Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

If you have your Bibles with you please open them up to Mark 1, Mark 1.

Have you ever had just an all around great day?

Whether it was at work or at home - it was just a day that everything went perfectly.

Maybe you woke up and your kids had already made themselves breakfast and were busying themselves cleaning the house.

If you have had a day like that can you tell me what it was like.

Or you went to work and a major project just came together on time and everything was perfect.

Jesus had just experienced such a day.

He had attended synagogue with His disciples and was asked to be the guest rabbi and deliver the teaching.

During His teaching a man with an unclean spirit had interrupted His teaching and He had delivered him and cast the spirit out.

He’d left the Synagogue and went to Peter’s house where He healed his mother-in-law of a debilitating fever and then, after sunset, had proceeded to heal many from the surrounding town who came to Peter’s home to see Jesus.

It was one of those days after which many of us would just want to rest or, more likely, to bask in the glory of the “beautiful” day that we’d just had recounting stories of it to our friends.

Christ was at a point of crossroads and His disciples thought one direction would be best but His Heavenly Father told Him to go in another direction.

We’re going to see three critical principles in this text that can help guide us in our ministry and personal directions.

The first is Christ’s Communication, then the Disciple’s Distraction and finally Christ’s Colporteur.

That last is actually a noun but I’m taking a bit of license with the language and making it an adjective just for this message.

It means one who distributes religious tracts.

Christ’s Communication

It was early in the morning as Christ rose and left the home of Peter.

He’d been up late into the night healing many who had come to the door of the home where He was staying.

But now in the early morning hours He rises from His rest to seek time alone with His Heavenly Father.

The time would have been between three and six in the morning and the fact that the text tells us it was very early tells us that it was closer to three than to six.

We see several points in this short verse that bear critical lessons for our own prayer life.

The first is that there is prayer must happen, the second is that we need to be purposeful or deliberate about it and the last point is the singular importance of private prayer.

Now all of those might seem to intermingle, and in some ways they do so let me explain starting with the first point that prayer must happen.

Speaking on prayer John Bunyan, the writer of Pilgrim’s Progress said

He who runs from God in the morning will hardly find him at the close of the day; nor will he who begins with the world and the vanities thereof, in the first place, be very capable of walking with God all the day after.

It is he who finds God in his closet that will carry the savor of him into his house, his shop, and his more open conversation.

Echoing this sentiment, the 19th century pastor E.M. Bounds once said

The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees.

He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day.

If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the remainder of the day.

Now, I am not a morning person - just ask my wife.

That’s one reason I am happy to tell you that this text is descriptive not prescriptive.

What I mean by that is that this text is not establishing the standard for prayer for all time - so if you are like me and are not a morning person then have no fear.

You can still have an effective prayer life without rising early in the morning like Christ does here.

We should note here though something that is in the statement I just quoted from Bounds - If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning.

Some of us are more efficient at rolling out of bed and checking our Facebook, Twitter or email feeds than we are at taking the time to commune with our Heavenly Father even if it is only for a few moments to consecrate the day.

I’m not saying you have to get up at three a.m. or spend four hours each morning in prayer - but we should seek Him first thing every morning when we awaken.

But like I said before if you aren’t a morning person there is still hope for you to have an effective prayer life.

There are other texts in Mark that tell us that Christ also spent time in the evenings praying.

In fact the other two key texts where we see Christ praying in Mark both take place at the end of the day.

The first instance in found in Mark 6:45-46 just after Christ has fed the five thousand.

He had just performed one of His greatest miracles producing enough food out of five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand men.

The total number of people with women and children would likely have been closer to 20,000.

And yet just as we see here in our text this morning He dismisses the crowds and then even His disciples to get alone.

He went away up the mountain to pray and He prays until late in the night.

The text says that He prays until the fourth watch of the night - also between 3 and 6 am - and then comes walking on the water toward His disciples.

The other instance that we see Christ laboring in prayer is in the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest.

This time again at night Mark tells us

My point here is that Christ doesn’t seem to have a set time in which He prayed - whether it was morning or evening the important item is that He took the time to pray.

And looking at the instances in which Mark tells us that Christ prayed can be instructive for us as well.

The first two were following what could only be called successful days of ministry.

The first was the healing of many sick and demon possessed individuals and the second was a feeding that was epic in proportions.

Yet instead of basking in the moment.

Instead of celebrating with His disciples, Christ rises early in the morning and steals out of a sleeping house to pray - which leads me to my next point, the deliberate prayer of Christ.

It doesn’t say that Christ simply rolled over or that He got up and went and sat in His favorite chair by the fire to pray.

It says that He got up, went out and made His way to a desolate or deserted place.

The word here for deserted is the same word used for the wilderness in Mark 1:3 and Mark 1:14.

I mean Christ didn’t even get up and go down the street to the local Starbucks or park to pray.

He completely left the town of Capernaum and went out into a deserted place to get completely alone and pray.

This took some effort on His part.

This cost Him something.

These were no, to quote H.B. Charles, “text message” prayers that Jesus was going out to say.

Sometimes we are guilty of doing just that with our prayer lives.

When we do pray it is often a text message prayer - or worse a tweet prayer that we try and fit in 140 characters or get straight to the point.

Many times our prayer life doesn’t really cost us anything - whether it is sleep in the morning or maybe missing a favorite show at night - because we just fit it in whenever and where ever we are.

Don’t mistake me here though - those prayers can be important and we certainly should utter prayers in the moment but if that is the extent of our prayer lives then we are missing out on the true benefits of prayer.

Notice here that Christ made it a priority to get alone and to have private prayer.

If Christ, who was God incarnate, felt that it was critical to get away for private prayer why is it that we think we can get by in our spiritual lives without it?

There is a wonderful little book written by the Puritan Thomas Brooks entitled the Privy or Secret Key to Heaven and it is a treatise all about the importance of private prayer.

If you want to add a category of reading to your discipline of reading books for spiritual growth I would highly recommend that you look into reading the Puritans - they are challenging and convicting and generally spot on.

And the good thing is they’re all dead so you don’t have to worry about reading their books and then finding that they don’t lie up to what they encourage.

In the case of Thomas Brooks, he wrote the Privy Key to Heaven, during the black plague in London during 1665.

In the book he makes this statement

“The power of religion and godliness lives, thrives, or dies, as closet prayer lives, thrives, or dies.

Godliness never rises to a higher pitch than when men keep closest to their closets.”

Another important point that we can learn from this text is that private prayer is meant to be just that - private.

There is something to be said for praying publicly, much can be accomplished through the discipline of public prayer.

It is one way that we as a congregation can all lift a united request to our Lord.

Here we have no idea what Jesus was praying to His Father.

There are times when our conversations with Him should remain private.

There are times when our business with God is only for Him and us.

We do get some clues later in the text about what Christ may have been praying about.

This was most likely a high level planning meeting between Father and Son regarding the continued steps of His ministry.

If it were us we would probably need to pray for humility as we would tend in our human nature to boast about the great day fo ministry that we had just had or to take too much credit for what had taken place.

But not Christ - He was the picture of humility and He would probably have spent time thanking His Father for what had happened the night before and then seeking His direction for the next steps.

And so we have a picture here of private prayer - that it needs to be deliberate, that it needs to be private and most important of all that if Christ felt the need to devote time to private prayer that we do ourselves an incredible disservice in our spiritual growth when we do not.

In fact, oftentimes we are more like the disciples than Christ.

Disciple’s Distraction

The disciples experience that morning was much different from Jesus’s.

The woke, not of their own accord to go and have a wonderful time of private devotion, but instead they were awakened by the raucous crowd beating on the door wanting more of what they had experienced the night before.

This is not a pleasant way to be woken up.

It’s much the same as we experienced on our first night in boot camp.

Everything the day before had been so nice as we were welcomed into the camp and put to bed.

And then at 5 am someone came through the barracks clanging together two trash can lids - or slamming a lid on the trash can itself - I’ve blocked the memory out to minimize the trauma to my psyche.

When the disciples woke they would have been shocked and surprised to find that Jesus was no where to be found.

So the text tells us that they searched for Him.

As we will see throughout the rest of Scripture Simon was in the lead.