SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/28/2012 9:45:46 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Service Leads to Honor
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Mark 9:30-40
Message of the verses: As mentioned in yesterday’s SD we will once
again look into the 9th chapter of the book of Mark. I have mentioned in an earlier SD that one of
my goals this year was to look at a whole chapter of Mark each month by
listening to it and then listen to sermons on it from John MacArthur and then
break up the chapter into sections and comment on it. I actually began to look at the Gospel of
Mark in December of 2011. Today we will
pick up our study of Mark’s Gospel in the 9th chapter at verse
thirty.
Service Leads to Honor: (Mark 9:30-50): I want to begin by just looking at Mark
9:30-40 and then see how far we can get.
“30 ¶ From there they went out and began to go
through Galilee, and He did not want anyone to know about it. 31 For He was teaching His disciples and telling
them, "The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they
will kill Him; and when He has been killed, He will rise three days
later." 32 But they did not
understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask Him. 33 They came to Capernaum; and when He was in
the house, He began to question them, "What were you discussing on the
way?" 34 But they kept silent, for
on the way they had discussed with one another which of them was the greatest.
35 Sitting down, He called the twelve
and *said to them, "If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all
and servant of all." 36 Taking a child,
He set him before them, and taking him in His arms, He said to them, 37 "Whoever receives one child like this in
My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who
sent Me." 38 John said to Him,
"Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name, and we tried to
prevent him because he was not following us." 39 But Jesus said, "Do not hinder him, for
there is no one who will perform a miracle in My name, and be able soon
afterward to speak evil of Me. 40
"For he who is not against us is for us.”
I suppose
that humanly speaking it would have been hard for Jesus and His disciples to
just disappear from the crowds for Jesus was so to say “the only show in town”
and what I mean by that is that no one had ever seen anything like the miracles
that He had done and no one had ever heard a man speak like this before, and
for that matter no one has since either.
Jesus wanted to make some time to just teach His disciples things that they
would need to know for in just a few short months He would be gone from them,
and He was the one that they relied on for everything, so the lessons had to
begin with more intensity for His disciples.
Now when we read through this Gospel and we look at some of the things
that His disciples did and said we sometimes kind of shake our heads wondering
why they would say and do things like they did.
Then when we get to the book of Acts we see the disciples in a whole
different light, doing things by faith, stepping out on faith and even being tortured
for the cause of Christ. What was the
difference? For the answer to that
question let us look at several verses from the 14th chapter of the
Gospel of John. “18 ¶ "I will not leave you as orphans; I will
come to you. 25 ¶ "These things I have spoken to you while
abiding with you. 26 "But the
Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach
you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.” We see that Jesus tells His disciples that He
would not leave them alone, but that His Father would send them the Holy Spirit
to give them the strength that they need in order to do what Jesus wanted them
to do. We also see that the Holy Spirit
would cause them to remember things that they would need to remember, and that
is why we have the four Gospels. I want
to look at one more section of Scripture from the book of Acts that will shed a
bit more light on this subject: “6
¶ So when they had come together, they
were asking Him, saying, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the
kingdom to Israel?" 7 He said to
them, "It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has
fixed by His own authority; 8 but you will receive power when
the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in
Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the
earth."
We see in
verse thirty-two that the disciples did not know what raising from the dead
meant, and when we look at the book of Acts we see this as one of the major
themes, if not the major them of the book of acts. Paul writes a whole chapter on the resurrection
in 1Cor. 15, for without the hope of the resurrection we as believers have no
hope at all. Paul says “If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of
all men most to be pitied.” (1Cor. 15:19) Paul writes to Titus saying “looking for the
blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ
Jesus, (Titus 2:13) The believers hope
is the return of Jesus Christ, but in order for Him to return He had to have
been raised from the dead. The point in
all of this is that His disciples had their lives transformed through the
coming of the Holy Spirit, and everyone who is a true believer in the Lord
Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord has the very same Holy Spirit in them to
lead them and to guide them into the life that God desires you to live.
The next
thing we see in this section is arguing amongst the disciples, so even though
they were grieved because they did not understand about the resurrection they
still had time to argue among themselves as to who would be the greatest. It looks like they got over their grief in
kind of a hurry. Jesus had just told
them that He would suffer and die and they wanted to know which of them would
be the greatest. This may all have come
about because Jesus had taken Peter, James, and John up on the mountain with
Him and left the others behind. How
would Jesus teach them humility? Well He
would use a child to teach them, and there was a time when mothers brought
their children to see Jesus and the disciples tried to stop them from seeing
Him, so it seems that there record with children was not a good one.
Dr. Wiersbe
writes “To teach them (and us) a lesson on honor, Jesus set a child before them
and explained that the way to be first is to be last, and the way to be last is
to be the servant of all. The unspoken
child is an example of submission and humility.
A child knows he is chld and acts
like a child, and that is his secret of attracting love and care. The child who tries to impress us by acting
like an adult does not get the same attention.
“True
humility means knowing yourself, accepting yourself, being yourself—and giving
of yourself for others. The world’s
philosophy is that you are ‘great’ if others are working for you, but Christ’s
message is that greatness comes from our serving others. Since the words ‘child’ and ‘servant’ are the
same in the Aramaic language, it is easy to see why Jesus connected the
two. If we have the heart of a child, we
will have little attitude of servants, we will welcome the children as the
representatives of Jesus Christ and the Father.”
At first
glance it seems that verses 38-40 do not fit into the context of what is going
on, but we see that John takes it upon himself to defend all the disciples by
talking about a person that they had seen casting out demons by doing it in the
name of Jesus. Now we must remember that
the disciples whom Jesus left while going on the mountain could not cast out
the demon in the deaf boy. Dr. Wiersbe
points out “To use the name of Jesus is the same as working under His authority
so the men had no right to stop the man.”
We see a
similar statement by Jesus in Mark 12:30 as the one in Mark 9:40, “’He who is
not with Me is against Me;’” What we see
in these verses is a dividing line, you are either for and with Jesus or you
are not with Him and therefore against Him.
We don’t know when the disciples saw the casting out of demons by these
men, but Jesus said that they were with Him.
We don’t
have to perform great miracles to prove our love for Jesus, as seen by the
example of the child that Jesus uses as an illustration. When we lovingly receive a child or in
compassion give a cup of cold water to those who need it we are showing our
love for Jesus Christ, we are giving evidence that we have a humble heart of
one who is a servant.
In tomorrow’s
SD we will learn that Jesus did not treat the statement made by John lightly,
but in fact, He goes on to explain the danger of causing others to stumble, and
this will cause them to stop serving the Lord.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: Humility is not really something that you can
work on, for once you think you have it, then it is lost from you. The theme verse in the book of Mark is truly
about humility as it states: “"For
even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His
life a ransom for many.’” (Mark
10:45) Sometimes it is hard to help
others because you really don’t feel like it but when you go past your feelings
and help you feel better that you have done it.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Do thing in the power of the
Lord that I know that I should do.
Memory verses:
Continue to review 2Peter 1:1-11
8/28/2012 11:37:08 AM
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