Read Mark 1:1-20
Hear! Hear!

Mark is the gospel of graphic detail.

Times, places, colors, numbers, locations, emotions tumble from Mark’s hurried pen. Mark reports about the same number of Jesus’ miracles as Matthew or Luke, but a much smaller number of His parables—only four. Mark portrays Jesus’ gestures, emotions, attitudes in a few bold strokes.

Mark progresses farther in his first 20 verses than Matthew covers in four chapters. Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled, John the Baptist comes and preaches, the Holy Spirit acknowledges Jesus as God’s Son, Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness, and Jesus calls his first disciples. Mark wraps up the whole thing in his first 20 verses.

The shortest of the gospels, Mark devotes five of the 16 chapters—almost one-third of his book—to the last week of Jesus’ life. In the remainder of the book, healings, sermons, and miracles tumble one after another in breathless succession. Things happen in Mark’s gospel “straightway,” “immediately,” or “forthwith.” The one Greek word translated by these three different English words occurs in Mark’s little book 42 times, more than the rest of the New Testament all together.

Yet, in spite of the movement, Mark’s gospel shares one thing with Matthew, Luke, and John: His picture of Jesus is majestic. Unhurried, dignified, deliberate, Jesus moves through Mark’s pages toward Jerusalem and His death with the same majesty that shines through the other accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Read Mark 1:21-45
Compassionate Cleansing

Mark’s purpose in writing was to show what Jesus did.

Mark’s question is:
What does God do when God becomes man, lives on earth, and becomes the servant of all? In rapid-fire order, Mark tells us three things that Jesus did.

• He drove an evil spirit out of a man, right in the middle of the Sabbath services in the synagogue (1:23-26).
• He healed Simon’s mother-in-law of a physical illness, a fever (1:29-31).
• He healed the sick and demon possessed in a great gathering of the entire town of Capernaum (1:32-34).

Notice the areas over which Jesus exerts authority. First, Jesus demonstrated power over evil spirits. Observe that the man with the evil spirit was attending religious services. Being at church is not the same thing as knowing God. The second healing proved Jesus’ power over physical illness. It was done in private, and for a woman. In the third demonstration of the incarnate God’s power, Jesus handled both demon possession and physical illness. It was done in the most public place available, the middle of the street, and probably for children and old persons, rich and poor, men and women, everyone.

Isaiah’s words were being fulfilled: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat (Isaiah 55:1)!”

All these are things Jesus did. What will you let Him do for you?

Read Mark 2:1-12
Raising the Roof

How did these guys do it?

How could they tear up the roof and let their paralyzed friend down in front of Jesus without dumping so much debris all over Jesus and the crowd that somebody would have stopped them?

After all that uproar, then what does Jesus say to the crippled man?
“Son, your sins are forgiven (1:5).”

Talk about an anticlimax. Do you suppose the men who had made that great effort to bring him to Jesus were disappointed? They thought this prophet who had been healing people left and right would say, “Walk!” Instead of that, all the Teacher does is tell him his sins are forgiven. Big deal. We’re all sinners.

What is Mark trying to tell us? Mark is especially interested in portraying Jesus as the divine Servant of man. This Servant is also the strong Son of God. How does Jesus’ handling of this circumstance prove it?

Mark records here a “first” in Jesus’ life. He is God, Who alone can forgive sins. Jesus proves His deity. He is Son of God, not just a prophet with a gift of physical healing. The sick man evidently realized, as Jesus did, that his basic problem was his sin, not his paralysis. In answer to his unspoken cry of repentance, the man found both spiritual and physical restoration.

Who do I really think Jesus is?

Read Mark 2:13-17
He Called Whom?

The Romans were pretty smart about managing their colonies.

They recruited natives of the country to collect the taxes. In fact, they didn’t have to hire someone; men lined up around the block to get the job. Fraud and extortion were expected. Tax collectors got rich.

That was enough to make Levi a social outcast. When Jesus called Levi to follow Him, He might as well have tapped a member of the Mafia. It gave the Pharisees a second reason to dislike Jesus. First, He claimed authority to forgive sins (2:5). Now He was inviting this disreputable traitor of a tax collector to join His band of believers.

Jesus added insult to injury by accepting Levi’s dinner invitation. Naturally, Levi’s friends were other rich pariahs and tax gatherers. Here was this great new teacher eating with such trash.

Why do you think Levi gave the dinner? Was it Levi’s first act of personal evangelism? Come and meet the One who has freed me from my sins, he is saying. Levi did not wait for his unsaved friends to look for Jesus. He made the first move to bring them to the Savior.

Levi is also known as Matthew. Maybe you have read his book, the one he wrote to help his fellow Jews. It’s called The Gospel according to St. Matthew.

Read Mark 2:23 - 3:1-12
What Are You Doing This Sunday?

If you want to follow Jesus’ example, what will you do on Sunday?

Evidently it was Jesus’ habit to attend Sabbath worship services.

When Jesus arrived at the synagogue one Sabbath day, two kinds of persons greeted Him, a man with a crippled hand and some Pharisees, religious leaders who were delighted to see Jesus put into a bind. If He healed the cripple, they could accuse Him of breaking the Sabbath by working on the day of rest. If He refused to heal the man, they could say He was lacking in compassion.

Jesus killed both birds with one stone. First, He did an act of compassionate healing. In healing the man, He taught us forever what Sabbath priorities really are. Labor must be avoided if possible; it is a day of rest ordained by God. However, failing to do works of mercy not only does not violate the Sabbath principle of rest; it is wrong.

Jesus’ second point outdid the religious leaders no end. He did not touch the crippled man. He only spoke to him, “Stretch out your hand.” Even the strictest keeper of the Hebrew Law could not consider it work when Jesus just spoke to someone. Neither was it “work” to stretch out your hand. Jesus, two; Pharisees, zero.

Read Mark 3:20-35
Your Mother Is Calling You

If you don’t think Jesus faced practical problems, just read what Mark records for us.

First, Jesus and the disciples were so busy they had no time to eat. Anybody identify?

Then His family came to get Him and take Him home because they thought He had gone crazy (v. 21).

Why do you think Mary and Jesus’ half brothers thought He had become mentally ill (v. 21)? Do you think Mary and the boys intended their action as a kindness for Jesus’ own good, an attempt to protect Him from Himself, when they attempted to take Him home and silence Him? Here is her eldest son, the one Mary thought would run the carpenter shop, out trailing around the countryside preaching. He heals the sick, feeds the hungry, and makes the religious leaders angry with His blunt teachings. If He doesn’t stop, He’ll get Himself killed.

What do you do when your family says, “Stay home!” but you think God is calling you somewhere else?

Jesus was not unkind to His mother, but He did not interrupt His work either. Instead He skillfully turns their action into an opportunity to pay His relatives a compliment. He says His true followers—those who obey His will—can be as close to Him as family, sharing the intimate, loving ties a good family enjoys.

Read Mark 4:1-20
Here’s How It Works

Mark was so busy recording what Jesus did, that he didn’t record much of what He said. Mark’s gospel includes only eight of Jesus’ parables, less than half the number Matthew and Luke record.

One of these few is the familiar Parable of the Sower, the story of the farmer who went out to sow seed. Jesus turned it into a kind of Rosetta stone by explaining it to His puzzled disciples.

Once we get the hang of seeing the symbolism in Jesus’ deceptively simple little stories, we can readily make the application to our own circumstance. By applying Jesus’ clarification of the Parable of the Sower, we understand that preaching the gospel in any form, whether to a vast congregation or one on one to a friend, is like scattering seed. Some will take root, some won’t. Some will start strong, and then fail. But, like the farmer, we’ve got to sow that seed or there will be no chance of a crop.

If you’re trying to witness faithfully for your Lord, and the going seems slow, vv. 8 and 20 should be of special comfort. In spite of all the discouraging things that can happen, some seed does fall on good soil. People do get saved. Babes in Christ do mature into sturdy soldiers of the cross. Hang in there!

Read Mark 6:7-29
Unintended Consequences

People were confused about Jesus.

Those who had read their Bibles thought maybe He was Elijah, whom the prophet Malachi predicted would appear again some day (Mal. 4:5). Others said, “No, He’s not Elijah. But Jesus is another mighty prophet God has sent to us. He’s another one like Isaiah or Jeremiah. After 400 years of silence, maybe there is hope for Israel yet.” King Herod was sure he had the authoritative idea. Herod said that man doing all these wonderful things is John the Baptist, come back from the dead. “I should have known I could not get rid of him,” Herod thought.

The tawdry tale of John’s killing on Herod’s orders (vv. 17-29) is what writers call a “flashback.” It had happened previously. Mark recounts it to explain why King Herod is upset when he hears of the breathtaking things Jesus and His disciples are doing.

Why should this matter to us? Why did the Holy Spirit impress, not only Mark, but also Matthew and Luke to include the story of John’s murder (Matt. 14:1-12; Luke 9:7-10)?

Is it because this true story illustrates a universal truth for all time? An evil woman and a weak man with a guilty conscience combine to kill a good person. Heard any version of this universal triangle recently?

Read Mark 6:30-44
Do-It-Yourself Project

It’s easy to feed people with someone else’s loaves and fish. But don’t take mine.

Jesus had been teaching a long time. It was getting late. The disciples said, “Look, Master, we’d better wind this thing up and head out of here. Send the folks away so they can buy some supper and we can get home to ours.”

“You give them something to eat,” Jesus said (v. 37). “Take an inventory. How much bread do you have?”

That didn’t take long. Among the twelve they drummed up five loaves and, they reported as an afterthought, two fish.

“There goes our supper,” Peter muttered to Andrew as Jesus took their loaves, and their two pitiful little fish.

Look what Jesus did with them. The disciples plus 5,000 other people got more supper than they would have if the disciples had kept that carefully packed lunch all to themselves.

God created each of us one-of-a-kind persons. He wants us to offer back to Him the unique gifts and talents He bestows on every one of us. Give back to God your little loaf of gifts, your one small fish of talent, and watch in amazement as God blesses it and feeds the spiritually hungry—maybe physically hungry—people around you.

Read Mark 7:1-23
The Real Thing

Do you know real worship when you see it?

If you have trouble describing worship, how about starting at the other end? What is worship not? Is it a particular building? Is it a music style? Is it fellowship with other persons? Or is real worship something that happens between you and God?

Notice that in Mark’s account of this event, Jesus never defined worship, but the Pharisees did. The Pharisees were a strict, honorable, backbone-of-society kind of people. They shared many of our Christian beliefs: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, a judgment day coming. But in order to worship, they said, you had to do everything in a certain way, just exactly as they said it ought to be.

Jesus did not go around picking fights. But He never backed away from one either. Jesus lays into them. “You are so preoccupied with ceremonies you have lost sight of God,” He said. “You are so busy with conforming to man-made requirements that your purity of soul has gone.” Instead of saying with the psalmist, “Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness” (Psalm 29:2b), their worship had deteriorated into a stern command, “Be certain to scrub the dishes.”

Perhaps the psalmist expresses the essence of true worship in the rest of that verse: “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name” (Psalm 39:2a).