Mark 1: 14-20
Repent and Believe The Gospel

C.S. Lewis says in the third chapter of Mere Christianity:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else He would be the devil of hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse."

John Nash saw as real things that were not real; we, on the other hand, miss, fail to see, what we have been told is real -- that reality which gives shape and meaning to all that we see physically.  Why do we do this?  What dims our vision?  I hope we can discover some causes and cures as we look at a claim of Christ about the truth of things, the truth that supersedes and judges all other truths.
 

My text this morning is Mark chapter 1 verses 14-20.  I'll begin at verse 9, where Jesus comes to his cousin John to be baptized. (Mark 1: 9-20)

There are two ideas here that I want to look at.  One is the word of Christ concerning the Kingdom, the other is the reaction of Peter and the others to this word.

"The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel."

As I said, though, my interest is not primarily in the content of the claim and command, but in the appropriation of the truth of these things by those who followed Christ. But it is the claim that gives access to the reality of this other place, that reveals it; and so we shall look at it first.

"The time is fulfilled" tells us that something is happening that has not happened before.  The space/time reality of the incarnation is unique in all of history.  It has continuity with God's revelation throughout the Old Testament, but it is different in content, as we know, from what was expected, and bespeaks a culmination and end-point of that earlier revelation.

"The Kingdom of God is at hand" was a central motif of all of Christ's preaching.  It is understood to be a present and future reality; an "already/not yet."  Where it is "not yet" is wherever sin still reigns; the "already" is wherever the power that was Christ's both to use and to bestow on His followers, as demonstrated in beatings, exorcisms, and his work of declaring the truth about God, wherever that power is reigning, changing, redeeming.

"Repent" is a call to turn toward.  Whichever way you have been going, turn toward this Man, toward this Kingdom, toward love, toward God.

"And believe the Gospel" the good news for which all who knew God had waited since the earliest stories of an expected Messiah..  Belief in the claims of Christ brings fellowship with God the Father, Son, and Spirit.  But it is another kind of belief: an extension of the belief in a proposition; that is the central issue.  To believe that the kingdom of God is the outcome of the good news is to believe in a whole array of truths, some of which were not available to the first hearers of these words of Christ, but are part of our understanding now.

So the second and more important thing that I want to look at today is the reaction to this claim on the part of the first disciples.  It was a simple response, but profound in its meaning.  Would you or I have responded in the same way?  Have opportunities come and gone several times already for you?  Did you have "eyes to see and ears to hear?"

After Christ made this statement about the Kingdom of God, we read that he passed by the sea of Galilee, where he found Peter and Andrew and then James and John.  When we look at a harmony of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke side by side, we learn that there is much more to this encounter than the bit that Mark gives us.  In Luke, Jesus performs what seems to have been a miracle in telling Peter and the others where to cast their nets for a great catch of fish.  Luke also tells us that Jesus had been speaking to the crowds out of Peter's boat.  And we read in John that Jesus had encountered Andrew and Peter earlier at which time John the Baptist said of Christ "Behold, the Lamb of God."  So these men knew who Jesus was, and had spent time with Him.  His words, his demeanor, his character, were all before them. -- But we recognize that this event, this calling from everyday occupations for a permanent discipleship, was new.  This was a call to give up all else for something that they had no guarantee of the truth of-only the witness of this man.  They did have the testimony of John the Baptist as well as a long tradition of expectation of a Messiah.  The claim that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom at hand would have been familiar, the need for repentance shown by their previous following of John the Baptist, undergoing his baptism of repentance, and even the idea of good news would have had a certain meaning, although not with the clarity that would come later as Jesus showed just what would have to occur to bring about the culmination of this good news, this gospel.  But they still did not yet have their own vision of the kingdom of which Christ had spoken nor their part in it.  They would eventually see it, but what they did here was not based on their having lived in it.  And, of course, what they did was to without hesitation leave all and follow Christ.  And not only they, many others afterward responded to Him, repented, believed the gospel and lived in the already existing Kingdom.  You may well think that if you could have seen this Christ as they had seen Him, you would follow too.  But you have the advantage of hindsight based on the historical record.  They did not.  Remember that many others living at that time knew all the things that these men knew, but would have and sometimes did refuse Christ's call when it came.  Some refused on theological grounds, some had too much to lose.  But these men, Peter and Andrew and the others, believed when told, and they acted when called.  And they acted according to this call for the remainder of their lives, not out of the memory of Christ but out of their own encounter and participation in the Kingdom.  For many have lived in this kingdom without ever having seen Christ in the flesh.  Do you?  Do I?  To believe the gospel is to see the Kingdom of God at hand.  We know that the kingdom is both already and not yet.  But this "not yet" does not mean that it is coming into existence. it means that it is already redeeming and changing, and destroying all that finally resists it.  IT IS A PRESENT REALITY.  Live in it.

There are two ways to see the source of the ability to respond and live in the kingdom of God in the way that Peter and various others did; to respond without hesitation with trust and obedience and growing conviction based on experience.  One is to look for the particular historical and personal realities that made up the character of these men; the other is to acknowledge that faith is a gift of God and we cannot expect to see this kingdom in the way they did without this gift.  But I take for granted that God gives this to all to whom He gives Christ, so I set it aside for another time.

Let's look, then, at several aspects of this "seeing what others do not," remembering the intensity with which we know that Christ himself, and Peter, and the Paul, and Stephen, and John of Patmos all saw this reality.  I am not urging mystical experiences on you -- I am asking you to consider whether you see enough to enable you to abandon all for the sake of this kingdom.  This is not mysticism, it is the "peace that passeth understanding."  I know that my own vision is most often limited to the physical realities that I see around me.  I must work very hard to believe that what seems out of control is not, that what is bad God will work for good, even that following Christ is worth doing.  These four disciples had sufficient cause to follow.  Let's examine in detail these causes, these things that enabled them to go with Him so quickly, and compare them to our own situation

1. Perhaps most important, or at least we think so, was the physical presence of Jesus.  Remember His words to Thomas "Blessed are those who have not seen and believe."  It was a wonderful thing to be in the presence of Christ. It is what we desire.  We saw person after person respond to His love.  Consider Mary and Martha and Lazarus, or the woman at the well, but, as I said earlier, consider too the scribes and Pharisees or the rich young ruler who "went away sorrowful, for he had many possessions."  Or the crowd that shouted out "crucify him."  No, it was not the presence of Jesus alone that gave the power to repent and eyes with which to see the kingdom, it was more.

2. Perhaps it was the fact that these people had access to the revelation of the prophets and were immersed in a culture in which a Messiah was expected.  "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a horn of salvation for us" These are the words of Zechariah before the birth of Christ.  And Zechariah was the end of a long line of those to whom God had given his word concerning this" horn of salvation," this Messiah.  Yet not one of them had the physical presence of Christ. But they believed in, and lived in, the hope of the kingdom.  You and I have every word that they had, and we have the Holy Spirit in a way that they did not, as well as the confirmation of the historical record of Christ's life, and the witness of the church to the reality of Christ's spiritual presence.  They had no advantage in this history to which we have equal access. 
* hint

3. They lived in a naive age compared to ours.  We say that it was easier to believe in the supernatural, in the healing of disease by the expulsion of demons.  But look at the culture around you.  "Officially" we are scientific and rational, but I believe the argument could be made that we are as polytheistic and prone to belief in the supernatural as any culture has ever been.  The difference is that we separate it from what we call the rational and real, and privatize it.  Living in the Kingdom now, showing it by our lives to non-believers, has the capacity to change hearts that it has always had.

4. We have to separate the true Christ of the Gospels from the culture that has co-opted His teachings and distorted His message.  On the one hand the good news is reduced to financial affluence, and on the other the gospel is bad news for many who don't meet western cultural norms in those things which are not scriptural norms.  All of this obscures the Biblical picture of the kingdom.  But it seems to me that the Pharisees had done the same sort of thing at the time of Christ's coming.  His followers had the same task of sorting the evidence, arguing against the powers that be, of fighting even the prevailing church, as we do today.

5. For Peter and the others to leave their nets was a simpler task than what we would be called to today.  But these men had families, business responsibilities, relationships to their church -- all of the things we believe are impediments today.  And further, when they set off on this journey of following Christ they had no mission organization to provide structure and support; something that we would most likely enjoy today.

6. Jesus' words were clear -- "follow me."  We claim that we would go if those words were said to us in the same clear, auditory way.  But isn't it true that much was already in place when the disciples heard those words, as they are already in place for you. His words were authenticated by the vision of the kingdom that they already had.  In other words they saw who Jesus was and knew where he wanted them to go and what sort of things they would do because they already had a vision of what the kingdom was, in part, a vision that you have in just the same way insofar as you have been taught.  And we all have been taught.  Christ was the culmination of that vision, not the source of it.

In the movie John Nash sees what is not there.  I am arguing that we fail to see what is there, and that there is no excuse for that failure, at least no excuse like those I just named.  But this kingdom is there only to the eyes of faith.  So every one of the supposed advantages that some earlier saint had over our generation is met by this one point.  And as we read of these early saints, the type of vision granted by this faith is more like the vision of John Nash for what was not there than like our limited, hesitant vision of what is there.

Paul, and others, saw, by Gods grace, parts of the kingdom that we don't expect to see.  They were exceptional in that way.  But they also saw, and lived in the reality of enough of that kingdom in a way that we share, that enabled them to act with a boldness that we should expect from one another.

I'd like to as some rhetorical questions and answer these questions with simple quotations nom the Psalms.  Many of the things said in the Psalms are metaphorical, as when God is said to have wings or to be like an eagle or to rescue us nom deep water.  But I believe that these lines that I am about to quote are meant to be understood as uttering truth about the reality of things, a spiritual reality, but with real consequences in our physical world.

Are you fearful?  "The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and delivers them"(34: 7)

Are you often angry?  "He makes peace in your borders" (147: 14)

Will you endure the difficult situation you may be in?  "The Lord preserves the faithful" (31: 23)

Do you dread the news coming from the Middle East?  "The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to naught" (33: 10)

Are you bored, depressed?  "Look to Him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed" (34: 5)

Do you expect to see Christ redeem a seemingly unredeemable situation?  "I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living" (27: 13)

Do you?

Perhaps all of this sounds simplistic, but the gospel is simple in just this way.  Praise God.  These things are true.  They are true today, and they will be true long after everything that you see around you has disappeared.  We are surrounded by imitative, unreal claims: "imagine it and it will be," "visualize world peace," "just believe" and so on. Another recent movie (this one we couldn't finish) uses quantum theory to make the post modem claim that our thoughts bring reality into existence.  Post -modernism is important and many things it teaches us are true.  But this idea that there is nothing until we see it or claim it is not one of those things.  We are speaking here of things that are real.  But they require "eyes that see and ears that hear."

What, then, is the key to living in this truth, in the kingdom?  It is, at least, to recognize that faith -- belief -- is not once for all.  Of course saving faith is.  But all of those men and women before us who walked so mightily with God were faithful again and again and again.  Faith, the ability to see the kingdom of God as a reality, requires continuing assent.  Yes, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.  But the spirit calls us to response and action.  A call like Christ's to Peter will come again and again.  Sometimes it will be a call in which the consequences are known and feared.  You must, in that moment, refuse to see what is temporary and look to what is eternal.  You must say again as you said when you first believed "Jesus is Lord!  God is good!," and act according to those truths.  And at the risk of stating the obvious, abide in Christ!  Faithfully, expectantly, regularly, seriously, acknowledge that He is near and that all His words are true. 

I return to the visions of John Nash, and I say again, Nash imagined things that were not there; I am calling us to live in the reality of things that are there, though not seen with the eyes.  "For the Kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power," Paul says in I Corinthians.  Should this not be understood as a call to living and acting in a reality that is not limited to a confession of faith in Christ but includes the exercise of full citizenship, all its rights and responsibilities, in the glorious Kingdom of God which surrounds us.  Let us pray.

[Sermon by Lee Moody.]