Jesus's Kingdom Creates Shockwaves | The Gospels | Mark 3:1-12

[music] Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks. Where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrot. Sometimes a seemingly small act can create a swell of consequences. Even the youngest of children can't help but be an awe of this truth when they observe the ripple effect caused by a small pebble in a large body of water. As the energy of that one seemingly innocuous disruption expands through the medium of water, we're given a picture of how power is propagated. Waves build upon waves until there's a large ring of energy that started with just this one little pebble. As we read through the early chapters of Mark's Gospel account, we notice a kind of ripple effect emanating from the presence of Jesus. It's almost as if his actions create a kind of shock wave in people's personal lives but also through entire communities and regions. These shock waves, these ripple effects, they reveal something significant about the momentum of Jesus' kingdom but also the meaning and the priorities of it. Our passage today is like a small case study in how the propagation of Jesus' kingdom reveals the priorities of his kingdom. We'll see how his encounter with religious leaders, crowds, and impure spirits exemplify a pattern, a kind of ripple effect. But unlike the child watching the small waves created by a pebble, we're not meant to observe this ripple effect. We're meant to embrace it, to be embraced by it and respond to it. As we prepare to approach God's Word, let's pause and ask for His grace for His kindness to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath in this new day and thank you for the gift of your Word. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement, our calendars and our contingencies, all these things that we feel like we could control and the things that we feel like we can't know that we can't. God, we bring them all before you. Meet us in this space. Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in Mark's Gospel account and as we read your living Word, may it read us and restore us to life with you. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, now leading up to this point in Mark's Gospel account, Jesus has been causing quite a stir in how He heals people, who He calls to follow Him and how He upends the conventions of the religious establishment. Those themes continue as we head into the first 12 verses of chapter 3. We're going to start by reading the first six verses. We're going to keep it eye out for the ripple effect that Jesus creates with His ministry. Let's go. Another time, Jesus went into the synagogue and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched Him closely to see if He would heal Him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Come here." Then Jesus asked them, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus. Alright, now let's just observe what happened here in verse 6. We know that something significant has occurred in verses 1 through 5 because of how severe the response is in verse 6. The Pharisees and the Herodians, these two groups who normally would not cooperate. They're now in cahoots to figure out how they can kill Jesus. Why? Because Jesus chose to heal this man with the shriveled hand on the Sabbath, an expression of work that did not violate Old Testament law, but did violate the man-made regulations of the religious leaders. Jesus upset their self-imposed rules about the Sabbath earlier in chapter 2. If you remember that, right before a passage today, actually, when he permitted his disciples to harvest grain to eat on the Sabbath, declaring that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. In disturbing the self-righteous regulations of the religious leaders, Jesus is creating little ripples that reveal the priority of his kingdom. The feeding of his disciples is like a pebble in the water, showing that the Sabbath rest that he brings will satisfy the deep hunger of humanity. The healing of this man on the Sabbath in chapter 3 is another pebble that creates another shockwave. It shows us that the Sabbath rest of Jesus leads to true restoration, a restoration that ripples out into the world. If the work of Jesus is a disturbance, it's a disturbance that the world desperately needs. But the disturbance doesn't stop here. It carries the energy and momentum of a wave that is building. It's a ripple effect that causes a response. Let's go to verses 7-12 and see how this restorative work of Jesus continues to propagate. Pick up in verse 7. Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lake, and a large crowd from Galilee followed. When they heard about all he was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumia, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Siden. Because of the crowd, he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him to keep the people from crowding him. For he had healed many so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. Whenever the impure spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, "You are the Son of God." But he gave them strict orders not to tell others about him. All right, now let's notice two dynamics at play here. First, in verses 7-9 we see more and more people coming to Jesus. The ripple effect of his ministry is magnetic. So many people come to him from around the region that he has to get into a boat to help with the crowd control. And verse 10 indicates that this increase in numbers is continuing alongside that priority of bringing about restoration. People who need healing are caught up in this wave of life creating love that emanates from Jesus. The shockwave of Jesus' kingdom is moving through more and more lives. So much so that verse 11 tells us that even impure spirits cannot help, but cry out that Jesus is the Son of God. Their proclamations are so boisterous that Jesus orders them to be silent, knowing that the time for a full public declaration of his identity has not yet come. Both the physical and spiritual realms are experiencing the ever-expanding effects of Jesus' mission. His mission to bring about rest, his mission to restore life, to make everything in the world the way it's meant to be again. Now if that's the ripple effect of Jesus' kingdom, then the question is this, how are you going to react to it? Maybe you've been stuck in a stretch where your response is like that of the religious leaders. The restorative love of Jesus exposes a kind of hardness of heart within you because it overturns the man-made playbook for significance or security that you've been trusting in. What would it look like for you to not find rest and rules of religious performance or the hustle of our cultural moment, but instead find rest in Jesus, the one who satisfies you and restores you as you are, where you are right now. Or maybe you're convinced that you really need Jesus and you feel magnetically drawn to Him but there's something holding you back from really encountering Him. Maybe you feel like you need to be able to heal or fix parts of your life before you can experience that encounter with Jesus. If that's you, remember his words to the man with a shriveled hand in verse 3. Come here. Not a future version of you, not a different version of you, but you here and now. Jesus has come here. Remember Jesus' words in verse 5. Stretch out your hand. That part of you that seemed untouchable, beyond help, beyond restoration, beyond love, stretch it out. Jesus is inviting you to not only observe the ripple effect of his restoration, he's inviting you to be embraced by it. If the kingdom of Jesus is expanding and propagating with more and more life, more and more love, passages like this are meant to stir our hearts and stir our minds to see our true need for it. And not only that, to cultivate our hunger, to want the same thing for other people as well. The restorative kingdom of Jesus is at hand, and he wants his life creating love to change our lives and be channeled through our lives together. Family, Father, thank you for the goodness, for the truth and the beauty of your word. Let it not only inform us, God let it transform us into the people you've called us to be. Jesus, the restorative love of your kingdom is so powerful that it presses into our reality here and now. Help us receive your embrace and freely share it with others. Holy Spirit, captivate our imagination as we consider how the ripple effects of your restoration might enter our lives and emanate through our lives in this day that you've given us. We ask all of this because of your grace, for your glory, in your story. In Jesus' name, amen.