MARK 1:9-20
JESUS-THE PREACHER
I. PERSON:* Mark 1:9-11
A. Patrimony.
B. Processing.
C. Proving.
II. PREACHING:** Mark 1:12-34
A. Powerful.
B. Productive.
C. Provocative.
III. PERTINACITY:*** Mark 1:35-39
A. Preference.
B. Privacy.
C. Prayer.
Mark opens his work by not wasting many words. He does not go into the birth of Jesus because his readers-the Romans and the Gentiles-would not be interested in this detail. Instead, he begins his writing by reviewing John the Baptist’s brief work and then he moves to the advent of Jesus. In the first chapter of his writing, Mark moves through great detail about the beginning ministry of our Lord and then picks up the trail of Jesus as He begins His tour of the neighboring cities.
In the first chapter of Mark, I see Jesus as the ultimate Preacher. I see this in His PERSON. Next, I see Jesus as the Preacher in His PREACHING ministry. Then, I note His PERTINACITY as He decided upon some things that He must do for His ministry and He never varied from these goals.
* HIS PERSON: Mark does not tell us about the lineage of Jesus: he simply announces that He showed up for His baptism. However, the writer does tell us that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and that signifies that the He was completing the prophets’ messages about His Patrimony and from where He came.
Next, Mark tells us that Jesus went to the river to be baptized. The processing part of His fulfilling the ancient messages was sufficient for Mark and he moved on with his story. It is interesting to see that Jesus did not have to be baptized but He did as He continued to do the Processing of fulfilling the law as was His custom.
Then, Mark tells us that Jesus was driven into the wilderness for His Proving-His temptation. In such short bursts of writings, Mark tells the reader what others took pages to write. Now, the scene is set for Jesus to begin His earthly ministry and He does so with great haste.
** HIS PREACHING: Mark wastes no time in beginning his description of the way Jesus began His public ministry. As one reads the words of Mark, one gets the idea that the ministry of Jesus was quick, to the point and it produced results.
The first thing I note about His Preaching was that it was Powerful. He preached for results and He got results. He confronted the enemy of mankind on his own soil and won. He preached as if He knew what He was saying and the words He spoke hit the sin question square on the head. His sermons were Powerful and so should every sermon be that names the name of Jesus.
Next, I see where His sermons were Productive. He cast out demons, He healed broken and mangled bodies, He restored people to their health and never backed down in the face of opposition of which He encountered.
His Preaching was Provocative. He laid down the gauntlet and called for a radical change in the peoples’ lives. He never compromised and He stood for what was right. His preaching was not candy coated and He always ran into a maelstrom of opposition from those who did not like this way of preaching. To effectively preach Christ, one will cause Provocations relating to the sin question in peoples’ lives and will stir up strife. Satan wants to live comfortably with sin in the sinners and when he is confronted, exposed and made to face the Son of God, he will react negatively and that was what happened to this Preacher’s Preaching.
*** HIS PERTINACITY: To be effective, Jesus had to do some things by shear will power. He had to be persistent and never to waver. Some of these qualities are evident here in this passage before us.
One of these principles was His Preference to arise early, when everyone else was asleep and go away to pray to His Father. It takes real discipline to deny oneself, to get up early and to seek the Lord’s favor, but Jesus decided that this was a must for Him and he did it. Mark says that after a busy day, when he was tired, He still got up and went out to pray.
Next, a part of His Pertinacity was His desire to be alone with God; He coveted His Privacy with His Heavenly Father and would deny Himself the luxury of sleep in order that He could go somewhere alone and commune with His Father. If we ever amount to anything, we must get alone with God on a regular basis and call upon Him for help.
Lastly, the true secret to His success as a Preacher was His Pertinacity to His Prayer life. He recognized the value of Prayer and wanted to maintain this intimacy with His Father while here on earth. If He felt the need to communicate with the Heavenly Father, how can we think differently?
What made this Preacher-with no formal training-to be so effective? There are many reasons, of course, one of them was that He was God Incarnate in human flesh. Yet part of the reason for His effectiveness as a Preacher was due to His very Person, who He was, what He did on this earth to fulfill the Law as it was set before Him.
Another secret to His success as a great preacher was due to belief in who He was, the power he possessed, His ability to take the “fight” to Satan and to make people confront who they were-and who they should become.
Lastly, the success of Jesus as a Preacher was His personal life of prayer and His desire to be what His Heavenly Father wanted Him to be. Can we as preachers of today do less?
This Preacher set the tone for all who was to follow in proclaiming His name to the world. To follow this example is all that God wants from His spokespersons; to do less is to be an embarrassment to the cause of Christ.
