October 8, 2024: Tuesday Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 14:27-31
May Christ's gift of faith be your strong courage and hope in all things in your lives.
Good morning my dear friends. Sunday at church we had a virtual laying on of hands from the congregation for Kandice, Lisa, and Alexis as their family deals with the very sad news that there is little more that can be done for Kandice as her cancer has begun to spread. Lisa called this morning, and we were able to talk about all of this, and she and Kandice were very thankful for laying on of hands. Please continue to hold them in your prayers, along with Robert who is now working to handle multiple health problems. Please also pray today for the people of Florida, both its citizens and all who are vacationing at theme parks in Orlando. They will all be hit with winds exceeding 100 miles per hour on Thursday. Pray for the safety of those who are evacuating, and for those who will stay. It will indeed be very difficult for us as a nation if two or three more hurricanes hit Florida this year. Some of us might like to say it is God's punishment for how things are going there, but I believe, in reality, that this terrible storm damage is hitting that state because of the failure of God's children to really shepherd and steward on behalf of creation itself. Global warming is real in our lifetimes.
Today we continue in the Gospel of Mark 14:27-31. The Passover meal has now been eaten, and it is time for these often repeated by Christ conversations to be introduced into this important Jewish Holiday. What Jesus has to say is very troubling, but it doesn't take long for us to understand how quickly the disciples changed their opinions and choices about all of this. They would indeed stay hidden, so that even after His death, Jesus would have to come to them in the Spirit to move their courage and responsibility to the action of sharing the Good News in spite of their fear. In this passage, Jesus once again speaks of His death and departure from them. And, that their reaction will be to fall away. How disappointing it must have been for Jesus. After all He had been enduring, and His disciples being eyewitnesses to the miracles, and having heard the messages of the Truth of God many times over, they would still fall away because their faith was not strong enough to endure all of it, before the coming of the Spirit. When Jesus presents the beatitudes in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, it was difficult His disciples, and yes, even for us today, to comprehend the blessedness of the actions about which He spoke. But all things from God are blessings if we understand that God is really in control all of the time, even in the really bad things that can happen to people who are living lives of faith. In the steel of Christ’s faith, He could always see blessing at every turn. The list isn't easy to endure, even though Christ does!
Through Christ blessed is the pain and torment and every torture of the body
Through Christ blessed be the loss and failure of friends and family, and the sacrifice of love.
Through Christ blessed be the failure and the ruin of every earthly hope
Through Christ blessed be all sorrow and torment, hardships, and endurance that demand courage.
Out of all of these things that we tend to be weak in the knees about in our lives comes, readiness to handle them all, for love, friendship, and the success of God's kingdom work, because we live in faith, just as Christ did.
And the first of the disciples who came to know these blessings and their outcome was Peter. In this passage Peter is in the wrong place in his heart and head, unprepared to lose the Master, and perhaps even more unprepared to live filled with faith that trusts the LORD in all things, both good and bad. But if Peter's faith was skewered a bit, his love for Jesus was not. It is so much better to place loving the LORD above all the uncertainty that our lives must face. This whole passage brings us to its climax when Jesus announces that the betrayer has come. You and I know what comes next. Jesus did not run away or try to escape through the garden. He stood in His ground of faith, ready to understand what lay ahead as a blessed event, and how it would fulfill the forgiveness which God had, and has always, wanted for His Creation.
Next Monday we will spend time in the passage about Christ's arrest.
In the Love of Christ, Pastor Kim
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