Carols: Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

When James and John ask Jesus for powerful positions in his Kingdom, he teaches them a philosophy of power unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Jesus calls his disciples to embrace a paradoxical philosophy of life and death that initially seems like nonsense.  But once we begin to listen to Jesus and put his teachings into practice, we discover he is actually the wisest person who ever lived.

Almost every scene in the Gospel of Mark focuses on Jesus. One exception is the story of John the Baptist's death in Mark 6. This week we’ll explore how this story serves as a warning to Mark’s original readers and to us.

Mark 5 includes a detailed story about a man tormented by unclean spirits. His encounter with Jesus reveals both the work evil aims to do in the world and Jesus’s power to overcome it. The challenge when reading this story today is to correctly locate ourselves within it.

Guest speaker Dan Bouchelle presents a message called "The Rhythm of Jesus' Life".

Mark includes very little of Jesus’s actual teaching in his gospel. The teachings he does include usually generate more questions than answers, which seems to be Jesus’s intention. Sometimes clarify is overrated.

In Mark 3 Jesus goes up on a mountain and calls twelve disciples to him for a special purpose. The list of names of those he called is pregnant with gospel and helps us understand what the “ideal” church might look like.

Early in his ministry Jesus enjoys tremendous success. As his popularity grows, so does the danger of having his ministry hijacked by others. This Sunday we’ll explore a sequence from Mark 1 in which Jesus shows us how to stay focused and on mission when others are tempting us with a competing agenda.

The Gospel of Mark tells us that immediately after his baptism, Jesus is sent into the wilderness to be tested by Satan. The sequence of these events not only gives us a clue about Jesus’s mission as the Son of God, it also shapes our expectations for what it means to be a Christ-follower.

Over the next several months we’ll be working through some of the key events in Jesus’s ministry as depicted in the Gospel of Mark. The first thing we see Jesus do in Mark’s gospel is show up at the Jordan River to be baptized by John. Why did Jesus step into the water? How does his baptism shape the way we view ours?