10. The Realities of Discipleship Mark 6:1-30 p. 927

Remembrance Day  End of WW1 – 11am on 11/11.  One minutes silence  Casualties:  Canada 67,000 dead, 150,000 wounded  Total 16m dead and 20m wounded  WW2: m deaths.

Remembrance Day...  Ernest Hemingway: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime”  Putting an end to war:  Jesus sent his disciples: called for repentance.

1. Blindness of Familiarity  Jesus comes back to his hometown.  Who does his guy think he is?  “They took offense at him” (v 3)  Different responses to Jesus:  In the west: preconceived ideas crowd out the real Jesus  No exposure to the gospel: excitement  Don’t want to stop reading their Bibles.  Don’t let familiarity blind you to Jesus.

2. Blessing of Faithfulness  Jesus sends out the disciples.  Are the disciples ready to be sent out?  They go without bag, money or food (like Exodus 12:11)  A second great deliverance.  The disciples were to go trusting in God.  They were sent in reliance on the Sender.  Returned telling of “all they had done and taught” (v 30)  Miracles are exciting. Teaching requires a response.  REPENTANCE (v 12), Like Jesus’ preaching (1:15)

3. Cost of Discipleship  John the Baptist’s death  Parallels to Jesus’ death:  Arrested for offending rulers  Executed on the demand of a young girl  Herod acted out of fear and pressure  Mark puts the sending of disciples in perspective:  John is stupidly executed for a trivial reason  The cost of discipleship could be our lives

The Task is not Complete  Still need to take the message of Jesus to our world.  Dwight D Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”  Thomas Edison:

The Task is not Complete...  Thomas Edison: “There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. “  Need a change of heart... only Jesus can do that.