When People Can’t Get Passed Your Past

Mark 6:1-6

6 Then He went out from there and came to His own country, and His disciples followed Him. 2 And when the Sabbath had come, He began to teach in the synagogue. And many hearing Him were astonished, saying, “Where did this Man get these things? And what wisdom is this which is given to Him, that such mighty works are performed by His hands! 3 Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?” So they were offended at Him.

4 But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.” 5 Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And He marveled because of their unbelief. Then He went about the villages in a circuit, teaching.

Last week we talked about what or who the bible says that we are in Christ Jesus. We talked about that how,

• As a believer, you are saved. - Ephesians 2:8

• As a believer, you are new creation. - 2 Corinthians 5:17

• As a believer, you are a son of God. - Galatians 3:26-29

• As a believer, you are an ambassador. - 2 Corinthians 5:20-21

Then Paul encourages us in Philippians 3:12-14 to press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. He said, “but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead.” In other words, Paul is not letting his past of who he was to hold him back from the calling God has on his life.

The person that Paul use to be we see in the book of Acts. Paul who is also called Saul was a persecutor of the church of Jesus Christ. His main objective was to destroy the church. Bur when Paul meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus redirected His life and gave him new purpose. Then when people heard that the man Saul had meet Jesus and is now a changed man, nobody could believe it!!

Even in our text for today, we see Jesus had, had the same problem. In His hometown, we see the people of Nazareth were puzzled about the wisdom and power of God flowing through Jesus. After we get saved its hard for family, friends, and those who knew us before we got saved to believe the change that has occurred in our life. Then living this Christian life gets hard, but we learn how to press on and move forward inspite of the obstacles in life. We KNOW, that we have been changed, we KNOW we are a new creation in Christ Jesus, WE KNOW!!!

But what do you do ….. When people can’t get passed your past.

There are a few points I want to share with you this morning about, “When people can’t get passed your past.”

I. Realize people will be amazed and offended by who you were then and who you are now (vv 2-4).

After studying the text, I realized that there are two groups of people in the text. Those of Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth are one group and His disciples are the other group of people. Both know Jesus, both are familiar with Jesus, both know of the miracles he has performed, both know of the wisdom of God he teaches ….. BUT … one group can’t get past his past.

Mark 6:2-4 says:

2 And when the Sabbath had come, He began to teach in the synagogue. And many hearing Him were astonished, saying, “Where did this Man get these things? And what wisdom is this which is given to Him, that such mighty works are performed by His hands! 3 Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?” So they were offended at Him.

4 But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.”

It was customary for a visiting Rabbi/Teacher to have to opportunity to teach in the synagogue. The bible says that many hearing were “astonished or amazed”

• were astonished - ἐκπλήσσομαι: to be so amazed as to be practically overwhelmed (Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament: Based on semantic domains). Literally it means – to be beside oneself.

o It is in the imperfect verb tense — The verb tense where the writer portrays an action in process or a state of being that is occurring in the past with no assessment of the action’s completion. In other words, as Jesus spoke they became more beside themselves, more amazed, more astonished.