Mark 1:14-28

Mark 1.14-28
Theme: It’s about the Gospel

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According to 1st Timothy 4:2, there are only two times when it is appropriate to preach the gospel: in season and out of season! Spurgeon once said,
To be laughed at is no great hardship to me. I can delight in scoffs and jeers. Caricatures, lampoons and slanders are my glory. But that you should turn from [God’s mercy], this is my sorrow. Spit on me, but oh, repent! Laugh at me, but oh, believe in my master! Make my body as the dirt of the streets, but damn not your own souls!

The gospel, not the evening news, not your Master’s thesis, not Oprah, not Barrack Obama’s inaugural speech, not the Bhagvad Gita, not Apple I-Macs, Not the Dali Lama, not Michael Jackson, not self-help (nor doctor Phil), not the Liberal Party, not the Conservatives, not the Green party, not the NDP, not environmentalism, not the gay rights movement, not the Catholic church (nor the Baptist one for that matter), not your next door neighbour’s opinion, not even your opinion… the gospel is the most important message anyone can ever hear. It’s the only message that can change the world and make all those other messages inconsequential and trivial!

We see in Mark 1:14 that Jesus’ public ministry began at the end of John’s. The reference here to John’s imprisonment in the same sentence as the launch of Jesus’ public ministry is very deliberate; it is a reminder to the followers of Christ that they must be willing to follow Christ even if it means prison and death. You can’t follow Jesus and not be willing to do it unto death and you cannot be willing to follow him unto death if you are resistant to preaching the one thing that will get you killed: the gospel!

For the most part, even the best evangelists have not done enough and suffered enough in our time to preach the gospel (at least in North American). I know I’m guilty as charged. How many people around the world have died this week for that message? And we treat it like a superfluous optional add-on! “I would rather be uncomfortable with preaching the gospel than comfortable with not telling anybody about Christ.”

I see more emotion from Christians over Michael Jackson’s death than I have ever seen from them over the fact that millions… no billions of people are facing a Christless eternity (starting sometimes in their own households). When was the last time you and a brother or sister got together at Starbucks to plan a call to arms over the fact that your brothers and sisters in other countries are being persecuted, tortured and put to death for the gospel? Then what do you talk about at Starbucks (or Tim Hortons)? Is it anything even remotely glorifying to God?

We North Americans have reduced the gospel to a world view that isn’t any different from our secular brother’s and sisters- the only difference is we have get up earlier to go to church on Sunday and run to Cosco in the afternoon. No wonder our neighbours aren’t interested in the gospel, it only appears to offer what they already have less the headache of ‘organized religion”.

Verse 14 says that Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God. A good paraphrase would be to say: Jesus came evangelizing. There were three tactics in Jesus’ evangelism strategy: the Crowds (vv. 14-15), the Individuals (vv. 16-20) and the power encounter (vv. 21-28). We’re going to look at the first one this week and then the others in the weeks to come:

Tactic 1: The Crowds (v. 14-15)
When Jesus came into Galilee he preached a simple message: repent and believe the good news. This is the universal call of the gospel. That’s the essence of the gospel; it’s the central argument of the entire Bible: Repent because you are sinner; and believe in Jesus because he can save you from God’s wrath against you for being a sinner by taking it upon himself.

The Church ought to use every opportunity to preach this message and to preach it unambiguously and lovingly. We get so caught up in dressing it up and maker it sensitive to felt needs and we end up burying it in verbiage and flattery. The truth is most beautiful when it most naked! It is most powerful when it is unencumbered by human reasoning and self help prosperity mumbo jumbo!

The gospel is a sacred trust and it must be preached to the world because God has ordained it as the means for drawing in His elect and because it demonstrates the reality of John 3:16 (for God so loved the world…). And we are to be like our heavenly Father in doing the most loving thing we can do: tell people the good news that they’re bad, but He’s good and there’s hope! Even if it makes us uncomfortable. Do you think it’s easy for a doctor to tell his patient they need cancer? But he must, or how else can he prescribe the treatment that might save them?
How much more someone’s eternal condition?

According to Mark 16:15, we are to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature! You can practice on your cat, but preaching it people is the point! Mark Cahill says he likes to go to state fairs and preach the gospel. He says,
While at a state fair in Georgia, I had a conversation with three wild looking teenagers. They were tattooed, pierces and wearing crazy looking clothes. Near the end of the talk I told them they were fearfully and wonderfully made by God… [and he asked] “How special does that make you feel? [To which the responded] “Special”.

Let’s make plans to attend the next gay pride parade to share with those homosexuals the love of God in a loving way which is the most loving thing we could ever do for them! I bet we would be surprised at how receptive they were to it if we did it with the mindset that they are the image of God to be loved rather the mindset that they are licentious Sodomites deserving hellfire.

I wonder, when we see the tattooed, body pierced, scowling, fowl mouthed, images of God in our city do we see them as special creations of God deserving to hear the good news and join us in fellowship and worship every Sunday? Would we be willing sit next to someone with pierced eyebrow and sing biblical worship in a way that would be appealing to him if it meant his salvation? Or do we walk by and look scornfully down upon them from socially refined perches of morality. Do we actually think that God views us any differently from them or prefers to hear Himself glorified in our musical preferences more than theirs?

I would rather be uncomfortable with unbelievers coming into our church and getting saved and changing some of the things that we do because we love them rather than comfortable in our holy huddle and do it the way that we’ve always done it because we love our neighbours to little and love our traditions too much.

When Jesus invaded Galilee with his message that the Kingdom of God had arrived, he was turning everything upside down- especially the accepted religion. View this as an Old Testament theophany where God rides in on the crowds and the earth shakes and then you will get an idea of what was happening that day. He was saying, your religious practices are offensive to God, your purity is filth, your righteousness is what condemns you; your worship is idolatry, the Gentiles are going to be grafted in; the Torah is not the final word, the church includes believers from every nation; Gentiles will be called sons of Abraham and eat at his table while many of you are going to perish.

The gospel always turns established norms upside down!

God is just as glorified with drums as He is with a pipe organ! He’s just as glorified by the sound of little dirty sandaled Karen girls singing a child’s praise song in a bamboo church in a refugee camp in Thailand as He is with a professional choir and orchestra singing Handel’s Messiah in an opulent cathedral. God is just as glorified with a Wesley King James hymn as with Gangsta rap worship!


“The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel” is a message that every man, woman and child in Surrey, in Canada, in the world needs to hear. And when they hear it and start coming into the church it’s going to change things, its going to cause discomfort and even chaos, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but our society has changed radically in the last decade, they’ve literally become barbarians.

Did you know that the reason the Catholic Church did not send missionaries to Ireland for six hundred years was because the Irish were uncivilized barbarians with body piercings and tattoos? Whenever the Roman Legions tried to fight them, they would take off their clothes and behave irrationally. It spooked the Roman legions. It took an English slave named Patrick, who loved his masters enough to go and tell them about Jesus and it resulted in a massive revival in Ireland and the near complete destruction of their idolatry. He didn’t try to make Romans first! He became Irish.

Are you willing to live with change if it means that God will use you and this church to bring people to Christ?

Jesus commanded us go into all the world with the message. But we’re barely taking it to our immediate neighbours. Spurgeon said,
If there is any one point in which the Christian church ought to keep its fervour at a white heat, it is concerning missions. If there is anything about which we cannot tolerate lukewarmness, it is in the matter of sending the gospel to a dying world.

Our evangelism strategy to the crowds is supposed to be like that old Sower, throwing out seed and letting it land where ever the providence of God causes it to land. And some of it falls among the rocks and gets eaten by the birds; some of it lands in the shallow ground and springs up but gets choked out by the weeds or scorched by the sun.

But some of it falls on good ground and grows and produces fruit as much as 100 times. We don’t know what the good soil is, so we must distribute the seed indiscriminately and sometimes that’s going to result in rejection and afflictions and even imprisonment and death.

But you know what, there’s no way you can lose when you preach the gospel, no matter what the response. Can you imagine if I offered you a sales job that guaranteed 100% winning? No one can make that offer. In fact, if I offered you a sales job that guaranteed a 10% chance of winning, you would be happy!

But the gospel guarantees you 100% winning! This is how: there are only three ways that someone can respond to the gospel- they can accept it or you can plant a seed or they can reject it (often angrily).

“But pastor, you said its’ a 100% win, that sounds more like 66%. How can it be a win for me if some rejects the gospel- especially if they get angry?”

Even if it was only a 66% win, it would still be pretty good, but the way it is a 100% win for you is that even if they reject the gospel and reproach you, the Bible promises you will be rewarded, Peter says,
4 If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. On their part He is blasphemed, but on your part He is glorified (1 Peter 4:14).

Even if they get mad and call security and escort you from the premises, you are blessed! In fact Jesus even says, “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy! For indeed your reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:23).

Conclusion:
Let me conclude with some application: last week the Gateway Evangelism Team met to decide on a purpose statement to clarify exactly what we are about. This is what we came up with: the purpose of GET is “to expand the passion with the church to glorify God in the way that we share Christ with our community, our nation, and the world.”

You see, we have an agenda for the church. And many of you have the same desire- to see the church passionate about the spread of the enjoyment of God through evangelism. When Jesus came into Galilee preaching repentance and faith, he was really saying, its time for the reign of God and his majesty and authority to be enjoyed and manifest of in all the earth!

So here’s what I am asking you to do. Just begin praying. Praying for GET, praying for this community to be receptive to the gospel and praying that you would increase in your boldness to share it. And watch for God to bring people across your path… and they will. And they will be the ones to open up the conversation.

Not everyone will get saved. Not everyone got saved in Galilee. Jesus preached to multitudes, but he only had a handful of converts, who never really converted until after his death. So don’t lose heart if you don’t have immediate conversions; we’re all here because someone didn’t lose heart.