Mark Bradford's Bible Blog

Sin, Faith, Duty

¹Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. ²It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. ³So watch yourselves.

This is a serious issue that is ignored by many Christians. There may be things that are fine for a mature Christian to do that would be a major stumbling block for a new Christian. We need to be very careful about putting a new Christian in a situation where they could be drawn back into their old life. There are also cases where new Christians are drawn by some in the church into their petty squabbles and divisions. If someone is newly saved in our church, what kind of image of Christianity do they get from us? What do they observe from our behavior and attitudes? How many times have people rejected Christianity after being disillusioned by the actions of Christians? Jesus took this very seriously, as this passage shows. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

“If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. ⁴If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.”

The issue of forgiveness is another one that is not stressed enough in the church. See my other posts on the issue of forgiveness here. One difference in Jesus’ teaching here from other places I’ve blogged on so far is his stipulation that we must forgive our brother if he repents. Does that mean we withhold forgiveness until then? I don’t think so. What if the person you need to forgive is no longer alive? The key is to forgive them in our hearts. That means we no longer hold their sin against them. Some would say that God does not forgive us until we repent, but I don’t believe that’s true. It’s not that he doesn’t forgive us until we repent, it’s that we can’t receive his forgiveness until we repent. If your brother or sister who sinned against you never repents, you must still let it go and forgive him in your heart. You can’t continue to hold it against him or her until they come around, or bitterness will take hold and destroy you from the inside. On the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:24) Those who crucified him never repented, but he forgave them anyway. But they never received the benefit of his forgiveness, because they did not repent.

I admit I have a hard time with the idea of rebuking someone who sins. I don’t think Jesus is saying if you hear someone swear, you should walk up and rebuke them. He’s talking about someone who sins against you, as he says in verse 4. Let God take care of sins against him. And I don’t think he’s talking about petty slights and getting your feelings hurt. He’s talking about serious sins, like if someone steals from you, or tells lies about you, or some other major offense. All rebuking must be done in love, however. Love must rule over all of this. Love keeps no record of wrongs (1 Cor 13:5). If someone sins against us, we can’t just pretend it never happened, and we can’t keep it bottled up inside. But we can’t blow up at the guilty party either. We must speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15).

⁵The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

⁶He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.

In the parable of the mustard seed (Luke 13:18-21, blog, Mark 4:30-32, blog), Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. The kingdom of God is built on faith. It started small like a mustard seed, and like a weed (which the mustard plant was in that culture) it grew and spread. By the same token, if we start with faith as small as a mustard seed, the longer we walk with Jesus, the more it will grow like the mustard plant. That kind of faith can overcome any obstacle.

⁷“Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? ⁸Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? ⁹Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? ¹⁰So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’ “

We are the servants in this illustration. We shouldn’t think we’re getting brownie points in Heaven for all the ministries we’re involved in. When we realize all God has done for us, there is no way we can repay that debt. As the song says, the whole realm of nature would be a present far too small. Even when we dedicate our entire lives to Jesus, we are only doing our duty.

Mark Bible duty, faith, forgiveness, Jesus, Luke, mustard seed

Jesus’ Teaching on Prayer

¹One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

Jesus’ disciples were listening to him pray, and wanted to learn how to pray like Jesus did. Maybe Jesus was leading the group in prayer. How many times had the disciples heard Jesus pray aloud, and wondered at the power and intimacy of his relationship with God? Jesus had powerful prayer life, and often went off by himself to pray, sometimes praying all night. When someone who has a prayer life like that prays publicly, you get a glimpse of what their relationship with God is like. I’ve had the privilege to know several people like that, people who, as soon as they start praying, the room seems to fill with the presence of God. Imagine what it would have been like to listen to Jesus pray out loud! It’s no wonder the disciples wanted him to teach them how to pray like that. Apparently, John taught his disciples about prayer. Andrew was one of John’s disciples, and must have heard John’s teaching on prayer. But he wanted to learn how to pray like Jesus. Books and sermons on prayer are good and useful, but we need Jesus to teach us how to pray, for we do not know how to pray as we ought (Romans 8:26).

Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray in this passage in Luke, and teaches the crowd about prayer in Matthew 6:5-15, as part of the Sermon on the Mount. Both times he uses what we have come to call The Lord’s Prayer, but the prayers are slightly different, and the lessons surrounding them are different. This version of the prayer in Luke is more compact. Some manuscripts filled it in so that it had all the familiar phrases from the Sermon on the Mount version, but apparently most have a shorter version of it, like what follows in the NIV.

²He said to them, “When you pray, say:
” ‘Father,^[a]
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.^[b]
3Give us each day our daily bread.
⁴Forgive us our sins,
for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.^[c]
And lead us not into temptation.^[d]‘ “

Father. The public prayers that Jews of Jesus’ time were used to hearing tended to be long, flowery, and began with many salutations, names and titles of God. Jesus started his prayer simply with “Father”. The disciples had admired the intimacy with God that Jesus showed when they heard him pray, and they wanted to pray like him. Of course, Jesus had a head start when it came to intimacy with God. He is God, after all. But Jesus didn’t take his intimate relationship with his Father for granted. He spent a lot of alone time with God. You can’t have intimacy with anyone unless you spend time with them and share everything with them. That’s true of human relationships, and certainly true in a relationship with God. Jesus wanted his disciples to have the kind of intimacy with God that he had, and he wants the same for us.

Hallowed be your name. Hallowed means holy, or set apart for holy use. The first half of the Lord’s Prayer is all focused on God. If this is our model prayer, that’s the first lesson. Begin by recognizing who God is, how great, mighty, and above all, holy he is. It’s not that God wants to hear us compliment him, it’s that saying out loud how holy and awesome God is changes us. It gives us proper perspective. So often I have been guilty of taking up my whole prayer time with laundry lists of my needs. Lord, give me this. Lord, help me with that. Lord help so-and-so. God wants us to ask him for things, as we’ll see later on, but he doesn’t want us to start there, or worse, take up our whole prayer time with requests. Prayer is about building our relationship with God, not just about asking and receiving. The angels that surround the Throne of God continually call him holy (Isaiah 6:2-3, Rev. 4:8). If we start our prayers by joining with the angels in Heaven in proclaiming God’s holiness, we’ll be on the right path to having the kind of intimate relationship with God that he wants us to have with him.

Your kingdom come. Though this shorter version of the prayer doesn’t continue with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, like we’re used to hearing, the meaning is still there. We are to pray for the kingdom of God to come on earth. All through Jesus’ ministry, he preached the good news of the kingdom of God. If there was one theme to Jesus’ teaching, that was it. So it should be important to us. What will happen when that kingdom comes? God’s will will be done on earth to the same degree as it is in Heaven, completely, and without reservation. So Jesus begins his prayer not with a list of his own needs, but by saying “Father, your name is holy, and may your kingdom, your dominion, your will be accomplished on earth, and in my life, just as completely as it is in Heaven. Is that the attitude our prayers begin with?

Give us each day our daily bread. Only now does Jesus get to material needs. He doesn’t say, “Give us enough to stock up for the month, or enough in our 401k to retire”. He says, “Give us each day our daily bread.” God wants us to depend upon him day by day. Later in this passage, Jesus talks about asking, seeking, and knocking, and many have taken that passage and others to mean that we can ask for anything we can think of, no matter what our motivations are. But in his model prayer immediately preceding that teaching, Jesus gives us examples of the kinds of things to ask for. Modest things like enough food for today.

Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. Here’s the tough part. Jesus assumes that when we ask God for forgiveness for our sins, we have already forgiven others. He ties the two together, right there in the Lord’s Prayer. The meaning of this request is not, “Forgive us, and then we’ll forgive others”. It’s more like “Forgive us to the same degree that we forgive others”. In the version of this prayer in Matthew, Jesus immediately follows his prayer by saying this;

¹⁴For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins (Matthew 6:14-15).

That’s serious business, folks. I’ve talked about forgiveness before in this blog because I believe it’s a major issue in the church, and it’s an issue that has affected me personally. There are people in every church in the world who believe they are Christians, but will miss Heaven because there is someone they will not forgive. Jesus clearly said that if we don’t forgive others, God will not forgive us. He put the issue of forgiving others as a condition of our forgiveness right in the middle of the Lord’s prayer! We can’t even ask God for forgiveness unless we can also say for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. Are we getting it yet?

And lead us not into temptation. I prefer the way the New Living Bible puts this part. It says, “And don’t let us yield to temptation.” I don’t believe that God leads us into temptation. In fact, I believe the Bible teaches just the opposite. James 1:13-14 says:

¹³When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; ¹⁴but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.

God wants to help us overcome temptation, and that’s the real meaning of what Jesus is saying here. And let’s be honest, many of us play fast and loose with temptation. We leave the door open. That’s a losing game. As anyone on a diet can tell you, the best way to defeat temptation is to avoid it. And the best way to avoid it is to spend time with God. The closer we get to him, the less we want to mess around with temptation, and the more we will have the kind of intimacy with God that the disciples wanted, and that we need to have to be like Jesus.

Mark Bible forgiveness, Jesus, Luke, prayer

Jesus Rejected at Nazareth

¹⁴Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

Jesus was filled with the Spirit before his wilderness experience (4:1), but after going through a 40 day fast and overcoming temptation, now he walked in the power of the Spirit. If we are able, through prayer and fasting, to gain victory over temptation, we will be able to walk in the power of the Spirit. He went around teaching in the synagogues in Galilee. Jesus ministry was always a mix of performing miracles and teaching, but Jesus preferred to teach. I believe the reason he often told those he healed not to tell anyone about it was because most of the people in the large crowds he was attracting weren’t interested in his teaching, they just wanted to see or receive a miracle. But early in his ministry, he was free to teach in synagogues, and as yet, nobody opposed him. But that would soon change.

¹⁶He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. ¹⁷The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”^[e]

²⁰Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, ²¹and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as was his custom. Jesus was faithful in his participation in corporate worship. To those who think they can be a Christian without going to church, I have this question; How’s that working out for you? If anyone could ever say they could live a righteous life without attending church, it was Jesus, yet he attended the synagogue faithfully, and observed all the Jewish festivals as well. If Jesus is our example, then we can’t forsake meeting regularly with other believers. Saying you don’t believe in “organized religion” is just a cliche. A small group of people meeting once a week to study the Bible and pray is organized religion. It’s not that God gives you demerits if you don’t go to church. It’s that we can’t make it without the support of other believers. Jesus, even though he didn’t need to, attended worship services every week. If the object of being a Christian is to be Christlike, that means we must do as Jesus did, including being part of some kind of church body that meets on a regular basis.

I’ve always thought that this event took a lot of nerve on Jesus’ part. He had gone to his “home church”, the synagogue that he grew up in, and pretty much proclaimed himself the Messiah. Everyone there knew that passage from Isaiah was Messianic prophecy. The Messiah is speaking in that passage. For Jesus’ first comment after reading it to be, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”, it was nothing less than telling the people who had known him since he was an infant that he was the Messiah. It’s hard to convince the women who wiped your runny nose when you were 3 years old that you’re the Son of God.

²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

²³Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ “

²⁴“I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. ²⁵I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. ²⁶Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. ²⁷And there were many in Israel with leprosy^[f] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

²⁸All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. ²⁹They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. ³⁰But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

I have to admit, I’ve misunderstood this passage of scripture my whole life. I always thought that it was Jesus proclaiming himself to be the Messiah that made them angry, but it wasn’t. Verse 22 said they all spoke well of him at that point. What made them angry was that he wouldn’t perform for them like they wanted him to. Apparently they had heard about miracles he had performed in Capernaum before this, though Luke doesn’t record them. It’s as if they were saying, “OK, great, you’re the Messiah. Now do something spectacular to prove it.” This might have been the first example of the struggle Jesus had getting people to listen to his teaching rather than demanding miracles, but it wasn’t the last. When Jesus quoted to the crowd “what they would surely say to him”, he was undoubtably quoting what some had already said to him. He was summarizing the comments he had heard ever since he came back to his hometown. When the crowd showed up at the synagogue to hear their Hometown Boy Who Made Good teach, they were all expecting to see some miraculous sign. They must have gotten really excited when they heard him read from Isaiah and say it was talking about him. But Jesus had just overcome the temptation to work signs and wonders for their own sake in the wilderness, so he wasn’t about to succumb to that temptation now because of a little peer pressure. He turned them down flat, and that’s what made them angry.

When the crowd tried to push him off the cliff, that was often the first step in stoning. When the victim laid at the bottom of the cliff after falling, the crowd would throw stones at them until they were dead. We don’t know if Jesus escaped from them miraculously, or if he was able to walk away because he had enough friends and family there to let cooler heads prevail. I can imagine his mother Mary, who must have been there, appealing to her neighbors to let him go.

The point of this passage for me is, when God doesn’t deliver the miracle I ask for, do I get angry at him? I have to admit that I have been guilty of that. Years ago someone dear to me needed divine healing and did not receive it, while someone else I knew did. I was in a weakened spiritual state then because of an issue of unforgiveness in my life. Someone had wronged a friend of mine, and I would not forgive them. As a result, when the miracle I was praying for did not happen, but the miracle someone else was praying for did, I got mad at God. I had a genuine crisis of faith over that, and came close to rejecting Christianity altogether. It took me a long time to recover from that, and I still struggle over the issue of divine healing today because of that experience.

In verses 25-27, Jesus gives examples of cases where miracles were needed, but not received. When Jesus was here in the flesh, he did not heal every sick person he met. I have yet to hear anyone explain to my satisfaction why God heals some but not others. But I can’t let my lack of understanding be an obstacle to my faith. I don’t want to be like the crowd in Nazareth who became angry that he didn’t perform the miracle they wanted. I want to be like those followed him to hear his teaching.

Mark Bible Bible, forgiveness, Jesus, Luke

The Withered Fig Tree

²⁰In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. ²¹Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!”  ²²“Have^[f] faith in God,” Jesus answered. ²³“I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. ²⁴Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

This passage illustrates what is, for me, one of the points of the Gospel of John. I’ve repeated it in my blog on Mark’s gospel as well, and this is another example of it. That is, Jesus peformed miracles primarily for two reasons; to glorify God, and to help people believe. Why did Jesus curse the fig tree? Partially for the reasons I talked about in my last blog entry, because it was an illustration of Israel’s lack of spiritual fruit. But he also did it to help the disciples believe. When Peter pointed out the withered tree, what was Jesus’ response? Have faith in God.

Verses 22-24 are some of the most misused and misunderstood verses in all the Bible. Many churches and famous preachers base their whole teaching on this passage, and they do it wrongly. Jesus was not saying here that if you pray hard enough, and really believe, that God is obligated to do whatever you ask. That kind of faith is not faith in God, it’s just “faith in faith.” The expression “moving mountains” was a common expression among Jews at that time, and its meaning was the same as it is today. It meant that if you have faith in God, you can overcome any obstacle. Jesus cursed the fig tree to show the disciples what can happen if they have faith in God, not just faith in their own prayers.

²⁵And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him and ^[g]let it drop (leave it, let it go), in order that your Father Who is in heaven may also forgive you your [own] failings and shortcomings and let them drop.

^26[h]But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your failings and shortcomings. (Amplified)

So many times when passages of scripture are misused, those who do so don’t bother to use the whole passage in context, they just lift out a verse or two to make their point. These two verses are part of the same paragraph as the part about faith and moving mountains. It’s all the same thought, and we can’t separate them. Do those who preach “prosperity gospel” based on verses 22-24 also include 25-26 in their equation? Whenever the Bible makes a promise, there is always a requirement on our part to go with it.

The issue of forgiveness is a huge one that I feel is not stressed enough in the church. I believe there are many who believe they are saved who will miss Heaven over this issue. Take a poll of any church in America, and ask people to rank the following sins in order of severity; murder, adultery, and refusing to forgive others. I’d be willing to bet that most congregations would rank them in that order, murder being the worst, then adultery, then refusing to forgive. But Jesus never said that if we murdered someone, he would not forgive us. He never said if we commit adultery, he would not forgive us. But he did say here, and in Matthew 6:14-15, that if we don’t forgive others, he won’t forgive us. That’s very serious, folks. In the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus said “Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors,” he didn’t mean “forgive us first, then we’ll forgive others.” He was saying, “forgive us to the same degree that we forgive others.” I believe that, in fact, Jesus is laying out an unpardonable sin. Not the one he talks about in Matthew 3:28-29, (see my blog on that passage), but one just as dangerous, and unfortunately, just as common.

Is there someone who has wronged you, and you cannot bring yourself to forgive them? Until you do, the Bible teaches that God will not forgive your sins, either. It’s as simple as that. Any sin that Jesus himself says he will not forgive has to be considered an unpardonable sin. But like the more commonly known unpardonable sin (continually rejecting the overtures of the Holy Spirit), this one is not irrevocable. All you have to do is forgive. If God can forgive us after all we’ve done, then we can forgive others for what they’ve done. Do we want to be Christlike? Then we must forgive as he forgives. I hear sermons preached on lots of things that are less vital than this. I’ve heard lots of sermons on verses 22-24, but few, if any, on verses 25-26. That’s just wrong, and I believe God will hold those in spiritual authority over us responsible for it. As Jesus makes clear in this passage, faith and forgiveness are tied together. You can’t have one without the other. But if we forgive others, and have faith in God, we can overcome any obstacle in our lives.

Mark Bible Bible, faith, fig tree, forgiveness, Jesus, Mark