Christ Church Washington D.C.

Our sermon text this morning is from the Gospel of Mark chapter 8. These are the words of God.
Here in the wilderness.
And he sent them away. And straightway he entered into a ship with his disciples and came into the parts of Dalmanutha. And the Pharisees came forth and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation. And he left them and entering into the ship again departed to the other side.
And the disciples had forgotten to take bread, neither had they in the ship with them more than one loaf. And he charged them, saying, Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the leaven of Herod. And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have no bread. And when Jesus knew it, he saith unto them, Why reason ye because ye have no bread? Perceive ye not yet, neither understand? Have ye your heart yet hardened?
And do ye not remember? When I break the five loaves among five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments took ye up? They say unto him, Twelve. And when the seven among four thousand, how many baskets full of fragments took ye up? And they said, Seven. And he said unto them, How is it that ye do not understand? And he cometh to Bethsaida, and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him.
And when he had spit on his eyes and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw aught. And he looked up, and he said, I see men as trees walking. After that, he put his hands again upon his eyes and made him look up, and he was restored and saw every man clearly. And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to anyone in the town. And Jesus went out and his disciples into the town of Caesarea Philippi.
And he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist, but some say Elias, and others one of the prophets. And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and of the chief priests and scribes, and be killed.
Rise again! And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. And when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.
Amen. Amen.
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And then set your hopes on that resurrection because we’re not only people that die and then go to heaven. That happens when you die. But the Lord Jesus Christ is going to return and He is going to return bodily. And when He does, your bodies are going to come out of the ground. We’re people that believe in the resurrection. Put your hope there, ultimately, in the resurrection. So this life is good as a Christian. To die and to go be with Christ is better, the Apostle Paul says in the New Testament, and the resurrection of our bodies and eternal glory with Christ.
And one another is best by far. And if you keep your eyes there, you’re going to be very, very, very productive and useful inside the beltway, for those of you that are inside the beltway. This church will flourish. That’s the way it always works. If you try to grab on to the center, it turns into ashes. It disappears. It’s a figment of your imagination then. But when you go to Christ outside the camp, you find that you own the center. So that’s the first application.
The second application is this toy in the text between the things of God and the things of man. Things of God, things of man. First, the disciples really did think that Jesus was talking about bread, which is remarkably funny, but also remarkably concerning. Because the disciples weren’t thinking about bread because they were carnal.
They weren’t thinking about doing naughty things. They’re in the boat. They only have one loaf. And Jesus says something about leaven. And it’s so easy for us to go like, silly disciples. He just fed 4,000 people. True. But you have to go, if I were there, this is the kind of thing humans do. This is the kind of mistake we would make because, well, we have bodies and we need bread.
We’re located in time and space. And so it’s very easy to drift into the things of man. The things of man is not exactly like, don’t think really, really naughty idolatry. Think the normal kind of idolatry that we do a lot. Something like that. And then Peter is another example of missing it. He rightly testifies to the Christ and then immediately when he hears Jesus saying, so I’m going to go die and I’m going to
rise again. And same principle. You can be like, Peter, don’t you know he has to go to the cross? Well, no. If you were with Christ and he said, so I’m going to go and I’m going to suffer and I’m going to die, the instinct is to respond. Peter is a lovable character. It would be wonderful to meet him in glory because he’s always out front. So walked on the water and then started to sink. That kind of thing.
And then tries to stop him from going to the cross. Jesus says, and this isn’t the last time he fights with Jesus because Jesus says, you’re going to deny me three times. And Peter’s like, no, I will not. But then Peter went farther than anybody else did. And the thing is, we would have been thinking the same thing when Christ said it. We just wouldn’t have had the courage to stand up and rebuke Jesus. But you’d be thinking, I don’t know if it’s a good idea, the whole dying thing, Jesus.
We’d not do that. No one got farther walking on the water than Peter. He’s the one who actually did it. Now, what does this mean? Jesus is not only the Son of God, as we quoted from Nicaea, when it comes to who He is, He is the Son of Man. He is the Son of Adam. He’s the second Adam. But He’s like us in every way apart from sin. So every single one of us, the sons of Adam,
born corrupt in our nature, we’ve never known what it was like to not be corrupt in our nature and to not be guilty before God. We’re born that way because of this covenantal reality with Adam. But Christ is virgin-born. Christ is the Son of God. He took upon Himself true humanity, as Nicaea said. He’s truly and fully human. Jesus has, side note, Jesus has two wills. It’s a doctrinal thing. It’s important. I teach the NSA students. I ask them, how many wills?
I remind them they’re all heretics. It’s two wills because he’s fully and completely God and he’s fully and completely man. And his humanity is not fallen. He’s like us in every way apart from sin, which means he’s the most interesting man you’re ever going to meet because he’s not dealing with the corruptions of the flesh that we do. Even the best of us that really fought against the living, what does it mean to live by faith? What does it mean to put on the new man? No one’s like this Christ.
You must look to Him and don’t expect Him to say things that don’t surprise you. He’ll keep surprising you. This is what Christ does. So if you’re going to avoid the trap of falling into the things of man rather than going into the things of God, you have to pay attention to the Word made flesh. You have to pay attention to Scripture. Now we’re going to find you should not say,
man, are obviously bad. No. Grace restores nature. Grace restores nature. You heard this in the exhortation earlier. You are people that are being made fully and truly human. Normal people, as it should be. But that’s happening to you supernaturally as you look to Christ the Word. Where do we find Christ the Word? Two places primarily. First is Scripture. I would challenge you,
call you, to ensure that you and your family are meditating upon Scripture. You do not need to do some crazy, I’m going to go away for three days and read the whole Bible. It’s like, I don’t recommend it. You can do that if you want. It might be fine. But a regular diet of Scripture, short text, small text, do it at breakfast or do it at dinner. Do it whenever you can get it in with your family. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Genuinely.
You are going to partake of this loaf momentarily, and you’re going to eat the bread, and your soul is going to feed upon the bread. Your soul is going to feed upon the body of Christ. Your soul. Your soul. And your soul really has to eat. Because man doesn’t live by bread alone. He lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God. And if you don’t have it as a regular part of your diet, then you’re going to get anemic. You’re just going to get sepsis.
It’s super bad. You don’t want it. Just regular. And you’ll find God’s always surprising you. And then your mind starts to take shape with Scripture. So Christ is the outsider in this text in the far reaches of Galilee of the Gentiles. And who does that remind you of? If your mind’s saturated in Scripture, it reminds you of David from the Old Testament. Jesus is the son of David. What did David do? David had to flee Saul. He had to go in the land of the Philistines. He had to go away from the power centers. And what happened in the cave of Adullam?
All these like riffraff gathered to David. 600 men who were disappointed with the king and disgruntled with the king. You think that was a happy crew? No, it wasn’t a happy crew. What is it? But that’s going to the son of David in the wilderness to be fed. Sinners, what are we? We’re reminded of who we are. We know we don’t deserve to be here. We just don’t. We’re at the table of God. You think we deserve to be at the table of God? No chance. So that’s an example of your mind. You’re saturated in Scripture.
Look to Christ, the Word, in order to avoid the problem of falling into only thinking about the things of man and thus being disjointed is in creation. I mentioned to you earlier that you can’t know your thumbs. I really mean that. The Christian way is faith seeking understanding. It’s not understanding seeking faith. Faith apprehends everything that God has revealed to us and all of creation is revealed to us. All of creation is this way. This is how the ancients thought.
Performers thought basically ever since the Enlightenment, people don’t think this way. And you have to recover this. This is a deeper, broader, more difficult point. But in all of your sciences, math, and all of it, you have to recover the fact that creation is word. It is word from God. Nate Wilson, an elder out in Moscow, Idaho, has written a book called Notes from the Tilt of the World. It’s a wonderful book. And he says, I see craft in the world. I cannot watch dust swirl on the sidewalk.
The world is inevitably art. And it is inevitably art from top to bottom in every time and in every place. God has created ex nihilo. The same kind of thing communicated by G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy. He writes,
Jesus says, bread?
You know I make that stuff, right? But we’re in a ship. It’s like, what? I make bread. I just did it. But that means he made your children. He made them. He makes your eyeballs and he keeps them going. God is doing this now. You live in him. We live and move and have our being in him. And you will come to know that God as you trust and obey him.
Looking to his creation. This happened. I was at the campus of University of Idaho doing evangelism. And there is a particular individual there who flies the asexual flag. And he’s a bit of a strange bird, but I’m very glad for the dialogue. And he asked me when we’re talking, he says, how do you know that God exists? I said, because I obey him. And this brought him up short. He wants a rational argument. But the fact is,
it’s faith seeking understanding. Jesus actually says this explicitly in the Gospel of John. He says, my teaching is not my own, but his who sent me. He who does his will will know the doctrine. It’s that simple. He comes from outside the world. He who does his will, that kind of man, will then know the doctrine. You should know that the war between the things of God and the things of man is not the kind of war that wanes.
We have been blessed in this nation. The kingdom of God has spread throughout the West. It’s spread remarkably. I was reminded of that when I went to Arlington Cemetery just yesterday with my son. The vast majority of those gravestones marked by crosses. It’s the Christian people. You walk around town, even D.C., crosses. Crosses everywhere. Go look at the back of the Supreme Court. Moses, right there in the center. Two tables of the law.
God is blessed. But here is the danger. This war, this need to walk in harmony, things of God, and the renewal of humanity with the things of man, that doesn’t get any easier as the kingdom of God grows. It actually gets thicker and thicker and stronger and stronger. It’s still easy in all of these blessings to slip right into the things of man. It would be very easy to do that. It would be very easy to kind of grow cold in our proclamation of Christ. What do I mean by that?
Well, there’s an Anglican priest who was a very honest one. He said, look, wherever the apostle Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea. And that wasn’t because England had become just such a lovely place. No, it was because the church of England had grown soft and weak and was no longer following its master. I was at the hotel right around the corner.
The front desk guy was talking to another guest, and he said, there’s a lot of stuff going on over there in the street. He’s like, yeah, there’s a church there, and they protested. I said, oh, yeah, I’m here for that church. And the man, who might be among us because he said he might come stop by, but he said, he goes, they’re angry at Christians? And I was like, yeah. He’s like, why? I was like, well, they’re going to give you a lot of reasons. Well, the reason is because Christ hung on a cross. They crucified his Savior. Jesus makes it very, very clear.
They called the master of the house Beelzebub. How much more will they malign those of his household? So what you must do is always lean into the things of God. Be perceptive of the things of God in creation and in Scripture and watch the renewal of humanity on the other side. Third and final application. In this text, it’s very clear that every man has to personally decide to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ demands that a man follow him.
There’s no doubt that if you were in the outskirts, Galilee of the Gentiles, and he said, if you’re going to follow me, then take up your cross. Lose your life. There’s no doubt that if you don’t understand who he is, you’d call him a cult leader. I mean, take it in. This man looks at you and he’s like, I’m going to die.
And you have to die too. But you’ll rise again. That is what he said. He’s no cult leader. He’s the son of God. This is where Lewis, again, he says some people, and this would be remarkably practical for a renewing and dedicating ourselves to God. Praise the Lord that we are rededicating ourselves to God and that you can draw on all of this history of different proclamations and prayers and being called a Christian nation by the Supreme Court. Justice Brewer back in the late 1800s.
You got all kinds of examples. This is what we do. But what is the tendency? Our tendency is to drift into these kind of vagaries and be willing to talk about Jesus as if he was a good teacher. He was a good moral man. So Lewis says, some people say, well, I don’t know that Jesus is the Son of God, but I believe he’s a good moral teacher. And Lewis just calls their card. This is the kind of things Jesus said. He is nothing. He is either a liar.
He is a lunatic, on par with being a poached egg, or he is Lord. So I can guarantee you, if we’re looking at Jesus, who just fed a bunch of people, and then he says, I’m going to die, and you have to die. We’re like, metaphorically? Like, can we metaphorically die? Like, no. No, no, I want it all. Like, I want you to die in faith. Be planted in the soil.
As a seed that’s going to rise in the resurrection. And then you rewind that clock and you die daily. You make a decision every day. I’m going to wake up and I’m going to die. So men, if you want your wife to be lovely, be twisted on a pike for her. The way that Christ was twisted on a pike for His bride. This is what you’re supposed to do. If you want your children to drink deeply of the grace of God, then you have to pour yourself out for them. That’s all. Every single day, pouring yourself out for other people. This is the call of the Christian.
Now, some people want to say, Jesus took care of the cross. Well, praise the Lord. In one sense, He did take care of the cross. And then He says, you take care of your cross. You take care of your cross. You have to lose your life. Which means, I’m not going for all of the greedy things. And you have to work it out with God about when you’re being greedy. That doesn’t mean, don’t get weird and be like, no steak dinner. Steak dinners are great. Barbecue is great. All of that great. God has made a good world for you to enjoy. But the dying says, I don’t.
I care about my reputation in the wrong way. I’ll defend myself. You need to defend yourself. But I’m not eager and lusting for the praise and applause of man. I’m not seeking the glory that comes from man, but rather I’m seeking the glory that comes from God. And that means death and resurrection. God always makes his church decide. Egypt or the Red Sea. Esther, go before King Ahasuerus or flake out. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Go into the flaming fire or worship idols. But you must not expect him to permit you to be indecisive. Now, the church eats by going into the wilderness, and the church lives by going to Calvary. So it’s very clear to me that as God blesses this congregation particularly, you saints, individually, corporately, all of that,
there’s going to be many deaths and resurrections to go through. So don’t avoid the cross. Watch the magic of God. Watch the power of God. Watch the resurrection that will continue to come. Because if you’re going to testify before this adulterous and sinful generation, and it absolutely is one, then you’re going to be repudiated the way that Christ was repudiated. But Chesterton again said,
Now, there are many explanations for why you all are hated so much, although it’s been pleasant and quiet today out there in the street. All of the answers to that are very superficial. The answer is very simple.
Answer the question clearly. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is the Son of Man. He is the Son of Mary, who took upon Himself the sins of the world, my sins and your sins. He’s gone to the cross. He has risen again, and we will follow Him. The truth is, you have been unashamed of Christ in an adulterous and sinful generation, and in turn, Christ is not ashamed of you. Our God and Father, we thank You for Your faithfulness and goodness to us. We thank You for Your Christ.
We thank You for Your Son, the second Adam, truly God and truly man. We thank You for the forgiveness of sins found in Him. We thank You for His power and His glory. We worship You this morning and give You praise and honor. And as we do, we lift up the prayer. Christ taught us to pray, saying…