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June 14 - June 18, 2024
Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
“And the earth was without form and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttered above the face of the waters like a dove, and God spoke:
Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.
Instead, trinitarianism holds that there is one God in three persons who know and love one another.
do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory that I had with you before the world began” (John 17:4–5). Each person of the Trinity glorifies the other.
You’re glorifying something when you find it beautiful for what it is in itself. Its beauty compels you to adore it, to have your imagination captured by it. This happened
And when it’s a person you find beautiful in that way, you want to serve them unconditionally.
Of course not, we’re doing it out of need—we say yes to everything out of fear and cowardice.
To glorify others means to unconditionally serve them, not because we’re getting anything out of it, just because of our love and appreciation for who they truly are.
A self-centered life is a stationary life; it’s static, not dynamic.
A self-centered person wants to be the center around which everything else orbits. I might help people; I might have friends; I might fall in love as long as there’s no compromise of my individual interests or whatever meets my needs.
Self-centeredness makes everything else a means to an end.
The Trinity is utterly different. Instead of self-centeredness, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are characterized in their very essence by mutually self-giving love.
If this world was made by a triune God, relationships of love are what life is really all about.
That’s all love is—chemistry.
because love can exist only in a relationship.
But the triune God already had that—and he received love within himself in a far purer, more powerful form than we human beings can ever give him. So why would he create us? There’s only one answer. He must have created us not to get joy but to give it. He must have created us to invite us into the dance, to say: If you glorify me, if you center your entire life on me, if you find me beautiful for who I am in myself, then you will step into the dance, which is what you are made for. You are made not just to believe in me or to be spiritual in some general way, not just to pray and get a bit of
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We look at Adam and Eve and say, “What fools—why did they listen to Satan?” Yet we know we still have Satan’s lie in our own hearts, because we’re afraid of trusting God—of trusting anybody, in fact. We’re stationary, because Satan tells us we should be—that’s the way he fights the battle.
A gospel is an announcement of something that has happened in history, something that’s been done for you that changes your status forever.
But the gospel says, “This is what has been done
in history. This is how Jesus lived and died to earn the way to God for you.” Christianity is completely different. It’s joyful news.
The gospel is that God connects to you not on the basis of what you’ve done (or haven’t done) but on the basis of what Jesus has done, in history, for you. And that makes it absolutely different from every other religion or philosophy.
There’s nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption:
Self-absorption leaves us static; there’s nothing more disintegrating.
Why do we have wars? Class struggle? Family breakdown? Why are our relationships constantly exploding? It’s the darkness of self-centeredness.
When we decide to be our own center, our own king, everything falls apart: physically, socially, spiritually, and psycho...
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A true king will come back to put everything right and renew the entire world. The good news of the kingdom of God is this: Jesus is that true King.
so when you come under the healing of the royal hands, under the kingship of Jesus, everything in your life will begin to heal.
But the good news of the kingdom of God is that the material world God created is going to be renewed so that it lasts forever.
Jesus immediately calls people to follow him. This is unique in Jewish tradition. Pupils chose rabbis; rabbis did not choose pupils. Those who wished to learn sought
You can’t have a relationship with Jesus unless he calls you.
Jesus is saying, “Knowing me, loving me, resembling me, serving me must become the supreme passion of your life. Everything else comes second.”
What’s the solution to fanaticism? Many would say, “Well, why can’t we be in the middle? Moderation in all things. Not too zealous, and not too uncommitted. Being right in the middle would be just right.”
He says “anyone.” There’s no double standard. “If anyone wants to have anything to do with me, you have to hate your father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and even your own life, or you cannot be my disciple.” That’s what it means to follow Jesus.
Jesus is not calling us to hate actively; he’s calling us to hate comparatively
“I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look like hate by comparison.”
But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used. If he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal.
They aren’t as fanatically humble and sensitive, or as fanatically understanding and generous as Jesus was.
Why not? They’re still treating Christianity as advice instead of good news.
The gospel isn’t advice: It’s the good news that you don’t need to earn your way to God; Jesus ...
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And it’s a gift that you receive by sheer grace—through God’s thoroughly unmerited favor. If you seize that gift and keep holding on to it, then Jesus’s call w...
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Because the gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it’s about being called to follow a King.
He shows he has real power over sickness—just a touch of his hand and the fever is cured.
There are, in fact, thirty healings recorded in the Gospels, all showing us that Jesus has authority over sickness.
And over the first few chapters of his Gospel, Mark goes on to stack up layer upon layer of evidence to show that Jesus’s authority extends to every realm of life.
Authority yet humble
The path Jesus takes you on may look like it’s taking you to one dead end after another. Nevertheless, the thread does not work in reverse. If you just obey Jesus and follow it forward, it will do its work.
MacDonald, author of The Princess and the Goblin, put it like this in another story: “The one secret of life and development, is not to devise and plan . . . but to do every moment’s duty aright . . . and let come—not what will, for there is no such thing—but what the eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first.”17 And in yet another: “You
will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.”18 That is, you will be dead so long as you ...
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When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It’s not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be—it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it’s rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It’s saying, “I will decide exactly how I live my life.” And Jesus says that is our main problem.
The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.”
