Landon Coleman
Immanuel Sermon Audio
Merry Christmas: Jesus Is Born (Mark)
If you have a Bible, I will invite you to open to the Gospel of Mark chapter 1. Mark chapter 1, there's an outline in the bulletin where you can follow along this morning. I'll remind you that we are on holiday schedule this morning for this one more week. We'll be back to normal schedule the next two weeks, and then we'll be back to holiday schedule the last two Sundays of the year. And so we don't have any nursery this morning, that means we have all the kids in with us. And we're glad that they're here. We're glad that these parents have brought their kids to church. We anticipate that they'll make some noise and just consider it ambiance type noise for a Christmas series as we're literally celebrating the birth of a baby, the God-man. We're glad to have the children in with us this morning. This is week two. In a series we've titled Merry Christmas. We're spending one Sunday in each of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This morning we're in the Gospel according to Mark. And then we'll spend one Sunday in Philippians and one Sunday in Hebrews. In each week, we're just trying to think about the miracle of the incarnation, and we want to ask and answer the questions. Who is Jesus? What are the Gospels telling us about His person, His identity, His nature? Who is He? And why did He come? Why was He born? Why was He born as a baby? Why did He live as a man? Why did He die on a cross? Who is Jesus and what was His purpose in coming to the earth? So I'm going to have you read with me. Mark chapter 1 beginning in verse 1, and we're going to read all the way to verse 15. And then we'll pray and ask the Lord to bless the reading of His Word. Mark chapter 1 verse 1, the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, "Behold, I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make His path straight." John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to Him and were being baptized by Him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, wore a leather belt around his waist, he ate locust and wild honey. He preached, saying, "After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. When he came up out of the water immediately, he saw the heavens being torn open in the spirit descending on him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven, "You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased." The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan and he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God insane. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel. For ever oh Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. And this morning our prayer is an echo of the men who came to Philip and Andrew and they asked that they might see Jesus. We pray that you would help us to see Jesus this morning. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Let me make a few comments on the front end about the gospel of Mark. I think some of these things will help us as we try to navigate these opening 15 verses. Matthew, Mark and Luke together are known as the synoptic gospels. That word synoptic means they see it together, together they see. So Matthew, Mark and Luke, the synoptic gospels, they tell the story of Jesus in largely the same way. They follow the same basic chronology of Jesus' life. They tend to include the same periods of his life at times their word for word identical. So what scholars suggest to us is that Mark probably wrote first and then Matthew independently and Luke independently took Mark, took parts that they wanted to use and took some out and added some in and did a little bit of editing. And then we have Matthew, Mark and Luke, the synoptic gospels. Now some of you noticed that as we read Mark chapter 1, the verses we read had absolutely nothing to do with the Christmas story. Mark is the only gospel author who does not include a version of the Christmas story. He just leaves it out. He jumps right in to the action. Matthew, we saw last week, tells us the Christmas story from the perspective of Joseph and Luke we'll see next week, tells the Christmas story from the perspective of Mary. When we get to John, we'll read the Christmas story from a heavenly perspective, a cosmic perspective from a Trinitarian perspective. Mark leaves it out completely which leaves you asking the question in a series titled "Mary Christmas, Jesus is born, why are we making a pit stop in the gospel according to Mark when he just leap frogs over that part of the story entirely?" And it's a good question. Here's the answer to your question. Why are we looking at Mark in a Christmas series when Mark doesn't even tell the Christmas story? Here's the answer. It's the dog that didn't bark. The dog that didn't bark. 1892, a man named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote one of many volumes in a series of books, volumes of books that followed the adventures of a man named Sherlock Holmes. In 1892, he wrote a book titled "The Adventure of Silver Blaze." And Holmes is trying to crack the case. Silver Blaze is a racehorse and he's gone missing and he can't find him and he's looking and he's sleuthing and he's doing all the Sherlock Holmes type things. And he realizes in the end that the case can be cracked, the case can be solved because on the night when Silver Blaze went missing, the guard dog didn't bark. The guard dog knew the person who came to take Silver Blaze and it wasn't a concrete piece of evidence that helped him solve the case and figure out the meaning, but it was something that didn't happen that helped him solve the case. Likewise, in the Gospel of Mark, when we're reading about the life of Jesus and when Mark intentionally jumps right into the action and he leaps over something as important as the birth of Jesus, the miracle of the incarnation, which I said last week and I've said to you many times, is the greatest miracle in all of the Bible. God becoming man without giving up his godness, his deity. Mark just jumps over that and he jumps right into the action. It's the dog that didn't bark. He's leaving out something that seems so obvious and so important and so fundamental to the story to tell you something else that you need to hear and to emphasize something else that you need to hear. Yes, Jesus was born. Yes, we celebrate his birth at Christmas, but why was he born and who is he? Those are the questions that Mark is aiming to answer in Mark chapter 1. Mark is a Gospel of Action. We've talked about this already. Mark over and over and over again, over 40 times he uses the word, the adverb immediately. That's how Mark tells a story. It's kind of like talking to an eight-year-old boy and then this and then this and then this and then this and then this and immediately they did this and then they did this and he doesn't stop very long in any of these stories. The action just keeps moving all the way through the Gospel immediately, immediately, immediately. We see it even in our text this morning. Now, one piece of housekeeping, this will just save us some time in a minute and maybe it'll clear something up from some of you who pay attention to details. The opening quotation in Mark 1 verse 2 and 3, "It is a combination of Old Testament quotes pulled from Exodus 23 and Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40." And here's why I point that out to you. Some of you will read carefully and you'll see that verse 2 and 3 have a footnote. And if you follow that footnote in many translations down at the bottom, it will send you to the Old Testament book of Malachi. And yet you read up above in Mark 1, 2 that Mark says this is written in Isaiah. And I'm simply telling you this is not a citation error. This is not a bibliographic mistake. What Mark has actually done is he's taken three Old Testament texts and he's mashed them together. One from Exodus, one from Isaiah and one the longest from Malachi. And so many times the footnote just sends you to one place and you say, "Well, this looks confusing. This looks like a mistake. This looks like an error." It's none of those things. In fact, we saw the apostle Paul do something very similar in Romans chapter 3, beginning in about verse 10 and 11. He just pulls Old Testament verse, phrase, wording, and he just pays them together one right after another in one long Old Testament quotation. Mark has done the same thing here in chapter 1. So let me give you the big idea of this text. Very simple. Jesus is the son of God and he was born to preach good news. Who is he and why was he born? What was he doing here? Well, he's the son of God and he was born to proclaim good news. That's the word gospel, good news. I've told you before about my 11th and 12th grade year in high school, I had an English teacher both years named Deney Davis. And I think about Ms. Davis and her English classes that I had in high school. I think I have an endless supply of illustrations from her class. She was a wonderful teacher. She was a good teacher. She actually taught us how to think through and read and diagram sentences and all the things you learn in English. One of the things she did for two years, 11th and 12th grade, is every Friday we had a vocabulary test. 20 vocabulary words. These were words you would not use in everyday conversation. She was trying to expand our vocabulary beyond our sort of simpleton high school language. And she would give us these 20 words. She would give us a list on Monday so you could start studying on Monday. You could go through the list. You could look them up. You could learn the definitions. And on Friday she would hand out a sheet and there would be the words and you had to write in the definition of the word. Now interesting, at the back of her classroom, there was a shelf of dictionaries. And her rule was that at any point in any class, if you were one of her students, at any point you could get out of your seat, walk to the back of the room, pick up a dictionary. This is before you could just do dictionary.com and Google on your phone. You could walk to the back of the room. You could pick up a dictionary, take it to your seat, and you could use it for whatever you wanted on any test, any assignment, and any vocabulary quiz every Friday. I was amazed as a student, always amazed, at how many people refused to stand up, walk to the back of the room, open the dictionary, and literally copy down the definition of these words on her quizzes. I was amazed that many students wouldn't bother to do that, and I'm sure she was dismayed to grade these vocabulary tests, 50, 60, 30, 20, people who just wouldn't look up the word when the definition was available to them. When I got mostly done with this sermon, I started to look back over it at the outline and the things that I wanted to talk about, and I said to myself, this feels like a Deanie Davis vocabulary test. There's a whole bunch of words in here, titles and names and Greek words and things that we got to sort out, terms that we have to understand. This is a lot like a vocabulary test. The key to understanding Mark I is the vocabulary. We would be fools if we didn't use the rest of Scripture to define these terms, and we would be foolish not to use Matthew and Luke and John to define these terms. That's how reasonable people read the Bible. They use the Bible to interpret the Bible. You bump up against something that maybe is a little bit unclear, and you find another place in Scripture that helps you to understand it. So I'm just telling you at the outset, there's a lot of vocabulary, a lot of terminology, a lot of titles that we're going to talk about this morning. And the vocabulary is defined not by me, not by some theological expert, but the vocabulary is defined by Scripture itself, and so we'll try to make sense of Mark chapter 1 together in that way. What does Mark want us to know about Jesus? I want you to see five truths that Mark wants you to know about the Lord Jesus Christ. Number one, Jesus is the fulfillment of all the Old Testament hopes and promises. All the hopes and all the promises of the Old Testament fulfilled in Jesus. Yes, He fulfills the prophecies, all of those prophecies that point forward to the Messiah. But the things that Jesus fulfills are bigger and broader than just specific prophecies like the one that Jake read from Micah 5-2, that a ruler would be born in Bethlehem. That's a prophecy, a specific prophecy. Jesus fulfilled it, but He fulfilled bigger and broader things than just specific prophecies. Let me give you a few examples. Jesus is the Christ. We talked about this last week. Christ, He's the Messiah. Really in Greek or in Hebrew, Christos or Mashiach mean the anointed one. He's the anointed one. Who was anointed in the Old Testament? Well, the prophets were anointed, that they might speak for God. The priests were anointed, that they might stand before God and offer sacrifices for the people. And the kings were anointed, that they might rule over God's people. Prophet, priest, and king. Jesus is the fulfillment of those three offices. He's the true prophet, He's the great high priest, and He's the king of kings. He's the fulfillment of all of those things. Mark tells us this in verse 1, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus, the Christ. Number 2, consider the ministry of John the Baptist. John shows up immediately. His job is to prepare the way, prepare the way for the Lord's messenger, prepare the way for the Lord's prophet. It's a ministry that was promised in the Old Testament. One of those promises is in the book of Malachi, and Malachi says, interesting, that before the day of the Lord comes, Elijah would show up. You remember Elijah from the Old Testament, out in the desert wearing camels, hair garments and a belt of leather and calling people to repentance? What do we read about John the Baptist here? He lives in the desert, and he wears camel hair, and a leather belt is marked just into fashion. Is he just trying to give you the latest Christmas? Maybe you should think about this for stocking stuffers. No, he's trying to draw you back. The vocabulary is important. He's saying to you, this is the fulfillment of the promise of Elijah. It's John the Baptist, and he's preparing the way for Jesus. Consider Jesus identifying with sinners. Jesus is standing in the place of sinners in the story that we just read. John is baptizing. He's out in the Jordan River. People are coming to him. Why are they coming to him? What did Mark tell us? He's preaching a message of repentance, and they're coming to confess their sins and to be forgiven of their sins and to prepare their hearts for the messenger of the Lord who was on his way. Jesus goes out to this man John, and he wants to be baptized. Why were the people being baptized? They were confessing their sins. And out into the middle of the river walks the sinless, spotless, perfect Lamb of God. Why is he standing in that river? He has no sins to confess, but he is standing in the place of sinners. And we'll see later in this sermon when we work our way to the end of Mark's gospel that it's not the last time that he would stand in the place of sinners. He's identifying with sinners. This is what the Lamb did in the sacrificial system. The Lamb stood in for the sinner, and the Lamb died as a substitute so that the sinner, confessing his sins, could live. Think about Jesus' obeying when tested. He goes out into the wilderness. Mark gives you a very short account of Jesus being tempted by the devil. He's being tempted by Satan. He's being tested by God. You can read the Old Testament as one long story of failure, failure and disobedience. My personal Bible reading plan right now has me in the book of Jeremiah. We did a sermon series on Jeremiah not that long ago. Preachers aren't supposed to say this. I'm going to be honest with you. I'm ready to get out of the book of Jeremiah because it's the same thing for over 50 chapters. God was gracious to you, and you squandered it away, and you chased idols over and over and over for 50 chapters He recounts their failure, their disobedience. Here's Jesus tested by the Father, tempted by the devil and obedient. He passes the test. Last, Jesus is the true Israel. Many things we could say here. I'll just point out to you that in the Old Testament Israel spent time in the wilderness 40 years, and then they crossed the Jordan as they came into the Promised Land. Jesus in this story passes through the very same river, the Jordan River, and He spends 40 days in the wilderness. And all of those details in the name of the river and the time and the numbers and all of those things, they're not incidental. They're not coincidental. They're important. And Mark is saying to you that just as Israel passed through the Jordan and spent time in the wilderness, Jesus did the same. He's the true Israel, the fulfillment. Secondly, and this is a big one, Jesus is the Son of God. He's the Son of God. Mark chapter 1 verse 1, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." And verse 11 in chapter 1, "A voice came from heaven, 'You are my beloved Son.'" You understand this is the Father speaking, the Father speaking to the Son. You are my beloved Son with you, I am well pleased. Look at verse 13, "He was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan." Now Mark doesn't tell us the temptation details. But Mark's not the only gospel we have, is it? That was the very first temptation. If you are the Son of God, look at the stones and tell them to become bread. What did the voice say from heaven when Jesus was baptized? You are my Son. And what does Satan start with? If you're really, did God really say? If you're the Son of God, look at these stones and turn them into bread. What was the second temptation? If you are the Son of God, throw yourself off this temple. And he quotes scripture and he says, "The angels will bear you up lest you strike your foot upon a stone." He misquotes scripture. If you are the Son of God, Jesus is the Son of God. There's no question about that. The voice from heaven spoke clearly. This is my beloved Son and I'm pleased with him. Now what you need to understand and I need to understand is that this title Son of God, it doesn't mean that Jesus is less than the Father, like 1A and 1B. It doesn't mean that Jesus had a beginning, right? There was a moment in space-time history where the miracle of the incarnation took place. But the Son of God has existed as the second person of the Trinity from eternity passed. When we call Jesus the Son of God, we are saying that he is equal to God. He is truly God. So let me give you a few examples of what we're trying to make sense of here. In the year 532, the emperor of Byzantine, the Byzantine emperor, Justinian the Great, he was living in Constantinople and he said, "We need a cathedral and it needs to be bigger and better than anything in the world." And so he built this church. He named it the church of God's holy wisdom. We call it the Hagia Sophia, holy wisdom, Hagia Sophia. They built it. This blows my mind. They tested it in five years, 532 to 537, it was completed, five years of construction. For a thousand years, for a millennia, this was the biggest building on the planet. Visitors from other countries came to Constantinople and they walked in this church and they said they felt like they were instantly and immediately transported to heaven. It literally took their breath away to walk into this building and see what it had been built, 532. Now it stood as a church for almost a thousand years and in the mid-1400s, when Muslim conquerors took the city of Constantinople, they decided not to tear this building down. It was too great. They said, "We're going to leave it, but we can't leave it as a church. We're going to turn it into a mosque." And so in converting this church, this cathedral into a mosque, they said, "We have to take out everything that makes it look like a church. Take the bells down. No more church bells. Take the crosses down. Take the altar out. Take the baptistry out, all of those things removed. All over the interior of this cathedral, there were paintings and mosaics, beautiful art, all of Christian scenes and biblical scenes, and rather than rip it down, they just plastered over all of it. They just covered it all up. We don't want to see any of those things. Covered them all up. Added the four minarets, the four skinny towers on each corner, minarets are used alongside a mosque for the call to prayer. So originally those were not there. They added those minarets. And inside of every mosque written on the walls is what Muslims call the Shahadah. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. And so they wrote that on the walls, on the inside of this former cathedral turned mosque. And then like they did many, many times when they converted a cathedral into a mosque, they actually added something to the Shahadah. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. They added another phrase. This is what they added. He does not have a son. There is no God but Allah, Muhammad is his prophet, and he Allah does not have a son. Now why did they add that? It's because when they talked with these Christians, they understood that the Christians believed that Jesus was the son of God. And Muslims believe in Jesus, they believe he was a prophet, lowercase p, prophet. One more, not equal to Allah, not truly divine in any sense, not God. And they went to great pains in converting this cathedral into a mosque to say, look we believe there is only one God, Muhammad is his prophet, and we are out on Jesus being the son of God. He does not have a son. They understood that calling Jesus the son of God was a title of divinity. You know who else understood that? The Jews in the gospel of John. Because in John chapter five, the Jews were seeking to kill Jesus because not only was he breaking their Sabbath rules, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal to God. The Jews understood exactly what Jesus was saying when he called God his father and he identified himself as the son of God, they said, you're making yourself equal to God and they didn't believe that he was equal to God. Mark wants you to understand that Jesus is the son of God, he is in fact equal to God. How does Mark begin? Mark chapter one, verse one, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. How does he end? Mark chapter 15, when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, truly this man was the son of God. Mark couldn't make it any planer for us, bookending his gospel with this title, Jesus is the son of God. Number three, we'll be brief with this point, Jesus worked and he works in perfect harmony with the Father and with the Holy Spirit. We'll be brief because we just went through a Wednesday night study titled salvation. One of the things we saw over the course of that Wednesday night study is that our salvation from beginning to end, eternity past to eternity future, is the sovereign work of the triune God, the Father planning it, the Son accomplishing it, the Spirit applying it to our lives. The Holy Spirit and God the Son and God the Father work in perfect concert, in perfect harmony in securing our salvation. We see a glimpse of that here. We see this promise that God the Son would baptize with God the Spirit. We see God the Spirit descending when God the Son has baptized. We hear the Father speaking from heaven. We even see the Spirit launching, literally throwing Jesus, Mark says, into the wilderness to be tempted, Father, Son and Spirit working in perfect unity to save sinners. Number four, very important, Jesus was a man on a mission. He was being born and living on this earth was not aimless. This was not the kind of vacation where you just go and you figure out what you're going to do when you get there. Some of you like to take those kind of trips. We're just going to go. We have no plan. We'll just figure it out as we go. Others of you and you're probably married to each other. Others of you say, no, we need a plan. Where are we going? What are we going to do? How much is it going to cost? What's the goal? What are our objectives? With Jesus in coming to this earth had a plan. He had a mission. He had an objective. Look at Mark chapter 1 verse 14 and 15. After John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel. Show of hands. How many of you like to set a countdown timer on your phone for big days, vacation or holidays? How many of you have a Christmas timer of some sort? Okay? It's easy today. The math is easy. December 1st, you got 24 days, Christmas will be here. We'll get through Christmas and teachers will set a countdown timer for spring break. How long to spring break? You'll make it to spring break. You'll say, how many days to summer vacation? When is the last day of school? A couple of weeks into summer, parents will set a countdown timer for the first day of school. When does school go back? When do we send these kids back? We set countdown timers for things where we're excited and we're anticipating something that's coming. I set a countdown timer on my phone too last year for the day that Emma was going to graduate high school and for the day that she was going to move to college. And it wasn't because I was thrilled that either of those were happening, but it was just to be mindful that that day is coming. How many days left? And I could look at it on my phone. It's a big day. It's a big event. Do you hear what Jesus said? Mark chapter 1 verse 15, the very first recorded words of the Lord Jesus Christ in the gospel of Mark, the time is fulfilled. Now's the time. No more waiting. God's people had waited and waited and waited and his promises and his covenants had been passed down from generation to generation to generation and they had waited and they had waited and they had waited and the first thing Jesus says is now's the time. No more waiting. The time is fulfilled. He was a man on a mission. One of the things you'll find if you read the gospel of Mark is that Jesus had a mission and no one could dissuade him from his mission. No one. And they tried. I'll give you a few examples. Mark chapter 1 verse 38, Jesus has publicly performed some miracles and he's done some teaching and he's healed some folks and the disciples are with him and they wake up in the morning and there's this big crowd and the crowd wants to see Jesus. They are so excited about all the miracles, all the great stuff and they're thinking what could we use this guy for? He is powerful. And the disciples come to Jesus and they say Jesus, good news, yesterday was a raging success. The crowds are looking for you. Let's go. And Jesus says absolutely not. I've come out to preach the good news of the gospel in other towns and I will not be dissuaded from that mission. This is why I've come out. Can I give you another example? Mark chapter 8, this is right on the heels of the transfiguration. And Jesus says to Peter and the disciples that he, the son of man, soon will be betrayed and beaten and crucified and killed. He says that's the plan, guys. One of you is going to betray me, they're going to beat me, they're going to lie about me, they're going to kill me, they're going to put me in the ground. And what does Peter say? Not going to happen, Jesus. We will never let that happen. We have a better plan. We don't like that plan. We don't want that to happen to you. That's not going to happen. And what does Jesus say to Peter? He says, get behind me. You're speaking for the enemy, Peter. You're trying to dissuade me from my mission for the very reason that I came. Peter, you've got to fall in line. I've got a mission to accomplish. What was that mission? We read it as our call to worship. Mark chapter 10, verse 45, "For even the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." He came to ransom us from sin and death and hell, to die our death that we might have eternal life. That was the mission. Did he accomplish it? Well the gospel of John tells you along with the rest of the New Testament that Jesus did in fact accomplish his mission and there's a number of ways that we could connect these dots but I just want to show you one little clue, one little bread crumb trail, one little Sherlock Holmes like detail that will help you see that Jesus accomplished his mission. When you read the gospel according to Mark, you'll find the Greek verb skidzo twice, skidzo. The verb means to tear, to rip into, it's the root of our word skitsafrenic, skitsafrenic is a person whose mind is torn into, that's the root meaning of the word, skidzo. That verb shows up in Mark's gospel exactly two times. Here's the first, Mark 1, 10. He came up out of the water and immediately, there's that word immediately, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open, the heavens torn open. What was Jesus doing when this tear took place? This standing in the place of sinners, the spotless, sinless Lamb of God willingly standing in the place of people who would come and confess their sins. He's identifying with sinners. He's standing in their place and the heavens were torn open. Here's the second occurrence of this verb, Mark chapter 15, verse 38. It's the curtain of the temple was torn into from top to bottom. What was Jesus doing when that curtain was torn into from top to bottom? Well verse 37 said he uttered a loud cry and he breathed his last, you understand he's dying on the cross. He's hanging in the place of sinners, the Son of God hanging in the place of sinners, dying our death. Mark 1, he's standing in the place of sinners and the heavens are torn open. Mark 15, he's hanging in the place of sinners and his curtain is torn into. His mission was to ransom people for God, to restore them to a right relationship with the Father. And Mark is telling you with this little breadcrumb trail that his mission was accomplished. In the baptism, this is my beloved Son, with his dying breath, Father, the Son, says Father into your hands. I commit my spirit." And his mission was accomplished. One last truth to see. Number five, Jesus offers good news for those who will repent and believe. Now word repent literally means to change your mind, to change your mind about God, to change your mind about sin, to change your mind about Jesus, to change your mind about salvation, to agree with God about all of these things, to stop thinking the way you would naturally think and to agree with God to repent. To believe is to accept something is true and is to rely on it, is to cast yourself on it, is to build your life upon it. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel. I understand that Mark 1 doesn't have a Christmas story, but this preaching of Jesus gets down to the heart of Christmas. It's the real issue of Christmas. It's not are your trees up yet. It's not did you put lights on the house. It's not are you buying lots of presents. It's not will you do this or that or go here. It's do you understand who Jesus is? Do you understand why he was born and why he lived and why he died? Understanding those things, will you repent and will you believe? Father, this morning we're grateful for your word, grateful for the gospel according to Mark. Lord, do we trust that what we have in Mark's gospel is exactly what you want us to have? Lord, not having a Christmas story means that there's something important for us to understand. Not just about the fact that Jesus was born, but about who he is and why he came to this earth, why he lived for us, why he died for us. Father, we pray this morning that we would see the truth about Jesus in seeing it. We pray that we would repent and that we would believe. Lord, we pray this morning for those who are here who have never put their faith in the Lord Jesus. They've never changed their mind. They've never agreed with you about salvation. We pray this morning that by the work of your spirit, applying salvation to these lives, to these hearts, that people might repent and they might believe. Lord, in all these things, we're dependent on you. We need you. We rely on you. We look to you. We're powerless without you. Apart from the Lord Jesus, we can do nothing. And so Father, we want to take a moment just to acknowledge our dependence on you and your provision, in your mercy, in your grace, your kindness. Father, be honored as we sing. We do it for your glory and we do it in Jesus' name. Amen.