In the last passage we looked at, Jesus had just called his first disciples. Remember, Simon and Andrew, James and John were at the Sea of Galilee, plying their trade as fishermen, and Jesus issues a compelling call: ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once, they drop what they are doing and follow Him.
(This was not their first encounter with Jesus. The Gospel of John records an earlier meeting. But things are different now. Jesus has called them to follow and they have responded. Now they are ‘disciples’.)
In our passage today, Mark outlines what is essentially their first day on the job. This is a day in the life of Jesus, and as Jesus’ disciples, or apprentices, this is their first day of training. They are ‘job-shadowing’ Jesus. In this 24-hour period they get introduced to what will be the essence of Jesus’ ministry for the next three years. They will see what Jesus wants the essence of their ministry – and ours – to be.
Let us look at this day-in-the-life of Jesus:
After calling the disciples, they go back into town, Capernaum, which is where the disciples lived. On the Sabbath day, they go to church, to the synagogue. It was customary to invite a visiting rabbi to teach, and so Jesus begins to teach. Mark does not record the content of Jesus’ teaching, only the impact that this teaching had: the people were amazed at the authority with which Jesus spoke, authority that their own teachers lacked.
Their ‘teachers’ were what we call ‘scribes’, men who made their living copying by hand the Jewish Scriptures. To guard against copying errors, they had to know it well, so they became experts in the Scriptures and the rabbinic law. But as experts, they missed the forest for the trees. They knew God’s word inside out and backwards, but missed God. They had knowledge but no passion.
When Jesus stands teaching, the people immediately notice the authority with which he speaks. There is something different when he teaches.
Suddenly a man possessed by a demon interrupts and shouts out, ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’
A couple of interesting things here: What is a demon-possessed man doing in the synagogue? It reminds us that just because someone goes to a place of worship, it does not necessarily mean they are the genuine article. It is very possible to be very religious and yet far from God.
Also, why does the demon publicly identify Jesus as the ‘Holy One of God’? Isn’t that counter-productive to a demon’s agenda? Well, the demon is actually picking a fight, going on the offensive. The phrase, ‘What do you want with us’ loses something in translation, but it was the traditional language of quarrel or conflict. It occurs many times in the Old Testament, like Judges 11:12 where an Israelite ruler says to an enemy king, ‘What do you have against us?’, or 2 Kings 3:13 where Elisha the prophet says to a wicked king, ‘What do we have to do with each other?’ This demon is giving Jesus the verbal equivalent of a shove in the chest and saying, ‘You got a problem with me?’
It was a common concept, too, of the day, that to pronounce a spirit or individual’s name was to gain a certain amount of mastery over him. So the demon tries to get the upper hand by pronouncing Jesus’ earthly name and divine name: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God.’ The demon-possessed man aggressively interrupts Jesus’ powerful teaching.
Jesus’ response is immediate and forceful: He commands the demon’s silence, undermining the demon’s perceived advantage. He commands the demon to leave the man. The demon has no choice but to obey. He is no match for the power of God in Christ. He doesn’t leave quietly, though. He shakes the man violently and lets out a shriek. But he goes, and the man is set free.
Again, the people are amazed at the power encounter they’ve just witnessed, and they marvel at Jesus’ authority not just as a teacher, but over demons, as well.
After ‘church’ Jesus and his followers go to Simon and Andrew’s house. Here Simon’s mother-in-law is laid up with a fever. With a touch of his hand, Jesus heals her, and she gets up and serves them dinner. (Her response to being ‘touched’ by Jesus is to serve him.)
Now, news of Jesus’ casting out of the demon has spread through town, and after sunset – ie when the Sabbath was over – everyone brings their sick to the house where Jesus is. Jesus spends the evening healing many of the sick, and driving out demons. (Again Mark mentions that Jesus orders the demons’ silence.)
The next morning, literally ‘a great while before day’, Jesus slips out of the house and goes to a solitary place to pray. He had taught the previous morning, and had ministered to the crowds, healing many, and not starting that until after sunset. Was he tired the next morning? Almost certainly. Yet, well before dawn he sneaks off, unnoticed, to pray.
When he is eventually found, the disciples say, ‘Come on, everyone is looking for you!’ But rather than go back into town, Jesus says, ‘Let’s leave this place and go somewhere else. I need to preach there, too. That’s why I’ve come.’
I wonder how the disciples reacted. They were probably dizzy with the success of their first day on the job. Jesus has been acclaimed publicly as a great new teacher, a rising star. They’ve seen him take on demons and win without breaking a sweat. They’ve seen him perform miraculous healings and now the whole town wants him. From a PR perspective the obvious thing to do is to stay. Clearly God is at work. Clearly this is effective ministry.
Isn’t that how we think? If something was a hit last year, obviously we should do it this year. But if we only asked God, maybe he would say, ‘Move on to something else. I’m working over here now.’
Jesus has just been praying, and he is not moved by his sudden popularity. He knows his mission: So he leaves, goes to some other towns and preaches there, and casts out demons.
A day in the life of Jesus, and thus, the disciples are introduced to the ministry to which they have been called. We, too, see in Jesus the shape of our ministry.
There are three elements to Jesus’ ministry, not just in this one day but all his life. For three years we consistently see this same pattern, Jesus engaging in these three things.
The first is preaching: speaking the truth, proclaiming the kingdom, teaching the people. Jesus was constantly preaching. It was at the very heart of his ministry, so much so that his acknowledged title, even by his enemies, was ‘Teacher’. It is no surprise that the first thing we see Jesus doing is teaching in the synagogue and teaching with recognized authority. He spoke compellingly about God and his kingdom.
Jesus taught from a boat to the people on the shore. He taught on mountain tops to thousands, or in a home to a few. He taught the Scriptures in the Jewish synagogues. He taught using the tools of the trade of Jewish rabbis. He taught in short parables. He taught in longer lectures like the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, a teaching on the end times in Matthew 24 and 25, or the Holy Spirit in John 14 –16. He taught about love, prayer, financial principles, heaven and hell. He applied the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah 61 to himself: The spirit of the Lord is on me to preach the good news to the poor.
But the thread that tied all his teaching together was the Kingdom of God. That was his one great theme: What is the kingdom like? How do I live as a participant in the kingdom? What – like greed – are the enemies of the kingdom? Who is God, the king? and so on. . .
Jesus was a preacher. ‘Let us go to the nearby villages so I can preach there also. That’s why I have come,’ he said, and people flocked to hear him. A key element of Jesus’ ministry was preaching.
The second element of Jesus’ ministry was power. Everywhere Jesus went there were demonstrations of power. He did not just speak, but he performed miracles.
So here in the synagogue, in the middle of his sermon, there is a confrontation with a demonic spirit, and by his superior power, Jesus wins the decisive battle. That afternoon he heals Simon’s/Peter’s mother-in-law. That evening the town crowds into and around the house where he’s staying and he heals many of their sick, and frees many others from demons.
We gloss over it, that Jesus healed people, cast out demons and such, but think of it for a moment: where Jesus was, people inevitably were made whole, spiritually and physically. Some people walked, blind people could see. Even dead people were restored to life.
Jesus’ ministry was marked by demonstrations of power. As the bringer of the kingdom of God he engaged in battle against the kingdom of darkness, of sin. He exercised power over the three main enemies in that kingdom: demons, disease, and death.
In Luke 13:16, after he heals a woman who has been crippled for many years, is criticized for healing on the Sabbath. He responds: ‘Should not this woman whom Satan has kept bound for 18 long years be set free on the Sabbath from what bound her?’ Jesus came to do battle and his ministry was marked with demonstrations of power in the establishing of God’s kingdom.
These demonstrations of power, also proved the authority with which he spoke. At one point, he proved his authority to forgive sins by healing a paralyzed man. His disciples put their faith in him when he changed water into wine. Nicodemus said, ‘We know you are from God because of the miraculous signs you are doing.’
Everywhere Jesus went he performed miracles, acts of power that demonstrated who he was, validated his teaching, and pushed back the reign of darkness and advanced the kingdom of God.
So Jesus’ ministry, right from the start and all throughout, was made up of the constant pairing of preaching, and power.
Matthew 9:35: Then Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God and healing every disease and sickness.
But there is a third element that Jesus clearly found necessary: prayer. After his busy and, I’m sure, draining day, Jesus goes off to a solitary place (literally, ‘into the wilderness’, so he left the town) to pray, and he prayed for a good chunk of time: from well before dawn, until it was late enough in the day for the whole town to have been looking for him for a while.
This was not unusual for Jesus. On several occasions in the gospels we read that Jesus spent the night praying. Luke 5:16 tells us that he ‘often’ withdrew from the crowds and busyness, and went to lonely places to pray.
Prayer for Jesus was real, intimate communion with God His Father. It was what kept him mission-focused. In John’s gospel, Jesus repeatedly says, ‘I’m speaking what I’ve received from my father. I’m doing what he has told me to do.’
It is not coincidence that it was after a night of prayer that he identified 12 of his followers and designated them apostles, in Luke 6:12-17. It is not coincidence that it was after a significant prayer experience that he makes his way to Jerusalem where he knows he will be crucified. And it is not coincidence, here in his early ministry, that after he prays in the morning that he knows it’s time to move on.
It is not mere piety that sees Jesus getting up early to pray. This was a necessary part of his ministry. It is where the authority of his teaching came from. It was how his power was renewed.
These three intertwined, indispensable elements of Jesus’ ministry characterized everything he did: preaching, power and prayer. That was Jesus’ ministry.
What about his followers? After all, Jesus was absolutely unique, wasn’t he? And his ministry was unique. As followers of Christ ourselves, we are more interested in what his first followers did. What was their ministry like? What did Jesus call them to do?
It is interesting to note that Jesus’ disciples’ ministry, assigned to them by Jesus himself, was made up of those same three things.
Consider Mark 3:14-15. Jesus summoned the crowd of people that followed him around, and he chose twelve –designating them apostles – that they might be with him (that is essentially what prayer is: time with the Lord) and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. Jesus clearly expected them to engage in the very same activities that he was doing.
Even after his resurrection they continued that ministry. He had told them in Acts 1: ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses (preaching). So it was, that the power of the Holy Spirit came on them at Pentecost while they were praying. And they preached and three thousand people became Christians that day.
Or take Acts 4:31 – After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God (preaching ) boldly. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of Jesus.
Or Acts 6 – The apostles devoted themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word (preaching and teaching), and Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.
One more: 1 Corinthians 2: 4…. The Apostle Paul, whose letters are filled with references to his constant prayer for the churches, also says: ‘My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.’
The New Testament pattern for effective Christian ministry is three-fold: preaching, power and prayer.
For two thousand years the kingdom of God has been advancing. At the end of his ministry Jesus was crucified, the Son of God gave his life for the sins of the world, and of you and me. When someone accepts that, and by faith receives Jesus as not only Saviour from sin but as Lord and Master, that person moves from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God, a move the Bible compares to the move from death to life, emptiness to fullness, estrangement from God to being beloved children of God, and so on.
As Christ’s followers we have the noble and urgent calling to be God’s agents of grace in our day. We continue the ministry of Jesus and the early church. God wants to use us to rescue people from sin and bring them into his wonderful kingdom.
So what does that look like? How do we do that?
Well, we have a 3-fold pattern we can follow.
First, like Jesus, we preach, and by this I do not simply mean what I’m doing from the pulpit right now. Preaching in this sense is the speaking of the gospel, be it from a pulpit to a crowd, at the head of a Sunday School class, or informally one-on-one over coffee, at the office, or on the racquetball court.
We do fairly well at many aspects of preaching, as a church, primarily in our formal ministries. For example, we have Sunday School, LifeGroups and special events where the Christian truths are spoken and taught. My role every Sunday is to explicitly teach for 20 – 30 minutes what God has revealed about Himself and how to live in His kingdom.
We (and I count myself) do less well informally, I suspect: communicating the gospel well with friends and colleagues and neighbors, what we call ‘sharing our faith.’ But the Bible calls us to always be able to explain why we have the hope that we have. Not just what we believe, but why we believe it.
Romans 10 says that people are saved when they call on the name of the Lord. But it immediately asks; ‘How can they call if they have never heard of him? and how can they hear if no one preaches to them?’
People all around us: your neighbors, your co-workers, your friends, your boss, your team-mates. . . People all around us are lost. They are without God, without hope. The situation really is critical, and their only hope is to hear the truth: the truth of their situation and the truth that through Christ they can have life.
Satan is, Jesus said, the father of lies. And it is the truth that sets people free.
We can and should certainly let our lives – how we live – be a testimony of God’s work in us, but our lifestyle isn’t enough, unless people hear the name of Jesus and know that it is because of Jesus that our lives are what they are.
So an effective church ministry must always have at least the preaching of Jesus.
But there should be power, too. There should be things happening that cause people to see that there is something real behind what we are preaching. I go back to Paul in 1 Corinthians 2, which I quoted earlier, where he essentially says, ‘It wasn’t my slick preaching that got you; but my preaching was accompanied by demonstrations of divine power so that your faith wouldn’t be based on my presentation, but on God.’
Everywhere Jesus went, lives were changed: people were healed, demons were identified and cast out, people were transformed. Where his followers went, same thing.
Is that still true? Shouldn’t it be? Where is the power? If it is absent, it certainly is not because God has changed.
The obvious application here is healing of the sick. Now, I don’t believe, as some do, that God heals whenever asked, or that no Christian should ever get sick, and that if we do it is because of a weakness of our faith. But I am convinced that God wants to heal a lot more than we are seeing, and that the primary reason we see so little is that we don’t expect much healing. I am not sure exactly what the answer is, but part of my agenda in the next months is to discover how our ministry of prayer for the sick can be strengthened.
But it is not just about healing. There are also things like forgiveness, restored marriages, radically transformed lives, acts of significant service and the power of love, freedom from addictions, miracles of provision and protection, and so on), demonstrations of God’s power in countless ways.
What is there in our church, what is there in our lives, that we can point to and say, “That’s God!”
There are some: there is the work of God in F and C and J, who have had their hearts changed, the greatest miracle of all. There’s the youth whose hearts were convicted by God on their missions trip to Mexico last summer, and for some their lives are moving in a different direction because of it.
But there should be more. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God for salvation. I think we can see more people getting saved. The book of James says, in the context of both forgiveness and healing, that the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. I think we can see more healing.
My goodness, the same power that raised Christ from the dead is at work in us. ‘God is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask for or ever imagine, according to his power and work in us.’ That’s what God himself has told us in his word. But a glaring deficit in the experience of many churches today is the absence of demonstrations of God’s power.
Nicodemus said to Jesus, ‘We know you come from God because no one could do the things you’re doing if he wasn’t from God.’ How do people know God is among us?
Please join me in praying for God’s power here. Not for its own sake, but only so that people will know that what we say about God and his Son, Jesus, is true.
And so thirdly, of course, we too need to be much in prayer. Jesus continually spent time with his Father so he knew what to say and do. It was in the context of prayer that God’s Holy Spirit acted in power through Christ’s followers. And it is through our spending time with the Father too that we know what to say and what to do. It is according to our level of prayer as a church that we will see our preaching of Christ bear fruit, and the power of God in evidence in our lives and ministry. Both Jesus and his followers jealously guarded their prayer time. That kept the channels clear for God’s Spirit to come in power.
If our prayer pipe is ¼’ diameter, and we open the valve just a little, we will see a trickle of effectiveness. But if our prayer is a two-foot wide pipeline with a wide-open valve, God will pour into this place like you can hardly imagine.
We want to know Christ and make Him known. It’s why we exist as a church. And I believe you really want to do that.
Effective church ministry here will look like the ministry of Jesus and his followers;
1. Preaching, communicating the good news of the kingdom of God, and what Christ has done to bring that kingdom to us.
2. Demonstrations of God’s power; clearly seeing God doing things in and through us.
3. Prayer. Asking God to move and act, and listening for how he wants to move in us.
Can that be our church today?
Amen.