Writers explore it.  Psychologists study it.  Prosecutors lean on it.  And preachers encourage it.  We all acknowledge it is real.  While the consensus of mental health professionals is that it is a form of compulsive behavior, surely the ‘urge to confess’ is much more than that. 

Unless you are a nihilist, you must acknowledge that guilt and shame are real, that they are more than cultural conditioning.  After all, guilt is universally observed and universally experienced.  And we all seem to intuitively know that confession is the first step in unloading its crippling burden. 

The Biblical word we translate ‘confession’ literally means to ‘agree with.’  Relief from guilt begins with ‘agreement’ that we have done what is wrong or failed to do what is right.  And that in doing or failing to do, we have wronged both God and man and must seek forgiveness.   But forgiveness requires more than a sinner’s agreement that he has sinned. More than mere repentance.  For if God is unwilling to forgive, our confession provides no relief from our crushing guilt or shame.  In fact, it only aggravates it.

While there is some mild release from getting things off our chest.  Such confession is cold comfort in the face of all the heavy temporal and eternal consequences each sin unleashes.  Another confession is needed.  A confession of faith.  A confession that rests completely upon the person and work of Christ as the only and sufficient savior of sinners. That is the urge to confess that makes the difference and unties the knots our sin has securely fastened.

The Bible tells us that if we “confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead we will be saved.”   But this confession is more than “magic words.”  It is no mere orthodox mantra conjuring a spiritual forcefield to shelter us from the righteous judgement of a Holy God.  Faithful confession flows from a Spirit-enabled ability to embrace the person and work of Jesus Christ as he is freely offered to us in the gospel.  Not as we imagine or desire that he might be.

The ‘Elephant in the room’ of Mark’s gospel is the question, “Who is Jesus?”  Is he a mere prophet? A reincarnation of John the Baptist?  A returning Elijah?  Or a new Moses?  Or is he a demon-possessed, anti-establishment rabble-rouser?  A political rebel?  Just who is he?  Until halfway through the gospel, only demons seem to know. 

The most religious of men are insensible.  The crowds more and more inflamed.  While the disciples are becoming dull and duller.  But apart from the effective working of the Holy Spirit, we are all equally incapable of understanding the person and work of Jesus, freely offered to us.

In Mark 8, following the progressive healing of a blind man, Jesus leads his spiritually blinded disciples to Caesarea Philippi and to spiritual clarity.  He asks.

And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” –Mark 8:27-30

The language of Jesus’ second question is emphatic and direct.  “But you, who am I to you?”   The disciples are beginning to understand, but like the blind man, they need a further revealing touch from their Master to understand fully who he is and who he is calling them to be.  How do you answer Jesus’ question?  For his question is no less for us than for the crowds of Caesarea Philippi.  Is he the Jesus of our imagination or our felt need?  Or is he the Jesus freely offered to us in the gospel?

Join us as we examine Mark 8:27-9:1 and consider what it means to us and for us that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Chronic headaches? Tired, bloodshot eyes?  Increasing light-sensitivity?  Floaters?  Hazy vision?  Difficulty reading or focusing? It’s time for a comprehensive eye exam.  Yes, there will be the traditional eye charts to measure visual acuity and assess near or farsightedness.  Flashing lights, right and left, test peripheral vision and the reaction of your pupils.  While various “viewfinders” are used to assess color blindness and depth perception.

But there is much more.  Retinal cameras and slit lamp biomicroscopes allow your optometrist to evaluate the basic structural and functional integrity of your eyes.  The tonometer, which we call the “puffer,” measures eye pressures to assess for glaucoma.  And for those who need corrective lenses, the phoropter with its multitudinous knobs and lenses allows the optometrist to hone in on a correct prescription while you imagine you are manning the periscope of a submarine.

Routine eye exams are important, because a loss of vision complicates common activities and creates significant challenges in doing the things that are important to us.  Worsening vision is frustrating and often a source of significant grief.  But for many, treatment may reverse or mitigate vision loss.  While for others, advancing technologies offer new means of help.

But what if our vision loss is spiritual?  Loss of our physical sense of sight is worrisome, but how many of us are concerned about the condition of our spiritual vision?  Are we as anxious about hardening hearts, struggling faith, or spiritual apathy as we are about weakening eyesight?  How careful are we to examine the condition of our souls, of our faith, of our growth or regression in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ?  And if our spiritual vision is failing, what can be done?

In Mark 8 Jesus concludes his Galilean ministry and sets his face to go to Jerusalem, to betrayal, to rejection, to the cross, to death, and to resurrection.   As Mark’s narrative progresses Jesus’ popularity has increased, but his disciple’s faith has increasingly struggled.  Sandwiched between the healings of a deaf man and a blind man, in the final of the “boat narratives,” Jesus confronts the disciples with their spiritual blindness and deafness in a series of pointed rhetorical questions. 

Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? …Do you not yet understand? – Mark 8:17-18

As the boat moors at Bethsaida, Jesus puts an exclamation point on his rebuke, as he progressively heals a blind man.  In one of the most unusual healings in the gospels, Jesus shows his disciples and us a gracious picture of the importance of examining ourselves for spiritual blindness and seeking treatment from Christ alone.

Join us as we examine Mark 8:22-26 and consider Jesus’ unusual healing of the blind man and what it teaches us about our concern for spiritual growth. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Happy Wife, Happy Life!  Isn’t that what they say?  Sounds straightforward, right?  But is it?  Of course, we all want to love our wives as Christ loves the church.  But that comes at the expense of some of our notable tendencies.  It means we must realize that conversation requires both our mental and verbal participation.  It means we must stop actually “thinking about nothing.” Or as one friend called it, “thinking about the empty box.”  And as one dear saint once chided, “A good husband keeps his wife’s knives sharp!”  I thought it was a metaphor.  But no, she meant the kitchen knives.

And it is no small feat to keep a good, sharp edge on a knife.  Every stroke has a dulling effect.  Both sharp knives and sharp lives require vigilance, intentionality, and skill.  As knives and lives age, both feel the effects of a growing dullness.  The mental and physical edge, effortless in our youth, requires concerted effort as we age.   We join a gym, we get serious about eating the right things, we work crossword and sudoku puzzles, we develop rituals and build memory palaces to help us recall things that should be familiar and important.

What is true of our knives and our lives is no less true of our faith.  Of course, we understand that faith is a gift.  The effectual calling of the Holy Spirit imparts faith to men incapable of grasping spiritual truths or coming to faith through unaided reason or experience.  And yet the Bible speaks often of a growing faith. And warns us against allowing our faith to become dull.  

While reason and experience can never produce faith, they are important channels for the means of grace used by the Holy Spirit to give and grow our faith.  Which is why we are exhorted to be disciples – followers who are disciplined in the “diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption.”  We are told that faith comes by hearing the word of Christ.  That we are to study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth.  We are counseled in anxiety to go to the Lord in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving.  Faith is given and grown as a gift, but are called and enabled to be active receivers, guarding, contending for, and growing in our faith.

Is your faith dull?  Have the strokes of life taken the edge off?  Have you become complacent, callous, enfeebled in your faith?  Without spiritual care, without intentionality, without spiritual discipline our faith can become dull.   As the Gospel of Mark unfolds, Jesus wraps up his Galilean ministry and prepares to move toward Jerusalem and the cross.  At the same time the faith of the disciples grows increasingly dull.  The men who spent three years with Jesus, who heard with their ears, saw with their eyes, and touched with their hands the incarnate God struggled with spiritual dullness.  If this was true for them, how much more of a danger is it for us?

Join us as we examine Mark 8:1-21 and consider the dullness of the disciples’ response to Jesus’ warning to be vigilant against the chilling effects of religious formalism and worldliness.  But the warning was not for the Twelve alone.  For we too are warned about the causes, consequences, and cure for a dull faith.

We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Southerners are lousy at isolation.  Untrained in this discipline by a lack of inclement winter weather, we tear through our stock of supplies by noon on day one.  We love to prep for disaster, but have little patience to live within the parameters of our preparations.   We cancel everything in order to stay home, then stand all day with our noses pressed to the glass, itching to get out to see “what’s going on.”    Like school children after the first two weeks of summer vacation, we become quickly bored.

As long as our internet does not go down and take with it our Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, we may actually make it.   Surrounded by bread, milk and our snack trove, we survive our brief isolation by binge-watching.   For my wife and I, our nightly habit is British crime drama.  We especially like the adaptations of Ann Cleeves’ crime novels.   Her stories are complex.   The obvious culprits are never the perpetrators.   Only slowly does the truth come into focus as the “DCI” sifts through seemingly endless strands of contradictory evidence.   Cleeves’ stories give an appreciation for the complexity of criminal investigation, warning of the dangers of precipitous judgment.   To get to the truth, we cannot take a cursory look.

Perhaps we love fictional crime drama because it satisfies our need to see justice done, without complicating it with the complexities of our own sin.   In sixty minutes, confusion gives way to clarity and good triumphs over evil no matter what means it uses to get there.   But our lives are not so tidy.  In our real story, we are the fugitives who face a justice none of us can bear.   Yet the scales of God’s justice do not weigh the arguments for and against our guilt, but rather God’s justice and His mercy.

It is remarkable how much legal imagery the Bible uses to picture our condition.  The Old Testament anticipates a redeemer who will set prisoners free.  In the New Testament, both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are pictured as advocates, God the Father is often likened to a judge, redemption depends upon a declaration of judicial righteousness and our condemnation is set aside in Christ.  

History’s greatest courtroom drama is recorded in the Bible in Luke 22 and 23.  Following an irregular grand jury indictment, Jesus is brought before the criminal court on charges trumped up religious rivals.  In Pontius Pilate’s courtroom we see the greatest miscarriage of justice in human history.  Everyone is guilty – the judge, the prosecutors, the jury – everyone that is except the one on trial.  He alone is innocent.  Evidence is ignored and the judge is captive public opinion and his own corrupt history.  Despite his declarations of Jesus’ innocence, Pontius Pilate condemns him to death and compounds injustice by releasing a man who is truly guilty of all the charges leveled against Jesus.

As spectators, we recoil at this apparent travesty of justice.  But we must look more deeply.   No cursory examination of Jesus’ trial reveals the extent of the guilty.   It is easy to spot the guilt of the Sanhedrin, of the crowds, of Judas, of Pilate, and of Barabbas.  But the investigation must go deeper.  For we are not just spectators of this drama.  Jesus is not a hapless victim of human injustice, but a willing sacrifice to divine justice – justice that is rightly ours to bear.   It is not just Barabbas’ cross that Jesus bore, but ours.   God is just – His justice cannot ignore our crimes or allow them to go unpunished – but in His mercy He is the justifier of those who have faith in Christ.  Because of this we can have peace with God and with one another.  This my friend is good news.

Join us this Lord’s Day as we examine Luke 22 and 23 and consider Christ’s innocence and condemnation for our guilt and pardon.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

“Thithors!”  That word was my nemesis.  Every ‘s’ seemed an irresistible command for my tongue to leave its ‘tongue-tip-up position’ and slide out between my teeth.  My frontal lisp transformed ‘s’ words to ‘th’ words.  But ‘scissors’ was paradigmatic of my struggle.  Every Tuesday, I would leave Mrs. Cost’s first-grade classroom to sit at a tiny desk in the hallway with a speech therapist who helped untie my tongue.  I don’t remember all the exercises, but I remember when “thithors” became “scissors.”

While there are a variety of lisps common in the childhood of English-speaking children, they are all labelled as ‘speech impediments.’  The word ‘impediment’ is apt.  With no stigma attached, ‘impediment’ expresses the challenges unclear speech introduces into life.  Nothing is more broken in a fallen world than our communication.  And there are lots of impediments to it.  Impediments to expression.  And impediments to understanding. 

And our fallenness impedes nothing more thoroughly than a clear understanding of God’s nature and our own significance.  In his explanation of the Christian faith, John Calvin writes.

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves… Man never attains a true self-knowledge until he has contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.”   –Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin

But how can we know what kind of God exists?  One preacher rightly noted, “if we look at God from the middle of our circumstances, we will get a distorted view of God.”  Indeed, unless he reveals himself to us, our experience alone will always form a dreadful, threatening, apathetic, capricious view of Him.  But He overcomes the impediment of our darkened understanding by revealing himself in his Word and through his Son.   The Bible notes.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.  –Hebrews 1:1-3

In Mark 7:31-37 we encounter a man with a remarkable speech impediment.  He could not hear or speak clearly.  Perhaps he had suffered a childhood sickness that imprisoned him in uncommunicable silence.  As Jesus travels through the area that once begged him to leave out of fear, now the people flock to him and beg him to lay his hands on this man for good. 

At first glance, Jesus’ approach to healing the man seems surprisingly ritualistic and conventional.  Jesus had just healed a demon possessed girl remotely without a word.  But here he puts his fingers in the deaf man’s ears, spits and touches the man’s muddled tongue, makes a point of looking up to heaven and sighing, and then commands his ears to “Be opened!”  Why the drama?  Why the therapeutic actions when only his silent will is necessary?

But a careful look at the story shows us its overwhelming concern for clear communication.  Clarity about God’s grace.  Clarity about the nature of His redeeming and restoring work in our lives.  Clarity about what kind of God He is.  And how we may know Him.  In this short, compelling account, God sweeps away impediments and offers the good news of the Kingdom to all types of men and to this particular man.  And we see Jesus, clearly offered as the only Savior for all men.

Join us as we examine Mark 7:31-37 and consider Jesus, clearly offered to broken, isolated men as the only sufficient Savior.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Man’s best friend.  Loving and loyal.  Adoring and attentive.  Empathetic, protective, and supportive.  And often able to sense remarkable internal, medical dangers in their masters.   Who does not love dogs?  Sure, there are cat people, but dogs symbolize and exemplify unconditional love.  And they are affectionate.  A sign I saw recently offered a warning to visitors, “Beware of dog, he can’t hold his licker!”

Yet despite our love of canine-kind, our vernacular expressions do not esteem them so highly.  We speak of the viciousness of a “dog-eat-dog” world.  We say that ruined things have “gone to the dogs.”  Wretched illness is characterized as being “sick as a dog.” And of course, it is sometimes best to “let sleeping dogs lie.”  Even the Bible often speaks of dogs in a less than favorable light.  For example, Proverbs 26:11 and Proverbs 26:17 use some unsavory characteristics of dogs to illustrate the meddler. And when I was a boy, a fashionable epithet to declare someone unattractive was to call them “a dog.”

Few expressions involving dogs are positive.  And it is certainly not considered praise to be compared to one.  Which is what makes Jesus’ words in Mark 7:24-30 so shocking for their apparent offensiveness.   No reader of the Gospels can miss that Jesus’ words were often provocative, authoritative, and incisive; especially confrontational and explosive when it comes to religious hypocrites.  But Jesus’ response to a Gentile woman’s request for the exorcism of her “little daughter” takes us aback.

Hardly in sync with the racial sympathies of the Pharisees, Jesus seems to resort to them here.  The descendants of Abraham were supposed to be a blessing to the nations.  A kingdom of priests, a light to the Gentiles.  Instead, they had become a racist, self-conceited people who referred to all non-Jews as “dogs.”  And dogs in the ancient world were mostly feral, vicious, scavengers who threatened people, livestock, and property.  Much as we might view coyotes today.

For the only time in the gospels, Jesus here departs the historic bounds of Israel.  And in his upcoming ministry, he is more and more in Gentile areas as sets his face toward Jerusalem and the cross.  Tyre and Sidon, in modern Lebanon, were considered Israel’s bitterest enemies.  The homeland of Jezebel was filled with idolatry and paganism.  Jews considered the Gentiles of Tyre and Sidon as the worst of the worst.  ‘Dogs’ in the worst senses of the word.

We don’t know exactly why Jesus is there.  We only know he sought privacy.  Whether he was sheltering from the coming storm with the religious leaders or simply seeking a respite from the demands of ministry to have private time with his disciples before moving toward his passion, he sought to be in cognito.  Yet, his fame has preceded him, even in Syrophonecia.  And so, a desperate mother seeks him out. 

But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 

This scenario is a familiar one.  And until now, every desperate request of Jesus is met with remarkable compassion and sensitivity, even when the disciples beg him to send petitioners away.  So, we are unprepared for Jesus’ response.

And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Not only does Jesus appear to refuse compassion to a demon possessed child, but he offers offense to her mother.  His comments even seem tinged with racism.  And so we ask, “What is going on here? Who is this?”  But a closer examination of Jesus’ exchange forces us to rethink our cursory offense at Jesus’ language and see that he is at once demonstrating for us the remarkable, far-reaching grace of God and the dogged character of the faith he gives us.

Dull disciples need to learn the lessons that the “great faith” of this ‘Gentile dog’ teach.  Jesus takes them on retreat to prepare them for the coming storm.  And the dogged faith of a desperate mother does just that. 

Join us as we examine Mark 7:24-30 and consider hallmarks of a dogged, tenacious, persevering saving faith.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.