My name is Dana Condon. I come from New York.
I want to apologize for my accent and the rapidity with which I speak. But frankly, I am nervous to be with you. I always speak fast when I get nervous.
Everybody gets nervous up here. I do not know what it is. I notice even the announcements get flubbed up. You notice, when Lance gets nervous, “your rolls” is “ours.” Did you ever notice that? “Rolls” is “ours.”
Of course, Ernie made me nervous last night when he said he was going to cover the whole book of Acts. I am covering this morning Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Of course, we all know Stephen never gets nervous.
Well, here we are on the first day of the week, called the Lord’s Day, and I have the responsibility to share the Gospels as related to fullness. Well, that is a privilege indeed.
Do you not love evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and the Gospels they share? It is just like a refreshing breeze whenever an evangelist comes and speaks to us. He refocuses us upon the Lord Jesus. It is so good to share these Gospels together.
The wonderful thing about it is that the Gospels are so full. The Gospel is full of Christ from beginning to end. I mean, what a subject.
Matter of fact, actually this morning I am just going to take Matthew and Mark. Tomorrow, Lord willing, Luke and John. Because we have something before us that is tremendous to look at.
I would like for you just to notice two verses at the end of the Gospel of John—one at the end of John 20. Everybody turn there. Can you all see me? I am the guy you are supposed to be able to see. Can you see me?
The teenagers slouched down. See, they have learned that you can actually put the back of your neck on the back of the chair there if you slouch down. And that is why I am here this morning: to look all the teenagers in the eye. There is no escape.
Okay, John 20, verse 30.
Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not recorded in this book.
But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name.
Well now, there is the purpose of the evangel—the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you might have life in His name.
And then again in John 21, verse 25:
Jesus did many other things as well.
If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
I mean, that is why the Gospel is so full. Here we have four books full of the actions and words of Jesus, and then at the end of it all the Gospel writer says, “And you have not even heard the half of it.”
If I started to tell you all the things I knew, and then Matthew, Mark, Luke, James, and some of the others threw in what they knew, we would begin compiling something that would take the whole world to fill.
Now, maybe that sounds like evangelist hyperbole. Ministers are given to exaggerate. Would all His actions fill the world?
Well, in fact, Jesus only ministered four years. And He had a limited number of things He did, as many as they were, and a limited number of things He said, as many as He might have said.
But the thing about the invasion of Jesus into this world during those four years is that everything He spoke, everything He did, had a ripple effect through several layers of reality.
So when He spoke, He did not just speak to a few people. What He spoke has come down to touch off our lives today. What He spoke fulfilled the prophecies of the past. What He spoke began some movement toward the future.
Everything He said, everything He did, was like a meteor dropping down in the ocean and rippling out concentrically through a whole wave of different things. Every time He spoke, up in the heavens a demon fell out of the sky.
Every time He blessed a child, it was more than just blessing a little child. Why, I bet you every child He blessed somehow had a testimony of what happened in their lives pertaining to the kingdom of God as they grew up.
We have a Lord who did a limited number of things while here upon this earth those few short years, but everything He did had an effect—and still has an effect. And the ripples are still going out. And I hope the ripples attack us this morning.
We need the Gospel attacking us. I mean, Ernie started out last night in Acts, and we got through the fullness expanded, and the fullness extended, and fullness to the uttermost. We have not even done this stage yet.
But the Gospels are where the fullness starts. The Gospels stand in front of the New Testament and say, “You know, unless you look at Jesus, you are not going to come to fullness.”
You might get bogged down in doctrine, or bogged down in future things, and look at horses and wild beasts and bowls of wrath; but if you have not looked at Jesus, you will not come to fullness.
So I have the privilege of looking in these four Gospels and trying to present the Christ. I can bring us back to square one, where we always need to begin to come back to fullness.
Does it not seem like in our Christian lives the Lord always recycles us back around and says, “Now, let us get the first priorities down. Let us look again at our Lord Jesus.” It is our way unto fullness.
I love the Gospels. They are so full. The half of the story has not been told.
I love to tell the story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory,
Of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story,
Because I know it is true;
It satisfies my longings
As nothing else can do.
You know that song? Well, let us sing the chorus.
I love to tell the story;
’Twill be my theme in glory,
To tell the old, old story
Of Jesus and His love.
Well, we have all been deputized as evangelists. If you love to tell that story, I wonder if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually were evangelists. I know that they were apostles, but as they wrote this story, they became evangelists. If you love to tell the story, you are an evangelist.
The writers of the Gospels had a limited function. They did not really write these books to tell everything about the Lord that they had come to know.
But they had a burden from the Holy Spirit to introduce Christ to people, much like the priests in the wilderness had a responsibility to bring the Jewish worshipers into the tabernacle to offer their sacrifices.
They brought them in through the curtain and brought them to the outer court with their sacrifices. And there, for some of those men, for the first time in their lives, they saw the tent with the fire of glory above it, and the altar upon which their sacrifice was laid.
It is like the evangelists do that simple thing. They do not take us into the inner court. They do not show us the goal of all the divinity of Christ in His personhood and all those things that will be taken up this week as we regard fullness.
They just say, “First, let us look at the tent—plain, ordinary, skin tent—and then watch the glory fall. And let that tent be your home, because there are a lot more things to tell you inside the tent.”
And, of course, the Gospel writers always pointed them to that brazen altar. They said, “This is where it all begins.”
Every Gospel writer—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—centers the Gospel story upon the cross of Jesus Christ, as He died for our sins, as our sacrifice, as the Lamb of God.
This is powerful storytelling. And it is powerful storytelling because it is based on history. I love that about our Gospel.
When we talk about our Christ, we are not talking religion. We are not talking stories, made-up myths that have been formed in man’s philosophical minds. We are dealing with historical facts, and that is the wonderful thing about the Gospel.
We have got a history. If this is not true historically, then our whole faith is false. But the Man actually came. That Man actually lived, and He lived in power, and He lived in perfection.
That Man actually died, and He said He died for you and me. Then that Man rose again, and there are witnesses that say it. It is a historical fact. Now you have got to deal with it.
The Gospel is a power because they do not give us some kind of, “Well, there was one time an elephant named Ganesh, and then he was incarnated into a squirrel and became a man,” and all of this sort of business. Fanciful stuff.
No, we have a Christ of history that has to be dealt with. It is a powerful story.
Within the scope of this story, the Gospels do not really give us that much theology, nor really interpretation, nor sociology or psychology—although we can find some valuable bits of truth in all these areas for us.
It is not even really a history, nor is it, in the final analysis, a biography, as it were—a blow-by-blow account of what Jesus wore and all this sort of stuff like we would write biographies today.
As most of you know, Ernie and I had the disreputable problem of going to the cemetery for four years—the seminary, I am sorry. Seminary. I keep calling it a cemetery.
There in seminary, we studied under theologians who had given their whole lives just to study one of these books: Johannine scholars, the Synoptics. Sounds like a doctor, does it not?
They studied Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They would study it, pull it all apart, analyze all the sections, and finally spread it out so much that it just did not make any sense at all.
But that is exactly the opposite of the burden and intent of the Gospel writers. They are not trying to write a biography. They are not trying to write a theology.
They are presenting a Person who, by the Holy Spirit, leaps out of the page and confronts you and me in our lives and says, “I challenge the center of your life. What is your job? I challenge you. What are your morals? I challenge it. What is the center of your life? I challenge it.”
That is what Jesus does. And so, for some poor soul who happens on one of these Gospels and reads it with an open heart, the Holy Spirit starts to confront and attack and show a Lord Jesus that eventually humbles us and brings us to the first step into fullness, which is: repent and believe the Gospel.
We have some Gospel here.
Now this morning I want to begin by looking at the Gospel of Mark, just in a simple overview. I know that many of you have read these books many times, but I do want to sort of go over the top of the Gospel of Mark, and then hopefully the Gospel of Matthew. By then it should be noon, and we will have lunch.
Turn, please, in the Gospel of Mark to chapter 1, verse 1.
The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
It is written in Isaiah the prophet. So now, from the beginning of verse 1 to the beginning of verse 2, already you have got to know the Old Testament to understand the Gospel.
Well, not really. But there is a definite connection between the Old Testament and these Gospels.
I love the picture that G. Campbell Morgan gives when he shares the unfolding message of the Bible—the connection between the Old and New Testament. He says that in the Old Testament you have the presenting of a type that is shown clearly before us but not fulfilled until we come to the Gospel.
In the first five books of the Old Testament, you have a longing for a priest: the laws, the sacrifice, the tabernacle. Oh, man’s yearning and longing for a priest—somebody who can bring atonement to us, somebody who can intercede for us, somebody who can bring us into the presence of God.
Even though we have Aaron and various other high priests presented there, they are all men who are fallible and fall short. In the end, we are left with a longing, a yearning: “Oh, if we only had a real priest unto God.”
Well, Morgan says that priest fulfills it when we open up the Gospel of Mark. We see all that man longs for in the way of atonement and intercession—somebody who will lead me to God—when we look at Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.
The sigh for the priest has been met in Jesus Christ.
Then you have the historical books in the Old Testament that teach us about the king. We see the kings, and, of course, the zenith in David, and great kings like Hezekiah. We see the king in type.
We see a king—beautiful kings, wonderful kings, nasty kings—but we never see the perfect King until we see Jesus in Matthew. Suddenly, all the yearnings for a true and righteous King who would be enthroned forever are fulfilled. We look at Jesus.
Then the prophets rose and spoke the Word in diverse manners and portions throughout their lives. We were edified by hearing the prophetic clarity of the will of God, but even there there is a lack of fulfillment, because each one of the prophets only spoke parts.
Until we come to Jesus, the Word of God, the Man who was the prophecy itself. So the yearning for the prophet was fulfilled when we come to the New Testament.
You see the connection: Old Testament, New Testament; the sigh, the need, the type, the fulfillment—the Gospels.
When we get to the Gospel of Mark, I suppose most Bible teachers—and I find it to be so—feel like the Gospel of Mark presents Jesus as the mighty Servant of God.
We see, in this shortest of the Gospels, a powerful Servant, the Son of Man, marching through and doing the will of God. This is good news.
So let us look at it:
The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The actual verse that I would use to present this matter of the Servant of God is found in Mark 10. If you will just turn back.
Mark 10:42:
Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.
Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,
and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
And we see Jesus clearly wearing a towel of service, as it were, girded around Him, serving the living God in the power of the Holy Spirit.
It is amazing that Mark’s telling of the story reflects the mode of a servant.
Now, most people believe—and I also concur with this—that the Gospel of Mark is basically the teachings of Peter that, over the years, had been heard by Mark many times and now were being recorded by Mark.
We do not really know if Peter was there on hand helping Mark out, or whether Mark just wrote these things down later on. But they were most likely the teachings of Peter that, as he stood at Solomon’s Porch and preached in Jerusalem and other places, Mark now records.
Of course, the wonderful thing about the Gospel of Mark is that it is short, concise, shows action, and is powerful in its simplicity. There is just no fat on this little book. It is just lean and powerful.
The story is almost like Peter told it from his experiences there on the Sea of Galilee. The book opens, and there is that kind of stillness that you know means a storm is just about to break.
Then a lightning bolt comes down out of Galilee, and Jesus goes down in the baptism of the Jordan. He comes out, and thunder calls from heaven, “This is My Son.” Then the storm just blows over the land, and nobody is the same again.
It is one of those squalls that comes up on the sea from that moment of silence.
After that initial moment of silence there at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, where it just mentions that John came out of the wilderness preaching—that is the only introduction you find. There are no genealogies. There is no account of what Jesus was doing before.
You pick up some of those strands within this book, but within the details of this book you just see a Servant of God moving through the land in a powerful and simple way.
You see, that is the spirit of a servant. This is something we lose sight of sometimes: the simplicity of Christ and His life among us.
We get complicated, get a lot of systems going, get a lot of routines, liturgies—whatever you want to call them—but there is a basic simplicity to Christ. He moves with power, a demand of action. And when you read this Gospel well, you have to be captured by that.
There is another aspect of His servanthood that seems manifest throughout the book, and it deals with the sense of timing in the Gospel of Mark. It is nonstop action.
It is held together by an interesting conjunction which those who have studied the Gospel of Mark realize. Over forty times there is a little word used that we translate—old King James said “straightway”; we now usually use the word “immediately.”
Forty times within this Gospel of Mark, the word immediately is used. Now let us just look at chapter 1, and I am going to show you what I mean.
Because in the new translations, like the one I have here, it hardly shows any of them. But you lose the spirit of this thing—a sense of timing, a sense of urgency about this powerful Servant—when you do not see these things.
Now I will show you the first one. It is there in verse 10.
It says in Mark 1:9, “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” And straightway, coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens torn open.
Verse 12: “Straightway the Spirit sent Him out into the wilderness.”
Verse 18: after calling Andrew and Peter, “Come and follow Me,” straightway they left their nets and followed Him.
In verse 20, He went down and talked to James and John, and straightway He called them, and they left Zebedee and followed Him.
Verse 29 of chapter 1: “And straightway they left the synagogue and went into James and John’s home, Simon and Andrew.” Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and straightway they told Jesus about it.
So He went to her, took her hand, and helped her up; and straightway the fever left her, and she began to wait on them.
Verse 42: “And straightway the leprosy left him, and he was cured.” Verse 43: Jesus sent him away straightway and told him, “Do not tell anyone.”
Straightway, straightway, straightway. It is like a kid today who says, “And then Daddy slipped on the marbles that I had on the porch, and then he hit his head against the bike, and the bike hit the car, and then the car went out in the driveway, and then, of course, the garbage truck came.” You know, like, “And then, and then, and then.”
This is not a polished discourse. This is not written as if it were somebody thinking philosophically about the whole thing. This is one of those, “And then this happened, and then that happened”—a true narrative given with a sense of urgency.
You sense, about this precious Servant, this Jesus as He moves through the land, a sense of time.
Now it is also interesting that there in chapter 1, Mark is the only one of the Gospels that adds this to Jesus’ initial statements regarding the kingdom.
In Mark 1:15, after John had been put into prison, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.”
Now Mark is the only one who records that: “The time is fulfilled.” There is our word fulfilled. The time is fulfilled.
Of course, my translation here says, “The time has come,” and very simply that is what that means. The time has come. All things have been prepared. The time has come. Now the kingdom is coming. Everything has been prepared. Everything is ready. Now is the time.
But there is another sense in saying that the time is fulfilled. I do not believe we do violence to it if we just flip that word around and say Jesus came on the scene and time changed. He said, “The time is now filled full.”
Jesus changed everything. Everywhere He went changed to Eastern Kingdom Time.
Now all those folks there in Galilee had just been living. What kind of time were they living in those days? Day by day by day by day. Jesus comes, and suddenly the kingdom is upon them. “Wait a minute. What time is it? What is going on here?”
Jesus totally knocked them out of their doldrums as He came through with the Gospel.
It is interesting in the New Testament that there are two Greek words that we both translate “time.” There is this word chronos, like you get a chronologue—or a watch, clock time—and we get that Greek word chronos, which means time.
“What time is it?” Herod asked. “What time was it that you saw the star?” That was the Greek word chronos.
Then there is this other Greek word, kairos. Sometimes these words are used interchangeably, but that word kairos, which we translate oftentimes as “time,” means not just time but a period that is filled with an event.
It is time in its meaning, not in its ticking.
There is a very real practical application for us here when we think of fullness, because most of us will live at one of these two levels in any given moment in our lives. Either we are ticking away the time, or we are living in a fullness, in a meaningful time.
This word kairos appears in the New Testament when Jesus says, “Times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord.” That is that word kairos. “The times of the Gentiles”—that is the word kairos.
The time is filled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. There is no longer a ticking by your clock. We are on Eastern Kingdom Time here.
Everywhere that Jesus went, it was the divine now breaking onto the face of things. Everybody who was sick was hoping one day they would be healed. Jesus walked in, and now hit them. Kingdom time. It was revolutionary.
A sense of function, urgency, mission. The Servant of God went about initiating things because He knew the will of God.
We have an amazing story of events upon events. The first day He comes on the scene, He walks into the synagogue at Capernaum and He is preaching. Suddenly, the demon-possessed man begins to shout out. He casts the demon out of that man. Everybody says, “What is going on?”
Then He goes into Peter’s mother-in-law’s house, and she has a fever. Boom! He heals the fever. She fixes supper.
Then a whole bunch of people from the district who are sick and have some needs all come knocking on the door, and it says He heals every one of them.
Then the next morning, five o’clock in the morning, He goes out on the hillside and everybody is coming to find Him. The disciples say, “Oh, there is a ton of people down there.” He says, “We will go to another town.” He was on a mission.
Eastern Kingdom Time. He was living now under the presence of the Father’s will—a powerful Servant who would not be swayed from His mission. He moved in. And, of course, this is good news.
Well, it can be good news. It might be bad news. It depends how you respond to that kind of invasion.
Because the Gospel of Mark is basically the story of a D-Day, a blitzkrieg, an invasion.
It is interesting when you read the Gospel of Mark that, other than right at the beginning when He is baptized at the Jordan—which we know was down in Judea—if you read the Gospel of Mark without reading Matthew or Luke or John, you would almost get the idea that Jesus spent His whole time in Galilee.
It makes no mention of Jerusalem, as far as Him being there, until after chapter 10, when He starts to set His face for Jerusalem and goes up through Jericho, up through Judea, and eventually into Jerusalem.
Did you realize that? Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9—all the things that happen in Galilee. Well, maybe Peter has a bias here. Maybe Peter does not want to mention that nasty place down there, Jerusalem.
This is our problem: we have read this as a bedtime story. I am telling you, this is a shocker. This is not some fantastic bedtime story. You do not get a glass of warm milk and say, “I think I will read the Gospel of Mark.”
Well, you do not get ready at bedtime and say, “I think I will put on Sousa marches.” That is the same thing. This is meant to be abrupt. This is an invasion of Jesus.
As a matter of fact, you know what happens in this story, simply put, in the Gospel of Mark? Jesus invades Galilee and takes over as the center of things.
This boring place with only a lake suddenly becomes the center of focus. Why, even the big shots from Jerusalem start traveling up there to see what is going on, according to Mark.
Everywhere Jesus goes, the kingdom comes. People are healed, demons are cast out, the truth is spoken, the bread is fed, and Jesus stills the sea. He is in command. He is the center of this Galilee.
Suddenly Galilee becomes not Galilee of the Gentiles, but the Galilee of Jesus.
The folks are excited. There is a popular movement going on there. There are so many crowds you cannot even go into towns anymore. He has to stay outside and deal with the people. There is such an onslaught of ministry, sometimes He cannot even eat, and His own family thought He had gone a little local.
But you know what Jesus tells in a little parable? I think He sort of expresses what Mark was expressing in this Gospel.
When people came and accused Him of doing things by Beelzebul, He said, “I will tell you what. If I am doing things by Beelzebul, he is dividing his own kingdom. That cannot be.”
He said, “I will tell you what is happening. The strong man’s house—you have got to go in there, tackle and bind the strong man, then you can start doing damage. My casting out of demons is a sign that the strong man has been bound.”
This mighty Servant of God, this Jesus, this minister—anybody who reads this Gospel for the first time gets struck by the power of this Man. What authority He has, not like the scribes and the preachers.
Everything He says has effect. Everything He does has effect. He took over. He stormed Galilee. What good news! He challenged the very center of their lives.
Why, people, I bet you they hurriedly did their chores every day just to try to find out where Jesus was and go find Him. It is an amazing story.
Made even more amazing as Mark continues to tell the story, there comes a sort of watershed. You see, the whole time Jesus has been moving from place to place. He has been moving and doing God’s will, but there has been growing confrontation from the leaders. You would expect that.
But then the opposition began to mount from the people themselves. This is hard to understand when you first read this, because anybody who reads the Gospel of Mark is on the side of Jesus. You have got to be. He is doing good things.
I cannot understand how people could start rejecting Him. It is because He started taking over their center.
That is because He started going to people like the tax collector and saying, “Hey, you, on that job—leave your job. Follow Me.” Now you have got a choice, because you see, is my job the center of my life?
The confrontation of the Gospel is not that Jesus says, “Oh well, you keep your life the way it is; only change your religion a little bit.” No. Jesus comes and says, “I am either the center of your life or I am nothing to you.”
Everything has got to change, not just your religion. The whole thing has got to be reworked. That is what He did in Galilee.
The strange thing was, as far as popular opposition goes, the first main center of opposition was His own hometown of Nazareth.
The reason they opposed Him is because it says they were filled with unbelief and took offense at this guy whom they knew grew up in this town. They were probably envious and jealous and said, “Who is this man, Joseph’s son? What good is He? He is just a carpenter.”
But the amazing response is that Jesus could do no great works in that town because of their unbelief. He had to move on to other places. It is amazing, is it not?
Then, of course, the story goes on and on. We know that, at the same moment, there are people like the disciples discovering who Jesus really is—the Messiah—and at the same time He is being rejected by the multitudes.
But then Jesus starts moving in on the disciples. Now, so far we have been cheering for Jesus, right? Yes. He swept through Galilee. He had a blitzkrieg, took over the people, fed them bread, healed them, and taught them the truth. We are all going, “Give me a J for Jesus.”
Now one day Peter actually answers one of Jesus’ questions right—and not the third time, the first time.
“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Peter, because that is the first time you did not answer, but God answered truth.”
As soon as the cat was out of the bag that Jesus was the King—which is a shocker when you read this story—here is the guy running around as a mighty Servant, and it turns out He is the King traveling incognito.
You say, “Wait a minute. The King? A Messiah is supposed to do things a lot differently.” Well, that is the problem.
As soon as it came out that Jesus was the King, He said, “And I will tell you what this King is going to do. He is going to go up to Jerusalem. He is going to be betrayed. He is going to be beaten. He is going to be crucified. He is going to rise again the third day.”
Well, they never heard the third-day rising again. All they heard was that this Man was acting very uncharacteristically for the role of a king.
Here we spent all this time traveling with Him, and we suddenly realize He is a King, and now He tells us He is going to throw away His kingdom. Of course, Peter rebuked Him, and Jesus started getting on Peter’s case.
Now, brothers and sisters, because from this time on the revelation of His kingship was realized among the disciples, that is when He started getting on their case. In one sense, they had a pretty easy ride.
Do you realize it was after the confession of Peter that there was His first instance of saying, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow Me”? He had not said that before then.
He started picking on those disciples, it appears. He walked into a house in the Gospel of Mark and said, “What were you guys talking about on the road?” Of course, they were talking about who was going to be the greatest. He caught them.
Then one day John and James come up and say, “Why, we went to Samaria and they would not let You come in there. Should we throw down fire on them?”
Jesus starts nailing them. He starts telling them the truth. Now He started teaching them some positive things about the future and about the things that would be, but every time He mentioned His coming death in Jerusalem, it fell on deaf ears.
They just could not understand it. They did not want to hear it. It made them afraid.
Now, you would think that this Man who stormed Galilee and still had a big popular following would have continued right on doing miracles and doing mighty works.
But strange to say, Jesus changed His focus completely, as if to say, “The important thing is training twelve guys. The secondary thing is doing miracles and teaching the multitudes.”
Strange actions. But Jesus invaded these twelve men’s lives, began to teach them truth, began to show them things, and began not to let them get away with things they had gotten away with before.
You see, this is the way unto fullness—the cross—seen even in its initial way right here. As soon as we recognize He is the King, well, that is when He has permission, as it were, to begin to bring us to the cross.
And so He does. He emphasizes the twelve, and most of the miracles He does for those last six months before the cross, He does out of religious territory—beyond the Jordan, up in Tyre and Sidon, in the Decapolis.
That is where He feeds the four thousand—in the Decapolis, outside the religious realm—because He has been rejected.
Then the story ends. A surprise, is it not? Jesus, in fact, goes to Jerusalem. Of course, He is betrayed. Of course, He is tortured. And, of course, He is crucified.
This is central to the Gospel of Mark. The book talks about His going to Jerusalem and His passion.
Then right at the end, characteristically simple, understated, it says, “On the first day of the week, the women went to the tomb.”
When they got there, there was no Jesus. But there was an angel who said, “Jesus has gone into Galilee. Get the disciples and get up there. Check out the land.”
What? Please, I lost the page. What happened then? He leaves us hanging. He says, “This is just the beginning. You have got to find Mark 2 to see what happens after that.”
Maybe we could just summarize a few things here before we move on to the Gospel of Matthew. What we need to see is the fullness of Christ as the Servant of God, as He comes in our midst and deals with us.
Maybe this morning I am talking to somebody—maybe a teenager who is here—and you have never really let Jesus be the center of your life. Maybe you are an adult, maybe you are a husband who is here because your wife dragged you.
Yet you do not really know the Lord Jesus. Well, now this is a message for you.
There is a Servant of God who is powerful, and yet, strange to say, He waits for your permission to recognize Him as King. And He will change your life.
He will put you on to Eastern Kingdom Time, take you out of chronological roundabout, ticking away your time, and bring you into eternity and the eternal now.
There is Jesus, the Servant of God, and that is the beginning of the way unto fullness: to recognize His great power, to recognize that His purposes will not be thwarted, to recognize that the way He invaded the land of Galilee is the same way He wants to invade our lives.
But, of course, I am speaking mostly to believers here, so I guess this Gospel does not apply. But I know it does.
Because our lives get out of focus. We get other things in the center of our lives. How we need this mighty Servant of God to come and invade our lives and challenge all those things we have just been comfortable with for so long.
Do you sense the comfort in the Gospel of Mark, as if the Christian life is some kind of throwing of flowers over a bed in a hothouse at ease?
There is a Servant of God who lays down His life. He is a model for us—an impossible model—and yet He says, “If you would be a servant of God, take up your cross, be endued by the power of the Spirit, follow the orders of the Father, and invade while you are here.”
We have the fullness of Christ to deal with here.
My friend Rob Saunders, who has a homespun Southern way of saying things, would always say, “Our God is playing hardball.”
We Christians have been loved by the Lord Jesus with great grace, mercy, and love. But if we have fallen asleep like that sleepy province of Galilee, if we have become Galilee of the Gentiles—the sort of compromise of semi-Jewish and semi-Gentile—if we have become the center for Tiberius, the Roman government, to dwell, and if we live in darkness, then Jesus comes as light into the dark place.
Galilee was the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, and the Scriptures described it as the place which is the valley of the shadow of death. Jesus gives life to that place.
The church today, even the church of our Lord Jesus Christ, is sometimes almost impotent in the valley of the shadow of death, where we are a mixture. We are not religious; we are not of the world; we are just something in between.
Only by the invasion of our Lord Jesus Christ can we come to the fullness of Christ. He is powerful.
Brothers and sisters, there is a great inner life regarding the Christian life, but if we ever lose sight of the fact that there are actions as Christians, then we have lost sight.
Actions do speak louder than words. Actions have always been the initial front line by which men will see our good works and glorify our Father, who is in heaven.
If we ever get to the place where we are beyond action, then we have gotten beyond our Lord. He is a Man of power and action. He is a Man of mission. He is a Man on Kingdom Time.
He would call us to this same mission as the body of Christ. If we want fullness, then may the Lord awaken us to the reality and the power of His life, to bring light where there is darkness in this world, even today.
So, the Gospel of Mark. Now we turn to the Gospel of Matthew, and here we find the same Gospel story. But amazingly, Matthew sees it in a different way.
Probably Matthew’s Gospel was written after Mark. He could have seen Mark and the stories Mark told. There are a lot of similar stories, and we do not know.
But one of the things Matthew has done—one of the things that seemed germane to his own life as an evangelist—was this: he was struck, absolutely convinced, that Jesus’ coming was the coming of the King and the bringing of the kingdom.
He was absolutely convinced of that. And you know how he got convinced? He got convinced by reading the Bible.
That is why the word fulfilled is used eighteen times in the Gospel of Matthew. Sixteen of those eighteen are, “that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.”
He says, “I know Jesus is the King, and I know He has brought in the kingdom. Do you know why? Because everything He did—this was that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.”
Everything that Matthew sees has this broad stroke about it. He says the whole story of the good news of Jesus is a story of the fulfillment of all that has gone on in the past and of bringing it up to its fullness as the King.
So that is the Gospel of Matthew. That is what Matthew has to share with us.
It is as if he pulled the camera back a little bit. You see, the Gospel of Mark was written with one of those handheld VCR cameras following Jesus through the streets and taking close-ups.
Now Matthew takes the camera back a little way, about as far as that one is from me, and he sees Jesus in His bigger light.
He says, “Now wait a minute. I want to tell you the same story, but there is some background here you have got to know. It makes the story more beautiful and complete if you see the background of this whole thing.”
When Matthew tells this beautiful story, he throws it into the light of good news as he contrasts Jesus the King and the kingdom Jesus brings with the kingdom of Israel as it was in those days.
The Gospel of Matthew was written perhaps for the Jews. It was written to appeal to people who knew the whole history of Israel.
So when Matthew tells the story, he tells it as the fulfillment, as the completion, of all the history of Israel. He shows it through those fulfillments of the Scriptures and the things he has to say.
He brings it back and says, “Now look at Jesus. Watch Him walk.”
As Matthew pictures Jesus walking, he pictures Jesus, and everywhere Jesus goes, again there is Kingdom Time. There is evidence. There is a microcosm of the kingdom, even there with Jesus and His little band of disciples.
When Jesus speaks according to Matthew, He speaks as the King, making pronouncements regarding the kingdom.
Matthew 5, 6, and 7—the so-called Sermon on the Mount—could be called the manifesto of the King. Because He stood up and said, “Now let Me tell you what the kingdom is really like.”
“It is for the poor in spirit. It is for the pure in heart, for the hungering and thirsty. Let Me tell you what the kingdom is really like.”
“You heard that it was said in the old times that you should love your neighbors and hate your enemies, but I say to you in this kingdom, love your enemies.”
Jesus brings in the kingdom. Jesus is the King, and everywhere He goes Matthew casts Him in a more regal light.
You almost see the invisible purple robes around Jesus as He goes from place to place in control as the King. Everything He says has some sort of pronouncement on the kingdom.
When He shares His parables, they are parables of the kingdom. When He shares about the end times, they are the end times regarding the kingdom.
And the people responded. Why did they respond in Matthew’s view?
Because the common people had the common sense to realize that when they looked at Jesus and His kingdom, their kingdom, Israel, was bankrupt by comparison.
Now, good news is good news if you are willing to accept the status of where you are at.
When John the Baptist came on the scene at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and said, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand,” he had a veritable landslide of response.
People poured down from Jerusalem and Judea and the districts around Judea, because this message of John the Baptist hit pay dirt in the hearts of everybody who knew the truth.
Now here the kingdom of Israel was trying to puff itself up like it was something great. They had public-relations men just like the United States: “We are the greatest. We are number one. We have got all this stuff—the greatest government, greatest military, the greatest GNP, whatever that is.”
Israel had its pomp and circumstance. And all those guys with the robes, they hated everything that John the Baptist said.
Because John the Baptist said, “Repent, because the real kingdom has come. You remember the kingdom that we read about, about David and this kingdom? Repent. That kingdom is coming.”
“Look at this kingdom we are living in today, you brood of vipers,” he says to the leaders. “When are you going to fess up to the fact that we are bankrupt? How are we going to see the King unless we confess we are bankrupt?”
I mean, who did they have for king? Herod? What a hoax. This guy was no Messiah. This guy was no righteous king. Herod and his cronies, his sons and cousins—and besides, Herod was a puppet anyway, not a real king. He was just a puppet of Rome.
This whole kingdom of Israel was a hoax. The religious system had gotten a lot of flourish to it. You know, the deader things get, the more robes you wear and the greater the music.
You go up to Jerusalem on any given feast day, man, they had professional trumpet players—Satchmo and the whole lot—just laying away. The priests knew how to say everything, and they not only said the Hebrew, but they rolled the R’s when they said it.
Oh, they had pomp and circumstance. They poured the water out into special gold. Oh, they just—and it was dead.
There was no ark in the temple. There was no life in the whole thing. It was dead, dead, dead, for anybody who had eyes to see. The common people had eyes to see.
Not only that, the rabbinic hyper-talk had, for years, just chased the law around until it lost its meaning.
The people had gotten frustrated because it was impossible for a common person to ever be considered religious in Judaism. You had to be full-time students of the law. You had to understand and get the list of this week’s rabbinical-law interpretations.
In order to be religious, and the common people, like those folks in Galilee, did not stand a chance.
But the folks knew that there had been a lot of hot wind around—a bunch of windbag rabbis going around philosophizing on the law until you could not even understand the law because the traditions of men had clouded it up.
But when Jesus came on the scene, when Jesus spoke, the people said, “Yeah, that is what it means. What do these jokers say?”
Listen, man. He not only knows the law, but He knows the spirit of the law. He knows what the law is supposed to mean. It is not just a lot of gamesmanship and semantic word playing.
When Jesus did something—yeah, look at that. I mean, when He says, “Be healed,” for God’s sake, be healed—not, “If it be Thy will,” and all that.
When Jesus walked about as a King, He walked about as a compassionate King, who looked out over sheep without a shepherd with deep compassion in His heart. When did they ever see a king like that?
He was a champion of people who were beaten down, demon-possessed, former prostitutes, tax collectors, and nobodies. Where did they ever find a king like that?
Boy, this was a King. And they had finally seen the King. And the people rejoiced.
Now the religious leaders decided they had to do something. But the interesting turn in the Gospel of Matthew was very similar, of course, to the Gospel of Mark.
The only way that that King can come in is by going to the cross.
Here again, the cross looms large within the Gospel of Matthew, and you find a King who probably could have—I fully believe this—Jesus probably could have taken over the world with His winsomeness, wisdom, and power.
He could have defeated Rome. Yet He took all that He had as the King and laid down His life and died so that there could be a kingdom. That is you and me.
You know, you have got to have a King and a kingdom. You have got to have domes to make a kingdom.
Jesus laid down His life for you and me. The King laid it down and became poor that we might be rich.
When you read the Gospel of Matthew, it seems so complete. The Gospel of Mark says, “Here is the Servant. Watch Him quick.”
You look at the Gospel of Matthew, and you see that a King has been set into place who at the end can say:
“All power and authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.
Go and make disciples across this world, and baptize them in My name.
Teach them all the things I taught you, and I will be with you always.”
Now, there is the pronouncement of a King as Jesus sends us forth.
Well, what a Gospel we have, and what a lesson to learn. We want fullness so bad.
But I suppose if there is a lesson to be learned from the Gospel of Matthew, as we look at our Lord Jesus as the King, it is that there is no coming to Jesus the King, nor to His kingdom, unless we repent.
That is, in the sense of recognizing our own bankruptcy without Him as the King of our lives.
How long will it take the Spirit to convince us of the bankruptcy of our own folly, so that we can give our lives to the King and start to live on Kingdom Time?
There is such good news, but there is such confrontation. There is a kingdom waiting, and in fact there is a kingdom that is a reality and an experience for those who are poor in spirit.
For those who are pure in heart, for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, there is a kingdom already. Rejoice and be exceeding glad.
What is the state of your economy? Are you bankrupt?
Whereas in the Gospel of Mark, are you sleeping, Frère Jacques?
The Lord Jesus, I would pray, by His Spirit could come through these Gospels as we read them again and stir us out of bedtime reading to realize we are dealing with a King.
He is at this very moment establishing His kingdom and sending out the good seed, looking for good soil that will bear fruit thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.
In His kingdom judgments, He acknowledges that there is some seed that is going to fall on rocky ground, and seed that is going to fall on thorny ground, and seed that is going to fall by the wayside.
But He throws the seed out anyway and says, “I, Jesus, am the King. My kingdom shall never fail. Put Me as the center and the King of your life, and live with Me in My kingdom.”
The Gospel is simple, but we see a full Jesus, and we have only seen the half of it. Jesus is the Servant. Jesus is the King. May we see Him as that in our lives by the Holy Spirit today.
Shall we pray?
We have our own Gospel to write—the Gospel according to me and you. What are we convinced of regarding Jesus?
Is He the powerful Servant who can invade our lives? Is He the King, the King who has a kingdom, if we will just come to Him?
What is the Gospel according to us, as we sit here on this Lord’s Day and call Him the Lord?
According to Matthew, the Scriptures have been fulfilled. Everything from His birth, through His life, through His death, through the places He lived, is all in fulfillment.
Lord Jesus, I would say to You that there is a fulfillment of our lives that we long for so much. We long to know fullness and not sense our emptiness.
We are tired of futility, of the bankruptcy even of our Christian ways.
And we would want to turn to You as King and enable You to move through our hearts by the power of Your Spirit, to rekindle and empower us. Send us on mission. Establish Your kingdom.
Oh, Lord, we thank You that in the fullness of the time, You sent forth Your Son in order to redeem us from the law, that we might be adopted as sons.
Lord, we pray that You will bring us into fullness, even when it means in spite of us. We pray that You would attack us in our comfort and convince us that You alone are the effective center of our lives.
I pray, Lord, especially for young people here this morning, who have such a potpourri of centers offered to them, that they can understand that they are choosing, and their life is all predicated on this: Is Jesus my center and my life?
All these things will be added unto me that I need, if the kingdom is first.
I pray for us who have known You for years—the adults, the mature—that You would awaken us as a Galilee out of sleep; that You would bring us into what Your purposes are for the church.
Make us a servant church. Make us a church of the King.
In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.