The good news then, the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that He has manifested God’s nature to us, and being God in the flesh, has become our propitiation through His sacrifice, in order to reconcile us to God. Now we could spend a

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