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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The Bible has a lot to say about food and eating. Some of you are very appreciative of that fact. My wife thinks that food is next to godliness. You’ve heard the phrase, “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?” Well, my wife thinks it should be “the way to God is through a man’s stomach.” She loves food and loves to cook. Her solution to all of life’s problems is to make a cake. When we were first married, she hadn’t been a Christian long. And so she was very disappointed to learn that in heaven

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I’ve said it many times before, that every miracle of the gospels is a spiritual parable, meant to teach spiritual principles. And we are looking at such a miracle today and the spiritual principles that we can learn from it. Last time we talked about the gospel’s authority over the spiritual realm and the physical realm; the spiritual realm was illustrated by Jesus casting out the demon of the man in Capernaum, and then the physical realm was illustrated by the healing of the leper. Today, Mark is showing us the priority of the spiritual over the physical. The purpose

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Mark writes in the opening verse of this book, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Gospel comes from the Greek word euaggelion, which means good news. And so thus far in this book, Mark has been showing us various aspects of the gospel. Last time we looked at the message of the gospel, which is repentance of your sins and faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Then we looked at the ministry of the gospel, which is to make disciples. Today, we are looking another aspect of the gospel, which is

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