Marveling at Unbelief

We are continuing in our series Kingdom Come, the Gospel of Mark and the secrets of God's Kingdom. And today we're landing in more of the secrets of how God functions in saving people and how God matures His servants. And in fact, He shows us through the model of the way that he constructed Christ's life. And so without further ado, I'm going to start reading our passage from today. It is from Mark Chapter Six verses one through six. Mark Chapter Six, verses one through six. And this is a good Thanksgiving passage. We're talking about a homecoming. We're talking about the ordinariness of Christ, something that we sing praises about at Christmastime, the simplicity of his life and the Lord will use it as a good segue to our Christmas season. Would you please hear the preaching of God's Word.

"He went away from there and came to His hometown and His disciples followed him. And on Sabbath He began to teach in the synagogue. And many who heard him were astonished saying, "Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to Him? How are such mighty works done by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household." And He could do no mighty work there except that he laid His hands on a few people and healed them. And He marveled because of their unbelief. And He went about among the village's teaching." This is the word of our Lord. Let me pray.

Heavenly Father, we praise you this day for your word. We thank you for assembling your saints here today. We thank you Lord for giving us your word so that we are not people who are clamoring about, walking in darkness. We thank you for your revelation of yourself to us in the life of Jesus Christ. And now in just the opening of His word, we ask, Lord that you prime our hearts to receive what you would have us hear today and let us receive with belief. We pray that our hearts would be good soil to hear your word so that we would believe it and be faithful servants in your kingdom as we go forth from this week, this day. In Jesus name I pray, amen.

Well, I've learned over the years about myself that I like to learn by learning on the positive side of things. I like to be told what to do and to believe a little bit more than being told what not to do and what not to believe. But as I've gotten older, hopefully as a mark of wisdom, I've learned that those lessons that talk just as much about what not to do, what not to believe are just as valuable as those positive lessons, the positive wisdom. And today is a lesson from scripture, a text that teaches us in the negative manner. Last week, the last couple of weeks, we've talked about profound miracles and faith. And chapter five of Mark where we were the past couple of weeks might be labeled as the triumph of faith. So we talked last week a lot about the triumph of faith. Jesus healed a man and who was possessed by a legion of demons. And what does Jesus do when he sees who Jesus is properly, he sees him as the Christ, the Messiah. The Lord tells him to go and spread his faith, tell others about what the Lord has done for him and how he has saved him. Furthermore, Jesus learns of the faith of a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years and He heals her and he says, "Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease." Furthermore, in chapter five, when Jairus, a father with a sick dying daughter comes to him and pleads with him to go and heal her, Jesus says, "Do not fear. Only believe." And he does, and he saves Jairus's daughter. He actually raises her from the dead.

And so Jesus in Chapter Five, encounters faith in people. He encourages them to have it. And today, as I said, we're learning more in the negative. What do we encounter in chapter six of Mark? We encounter unbelief and in profound ways. In verse 6:6, we come across Jesus doing something that the scriptures do not capture Him doing often. Verse six says, "He marveled. The man who cast out a legion of demons, who healed a woman who was bleeding for 12 years, who raised the life of a dead child, marveled." This is only one of two areas in all the scriptures where Jesus marveled, He was amazed, He was awestruck. Here and in Matthew 8:10. In Matthew 8:10, He marvels at the extraordinary faith of the centurion who asks him to only say the word so that his servant lying at home away from him would be healed. And Jesus does. He marvels over the man's faith, the centurion's faith. But here in chapter six, Jesus marvels at the unbelief of the people of Nazareth. Verse six says, "And He marveled because of their unbelief."

Furthermore, in chapter six, not in our scripture today, but later on, we encounter a profound example of unbelief in the life of Herod. Verse 14 of chapter 6 mentions that Jesus' name had spread to the courts of King Herod. King Herod heard of it, heard of Jesus and his teaching and his proclamation that the Kingdom of God was at hand for Jesus' name had become known, the ruler of the land of Israel knew about Jesus. But verse 20, he tells us, "For Herod feared John knowing that he was a righteous." John is John the Baptist, baptizer. "Knowing that he was a holy and righteous man and he kept him safe. When he heard him," heard John preach. "He was greatly perplexed and yet he heard him gladly." But what we learned is that though Herod liked to hear John preach, it stimulated his intellect. In Acts 12:20 to 23, we hear of his gruesome death and he stands as an example of what unbelief can lead to for all of us.

And so today it is a sermon with a lot of gravity. We're not celebrating a happy homecoming. Jesus didn't go home and have a joyful Thanksgiving. This is a sad story. The people closest to Jesus, the people he spent his adolescence and young adulthood with reject him. But as I said, there's much to learn in this negative teaching, this text told us to not be like the people of Nazareth. And in many ways, our job is to make sure as Christians that we don't repeat the same mistakes and practice such unbelief.

So I'm going to break the sermon up into two sections, the ordinariness of Nazareth's unbelief and the second one, the extraordinariness of Christ's ordinariness, the ordinariness of Nazareth's unbelief. As I meditate upon our texts here in the first section, I'm going to bring out the characteristics of unbelief. Unbelief is a topic that we typically avoid, but it's really good to understand it, to be able to identify it. And when I speak about this, I don't want you to be thinking about all the people out there, all the people sitting around you, maybe a brother, sister in the church who you know is struggling. First and foremost, I want you to check your own heart to be listening, to hear if you have any signs of unbelief, if you are showing the tendencies of unbelief. And so as we discover unbelief, we'll talk about the fact of it, the tendencies of it, the nature of it, the consequences of it as we discuss the ordinariness of Nazareth's belief.

So firstly, I emphasize the fact of unbelief. Nazareth's unbelief is something that Christ disciples will encounter regularly in their ministry. And as I said, this is not your average homecoming for Jesus and his disciples. We read in verse one, "He went away from there and came to his hometown and His disciples followed Him." And so what we find out today is that Jesus, He goes to His hometown, He's bringing his disciples, and this is a business trip. He's been back to Nazareth before a year or so ago, and He goes back to Nazareth. That time He was by himself. This time it's with His disciples and what's he doing? Last time He was at Nazareth, this was the start of His ministry. And Luke Four chronicles this and he basically goes to the synagogue and He reads a passage from Isaiah that talks about the arrival of the Messiah, the arrival of the Kingdom of God. And he says, "On this day the scripture has been fulfilled."

And what do the people do? His hometown, they rejected Him then and then they take him up to the highest point in town and threaten to push Him off the cliff for his blasphemy. But now He comes back a year later after gathering a group of disciples and he comes back after developing this reputation in the land. And so first and foremost, this is a lesson, what Jesus is going through with His disciples through this experience is a lesson about discipleship. It's a lesson for them that He's preparing them for the time when He's not with them. He's given them a dose of reality for what they're going to experience as they serve Him after his death, resurrection and ascension. And I emphasize this first point, the ordinariness of Nazareth's unbelief. I emphasize that with the subpoint of the fact of unbelief because Jesus shows his disciples that a clear and authoritative proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ will not always be met with acceptance and joyful welcome in the hearts of an audience.

In fact, we should be more liable to expect that we will encounter more unbelief than we do belief. In the Book of the prophet Isaiah in chapter 53:1 the prophet writes, "Who has believed what He has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" And these are written as rhetorical questions with the implication that not many. When the arm of the Lord, when Jesus walks the earth, not many hear Him. Not many people heard God's Word and believed it and obeyed in Isaiah's day and not many when Jesus walked the earth. And so Jesus is, by talking about the fact of unbelief, He's trying to get them ready. You are going to encounter this and you need to be prepared. And I lead with this point because if you read the Gospel of Mark up to this point, it's almost as if you're reading a Marvel comic book.

Jesus is this superhero where town after town, He's preaching the truth. He's destroying his enemies in debates, He's healing, He's showing limitless extent of his authority and power. And now this is just an oddity, this point in Mark Six where he goes to His hometown of all places and it says, "He could do no mighty work there." And why? Because of their unbelief. So we as disciples today need to expect that unbelief is something that we are going to encounter often. A lot of churches don't really prep people in their body for this. They tell people, evangelize, evangelize, evangelize, share the gospel.

But they don't really prepare them for the challenges of unbelief. They don't prepare them for the tendencies of it, the way it expresses themself and talk about the seriousness of it. And so a lot of Christians, when they are saved, they're excited. They want to tell people, "God has saved me, he has forgiven me of my sin in Jesus Christ." And they cannot help but speak and share it and tell other people in their life, in their circles on the street of the great grace and mercy that God has shown them. But they have one or two experiences where this doesn't go as planned. They're rejected or met with coldness, hardheartedness attack, attack of them, and they go into being incognito Christians like Secret Service Christians hiding from the world and never or rarely sharing the gospel again.

And so today, I just emphasize this first point, we can't be surprised by unbelief. We're going to face it over and over again in this life. And in fact, we need to see that when we face it. It's not just ... Of course it's sad, we want everybody to believe the gospel, but it's a confirmation that we're doing something right. Christ himself came and he preached the word mightily and clearly and yes praised God, some believed Him, but He also was rejected. It's an affirmation that we're doing something right. If we tell people about God and we're always getting people believing, then that's an indicator that there might be something that isn't faithful with the message that we're sharing and we really need to assess if that's real fruit coming in through our ministry.

But we need to expect that the ordinariness of Nazareth's unbelief, it's extraordinary at this point in the course of Mark, but Jesus for his disciples has shown this is a reality you're going to face regularly going forward. And going forward, I want to talk about the tendency of unbelief. We need to realize the fact of unbelief, but we need to see the common tendencies of it. One of the things, the primary thing that unbelief does is it has a tendency to disguise itself by transferring its object of attention to something else away from the real stumbling block of Jesus Christ.

And so we see here in verses two and three, the people of Nazareth, they practice this. Verse two says, "And on the Sabbath." And just little side note in other towns in Capernaum where Jesus was prior to this, before His disciples, he couldn't go anywhere without crowds gathering in His way, just stopping him in His path and forcing him to preach and perform miracles. He couldn't get a break, but now He enters into his hometown and nobody's welcomed him. He has to wait for the Sabbath to preach. "And on the Sabbath, He began to teach in the synagogue and many who heard him were astonished."

So the people who we know will show extreme unbelief, they actually are amazed at Jesus's teaching. He opens up the word like nobody else they ever heard. Every time Jesus preaches, it's a home run. Imagine a preacher having that kind of preacher show up, but how do they respond? They say, "where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon and are not his sisters here with us?" This is a deflection. It's a deflection from the central message that Jesus brought to them. The people respond to Jesus teaching by directing their attention to his ordinariness, the ordinariness of the speaker. They do this in order to hide the fact that it's the message of the gospel that their hearts were hardened against.

And anyone here, anybody who's been Christian for a while and has faithfully shared the gospel, know the tendency of people to do this. People will talk about anything and go for hours and avoid the central message of the gospel. They'll avoid the elements of it that offend them, the elements of it that call them to belief, call them to repentance, and we need to be ready for it. Again, we can't be surprised by this. When we share the gospel, we should expect to face this sort of dodging. And furthermore, we should expect to face that they will attack us. One of the greatest ways they just look at Jesus, "Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this the son of Mary? Aren't his brothers and sisters here in town? Who is this guy? Who is he to call us to repentance before Him as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? He's just an average guy, an ordinary Joe. He's cheese pizza. We shouldn't listen to him." And they poke. They poke at Jesus. They start pointing at his deficiencies according to earthly standards.

And we as Christians, we should expect this. How far did Jesus's opponents go in His life to doing this? They sent Him, they attacked the person to the point of sending him to the cross, leading to His crucifixion and for His servants, we are no greater than our master. We are going to get the same treatment. But one thing, just when this happens, when there's this tendency for people to start questioning our character, questioning our delivery of the gospel, our maybe not so refined delivery of it, though it is full of the truth, we just have to remember the gospel ourselves in that moment.

We can have security to stand before people in our weakness while proclaiming the gospel because what does the gospel say? Our identity is not built upon any good works that we've done. Our identity is not built on the sin that we've committed, the rebellion against God, the guilt and shame that marks our lives. The gospel is that when a person turns in faith, turns from their sin and turns in faith to Jesus, God applies Christ's perfect and righteous record to your account and He applies your sinful, imperfect, prideful record to Jesus. And that's what the transaction that happened on the cross and it's applied to us by faith. And when we are attacked by the world, we can't take those attacks by heart. They're predictable and we have an identity that is rooted in the rock of Jesus Christ.

So we need to be steadfast in these moments when we face these tendencies and we need to redirect people lovingly, kindly, gently to the central question of belief and that is the message of the scriptures of the gospel, God's rescue plan for man and his sin that marks the whole book after Genesis Three, the fall of man. And so we need to anticipate this tendency. Unbelief is always distracting from the heart of the gospel and distract them from the fact that it's really the gospel that is offensive to a person. And so as we discuss the ordinariness Nazareth's belief, next I want to talk about the nature of unbelief. This is something that really needs to be made clear. The reason Jesus marvels at unbelief here in these verses is because it's one of the evidences of the power of sin in man's life. That's the great reason behind marveling at it.

Here in the world upon God's creation, Jesus, the begotten Son of God who took on flesh is seeing firsthand the outworking of the fruit of sin in the lives of men and women that He knows and loves. Men and women who should have known the story of his mom's birth. And we get the understand it's not this Mary's son. In that day you would've never appealed to someone by their mom's name. It would be their father's and they're appealing. They have knowledge that he was born into a unique situation, whether maybe they're implying promiscuous or it was actually a miraculous birth. These people who would've known the story of his birth, who would've thought deeply about Him and His childhood. Have you ever seen a perfect child? If Jesus was in this community for 28, 29 years, a perfect child would really stand out in a community of 500 people and they would've seen him when they engaged with him as a carpenter, an honest tradesman who doesn't raise the prices. This guy would've had a righteous standing before Him.

And these people who would've known Him better than anybody else who walked the earth, they hear His teaching, they hear of testimonies of his miracles in the nearby lens and He does actually heal a few people upon this visit. These people reject him and it shakes Him. And this is why He shudders an agony at unbelief when He faces death later on with his friend Lazareth, He faces the reality of sin and its impact and He marvels, He shudders, He weeps at it. And so unbelief is not something that Jesus engaged casually. It's not something that we should engage casually. What I'm trying to get us to is unbelief. It's really important in a city like ours with lots of just bright people, driven people, motivated people, unbelief it's not just a weakness of one of our friends who's really intelligent. The ultimate key to unbelief doesn't lie in the mind. It lies in the realm of the moral nature of the will of man. That's where unbelief finds its home.

In our text today, the people in their response, they try to deflect from their unbelief. They try to show themselves as not gullible. "Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of men and women that we know? We're not going to be tricked by Him. Jesus, you were just one of us. You didn't get the proper education that a rabbi should get. This message sounds too good to be true. We're not going to believe you Jesus. You're not just one of us." And so unbelief in the Bible, it arises from first and foremost a hard, evil heart of unbelief, not a lack of truthfulness or sufficient appeal to the intellect. We need to understand that.

And that's a lot of conversations, apologetic conversations, sharing the gospel conversations, they devolve into these long conversations about minutia, details of scripture away from the heart of the gospel that calls people to repentance and faith in Christ. And we need to treat it seriously, not let people trivialize it. Well, unbelief is one of the ways, it's described in scripture is in essence it's calling God a liar. Where every find our hearts are still an unbelief. We're calling God a liar.

First John 1:5 to 10 says, "This is the message we've heard from Him and proclaimed to you. That God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar. And His word is not in us."

Anybody who denies that they were created by God and His image and have rebelled against Him and do not have right standing before Him is saying, "God is a liar for telling me this, for proclaiming this, for sending His son into the world to proclaim this and be the means of reconciliation between me and Him." We need to be honest with ourselves as we process this. We need to be honest with the people with whom we share the gospel about the nature of unbelief. Unbelief, it's of a moral nature. It is rebellion against Christ's rule and reign of creation of our hearts. And so this isn't to say that they're not intellectual problems, they're not hard questions to take up with scripture, but what I want to say is that the heart of unbelief lies not in the mind but in the moral nature and the will of man. And we need to keep people to think in that area when we engage unbelief.

Jesus further elaborates on this in John 16: 8 to 9. He says that, "When the Holy Spirit comes, when He comes, He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment concerning sin because they do not believe in me." It's a moral unbelief, it's a moral problem, not an intellectual problem. And we see this further in Mark 6 as we'll talk a little bit more about Herod next week. Herod's a perfect example of this. He loved to hear John the Baptist teach. This guy who was a prisoner in his castle or fort or property. He wants him to come up and preach to him.

So he heard the good news of Jesus' coming, of the King's arrival, about how John said, "He must increase, I must decrease." But Herod had all the facts. He knew everything and he did not believe the message and so therefore ... And why? What's behind that? Herod didn't want to change his behavior. He knew that the message that Jesus Christ was the Lord, that he had a call on his life, that to believe in Him and to obey Him would mean that he has to change, he has to repent and submit to Christ and His ways. And that's behind a lot of unbelief. The nature, it's moral rebellion. We just don't want to honor God with our lives. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it. And how many of you know that? I know that that was me before I was Christian.

When I grew up in the church, in eighth grade, I wrote at the end of confirmation class, it was a 100 word essay, which is like that was frighteningly intimidating at that point. And I wrote it. I was like, "I think I'm saved because God offers me a great deal here. I sin and Jesus takes the punishment. I get eternal life. I get the power of his spirit in me and it's just a good deal. I'll take it." I intellectually understood that in eighth grade and I was amazed that the pastor of 15 kids was quoting my 100 word essay for a sermon. But I was not saved until I was 23. I was not born again until I really saw that I needed to repent of my sin and give Christ the lordship over my life. I didn't have freedom from the guilt and shame of sin until I did that. I did not walk in the Lord's power and the power of the Holy Spirit until that point. And the nature of unbelief is that we need to repent of that mindset. And this goes for Christians too.

We hesitate to give Christ lordship in specific areas of our lives. A lot of people talk about anxiety as if it's like a friend in their life, as if Jesus doesn't have anything to say about anxiety. He has a whole lot to say. Jesus, we've struggled to give Jesus our finances to steward them for His glory, for His kingdom. We've struggle to give Jesus over our plans for our singleness, plans for our marriage plans, for our career, and the Lord calls us to and we just go on justifying sin, justifying unrepentance. And it isn't just neutral intellectual protest,. It's a rebellious act in which we dethrone in Jesus as Lord of our lives and we call God a liar. So we need to constantly ask ourselves if we're struggling with unbelief to identify that we ask how do we respond to the Word of God? Do we hear with gladness and let it and I just hear it and say, "Well, good talk, good speech. That's clever?"

Or do we hear with gladness, let it take root in our hearts and lives as the powerful of the sower discussed earlier in Mark? Do we have good soil or are we resisting it? Are we holding onto it until we have a problem believing it and applying it into our own life? To close out our discussion of the ordinariness of Nazareth's unbelief, I lastly want to discuss the consequences of unbelief. And this is building off of the last point. When we don't believe, there are great consequences. This is covered in verse five, and the scripture says, "And He could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them." The emphasis here isn't on Jesus's inability. We've seen the extent of his power and authority over nature, over sickness, over death itself. He can function in any way that He wants that is consistent with His holy character.

But the focus here is not on Jesus's inability but on Nazareth's foolishness, on the way that the city robbed itself of receiving more grace and power of the work of Jesus among them. This shows us that there is no greater enemy than to the work of God than unbelief. It causes God to turn away without revealing himself with further grace and power. And when you really take this in, there's something really scary about it. And if you're feeling like this is heavy, there's a lot of weight to the sermon so far, you should. I was feeling it all week as I was meditating on this.

It's scary to think about what happens when God turns away from a place, turns away from a people, turns away from you. Mark 6:11 helps us understand this a little bit more. Jesus gives counsel to his disciples for how they should respond when He sends them out and they are not received with belief. Verse 11 says, "And if any place will not receive you, and they'll not listen to you when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." So Jesus in this situation, what we see after Mark Six is that Nazareth does not believe Him, His hometown, and He turns His back on them. They know they know His Word, they know who He is, they know how they should respond to it, and he walks on them.

Further, Mark 6:11, He tells his disciples that when they're not received with belief to shake the dust off their feet and leave a land. This is a reference to what Jews would've done when they left a gentile, pagan, non-believing land to go back to Israel to the Holy Land. This act would symbolize the shaking off of the defilement that could have got on them in the non-believing land and more importantly, serve as a called to the judgment of God upon that land end. So we need to see there's grave consequences to unbelief. We need to see that the Lord, the gospel not only has a saving effect where it meets true faith, but that it has a judging effect where it meets unbelief. It is the proclamation of the gospel that both exposes and judges unbelief.

And I love this passage in scripture that talks about for someone, the life of Christ you are called. You're not just saved. You're not just given the power of the spirit. You're called into God's profound work to spread His rule and reign on the earth, to go back to the initial mission of being fruitful and multiplying for His glory. And you are given a power and your life is a triumphant possession. You are the victor and God has given you power as a steward of the gospel. And in that power, people are going to receive you with joy and gladness when they hear the gospel and they receive it and repent and obey God. And to others, you're going to have a stench. That power goes out and being a means of judgment to those who hear the gospel and do not receive it.

And this is pretty intense, but this is what the scripture says. When we share the gospel, we have to understand the responsibility that we are given. We need to stay faithful to it and we have to just keep people at the center, keep people at the central focus. We need to try to get people to honestly assess, do they believe God's Word? Do they believe He has a call in their life? He is creator, they're created. The greatest position of experience of peace, love, joy is to be reconciled to Him through Jesus Christ. We need to keep people there given the consequences.

So now after this solemn discussion of unbelief, one can only wonder how to respond to unbelief when we face it and to get the right answer, we look at how Jesus reacted to it. Look at verse six. It says, "And He marveled because of their unbelief and He went about among the villages teaching." That last part. "And He went about among the villages teaching." How do we respond to unbelief? We keep going. We keep sharing the gospel and leading a life worthy of a child of God. This is what Jesus did and we have to revel over the fact that Jesus kept going when it was really difficult.

Verse four says, "And Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household." Jesus's marveling would have been filled with grievous pain. Of all the people in the world who should have believed in Him, those in His hometown, his own relatives, His own household should have believed Him, but they don't. Do you know what it's like to be rejected in your own household? My wife, when she does not joyfully receive me for five minutes, I'm a broken man and that's two become one. You do become one another and there's something good about feeling that pain, but we have to make sure we don't make idols out of our spouses and their adoration.

But Jesus was rejected by His household and He did nothing. I sin, I say foolish things to my wife, to my family members. Jesus never did that. They had no reason to reject him. Can you imagine the pain He felt when people who He lived with for almost 30 years rejected him, a town of 500 residents? I'm from a town of 17,000 people and you kind of know everybody 5 years above you, 5 years below you who went and did something significant in the world. Jesus is from a town of 500 people. He should have been their poster boy, they should have been seeing how lucky they were to have Him be known as Jesus of Nazareth, put their town on the map, but they reject Him. Imagine that pain.

But how does Jesus respond? He keeps going. He knew that in his walk facing unbelief would be a fact. It would be an ordinary thing. And he says, and what does he do? He continues his primary task. He went about the villages teaching, trying to save others. He's preaching the word for His first task, telling them that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and we need to do the same, and we do it because Jesus did. But we also as we talk about this, it should remind you already about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In Mark 3:26 to 29, we read and he said, "The Kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day and the seed sprouts and grows. He knows not hell. The earth produces by itself first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe at once he puts in the sickle because of the harvest that's come."

And this is saying that to a degree God has ordained that His kingdom functions this way. What are his servants to do? They're to continue to scatter seed by preaching the gospel whether they are received with gladness and belief or whether they're rejected. And that's the call of all Christians. Regardless of the reception we have, we're called the faithfulness to this task and we submit to the Lord's way of building His kingdom. And this, when you share the gospel, sometimes you feel really foolish. When you are humbled by the grace of God and know your weakness more and more you say, who am I to send this? But it's maintaining that proper heart and keeping to the task that the Lord uses to save people and we keep going whether He lets us live in the day of profound harvest, of salvation of many souls or not, and we're just following the path of Christ himself.

So I've spoken a lot about this topic of unbelief. I hope that you do understand the fact of it, the tendencies, the nature, the consequences, but this passage does offer a whole lot more. One of the reasons Jesus was able to face such unbelief and keep going was because he knew the fact that He would face it. However, Jesus could face such unbelief and stay faithful in ministry because of His faith in his father's chosen plan to develop Him and grow Him as a disciple. And this is a discussion of the extraordinariness of Christ's ordinariness. In our passage today, we see that one of the reasons the people of Nazareth showed such unbelief is because they rejected Jesus for His loneliness and poverty. They say, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of these men and women that we know." They're saying, "His ministry is presumptuous. Who is he to preach to us in this way? Tell us what to do. What did you do? Go and hide in a cave and learn all these teachings."

What are they saying here? They're wrestling with tension of there's a tension between what they hear and learn from him and in all of its magnificence and glory, and what they see when they look at Him, they see an ordinary guy. You see in the minds of the minds people of Nazareth, a person in order to be listened to and heeded as a prophet of God must have gone to school to study and obtain a degree. They should have studied under the best rabbis of the day, God and formal teaching. But Jesus though, astonishing, He does not have that background and they reject him for that. They were offended at him. They're scandalized, they are revolted and they want nothing to do with Him for disobeying these manmade rules, these prejudices that they have over how their faith tradition should be stewarded regardless of what it says, how it weighs against the scripture, they disqualify his ministry. They're offended that such a man with such a background could teach them with such wisdom and power.

And even though the facts say that, wow, this guy's teaching is like no other. This guy performs miracles like no other. If they studied the scriptures, they should have been inclined with all the knowledge they had of Him to say maybe this is the Christ the Messiah, but instead they're revolted by Him. And so the world, it revolts against Christ's ordinariness and the people of Nazareth do that and people still do that today. Christianity is too simple. The gospel's too simple. Christians themselves are too simple. It's been the case throughout all of history.

One a great story from the Old Testament is about Syrian general called Naaman. He is essentially, Syria is the powerhouse, the force, the nation, strongest nation of the day, but he has leprosy and he's their strongest general and he wants to be healed. He hears about this prophet, this power in Israel who has his power in Israel. And he goes, where does he go first? He goes to the king's courts to find his healing. The world always thinks that the extraordinary must do extraordinary, be extraordinary by their sins and he goes to the King, the King says, "Why are you here? I don't have any authority to help you here. I can't heal you."

Then he says, go to Elisha, the prophet, and he takes his horses, he takes his royal chariot and he goes to Elisha and Elisha sends out his servant. Elisha doesn't even greet him and Naaman is offended. The servant tells him, "Go to the water, jump in the Jordan and you'll be healed." And Naaman's revolted at that. He says, "Why didn't I go just jump in the mighty waters in Assyria to get healing if this is what you are offering me?" The world is revolted at the ordinary of Jesus and Christianity, but we need to actually see the extraordinariness of Christ's ordinariness. Our Lord doesn't look at life in the same way as us. What's important to man is not important to God. How could Jesus face such unbelief in his ministry? How did he have the character to not lash out when crowds willfully dishonored Him? The answer is that our Heavenly Father believed that it was the best possible education, occupation for his begotten son before His public ministry to be a carpenter.

Jesus was 30 when his ministry started, but all the time from His early teenage years until the point of the start of ministry, He did the lowly work of a carpenter and He probably did some stone mason rework. That's what the text gets us to see here. That's why the crowd was offended at him. God has his ways of raising up His disciples to do the work of the ministry often against the standards of the world. And we need to be able to appreciate that. God's ways are different than what you and I would ever conceive. And if they were limited to what you and I conceive, would He really be a God that we can worship? And when we project expectations onto God and we say scripture doesn't align with them, we're really just forming a God in our own image. We're breaking the first commandment of practicing idolatry, but God is different.

Isaiah 55:8 says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways," declares the Lord." We should revel in the fact that God's ways are greater than ours. When I know my prejudices, my biases, my preferences, my tendencies, I praise God that I'm not God because I know that I would just destroy people who are different than me. How many times have we seen people of power do that? Just rid the world, cancel the world, be revolted like the people of Nazareth are at those who are not like them and do not meet their standards. But you see, God is different. The object of Christian life when you're saved, it's to be more like Jesus, to grow in the character of Jesus and to tell other people about salvation they can have in Jesus. And so once saved, God starts to do new and good work on you. The object is no longer to impress people with our own strengths and wisdom, but to become like Jesus and pray that He would use us as much as He wills, use us profoundly in our weakness for His glory.

And God to prepare Jesus for such work, what did He do? He didn't want His son to go to the Jewish seminaries of the day. He had another school in mind and that was being a carpenter. Philippians 2:5 to 8 describes the way that God trained up Christ for the task ahead of Him. Have this mind in 5 through 11. "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus who though he was in the form of a God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. But emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

I know a lot of you have read this, we return to this passage a lot because it is gold, but what I want you to take away today is have this mind among yourselves. We're supposed to have the mindset of Christ, the humble, the lowly mindset, the faith to believe that God the Father, can use the most trying and challenge of circumstances to save us and to raise us up, to grow our character, to prepare us for greater ministry.

Verse seven, like Christ, we're to empty ourselves, make ourselves some translators say, "Make ourselves of no reputation." Jesus deliberately excluded himself from positioning himself to be of any reputable status before the world. Even going as far as being willing to take on death on the cross to fulfill his calling. Jesus didn't position himself to be great in the eyes of men with His life. He was great by humbling himself and becoming obedient to the point of death on the cross. While the world shames and rejects Him for this, and Jesus was the cornerstone that the Jews stumbled over. They could not believe in a God man, a messiah whose primary mark on this earth was going to the cross, the world rejection for this. We need to praise Him for this.

God the Father knew that the best way for Jesus to have the mindset to carry out His task was to be a carpenter in a place of obscurity, a place of humility in a family without reputation or money. Jesus obeyed the Father. He deliberately chose obscurity in the eyes of men. And throughout His ministry, we see him especially multiple times in Mark to this point, even as ministry is launching, He intentionally tells people not to tell of His mighty works so that He doesn't get popular in the eyes of men according to the standards of men. He doesn't want to draw a following around those things. He wants to draw a following around people who worship Him as Lord and Savior.

And so if we follow Christ, we need to have this mindset. We need to see that all the pain of being the carpenter and Nazareth and facing this rejection from a tiny town. It was preliminary training for Jesus's crucifixion on the wood of the cross as well as rejection from his brothers, the Jews in Jerusalem. Jesus worked with wood, but one day he would be worked upon wood and he had the strength of character and the spirit of God to carry out and endure His task because of His training, God's training program in Nazareth. In His human nature, Christ faced experience that gave him a growing obedience to the Father. And as I talk about the way God, the extraordinariness of Christ's ordinariness, how God used it all to form Jesus, to shape Him for the work that he had for Him. We need to see that this isn't something that seminary offers. This isn't something that's sitting in holy huddles and small circles doing Bible study, filling yourselves with knowledge can accomplish, can teach you.

Seminary and Bible study, of course, we love scripture. I'm taking you to a really hard scripture today, the day after Thanksgiving because that's what the Lord brought us to. That's what the Bible says. We love scripture. But you can fill your head with knowledge through seminary, through bible study, through formalized discipleship programs, but it can leave you lacking in the ability to obey your heavenly Father in the face of hardship. That takes discipline, that takes hard work. It involves the development of pain tolerance, and you see, when you face hardship and the ordinary of things of life, when you're dealing with a stubborn roommate or spouse or boss, facing crazy and rebellious children, being put to the test in the face of unbelief and persecution, you can't just get the good book out and pause every time in the moment. You have to have the ability to fellowship with your heavenly Father in the moment, abide in the moment, rely upon His spirit to give you the wisdom, give you the power to handle that moment faithfully.

This is what Jesus learned in his upbringing and of course he knew a lot of scripture and was quoting a lot of scripture. We want to have our hearts and words saturated with it, but we need to know how to act out our faith as he did in the moment. Jesus learned how to wisely while facing challenges as a carpenter in a household with many unbelieving family members. He learned how to not proudly put himself forward in religious debates. He learned how to respond to rejection, disappointment with grace. He learned how to do good work, careful work, wise work for the glory of God and not himself. He lived for the glory of God in all situations as all of us are called to.

And these lessons are just being able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary in our day-to-day lives. This is some of the most important wisdom that any Christian can have. I mean, it just unlocks life. We read of God. He is sovereign. Jesus Christ, He has ascended to the throne of God and at his right hand of the Father, He is in control of all things. And so all circumstances we face, He has ordained them by his providence and we need to trust and His goodness. That doesn't mean we don't stand up for righteousness's sake in the face of sin and injustice. It doesn't mean that we become doormats in this life. We stand on the truth. We speak the truth in love, but we as Christians, we need to trust in His plan in every moment. And we need to see that oftentimes Christianity is lived out and worked out in the ordinary.

This is important for all Christians, all people, but especially young people in Boston because so many people come to the city and they take up Christianity like any other field or trade or profession, thinking that it's something to be studied, something to be mastered through work, through effort, you reap greater benefits, through study, you ascend to higher levels of knowledge and enlightenment. It's not the same.

When I became a Christian, I associated Christianity with adrenaline that I got while doing things that I was good at. You hear the word flow, the experience of flow. You feel like you're in the zone and you can go for hours and you feel unstoppable and your whole system is working in coordination with your mind. And no. Much of Christianity is going forward while your body and flesh is resisting because Jesus Christ hasn't come back to give us a new regenerated perfect body. You are called to walk forward in faithfulness and it's hard. Your body resists, your mind resists while the soul keeps going forward. And we as Bostonites, we need to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. The goal of Christianity is not to do something, step into a community and master it and get adoration from peers around us, smugly show ourselves to be more capable than others.

The goal of Christianity is different. Our calling is to show ourselves approved unto God. Two Timothy 2:15 says, "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth." You're saved by God's grace. He gives you a new identity and He is calling you to be faithful in day-to-day life with every task before you. And we need to see that we're workmen, we're carpenters, we're people who don't need to be ashamed, fearful of what people think of them as we pursue this faithfulness and we need to continue to rightly handle the truth. This is for pastors, but every Christian needs to be able to give a reason for the hope within them in a coherent manner.

As Christians like Christ, as we reflect on this pastor, we're to view the world as God's workshop and see that through whatever circumstances that we face in faith, we need to be humble and obedient to His plans, even to the point that obedience brings suffering and even physical pain or death. I know some of you're thinking that this is radical and it is. It's completely radical to the message of the world that tells you to live for yourself, your comfort, your glory, but it's what Christ himself did and told us to do. Matthew 16:24. "Then Jesus told his disciples that anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

Unless a person takes up this mindset, unless they're aiming for this, they can't be a disciple of Christ and their life is going to be marked by the void of God's power. All disciples of Christ should ask regularly, am I losing my life that I might find it? If that's the case, we'll find that the people around us don't approve of us, but God does. And that is what really should please our heart, that our Father accepts us. Even in our stumblings and imperfections, He's willing to give us, clothe us with more and more grace. The world may laugh and reject and despise us for our ordinariness, but we can be okay with that because they did that to Jesus. We're in good company. Isaiah 53 says, "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed Him not." The world rejects Him, but when we trust Him in faith and follow Him, we're going to face these same trials.

The world might laugh at us as we try to stay humble, keep a servant's mindset in the face of adversity and persecution, but we know that we take heart knowing that the Lord proves us in Christ. Are you denying yourself to follow Jesus? The travesty of this passage, the tragedy of unbelief, is that the people of God often do not do this. They often do not deny themselves to follow Christ. That's what happened in the synagogue of Nazareth. The people of God were not denying their preferences, were not submitting their view, their religious views, their tradition, their faith to the teachings of the scriptures and the Christ himself. They weren't willing to change their preferences, their actions for Him.

Furthermore, Philippians 2:20 to 22 shows us that even Christians, even in this age of the church, a lot of Christians do not deny themselves the follow of Jesus. He says, "For I have no one like Him." This is Paul writing about Timothy. "For I have no one like Him who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare, for they all seek their own interest, not those of Jesus Christ." So what church communities can be marked by people who are all seeking their own preferences and the way they go about things and the way that the ministry is operating and who speaks and how traditions are upheld.

And Paul says that what Mark shows us in this passage is that this is a tragedy and it leads to just the power of God being put out among the people. And so we each as individuals need to check our hearts to make sure that we are dying daily to follow Christ. We need to trust that God can save us and that he can use the ordinary in extraordinary ways to grow us further into the image of Jesus, and to use us for his mighty works in this life. Jesus marveled in this passage that all of these people were seeking their own good, not the things of God, not Christ himself, not faithfulness to His plan for them. Let's make sure that we don't make the same mistake ourselves. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we praise you for your steadfast love, your loving kindness, your long-suffering love toward your children, for we are prone to wander. We are prone to favor our preferences, our desires, our ways over yours. But praise be to God that you are patient toward us in Jesus, in the same way that you sent Jesus to Nazareth multiple times in the same way that Christ just continued to minister despite facing rejection. Lord, you just offer us forgiveness in Jesus, in our folly, in our stubbornness, in our hardheartedness, and we can have peace with you because of Christ.

And Lord, we pray, grow our belief. If any of our lives are marked by unbelief, we pray, help us in our unbelief. Lord, help us to identify those areas of our lives where we are not submitting to your lordship. Show us how we can be more faithful servants of your kingdom. Help us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. Help us to see your word and your power going forward in our lives while the world might say otherwise and try to quench such power. We ask, give us greater faith to trust you and honor you. In Jesus name I pray, amen.