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How is your relationship with
Jesus going lately? I'm not talking about your relationship
with God in general. I'm talking specifically the
second person of the Trinity, your interactions with Him. When you post about a relationship
on Facebook, there's different options you can have. One of
the options is, it's complicated. Have you ever seen someone do,
like if you know a teenager, if you ever see a teenager, then
they post in a relationship on their Facebook, you watch them
and then within about two weeks, it'll say, it'll change to, it's
complicated. If we posted about our relationship
with a second member of the Trinity on Facebook, that's the designation
we would have to use. It's complicated. Not for the
same reason that the teenagers use it, but because it really
is a complex, multifaceted, Relationship. It's complicated. As your savior,
you look to him for salvation and forgiveness of sins. As your
king, you bow before his authority. As your creator, you submit to
him as the owner of your life. As your mediator, you look to
him for justification. As the Son of God, you worship
Him. As the perfect man, you follow
His example. There's all these different facets.
Your relationship with Jesus might be stronger in some of
those areas and weaker in others. But if you're like most Christians,
you probably never think about or put any effort into or even
maybe know about or appreciate this aspect of your relationship
with Jesus that we're going to talk about tonight. But it's important, it's emphasized
in Scripture, and Jesus brings it up in this text in a very
dramatic way. So look at Mark 3, verse 31. Mark 3, 31, Then Jesus' mother
and brothers arrived. Now just to refresh your memory
of where we're at here in Mark, Mark is showing us the various
responses to Jesus' ministry by different people. The scribes
decided He was satanic. His family decided He was insane. insane isn't as bad as satanic.
So, I mean, the family's reaction isn't as bad as the scribes,
but it's still a clear-cut rejection of Jesus' claims. They obviously
don't believe that Jesus is who He claimed to be, right? Because
if somebody thinks He's God and He's not, then he's a nutcase. That's how you decide someone
is insane if they're claiming to be God. Like the guy in the
mental hospital that said, I'm Jesus. And then the guy in the
bed next to him said, who told you that? And he said, God did.
And the guy says, no, I didn't. I mean, that's the stereotype
of people in a mental institution, right? They think they're God.
And so if someone claims to be God and you put him in a psych
ward because, then that means that you don't believe his claims,
obviously. So this is a sad scene. It's sad. It'd be painful for
any of us to have your family going around saying you're a
lunatic. Because it says they were saying this. But for Jesus,
I mean, none of us love our families like Jesus loved His family.
This is a man with perfect love. And the more you love someone,
the more it hurts when they reject you. So we can barely imagine
how painful this had to have been for Jesus. But it's an encouragement
to those of us who have lost relationships because of our
faith, right? Because when Jesus said we must
be ready to lose our families in order to follow him, to give
up family if need be in order to follow him, he's not asking
us to do anything that he didn't go through himself. So if you've
ever been rejected by family or friends for your faith, Jesus
has personally been through that. He knows what that's like. and
not just your family, but the world in general will think that
you're crazy. They'll respond the same way
they responded to Jesus. John 15, 18, "'If the world hates
you, keep in mind he hated me first,' Jesus said." You might
remember Joey Behar was in the news recently for calling Vice
President Pence insane because he thought he could interact
with God in prayer. It's nothing new. The world's been saying
that about Jesus' followers for 2,000 years. They said it about
Jesus. It's part of how we bear the sufferings of Christ, to
join with His shame in that. Let us go with Him outside the
camp and bear His shame, right? So, Jesus' brothers think He's
a lunatic. Did Mary think that? What about Mary? Because that's
hard to imagine. She knew about the virgin birth,
right? If there's ever been a person
that didn't doubt the virgin birth, it was Mary. She definitely
knew about that. Everything we read about Mary
at the time of Jesus' birth sounds like she believed, even before
He was born. And when John 7, 5 says that
Jesus' brothers didn't believe in Him, it doesn't say Jesus'
mother and brothers, it just says brothers. So I don't know what's
happening here. Maybe she's just tagging along.
She doesn't agree with the brothers, but she's tagging along. Or maybe
she had a lapse, a temporary lapse in her faith, kind of like
John the Baptist. We just don't know. But we do know, at least,
his brothers thought he was insane. Scribes think he's satanic. Family
thinks he's insane. And for the last several verses,
if you can think back to last time, Jesus has been refuting
the scribes' claim that he's satanic. And he just demolished
their claims. So is he going to do that now
with the family? Is he going to refute the family's claim that he's
insane? And I would say, I think he already did. Effectively,
he pretty much refuted both accusations in one shot, because when Jesus
was dismantling the scribes' position with devastating logical
proof after devastating logical proof one after another, I don't
know about you, but to me, he seemed pretty lucid. Right? I mean, who's really insane? The man who can confound the
smartest scholars of the day, every single time, off the top
of his head with a few sentences? Or people who think a man like
that is insane? Right? If someone looks at Jesus'
words, these teachings that have captivated humanity for 2,000
years, have comforted and instructed and built up men and women in
every culture and era and transformed millions of lives, and they look
at those words and conclude, oh, they must have come from
someone who's insane, I think we know where the real mental
deficiency lies. So, back in verse 21, Jesus'
family decided to come and take Jesus into custody. Now, ten
verses later, they finally arrive. It took him 10 verses to get
there. Here they come. Mark gets real dramatic here, and he starts
using present tense verbs. Literally, verse 31 is, and Jesus'
mother and brothers are arriving. So he wants you to picture this
in your mind's eye. He wants you to see it. Here they come.
There they are, Jesus' brothers, Simon and James and Judas and
Joseph, and then there's Mary with them, and here they come.
No mention of whether the sisters were there, but he had sisters.
What does Jesus say when He sees them coming up, when He sees
them arriving, what does He say? He never does see them. He doesn't
see them because they don't come in. Verse 31, "...standing outside
they sent for Him, calling Him." Why are they outside? Why don't
they go inside? Well, they can't. The house is so jam-packed they
can't even get in there, according to Luke 8 and 9. And they might
not have wanted to go in there anyway. If they're going to... I mean,
they're there to tell Jesus that He's insane and we're here to
take you into custody. That's just not going to go over
very well in front of all Jesus' followers, right? So, maybe they
didn't even want to go in. So here the family is standing
outside. They're standing outside the house. The crowd is inside,
and it's just kind of a striking scene, just ironic, because typically
it's the reverse of what you normally see. Usually the family
is on the inside of the house, and the crowds are on the outside.
Here you've got the crowds inside and the family outside. It's
an odd scene, and it's more than just an odd scene. It's a picture
of a profound spiritual reality that Jesus is about to teach
regarding insiders and outsiders in His kingdom, in the family
of God. And in the next chapter, in chapter
4, we're going to see Jesus actually use this language of insiders
and outsiders when He gets to the secrets of the kingdom in
chapter 4, verse 11. All right, so verse 31, they sent for him,
calling him. So they come up to the fringe
of the crowd. They can't get in the door. There's
some people out there around the fringe, and they just say,
hey, can you get word to Jesus, please? Let him know his mom
is here, his mother and brothers are here, and we'd like to see
him. And the guy's like, sure, yeah, I'll tell. And so he passes
the word along, and then they get it to the next guy, and it
moves up through the crowd until finally somebody near Jesus gets it and
the disciples sitting right in front of him, in verse 32, a
crowd was sitting around him and they are telling him, again
these present tense verbs, and they're telling him, Behold,
your mother and brothers are outside looking for you. Now,
the behold means the disciples think this is a fairly big deal.
Hey, your mom's here. I mean, she would have traveled
all the way from Nazareth, right? Your mom's here. And they interrupt
whatever Jesus was saying, whatever he was teaching, in order to
say this. Hey, behold, look at this. Your mom's here. And Jesus
put up his hand and said, please hold questions and comments to
the end. No, he doesn't. He lets himself be interrupted. Whatever it was he was teaching,
he just lets himself be interrupted, which he always does, which is
good because because this is important. Whatever it was Jesus
was teaching never even made it into the Bible, right? But
this interruption did. Amazing how many wonderful teachings
of Jesus came in interruptions to something else that He was
doing. Anyway, He lets Himself be interrupted and takes advantage
of this teachable moment that only Jesus could see as a teachable
moment. I would have never caught on to this as a teachable moment.
This is like the most ordinary kind of a circumstance you could
possibly have. Somebody comes up and you say,
hey, so-and-so's looking for you. I mean, how many of us would
say, oh, teachable moment. I could launch into a sermon on that.
If this happened to me, I guarantee I would not have caught that
as a teachable moment. I'd say, hey, your mom's here. I'd say, oh,
I'll be right out. That'd be the end of it. And even if I
did think it was a teachable moment, it's like, I gotta teach
something, I gotta teach something. Your mother and brothers are here, family,
okay, I'll teach about family. What would I say? Maybe something
about the importance of family. It's the most basic building
block of society. I could talk about the disintegration
of the nuclear family, destroying our culture. That's not the direction
Jesus goes at all. In fact, he seems to go in the
opposite direction of that. As usual, Jesus is full of surprises.
Look at verse 33. Here's His answer. They say,
behold, your mother and brother here in verse 33. Who are my mother
and brothers? He asked. Then He looked around
at those seated in a circle around Him and said, behold. So He takes
their word that they just used, behold, and they said, behold,
your family's here. And He says, do you want to behold
something? Behold this. Here are my mother and my brothers.
Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother. Meanwhile, Mary and the brothers
are outside waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, someone squeezes out
the front door. What's the deal? Is he coming out? I don't think
so. Why? What did he say? Did you
tell him that his mom's here? Did you tell him? Yeah, we told
him. Well, what did he say? Well, he made a remark about
family. What are you talking about? Come
on, what did he... Well, he said, we told them your mother and
brothers are here, and he said, who are my mother and brothers?
And then he pointed to his disciples and said, here's my mother and
brothers and sisters. Mary's face turns white. Sorry Mary, I don't know what
got into him. He's not coming out. And Jesus'
family stands there in stunned silence. The importance of family in that
culture and the shame associated with any kind of disowning of
your family. Jesus as the older brother, Joseph
is most likely dead at this point, so he's the caretaker of the
family. This is just a shock at so many different levels. So they're standing there. Finally,
one of them turns and starts walking. The rest of them follow
and they start heading back to Nazareth. Must have been an interesting
30-mile walk home back to Nazareth. So what did that event do? Did
that event like jar his family into realizing their error? Not
yet, because we're going to see in chapter 6 of Mark, a couple
chapters from now, we're going to see that In Mark 6, verse
4, Jesus still has no honor among His own family. So what's going on with Jesus
here? Is He just upset because they were saying He's crazy or
something like that? No. No, Jesus loved His family, and
we'll see that. What Jesus is doing here is something
much, much bigger than anything to do with His physical earthly
family. Jesus is doing the same thing
here with family that He did in the previous section with
the nation of Israel. In appointing the 12, remember
I told you He's recreating the nation of Israel on new foundations? Here, He's recreating the world's
most basic institution, the family, on new foundations. So this kingdom
that Jesus has been proclaiming this whole time, He's saying
it is a nation, like Israel, and it is a family. And so out
of the ashes of his earthly family, a new family bursts out of the
limits of blood relations and will end up gathering in millions.
And later on in chapter 10, Jesus is going to offer that family,
this new spiritual family, as the reward that you get if you
lose your family for Christ. or lose your family for anything.
If you lose your family for anything, you get a reward. You lose your
father, you get a hundred fathers. You lose your mom, you get a
hundred new moms. In this life, not in heaven, but in this life,
and it's talking about the church. And there's so much we could
say about that, but I'm going to resist the temptation. I'm
going to hold off until we get to chapter 10, because that's what chapter...
The focus on chapter 10 is our relationship with each other
as family. Here, the emphasis is a little different. The emphasis
of this passage is in our relationship with Jesus as our brother or
our son, believe it or not. And so that's where we're going
to focus tonight, our relationship with Jesus. Verse 34, So he looked
at those seated in a circle around him and said, Behold, here's
my mother and brothers. Whoever does God's will is my brother
and sister and mother. So is Jesus just completely disowning
his family here? Is this replacement theology
with the family, like he's replacing the physical family with the
spiritual family? No. Physical family still matters. We'll see that later in the book.
Jesus is gonna forbid divorce. He's gonna talk about honoring
your father and mother. If a person doesn't provide for his own family,
he's worse than an unbeliever. The physical family's still in
place, and when Jesus was hanging on the cross, he tells Mary to
take care, or he tells John to take care of Mary, I'm sure there
are plenty of widows, plenty of women in need in Israel at
that time, and He didn't assign any of His other disciples to
take care of them. It is His physical mother that
He took care of. So, Jesus is leaving the physical
institution in place, but He's also creating a much, much greater
form of that institution that supersedes it in importance and
in every way. So you've heard blood is thicker
than water? It's not, not in this family. The water of baptism
is way thicker than blood. When Jesus' brothers write a
book of the Bible, later on they become Christians and followers
of Christ, James and Jude, and when they write their books of
the Bible, they introduce themselves at the beginning of the book,
not as Jesus' brothers, but as Jesus' servants. Why? Because that's a higher credential.
Yeah, we were his physical relations. That's meaningless. We were his
spiritual relations. That's what matters. People think they're Christians
because they grew up in a Christian home. No one ever grew up in a more
Christian home than Jesus' brothers, right? I mean, talk about a Christian
home. Christ is in the home. That's a Christian home. And
yet none of his family were included in the kingdom until they placed
their faith in Jesus Christ. if not even Mary, the blessed
Mary, can play the family card when it comes to getting into
the kingdom, and nobody can, right? And I mention that because
the Roman Catholic Church has made much of Mary's relationship
with Jesus as physical mother. Jesus actually corrected that
very attitude in Luke 11. In Luke 11.27, as Jesus was saying
these things, a woman in the crowd called out, "'Blessed is
the mother who gave you birth and nursed you!' And he replied,
"'On the contrary, Blessed are those who hear the word of God
and obey it. She's saying, blessed is your physical mom? And he
says, no, no, no, blessed are my spiritual mothers and brothers. So if you think Mary was special
because she gave birth to Jesus, she was, but anyone who follows
Jesus is more special. Your natural family is important,
but it's not ultimate. And this is a good thing for
us to hear, because you can make an idol out of family in the
evangelical Christian church, and nobody will bat an eye. There's
no stigma attached to that particular sin. In fact, you can write a
book. If you do that, you can write a book and teach others
how to do it, and you'll sell a lot of books. There's a segment of the church
where family is ultimate. Nothing ever infringes on family
time. And there's almost no investment
in spiritual siblings at all because their time is all caught
up with their physical family. And the physical family never
makes any sacrifices for the church for the spiritual family.
And that's wrong. That's just behaving as though
this passage didn't even exist. Jesus said, this family's bigger.
It's more important. It's more fundamental. when you
hear people give their testimony. You ever hear someone give their
testimony and they say, oh man, I used to just live for recreation,
or money, or my work, my career, and I was just totally, I lived
for that, or I lived for sex, or you know, for recreation,
or whatever. But then I repented and I became a Christian. You've
heard testimonies like that, right? You ever heard anyone give a
testimony and say, oh, for me, it used to be my family was the
most important thing to me. and I lived for family, but now
I repented of that and I became a Christian. You don't hear that
one very often. In the movies, you know, they
always, they live for money and everything, and then they finally
come to their senses, and then they devote themselves totally to family.
And what Jesus is saying is, no, the spiritual family is more
important, it's bigger. Alright, so it's bigger, so then
what does that mean? Who qualifies, then, as a member of God's family? Who's an insider? Everyone? Did Jesus teach the universal
brotherhood of all mankind, universal fatherhood of God, like the Unitarian
religion teaches? No. No. It's only the insiders
who are included. And when we see Jesus' family
walking away in this scene, it seems really sad, right? I mean,
you just picture that in your mind, it's heartbreaking. First we're sad when we see Jesus'
family's rejecting Him. Now we're even sadder when we
see Him seemingly rejecting His family, and they're outsiders. But Jesus isn't shutting them
out. In fact, in the very next breath, what does Jesus do? He
throws the doors of His family, His spiritual family, His spiritual
household, wide open so that anyone in the world who wants
to can come in. And after His resurrection, they
do. His brothers do come in, don't they? So, who are the insiders? Who gets into this family? Jesus
describes them in two ways in this passage. See if you can
spot them there. What are the two different ways
that Jesus describes His family? One is in verse 35. Straightforward. Whoever does God's will is my
brother and sister and mother. So the thing that makes you a
physical family is shared DNA, right? The thing that makes you
spiritual relatives and family is shared spiritual DNA, which
is what? Doing God's will. It's the lives
that revolve around God's will. That's what makes us family.
We want whatever God wants. That's what the word will means,
desire. We want what God wants. We're like Jesus in John 4.34.
My food, said Jesus, is to do the will of Him who sent me and
to finish His work. I just love God's will. Jesus
is all about God's will. And if you are all about God's
will, you're in His family. But how do you know what God's will
is? How can you find God's will for your life? That's an important
question because everything is riding on whether you find it.
Matthew 7, 21, Jesus said, not everyone who says to me, Lord,
Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, only he who does the will of
my Father. You don't go to heaven unless
you're doing God's will. So you better know what it is. And if
you do know what it is and you're doing it, then you're in, you're
an insider. All right, so that's one way
of describing the insiders, the family members. The other way
of describing them is in verse 34. And I think this is fascinating. He says, He looked around at
those seated in a circle around Him, His disciples, these are
His followers, and He said, Here are My mother and brothers. So who are the insiders? Who
are the family members? His followers. His disciples, right? Not just
the 12, but all His disciples, the women and the young and old
and everybody. And He says that all of them
are His brothers and sisters and mothers. So in one verse
He says, what does that tell you about what God's will is?
In one verse He says, my family is defined by my disciples. Then
in the very next verse He says, my family is defined by those
who do God's will. What does that tell you about
doing God's will? God's will is to follow Christ. It's the
exact same group. Now, no doubt the scribes thought
they were doing God's will, right? I'm sure the scribes thought
they were doing God's will when they called Jesus satanic. His
family probably thought they were doing God's will. Nobody
is doing God's will unless they're a follower of Christ. Here's the thing that you might
not have realized. Every follower of Christ is doing God's will. Every Christian is doing God's
will. Perfectly? No. So you might hear that, it's
like, all right, great, but what if I'm not very good at following
Christ? I'm a Christ follower, but I'm not very good at it.
I constantly stumble, constantly fail, disobey. Am I still in? Well, if you want an answer to
that question, all you have to do is watch these very disciples,
the rest of the book of Mark. Because Jesus calls them family
right here in chapter four. When He calls them family, when
He calls this group family that's sitting in a circle around Him,
He's not talking about spiritual giants. Anything but that. They were men of little faith
and hard hearts. That's all we see, the whole rest of the gospel.
You have to scour the gospel to find them doing anything right. But they were followers of Christ
and so they were in God's will. You see that? What about the
crowds who loved Jesus' teaching? They ate it up. They gathered
around Him. They pressed around Him. They
were clamoring for His teaching, but they didn't follow Him. They
looked to Him for healing, but they didn't follow Him. What
about them? Are they included? No. No, Jesus is going to explain
that later in chapter 4. this listening but not being included
thing. But if you're a follower of Jesus,
then you are doing God's will for your life. You are in God's
will. And that's great news for people
who are struggling to discover God's will for their life. We
talk about God's will like it's this hidden mystery that is just
almost impossible to discover. God's will is not a hidden mystery
that's only discoverable to spiritual giants. Every Christian knows
and does God's will. If you strive to follow Christ
and you repent when you fail, you are right in the center of
God's will for your life. And it sounds a little odd because
usually when we talk about God's will, we talk about it in context
of trying to decide, make wisdom decisions. This option, this
option. Should I take this job, that
job? Live here, live there? Marry this Christian or that
Christian? Should I take this school or that school? Whatever. Usually when people are talking
about God's will, they're talking about deciding between two non-sinful
options, and they're just trying to pick the one that'll have
the best outcome. The biblical terminology for that isn't really
God's will, seeking God's will. That's not the terminology the
Bible uses for that kind of decision. It's wisdom. The terminology
the Bible uses for that is wisdom. You've got to apply wisdom in
those kind of decisions. Now does wisdom matter? Yes, yeah,
but not nearly as much as holiness, not nearly as much as following
Christ. Very often when people say, I'm seeking to discover
God's will in this matter, it has nothing to do with holiness.
So often, really what they want is they just want God to reveal
to them which option will have the least amount of hardship
and trouble and the greatest temporal rewards. Which one of
these options is going to get me the most money, the most comfort,
the least trouble, the least hardship? And they think they're
discovering God's will when really all they're doing is trying to
discover which path has the least amount of suffering. But if you
think seeking God's will and seeking less suffering is the
same thing, you need to reread 1 Peter 4, which says, "...he
who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result,
he does not live the rest of his earthly life for evil human
desires, but rather for the will of God. The one who suffers lives
in God's will." So seeking God has nothing to do with avoiding
suffering. A lot of times it's just the opposite. And it's not
about seeking worldly comforts. Which one of these jobs will
make me the most comfortable? 1 John 2.17, the world and its desires
pass away, but the man who does God's will lives forever. It's
not about earthly comforts. So yeah, go ahead and use wisdom,
but realize these wisdom decisions we make aren't as important as
we make them out to be sometimes. Think of it this way. If you're
following Christ, you're striving to obey Christ, repent when you
disobey, That's like being on the interstate and going the
right direction. If you're on the interstate,
you're in God's will. Issues like which career path should
I take, who should I marry, where should I live, all that stuff,
those decisions are like which lane you're driving in. Now,
does that matter? Yeah. You know, if you make a
dumb decision about your career or marriage or something like
that, but you're still pursuing holiness, you're still following
Christ, then you might have to drive in a lane that's got a
bunch of potholes, and it's going to be a bumpy ride. But you're
still in God's will if you're on that interstate. And hitting
those potholes, honestly, might do you more good than driving
in the smooth lane next to you would do you. Because a smoother
ride is not necessarily a better life. So, God's will? Follow Christ. If you're following
Christ, you're in God's will. You're in God's will. Alright.
So, let's talk about Jesus as our brother. There's no way we
can do any kind of justice to this doctrine tonight. We can't
even begin to scratch the surface of it in one sermon. Just to
give you a sample, we could do a whole sermon or series on Hebrews
2 where it talks about Jesus became our brother in order to
be an ideal high priest, right? The second half of Hebrews 2.
He had to be made like his brothers in every way in order to experience
all that we experience. And it talks about how Jesus
was not one bit ashamed to call you brother. He's not ashamed
to be your brother. or earlier in Hebrews 2, it explains
how Jesus became our brother in order to fulfill God's plan
for the exaltation of the human race. Remember Psalm 8? Remember
when we studied Psalm 8 and we found out that God's plan was
for mankind to rule, to be supreme over the whole creation? And
we look around and it's like, I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing
mankind reigning over the supernovas." And he's like, yeah, we don't
see it now, but we see Christ who fulfills that for us. He
comes, He reigns over, He became a man, He became our brother,
and then how He reigns over everything, that fulfills that whole Psalm
8 plan. We read that Jesus had to become
our brother in order to be able to die, right? He had to die
to defeat death. He couldn't die as God, so he
became a man, he became our brother, so he could die in our place
and be exalted in our place. So, I mean, there's just so much
we could cover. We don't have time to really talk about any
of that tonight. So let's just tonight, in the little bit of
time we have left, just focus on the relational aspect. Jesus,
our brother. How is your, let's go back to
the question at the very beginning of the Bible study. How is your
sibling relationship with Jesus going right now? I can actually remember the first
time I ever to the lyrics of the hymn, Joyful, Joyful, for
the first time, and we're singing, and all of a sudden, there's
a line in there that says, God our Father, Christ our brother. I remember
the first time I heard that, I was like, what? No. And it sounded like blasphemy
to me. It was like, Christ my brother, Christ my King, Christ
my God, He's my Creator, He's my Lord, He's my Master, He's
not my brother. And I just didn't know the scriptures well enough.
I didn't know the Bible taught this. And just going by my own impressions,
it didn't feel right. It seemed wrong because brotherhood
is kind of a peer relationship, right? Your parents are over
you, your siblings are beside you, at your level. And that
just like, it didn't compute for me. And it really doesn't
seem to compute in the book of Mark here, because the whole
book, he's just been portraying Jesus as this unique Son of God,
exalted above everyone else, different, unique, in glorious
ways. So now, to suddenly describe
our relationship with Him as this horizontal, even kind of
sibling status is unexpected, to say the least, in the book
of Mark. But none of that is a problem.
if you just realize that everything that the rest of the Bible says
about the supremacy of Christ over us still stands. All of
that still stands. He's still our Lord, He's still
our God, our King, our Master, our Maker, our Creator, all of
that. But there are aspects of brotherly love that Jesus also
wants to share with us. He wants to share every kind
of love with us. And you can see that if you watch his friendship
with the disciples in the Gospels. Just watch his friendship. You
know what I told you before when he called the twelve and that
they might be with him? He pointed to them apostles that
they might be with him and I said that's for training? It was for
training, but it wasn't just for training. It was also for
companionship. There's no indication in the
Bible that Jesus had any other friends besides these guys. And that's striking me because
one thing I've noticed is most big shots are only friends with
other big shots, right? We were just talking about this
last night about some of these big names. Usually big shots
are only friends with other big shots. And these disciples, they're
not big shots. They're not even medium shots.
These are some of the littlest shots there are. I mean, these
guys are just, they're nothings, they're nobodies. And yet, Jesus, when
Jesus took some time off for rest, he wanted to be with them.
In John 13, 1, it says, he loved them to the end. In his darkest
hour, the night before he died, when he was just falling apart,
he longed for their companionship. He just wanted them to stay with
him and pray with him. It almost sounded like he needed
them. And if you're a follower of Christ,
did you know that Jesus desires that kind of companionship with
you? When you're talking to the big
boss at work, you know, the CEO or something, you're standing
up straight, you're all business, you're all business, right? But when
you're just like talking with the guys out at the loading dock
or something like that, you let your hair down a little bit more
and you're yourself. And you're never more relaxed
when you're with your brother or sister. I was watching in church the
other day, these two little kids, brother and sister, were sitting
in front of us and they were, The sister was sitting so close to
the brother, she's watching his Bible, and he's going through,
and by the end of the service, she's only like on one third
of her chair. She's all just like right up against her brother.
It was just perfectly natural. It was just the neatest thing
to see. There's a side of my personality
that I think nobody has ever seen, really, like my siblings
saw it growing up. I've known them longer than I've
known anybody else. Right? Except for my parents.
But I'm guessing my siblings will outlast my parents, and
so that'll be the longest relationship I ever have. This is a special
kind of relationship, and Jesus wants that kind of relationship
with you. He wants your worship, he wants your awe, he wants your
fear, he wants your reverence and your obedience, all that.
He still wants that, but he also wants you as a sister or brother. He wants that unique kind of
familiar, warm, close, lifelong, uninterruptible love where you
share the realities of life, you share the little things,
the tiny things in life that you don't talk to anybody else
about, that bond of brotherhood, that camaraderie, that family
loyalty, that family priority, all of that. He wants our sibling type love,
but he wants that from us. But more important than that,
much more important than that is we get that kind of love from
him. He's the perfect older brother.
He's the perfect older brother. And if you don't have a great
older brother, yes, you do. Yes, you do. What does an older brother
do? What's an older brother's role?
When I was growing up, I have an older brother, so I can tell
you. My older brother, when we were kids, was a unique combination
of companion, teacher, and protector. We shared a bedroom. We talked
about things I'd never talked to anybody else about. He was
a protector. I'll never forget the day I was
flying a kite with Donnie, and we came around the corner, and
there was Mark Washington, who was the scariest bully. Mark
Washington's terrorized me like no other bully ever did, and
I never came out well when I ran into that guy. But this time
Donnie was with me. It's the only time I ever ran
into Mark Washington was someone else with me and it was Donnie
and I jumped behind Donnie. Donnie was kind of a little,
I think we were the same size at this point. I don't know that
he was any bigger. He might have been smaller than me, but I jumped
behind my brother and Donnie stood up. Mark Washington probably
could have waxed both of us easily, but Donnie stood up to him, nothing
happened. We got away just fine. That was
the only time I ever felt safe in the presence of Mark Washington.
God made brothers to be protective. And especially of sisters, right?
One thing I'll never forget is another thing, when we were little
kids, I was just real little, and I remember something dropped
off the shelf in the kitchen and landed on my little sister
Carolyn's toe and crushed her toe. And she cried so hard and
I couldn't stand it. The pain I felt was almost unbearable
because I couldn't do anything to help her. And to this day,
when that memory comes to my mind, I can't even think about
it. I hate that memory. That's the natural kind of protective,
compassionate love that God planted in elder brothers for their siblings.
It's the way it's supposed to be. Now, if you're one of Jesus'
followers, maybe you don't have a sibling like that, but if you're
one of Jesus' followers, you realize that Jesus has that kind
of love for you, that kind. When something lands on your
toe, something threatens you, he feels that special brotherly
compassion. He puts himself between you and
spiritual danger. And more importantly, he's strong
enough to shield you from any spiritual threat if you just
jump behind him. Another thing I remember about
my brother is the things he taught me. He was a teacher. He taught me
all kinds. He taught me how to fly a kite. He taught me all
kinds of stuff about science. He loved science and he really
sparked my interest in God's creation because he taught me
so many fascinating things about science. I loved that. I remember
one time he explained inertia to me. Not long after that, we
were sledding. We were on a sledding hill with
a bunch of other kids. And I was right next to these high school
kids, these older, bigger kids. And I made this comment. I don't
know. I was probably trying to show off my vocabulary or something.
I made this comment. It's like, oh, my inertia is going to carry
me all the way down to where I'm going to really get a long
run. And this high school kid corrected me. He said, it's not
inertia. It's momentum. And I didn't say anything to
him. But I remember thinking, I'm going to ask Donnie. Is it inertia
or is it momentum? And if Donnie told me it was
inertia, it wouldn't matter if Albert Einstein said it's momentum. If Donnie says it's inertia,
Einstein's an idiot, right? That's how I felt. Turns out
it was momentum is the correct term. Anyway, Donnie attached
a pen holder to his Bible. I don't even have my Bible here.
You can see it. I got a pen holder on the front
of my Bible. That's me walking in my brother's
footsteps. I want to be just like him. I remember the day
we were in a tent and camping, and he warned me about temptations
and various sins and how they're a trap, and he was explaining
it. I can remember the exact time and place when he was teaching
that to me. Older brothers teach younger
siblings in times and places the parents can't reach. No one
can reach into those moments and contexts of life like an
older brother can, and Jesus does that for us. He wants to
play that role in our lives. He's right there beside you in
the events of life, teaching you how to think about them,
how to deal with them. So that's Jesus as brother. What
about this thing about Jesus' mothers? How many of you really
think of yourself as Jesus' mother? You just spend a lot of time
thinking about Jesus as your son. It's strange, right? It sounds
strange, but Jesus mentions it three times. We have to think
about it because He mentions it three times in two verses. Mark 4.33, Who are
my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers.
Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother. Now, again, we can think of this
in both directions, our love for Him and His love for us.
Regarding our love for Him, there's something very special, there's
a very special kind of love that exists only between mother and
child. Anybody disagree with that? I mean, there's nothing
like it in the world. There is no stronger love. There
is not any stronger love. There are a lot of people that
I can think of who used to love me, right? But something happened
that they turned against me, or they just forgot about me,
they moved away, and out of sight, out of mind, whatever. But there's
never been a moment when I wondered if mom still loved me. Never.
I make myself obnoxious to other people, and they'll turn against
me. I make those very same moments, mom doesn't seem to activate
more of her love and compassion for all those consequences of
my obnoxiousness. If you're a mother, You have
capacities for a depth of love that are unique in the human
experience. And Jesus wants that kind of love from you. If you're
a mother, you have a capacity to love in a way that is unique.
So you can love Jesus that way. But again, that's not the most
important piece. The most important piece is Him
loving you like a man loves his mother.
And this is something that all of us, men and women, can appreciate.
There was a commercial I saw on TV the other day where this
older woman is sitting on a couch and all of a sudden this guy
just bursts in her front door and he's flying in the front,
he's winded and he's all alarmed and he's like, Mom, I'm here,
what did you need? And she says, oh, I just wanted
to show you that I figured out how to use the TV room. And it's
a funny commercial, but it illustrates the point about how if a man
gets a call from his mother, he drops what he's doing and comes,
right, to help her. No one has access to you like
your mom, right? That's why it seems so shocking
in this story when Jesus is sitting there and says, hey, your mom's
outside, and He doesn't go outside. It's a shock. Most of us would
not do that. We would go out there immediately.
Even if you don't have the most blessed woman of all of history
as your mom, like Jesus did, still, even if you just have
an ordinary mom, still, she calls you on the phone, do you just
put her on hold? I don't recommend it. What would happen right now if
you got a call right now from your mom saying, I'm in trouble, I
need your help, please come help me. Would you just say, sorry
mom, I'm in a Bible study, try 911? No, no, you'd just drop
what you're doing, you'd go. You'd probably respond right
away to any kind of a call from your mom if she wanted you to
come. But if she's in danger, distress or something, nothing
could hold you back. That's the love of a son for
his mother. And that's how we are in our
natural sinful state for our imperfect love with our mothers. What kind of love does the perfect
man have towards his mother? If someone so much as insults
your mom, you get the black eye, right? That's like the classic
thing. You don't insult mom. But how do you think Jesus would
respond if somebody, like if Mary were in danger and she's
screaming for help, how do you think Jesus would respond? How
do you think Jesus responded after Joseph died and he walked
in the house and he saw his mom crying? what do you think activated
in his heart? Whatever natural response of
love a man has for his mother, crank that all the way up to
perfection and you know how Jesus loved his mother. And what he's
saying here is that he has that kind of love for every one of
his followers. He loves you like his own mother.
That kind of priority, that kind of urgency. I don't know what you think about
Jesus' attitude towards you, if you think He's sick of you
or whatever, but Jesus is just like us. He enjoys being around
family. And so that's where you can find
Him. And I'll close with this. You
can meet Jesus anywhere, but the place where you're most likely
to run into Him is the place you're most likely to find anyone,
in their own home, with their family. If you want to draw near
to Christ, come to family gatherings. spiritual family gatherings,
the church. And if Jesus feels this way about his brothers and
sisters and mothers, how should we feel about our spiritual siblings? Matthew 25, 40, the king will
reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the
least of these brothers of mine, brothers of mine, you did for
me. Let's pray. God our Father, Christ our brother, All who live in love are thine.
Lord, this is just an astonishing truth. And as I found, as I studied
this this last couple weeks, I found it hard to live out,
hard to remember during the day, hard to commune with you as brother,
to appreciate this, that you love me like you love Mary, like
an older brother. The moments that it sunk in were
wonderful. but it didn't sink in very many
moments these last two weeks, Lord. And so I just pray that
you would help us. Help us see this, help us appreciate this,
help us live like this is really true. We ask it in the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ, our brother. Amen. Questions? John really understood your sermon
this afternoon. He spent the whole book of 1
John driving that point home. And he sums it up really well
in 1 John 3, 23, where we're going, okay, we're supposed to
keep this commandment, so which one? What is God's will? So this
is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son, Jesus
Christ, and we love one another, just as He commanded us. You're
doing God's will, you believe in His Son, and you love one
another. Right, exactly. What verse is that again? That's
1 John 3.23. 1 John 3.23 sums the whole thing
up. You're doing His will. Yeah, I was thinking about what
verse to conclude this with, and I was all over 1 John, because
I had the same thought. I thought, man, John really gets this. He really,
you can just tell in everything he writes. And I got, so I was
quoting pretty much the whole book of 1 John, and my conclusion
was, well, that'll take too long. But yeah, there's so much in
there that's like that. Yeah, I do. I do. That alarmed
me. We were at the Seder and the rabbi said Jesus had to become
man because he didn't understand. what it's like for us, and I
heard him say that, and I thought, I'm just gonna give him the benefit
of the doubt. It probably came out a little stronger than he
meant it, but then he repeated it about four times. He didn't
understand, then he became a man, then he understood, finally he
understood, and I was like, finally, I just disagree with this. God
knows everything, he understands everything, but he hadn't experienced
everything, and that's why he became our brother. He became
our brother in order to experience what we went through, because
he knows what it's like for us, But we can appreciate His compassion
more knowing that He's been through it. That He's actually felt what
it feels like. Instead of just knowing about
it. Yeah, He knows everything. So He knows what it's like for
us to be tempted. He knows what it's like for us to be weak. But to
experience it is a whole other thing. And there's other places in the
Bible that use that same language. Like when when Abraham is about
to kill Isaac and he actually raises the knife and starts to
do it, and then he stops him and God says, now I know that
you trust me. Did God not know that Abraham
had faith? Well, we already know that he knew prior to that. But
when he says, now I know, it's that knowledge of experience.
Now I've seen it, I've watched it. Right, so if you think that,
if you have this idea that you can sometimes get, it's like,
okay, I've got to choose. Do I take this class or that
class? And if I choose this class and it turns out that class was
God's will, now I'm out of God's will. you know, how can I ever
get back into God's will? Especially if you get married
to the wrong person, then you're forever out of God's will. That kind
of thinking is incorrect. The Bible doesn't use the term
will of God to describe those kinds of things. So, her question
was, if we use wisdom, then we can be assured that we're in
God's will? And I would say, even if we don't use wisdom,
if we're still following Christ, then even if I choose folly,
I do something stupid, I go against wisdom, If I realize that and
repent of it later, then I'm in God's will. Now, as far as
the best path, it's good to learn as much wisdom as you can, because
there are paths that are way more fruitful than other paths.
If I'm trying to decide, okay, what path, if I'm trying to decide
what path will get me the most money and the most comfort, then
that's not the right criteria to use. But if I'm trying to
say, okay, what path is gonna be the most fruitful for ministry?
If I take this job, then it's going to require all my time,
and I won't be able to study the Bible at all, and I can't
teach, and my gift is teaching, so I'll just have to not use
my spiritual gift and just spend all my time at work in a secular
job. Or I could take this job, which allows me to study and
learn and teach. then it would be foolish for me to take this
job. Wise to take this one. If I don't have enough wisdom
and I take the foolish one, then I'm going to hinder my fruitfulness.
That's a bad thing. But it doesn't mean I'm out of
God's will, because if I'm a Christian, I'm doing God's will. And I can
still be a godly person in this bumpy road over here that I've
chosen.
Family Ties
Series Mark: Galilean Ministry
| Sermon ID | 47182223293 |
| Duration | 51:48 |
| Date | |
| Category | Teaching |
| Bible Text | Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46-50 |
| Language | English |
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