Mark 3:7-35 - Jesus Gets A New Family

Well, we're continuing in the Book of Mark today on Tabernacle Talk, and we are in Chapter Three.

And yesterday, what we saw was Jesus, he cares about people, he loves people, he cares about those that are hungry, he cares about those that have sicknesses and diseases, and he does what he can to help them, both in their soul and in their body.

And we saw that that angered the religious people of the day who had set up fences and laws around God's laws, so much so that even healing someone on the Sabbath, on a holy day, was something that was looked down on.

And we ended with verse six in chapter three yesterday. Immediately the Pharisees went out and started plotting with the Herodians against him how they might kill him.

So here the religious, almost more kind of fundamentalist group of the Pharisees as far as like their respect and deep whatever for the word of God, the Old Testament, as well as all of their additional laws, they started plotting with the not caring

about God's word Herodians, those that they wanted political power. They had aligned themselves with King Herod of the Aramaans who was ruling over Israel and Judea at that time. So what's Jesus' response to being hunted? Does he flee the country?

Does he rise up an army against his followers? Well, let's see what happens starting in verse number seven today.

Jesus departed with his disciples to the sea, and a large crowd followed from Galilee, and a large crowd followed from Judea, Jerusalem, Ijumea, beyond the Jordan, and around Tyre and Sidon. Okay, everyone's coming to hear Jesus.

The large crowd came to him because they heard about everything he was doing. Then he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him so that the crowd wouldn't crush him. He says, hey, if I'm out on a boat, then I can project my voice.

It'll, you know, bounce off the water, and I'll be able to speak to this large crowd, but that way both they can hear me and I don't get trampled from people trying to, trying to, you know, touch Jesus and find healing or whatever the case might have

been. Verse number 10. Since he had healed many, all who had diseases were pressing toward him to touch him. Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, you are the son of God.

And he would strongly warn them not to make him known for reasons that we've gone over the past few days.

So everyone wants what Jesus, everyone except for the Pharisees and the Herodians are trying to kill him because he's, you know, he is a rival power to their religious authority and to the Herodians, to their political authority.

And so they're looking to kill him, but the people, they want what Jesus can do for them. Verse number 13. Jesus went up the mountain and summoned those he wanted, and they came to him.

He appointed 12 whom he also named apostles. That is messengers, it's ambassadors. It's someone that would represent, that would take your message to another place.

So he appointed 12 apostles, and he says, here's their mission, to be with him, to send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons.

So here, the threefold goal of these disciples, these apostles, these ones he's gonna send out, it says first, to be with him.

And man, that is the call of every believer, every Christian, is first and foremost to be with God, that we would spend time with him in his word, that we would spend time with him in prayer, that we would spend time with him in communion and

connection with his body, the church, the fellow believers. We can do lots of things for him, but the most important thing is to be with him, to know him and to be known by him.

He says he named the apostles to be with him, to send them out to preach. I'm going to assume, given on my limited knowledge, this is the word k-ruso. It's to cry aloud.

It's to tell everyone this good news about the gospel. You were not called to be a disciple just to hear about what Jesus has done and receive it and enjoy it. You are also a disciple so that you would tell others.

You would tell a family member. You would tell a friend. You would tell a coworker.

You would tell a neighbor about your God, about your Jesus. And sometimes we can shirk from that responsibility and we would say, man, that's the responsibility of maybe a pastor. That's the responsibility of an evangelist.

That's not my responsibility, but I challenge you. Jesus did not, you can think after his resurrection, who did he have declare the message first? It wasn't first the apostles.

First, it was just some women that had come to the tomb and they were going to anoint his body for burial and the angel sent them out with the message first.

And they were the ones that told the apostles who were still hiding away in the upper room that they said, hey, he is risen. We've seen an angel. It's been told to us what's happening.

It's Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and her telling the others what she had seen. And it's Jesus with the two random disciples. From some ancient documents we have, it might have been a married couple from some of the things that I've read.

This married couple that they were on the road to Emmaus and they made that journey, that trek to that town.

And then they realized that it was Jesus and they ran all the way back to Jerusalem to tell everyone about it, to tell others about the gospel, to tell others about Jesus is not the responsibility of just a few. That's the responsibility of the many.

And man, what a difference it would make in our churches if instead of just one or three or five people inviting others to church, telling others about the gospel.

Man, if you even have just a church of 30 people, but those 30 people, every single week, they're telling one person about the gospel. They're telling one person about Jesus.

Over the course of a year of 52 weeks, if you have 30 people every single week for 52 weeks, sharing or inviting or telling the gospel to people, man, what a difference it can make in communities and in areas.

But we can do so much more together than we ever could separately. So I want to encourage you, don't assume that you need to have all the answers.

Sometimes a humility that says, man, that's a great question about faith or the Bible or Jesus or other religions. I don't know the answer to that yet, but I would love to learn the answer, get the answer and come back to you.

It opens the door for another conversation instead of you necessarily feeling like you have to have all the answers. The only one who's got all the answers is God, not us.

And we can have a humility that the Holy Spirit will work in hearts and in minds far longer than we can. But we need to be faithful to give the message.

And may we live holy lives, that it's evident that we have been with Jesus, that the fruit of the Spirit is coming out of our lives, so that then when we preach the Gospel, it has some weight to it.

It's got some punch that people know, man, this is real, this is real in this person. So Jesus names the apostles to be with him, to send them out to preach, to declare the message, and to have authority to drive out demons.

So everything that Jesus has been doing, he doesn't want to be the only one to do it. He commissions these apostles, these messengers, so that they would do the exact same thing that he was doing. And man, what an encouraging thought.

I think of what Jesus says even in that last supper to his apostles. He says, you've seen the things that I'm doing. He says, but I'm sending you the Holy Spirit and you're going to do even greater things than I have done.

During his life here on earth, Jesus never had perhaps a large crusade in which there were tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

And I can think of even over the last 200 years, some of the great revivals and crusades that have taken place, the advent of the internet, that people can declare the gospel and it can go so far.

And Jesus has empowered us through his Holy Spirit to do that, that we would follow in the same way that he did, that he made disciples who made disciples. And that's our call.

We're not necessarily called to reach every person in our area with the gospel. But we can make a difference in another person's life. We can make a difference in two or three people or in Jesus numbers, in 12 people or in 70 people.

But our goal is, Jesus has given us the mission to do the same things that he did. And we ought to follow in that. It's in the Great Commission.

Go there for and make disciples. What I've done with you, go and do with others. Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I've commanded.

So they have this threefold mission, to be with him, to preach and have authority to drive out demons. Verse 16, he appointed the 12. So these were his closest apostles and disciples.

He says, to Simon, he gave the name Peter. So Simon is an Aramaic name. Oh, sorry.

Let me recall this. So Peter is Petros, which is a Greek name. The Aramaic version, I believe is Cephas.

So before his name was Rock in Hebrew or Aramaic, and he gives them the name Petros. It's you're a pebble, you're a stone, that's who you are. And it makes his later conversations with Peter about upon this rock, I will build my church.

He says, you're Peter, you're Petros, you're this pebble, you're this stone. But upon the firm foundation, the big old rock of the truth of the gospel that you just declared, that's what I'm going to build my church on.

So he says, to Simon, he gave the name Peter, and to James, the son of Zebedee, and to his brother John, he gave the name Boronages. That is, sons of thunder. He says, you guys are volatile, you are loud, you are sons of thunder.

Verse 18, Andrew, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James, the son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus, Simon, the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him. So here's these 12. And you have fishermen in there.

You have some people that had at one point been following John the Baptizer. You have a zealot, someone that would violently try to overthrow Rome or Rome's rule in Israel.

You have a former tax collector, and you have the one who would eventually betray Jesus. And that brings some comfort into my life. And I hope it would in yours as well.

If even the 12 that Jesus appointed to be with him, if one of them did not believe in him, then there will be times in our life where we have people that are close to us, that don't love us as we love them.

There will be times as a pastor, as a teacher, that some people don't get it and walk away from the faith or that betray. And you are in good company when that happens. If it even happened to the Lord, then assuredly it will happen to us.

Verse number 20, Jesus entered a house and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat. So it is just packed full and they can't even eat.

Verse 21, when his family heard this, they set out to restrain him because they said, he's out of his mind. The scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said, he is possessed by Beelzebul. He drives out demons by the ruler of the demons.

So here there is strong disbelief in who Jesus is and what he's doing both from family, those that should have been closest to him, and hear from the scribes that are attributing all of his works to the demonic.

Verse 23, so he summoned them and spoke to them in parables. That is a earthly story with a heavenly meaning. He says, how can Satan drive out Satan?

So Satan is, it's not necessarily a proper name. The phrase is the accuser. So the word devil, diabolos in Greek is the slanderer.

So most of the time when we talk about, kind of this ruler of the demons, we think Satan or the devil is kind of a proper name, but it's the slanderer or the accuser. It's kind of in court, court talk. This would be the prosecutor.

It's the one that brings the case against the defendant. And that's how God talks about this particular spiritual being, that he brings cases against God's people, as he did with Job.

As Romans 8 says that he wants to do with us, who shall bring anything to the charge of God's elect? And in Revelation 12 where it says the accuser of the brethren, the one who accused us before our God night and day has been cast down.

So this is him. He says, how can Satan, how can the accuser drive out the accuser? He says, if a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

If a house is divided against itself, a family, that house cannot stand. There are a quote that Abraham Lincoln quoted in regards to the Civil War and something that's often attributed to him, but originally comes here from Jesus.

He says, and if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is finished. He says, if Satan is fighting against Satan, then he's powerless.

He says, but no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man, then he can plunder his house. He says, I am not doing this by the power of Satan.

He says, I'm going in and I am binding the works of Satan and I'm taking all of his stuff. The people that he has captured through his demons, he says, I am setting them free. I'm tying up the demons and I'm casting them out.

Verse number 28, truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for all sins and whatever blasphemies they utter. He says, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.

Because they were saying he has an unclean spirit. Here, this is someone that refuses to listen to the voice of God. You can't, to persist in that sin is the unforgivable sin.

To say this is not the work or words of God, I do not believe it. As long as you persist in that, you can never have forgiveness. Okay, why would that be?

If you persist in saying, I don't believe God, you cannot at the same time say, I repent of that sin, I'm turning from that sin and I need forgiveness.

As long as you believe that you do not need to listen to Jesus, you don't need to listen to the word of God, then you can't receive forgiveness because you wouldn't seek it from Jesus.

And so here he's saying, if you don't believe me, if you don't turn to me, you can't experience forgiveness. It's through me and through no one else. So first his family had said, okay, we're gonna restrain him, he's crazy.

The scribes say he has a devil. He deals with the scribes and now he's dealing with his family. Verse 31, his mother and his brothers came and standing outside, they sent word to him and called him.

A crowd was sitting around him and told him, look, your mother, your brothers and your sisters are outside asking for you. Verse 33, he replied to them, who are my mother and my brothers?

Looking at those sitting in a circle around him, he said, here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.

Man, Jesus here says, there is these people that are unbelieving, they're not really my family. He says, you people that care about the word of God, you are my family members.

What an incredible thought that we can become the family of God through belief in Jesus.

That we, I think even for those of us that are gentiles, that are not Jewish, those that have no familial relationship to Christ, perhaps by blood, that he has adopted us as his family.

And there, I think it's so interesting that he says, the one that follows and does the will of God, that here's my voice, this is my brother and my sister and my mother.

There are a few kind of faith traditions under the guise of Christianity that sometimes exalt Mary to a position that scripture doesn't, even in such a way that she would receive prayers or be viewed as perpetually holy, just like Jesus was holy.

And that is incorrect. Even as we read here in this passage, we see here Mary and her with her children trying to stop the work of Jesus.

And it's not quite in the same way that the scribes do where they attribute it to Satan, but here Mary and her kids, they attribute Jesus' works and actions and words to insanity. And that is not a holy or a righteous thing. That is a bad thing.

So here Jesus says, hey, you want to know who my real family members are? It's not just those that are related to me, my blood. It's those that are in the family of God.

And as we would read later throughout the New Testament, we see Mary come around. We see James and Jude, it would be Jacob and Judah, Jesus' brothers that would come to believe in him.

James would become one of kind of the lead pastors, overseers, elders of the church at Jerusalem. And both him and Judah would write two of the books of the New Testament.

James, the letter of James and Judah, the letter of Jude right there at the end of the New Testament. So we can see that they come around to believe in Christ.

But at this moment, Jesus says, my real family is not just the people that I'm related to by blood. My real family are those that love God.

I wanna encourage you, have that mindset with your relationships that the people that you ought to be closest to in this world are not just your family members, but your family members in Christ, those believers in your local church or maybe a close

friend that is a believer in the Lord. Place an importance on those relationships because those relationships are the ones that will sustain you even sometimes when family that doesn't know the Lord, when they want to pull you away from perhaps

regularly attending church, when they want to pull you away from following Jesus, having an importance that says, no, I can't abandon my spiritual family. And if I have to choose between my spiritual family and my physical family, I'm gonna follow

Jesus and go with my spiritual family. And may we have an appreciation for our spiritual brothers and sisters that we all have the same heavenly father through the work of Jesus, that we are Jesus' brothers and sisters, as Hebrews 2 would also tell

us. Let's have an importance on our spiritual family, care for them, spend time with them, love them, do things with them, do activities with them, do outreach with them. So today, what are some takeaway thoughts? Jesus cared about people.

He even did some things to magnify his voice so that more people could hear about him. He had a care to realize what he could and couldn't do. It's why he got into the boat, because he knew if I stay on the land, I'm gonna get crushed.

And sometimes we need a little separation. We need a little, I hesitate to use the phrase me time, but sometimes we need to recognize our limitations and adjust accordingly. Jesus wants people to be with him.

He wants people to preach, to declare, to send out the gospel. He's given us his authority. Jesus was one.

He tells us to listen to God. And if we don't listen to God, we can't say that we are religious, we are holy, we have to listen and obey the voice of God. And our truest relationships are our spiritual family, those that follow the Lord.

And in a choice between the two, we ought to choose our spiritual family because that's who Jesus chose. And that can even motivate our physical family to go, man, there's something so different, so unique about the relationship of the family of God.

So thanks for tuning in. Tomorrow, we're gonna look at some parables, some earthly stories with heavenly meanings in chapter four.