Sermon Tone Analysis

Financial Report:

There are always two ways to respond.

Thank you for responding so supportively.

Prayer Time

9:30am on the Patio

Women’s Book Club

First meeting September 29 Registration is free — Receive weekly email — Reading “In His Image” Jen Wilkins — Purchase Book on Amazon

Missions Update: Lucas and Katy Matthews

I led two summer missions to San Diego - one week each in May and June.

We taught our students how to share their faith, walk in the Spirit, grow in their faith through the Word and Prayer, and more.

Each day we had a combination of training/development and time sharing our faith on the beach in San Diego.

11 people indicated decisions to trust Christ as our students shared the gospel on the beach with vacationers.

6 of those 11 were from other countries like South Korea, Canada, Ireland, and Argentina.

The church can be praying for those people - that they would grow in their faith and get connected to other Christians and a church.As a team we just had a couple days of staff planning.

We’re gearing up for Fall launch at Sac State and ARC.

We are also hoping to get movements started at Sierra College, William Jessup, and Yuba College.

If anyone from the church is interested in getting involved, we’d love help finding student leaders on those campuses.

We’ll be visiting Sierra College in the next couple weeks to hopefully find some students so I can pass on that info once we solidify our schedule.

The church can be praying that God would lead us to the right students who want to see their campus impacted by the gospel!Personally, Katy is recovering from a foot injury that happened about a year ago.

She’s been in physical therapy for the past year and is doing a lot better but isn’t quite at 100%.

You can be praying for her health, especially as I go back to campus and won’t be able to help out as much with Ellie during the day.

Ellie is 15 months old and walking.

She is a joy and a handful!

Here’s a recent picture of us as well.

September Sermon Series DNA

Beginning September 9

DisciplesPath beginning in September

Beginning September 9 or sooner in your Gospel Fellowship

Introduction: Epic Stories in the Bible

We’ve talked about Courage from David and Goliath, Redemption from the story of the Exodus.

Today we’re going to look at a theme that was a part of the last two weeks, but is made a bigger emphasis of in our story today.

What the Problem is; our contemporary cultural context: Here is what we face

We live in a society that knows and by in large, likes Jesus

The majority do not reject the existence of Jesus

The majority have an appreciation and respect for the way Jesus treated other people

The majority liked Jesus teaching

But not everyone likes the idea of Jesus being one with Authority

Why?

Because something inside of humans rejects the very concept of authority

We would prefer a linear equality where no one is above anyone else

And in some cases, it works fairly well… in others a total disaster

Kids do you struggle to listen and submit to parents, and teachers, and the teenagers that work at the public pool and are like, “No diving, flipping, running...”

Grownups you know who you are, you roll your eyes at the email the supervisor sent or something...

So what we have the tendency to do is take our idea of authority and lay it over the top of the Bible and read this story about Jesus having authority and almost twitch...

What the Bible says; the original readers’ cultural context: Here’s what we must do

This is not a new problem.

All of humanity has always struggled with the concept of the authority of the God of the Bible

Since we’re not going through the book of Mark in sequence I want to make a few comments about the section we’re delving in to.

Mark (who most scholars believe) is retelling the story of Jesus as told by the Apostle Peter.

Mark is an action-packed, explosive account of the life of Jesus told primarily through his works.

The broader context of is that Jesus is peeling away the authority of the Jewish religious leaders through five interactions beginning with the one we’re looking at today.

This points back to and connects with many of the OT prophesies found in the major prophets of Isaiah and Jeremiah that God would remove Israel’s shepherds and become the Shepherd himself.

And that the Chief Shepherd would then reassign those duties to trusted under-shepherds who would serve the people of God.

So we’re going to zoom in and look at this first interaction with those religious leaders, but we’re not going to focus solely on the meaning of that conflict.

Instead, I want us to zoom in even further to see this story within a story.

The ministry of Jesus launched in the city of Capernaum where he taught in the Jewish Synagogue, the people were amazed at the authority behind his teaching.

During that gathering there was a demon-possessed man in the crowd.

After hearing Jesus teach, the demon inside this guy couldn’t resist exposing Jesus to be the Messiah.

Jesus tells him to keep his mouth shut, then he casts the demon out of the man and everyone is freaking out.

Jesus quickly gets out of there, heals Peter’s mother-in-law at her house, and then the entire hospital and insane asylum shows up at Peter’s door.

Jesus heals many of them, casts out demons, goes to bed and wakes up the next morning goes up in isolation to pray and after a few hours the disciples come up to the mountain are like, “Jesus, everyone is looking for you.

You’re a rock star!”

Jesus resists the crowds and says, “Let’s go to a different city, so I can preach.

That’s why I came.”

So they go all throughout Galilee preaching, and healing people, and casting out more demons and then the scene in Galilee looks virtually the same as it did in Capernaum.

People just want a show.

So Jesus goes back to Capernaum.

He’s at home for a couple of days and word got out

The mob shows up at the door of his or maybe Peter’s house

So he preaches the Word to them

While he’s preaching… they hear people on the roof and then they hear the roof getting chipped into and then breaking open… the four friends begin lowering their paralyzed friend into the house...

House Construction

If you’re a visual learner like myself, I am just mesmerized by this picture.

Typical Palestinian homes were simple.

There was a larger room and maybe another small room or two.

But they made use out of the roof of their homes.

Think of it like a patio.

So there were staircases that led from the ground to the roof.

The roof were fairly basic as well.

They had beams that ran across the front to back covered by palm branches and then a mixture of mud and clay served as a bond/tile.

So this place is jam-packed with three types of people.

There are the learners, (who were amazed at the authority of Jesus and want to hear the word) the thrill-seekers, (who are really only there because they want to see the magic show) and critics (who heard Jesus the last time and feel threatened by his authoritative teaching and that he can back it up with some incredible miracles).

These four guys somehow convince their crippled friend that if they could go and see this new healer that they believed he would be healed of being paralyzed.

What is interesting about this story is that a paralytic has friends.

He not only has friends; he has four absolutely devoted friends.

They love this guy.

It’s possible he was not born paralyzed, had he been born paralyzed he may not have had any friends.

In Jewish custom being born with a deformity of almost any kind placed you outside of the community which made it nearly impossible to build relationships outside of your own family.

So they rushed their friend to presumably Simon Peter’s home, but when they arrived it was impossible for them to get him to Jesus.

So their plan B was to somehow lift up their friend (have you ever tried to carry 150 lbs of 'dead' weight?) to the roof, but imagine this, they start tearing the roof apart!

From what we can tell, this house didn't belong to any of these guys.

Who gave these the permission to do this then?

For these guys, this was a now or never situation.

"We can worry about fixing the roof later.

We can worry about paying the owner back later.

Right now, Jesus the healer is within our midst and we don't know that we'll have this opportunity ever again, money is not an issue.

Convenience is not an issue.

It doesn't matter what people think of us, or how uncomfortable this is, or how bad this looks, we are not leaving until Jesus heals our friend."

Just imagine...

Imagine being in the middle of a worship gathering and hearing rustling on the roof, small distraction, but then the roof starts coming off.