The Miracle We Need (2) (Mark 8.10-30)

Loanne recently read an article that she’s brought up multiple times over the past few weeks. She keeps bringing it up because it’s so pertinent to so many different situations.

The article was based on a study on how people make decisions. We think we know how we do this: we think we examine the facts, the data, the possibilities, and then that we make a decision based on the information we’ve gathered. But what this study found is that the vast majority of people don’t make decisions like this at all. In reality, we know what we want—so we’ve already made the decision, even if that decision is to not make a decision—and then we examine the facts in order to justify the decision we’ve made.

This study actually supports a truth about humanity that we see all throughout the Bible: that human beings are not mainly guided by our minds, but by our hearts. Our hearts want one thing, and our minds follow. We desire what we desire, and because that’s what we desire we trick our minds into finding all sorts of reasons why what we want is more important than what God tells us.

I’ve mentioned what James K.A. Smith said multiple times over the years, but it’s been a while, so I’ll say it again. Smith follows this biblical line of thinking and puts it like this: in our society we’ve so intellectualized our anthropology that we often think that in order to really know someone, we need to find out what they believe; what they know; what their opinions are. But that’s not how it works. If I want to get to the bottom of who you are as a person, what really makes you “you”, then the question I should ask you is not, “What do you believe?” or “What do you know?” If I really want to know you at the core of your being, the question I need to ask is, “What do you want? What do you desire? What do you long for?”

Last week we saw Jesus performing three different miracles in Gentile territory, and the middle of these three miracles required more than just a word or a touch—a deaf-mute came to Jesus and Jesus healed him in several steps: first he placed his fingers in his ears, then he spit and took some of his own saliva and touched the man’s tongue with it. Then he said, “Be opened,” and the man could hear and talk. It was a particular sort of miracle, a miracle of perception.

The point: in order to see why Jesus came, we need a miracle of perception—we need him to open our ears to hear his voice.

I said that last week’s sermon was the first part of a two-part sermon. Today we see the same basic thing, but the context is different, and so what we see here goes even deeper.

Seeking a Sign (v. 10-21)

So let’s get started. Jesus has just multiplied food for the crowd in Gentile territory, and now he and his disciples get back in their boat and head back to Jewish territory.

And when they arrive, the Pharisees come to him, and the old arguments begin all over again.

V. 10:

10 And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha. 11 The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. 12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” 13 And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side.

So the Pharisees—these hyper-religious leaders who were threatened by Jesus—come to him and “seek from him a sign from heaven to test him”. I have a friend named Eric who, when he was younger, worked for a while as a professional magician. The moment anyone learns about this, it kind of seems like they no longer care about Eric as a person—all they want is for Eric to do a magic trick for them. He’s an indulgent fellow, so he usually does it, but it does depersonalize him a bit. He’s no longer this distinct individual named Eric, he’s “the guy who can do magic.”

That’s sort of how the Pharisees come to him now: “Do a trick. Prove you’re the magic man everyone says you are.”

Mark tells us that Jesus “sighed deeply in his spirit”—you can feel his exasperation—and he asks them why they’re looking for a sign, then tells them he won’t play: no sign will be given to this generation.

What does he mean by this? It’s a bit confusing, because the Pharisees have already seen loads of “signs”. They’ve seen Jesus heal a paralytic in chapter 2, they’ve seen him teach with authority, they saw him heal a man with a withered hand in chapter 3, they saw him feed the five thousand in chapter 6 (they’re not specifically mentioned, but in a crowd that big, there’s no way they weren’t there).

They have signs. And they’re asking him now to do something at their insistance, like a performing monkey.

And Jesus won’t do it. He says no sign will be given “to this generation”. Here’s what I think he means by that. I don’t think he’s talking about age—in a literally “generational” sense—and I don’t think he’s contradicting himself either, in the sense that he’s already given them signs. I think he’s saying that to this “generation”—that is, to the people who want to see signs “to test” Jesus, like the Pharisees do—no sign will be given to them that will ever actually convince them. They’ve seen all they need to see, they’ve heard all they need to hear, and they’re still hard-hearted.

They don’t want to be convinced, they want to test Jesus. They want to see how far they can bend him until he breaks.

So let them stay there. Let them remain unconvinced. Their test won’t work.

Now after this, Jesus and his disciples get in their boat again and go away to the other side of the sea—still in Jewish territory, but further away. And there is a really interesting exchange that takes place between them. V. 14:

14 Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. 15 And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” 16 And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread.

Let’s be honest for a minute: I hope I’m not the only one who finds Jesus’s warning a bit confusing. The disciples have forgotten to bring bread—so you know that’s on all of their minds. They’re in a boat, and they’re getting hungry, and they’ve got nothing to eat. Who’s going to take the responsibility for this?

Instead of addressing the actual problem, Jesus uses an image connected to bread to speak about something completely different. It’s no surprise the disciples have a hard time connecting the dots. We give them a hard time about v. 16, but I guarantee I’d have probably said something just as dumb.

The funny thing is, Jesus responds to what they’re saying in a fairly strong way. V. 17:

17 And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18 Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?

We need to remember that Jesus is always very aware of both to whom he is speaking and of what they need. He’s not losing his patience here, and he isn’t being cruel. He asks them these frank and difficult  questions to make sure they’re all paying very close attention to what he’s about to say, because it’s important. He wants to make sure they all see that they’re not seeing yet. That when he speaks to them, he’s aiming deeper than the surface, deeper than “What are are we going to eat tonight?”

So what does he want them to see? End of v. 18:

And do you not remember? 19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” They said to him, “Twelve.” 20 “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” And they said to him, “Seven.” 21 And he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”

So you see what he’s doing: he’s taking them back to the baskets of food left over, after he multiplied the bread and fish. When he did it in Jewish territory, how many baskets were left over? Twelve—twelve tribes of Israel. And when he did it in Gentile territory, how many baskets were left over? Seven. And what does seven represent in the Bible? Completeness. He’s saying, I’ve come to the Jews, and I’m feeding the Jews, but this grace will extend to the Gentiles as well.

In other words, “I am changing everything. Everything about what you thought it meant to be God’s people.”

Of course they still don’t understand this—not quite yet—but he’s slowly and patiently nudging them there.

So why did he warn the disciples about the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod?

Leaven, in the Bible, is often used as a picture of an influence that spreads. When you put leaven, or yeast, in a lump of dough, that yeast spreads throughout the whole lump, causing it to rise. The influence of the Pharisees, and the influence of Herod, will spread all through you if you’re not careful.

So what is their “leaven”? What characterizes them in this story?

We see that the Pharisees are hard-hearted, and stay hard-hearted, in order to maintain their grip on their own religious power. And we see that Herod was hard-hearted, and stayed hard-hearted, in order to maintain his reputation and his hedonistic lifestyle.

Remember the question from the beginning of this sermon, the most important question we can ever ask about a person? What do you want? For the Pharisees and for Herod, we know that the answer is clearly not Jesus.

They have no interest in Jesus at all, other than as a threat to the way of life they’ve built up for themselves. When they look at him, they only see what they stand to lose. Don’t be like them; don’t look at Jesus the way they do. Don’t look for the same things they’re looking for.

Eyes to See (v. 22-30)

Now on that note, Jesus and the disciples come to Bethsaida, and once again, we see something similar to what we saw at the end of chapter 7—a miracle in several steps. V. 22:

22 And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him. 23 And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” 24 And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.” 25 Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 And he sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.”

So this is just like the deaf-mute in chapter 7: it’s a progressive miracle, not an instantaneous one. Jesus leads him out of the village—he wants privacy for this—and spits on his eyes, touches him. “Do you see anything?”

Sort of… He can see shapes and colors now, but nothing really distinct.

Jesus does it again. And this time, his sight is restored completely.

As I said last week, this miracle and the healing of the deaf-mute in chapter 7 are the only two miracles recorded in Mark’s gospel that seem to require a bit of effort on Jesus’s part. The question is why. I don’t think, as some have suggested, that this miracle was more difficult for Jesus than all the others. I don’t think that’s why he takes more than one pass to heal this man. I think he does it for the same reason he did it with the deaf-mute: to show that this is a different kind of miracle. He’s using this man as a living parable that displays something deeper.

When the blind man said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking,” I wonder if the disciples, standing by, heard Jesus’s voice in their heads saying, “Having eyes, do you not see?” I wonder if they thought back to the deaf-mute and remembered Jesus saying, “Having ears, do you not hear?”

I wonder if, when this blind man was only partially healed, they realized that they were only partially healed too.

I wonder if, when the blind man could finally see clearly, they were a little envious of him.

The reason I wonder all this is because of the harsh questions Jesus asked before, and because of what comes immediately after—if the disciples weren’t actually thinking all these things, at least we know it was definitely on Mark’s mind as he wrote his gospel. Because the story of this blind man’s healing is immediately followed by one of the most amazing passages in this book.

V. 27:

27 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?” 28 And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” 30 And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

So think back over the passages we’ve seen recently:

Jesus in Gentile territory, extending his healing and provision to them.

Jesus healing a deaf-mute in stages, giving him “ears to hear.”

Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for their hard-heartedness and warning the disciples not to be like them.

Jesus reminding them of his miracles, and the deeper sense behind them.

And finally, Jesus healing this blind man in stages: partially healed for a moment, fully healed at the end.

What has only been suggested up to now is spoken plainly, for the first time since chapter 1, verse 1. “You are the Christ.”

“The Christ” is the Messiah, the Savior God had promised to save his people. And the interesting thing is that the first person to say it here isn’t Jesus himself, or John the Baptist (who definitely knew more about Jesus than most other people), but Peter. Other people say Jesus is John the Baptist, or Elijah, or one of the prophets. But who do you say that I am?

You are the Christ.

It’s the first time anyone has expressed it this clearly and openly.

But how did Peter know? He’s an uneducated man—a laborer, a fisherman. He was not trained as a rabbi, is not used to making complex theological arguments. And Jesus has never outright said that he is the Christ.

So how did Peter know?

Because he was given eyes to see. Ears to hear.

It wasn’t perfect (as we’ll see in next week’s passage)—Peter’s still at the point, like the blind man, where he’s starting to be able to see the shape of things to come, but not yet grasp the clear picture. But what he sees is enough. Enough for him to affirm that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Christ.

Finally—someone sees Jesus for who he is.

What Are We Looking For?

Friends, this is where everything in this gospel has been leading us. All these miracles, all this teaching, point in one direction: to the acknowledgement that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. It’s what Mark declared in the very first sentence of this book—and finally, someone within the narrative has seen it.

So it’s impossible for us to read this text seriously without hearing Jesus ask us the same questions he asked the disciples: Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?

What you’re seeing depends on two things. First, it depends on God, who performs the miracle in our hearts to give us eyes to see: we need a miracle of perception, like the blind man, and he’s the only one who can give it.

But if that’s all we think about, what will we do? We’ll sit around, like the blind man, waiting for Jesus to come across our paths. We’ll spend our time waiting for God to come down in a bolt of lightning or a voice from heaven and shake us up.

That’s not the way Jesus reveals himself, most of the time. It’s not the way he revealed himself to the disciples. Instead, he warned them. He pushed them. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod,” he said. Because he knows that our instinct will be to think just like them: to come to Jesus to test him, rather than to know him.

So here is the question we need to ask, and it’s quite simple: What are we looking for?

Are we looking for proof, or are we looking for Jesus?

The Pharisees want a sign. They want proof. They want to test Jesus, to see how he stands up under intense scrutiny.

So often we do this too. We stand back around the periphery and we wait to see what will happen. We think, Maybe if I had proof, I’d fully embrace the Christian life. But that’s just not true. The Pharisees already have all the proof they need—and they’re still resisting. Not because they don’t see what Jesus is doing, but because they don’t want to lose what they have.

The Pharisees want a sign.

But Peter, for all of his faults, isn’t looking for a sign. He’s looking for Jesus.

He doesn’t understand everything, his knowledge is still very sub-par. But what little he knows is enough to convince him that Jesus is worth following.

So what does he do? He doesn’t wait to understand everything. He doesn’t wait to be more convinced. He’s looking for Jesus, so he follows Jesus. And when he sees Jesus do what he does and say what he says—the same things the Pharisees saw—he is finally able to connect the dots.

Not because he’s more intelligent than the Pharisees, not because he’s got more training. But because unlike them, he wants to know Jesus for who he is, even if who Jesus is turns out to be hard to wrap his mind around.

And that desire to know Jesus is the miracle Peter needed. That desire to know Jesus is another way God gives us eyes to see.

That is the prayer we should all be praying: “Lord, help us want to know Jesus. Give us eyes to see.” And the prayer that should come on the heels of the first one is: “Lord, help me to stand on what I already have seen.”

We might look at the little we have grasped, the few things we have seen and understood, and think it’s not enough.

But it is.

Last week I told the story of the first time I felt God open my ears to hear him—it was really simple, a mere thought that said, “I can no longer say I don’t believe.”

It took a couple years before I became a Christian.

And I didn’t become a Christian because of a massive revelation. I couldn’t say that I had all the elements I felt I needed. With the help of some brothers and sisters in Christ who were patient with me and loved me well, I simply came to the realization that I had enough. What little I knew and understood was enough to convince me that Jesus was worth following. I realized that I could stand on what little I knew, and trust him for all the rest that I didn’t know.

And oddly, it was that decision—the decision to stand on what I did know, and to trust God for everything I didn’t—that helped me to see more and more as the years went on. If I’d kept waiting, I’d still be waiting today.

But I came to the point where I wasn’t looking for proof anymore; I was looking for Jesus. And because I was looking for him, he gave me eyes to see.

My eyes are not perfect—they’re still cloudy, and quite myopic.

What I don’t want is to be willfully myopic—to refuse to look closely at who Christ is, and what he demands of me, because looking closely means I’ll have to act. If I’m looking for Jesus, that is one thing that I can no longer allow myself—that is off the table.

But if seek him, then every day I spend with him is another day when he places his hands on my eyes, and takes them away, and I see a little more clearly.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not—the questions are the same.  What are you waiting for? What are you looking for? Are you looking for proof, or are you looking for Jesus? Are you looking for security, or are you looking for Jesus? Are you looking for acceptance, or are you looking for Jesus? Are you looking for love, or are you looking for Jesus?

None of those other things are bad; but Jesus comes first. Will you stand on what you have seen of him, and follow him, rather than these other things you think you need?

If you really want to know what makes you “you”, at the core of your being, the question you need to ask is not, “What do you believe?” but “What do you want?”

Our prayer should be, “Lord, help me want to see Jesus. Help me look for Jesus. And give me eyes to see.”

The Miracle We Need (1) (Mark 7.24-8.9)

We all know what it’s like to get sucked down a YouTube rabbit hole.

One of my favorite rabbit holes to get sucked into is videos of people seeing or hearing in a new way, for the first time: videos of babies getting fitted with their first pair of glasses, of people getting cochlear implants and hearing their loved ones’ voices for the first time, or color blind people receiving those glasses that finally allow them to see colors. I could watch them for hours.

We become blasé to these miracles of perception that exist all around us, “miracles” made possible through science, but the older I get, the more I become convinced that miracles of perception—real miracles of perception—are the most impressive kinds.

I believe this because I know people who have benefitted from other types of “miracles”, of recoveries from injuries or illness that shouldn’t have been possible, without really being changed by them. It happens all the time—people who have heard the gospel, who receive blessings that can only be explained by God’s hand at work, but who remain indifferent to God after they’ve received it.

A physical miracle can do someone temporary good, but in the end doesn’t change much. But a miracle of perception—a miracle that changes the way you see the world around you—is durable.

I’m saying this because we see three miracles in this text; they’re all different sorts of miracles, which we’ll get into. But I believe that in the end, when you take them together, everything we see in today’s passage is about perception: it’s about Christ changing our way of seeing ourselves and of seeing him.

All three miracles send their own separate message, but taken together give us a bigger message of where Christ is taking us.

We’ll start with the individual messages of the individual miracles.

1. The Grace of Christ is Not Normal. (7.24-30)

If you remember last week, the entire passage was about purity—the Pharisees asking a question about handwashing, Jesus responding that they’re hypocrites because they tweak the Law of Moses to fit their own purposes, and then telling his disciples that it’s not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of their hearts.

Mark gave a very brief commentary on Jesus’s teaching at the end of v. 19: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

This was a massive departure from Jewish thought, as we saw last week, and the disciples would take years to understand it. But this is precisely the direction that Jesus goes now in v. 24. We read:

And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

Tyre and Sidon were firmly in Gentile territory. While it wasn’t at all unheard of for Jews to live in the same cities as Gentiles, there was still absolutely a barrier between them that came all the way from the Law of Moses. The people of God were commanded to stay separate from the other nations (in their marriages, in their daily lives) because these other nations were idolatrous nations, and if the Jews mingled with them they would be tempted to follow their false gods. (Which, if you’ve read the Old Testament, you know is exactly what happened on multiple occasions.)

So already this departure from Jewish territory into Gentile territory is a bit surprising: why is he going there?

Let’s keep reading. V. 24:

And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. 25 But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

So we can see the situation is complex. Jesus is a Jewish teacher, ministering to the Jews. But now here he is in Gentile territory. His reputation has preceded him, so this Syrophoenician woman comes to him saying her daughter is possessed by a demon, and she begs him to cast the demon out.

Notice right away that she adopts a posture of humility—she came and “fell down at his feet.” She knows perfectly well that she has no reason to expect him to answer her request.

But she’s desperate. This is her little girl, being tormented by a demon. We don’t have the details in this case, but we saw what a demon did to the man in chapter 5: he would cry out, cut himself with stones, had taken to living among the tombs, and no one could bind him or keep him from hurting himself.

It’s difficult to understand the intensity of this torment. When Zadie was two she began having night terrors. Night terrors are absolutely horrifying if you don’t know what’s happening. It’s a form of sleepwalking, except it’s violent. She was screaming in her bed, thrashing around, knocking into the bed and into the wall. Her eyes were open, she was saying things, but she wasn’t awake. When a kid has night terrors you can’t wake them up. All you can do is be there to keep them from hurting themselves until they finally calm down again.

Night terrors are quite common with little kids, and they go away on their own most of the time. But the first time it happened, we had no idea what was going on. It was terrifying; all we could do was pray that it would stop. (Thankfully, it did; it lasted a few months and now she sleeps great.)

That was only night terrors, and I felt so incredibly helpless. With a demon possession, it doesn’t go away after a few minutes. It’s constant, it’s brutal, and as a parent, this woman could do nothing to help.

That’s what drove her to Jesus. She had no idea he was the Messiah, probably didn’t even know what the Messiah was. All she knew was what she had heard about him, that he was able to heal people. And she was desperate enough to go to this Jewish healer and ask for help. Despair, hopelessness, hitting rock bottom, can be a great catalyst for a miracle, because you literally have no other recourse—you’ll take absolutely anything you can get.

Now, watch how Jesus responds:

27 And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

Some have suggested that when Jesus said “dogs”, he’s using an almost cute term—that’s why the Segond 21 translates it as “little dogs”. They’re trying to make it sound less offensive to modern ears, the way we call kids “ma puce”. This translation is possible, but it changes nothing: it’s still a derogatory term. This is the way Jews referred to Gentiles: as dogs.

It’s a shocking thing to hear Jesus say—but why are we shocked? We were speaking about this while preparing it for our community group Bible studies, and Mariya suggested it’s because we have a sense of entitlement. I think she’s right. We’re shocked that Jesus would say this because we couldn’t imagine Jesus saying this to anyone.

But he’s saying it for a reason. Jesus is laying out the harsh truth of the situation up to this point. Or rather, he’s laying out the perception they all had of the situation. This is just the way it was: the Jews and the Gentiles did not mix. Jesus is the Messiah promised by God to the Jews, to “the children,” as he puts it. So it’s not normal that the Jewish Messiah would stoop to help a Gentile—someone who didn’t believe in the Jewish God.

In our study group, Joe asked this very good question: “How would you react if someone shared the good news of the gospel, and then said, ‘But it’s not for you’?”

That’s essentially what all Gentiles should be hearing. If we are not Jewish, then ordinarily at least, Jesus isn’t our Messiah—he’s theirs. It’s not normal for him to save us; it’s not normal for him to help us.

Now most Gentiles would probably take what he says as an insult, as a rejection. And maybe the woman does too; maybe she hears the word “dog” and recognizes it for the derogatory term it is.

But she’s desperate. So she makes a bold statement—a final, last-gasp attempt to save her daughter. She says (v. 28):

28 But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Desperation and hopelessness drive us to humility. Rather than being offended, she agrees with him. “No,” she’s saying, “it’s not normal that you should do anything for me. But you can. And I’m asking you to do whatever you will.”

Whether this woman knew it or not, she touched on a great biblical truth, that is spread throughout the entire Bible: God made a promise to Abraham, thousands of years earlier, that he would make his descendants into a great nation, and that this nation would bless all the peoples of the earth. God would come to Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, first, and he would give them to feast; but the rest of the world would also benefit from this family.

And here we see exactly that: the Messiah of the Jews, descended from Abraham, extending that blessing to the nations.

V. 29:

29 And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.

Of course, Jesus had every intention of healing this woman’s daughter from the beginning. He said what he said to make it clear to whoever was around to hear that his grace to this woman is not normal…but that he would give it anyway.

And that is the first lesson here. The grace of Christ is not normal, no matter who we are. We have sinned against our Creator; we have rejected him and desired to be our own gods. And yet, he came to save us from ourselves.

This woman understood that Jesus’s help was not normal—and yet she came. She asked. And she received his grace.

That’s the message of the first miracle. The message of the second miracle is just as interesting.

2. A Miracle of Perception Is a Different Kind of Miracle. (7.31-37)

V. 31:

31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis.

So he’s traveled from Tyre and Sidon to another region, the Decapolis, which was still out of Jewish territory—it was a more mixed region, but its population was not comprised of mainly Jews. V. 32:

32 And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. 34 And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35 And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

This miracle is really interesting. It’s the first miracle of only two we see in the gospel of Mark that require any kind of effort on Jesus’s part. Normally, he just says a word or touches someone, and they’re healed. This time, he does more than that.

He puts his fingers in the deaf man’s ears, then spits, takes some of his saliva, and touches the man’s tongue with it. And then he speaks: “Be opened,” he says, and the man can hear, and his speech impediment is healed.

I’ve heard a lot of people read into the different things Jesus does here—I once even saw a pastor spit on a person who was sick, believing that there was some kind of power in saliva. (It didn’t work.)

I think it’s actually far simpler than that. I think Jesus goes through extra steps here (and later on, in chapter 8, when he heals a blind man) simply to show that this is a different kind of miracle. He’s not healing a cripple, or a skin disease, or a blood infection. I think Jesus was perfectly capable of simply saying a word and healing this man. But he’s setting this, and the healing of the blind man in chapter 8, apart.

Why? Because these are miracles of perception. Hearing, seeing, speaking.

Essentially, he’s using these miracles as living parables. Think of how many times in the gospels we see Jesus teaching, and then he ends his teaching by saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”. His point is that not everyone does have ears to hear. Not everyone does have eyes to see. We need something more for that to happen.

We need a miracle of perception.

And here we see Mark paying particular attention to the reaction of the people who see this miracle. Jesus tells everyone not to talk about it, but (v. 36): the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.

Mark has mentioned multiple times that when Jesus performed miracles, people would often respond with amazement or surprise. They’d look at one another and say “Who is this man, who can command demons and heal diseases and calm the storm?”

But this is the very first time that Mark reports a reaction that more closely resembles worship.

V. 37:

And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

That may not be the first time anyone has said this about Jesus, but it’s the first time Mark mentions it, and I think he mentions it because he wants us to see that this kind of miracle, besides just being amazing, is good. We see Jesus performing this miracle in a different way than the others, and people responding to him by saying, “He has done all things well!”

We’ll come back to this in a few minutes—I think this miracle is sort of the hinge on which this passage turns—but before we do, let’s look at the next one.

3. The Grace of Christ Is Extended to All. (8.1-9)

In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him and said to them, 2 “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. 3 And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away.” 4 And his disciples answered him, “How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?” 5 And he asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” They said, “Seven.” 6 And he directed the crowd to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and they set them before the crowd. 7 And they had a few small fish. And having blessed them, he said that these also should be set before them. 8 And they ate and were satisfied. And they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. 9 And there were about four thousand people. And he sent them away.

This particular miracle is really interesting, because it’s been done before. The events of the beginning of chapter 8 are almost identical to the events in chapter 6, verses 30 to 44, when Jesus feeds the crowds there. Lots of people gathered in a desolate place, they’re hungry, and Jesus has compassion on the crowd (it’s mentioned in both texts). He takes a few loaves of bread and a few fish and multiplies them to feed the entire crowd, with food left over. The same thing as we see here.

There are, however, a few significant differences between the two events.

First is the location—in chapter 6, Jesus and the disciples were still on the other side of the sea of Galilee, firmly in Jewish territory. Now they’re in the Decapolis, and this crowd is filled with Gentiles.

Second is the disciples’ reaction to the need. In chapter 6, when Jesus mentions that the crowds are hungry, the disciples start brainstorming where to go buy food. This time, that doesn’t happen. Jesus mentions their need, and they respond by asking in v. 4, “How is this possible? How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?”

At first glance, you’d think it’s sort of a dumb question, because Jesus just multiplied food for the crowd in Galilee not long before—they know perfectly well how it’s possible. So why would they ask the question?

Mark doesn’t tell us, but I would be willing to bet that they’re asking the question, not because they can’t conceive of how Jesus could feed the crowd, but rather because they couldn’t imagine Jesus doing it here. It’s one thing to feed thousands of Jews, but Jews don’t eat with Gentiles; Jews don’t serve Gentiles food; it’s not just a miracle that’s required, but a rewiring of the disciples’ entire way of seeing these people.

The final difference is quantity—especially quantity of leftovers. In both passages, we start with a small amount of food, Jesus multiplies the food to feed thousands of people, and there is a lot of food left over.

I know we saw this a few weeks ago in chapter 6, but it’s significant, so I’m going to say it again. In chapter 6, there were twelve baskets of food left over. What does the number twelve remind you of? Of course, if you know the story of Exodus, it will remind you of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Here in chapter 8, there are seven baskets of food left over. Seven, in the Bible, is the number of completeness, of wholeness. 

Seven baskets here, twelve baskets there. And there’s a reason: God knew exactly what he was doing when he planned out how much food there would be left over. Again—he’s making a living parable.

In the first miracle, as we’ve seen, Jesus is in Jewish territory—he’s preaching to Jews, and he’s feeding Jews. Twelve baskets, twelve tribes of Israel. In this second miracle, Jesus is in Gentile territory—he’s preaching to non-Jews, and he’s feeding non-Jews. And this time, seven baskets are left: completeness.

First he comes to Israel, and feeds his people. Then he goes out into the rest of the world, and feeds them in the same exact way. Jesus didn’t come just to save the Jews; he came to save all his people. People from all nations, all tribes and tongues.

Think back to what the Syrophenician woman said earlier. Jesus said,

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

And Jesus approves.

Here we see him extending that approval to this entire crowd—he fed the Jews first, multiplying their bread and filling them up, and now he does it for the Gentiles. But it’s not “crumbs” he gives them; just like with the Jews, he gives them an abundant feast. The same feast as the Jews got—everyone filled to bursting, with plenty left over.

The message is simple: the grace that Jesus Christ, the Messiah, came to give to the Jews, isn’t just for the Jews—it is for all peoples, all nations, all tribes. No one is excluded on the basis of who they are or where they come from.

The Miracle We Need

So we’ve seen these three miracles now; each is unique, and each has its own particular message they communicate. You could preach one sermon on each of these miracles, and you’d come out with three different messages.

But Mark tells his story with intentionality; he puts them together for a reason. So what is that reason? What do we see here?

We see, first, that the grace of Christ is not normal—it’s not normal that God would show his grace to those who were not his people (like us), it’s not normal that God would show his grace to his own people who reject him. His grace is not normal.

And yet, his grace is abundantly offered—not just to the Jews, but to all peoples.

What does his grace consist of? It consists, of course, of everything Christ came to do: to be punished for our sin in our place, to give us his perfect life, to forgive us for our sin, to declare us righteous, to give us eternal life. He came to save us from our sin, and that is his grace.

But for us to access any of that—for us to realize our need for a Savior, and turn to him—he needs to give us another grace, and it is this grace that is highlighted in this text.

This grace, offered to all peoples, is a miracle of perception. This grace, offered to all peoples, is not material blessing, but changed eyes, changed ears, changed hearts. The ability to desire God’s presence, to see God’s glory, to hear God’s voice, to proclaim God’s kingdom.

That’s what we see here. He gives the grace to see ourselves differently—to know that we, like the Syrophoenician woman, are undeserving of his grace. He gives us the grace to see him differently—to know that, despite how undeserving we are, he gives us grace, and he gives it abundantly.

I remember one of the first times this ever happened to me. I had grown up in church, so I’d heard the gospel and stories from the Bible all my life; I’d heard thousands of sermons. But I didn’t care; I was disinterested. I did a very good job pretending, but I didn’t actually believe any of it.

Then when I was nineteen I got a job at a local printing company. My particular job was printing things on t-shirts: company t-shirts, event t-shirts, and so on. The company was small, so the owner had set up the t-shirt printing material in his father’s barn, in the middle of the forest about ten miles out of town. And that’s where I’d spend my workdays—all by myself in this barn, in the woods.

I had a little CD player out there so I could listen to things, and one beautiful summer day I put on the only thing I had in my car. It was a Christian musician I kind of liked, so I put it on and it played on a loop all day. And I don’t quite know how it happened, but during one particular song that put particular emphasis on the gospel, this thought came unbidden: You can’t say you don’t believe this is true. You can try, but it’d be a lie. You believe this. You know you do.

I kept trying to work for a while, but I couldn’t: I had to take a break and go outside. I looked up at the trees, at the sky, at the sun shining, and I knew it was true. I couldn’t say for sure exactly what I believed, but I couldn’t truthfully say I didn’t believe God had sent his Son.

It took a couple years to bring me to a full conviction of the truth of the gospel, but on that day, Jesus started the process. He opened my ears, made it so that when he spoke to me through the gospel, I heard him. I had no more choice in the matter than the deaf man after Jesus healed him; he couldn’t choose to be deaf again, and of course, who would want to?

This is what God does—sometimes all at once, sometimes incrementally. He opens our ears to hear his voice, he opens our eyes to see him. And what do we hear him say?

We hear him say, “You don’t deserve my grace. You have sinned against me, and deserve condemnation. But I came anyway. I died anyway. Yes, even for you.”

So what do we do with that? Very often, we feel like we need to wait for this monumental event. But we can learn so much from the Syrophoenician woman. She never had a revelation from heaven—she didn’t hear God telling her to come to Jesus. She saw her need, and she had nowhere else to go.

And that was enough. That was a miracle.

Some of us, whether we’re Christians or not, need to come to the realization that nothing in this world will satisfy our deepest need. This will happen over and over in our Christian lives, because we need a constant reminder of who we are and of who he is. We need to feel the weight of our sin, the weight of our need. We need to fall at his feet and beg him to give us eyes to see, ears to hear. And we need to realize that when we do, he is waiting—not with crumbs, but with a feast.

The Diagnosis (Mark 7.1-23)

A couple years ago, Jack got sick. He was weak, he was dizzy, especially when he would lie down. It lasted a while, so we started getting worried. We took him to the doctor and she ordered a blood test.

We couldn’t get an appointment with her until the week after to check the results, so I brought the test results with me to church one day and asked Josh (a doctor-missionary who was attending Connexion at the time) to look at them. I watched him nervously as he looked over the results, because we had noticed a few things were out of range. He looked them over grimly, then said, “From what I can tell, it looks like he’s extremely dehydrated.”

All that worry, because Jack wasn’t drinking enough water. Sure enough, we made him drink a lot more water, and a couple days later he was fine.

A good diagnosis, however unexpected it might be, can target an illness, allow you to treat it efficiently, and also change your perspective on what’s actually going on; it helps you worry less about things that are no big deal, and to take seriously things that need to be taken seriously.

This is essentially what Jesus does for us in today’s text: he takes advantage of a criticism from the Pharisees to give them a scathing diagnosis of their real problem, and ours.

This passage falls perfectly in line with what Mark has been doing since the beginning of his gospel. One of his main goals in this book is to explain to us precisely who Jesus is. Jesus comes preaching the coming of the kingdom of God and calling people to repent of their sin, and he travels from place to place, teaching the crowds and performing miracle after miracle. In the text we saw last time—the second half of chapter 6—we saw him multiply bread and fish to feed five thousand, walking on water, and healing the sick in Gennesaret. And we saw that the particular miracles he performed, and the way he did it, shows us that Jesus is ushering in a new exodus—moving his people out of death and into life.

Mark’s going to continue in that same vein in today’s text: by showing us how Jesus diagnoses the problem of the Pharisees, and of all humanity, he sheds more light on exactly who Jesus is, and what he came to do.

The Pharisees’ Question (v. 1-5)

When we start chapter 7, Jesus and the disciples have landed near Gennesaret off the Sea of Galilee, and Jesus has been healing people all over the region. And apparently a group of Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem have come to Jesus and are watching what’s happening around him.

Just as a reminder: the Pharisees were a group of highly religious men who prided themselves on observing the law of Moses to the letter—they saw themselves, in a sense, as arbiters of the Jewish faith. The scribes were religious leaders, experts in interpreting the law. So they’re not the same thing, but their interests often aligned.

And when they observed Jesus’s disciples, they got worried—because they observed a certain behavior in them that, presumably, told them a lot about Jesus. If the disciples act a certain way, that says something about their Master.

Let’s read starting in v. 1:

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4 and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

Now the obvious question to ask is, why is this such a big deal? I mean, in terms of hygiene it’s not great—always wash your hands before eating—but why would that make their hands not just dirty, but “defiled”?

It all comes down to the notion of purity. Not moral purity, but ritual purity. In the law of Moses, there were certain things that were designated “clean” and “unclean”—certain meats the Jews weren’t allowed to eat, certain things they weren’t allowed to touch. The list of things that could make you ceremonially unclean is, all things considered, reasonably short, and the list existed for a reason: to show that you can’t come into the presence of God in a carefree way. The Jews were called to think hard about what it means to belong to God’s people, and the notion of ritual purity helped them recall that truth. If they touched something that was unclean, they had to go through a process of purification before coming back before God to offer sacrifices.

Being ceremonially unclean meant that you were required to stay away from other people while you were unclean, and it meant that you were excluded from the presence of God, at least temporarily. We have no equivalent for this in our modern society: we have no experience that  would exclude us from both our community and from God’s presence. Even if we did have something like that, most people today probably wouldn’t care—they’d just find another community or another god.

But for the Jews, this was a very big deal. If you were impure, you lost everything. If you were pure, you had access to everything. The stakes were incredibly high.

And what happens when the stakes of a given act or situation are high? We get nervous—we start to think of all the ways things could go wrong. So we start to make plans to keep that from happening.

This is, essentially, what happened over the centuries. The law of Moses forbade certain things—things they weren’t allowed to eat or touch—but over the years, the “elders”, the religious leaders, started adding things to that list, just in case. I understand this temptation completely—I myself would rather be too careful rather than not careful enough in most matters. But they added things God never intended to the list of “unclean” things.

Like the need to wash one’s hands before a meal. For hygiene, of course, it’s a good idea. But the law never said eating with unwashed hands made one unclean or “defiled.”

So that’s the context of this strange exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. Jesus’s disciples are eating with unwashed hands, so the Pharisees and scribes ask him why he’s allowing it, as if the disciples are breaking God’s law by doing so. (They’re not.)

Now of course Jesus could have just explained to them everything I’ve just said, but he knew what was going on in their hearts, and he apparently decided to take advantage of their question. Because, as we see over and over again in the gospels, two things that Jesus cannot stand are religious people who live hypocritically, and religious people who miss the point of their religion.

The Pharisees’ Hypocrisy (v. 6-13)

The question of the Pharisees and scribes is a trick question, of course; they don’t think he’ll have a good answer. So Jesus does what he does so well: he ignores the trick question and turns the tables on those who asked it. V. 6:

6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
                  “ ‘This people honors me with their lips,
      but their heart is far from me;
            7       in vain do they worship me,
      teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus tells the Pharisees that they “reject the commandment of God”? It sort of seems like they’re doing the opposite, doesn’t it? like they’re not rejecting the commandment, but rather taking it too far.

But if Jesus is telling the truth, by taking it too far, they are rejecting it. Let’s look at the example he gives and see if we can understand what he’s talking about.

V. 9 again:

9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban” ’ (that is, given to God)— 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

On the surface it may seem like Jesus’s example is coming out of nowhere; they were asking him about hand-washing, not about money given to God. But here Jesus shines a light on their whole attitude regarding the law. And their attitude makes a clear statement to God: that what he commands isn’t enough. It’s an attitude that tries to make sure God gets it right. Surely when God talked about ritual purity, and gave a list of things that could make people unclean, he meant that list to be a lot longer. So we’ll just go ahead and make that list as long as we can, just to make sure we’ve covered all the bases.

That’s the logic they apply to the law in general, Jesus knows, so he gives them an even worse example. The law says, “Honor your father and mother”—and it takes it very seriously, as we see in v. 10: according to the law, dishonoring your parents was punishable by death. (Hear that, kids?) Though its application changed over the years, the importance of honoring your parents continued all the way until your parents’ death; in their old age, when they can’t work anymore, it was the children’s responsibility to care for them, to contribute to their welfare.

But God also told the people to contribute financially to the tabernacle, and later, to the temple. This was a big part of the law as well.

So (here’s the Pharisees’ logic, taken to its conclusion), surely the commandment to give to God’s house is more important than the commandment to honor your parents. If you have to choose between one commandment or the other, which do you choose? After all, who is more important? God, or Mom and Dad?

God, of course. So all the money that would have gone to Mom and Dad, we can “dedicate it to God” (that’s what that word “Corban” means), so we don’t have to give it to Mom and Dad. Think of all the money we’ll save, when we can take two lines in our budget and shrink them down to one! And we’ll feel good and pious on top of it, because we’re giving to God.

You see the problem. Here’s tradition again, applying the law incorrectly in order to feed the egos of the obedient.

The problem is always the same. God commands a certain number of things (and make no mistake, his commands are strict, as we’ll see later). Then the religious leaders come along and establish tradition that goes beyond what the law says.

We all know that the Catholic Church elected a new pope this week, Pope Leo XIV. I know nothing about the man, besides the obvious; he seems like a nice man and it sounds like he’s done some good work.

But there are problems, not with the man himself, but with what he represents and what he says. I don’t have time to get into all of them right now, and I’m not trying to offend anyone—if you’re Catholic or come from a Catholic background, we love you and we’re happy you’re here—but the new pope’s speech gives us a very quick example of the kind of thing Jesus is talking about.

I won’t read the whole thing, merely give two select quotes. The first came early on in his speech:

“Therefore, without fear, united hand in hand with God and among ourselves, we move forward. We are disciples of Christ. Christ precedes us. The world needs his light. Humanity needs him as the bridge to allows it to be reached by God and by his love…”

To that, I say amen—there’s a need to specify who are the “we” who are disciples of Christ, but he’s right. Christ precedes us in our mission, and humanity absolutely does need him. He is the bridge between humanity and God.

So far, so good.

But this is how he ended his speech:

“Today is the day of the Supplication to Our Lady of Pompeii. Our Mother Mary always wants to walk with us, to be close, to help us with her intercession and her love. So, I would like to pray together with you. Let us pray together for this new mission, for the whole Church, for peace in the world and let us also ask Mary, our Mother, for this special grace.”

And he followed this with the famous Hail Mary. Only one prayer offered up by the new pope, and it was offered, not to our Savior Jesus Christ himself, but to Mary.

The Bible never encourages us to pray to Mary, but it commands us continually to pray to Christ, because Christ—not a pope or a priest—is the intermediary between God and man.

“…teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.” And what is the danger of this? That we might hear God say, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.’”

Tradition in and of itself isn’t a bad thing; it can be immensely helpful and structuring. However, these leaders to whom Jesus is speaking put their tradition on the same level as the Word of God, treating disobedience to tradition with the same severity as disobedience to the Word of God.

It is an unbelievably arrogant way to behave, because it assumes that God didn’t get it right the first time. And the end result of this kind of behavior is always that our tradition will come and replace the Word of God, because our tradition comes from us, and we understand it. We like its rigidity because it makes us feel pious; it gives us concrete actions we can perform to prove our own worth to ourselves.

Treating God’s law this way takes the spotlight off of God, and puts it on ourselves. We do what we think is right, and we do it because we think it makes us holy. We assume that if we act a certain way, and obey these rules established by our tradition, God will look at us and say, “How amazing you are!”

But the point of the law was to show the incredible distance between God’s holiness and our sin; to show that sin is an active barrier to fellowship with God; in other words, the law existed to show us how good he is, not how good we are. “‘This people honors me with their lips,’” God said through the prophet Isaiah, “‘but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

When you hold too tightly to the tradition of men, you leave the commandment of God. Which is a grave mistake because the commandment of God actually cuts far deeper, than our tradition.

And that’s where Jesus goes next.

Humanity’s Problem (v. 14-23)

This time, Jesus speaks to the crowd again and he does what he always does so beautifully: he takes a simple commandment from the law and turns it completely on its head. This is what everything so far in this chapter has been building toward. V. 14:

14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

Now if you read v. 14 and 15 and you feel a bit confused, don’t feel bad. After all, the law of Moses explicitly said that there are plenty of things the Jews weren’t allowed to eat, or else they would become “unclean.”

Let’s face it: this parable (this teaching given through a picture) that Jesus tells in v. 14-15 is not very clear. That’s not a criticism of Jesus teaching. Remember what we saw about parables in chapter 4? We saw that the point of parables wasn’t usually to make things clearer, but on the contrary to make them even more obscure.

So it’s not at all surprising that the disciples would hear this and be confused, because it sounds as if Jesus is saying that God’s own laws of ritual purity are wrong. But the one thing the disciples almost always have in their favor is that when they’re confused, they ask questions. It’s the right thing to do. V. 17:

17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Look at the picture he’s painting. We eat food; where does it go? Into the stomach, to be expelled. When we eat food, what does it miss? It misses the heart.

Obviously there are foods that can lead to heart disease; Jesus isn’t being scientific here. He’s speaking in spiritual terms.

In the Bible, the “heart” is the center of one’s person, the seat of our thoughts and will and emotions and conscience. The heart is what makes us who we are as individuals.

Do you see what he’s doing? He’s helping the disciples see the forest for the trees. He’s taking the focus off of the commandment itself, and directing their attention to what the commandment was trying to say.

What was the commandment on ritual purity trying to say? It was trying to show that there is a natural barrier to fellowship with God, that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God’s holiness and our sin. The commandments on ritual purity merely took that abstract concept and made it concrete, made it feel more real, more immediate. When someone became unclean and was required to go through the process of purification in order to offer sacrifices again, they felt what it’s like to be cut off from God, and how badly they needed to be purified.

All the Jews knew what this felt like, because the list of things that could make one unclean included quite ordinary things that would happen to everyone at least once. Almost definitely, they had all been through the rites of purification before, and knew what it felt like to be temporarily unclean.

So imagine what a hammer-blow it would be to hear Jesus say that what they felt during their ritual uncleanness, they should be feeling all the time. Why? Because it’s not what goes into a person that defiles him, but what comes out of him. V. 21 again:

21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

These are devastating verses, because they show that the real problem is far bigger than we imagined. Jesus says the real problem isn’t what we do: what we eat or drink, or even the sinful actions we perform. Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness—these are all evil things, Jesus says. But they’re not even the main problem. Because where do these evil things come from? They come from within. From out of the heart of man.

What truly defiles us, Jesus says, is what comes out of us.

We see it all the time in children; when they get in trouble, what is their instinct? It is to defend themselves by throwing the blame onto something else. “I didn’t mean to, the cookie fell into my mouth!” “It wasn’t me, it was my sister; she took my fist and hit herself with it!” It sounds goofy, but parents, you’ll know—kids think of the dumbest things to lie about.

And really, we adults are no different, we just do it better. When we sin against God, we think of the most brilliant justifications for why we couldn’t help it. Why it wasn’t our fault. Why we couldn’t have done any differently. We do it so well that we actually convince ourselves that we’re not that bad; in the deepest parts of ourselves, we really are good people, and it’s the circumstance that made us disobey God’s clear commands.

If you read the Bible, you’ll notice two things that seem to be at odds. You’ll see that the Bible is both far more positive than we are in its view of humanity, and far more negative. It tells us that we have been created in God’s very own image. So it fights directly against everything in us that tells us we’re worthless, that we can’t do anything right, that God could never love us.

At the same time, it tells us that sin has so corrupted us that as bad as we often think we are, we’re actually worse. Jesus tells us here that everything wrong with our world doesn’t come from outside of us—not from Satan or demons or anything else. Everything wrong with us comes from inside of us.

Incredible potential, crushed by incredible evil.

It’s a doctrine we refer to as “total depravity”. Total depravity doesn’t mean that we’re all as bad as we could be, but that sin has sunk its fingers into every corner of our hearts and souls. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

That sounds terribly grim; the problem is far worse than the Pharisees or the scribes had imagined. What possible hope could we have, knowing that the human heart is responsible for every wrong, every injustice, and that we are all infected with it? Look at the list that Jesus gives of what comes out of the heart of man in v. 21-22. It’s not exhaustive, but even so, not a single person in history could look at that list and not find themselves on their somewhere. Maybe I’ve never killed anyone or cheated on my wife…but I’m definitely guilty of coveting, of deceit, of envy, of pride, of foolishness.

What hope could we possibly have, if the real problem doesn’t come from outside of us, but from inside? Jesus called people to repent, to abandon their sins and to follow him. But how do we do that? I might be able to stick at least sort of closely to a pattern of behavior, but I can’t abandon my own heart; I carry it with me wherever I go. And this heart I carry around produces all these evil things.

What hope do we have?

Well, think about it this way: why would Jesus say this to his disciples? Jesus isn’t cruel; he doesn’t ever want to just frighten people for the fun of it. What is he trying to help them see?

He’s trying to help them see what they need to be rescued from, so they can understand what kind of Rescuer Jesus is.

Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas des comportements extérieurs, mais qui visera le cœur de l’homme. Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas de réhabilité les habitudes sociales ou morales de son peuple, mais qui prendra leur péché sur lui-même et leur donnera sa justice. Il est le Sauveur qui ne se contentera pas de maquiller les cadavres que nous sommes, mais qui nous ressuscite avec lui pour faire de nous des nouvelles créations.

Our diagnosis is incredibly brutal; it’s far worse than we thought. But when we have a diagnosis, we can welcome the cure.

The Diagnosis and the Cure

Now when we read this text, our temptation will be to rush to the cure as quickly as possible. If Jesus tells these things to the disciples to help them understand what kind of Rescuer he is, then we want to immediately go to the comforting truth that Christ really has paid for our sin.

But notice that he doesn’t go there quite yet. He doesn’t tell the disciples, “You see? You all have evil hearts—but don’t worry, I’m the Rescuer. I’ll die to change those hearts and pay for your sin.” He’ll get there eventually, and they will understand all that…but for now, Jesus lets them sit in the uncomfortable truth of what their problem is.

It makes sense. The cure for our sin is given freely in Christ. Our evil hearts that produce evil ways have been punished, once and for all. Our sin was nailed to the cross with Christ.

But we saw it last week, in Isaiah 55: to accept that cure means a radical reorientation of our priorities, of our view of ourselves, of everything we are.

And I’ve seen far too many people who look at this reorientation and say, “You know, that just seems like a lot.” And they reject the cure, because they don’t fully feel the weight of the diagnosis.

We cannot make the same mistake.

So the challenge to all of us this week, after spending time meditating on this text, is to sit in these truths for as long as we need to. To meditate on the reality that the sin which condemned us came from within us, and not from outside.

And then, once we begin to feel how desperate our situation was (and perhaps is still), to marvel at the fact that it is this kind of sinner Christ came to save. He took on himself, not only our sinful acts, but our sinful hearts. He didn’t just free us from condemnation; he died to make us new creations. He didn’t just teach us lessons, he made us alive.

Sit under the weight of your sin for as long as you need to, in order to fully understand the weight of his glory. And then come to him—perhaps even for the first time. Come to him and know that, when he described the darkness of our hearts, he knew perfectly well that it was those kinds of hearts he was dying for. Let us marvel at our Savior this week, and thank him for loving the unworthy.

“And They Lived Happily Ever After…” (Isaiah 55)

Most of you know I love movies—I love stories of all kinds, really, whether they’re movies or books or songs. But as the years pass, I find myself becoming less and less patient with stories that have easy, happy endings. Stories with happy endings make me feel good, but they don’t always ring true. Happy endings in real life are possible—they do happen, I know—but much of the time, people’s stories don’t end well. We march on from one painful event to the next, observing atrocities in the world from afar and witnessing disturbing behavior in the people around us, getting older and weaker as we go, before finally succumbing to the ugly reality that is death.

That’s the way life often is in a fallen world, so I have a hard time believing in happy endings.

But the fact that something is uncommon does not make it untrue. For all the unhappy endings we see over the course of our lives, there is one happy ending that is promised.

That’s what we’ve been looking at over these last two weeks: the plan God set in motion to ensure a happy ending for his people.

On Easter Sunday, we looked at Isaiah 53, in which God tells, centuries in advance, what exactly Jesus Christ would do for us. We saw that in response to the problem of our sin, our rebellion against God which separates us from him, God would send a suffering servant—a Savior, a Messiah, to come and suffer the consequences of our sin, in our place, in order to share with us his glory. This suffering servant described by Isaiah is the perfect description of Jesus Christ, who would come centuries later and do exactly what Isaiah said he would do.

Last week, we saw the first effects of Christ’s saving grace in Isaiah 54. God has given his people a new family situation, a reversal of fortune, from sterile and abandoned to protected and flourishing.

Today, we’re going to be looking at the final application of the good news of the gospel, in Isaiah 55. If Isaiah 53 explains the mechanics of the gospel (how it works), and Isaiah 54 explains how the gospel changes who we are, Isaiah 55 explains how the gospel is lived out in the Christian life.

And it is the only way. There are many different ways of applying what we see here in the minutest details of our lives—because we’re all different from one another—but there are a certain number of commonalities that will always be present if we are truly Christians. In other words, this passage describes not the end, but the beginning: Isaiah 55 describes what some have called “the basic Christian life”.

Context: Everyone, Everywhere, All the Time

Before we get started, we need to look at a bit of context that is really important. Last week, we saw that in Christ, God had brought about a new family situation for his people: instead of being barren, his people would be fertile; instead of being desolate and abandoned and under God’s judgment, his people would receive his salvation and compassion.

But of course, one might say, in chapter 54 he’s talking about God’s people, Israel, the people whom he had judged for their sin and subsequently forgiven, and promised a Savior. What does all of that have to do with the rest of the world, with people who are not members of Israel?

We see that pretty clearly at the beginning of chapter 55. V. 1:

“Come, everyone who thirsts,
      come to the waters—

So let’s not miss that very strong word “EVERYONE”. Next, v. 3-5:

3       Incline your ear [EVERYONE whom he just called in v. 1], and come to me;
      hear, that your soul may live;
                  and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
      my steadfast, sure love for David.

So the covenant God made with David, the covenant God made with Israel, he will extend to you who do not belong to Israel. And in case it wasn’t clear enough already:

            4       Behold, I made him [DAVID] a witness to the peoples,
      a leader and commander for the peoples.
            5       Behold, you [the Messiah, the ultimate descendant of King David] shall call a nation that you do not know,
      and a nation that did not know you shall run to you,
                  because of the LORD your God, and of the Holy One of Israel,
      for he has glorified you.

So the “new family situation” that Eduardo preached about last week, we see here, extends to people from all nations. Those who have nothing, those who have no rightful claim to the blessings of the Messiah, but who are hungry for them. The covenant made with David is extended to all peoples, because he is (v. 4) “a witness to the peoples”—plural, not singular.

In general we need to be careful about taking Old Testament prophecies and applying them directly to our own lives—often, those prophecies were given to specific people at specific moments in history, and for specific reasons. However, because of what we just saw in the first five verses, I do feel comfortable applying this passage to us, and not only to the people of Israel: the chapter opens with God opening up these promises to all nations, to all peoples. And that includes us.

That being said, in this text Isaiah answers for us not one question, but four—four distinct questions that spring out of the gospel. They’re fairly simple, but profound in their impact on our lives. Here are the four questions:

• What is the call of the gospel?

• How can we access the life he promises?

• How can we be sure it will work?

• And finally: What will the result of the gospel be (for us and for God)?

That’s where we’re headed this morning.

For the last two weeks, we have been looking at the most monumental truths imaginable. They are truths which change everything—not just for today, but for all of eternity. They are truths that will right every wrong, that will fix everything broken, truths which tell us that no matter how hard it is to believe, a happy ending is possible for us, and it has been made available for us.

So if the promise of the gospel—that Christ lived, died and was raised in our place, for our sins, so that we might have peace and comfort and salvation in him, how are we to respond?

What Is the Call of the Gospel? (v. 1-5)

I remember when I was a new Christian being consistently surprised by what I read in the Bible. I had grown up in church, so I thought I knew this book pretty well. And that’s one reason why reading the Bible is, frankly, so much fun, so stimulating: I’m always running across passages I never would have expected.

Like this one. If you were to ask me, “What is the call of the gospel?”, at the beginning of my Christian life my answer probably would have been something like this: “The call of the gospel is to repent of your sin and believe in Christ.” And that’s not a bad answer—we’ll get to that answer a little later.

But it’s not how God frames this passage; that’s not how he starts. Listen to what he says. V. 1:

“Come, everyone who thirsts,
      come to the waters;
                  and he who has no money,
      come, buy and eat!
                  Come, buy wine and milk
      without money and without price.

Do you see how that’s different from my earlier definition? The call of the gospel is not a command, it’s an invitation. Or rather, it’s a command that is an invitation. The only prerequisites for receiving the grace of God are being thirsty, being hungry, and being poor.

Come, everyone who thirsts! Come to the waters!

Come, everyone who is hungry! Buy and eat!

Come, everyone who has no money! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!

What kind of king gives an invitation like that? An invitation to people from all nations, from all peoples—even people from enemy nations—to come in and be fed, with no payment, no tariffs, no interest?

This is the God we serve, whose first initiative is to feed those who come to him hungry, to give to those who cannot give back.

Now of course, he’s not talking about physical food and drink—God never promised we would never have times when we feel physical hunger or thirst. So what’s he talking about? If God invites those of us who are hungry and thirsty to come to him and eat, come to him and drink, then what exactly are we hungry and thirsty for?

He answers that question in v. 2-3:

2       Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
      and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
                  Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
      and delight yourselves in rich food.
            3       Incline your ear, and come to me;
      hear, that your soul may live;
                  and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
      my steadfast, sure love for David.

There is a universal desire in the human heart to be happy—to be satisfied. And there is a universal tendency in the human heart to pursue things that will never satisfy us.

The best meal, the best job, the best house, the best marriage, the best children, will never fully satisfy us. I could say that they will never satisfy us because we live in a fallen world and there will always be something that comes along to throw a wrench in the works—illness or financial trouble or broken relationships or sin. But that’s not even the real reason. These things we pursue will never fully satisfy us because they weren’t meant to satisfy us. We weren’t created to be satisfied by these things, and they weren’t created to fulfill that desire.

And yet we still spend most of our waking hours pursuing things that will, at best, give us momentary glimpses of the satisfaction we long for, like walking by a kitchen and smelling good food being prepared. That’s at best. At worst, they will disappoint us to such an extent that our capacity for satisfaction will shrink. We’ll be so frequently let down by these things that we’ll come to believe nothing will ever satisfy us.

Both of these options are substandard. “Why,” God asks, “do you spend money for that which is not bread—” (that which won’t fill us) “—and labor for that which does not satisfy?” It’s a rhetorical question, like when you ask a child who just ate a clot of dirt, “Why did you do that?” There’s no good answer to that question. And that’s the sort of question God’s asking here. Because there is no good reason to labor for that which does not satisfy. We do it, only because we don’t see any better options, and we’re trying to make the most with what we have.

So God offers us a much better option. He says, “Listen diligently, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear—” Why? “—that your soul may live.”

That is what we want. That is what we hunger for. We want to live. So we travel, and we pour ourselves into things we think are worthwhile, and we pursue leisure, and we work on building relationships, and none of those things are bad—but we mistake those things for life, and they are not life.

What gives us true, lasting, satisfying life? Listening diligently to what God says, eating the food he gives us, resting in the covenant God has made with us, and running to the Savior he has glorified. That is what will satisfy us, because that is why we were created.

And living like this is the call of the gospel. It is not a weak call, and it is not a call that is without risk. But it is a call that is unequivocally invitational.

Are you hungry? Come and eat.

Are you thirsty? Come and drink.

Are you tired of working for that which does not satisfy? Come and live.

That is the call of the gospel.

So here is the second question:

How Do We Access This Life? (v. 6-9)

The call of the gospel is an invitation to come and live, and we saw in chapters 53 and 54 that God has provided a Savior who would make that invitation possible. He sent his Son to live our life and to die our death, to take our sin on himself, to be punished in our place and to give us his righteousness. The end result is that our sin dies on the cross with Christ, and all we have left is the righteousness of Christ that was given to us.

But there is a strange thing that happens when we talk about these truths. We talk about these truths as if because Christ has purchased our salvation for us, there’s nothing for us to do—and that is simply not true. We look at the finished work of Christ, and we assume that because his work is finished, ours must be finished too.

But that’s just not the case. And there’s a good reason. Even though his work is finished, our work is not, because we have a hunger in us that only God can satisfy, and if we want to be satisfied, we have to eat.

So what does that “eating” and “drinking” and “living” look like?

It looks like repentance. It looks like confessing our sin, turning away from our sin, and pursuing God’s ways instead of ours.

V. 6:

6       “Seek the LORD while he may be found;
      call upon him while he is near;
            7       let the wicked forsake his way,
      and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
                  let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him,
      and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
            8       For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
      neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
            9       For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
      so are my ways higher than your ways
      and my thoughts than your thoughts.

In my opinion, these four verses are the best description of repentance in the Bible. Because they not only tell us what repentance is, but why repentance is necessary.

Repentance is seeking the Lord and calling upon him—asking for his help, because we know we need it.

Repentance is forsaking our wicked ways and unrighteous thoughts—turning away from them, to the point that these sins we used to pursue are simply no longer an option for us.

Repentance is pursuing an entirely new way of life, and entirely new way of thinking. Learning to think his thoughts rather than our own, learning to walk in his ways rather than our own. It’s absolutely vital for us to see that these famous verses—v. 8 and 9 (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways”)—come in the context of repentance. He’s not talking about the unknowability of God (although God is impossible for us to fully grasp). In v. 7 he calls us to forsake our ways, and then he tells us in v. 8-9 which ways to follow. You see the difference? He’s not saying, “You’ll never be able to understand me” (even if that’s true). He’s telling us that our ways are worthless, and he’s calling us to follow his ways instead.

And that is going to require a serious mentality shift on our part.

The closest thing I could think of to describe what’s going on is schizophrenia. I shouldn’t need to say this, but I feel I may: schizophrenia is real thing. It is an actual disorder of the brain, characterized by disruptions to thinking and emotions, and a distorted perception of reality. And that’s the really spooky part—we all suffer from disruptions to thinking and emotions from time to time, for a lot of reasons. But if you have a distorted perception of reality…how would you know? If you’re suffering from hallucinations and delusions, how would you know, on your own?

Think of how scary that is. You look at the world around you, you think something is happening…but in fact what you think is happening in he world and the reality of the world could not be farther apart.

I don’t want to frighten anyone, but in essence, that is what God is telling us here.

In terms of its ability to skew our perception, schizophrenia pales in comparison to sin. Every one of us needs to accept the fact that we don’t see things as they really are. We don’t think of things as we should. We don’t value things that are valuable, and we don’t pursue that which will satisfy us. Because we are still in this world, we do not see things as we should, reason as we should, or make decisions as we should. Our ways are awful. Our ways are so far from the right way that the only way God can describe it is by saying, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Repentance, then, is the arduous, lifelong process of learning to see that nearly everything I think is wrong, and that everything God is telling me is right. “Incline your ear,” he says, “and come to me; hear, that your soul may live… Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

If we can learn to recognize that our instincts are wrong, and that God tells us what is right, then with his help we can finally start doing something about it. Our ways are wicked, but we don’t have to keep walking in them. We can change. We can repent.

One of the hardest challenges of the Christian life is believing that true repentance is possible. We get discouraged far too easily; we don’t even think it’s possible.

I was in Evian this week at the pastoral conference for the AEEBLF, and someone told a story. A kid asks his dad if he can go play by the lake.

Dad says, “Yes, but don’t go in the water.”

“I won’t.”

“No, really—I know how much you like to swim. Don’t go in the water.”

“No no, I won’t.”

A couple minutes later the kid starts heading for the lake and the dad stops him. “I can see the swimming suit hanging out of your pocket,” he says. “Why do you have that?”

The kid says, “Well, just in case I’m tempted to go in, I don’t want to get my clothes wet.”

This is how we often approach temptation. We’ve given up before it even comes: we assume the temptation will be too hard to resist, so we assume that our sin is inevitable. Often we give in to temptation simply because we leave ourselves the option of doing so.

I see it over and over again: many of us tend to accept a lack of holiness as an ordinary part of the Christian life, and it’s not. God calls us to turn away from our sin—to forsake our ways and our thoughts, and to follow his—and he wouldn’t call us to it if we were unable to do it. We are capable of far more holiness than we think. 

And we come to him and we repent and we pursue holiness—we pursue his ways instead of our own—not to get saved or to stay saved, but because he invites us to do it.

That’s not only why we repent, but how we repent! We already saw it in v. 1. “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Hear, that your soul may live!” Do you see how he describes it so much differently than we do? Repentance and holiness are not a burden; they are air for our lungs, food for our souls, life for our souls.

How much effort are people willing to put into physical exercise when they realize that it will help them live longer? When we realize that holiness is life—that it’s rich food, that it’s good drink—how hard will we work to be holy? What will our repentance look like then?

Which leads us to our next question—if God is inviting us to life, and if God is telling us how to access it, how can we be sure it will work?

How Can We Be Sure It Will Work? (v. 10-11)

The answer to this question is incredibly simple, to the point where it will make some people uncomfortable: it will work because God will make it work. V. 10:

10       “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
      and do not return there but water the earth,
                  making it bring forth and sprout,
      giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
            11       so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
      it shall not return to me empty,
                  but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
      and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

The picture he gives here is almost comical because it’s so obvious. The world is very good at growing things. Rain works well. When it falls, it doesn’t immediately get sucked back up into the sky again. It falls and waters the earth and causes plants to grow, which give us fruit and grain.

In the same way, whatever God decides to do—and that’s what he means when he talks about his “word” that “goes out from my mouth”: he’s talking about his decrees, his declarations, his decisions—will always fulfill its intended purpose. If God says something, that thing will absolutely happen. His word will not return to him empty; it will succeed.

God says that if we come to him, and turn away from our sin, and follow him, then he will give us life. He will feed our souls, and he will make us holy.

Some of you need to hear this, because you’re convinced there’s something in you that is stopping you from living for God as you should. But God says here that that is a lie. There is no defect in any of us that can stop his promise from being fulfilled: his word will always succeed in the thing for which he sent it, and he said, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; seek the Lord while he may be found; return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on you; forsake your ways, and follow mine.”

That is what God has said. That is his invitation to you. Do you really think there’s some handicap in you that could possibly stop God from giving you life if you come to him? There isn’t. His word will not return to him empty. It will do what he intends for it to do.

So no matter how you feel about yourself this morning, you can do this. You can respond to him in faith. You can change.

This is such good news. Which makes the final question incredibly easy to answer: What will the result of the gospel be for us and for God?

What Is the Result? (v. 12-13)

The result is joy for the world, and glory for God. V. 12:

12       “For you shall go out in joy
      and be led forth in peace;
                  the mountains and the hills before you
      shall break forth into singing,
      and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
            13       Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
      instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
                  and it shall make a name for the LORD,
      an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

This is an almost silly level of joy, like he’s describing an old Disney cartoon, where the trees and the flowers are singing and dancing. That is the goal he’s going for: that God might be recognized for the wonder-working, all-compassionate God that he is, and that the whole world might know his name, and respond with such joy that the earth itself sings in response.

This is what it will feel like to be in heaven. This is the result of the gospel: joy to the world, and glory to God.

Conclusion

In the light of the gospel we saw in Isaiah 53 and 54, here in chapter 55 we see:

• a call to live (v. 1-5);

• a call to repent (v. 6-9);

• a promise that God will do what he says here (v. 10-11);

• and a promise that the result will be joy, in the praise of his glory (v. 12-13).

Two calls, to promises.

I know that many of you here today are desperate for life, and you have been for some time. You always feel like there’s something holding you back. You want to be happy, but you don’t know how. And this text diagnoses the problem with laser focus.

One of the first questions we should ask when we’re going through a period of spiritual dryness is, “Is there any sinful pattern of behavior in my life of which I have not repented?” Now sometimes the answer will be no—sometimes we’re just going through a difficult time, or circumstances have worn us down. But the problem is that we will often assume that the problem is our circumstances. And we do that because the alternative is too painful. We don’t want to consider that we are the ones making life so hard on ourselves, that we’re having a hard time living because we keep going back to what kills us.

Do you see how this text changes the way we ought to think about repentance? We always think of repentance as “what I have to do in order to be saved,” when God describes repentance as “what I do in order to live.” That’s very different. Repentance is not the box to check in order to get into heaven; repentance is the life we live in order to be happy, forever. In order to be satisfied, forever. Repentance isn’t a task to accomplish but a life to enjoy. Is it hard? Of course it is. Most good things are hard, and they’re all the better for it.

So stop resisting. Discipline yourself. Listen to what God says in his Word, and come to him, so that you may live. Reject your ways and learn to follow in his. It will be a radical recentering of every area of your life—but it will be good. Water for the thirsty, good food for the hungry.

And believe that when you come to him, when you seek him, when you call on him, and when you repent, he will answer. He will have compassion on you. He will pardon you. He will feed you. He will give you life. It may not happen the way you expect, but it will happen. God’s word will not return to him empty.

This is the life he invites us into, that gives us a foretaste of heaven, where all the earth will rejoice in the glory of God’s name, through the finished work of his Son.

Texts like this remind us that as good as we think God is, he is infinitely better. So since he is so good, let us come to him and drink.

Isaiah 54: Eduardo Peres

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wuNIhXLhdH5gqGZctt5qq58YRVSRuciPrX1WfchjuJ4/edit?usp=drivesdk