Amazed And Afraid

This morning I wish to speak with you about a common pattern that occurs in many individual relationships with the Lord. The trend that happens over and over, and the one that we will see in our passage of Scripture, is this: An individual will come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and grow closer and stronger in their relationship with Him, and become excited about how God is moving and working in their life; but they also become accustomed to certain spiritual patterns, and get used to God working in familiar ways.

When they happen to grow to a certain point in their faith, God will ask the person to do what they’re not used to doing. He might ask them to take a step of faith and do something that doesn’t make much sense; and out of fear of the unknown that person may refuse to press onward and trust God, and refuse to grow any more in their faith. At that point their relationship with the Lord starts to suffer.

For eleven years a man named Merhan Karimi Nasseri was a man without a country. For eleven years he lived in a Paris airport. He had no passport. He had no citizenship. He had no papers that enabled him to leave the airport or fly to another country.

He had been expelled from his native country of Iran. Then he was sent away from Paris, France because he lacked documentation. He said his Belgian-issued refugee document had been stolen. He flew to England but was denied entry and sent back to Paris. When he was returned to the Paris airport in 1988, airport authorities allowed him to live in Terminal 1, and there he stayed for eleven years, writing in a diary, living off of handouts from airport employees, and cleaning up in the airport bathroom.

Then in September 1999 the situation reversed. French authorities presented Nasseri with an international travel card and a French residency permit. Suddenly he was free to go anywhere he wanted. But when airport officials handed him his walking papers, to everyone’s surprise, he simply smiled, tucked the documents in his folder, and resumed writing in his diary. They found that he was afraid to leave the bench and table that had been his home for eleven years.(1)

As we will see today, many of us grow accustomed to where we are in our relationship with the Lord; and then when God asks us to do something different or unpredictable, we can become afraid and remain right where we are, just as Nasseri remained in the airport when given the chance to venture out on his own. So, what happens when we refuse to move ahead and step out in faith? Well, we will soon find out. Let’s all stand in honor of God’s Word, as we read Mark 10:32:

32 Now they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them; and they were amazed. And as they followed they were afraid. Then He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them the things that would happen to Him.

In this verse we read that as Jesus’ disciples followed Him to Jerusalem, they were all filled with both “amazement” and “fear.” Now, the gospel writer Mark apparently liked to use these two words quite often in his writing.

Throughout Mark’s gospel, people respond to Jesus with amazement and with fear. They were amazed when Jesus healed a man who could not walk. They were amazed when He said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy person to enter the kingdom of God. They were amazed when He instructed them to return to Caesar the things that were Caesar’s.

The people were afraid when they realized that a man who had been possessed by a demon had been healed. The disciples were afraid when Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus, and we are told that their fear left them speechless. The people were “amazed” by what Jesus did and said because He challenged much of what they took for granted, and they were “afraid” of the power that He possessed.(2)

“Mark combines the two emotional responses when he tells us that the disciples were both amazed and afraid as Jesus went before them as they journeyed toward Jerusalem.”(3) He does this in a few other places as well. For example, in Mark 5:15, and 20, we are told how people responded to Jesus when He healed a demon-possessed man. These verses say, “Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid . . . And [the man] departed and began to proclaim in Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him; and all marveled [or were amazed]” (cf. Mk 16:8).