Long Night, Early Morning

Good morning.

Today's text is Mark chapter one, verses twenty-nine to thirty-nine, and it says, And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.

Now Simon's mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her, and he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons, and the whole city was gathered together at the door, and he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

And rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.

And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him, and said to him, Everyone is looking for you.

And he said to them, Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.

And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Got a couple of announcements to make this morning.

First of all, November 8th, which is in two weeks, I think, uh, we are having a baby dedication.

So as a church, we rally around our families and our kids, and we commit to each other as the parents make an oath to raise their kids up in the Lord, and the church makes an oath back to them to say that we are going to support them in this endeavor.

We are going to support our uh parents in the difficult task of raising up children in the Lord.

So that's November 8th.

Uh you can register for that in our newsletter.

Uh and uh uh yeah, if you so if you have a baby who is just recently born, which is the definition of baby, uh, then you can register them uh for that.

Also, on November 12th, uh we are uh having a a whiskey night, a men's whiskey night.

Cool, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

Something we can all get behind.

Um and uh uh that'll be at John's house.

John, you want to stand up and it show everybody what the top half of your face looks like?

Yep.

High risk, high reward.

And the uh uh uh so it'll be at John's house, and it's bring your own whiskey, uh bring your own cigars if you smoke cigars, uh, or you know, don't bring weed.

I don't want to have to establish convictions there.

Um uh but uh yeah, so we're having that.

Look, uh this is uh uh a time for the men in our church to enjoy one another's company, to build up one another.

Uh man, how many friendless men do you know?

You know, I think that's I think that's typical um for our culture, that we just kind of drift apart from each other.

And so we want to uh really establish that together for our church.

Uh uh okay, so our next announcement.

Now, this is a big one, and there's gonna be uh a bit of teaching that comes before it.

So uh first of all, I want to lay out uh, I'll tell you what we're doing, then it wanna lay out kind of our reasons why.

Uh uh we uh in in two weeks, we're going to uh turn off the live stream.

And uh we're gonna uh instead of having a live stream, we're just going to post the sermon immediately after uh we're done with the sermon.

Um we didn't have a live stream before going into COVID, and we intentionally didn't have a live stream before going into COVID.

So part of the intentionality of that uh was we wanted to uh gain an understanding of the church and our worship together on Sunday mornings is not just the receiving of information.

It's really easy to think that what's happening here is just kind of a live podcast.

And what matters is how clever I can be in my sermon, and then the information that you can take from it uh and then apply to your life throughout the week.

Now, that that does matter, not the cleverness part, but the application part does matter.

But here's the reality the best preaching in the world you have in your phone right now.

And look, I I I'm comfortable in my preaching, but it's not the best preaching in the world.

So that means we're coming here for something different than that.

We're coming here together, gathered together, because the church throughout history, and the way that the Bible describes the church to us, is an assembly.

The time that the people of God are first referred to as a church is when God gathers them together after rescuing them from Egypt at the foot of Mount Sinai.

And the Greek translation of the Old Testament uh describes that gathering of the church as an assembly, translated ecclesia.

And ecclesia throughout the New Testament, wow, we're starting to shed some light on the matter.

Ecclesia uh is the word throughout the New Testament, which is translated assembly, which is directly translated as church.

Gathering together in person is essential to the nature of the church.

It's not incidental.

A church is not something where we just provide information.

We're literally gathering together to worship the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so it is not the uh the uh uh a lot of times we think of the we think of the church as as like, okay, we'll see what we can get out of it for our lives, and and the purpose of the church is that we'll get something out of it for the rest of our lives.

Now, that is a purpose of the church.

But primarily, the church is an end.

What we do here when we worship the Lord together and we sit under the proclamation of his word, we take uh the nourishment of our souls in sacrament, which is you can get on Amazon.

Uh when we uh when we do those things uh together and we uh we we submit to those, we're moving into the structure that God has placed in the world to transform our hearts.

And we're fulfilling the ends of our calling as humans, which is to worship and enjoy the Lord and community.

That was the purpose of our salvation, that Jesus might call us out of the world and into a community of his people to worship him.

So when we gather together on Sunday mornings, we're we're doing that, we're showing a picture of that.

So uh this is a a time for uh some repentance as well for us.

You know, uh I think that that gathering is is an essential calling.

And the uh we've we've operated in such a way where it hasn't been possible.

You know, you you may be sit sitting at home right now thinking like, okay, well, you're gonna spring this news on me right now.

Uh uh first of all, this is kind of an it can be a nerve-wracking time to go anywhere, let alone an assembly.

Uh second of all, um uh you've got a cap on 50 people that can show up.

So what's the deal?

Well, here's here's what I want to say.

We uh we need to uh own and apologize for uh having a limit where we didn't need one.

Uh the 50-person limit in the room is is required right now under COVID, but we've got creative ways that we can accommodate everyone in a church of our size.

Uh we can have an overflow room beyond 50 on the outside, uh in the room just off to the side.

And that's our intention to begin, uh, is to start with an overflow room.

But ultimately, we'd like to move into having two services.

And with two services for a church of our size, we'll be able to accommodate everyone.

Uh and uh look, it may be that there's a first service and it looks like this.

You know, 50 people in a room, we're at our max, and the next service looks like 10 people gathered together.

We'll say, well, this was awkward.

And we might even be tempted to think, well, this didn't work.

But working for church isn't about creating an entertaining environment.

Working for church is about gathering the Lord's people together to worship Jesus.

Our hearts get formed in the worship.

And so we want to demonstrate how much we think this uh is true by creating the opportunities to uh gather.

So so that if you're a part of our church uh as the leaders, we will commit to you that you'll be able to gather together on Sunday mornings.

Um and currently, uh within the restrictions that are placed on our church, we don't we aren't we don't have to violate any restrictions in order to be able to do this.

Uh so let's operate within the freedom that we have.

So this is a uh a logistical announcement of what's coming.

You won't need to sign up anymore.

Congratulations, no more tickets to church.

Um but you may show up and it may be such that, oh, you know what, I was a bit late, I need to go into the overflow room.

There'll be an elder present in that room, be able to administer the sacrament.

You'll hear the same thing that's happening in here, and we'll probably have to shout back and forth to one another, which like I will love that, and like most people will hate.

Um so that's the that's the transition that's coming in, that's coming in two weeks.

Uh if you have questions, uh please reach out to us, info at Redemption Denver.

Uh, and uh love to work through this and process our thoughts with you.

But uh we uh we think that this is uh although it could be a difficult time to express the nature of the church and that this conversation, the the political pitfalls of this conversation were surrounded by.

And so we debated back and forth of is it is it even worth bringing up now?

Uh but in another sense, it's like, well, what better time?

You know, uh rarely is the the nature of the church as an assembled people uh kind of topical in people's minds.

Uh so we're we're seizing the moment uh to do that.

All right, that's sermon number one.

Let's uh pray and we'll have sermon number two.

Father, we praise you for uh your designs and your intentions for us as a people.

Lord, we ask that uh you would continue to establish unity of heart and mind in our church as we gather to worship you, Lord.

Lord, I pray that today as we see uh the record of your life, uh which you've given to us in the Gospel of Mark, that we might see a clear picture of who you are.

And that uh in seeing who you are, you might be glorified in our hearts, and that our hearts might be transformed just by seeing who you are.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay, so today's sermon, uh Mark 1, 29 through 39, and it's uh the title of the sermon is a long night, early morning, uh, which is like that's like what parenting is like.

Uh it's long nights and early mornings.

And this is kind of a slice of life for Jesus, this account.

We just get kind of a day in the life, and he has a really long night, and then he has a really early morning, and we're gonna look at both of those.

Uh, but this picks up right where we left off last week.

Jesus last week went and he taught in the morning on the Sabbath day and in the synagogue, and there was a man with a demon.

And the man with the demon is uh uh the demon is cast out by Jesus, and people are astonished at his authority.

And so he uh after that, after that kind of incredible morning in the synagogue, they leave.

In Mark 1.29 it says, and immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.

Now, this is a moment of life uh for Jesus that I can I actually have some insight on.

I know what it's like to teach on a uh Sabbath day morning and then go home.

Uh and I like to do two things.

I like to have a Coke with some sort of sandwich, uh, and I like to watch a show uh that's completely non-spiritual.

I like to watch preferably some show about cars in some way about cars.

And and part of the reason for that is when I'm when I'm going home and after we do this together, uh I I've found in my heart that I'm often just like tiptoeing on the edge of a sort of shame spiral that it's very easy to fall down the precipice of.

Uh, and I'm sure many of you can relate to this.

You know, you have big days in your week, uh, a week that's you know, has a complicated meeting with uh your boss or a difficult employee, or uh a day where um your spouse doesn't get home until really late, and so you've got so much time with the kids.

Um, and you'll reflect back and it's like, man, they just watched like six hours of Daniel Tiger.

I feel ashamed of myself, or man, I shouldn't have said that to my boss in this way.

And there's all these opportunities to pick apart and uh critique uh yourself and in what just took place, and you can imagine the people you disappointed, or whatever it may be.

And so I find that Sunday afternoons are really prone to that.

Uh and part of the reason for that is because there's uh a call to service that I have in the duty of preaching, but there's also a real temptation to make my preaching the core of my identity.

Say how I do preaching is who I am as a person.

And we do that with all sorts of things.

How I did parenting today is who I am as a person.

How I did with this relationship with my employee or my employer, that's who I am as a person.

And so while it's perhaps the heights of our calling, we're playing with fire because we're playing with something that we're giving the power to define us.

So we're really playing with fire with these things.

The Bible calls those sorts of things idols, those things that we give definitional power over ourselves.

And they have a unique ability to enact shame in our hearts.

Now, Jesus, on the other hand, he seems so able to have this morning in the synagogue, and it's an incredible morning where he speaks with this authority, and then he goes back to his friend's home, and rather than spiral into a sort of self-centeredness, he is completely open and available to the problems of the people that are around him.

Instead of living in the past of what his performance might have just been, he is able to be completely present with the calling that God has placed in front of him right then.

But then Jesus does something even more incredible in this passage, which is he's present with the problems that are in front of him, and he is able to gain a perspective on the whole story, which allows him to leave the problems that are stacking up before him.

Most of us can do one or the other.

We can stay buried in all of the problems that continue to feed themselves into our day, or we can gain a perspective and ignore whatever problems might be showing up.

Jesus somehow is able to do both.

And this morning we're gonna look at how he does that.

First, let's look at his presence.

In Mark 1, 30 through 31, it says, Now Simon's mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her.

And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

Okay, so Jesus goes back into Simon and Andrew's home.

Simon remembers Peter, and Peter's mother-in-law is sick and she has a fever.

And so they just tell Jesus about the mother-in-law, you know, like, hey, welcome in, you know, ha have a seat.

Uh, this is my mother-in-law.

Yeah, she's been sick for a couple of days.

And so Jesus walks up, grabs her hand, and she's healed.

Jesus is just exposed to the problems and the sicknesses in the personal quiet moments of the lives of his disciples, and he immediately steps in.

He's bringing the kingdom wherever he goes.

There's sickness here.

But Jesus is here now.

And so where sickness is ruling, Jesus steps in to bring his kingdom into the lives, even in these quiet moments.

All he had to do was be informed.

Now, the response of Peter's mother-in-law is she immediately moves into service of Jesus.

This word service is so important throughout the Gospel of Mark.

It's core to the identity of who Jesus is and who he transforms his people to become.

The central verse in Mark says, and in the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

And so in Jesus' service and in his bringing the kingdom, when someone's brought into that new reality, they take on these hearts of service for those around him that worships Jesus in front of them and those around Jesus.

This heart of service begins to expand into the world.

Now, they probably hung out for a little while longer.

Uh and this uh uh when they were it what happened is at the end of the Sabbath day, uh the whole city lines up.

So the Sabbath day is from uh Friday night at sundown to Saturday night at sundown.

And during that time, you would have been prohibited from uh you know going out, walking around, going to other people's homes, that sort of thing.

But right when sundown happens, everybody lines up at Peter's house because they hear about Jesus.

And uh this is what it says Mark 132 through Mark 132, actually, I think it says 132 through 34.

Oh, nice, Zach fixed it.

Uh that evening at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons.

So the Sabbath day ends.

Remember, Jesus preached in the morning, comes home, he continues to serve.

Now night falls, and the whole city lines up.

Okay, so he here's what uh if if Megan, my wife, asked me to take out the trash on a Sunday, I'm like, what are you kidding me?

If the whole city lined up afterwards, be like, oh man, this is a disaster.

Jesus remains completely present in this.

Oh uh listen to the account.

Mark 1, 33 to 34, it says, And the whole city was gathered together at the door.

He healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him.

Now, next week we'll talk about Jesus silencing the demons and why Jesus is telling everybody not to uh describe himself all the time.

But uh this week I want us to see that all the city had to do to be healed of their sickness, to be freed from their demonic oppression was just be in Jesus' presence.

That's it.

They just had to be there.

And Jesus of his own accord, he steps into their lives and he heals them completely of a free gift of service and of love to the community that he found himself in.

There's no uh there's no measurement of faith.

There's no, you know, you if you if you had believed, I would have been able to heal you.

No, it's just people just showed up, all they brought was their problems and their needs.

And Jesus steps into that space.

Look at the character of God.

In this instance, it looks as though there's just not a problem that Jesus won't step into.

There's not a circumstance that Jesus won't make himself present and available in.

And that's why it's so shocking when the next morning the town gathers together again and Jesus doesn't heal any of them.

So let's move next to perspective.

We're going to skip a verse, which we'll get back to in Mark 1:36 through 38.

Mark 1:36–38

Simon and those who were with him searched for him.

Him as Jesus.

Ever had a morning like that?

And they found him and said to him, Everyone is looking for you.

And he said to them, Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.

Okay, so the next morning, Simon wakes up, the the whole town's gathered together.

They're like, Hey, where's Jesus?

Where's Jesus?

We're at your house, ready to come to your house.

Remember it was the pop-up uh urgent care and exorcism uh superstore yesterday.

Uh where where is he?

And so he's frantically going around looking for Jesus, can't find him, he's in a desolate place, and informs him, hey, it's time to show up now, Jesus.

And what does Jesus say?

Not, oh great, a bunch of new problems that I can step into.

No, he says, no, we're leaving.

Uh I came to preach to all the towns, and so that's what I'm gonna do.

So how is it that Jesus is able to stay so present and so uh available for the problems that are just presented to him, and then gain such a perspective on his mission that he's able to step away from the same pressing problems and focus in on what God has called him to do for the day.

Well, simply put, Jesus prays.

Jesus steps away and he spends time with the Father.

They couldn't find Jesus because his late night was tapped off with an early morning.

Mark 135, it says, and rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.

Jesus is grounded in his father's mission.

And so all of the service that he was doing is ultimately service to the Father.

And uh every other Wednesday we meet and we're reading through a book called A Praying Life by a man named Paul Miller.

And uh in it he he discusses how frequently Jesus steps away and he gets time with just him and the Father alone in a desolate place, praying.

He says, Jesus defines himself only in relationship with his heavenly father.

Consequently, he doesn't try to find himself, he knows himself only in relationship with his father.

The center of Jesus' identity, self-understanding, mission is who he is in relationship to the Father.

So Jesus is able to be both totally present with any of the problems that are laid before him in each day, but he's not a slave to those problems because he's not using them to describe himself.

He knows who he is in the Father.

And because of that, it just as he is able to be present in those issues, so too is he able to step away and live with a real intentionality, because he doesn't need those problems to define them.

Look, this is so otherworldly.

Because most of us relate to our pressing concerns, and the pressing concerns that we encounter every day, we relate to them like addicts.

We're addicted to our problems.

We're addicted to our pressing concerns.

That means the problems that are presented to us in each day, these aren't things that we're serving.

These are things that we're using.

We're using the problems that we're given each day in order to build up a sort of identity for ourselves.

And what that tends to is an experience of shame.

Because when I use something like preaching to build up an identity of myself, all of a sudden, what's designed to be a good service and a good calling to proclaim the Word of God to our church now is not something I'm serving, but it's something I'm using to get something else out of, to define myself in some way.

And I'll tell you what, you never live up to what that is.

And you start confusing things that aren't sin for sin.

Dan Allender, in his book Cry of the Soul, he puts his finger on this sin beneath the shame that we often experience from our problems.

He says, It, the sin, was not in the initial embarrassment, nor even in the growing shame.

Rather, it was in my demand to be competent, adroit, and attractive.

Now I don't know what adroit means.

These are not the adroits you're looking for.

Someone literally groaned when I said that.

But what he's getting at is look, you you leave that meeting with your boss, and you're spiraling in this sort of cycle of shame.

The sin isn't the shame.

The sin is that you demand to be competent.

There's no option for you to not measure up.

That's because the core of who you are, what your faith is in, is your competence.

You know, I'll I'll leave and I'll filter a Sunday morning.

This is like a confessional Sunday morning for me.

And I'll filter a Sunday morning, not through what I said, but I'll imagine myself as some of you and what I know is happening in your life, and then I'll think of how you're critiquing it.

Right?

You we all do this for different circumstances.

And what are we worshiping there?

I demand to be esteemed in this person's eyes.

That's the sin.

That's where we've taken a person and we've we've given to them the whole of our lives to hold in in their hands and their opinion.

And then we we worship it with our lives.

And goodness is defined as appeasing that person or circumstance, and shame is defined as not appeasing it.

But that's not what defines goodness.

Jesus goes and he rests with the Father.

And he sits with his father and he hears his father say, You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.

And Jesus, in his time with the Father, he knows I am with the God of everything, the one who controls everything, who holds me in his hands, to whom I owe all gratitude and the whole of my life.

It is he who defines what is good.

It is him who I'm seeking to serve here.

And so Jesus avoids this trap of a group of people lined up at the door.

And most of us in our hearts, we would look out and we'd say, man, we really got some momentum here.

I gotta get out there and get this because where does my success lie?

It lies in their opinion of me.

It lies in their opinion of me.

It lies in their experience of me as the healer of the town.

Oh, healer of the town.

That's my Twitter bio.

Jesus knew his mission was from the Father.

And so he's able to walk away.

It's not out of neglect, it's out of real service.

Because Jesus was actually serving the people that he was present with.

He wasn't using them.

See, when Jesus, Jesus is unique in this way, he's so settled in himself.

And that's why when you think of you coming to Jesus, you can be just like Peter's mom or Peter's wife's mom.

He's just sick and Jesus was present.

There's a fever, maybe not even that bad.

But Jesus still steps into it.

You can take that type of confidence when you approach Jesus.

He's not using me.

He's so grounded in the Father and the Father's love.

He's really serving.

He's really giving himself.

We can be intimidated by someone like that as well, because like the crowds that gathered that thought they knew the depth of the problem that they had, and who might have even felt neglected by Jesus not showing up that morning to tend to that problem.

When Jesus is also so guided by the Father, we know that he's most concerned with our deepest need.

And so that's why Jesus leaves the people that morning and he sets his face towards his father's mission, which was to continue proclaiming the gospel in the rest of the cities, and by the proclamation of that gospel to be taken to the cross, to die, to atone not just for our sickness, not just for our demon oppression, but for the sins of our own lives, so that we might be set free forever to have that same intimacy with the Father that we see Jesus enjoying, so that we might rest in the Father in the same way that Jesus rested in the Father.

Imagine if he had taken another approach.

And Jesus instead was more like us, and so he didn't just serve, he used.

And Peter runs up to Jesus and he's like, hey, I found you.

Everybody's ready, we've got the place prepped.

I made a line this time, so it won't be like yesterday.

Um and Jesus and Peter had to have been thinking, everybody's gathered at my house.

This is pretty cool.

And look, uh, what will helping be like?

This is the illusion that I think Peter had started to kind of buy into.

I can give everyone what they want all the time.

Jesus knew that's not what helping is.

So what if Peter had convinced Jesus?

Uh Jesus comes down, they're like, okay, we'll set up shop here in Capernaum.

Oh, uh, we can build out a waiting room and we can set up a line outside.

And uh, Peter, could your mother-in-law make us lunch each day and we'll hang here and you guys keep fishing, and I'll heal everybody forever.

And Jesus decides, I'll I'm you know, incarnate as a man, just like every other one, so I'll heal everybody here every day for the next 60 years, and I'll ascend to the Father at the ripe old age of 90.

I'll never say no.

And we remain dead in our trespasses and sins, never able to rest in the glory of the Father.

People have their sicknesses taken away, but they die unable to rest in the glory of the Father.

Do you see how lovely it is that when Jesus is serving us, he's serving the will of the Father first.

He calls us to adopt that same position in our lives.

And we're freed up, just like Peter's mom was, mother-in-law, healed by Jesus and immediately freed to serve in the way that Jesus does.

Not using his problems like an addict, but freely serving.

That is our call.

Christian service is a different flavor, it's a different type of thing.

A bunch of problems line up, and we can joyfully serve them without using them or being addicted to them.

Staying focused with intentionality on what the real issues are at hand.

Wow, what an amazing group of people that could be.

All it took for Jesus, for Peter's mother-in-law for that to happen was to just take Jesus' hand.

We can come and rest in the Father in that same way.

Jesus rested by taking intentional time to sit with just Him and the Father in prayer.

Many of us are so scattered, chasing whatever problems are that happened to be in front of us, living in this addictive pattern, because we haven't taken the time in the model of Jesus to rest in the Father.

Now, this year we are doing a prayer study.

And my intention was, after seeing the year develop, that during this time, we wouldn't do a prayer study, but we do a study on like cultural engagement because there's so much activity in our culture right now.

I felt, you know, the way to equip our church is to give them the language around cultural transition and things like that.

Oh, but then it occurred to me, first of all, culture is moving way too fast for me to say anything meaningful.

Uh secondly, that's likely not going to stop.

And thirdly, I don't think our culture needs people that are adept in its own language, willing to run into whatever problems happen to be lining up at the door the next day.

What our culture needs are people who are grounded in prayer, serving the Father, so that they can presently step into the needs that they're called to while maintaining the perspective of the mission that God has called them on.

So they can say yes with a whole heart and no.

That comes from prayer.

Comes from prayer.

All right.

Are there any questions, Matthew?

No questions today.

Let's take communion.

Remember that when Jesus said no to that sickness, that that he was saying yes to their ultimate healing.

And uh when he said uh uh perhaps when when he said yes to their death, it was because he was walking towards a death that he was going to take on behalf of sinners like us, so that we might walk in his life.

And uh does this by his broken body and his poured out blood, and so that's why we take communion each Sunday.

First Corinthians 11, 23 through 26, it says, For I have received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Holy Father, as we take communion together, I pray that you would attend this time.

Lord, that we would remember that we rest in the sacrifice that you made, and that in that we might be freed in our hearts to serve you and serve the things that you have called us to with wholeheartedness and intentionality, be able to say a yes and a no that both mean service to you.

Lord, what a work you'll have to do in our hearts to see that.

We trust that you will.

We have this up in Jesus' name, amen.