An active word back to Mark's Gospel, Gospel of Mark in Chapter 11. Last week we took a break from Mark to consider together the real story of St. Patrick, which I pray was an encouragement to your faith. But tonight I want to remind you of where we are in Mark's Gospel. We are in Jerusalem. After a long journey, finally, Jesus and his disciples are in the capital city of Israel. And so we have begun Holy Week, the final days of Jesus's earthly ministry, which ends, of course, with his death and resurrection and fulfillment of God's great promises. And you'll remember, that after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the first thing Jesus does is he symbolically judges and cleanses the temple by cursing a fig tree and by driving out the temple merchants, which brings us then to Mark chapter 11, into one of the most abused and most misunderstood passages in all of the New Testament, which you should know by now, those of you who have been with me for all these months in Mark, It's going to reveal, our passage tonight is going to reveal something significant about Jesus. That's what Mark is all about, about who he is, about what he has come to accomplish. Mark chapter 11, and I'll begin reading for us in verse 19. And when evening came, they went out of the city. As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, Rabbi, look, the fig tree that you cursed has withered. And Jesus answered them. Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive. If you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. When Christians in America in this day and age talk about worship, what do they typically mean by worship? singing, music, right? That's very common. Talk about worship, you might even have a title of someone in a large church with a whole staff of pastoral people, and they call one guy the worship pastor. And the worship pastor is the one who leads the singing, right? Or they can think a little bit more broadly about worship, and when they talk about Christian worship, they talk about the gathering on Sunday morning that happens, that we do weekly on the Lord's Day. But what is worship? Well, at the heart, worship is glorifying God. It should be at the heart of all of life. So working your job during the week, doing laundry at home, mowing your lawn to the glory of God. Where did worship first begin? You might say in the garden, we have a tendency to narrowly reduce worship to a human activity. Worship, I would argue, existed even before humans were created. And I would actually argue that worship exists eternally within the Godhead, within the Trinity, as God actively worships himself. So does that make God self-centered? You bet it does. He is self-centered. If he were not self-centered, God would not be God. He would be an idolater. For us to be self-centered is wrong because that makes us idolaters because God should be at the center of our lives. He's the only one worthy of being made central and being worshipped. And so God is right to put his glory above all else and to worship himself and to live for his own glory. So God eternally worships himself as the true object of of worthy worship and then the very purpose of his creation in Genesis 1 and 2 was worship. God creates the universe out of nothing and that which springs into being through his word and spirit as a result of his creative will worships him. gives him all glory. In various ways and performing various roles, angelic beings worship God. And not only the celestial beings, but all of creation worships the creator, as demonstrated in many of the Psalms. So worship then, it doesn't begin with men, but it begins with God. Because of who he is, and because he has created, God is the one who initiates worship. The chief end of God's act of creation is the praise of his own glory. All that exists, was created by him, exists for him, for his glory, for his worship. Now, this doesn't mean that God created because He needed to be worshipped. but that God as God is really the necessarily worthy object of all worship. It's a true worship. It's not just a duty, but it's the delightful purpose for which all creatures were created. I mean, there is nothing in this world more satisfying than fulfilling the very purpose for which you were designed and created. People get miserable by pursuing other purposes. When they pursue worship of God is when they are most satisfied because that's what they were designed by God to do, to give Him glory, to worship Him rightly. So, I don't know if you know this, but did you know that every single human being on this planet is a worshiper? We're all worshiping every second of every day. In fact, all of creation, so non-sentient elements, celestial beings, angels, and humans must worship because worship is woven into the very design of creation. Not only that, but human beings as bearers of the image of God, we were created to lead all of creation in the true worship of the Creator. That was our high role. That's why we were the pinnacle of God's creation. As the one who was given dominion, as the king priest in Eden, Adam's role was as worship leader for the whole creation to the glory of God. And the last Adam, Jesus, has been appointed the final king and the high priest over all heaven and earth as one who brings about the new creation and the glorification of his people so as to bring about the eschatological, in times, restoration of true worship forevermore. But of course, something significant took place in between Adam's true worship of God in Eden and the last Adam, Jesus's, true worship of God in the new creation. And that was false worship. fruitless worship, idolatrous worship. Genesis 3 was nothing less than a battle for worship, as Satan usurped mankind's worship from God, and after our fall into idolatry, And all the misery that that brought, I mean the whole history of the human race becomes this grand battle for worship, false worship as demonstrated by Cain, by sinful humanity destroyed by God in the great flood. by the Babel power building idolaters, but also worship of the true and living God by faith as evidenced by men like Abel, Seth, and Noah. And so the hope that that true worship might one day be fully restored by God. It was present among God's people after the fall. And there was no place where that hope was more embodied than in the temple. on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, where God's very presence dwelled with His chosen people. Not in the same extent to which it dwelled with Adam in the garden where they walked together in the cool of the day. There were boundaries. There were restrictions. but where he dwelled in a special way with his chosen people, where their worship was carried out, their faith was practiced there in the temple, their prayers were lifted to God there in the temple, their sacrifices for the forgiveness of their sins was offered up there in the temple. But the desperate fallenness of the human heart can be seen in how even the temple itself got perverted and turned into an idol. The people began to view it as a kind of lucky charm that they possessed that protected them from their enemies, rather than as an expression of true worship and of God's grace and mercy in dwelling among a sinful people. This is what the Lord says in Jeremiah 7. The prophet Jeremiah, the Lord speaks directly through Jeremiah to the people. And we read in verse one, the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, that is the temple. Stand in the gate of the Lord's house and proclaim there this word and say, hear the word of the Lord. All you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. Amend your ways and your deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Don't trust in these deceptive words. This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you don't oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you don't go after other gods to your own harm, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever. Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, we are delivered? only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord. Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil of my people Israel. And now, because you have done all these things, declares the Lord. And when I spoke to you persistently, you did not listen. And when I called you, you did not answer. Therefore, I will do to the house that is called by my name and in which you trust and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers as I did to Shiloh. I will cast you out of my sight as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim. As for you, do not pray for this people or lift up a cry or prayer for them. And don't intercede with me for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they're doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger. Is it I whom they provoke, declares the Lord? Is it not themselves to their own shame? Therefore, thus says the Lord God, behold, My anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground. It will burn and not be quenched. Now, Jesus has just quoted from this very passage. Mark records that for us in verse 17. And Jesus has come to fulfill Jeremiah 7. He has come to bring judgment on fruitless worship so that he would restore true worship for all peoples. And I mention all of this because the context is key here. The context is key to understanding our passage tonight. After hearing Jesus declare judgment on deceptively fruitless religion by declaring judgment on that deceptively fruitless fig tree, which had leaves, that's the deception, but had no figs, fruitless. And then after seeing Jesus enact judgment on the deceptively fruitless temple, Jesus is now with his disciples and they walk right past that same tree. And what do they find? Verse 20, as they pass by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, Rabbi, look, the fig tree that you cursed has withered. So what's that showing? What's that demonstrating in light of the context? This is a demonstration of what's going to become of the temple and that entire system of worship. Jesus, he's going to declare in Mark 13 verse 3, there will not be left one stone upon another. That will not be thrown down. So he's saying this beautiful, magnificent temple, the heart of the old covenant center for worship, it's deceptively fruitless and it will be thrown down, it will be cursed. Which happened, right, historically, just as he said it would in 70 AD. Demolished by the Roman army, just demolished. But Jesus's prediction of the destruction of the temple and the symbolic representation of its destruction in the withered fig tree, it's telling us more than just this temple's going away. This temple is going to be demolished. Jesus is telling them and telling us that whole system, that whole way of worship is being brought to an end. So he's clearing out the old so that he can usher in the new. That's what he's doing. That's why the fig tree's withered. So it symbolizes the deceptively fruitless worship of the people in Jerusalem in Jesus' day who were about to be judged. Jesus is bringing this idolatry to an end, and he's bringing something new. How? Well, remember what the final temple is. There's all sorts of prophecies in the Old Testament, promises about an end times rebuilt temple. That temple, Jesus says, it's his body. to be destroyed and raised again in three days. And that is how Jesus is gonna gather these new worshipers to himself from every tribe and nation and tongue and gather them together by faith. We are being built up together into the holy temple of the Lord, the body of Christ, the church. which is why the rest of the passage just goes on to say things like it does in verse 22. So look there again, verse 22 of Mark 11. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. Now, if you have always taken this passage out of its context, the way that the false prophets on Trinity Broadcasting Network do all of the time, and so many others, you may be caught off guard here. Peter says, the fig tree you cursed, Jesus, look, it's withered. And instead of Jesus answering Peter by saying, and so will this temple and its empty and idolatrous religion be cursed and wither away to nothing. He appears to answer Peter by saying, you'll get whatever you want if you just ask for it with faith. Just believe whatever you say will happen and it will become reality. Speak words of faith and create reality. In other words, Peter says, check out the withered fig tree, and Jesus more or less changes the subject and basically says, well, you think that's cool? You can literally lift mountains off the ground and throw them across the room with your words. But that is not what is going on here. That's not at all what's going on here. Jesus, He's not suddenly turned into Kenneth Copeland or Benny Hinn. And not only does that Word of Faith interpretation miss the context, it also disregards God's sovereign, divine freedom. I mean, it completely inverts the creator-creature relationship by turning God into the servant of man rather than the sovereign over man, which he is. And I really don't want to mince words here. That very popular, very popular word of faith garbage. It is from Satan and it leads to hell. It leads people to everlasting hell. Flee far from it. Speak out against it. Every opportunity you have. It's a deadly cancer that's infected almost every church in the West. Denounce it. Flee from it. So, if Jesus is not impersonating Kenneth Copeland, what is he really saying here? Now, the typical way that evangelicals will refute and give an answer to the word of faith heretics is to bring in passages like 1 John 5.14, which says, And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, God, that if we ask anything, according to His will, He hears us. Now that alone is sufficient to shut the mouths of all false Christianity on cable TV. But it's also missing the context of our passage here in Mark, because here, Jesus is not saying, ask anything that's in accord with God's will, and he will give it. It's actually more specific than that. So let me first give you a translation that's not very good English, but it more closely represents what's being said in the Greek. So this is my own translation, starting in verse 22. And answering, Jesus says to them, have faith in God. Truly I say to you, that whoever would say to the mountain, this one here, be taken up and be thrown into the sea, and would not doubt in his heart, but believe that what he says is happening, it will be to him. For this reason I say to you, all things, as many as you might pray and lift up a cry regarding, believe that you received and it will be to you. So I'll try not to get too bogged down in all of the weeds here, which we could easily do, because I do want to see just more broadly what Jesus is teaching about himself in these verses and what he has come to accomplish. But first, I do need to point out a few details. So first, Jesus says, whoever would say to the mountain, this one here, very emphatic, So it's just very emphatically talking about a definite mountain, right? He's not teaching if anyone would say to a mountain, hey mountain, go jump in a lake. If he has enough faith, the mountain's going to jump in the lake. No, he's talking about one specific mountain. So in the context of where he is and what's just happened, any guesses out there about which mountain he's talking about and referring to here? Yes. Yes. That's right. Mount Zion. Temple Mount, we can call it. So Jesus, he isn't teaching that super Christians who've earned their black belt in faith can walk around reshaping the landscape with their words like powerful Jedis or mutants with superpowers or something else out of Hollywood movies. No, he is speaking metaphorically about pronouncing judgment against false worship, against fruitless, idolatrous religion. And Jesus is saying that his followers must have faith in their all-just, all-powerful Lord to vindicate them in the face of false religion by divinely overthrowing all false systems of worship, which he is doing. He is accomplishing. This is one of the purposes that Jesus came, to destroy the works of the devil. And he will one day consummate that work of judgment. So we believe that our prayer to God is something that is already happening. It's something He's already accomplishing, which is why the verb at the end of verse 23, unlike the English translations, it is actually in the present tense in the Greek. So not will come to pass or will happen, but rather is coming to pass, is happening. And ultimately, there will be final judgment against all false worship and fruitless religion. You may also have noticed that I translated verse 24, all things as many as you might pray and lift up a cry regarding. There's a word pair in the Greek that most of the English translations don't really bring out. Pray and lift up a cry. that only occurs here in all of the New Testament, but it also happens to occur in the Septuagint. That's the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It occurs there one place and you heard me read from it earlier. That's right, Jeremiah 7. Jeremiah 7 in verse 16, where the Lord, through Isaiah, he pronounces his judgment on the false worshipers and commands the people not to pray or lift up a cry for themselves. So Jesus is making, he's making a direct verbal connection to that same passage that he's already quoted from when he says, you know, you've made my father's house a den of robbers or a den of thieves. He's quoting from Isaiah 7 there. And the implication is that since the faithful cannot, they're forbidden to pray and to cry out for the corrupt temple regime. They can only pray and cry out against the corrupt temple regime. And whatever false systems of worship there may be, and they've already received the answer to their prayers and their cries against false religion because God is at work tearing them down now as he builds his church in the world. Okay, so that's some of the weeds, but now I just want to pull up in our altitude and see the bigger picture of what's going on here in terms of what's being taught about Jesus, who he is, what he's come to accomplish. So let's take the passage as a whole. It begins with this withered fig tree that serves as a lesson of what would become of deceptively fruitless worship. And it's good to ask yourself, what areas of my life are characterized by any deceptively fruitless worship? Worship is not a game. Deceptively fruitless worship is dangerous. It's deadly. It invites the Lord's curse. Whenever there's this presentation on the outside of a life that is godly and pleasing to God, but on the inside it's all a lie. And this can happen even within the church. A while back I was meeting with a retired pastor who pastored for decades a church faithfully here in Austin. I was just picking his brain and trying to glean from his experience and his wisdom. And I was smarting and telling him about how in my own church that I had men who I counted as friends, I confided in them, and they turned out to be false friends, and they used even things that I had confided in them and been vulnerable with them, and you tried to use it against me. And he said, well, do you think that they are false believers? They're not really your brothers. And I said, no, I do think that they're my brothers. I count them to be my Christian brothers. And he said, well, you got it pretty good then, because let me tell you my story. And he told me about what he went through as a pastor. And he told me about how There was an elder in his church who was his best friend. One day his wife, the wife of this elder, was brutally murdered, bludgeoned to death in their home. Jewelry was taken. appearance that it was a burglary murder and yet the police charged the elder with murder. And he went to his best friend and he said, did you do this? And he said, no. He said, they tend to think the husband is guilty, but I didn't do this, I promise you I'm innocent. And so the whole church, including the pastor, got behind this man. And you guys know the way justice happens so slowly, over the course of a year it took till when they finally get to the trial and put this man on trial. Whole church has been supporting this man, loving on this man. And then the evidence comes forth in the trial itself, and the bloody pipe that was used to bludgeon this woman was found in a dumpster just outside of where this elder worked in downtown Austin. And inside the same dumpster were latex gloves, the insides of which had his fingerprints on it. And so it was shown that he'd murdered, brutally, his wife. And then it came out he was having an affair and didn't want to go through a divorce. And he set up this whole thing. So here's a man. who was an elder in his church. And it was a gospel-believing, faithful church. Still is to this day here in Austin. And on the outside, he looked like he was pleasing to the Lord. And on the inside, it was a lie. It was all just a lie. So his worship, it was deceptively fruitless. And that fig tree here, it serves as a lesson to all of us where all deceptively fruitless worship, it will lead to death. It ends in destruction. Jesus tells his disciples that it's going to be destroyed. The whole temple is going to be thrown down, not one stone upon another. And he says, I'm establishing true worship as the last Adam. I'm restoring the true worship of God. So this is a huge part of what Jesus came to fulfill, true worship restored. God with man again. Established by Jesus. And what will that entail? Well, he gives a few highlights here. Faith is key. Prayer. Forgiveness. You see those three things here? Why does he specifically mention these things? Think about it from the context. The context, which is all about the end, the judgment of the temple, the withering of death, of deceptively fruitless false religion and worship in the temple. It's the death of the old. Why mention faith and prayer and forgiveness in this specific context? Well, if the temple was at the very center of the people's worship in that day, and Jesus says it's going to be demolished, it's going to come to an end like that cursed fig tree did, that withered, then the natural question of any faithful follower of the Lord at Jesus' day at that time would be, what's going to happen to our faith? The temple is where our faith is fueled. Well, what's going to happen to prayer? The temple is the house of God, the house of prayer where we meet with God. What's going to happen to forgiveness? The temple is where sacrifices for the forgiveness of our sins is offered up. And all that's going away. And it does go away when Jesus dies, the final, infinite sacrifice for sins, opening up a new way to God, apart from the physical temple, through faith in Him, the true temple. And we have faith in Him and faith that He is destroying the works of the devil, that He's tearing down false worship and establishing true worship all over the world where His people believe on Him and pray and forgive one another in a new temple not made with hands. They worship in spirit. and in truth. And that's where this passage is ultimately leading. It's leading to the cross, to the resurrection, and to the gospel going out then to the ends of the earth, creating faith by the Holy Spirit working through the Word, creating true worshipers of the one true and living God under a new covenant by faith in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, how we thank you that through Jesus you are destroying the works of the devil. And so we do pray and we cry out against every false way. We pray that you would take the word of faith religion and Islam and Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Mormonism, every other fruitless system of religion, take them up and throw them into the sea. Exalt Jesus Christ, vindicate your people. How we thank you that Jesus is that ultimate temple, that the dwelling place of you, O God, with men. We thank you that he is the ultimate once for all sacrifice, dying in our place so that we have the full and final forgiveness of all of our sins and full access to your throne of glory. where we can come before you boldly to seek grace in time of need, to bring our petitions before you. We ask by the work of your Holy Spirit among us, keep us from every false way for the worship and glory of you, O God, through Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.