Who's In Your Life? Series

Title: Who's In Your Life

Text: Mark 3:1-6

Bottom Line: Our love for God is shown in our love of each other.

Intro

Growing up my dad was a furniture salesmen in New England and he sold one of a kind pieces to a lot of well off people. One of the perks of this job was he knew people that owned local amusement parks and had season tickets to some of the pro teams in the area. One of the guys my dad knew had season tickets to the Celtics, who were just terrible. When he could make a game he would give the tickets to us, so we would go to a few games a year. These weren’t any normal tickets, they were box seats. I’m not sure if you have ever watched a game in box seat, but I highly recommend it… Comfortable, private seats, couches with big screen, catered meals, and best of all they wheel in a desert tray and you get to choose ANYTHING you want. It’s great.

But as a kid that was my only experience at a NBA game. I just assumed that’s how everyone watched basketball. I was in for a harsh reality when we moved to Colorado and I went to my first game Nuggets game, who were equally terrible, and had to sit in the nosebleeds and worse yet there was no dessert tray!

We are in a series called Flipped and we are looking at expectations we have that Jesus flipped. And just as my expectations were flipped, Jesus flipped people’s expectations of who he was and what he came to do. If you were to read the Gospels you would see over and over again people thought the Messiah, Jesus, would be this way, but Jesus showed them over and over again that they had it wrong. This is still true today. So in this series we are looking at the expectations that Jesus flipped and what that means to us today.

If you missed Josh’s message last week you need to go online or grab our podcast and check that out! He gave us a challenge to look outside our circle to see who we can impact. And I don’t know about you, but that was a needed challenge and reminder of our mission.

Tension

Today we are going to take this idea and see what keeps us from living it out. Here’s the reality that we live in, we all have things in our lives that are keeping us from living the life God has intended for us to live.

Some of those distractions are bad things, in other words sin. But a lot of us are distracted by good things. We’ve let something good in our lives, something God intended to be blessing and we make that the ultimate thing. We worship the gift rather than the giver.

When a good things becomes an ultimate thing, ultimately that good thing because destructive.

This happens all the time in our lives, in our relationships, our finances, our families, our jobs… All good things. But sometimes those can distract us from the most important thing.

And we are going to be looking at an interaction Jesus had with the Pharisees and these guys were distracted by a good thing. The law. But they had taken the law, rules, which were a good thing, and made that into an ultimate thing.

Truth

Go ahead and turn over too Mark 3… As you do that let me explain a little of what is going on here… The Pharisees were one group of people that could just not seem to get along with Jesus. The Pharisees pursued righteousness through works. In other words they tried to do enough good deeds to outweigh their bad deeds. They followed the law better than anyone else could, which is a good thing. But when Jesus entered the picture he pointed out that in their pursuit of righteousness they had become distracting. They put their adherence to the rules over caring for people. They cared more about following the rules (which is good) than they cared about caring for and loving people (Which is better)

They cared so much about following God’s law, which is doing what the Bible says, that they created extra rules that aren’t in the Bible just to show how seriously they took it.

The interaction we are going to look at today the Pharisees are following God’s law for the Sabbath, the day of rest… God’s Law said that you couldn’t work on the Sabbath day, but the Pharisees were uncomfortable with the fact that God’s Law didn’t spell out what “work” was. So they came up with their own personal list of 1521 additional rules to follow to ensure that you would be not break the Sabbath.