I believe, without question, that the greatest pivotal event in history is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament saints looked forward to it, and the New Testament church looks back to it.  But not only is it central to Christians, the cross is the monumental centerpiece of the history of the whole world.  Even our calendar reflects the fact of Jesus’s life and death.  I know, AD does not mean “after death.” It means “anno domini”, which means “in the year of our Lord.”  However, even though historians now use BCE or CE, meaning “before common era,” and

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  It needs to be restated, that Mark is not writing a biography, but a gospel.  In other words, he is not attempting to record every little detail that occurred in the life of Jesus.  None of the four gospel writers do that.  Some may omit some things the others include, while including some things others omit.  And the reason for that is that they are writing a gospel, or a sermon if you will, which is presenting certain doctrines and principles that they want to emphasize.  So as we consider this text before us today, it’s important that we

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  In the passage of scripture we read today, we have seen a tragic picture of the fall of one of Christ’s greatest, most courageous disciples.  Peter, by all accounts, was the foremost of the disciples.  He was first to declare Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.  He was the one to jump in the water to walk on the waves with Christ in a storm.  If he had been a fireman, or a policeman or soldier, he would have always been first through the door.  Peter was a man to look up to.  He was a natural

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  I suppose that the section of scripture we are looking at today is familiar territory for most of you.  I assume everyone here has at least a basic knowledge  of the trial of Jesus Christ.  It is doubtful that I could add much that would be new to you.  And to be honest, that really is not what the purpose of my message should be; to teach some new thing, some new nugget of knowledge that you can add to your spiritual knowledge bank.  Sometimes I think that we confuse that approach with expositional preaching.  My view of expositional

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  We are looking today, in our ongoing study of the book of Mark, at the night before the death of Jesus Christ.  For those of you wanting to hear the story of the resurrection, I’m sorry to disappoint you.  I’ve been going through the book as fast as I could, but we are here today I believe by the providence of God.  For the question really that needs to be asked regarding the life of Christ, is why did He need to suffer and to die? And then when we answer that, I think we will have a new

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  Today we are looking at the section of scripture in which Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper. It is called by various names in Christianity today, in some churches, it is the eucharist, in some, it is communion. All refer to the same ceremony, yet all do not observe it in the same way. It is the belief of this church, and most conservative, evangelical Christian churches, that this ceremony is one of two essential ordinances for the church, the other being baptism. In fact, some theologians have said that the identification of the church is that it observes the

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  Back in chapter 12, you will remember that Jesus was asked, “what is the foremost commandment?” And of course the answer that Jesus gave was “YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.” Now that should be very familiar to all of you. However, have you really thought about this foremost commandment of God? If you consider all of the traditions of all the false religions and false gods of the world, in which of them does their god declare that

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  The passage before us today is without a doubt the most difficult of all of Mark’s gospel. There have been more books written and arguments presented on various possible interpretations than we could possibly address in a month of Sundays. I wrestled with how to present this passage for study today. I thought that I would try to introduce it and put off the bulk of exegesis until next week. I also thought about skipping it altogether this week. But somewhere along the way the Lord seemed to direct my thoughts to a particular theme that I am going

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  One of the titles of God that we are looking at today is the title of Lord. I think that the true sense of that word is somewhat lost on our culture today. It would be better understood in a feudal system, where one who was considered Lord of the Manor owned the land, printed money and was served by the people of the land. Over time, the title extended to various types of nobility, such as a Lord of Parliament, or someone called Lord who held an office of authority. The other historical use of the word was,

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  When I was in school, I used to hate tests. Usually, that was because I had either forgotten to study for it, or I was too preoccupied with sports or other activities to study for it. So consequently, when the teacher would say, “now put away everything off your desk and take out a pencil and a blank sheet of paper for your test,” I would get this horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and look around in a panic at my classmates all calmly putting away their books, in hopes that somehow this was all

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