Tag: Jesus understands

You Are Not Alone

34 Comments

Jesus’ journey to the cross in Mark’s Gospel is almost complete. This week we are walking through the rest of Mark 14 from where we stopped last time. We left Jesus having announced the arrival of His betrayer to His sleepy disciples. As we pick up this week, Jesus does indeed get betrayed and abandoned. He is subjected to all kinds of abuse and injustice. And in the end, He is left alone to face it. It’s a pretty dark chapter, but it’s one that reminds us that Jesus has been through it. When we are going through it ourselves, we’ve got a friend in Him. Let’s explore all of this in more detail as we take the next step on our journey to the cross with Mark.

You Are Not Alone

Misery loves company. Have you experienced that? When we are miserable, we want to know that we are not alone in our misery. This desire manifests itself primarily in a couple of different forms, one of which is more helpful than the other. The less helpful way that misery seeks company is for us to try to drag down the people around us so they are as miserable as we are. Have you ever been around somebody like that? They’re like a gloomy Eeyore all the time because they secretly hope that can make the people around them as morose about life as they are so there’s at least one other person as miserable as they are. 

Read the rest…

He Gets It

Leave a comment

Jesus came to fix what’s broken. He came to fix it in our world and in our lives. Yet how do we really know that He can do this? What kind of experience does He have with brokenness that would empower Him to know how to meet us in our need? As it turns out, He has a whole lot more experience than you might expect. Let’s talk about what this is and why it matters in the next part of our Advent series, Broken to Mended.

He Gets It

You’ve perhaps heard the old adage that someone doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. The idea, of course, is that until you have established some sort of a relational credibility with another person, trying to teach them anything of much significance probably isn’t going to work very well. I think there’s even more to this old adage than that, though. You see, given where our culture is today, people generally don’t merely want you to care about them. They want to know that you are authentic in your caring. They want to know that you can in some way empathize with their situation. Otherwise, you are just coming in as a white knight whom they aren’t going to trust. No, if you want to really be able to help someone today in a way that is impactful and sustainable, they’ve got to know you understand their situation in a meaningful way. Until you have that, they might deign to use you, but you won’t be doing anything of lasting significance for them. Once you can demonstrate your authenticity, though, you’re in. 

Read the rest…

Morning Musing: Hebrews 2:10

Leave a comment

“For in bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was entirely appropriate that God – for whom and through whom all things exist – should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How do you make something better? You have to work it and work with it. Great improvement doesn’t come overnight. Not even small improvement does. It comes one step at a time…often one hard step at a time. Sometimes, the harder a road something has been through, the better it has become. This isn’t a guarantee my any means, but perfection doesn’t often come without suffering. This applies to just about everything…including Jesus according to the author of Hebrews here. Let’s talk about it.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Mark 6:3-4

Leave a comment

“‘Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?’ So they were offended by him. Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his household.’”‬ ‭(CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

America is unique in the world. That’s the case in a number of ways, but I want to focus in on one in particular with you this morning. Our nation was founded in part on the ideal of hope. No other nation was ever founded so uniquely on hope—that tomorrow could be better than yesterday was—as this one was. Even as we are facing challenges and tensions as a people unlike many have seen in their lifetimes, still hope persists in many places. This is a uniquely western cultural phenomenon that does not exist in many other places even in the western world. Understanding this, we can start to make a little more sense out of the reaction Jesus got when he preached a sermon in His hometown.

Read the rest…