Losing on Purpose (Mark 8:27-38)

So in the movie Goodwill Hunting, Will Hunting uh is a janitor at MIT.

And many of you have seen this movie, I'm sure.

I'm not gonna say it's not your fault.

Um, but Will Hunting is uh he's a he's a janitor, troubled kid, 22 probably, and he's a he's a janitor at MIT, and he's useful, he's resourceful, he cleans the floors and the bathrooms, and he generally does his job well.

And there's this watershed moment at the beginning of the movie where we realize that this troubled kid who's in trouble with the law, who doesn't have his priorities straight, who's a janitor, he's also the smartest guy on campus.

That this troubled kid can do uh high math that even the top professors at MIT can't do.

And as bright as the student population is there, we realize that they are limited when it comes to, in comparison to Will Hunting.

And what happens is there is a moment when people realize they see this guy, they may acknowledge him, they might not even see him, some of them.

There's a moment that once they realize who he is and what he's capable of, it's impossible, impossible to treat him or to see him the same way that they previously saw him.

And in our gospel reading, we come to chapter 8, and what you have is a watershed moment.

This is the hinge passage on which all of Mark turns, where we find in Jesus, once you see him as he really is, you cannot unsee him.

That so far in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has talked a lot about the kingdom, but he hasn't talked a whole lot about the king.

We've seen him talk about the secret of the kingdom, we've seen him tell his disciples they've been given the secret to the kingdom.

We've seen him, we know as the readers, act as a king.

He can rule over unclean spirits, he can rule over wind and waves, he can rule over the natural order and multiply fish and loaves.

We know that he's the king.

Mark opens with that in verse 1, but he hasn't yet said this openly.

In this passage, we find he is the king of this kingdom, but we also find he's a kind of king that doesn't meet anybody's expectations.

In fact, the kind of king that he is is offensive even to his chief apostle.

The only way to see him as indispensable, the only way to see him with the value that he really has is to understand him on his own terms and not on the terms that we place upon him.

And that is to understand what kind of king is he?

What has he come to do?

And the answer, of course, is that he's come to go to the cross for sinners.

And what we're going to find is this changes everything about the way not only we see him, but that we see ourselves.

Let me read this passage from Mark chapter 8, and then we'll pray.

Mark 8 · chapter mention

And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, Who do people say that I am?

And they told him, John the Baptist, and others say Elijah, and others say one of the prophets, and he asked them, But who do you say that I am?

And Peter answered him, You are the Christ, and he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And he said this plainly.

But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

For what can a man give in return for his soul?

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels.

The word of the Lord.

And it is not like any word that we would write for ourselves.

And following your son Jesus does not go according to the script that we would write for ourselves either.

And yet, what we've just read is that following him is the way to life.

And so we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would give us ears to hear, that you would give us eyes to see Christ, and that by your Spirit you would enlarge our hearts.

We pray these things in his name.

Amen.

Alright, so this morning I want to ask three questions.

Who is Jesus?

And what does that mean for him?

And what does that mean for us?

So who is Jesus?

And what does that mean for him?

And what does that mean for us?

And this is his question.

Who do people say that I am?

His disciples have been sent out before to preach repentance, to exercise demons.

They've been given real authority.

And the point is they have gone out apart from Jesus.

They've enmeshed themselves in the crowds in a way that Jesus hasn't, and they actually get to hear the things that people are saying about Jesus.

And you know how this is.

People are more likely to say about you what they think than they are to your face.

And Jesus asked them, What are people saying about me?

Who do people say that I am?

And they say, Well, some people say you're John the Baptist.

And if that sounds familiar, that's because that's what King Herod thought.

When Herod heard about this, he goes, Oh, John whom I beheaded is back.

Turns out this is not uncommon.

Other people think the same thing.

Some people say you're John the Baptist.

And some people say Elijah, some of you say that you're one of the prophets, but all of the everything that Jesus hears reported back from his disciples is you're a prophet.

Maybe you're a particular one, maybe you've come in the spirit of one of them, but you are a prophet.

You tell the truth.

And so they think he's a truth teller, and as far as that goes, they're not wrong, but if you've read this gospel, we know how woefully inadequate that description is.

You see, there's a way to approach Jesus, even if you've been inside the church for a long time, that kind of slips into this idea, Jesus is probably better at life than we are, and our life would go better if we listened to him.

Again, as far as that goes, that's true.

But there's more.

He's probably better at life than we are, and our lives would go better if we learned to listen to him.

I mean, Jesus tells us in John 10, he says, I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly.

Here's a question.

What does that mean?

I think he has his definition of the abundant life, and we have our definition of the abundant life.

And here's what I mean.

All of us have a list of longings that we want fulfilled.

What does it look like to have a proper work, personal life balance?

We want this.

We want our work to be fulfilling, we want it to validate us in the right ways.

We want meaningful relationships that don't wear us down too much.

We want to be more efficient, more organized, more rested, more interesting.

We want to be more desirable.

Think about the podcasts that get shared around on your text thread.

You've got to listen to this.

You've got to listen to this.

And not just podcasts, the books, or just even like the informational reels on social media that has its own sort of business enterprise going.

And we tell ourselves, if I could just commit to that morning routine, I really think that that would unlock something for me.

If I could master that planner, if I could really implement that family systems theory, I think there's something going on there.

Then I'd really be firing on all eight cylinders.

And we import this way of thinking into our prayer life as well, don't we?

How do we approach Jesus?

Would you make my life more efficient?

We don't maybe use that language.

Would you help this relationship not to be so draining?

And again, as far as that goes, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

But what Jesus wants to put his finger on in this passage is what is the trajectory of our life and how does that shape how we approach him?

Our hardwareing really isn't the problem.

You know that humans, we, we're created good.

That the stuff we're made of is good.

The material world is good.

That any problem that there is with us is not with the stuff we're made of.

It's a moral problem.

It's a sin problem.

The direction of our hardware has been skewed.

Our longings are right, but now they're aimed at the wrong way.

And I think I've used this before, and I'll probably use it again, but when I was about six, it was around 4th of July, could have been Labor Day, summer-ish, we were at my lake house, and my dad was firing off bottle rockets.

We did this pretty regularly, and I wanted to be a part of this.

I wanted to light the fire rockets.

And he said, No, you're six.

And I said, Okay.

He goes into the boathouse, and everyone's sort of busy, everyone's entertained with each other.

And I see what my dad has got his little lighter, and I see the bottle rockets, and I grab three and I put them in the beer can that they're shooting out of, and I light them, and I'm like, Yahoo! And I turn to run and I knock over the can and they go shooting into the boathouse.

My dad comes walking out.

I mean, I remember this so clearly.

Like he jumps over one of them that went under him, and two of them at least went into the boathouse.

There was no fire or anything, but our tubes and our rafts were ruined.

Holes, you know, knocked in there.

Here's the problem.

Those bottle rockets did exactly what they were designed to do, but they were aimed in the wrong direction.

It's not a perfect illustration, but that is so much of our problem as human beings.

We have hard wirings in us that are not the problem, but where are they aimed?

And so often they're aimed at the wrong thing.

They're aimed, our impulses redirected in ways that cause harm and destruction and go against the kingdom that Jesus has come to restore.

And what this also means is that as redirected impulses, sometimes our prayers can sound like this: God help me to fly straight right into the doorway of that boathouse.

Help me to fly straight.

We don't even realize sometimes that the impulse that we're coming to God with is still aimed at the wrong thing because we have in mind our own kingdom, our own vision of the abundant life.

Jesus isn't merely a guru to give us a better version of ourselves.

He's come to save us from the entire trajectory of our lives.

Yes, he's the Christ.

Who is he?

The Christ.

He's the king.

But ironically, until we find ourselves on his trajectory, we'll still think that what he's calling us to do, that's the path of destruction.

That's Peter's problem.

Secondly, all right, he's the Christ.

What does that mean for him?

In verse 31, he uses the word must.

And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.

There's four things that are tied grammatically and I think thematically to this word must.

This is a package deal.

He must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and rise again.

He must do all four of those things.

You can't have one or two or three.

I must do all of these things.

Now this might be obvious, but let's flesh out the word must.

It's more than personal drive.

Okay?

Fun fact about me: I like to make terrible songs on garage band on a computer in my basement.

Alright?

I made one this past weekend, and there are times when I get a song idea and I feel like I must work on this song idea.

And I hole away in my studio for a little bit and I work on this song, and it's terrible.

Just yesterday, my son was trying not to laugh when I played it for him.

An artist must express himself.

When Jesus says must, he's not talking about expressing himself.

He's not even talking about a personal calling.

What he's talking about is the calling that his father has placed upon him.

And what that meant, Jesus and his father, the Son of God and the Father, have one will.

So Jesus is not a hostage to the will of his father.

But his father has placed a calling on him.

And he has written history out in this calling.

That history makes most sense when Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, suffers, is rejected, is crucified, and is resurrected.

He must.

It is the divine plan.

It is written in stone, as it were.

He must.

And since sinners and creation will be restored, and not just restored, but perfected one day in a way that it has never seen, then it is necessary, necessary for Jesus to suffer, to be rejected, to die, and to be raised.

And Peter is horrified by this.

He's horrified.

I mean, wrap your heads around this.

We do this probably in ways we don't even recognize, but Peter rebukes Jesus.

And anytime you rebuke the Son of God, I think it's safe to say you're probably venturing into unsafe territory.

I don't mean that Jesus is going to strike him down, but Peter, you don't understand.

You're moving the wrong way.

And lest we think I'm wrong about that, he says, get behind me, Satan.

What you want, if it's against what I'm saying, it has more in common with the devil than with your heavenly father.

That is a that's a wild thing to say.

And I don't know, we're not told how Peter responds.

We're not given the inflection of their tone, but Peter's clearly feeling pretty confident to venture out and say, and I think he thinks he's loving Jesus.

I think he thinks he's got the best of intentions.

Jesus, this is not the way it should be.

You're the king.

By the way, we've burned a few bridges hitching our wagons to you.

We've got great plans for you.

We're going to see in a few weeks that two others are like, hey, how about our, can we get on your right hand and your left hand?

I mean, like, you're the one who is going to kicktail and take names, not the other way around.

And whatever energy Peter brought into that room or that conversation, Jesus more than matches it, and he rebukes him.

He calls him the devil.

You may have the best of intentions, but you don't yet see that what your vision for me and you is has more in common with the temptations I've faced with Satan than with what my father has sent me to do.

Peter's saying, Jesus, for Pete's sake, the fireworks don't go up, they go into the boathouse.

And Jesus says, No, Peter, they don't.

Get behind me, Satan.

In verse 33, we read, but turning and seeing his disciples, he rebukes Peter and he says, Get behind me, Satan, for you're not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.

When he says the things of man, he doesn't mean I don't think he's saying humanity in general.

He's saying the humanity that has sided with Satan, the humanity that has been infected with sin.

And it's not an ad hominem attack either.

You know, I mean, I think sometimes we're like, well, the Bible's sarcastic.

I should wound with my sarcasm.

If Jesus calls Peter names, then I should be able to call you a son of a biscuit-eating bulldog, right?

Like, no.

He's highlighting what he's actually come to do, and he has to do that in a way of confrontation.

Peter, I think maybe you have the best of intentions, but remember last week when I told you that your heart is sick and desperately wicked?

Remember when I told you that it's what comes out of the heart that defiles a person?

It's not the arbitrary rules that cleanse a person?

Peter, my suffering, my rejection, my dying, and my raising is the only way to cleanse you.

And it's the only way to find the fulfillment of what you're actually longing for.

That if we can redirect the course of your life, it is one that follows me.

Yes, you must seek the kingdom.

But the only way to seek this kingdom is by receiving me as your king.

And as king, there are things that I must do.

If you would find your meaning, if you would find your purpose in any other good thing, you remain on the wrong course.

You were made for me.

But if I die for you, if I lay my life down for you, if I cleanse you, not only are you forgiven from all of your sinfulness and all of the wrong trajectory, I actually begin to change within you the direction of your heart's affections.

That they will begin to follow me, not perfectly, but they will begin to follow me.

So who is Jesus?

He's the Christ, he's the King.

What does it mean for him?

It means that he must die for us and be raised for us.

What does this mean for us?

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

I don't know if you've seen this necklace recently.

I've seen it a few times, and it's really just a gold chain with like an Uzi on it.

I don't know if you've seen that, and it strikes me as the most bizarre necklace in the world.

And that had to be what the first Christians who wore a cross looked like.

What are you wearing?

An electric chair around your neck?

A firing squad?

You're wearing a noose?

You're wearing a convention of death, a mechanism of death.

And Jesus says, pick up your death device and follow me.

Pick up your death device and follow me.

You have the right.

To bear your cross.

Now, this is not passive language.

Sometimes you hear somebody say, oh, well, that ailment, that's just their cross to bear.

And there might be some truth in that, but there is an active way to read this because the language says, pick up.

It's an active verb, and I think that the application for our lives ought to be active.

But to be clear, Jesus is not saying, cultivate in yourself a martyr complex.

Last week he taught us about our hearts, that we cannot cleanse our hearts by man-made rules.

Only he can cleanse them.

And likewise, there's a way to misinterpret when he says, pick up your cross and follow me.

He's not calling us to a life of asceticism.

He's not saying, avoid all riches, don't eat dessert, don't make babies.

He's not saying this.

The point is not asceticism.

The point is not just abstract denial of anything that is good.

The point is to put to death in us anything that is contrary to what Jesus intends for our lives.

That if we're going to follow Him on the way to His cross, that we're learning to put to death the things in us that He died for in the first place.

So it's not man-made rules can't wash us, and just like denying ourselves arbitrarily, that doesn't make sense either.

This world, our bodies, like nerve endings, all of these things are good.

Good.

When we deny ourselves, we're not denying ourselves God-given gifts.

We're denying ourselves the wrong trajectory of those gifts.

Jesus dies for our sins.

And so when we die to self, we're dying to the things He already died to.

Put it another way, what is grace opposed to?

I don't know that we maybe ask ourselves this question.

What is grace opposed to?

It is only opposed to one thing: sin.

It's only opposed to sin.

And so should we only be opposed to sin.

This is why last week opinions get so murky because you really ought to make sure we're talking about sin when we open our mouths.

But grace is opposed to it because Jesus died for it.

And what we're dying to is only and ever specific sins in the Bible.

We want grace to be opposed to hardship.

It's not opposed to hardship.

It actually calls us into hardship insofar as we die to the sin that grace is opposed to.

We need more than the right morning routine.

We need more than a better work-life balance.

We need more than our spouses and our coworkers and our children to see life our way.

Jesus didn't die for life to go our way.

He died for the sin in our hearts that we might be able to be freed from them in the way that we live.

He died for our pride.

He died for our entitlement.

He died for our stubbornness.

And then he gives us hearts that have the ability to be willing to follow him.

And Paul says it this way in Colossians 3.

Put to death what is earthly in you sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Think about this.

The things that we want, a better life, a better partner, a better job, a better whatever, he says, that's idolatry.

How is it idolatry?

Because we think that thing will fulfill us, that that thing will make us whole.

And he says, put to death that entitlement and seek the one who's actually the only one who can satisfy you.

If we're to accept the king of this kingdom, we must accept that our sin is our biggest problem, though it might not be the only problem.

We might have any number of problems that need to be addressed, but they're not the main problem.

And what this means, what Jesus is teaching us, is if we're united to him by faith, that his death on a cross for us, that his resurrection on our behalf, that now becomes what defines us.

And if he died for our sin, then we get to live as though that sin were dead.

I'm not talking about perfection.

I'm talking about the trajectory of our hearts.

In 1999, M.

Knight Shyamalan, I think I said his name right, really made his first big splash with the Sixth Sense.

And before this became a sort of cultural meme that we laughed at all the time, before it became this great big joke, it blew our minds.

And here's how it blew our minds.

Bruce Willis's character, he's a child psychologist or psychiatrist, and one night he's attacked by a former patient who says, You have failed me.

I came to you with my problems, and you failed me.

And this attack causes a whole rippling effect in his life.

He's disturbed by his failure, and not only that, it's messed up his marriage, his wife will no longer talk to him.

And he meets a child who reminds him of his attacker's childhood version.

And what his child says, he says, I can see dead people.

And Bruce Willis is like, I don't think I can believe that, but I've already failed one, I don't want to fail another.

And so he tries to hear where he's really coming from, only to find he actually does see dead people.

And then there's this sort of moment, oh, I'm dead.

My attacker killed me.

The whole life I've been living in this movie has been for nothing.

And the reason that my wife won't talk to me is because she can't see me or hear me.

I'm not there from her point of view.

The point is, he realizes everything he's been doing makes no sense with his station in life.

And what Jesus says is, if I've died for you, and I have died for your sins, to continue to breathe life into the sin that is dead to you makes no sense of the status that you have with me.

There will always be a fundamental disconnect because you are not living in light of what I have done for you.

And you are not following me in the freedom that I've given you, even if it feels like death.

Paul tells us in Romans 6, because we have been united to Christ by faith, he says, so you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies to make you obey its passions.

He's not preaching perfection, and he's not preaching this sort of guilt that weighs you down.

He's preaching out of a posture that assumes your burden has already been lifted.

Your guilt has already been atoned for, your hearts have already been washed, and you have been given a spirit that enables you to now fight these things that Jesus has already killed on the cross.

So when we breathe life to the sins that Jesus died for, it's to aim our lives back into the destruction that will come when we fly into the boathouse.

And Jesus goes on to say, he says, What feels like life, it leads to death.

And what feels like death actually leads to life.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

So often what feels like real living, this is living, is actually the opposite.

And it leads to certain death.

And this is what we find in this passage, Satan's great lie.

And Peter believed it, and you and I believe it.

But if we can see and not just see, but embrace why Jesus must die, why Jesus must be raised, we see that it changes how we think about everything.

That our biggest problem on Monday morning isn't that everyone in the family isn't doing what I want them to do.

My biggest problem on Monday morning is that I think I'm entitled to it.

That my biggest problem in the office isn't the politics.

I'm not saying those aren't real issues, that we don't need wisdom to navigate real issues.

But to say, no, Jesus, you died.

What did you die for?

And how ought that to shape what I want to live for and what I ask you for.

And what I want to live for is you, and what I ask for is your spirit, so that I might be able to do that.

Jesus is saying, You're already dead, and my death led to certain resurrection, and so will you.

If you follow me, and I have hitched you to my wagons, I've already, you're mine.

If you follow me, it doesn't lead only to death, it leads through death into resurrection.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for sending your son Jesus to fulfill that word and to speak holy words to us, but not just to speak to us, and not just to tell us what is true, but to be truth and life, that we might learn to die to our sin and live to righteousness.

But we need your help to do that.

So we pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.