“Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don’t presume you will have it tomorrow, and don’t waste it today.” —John Piper
Losers Keepers
Mark 8:27-38
Peter’s Confession of Christ
27 Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, “Who do people say that I am?”
28 They told Him, saying, “John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.”
29 And He continued by questioning them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.”
30 And He warned them to tell no one about Him.
31 And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
32 And He was stating the matter plainly. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.
33 But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”
34 And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.
35 “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.
36 “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?
37 “For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
38 “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
We are not called to a superficial Christianity. We are called to be Christ's disciples. We are called to discipleship.
The New Testament is full of instructions about discipleship. Here in Mark's Gospel, we find Jesus beginning to teach His disciples just what discipleship is all about. They knew He had called them. They saw themselves as His followers. But did they understand what it meant to follow Him? The call to follow Jesus is a call to discipleship. But what does that mean? As Jesus challenges Peter and the rest of the twelve here in this passage, He will unfold a radical teaching of being a disciple - a real follower of His.
Are you a follower of Christ? Do you see yourself as a disciple? It is important for us to understand just what we mean when we talk about discipleship. Far too many believers have a shallow view of what discipleship means in terms of their lives. Many claim to be followers of Christ who are only deceiving themselves and others. What they really have is only a sentimental fondness for sweet encounters with the blessings of the Lord. When it comes to following Jesus and denying self and laying down their lives, they pull up short. This is what the world sees. That is one reason they mock us. What we need to be and what we need to show the world is people who love Jesus passionately and follow Him completely. We will see in our text today two vital characteristics of discipleship. Hopefully, we will come to understand what confessing Christ means and how that confession is lived out in our lives.
The Confession of Discipleship
Part of our coming to Christ is our coming to a place where we can confess Him as our Savior and Lord. That confession is an acknowledgement that we personally take Christ as our Savior and commit our lives to live for Him. The confession of discipleship is a cornerstone of our Christian faith. In our text today, Jesus is leading His disciples to make such a confession. He does so through A Probing Interrogative.
"And Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, 'Who do people say that I am?' And they told Him, saying, 'John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but still others, one of the prophets.' And He continued by questioning them, 'But who do you say that I am?' Peter answered and said to Him, 'Thou art the Christ.' And He warned them to tell no one about Him." (vv. 27-30)
Jesus was always teaching, and this was no exception. On His way to Caesarea Philippi, He put a number of important questions to His disciples. He wanted to know, firstly, what people were saying about Him. The opinions varied. Some thought He was John the Baptist risen from the dead. Others felt He was the prophetic fulfillment of the coming Elijah. The Jews expected Elijah to come before the Messiah. Opinions varied from that point as people speculated that He was one prophet or another. These were the opinions of people. They are interesting, but not accurate. The world has its opinion of Christ, but it is not often accurate.
But while the world's opinion is interesting, it is really irrelevant. Jesus knew that His disciples knew what the world was saying about Him. But He wanted to know what they thought about Him. So He challenged them. He asked, "But who do you say that I am?" Jesus was really saying, "The world has its opinion about me; but I really want to know your opinion. Who do you say that I am?" It is important for us to understand that what the world says about Jesus should not shape our thinking about Him. Faith is a personal, individual matter. Each of us must come to Christ individually. It is not good enough that we accept popular opinion about Jesus. Popular opinion does not define Him. What have you seen? What have I seen? What do we believe about Jesus?
The question Jesus asked them needs to be asked today. It is as pertinent and relevant as it was then. You see, many people really don't know who Jesus is. There has been a vast change in this country in the last generation or two. No longer is there a Christian consensus in America. Whereas, in the early days of our history, a great percentage of our population went to church; today that is no longer the case. Years ago, even in the schools, children were taught from a Christian perspective. Now, admittedly they might not have believed, but at least they knew the facts. Unhappily, that is no longer the case. Today when the name of Jesus is mentioned, people's minds are clouded with various conflicting images. "What Jesus are you talking about?" they might ask. "Are you speaking of the Jesus of PTL and prosperity theology? Are you talking about the Jesus of the liberal church and liberation theology? Perhaps you mean the Jesus of the hyper-fundamentalists and militant, mean-spirited separationists. Just what Jesus do you mean?" People need to understand who Jesus is. They need to be able to answer this question for themselves.
Jesus' probing interrogative gives way to A Perceptive Insight. When Jesus asked His question, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter replied, "Thou art the Christ." Peter understood who Jesus was. He had come to an amazing revelation.
It is interesting that Jesus lived His life before His disciples prior to His asking them who He was. Peter had come to His revelation by a personal experience of Jesus. That is precisely the way we will come to a revelation of who Jesus is. We cannot rely upon other people's opinions. We must come to experience Christ ourselves. That is what the world needs as well. And that is what we in the Church need to be all about. We need to be introducing people to Jesus. You can argue about the concept of God all day long. But when people meet Jesus, they receive something more than an intellectual argument. They receive faith to believe in Him.
What comes next is left out of Mark's account. Matthew records for us a commendation given to Peter by the Lord Jesus based on Peter's revelation. It is found in Matthew 16, verses 17 through 19.
17 And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, aSimon 1Barjona, because bflesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.
18 “I also say to you that you are 1aPeter, and upon this 2rock I will build My church; and the gates of bHades will not overpower it.
19 “I will give you athe keys of the kingdom of heaven; and bwhatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” (NASB)
Why did Mark not include this important part of the story? One interesting speculation is that Peter himself wanted Mark not to include it. Mark, you recall, was not one of the twelve disciples. Mark came to Christ after the resurrection of Jesus and became one of Peter's traveling companions. The Gospel of Mark is, in reality, Peter's account of the life of Jesus. Mark's Gospel is really the Gospel according to Peter. And it may be that Peter did not want to include such a glowing testimony to himself in his account. While Peter was impulsive and headstrong, he had come to know his own fallibility. By the time Peter shared his gospel with Mark, he had come to realize that Peter was nothing, but Christ everything. I'm sure in his recollection, he remembered how right after this revelation he would be rebuked by the Lord. But he also remembered how he had denied Christ just before the crucifixion. For all you might want to say about Peter's impulsiveness, I believe he was a humble man. In Acts, we see Peter telling the men in the household of Cornelius who had fell at his feet to worship him to "Stand up! I too am just a man." So Peter did not want to put himself forward as someone special. Ivor Powell, in his commentary on Peter says, "If Simon Peter could enter the cathedral bearing his name in the Vatican City today, he would probably have a heart attack. To see many thousands of sincere people kissing his big toe would nauseate him. And his objections might earn an excommunication from the church in which he is so revered."
The fact that Peter was a fallible human being is graphically illustrated by what happens next. On the heels of this perceptive insight that Jesus was the Christ, we find A Parochial Interest.
31 aAnd He began to teach them that bthe Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
32 And He was stating the matter aplainly. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.
33 But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said “Get behind Me, aSatan; for you are not setting your mind on 1God’s interests, but man’s.”
(vv. 31-33)
Peter was not the first Pope, nor was he without error. As a matter of fact, it is interesting to note that even though God used Peter spectacularly on many occasions, he didn't even become the top dog in Jerusalem. But when the church council convened in the book of Acts, it is not Peter, it is James, the Lord's half-brother, who stands as the chief elder to speak for the body.
Here we see a parochial interest emerge when Jesus began to talk about His death on the Cross. Peter won’t stand for this, a premature death of Jesus doesn’t fit his ideas at all for the future of this company. And his vision for the future did not include Jesus' death. But the confession of discipleship cannot be separated from the Cross of Christ. This is what Jesus was pointing out. A Christ without a cross has no power to save. Jesus was trying to reveal to them the pivotal truth of His sacrificial death for the sins of mankind. The truth of the Gospel is not just the divine Son of God living out His life on this earth as a good example. The Gospel is the sinless Son of God dying as the Lamb of God on the Cross. Jesus cannot be preached apart from His Cross. He would not be believed in apart from His Cross. The message of the Gospel is the vicarious substitutionary atonement of Christ on the Cross. By "vicarious" we mean that Jesus' death on the Cross is our death to sin. When He died there, we died with Him. By "substitutionary" we mean that Jesus took our place and paid the penalty for our sins. By "atonement" we mean that Jesus, in paying for our sins, has made us right with God. And if we will believe in Him, what He did on the Cross will become effective for us. His death for our sin cannot be left out of any Gospel message. Because without His death on the Cross, we could not receive forgiveness of sins. That is why Jesus came. And that is why He rebuked Peter.
Jesus said, "Get behind Me Satan." That is indeed a serious rebuke. It indicates the seriousness of man's sin and the critical truth of Jesus' death on the Cross. The confession of discipleship cannot be realized without the intersection of the Cross of Christ. To confess Christ as our Savior and Lord means that we accept what He did for us on the Cross at Calvary as our only hope for eternal life. It is indeed essential to our salvation.
The Cost of Discipleship
So, we see the confession of discipleship made by Peter and some of its implications related to that commitment. Jesus now began to explain of the implication of discipleship in terms of our lives.
34 And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. (v. 34)
We find in this simple uncompromising statement the condition of discipleship. And that condition centers on the Cross. You see, the Cross is more than a dramatic executionary event in history. The Cross is a way of life. It is a principle of life for every believer. In this place, Jesus talks about taking up our cross and following Him. What does that mean? In Luke's Gospel, He adds the word "daily" to his admonishment. Taking up your cross simply means that there must be a daily commitment to follow Jesus Christ, a daily commitment to live for Him. To take up our cross means to submit out will, our desires for ourselves, to His will for our lives.
Notice what Jesus says in verse 34. "If anyone wishes to come after Me..." In other words, if you want to be Jesus' disciple, heed what follows. "Let him deny himself..." What it does not say is "deny yourself something." It simply says "deny yourself." In other words, we are not to live for ourselves, our personal wants and needs, we are to stop living for self. We are to stop making ourselves first. "And take up his cross..." The cross we are to bear is similar to the Cross Jesus bore. What actually happened when Jesus died on the Cross? He laid down His life for us. When we bear our cross, we lay down our life for Him. He laid it down when He died for us, and we lay ours down when we live for Him. This is what it means to follow Jesus.
Jesus continues to explain the cost of discipleship. This is a prime example of a paradox. A Paradoxical Instruction. It is paradoxical because is a teaching that is not in line with the world thinks. This a higher level of thinking, it rises above thinking about life as one thinks when they live their life for themselves. You might think of it as a royal thought process, a heavenly kingdom way of thinking, and then the beauty of its logic become apparent.
35 “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.”
36 “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?”
37 “For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
(vv. 35-37)
What does Jesus mean that if we try to "save our life we will lose it; if we try to lose our life for His sake, we will save it?" Everyone knows that if we don't take care of ourselves, no one will. The common saying is that we must look out for old number 1. If we let others use us, we will be used up. Do unto others before they do unto you. And, so Jesus’ saying doesn't make sense from a common point of view. It doesn't to the natural unchanged worldly mind. We are taught in this world that we only go around once, and we need to grab for all the gusto we can get. But that is not the way that Jesus explains it for those who live for the Kingdom of God. To take up the Cross of Christ means renouncing my life and finding my life in the life of Jesus Christ. In other words, we must give our lives to Jesus. And in return, He will give us His life, and suddenly our diminishing winding down life is restored to the glory that God intended for His creation from the beginning.
Consider the alternative. We can live in this life as desperately grabbing for whatever we can get. Opportunists seeking to amass all the material and worldly possessions that we can get. These are those things that we think we have to have for a maximized fulfilling life. But for what? That may be a sensible philosophy if indeed we only go around once and then upon death vanish into oblivion, as some believe. But what if we are eternal creatures? What if the spirit world is more real and actually eternal, with no end, as this life is. The Bible indicates that this is our reality, and that we are eternal beings. What about the life to come, after this temporary life is over? Scripture says "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" We can have everything this world has to offer, We might be among the super-rich, and possess the biggest and best that the world has to offer, but when we die, we leave it all behind, it is all worthless. It all has no more meaning than if we were penniless and lived in poverty. We need to look to eternal things now if we would prepare for eternity. By living our lives for ourselves, we forfeit eternal life. But by living our lives for Jesus, we inherit eternal life, we gain the riches of heaven. We may gain the whole world, but if we lose our soul, we have lost it all. What we realize, paradoxically, is that it is through Christ can we find true satisfied. In Christ we find purpose. In Christ our lives have true meaning and true fulfillment.
This passage ends with A Perplexing Implication. It centers on the fact that to truly confess Christ means more than saying the words, it means more than lip service. It means actually, truly living for Him, unashamedly before others.
38 “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” (v. 38)
Verbally confessing Christ cannot be separated from living for Christ. Christianity is not something done anonymously. We ask the question Jesus posed to His disciples, "Who do you say that Jesus is?" And then we must share with them the reality of who He is and what He can do in their lives. Jesus says that we should not be ashamed of Him or of His words. For many, to be a Christian is to subject oneself to mockery, as though Christians check their brain at the door. Never forget, the word of God still has the power to liberate souls from the bondage to sin.
