Service and Sacrifice — Mark 7-8

0:00 So, I'll start off with a piece of fashion advice. In case you're wondering, what color socks you need to wear, I matched them with my tie today, so. Alright. So, today we're going to be in Mark chapter seven and chapter eight. So you could turn there.

0:30 We're going to be in Mark seven and Mark eight. Ray skipped around a little bit, and sort of jumped into eight and did the feeding of it was either the 4,000 or the 5,000. So, but I think, we're going to kind of blend these together today and we're going to see, just how it all fits together. I also wanted to provide you with a map just because I remember back in the summer praying and I asked the lord, I wanted to learn and I wanted to gain a a greater context of the Bible when you read god's word and and you kind of imagine you're looking at the world from Google Maps and you kind of see it as a larger context and then you zoom in a little places, you look at this place and look at that place. That's how we look at this little picture here.

1:29 You can imagine zooming in. I don't know you have your smartphone now where you have Google Maps on it. You can kind of zoom in and look at this and look at that. But I asked the Lord to give me an understanding of the Bible greater context. And I believe that He has answered that and I'm very grateful for that.

1:53 Of course I'm not done yet but really appreciated that. So let's just read our text. We're going to be in Mark seven. We're going to read verses 20 four-thirty seven. Then we're going to be in Mark eight, verses 20 two-thirty eight.

2:12 So seven twenty four. And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know. Yet he could not be hidden. But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.

2:33 Now, the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. But she answered him, yes Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. And he said to her, for this statement, you may go your way.

3:00 The demon has left your daughter. And she went home and found the child lying in a bed and the demon gone. Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea Of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis and they brought him to a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged him to lay his hand on him and taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephitha, that is be opened. And his ears were opened.

3:39 His tongue was released and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, he has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.

4:39 And he sent him to his home saying, do not even enter the village. And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea, Philippi. And on the way, he asked his disciples, who do people say that I am? And they told him, John the Baptist and others say Elijah and others, one of the prophets. And he asked them, but who do you say that I am?

5:07 Peter answered him, you are the Christ. And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days, rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

5:33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked and said, get behind me, Satan. For you're not setting your minds on the things of god, but on the things of man. In calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

6:06 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels. Let's pray. Dear Lord, we thank you for bringing us here this morning.

6:35 We thank you for your word. We thank you that it's true. We thank you for Jesus and we thank you for this season. Help us to see Jesus clearly and to want to be like him, Lord. Give us that desire.

6:52 And if there be anyone here yet that has not placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, I pray that they would be moved this morning. In Jesus' name, Amen. So, I'm going to use the theme verse for the book of Mark. I don't know if we've said it yet in our study of Mark but I'm going to use that as an outline as well as two of Peter's messages in Acts. So there's two Peter's messages in Acts where he talks about the Lord Jesus, okay?

7:26 I'm going to use Mark ten forty five though. Mark ten forty five says, for even the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So we're going to split it up into two parts today. We're going to split it up into service. Jesus Christ came to serve.

7:49 And the second part is Jesus Christ came to be a sacrifice. So two parts. I was talking to someone this week and remarking just about how, we've been looking at many different things. The feeding of the 5,000, the 4,000, these great miracles, the the calming of the storm, Jesus's power, walking in the water. He's he's been healing a lot of people so far.

8:21 He's taught many things about faith, about our hearts, about trust, about evangelism. And we just, we've learned many things about what Christ did. We also learned about how Jesus, he received a lot of criticism. And if you remember and look back in Mark, it only takes to about chapter three till the Pharisees, they want to go out and they're plotting with their friends. How do we get rid of this guy?

8:56 We come to this portion and really all of that, it's been pointing, pointing towards Christ's mission. The second part of our of our message today and that is his sacrifice on the cross, okay? And we're going to see a little bit later on and we as we already read that Jesus Christ revealed His mission to go to the cross to His disciples for the very first time. Okay? But part one, let's talk about service.

10:02 This is a primarily Gentile area. If you look back in the Old Testament, maybe just do a Google search of Tyre Inside On and Bible and Old Testament. Jeremiah talks a lot about it, but, it's just a representation of a Gentile area. Non Jewish people. So Jesus went up here and if you look at chapter seven, it says that He entered a house and He didn't want anyone to know.

10:33 Yet He couldn't be hidden. So you can kind of get the idea. He come up, he went up there probably to take a little rest, right. He had been doing a lot of ministry. But because Jesus was so popular and He's doing so many miracles and and teachings, the word was out.

10:54 Okay? And if you actually look back, again, just look at this greater context thing. Jesus had already talked to a huge crowd of people and it had said back in a few chapters of Mark about how He was talking to these people and they're from all over the place. So He had already talked to people from Tyre and Sidon. Okay and He went up there.

11:18 So he couldn't be hidden. But we have this have this instance where this woman comes to him. And I want to highlight in verse 26 actually. It says, And she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. Earlier it said about how she fell down before Him.

11:43 She was desperate. And, and Jesus has this discussion with her. And, just shortened to the point is that, this discussion is really about the relationship between, the Jewish people and the Gentile people. Christ came mainly for His people. He was the Jewish Messiah.

12:11 Okay? But it does say in Isaiah, it prophesies about how Jesus Christ was not just going to come and be a sacrifice and serve His own people, but He was going to be a light to the Gentiles. In Isaiah 40 nine:six, it says, It's too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel. I will make you as a light for the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. I I don't know if this woman had read the Old Testament but her response does does lend itself to the fact that she had understood who Jesus was and and the first mission that he was on was he was coming for his own people.

13:08 Okay and that's what it means when he says, let the children be fed first, the Jewish people. But she says, yes, but even the dogs under the table, they they get a little bit of the crumbs. And so, Jesus looked and and heard this woman speak and he saw her faith. And he healed her. Or her daughter, right?

13:36 So, one example of Christ serving the people around him. And just one thing to draw out here is, Christ was not in his normal home. He was a very long way from home. Probably 30 plus miles from his stomping grounds, so to speak. And so, he wasn't quite where he was, normally, where he grew up, but he was still there.

14:08 He healed this woman anyways, right? He played the hand he was dealt, so to speak. This woman came to her in need and he met her need. So let's go on to the second one. It says in verse 31 that, He returned from the region of Tyre and he went through Sidon to the Sea Of Galilee in the region of Decapolis.

14:34 If you remember, earlier from Mark chapter four, I believe, that Jesus had already been to Decapolis again. He had healed the man who used to be called, Legion. Okay, this guy had a whole bunch of demons inside of him. And he healed them of him and after that, the man, he wanted to be with Jesus. But Jesus says, Go home and tell them, tell your family, your hometown about what I did for you.

15:08 And so it says he went around the whole region there and he told them about what Jesus had done for him. So Christ had already been there, okay? And they had already heard about Christ. Now, what's curious and what's interesting about this miracle, is who the guy was and what was unique about him. So this guy, he was deaf.

15:46 And he couldn't speak either. It's interesting, a couple weeks ago I got to hear a man who was about, it was about for three years, he couldn't speak at all. He had cancer from his throat and he couldn't do business at all. He was a businessman. And so, he could also, he would have dinner with his family, right?

16:14 And he was having trouble like eating it, but he couldn't speak. He couldn't tell his family that he needed help. And so these people, they brought him this man and again, it says, they begged him to lay his hand on him. And so, Jesus takes him aside privately and he he uses, I guess, you could say his own form of sign language. So, he he kind of puts his fingers into his ears and and he spits and he touches his tongue just to tell him like, I'm going to do something about this, right?

16:54 And you can imagine this sort of one on one thing, you know. Jesus is right here with this man, one on one. And again, he met a need, okay? And he communicated with this man in a way that this guy would understand. So, wow, that's amazing, isn't it?

17:29 It says that he charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. Jesus didn't want to get the wrong idea. He didn't want the wrong attention, right? We heard earlier in different times about how the disciples hadn't quite understood.

17:57 It was just for the food, right? That people were following Him, right? So, didn't want the wrong attention. Let's go to the third miracle. It's in chapter eight.

18:18 It says, And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and again it says, and begged him to touch him. So again, Jesus had already been to Bethsaida. He had been there for the feeding of the 5,000. And here's another note.

18:44 If you look in the book of John, Peter, Philip, and Andrew were actually from Bethsaida. So, they brought him to Jesus and again, they begged and Jesus took a man away and again, it was just a private thing. It was between him and the guy. Maybe the people were were standing close by. Okay, he didn't want, so much publicity for this.

19:16 And he spit on his eyes. Now, this, I read this, I don't know, it was a couple days ago but, that kind of stuck out to me. It's like, he spit on his eyes. Like he spit right into his face. And that's just kind of weird, right?

19:32 Normally, spitting into someone's face is not a sign of respect. But, he did that to communicate to him. To say, look, I'm gonna do something right now. And again, Jesus laid on his hands on him and he healed his sight. He met another need And in the end here, in the end of this passage here in verse 26, Jesus it says, He sent him to his home saying, Do not even enter the village.

20:11 Now, reading the book of Mark, you get the feeling that, Mark says what he means and he means what he says. And he only gives details when you need details. And so I like to suggest the fact that that's exactly what he did. Because we don't have any story about after that about if he went and told his friends or whatever. I imagine he went right, straight home.

20:38 And all that to say is I really appreciate this man's obedience. He obeyed the Lord. So, the first thing that we learn about Jesus is that he's a servant. And He did a lot of different things. He healed a lot of different people.

21:02 He did many different miracles. And maybe a takeaway for us would be that I don't know what your specialty is, what you're good at, but you're good at something I bet. Making a meal, talking to somebody, giving an encouraging word. Maybe you're a doctor and you can help someone that way. Also being a servant means that sometimes you go out of your normal comfort zone.

21:42 It means being flexible. He had seen these people in need and he met these needs. It also means maybe spending time with some people that not a lot of people spend time with. The deaf man, the speech impaired man, he probably didn't have a lot of friends. So Christ came to be a servant.

23:08 And so it says, and Jesus went on with his disciples, verse 27, to the villages of Caesarea, Philippi. You can kind of look on your map there. And on the way, he asked his disciples, who do people say that I am? You can debate. You can talk about it.

23:34 You can talk about what other people think. There's a lot of people in this world who who have their opinion about who Jesus Christ is. And even on a even on a side note, as an evangelistic tool, it's a good question. You can you can be talking to someone. You could just say, who is Jesus?

23:55 Right? But The real, the the better question for us today in light of what we've been learning in the book of Mark is who do you say that Jesus is? You have to decide in your heart who Jesus is. You have to make the decision. I kind of identify with Peter.

24:31 He's the first one to kind of speak up by himself. And he says the right thing. He says, you're the Christ. He's the Messiah, the chosen one from god. Again, Jesus says, he strictly, he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

25:04 So now, we we go into Jesus' plan. So he came to serve, not to be served, and then to give his life a ransom for many. And so sort of like a, you've ever seen an emission impossible movie, he declares his mission. He says, what's going to happen? And he began to teach them in verse 31 that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again and he said this plainly.

25:47 Christ's plan was to suffer and die on the cross. It was the most important thing that he did on this Earth. And Christ had his plan. He was following the plan of god in heaven. Now, sometimes when you're following god's plan in heaven, you can get discouragement, right?

26:49 He's like, I have to go to the cross. I have to suffer. I have to die. And we could say, because without his sacrifice, we would not have the forgiveness of sins. We can say that today.

27:14 If you look in verse 34, it says, and calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, so he doesn't just speak to his disciples, the people around him, but he also call, he talks to the different people around him. And he says, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?

28:06 For of his ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him will the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels. What does Christ call us to do? He calls us to the same thing that he does. He calls us to service. He calls us to sacrifice.

28:42 He calls us to submit to his plan. He calls us to deny ourself. Anything about ourself. Whether it's our our desires, what we want for a career, who we want to marry, even our daily things. He calls us to deny our self.

29:08 To take up our cross and to follow him. He calls us to give our life for the gospel. In verse 35, it talks about identity. He calls us to to lose our very identity and to identify with him and his plan. So, yes, we have careers.

29:44 We have day to day activities but when you follow Christ, your identity changes. You're no longer a carpenter. You're a Christian carpenter. You're no longer a teacher, you're a Christian teacher. That's the first thing.

30:05 You are a Christian. He calls us to that He calls us to submit to his plan He calls us to desire or to to die to ourselves Again, Christ talked and He declared this message to both His disciples. He talked to Christians. And He also called to the unsaved. This is a proclamation for everybody to deny yourself, to humbly submit yourself to Christ.

30:55 So if you're here today and you've not put your faith and trust in Christ, he's calling to you today to follow him. He wants you to submit to him and to his plan. He wants you to identify with him and his death on the cross. Saying that his sacrifice was enough. You have to decide though.

31:23 Again, you can you can talk and you can talk about with your friends about what other people think. But in the end, it matters what you decide. Who do you think Jesus is? For the believers in Christ, Christ is calling us to serve. He's calling us to die to ourselves.

31:53 To submit to God's plan. Not to have our own agenda, but to go along with his agenda. He's calling us to lay down our life for his sake and the gospel's. He calls us to confess him. He calls us to speak about Him in the world.

33:03 To serve Him in whatever way we can. To whomever we can. Whether it's healing in a physical way or in a spiritual way. Praying with somebody. Sharing a meal with them.

33:24 Talking to someone about the Bible, just visiting with somebody. He calls us to serve. And he calls us to sacrifice. He desires that we give up our life because he gave our life, his life for us. To give up our agenda, give up our dreams, our desires, our hopes, our very life.

33:59 And follow him. Let's pray. Dear Lord, we thank you for your son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the many examples that he set for us. The many miracles he did, Lord.

34:20 So powerful. Many different people he healed and he touched, Lord. He met with this man that maybe didn't have a lot of friends, Lord, but he met a need. He met also with this blind man and he changed his whole world, Lord. And you healed his vision completely.

34:55 Lord, help us to see the mission that you have for us. Help us to serve. Help us also to sacrifice, Lord. We thank you for your sacrifice for us. Two thousand years ago, you died on the cross for us and you rose again the third day later.

35:22 And we thank you that it was enough to pay for our sin. That it was it was enough to forgive us, Lord. Someone had to take the penalty for our sin. Lord, whatever you're calling us to do daily, the little things here and there or the, the bigger things with our careers, with our families. Please, teach us, train us.

35:51 Show us how to be a sacrifice for you, Lord. We just thank you again for the Lord Jesus. We pray that we would, know who he is this Christmas season. Pray these things in Jesus name, Amen.