Podcasts about despite jesus

What does a desperate mother's encounter with Jesus teach us about approaching God when we're overwhelmed? This powerful message explores the remarkable story of the Syrophoenician woman—the only person in scripture who seemingly "won" a debate with Jesus.On Mother's Day, we examine this unnamed mother who crossed every cultural and religious barrier to seek help for her demon-possessed daughter. Despite Jesus initially seeming to rebuff her with silence and a challenging parable about children and dogs at the table, she persisted with extraordinary faith. Her response—"Yes Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children's crumbs"—reveals profound theological understanding and unwavering trust.From her example, we discover three crucial principles for when life's burdens become too heavy: First, approach Jesus with genuine humility, acknowledging our unworthiness. Second, pray persistently without giving up, even when heaven seems silent. Third, fully trust Jesus enough to leave our burdens with him completely. This mother didn't just have a good argument—she demonstrated unwavering faith that impressed Jesus himself.Whether you're a mother carrying concerns for your children or anyone feeling crushed by life's overwhelming circumstances, this message offers hope. Jesus invites all who are weary and heavy-laden to come to Him. Unlike his temporary retreat to Tyre, Jesus never takes vacations from our needs. Right now, He intercedes in heaven for you, with inexhaustible resources of grace and mercy for everyone who approaches in faith.What burden feels too heavy for you today? Bring it to Jesus, not because of who you are, but because of who He is—mighty to save and generous beyond measure.Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-5u5KBgs8k

Even after the resurrection, the disciples experienced a fair amount of confusion. Despite Jesus' predictions that He would be crucified, buried, and on the third day He would rise again, His own men found it very hard to believe that they were actually seeing the truly risen, flesh-and-blood Savior.In the last of a three-part lagniappe series looking at moments of betrayal and questioning among the followers of Jesus, I explore Thomas's well-known interaction with Jesus. In this message, I examine how critically important it is to stay part of the body of believers so that we do not allow isolation to breed spiritual confusion. I also explore the unforgettable words of Jesus in John 20:29b, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," words that offer encouragement to each of us who today seek to walk by faith and not by sight.(RAR2025EP17)

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.Discover Your Next Step: HERE

Witness the miraculous healing of a deaf and mute man by Jesus.Jesus performs a miraculous healing of a deaf and mute man, transforming his life and astonishing the crowd. Despite Jesus' request for silence, the news of the miracle spreads rapidly, showcasing the boundless power and compassion of His ministry.Today's Bible verse is Mark 7:36, from the King James Version.Download the Pray.com app for more Christian content including, Daily Prayers, Inspirational Testimonies, and Bedtime Bible Stories.Pray.com is the digital destination for faith. With over 5,000 daily prayers, meditations, bedtime stories, and cinematic stories inspired by the Bible, the Pray.com app has everything you need to keep your focus on the Lord. Make Prayer a priority and download the #1 App for Prayer and Sleep today in the Apple app store or Google Play store.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Witness the miraculous healing of a deaf and mute man by Jesus.Jesus performs a miraculous healing of a deaf and mute man, transforming his life and astonishing the crowd. Despite Jesus' request for silence, the news of the miracle spreads rapidly, showcasing the boundless power and compassion of His ministry.Today's Bible verse is Mark 7:36, from the King James Version.Download the Pray.com app for more Christian content including, Daily Prayers, Inspirational Testimonies, and Bedtime Bible Stories.Pray.com is the digital destination for faith. With over 5,000 daily prayers, meditations, bedtime stories, and cinematic stories inspired by the Bible, the Pray.com app has everything you need to keep your focus on the Lord. Make Prayer a priority and download the #1 App for Prayer and Sleep today in the Apple app store or Google Play store.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week Rev. Mandy reflects on John 1:1-18 and the rich truths found there that Jesus is God.  Despite Jesus coming into the world he created, many did not recognise him or welcome him.  Even today, we too can fail to see Jesus at work in our midst and recognise his presence among us.Rev. Mandy challenges us all this year, to slow down and to be attentive to Jesus's presence in the everyday moments of life.  Jesus is right here, in this moment - in the now.  It is only when slow down and stop that we are open to recognise and be suprised by what God is going among us.

Sexual sin remains one of the most prolific yet overlooked issues within the Christian community. Despite the prevalence of church teachings on purity and righteousness, hidden struggles with sexual sin abound. Despite Jesus' promise of freedom in Scripture, pornography, illicit romantic novels and television shows, and sexual indiscretions continue to keep many believers in bondage. Statistics reveal a startling reality: 50% of American Christians ages 18 to 30 actively seek out porn annually. 68% of churchgoing men regularly view pornography. 20% of practicing Christians ages 18 to 30 actively seek out porn weekly. 15% of Christian women say that they watch porn at least monthly. Only 13% of Christian women say that they never watch porn. 20 % of youth pastors currently struggles w/ porn use. 68% of churchgoing men regularly view porn. 50% of pastors regularly view porn. 76% of Christians age 18 to 24 actively and regularly spend time searching porn sites. The average age kids see porn is 11. 95% of kids see porn by 14 . These hidden battles often lead to feelings of shame, isolation, and a performance-based relationship with God, making it harder to experience His grace, true intimacy, and freedom In this episode of "Christian Parent/Crazy World," Catherine is joined by Dr. Lina Abujamra, a pediatric ER doctor and founder of Living With Power Ministries, who delves into her own experiences and insights on breaking free from hidden sexual sin. Lina  sheds light on how purity culture's unrealistic expectations can lead to a dangerous form of idolatry, causing individuals to ignore deeper issues and seek fulfillment through temporary distractions. Key Highlights: Purity Culture's Impact: Lina unpacks how purity culture sets unrealistic expectations about marriage and intimacy, fostering a performance-based relationship with God. The Danger of Idolatry: Learn why idolizing a perfect life leads many to overlook deeper issues and lean on temporary distractions like TV, movies, and frivolous novels. Dealing with Hidden Sins: Lina emphasizes the necessity of addressing hidden sins openly and highlights the ease of falling into habits like consuming erotic content. Women like Lina have particularly struggled with pornographic novels and desire to be set free. The Importance of Safe Conversations: Lina shares her personal experiences, including the emotional hurt she faced within the church, and underscores the need for transparent discussions in our homes and communities. Sexual Sin in the Church: Catherine and Lina explore the alarming statistics on porn addiction among Christians, including pastors, and the urgent need for transparency. Guest Bio: Dr. Lina Abujamra is a distinguished pediatric emergency room doctor, author, speaker, and the founder of Living With Power Ministries. Known for her dynamic and heartfelt approach, she offers practical biblical insights to help people navigate life's challenges with faith and resilience. She has authored several impactful books, including Fractured Faith: Finding Your Way Back to God in an Age of Deconstruction, Resolved: 10 Ways to Stand Strong and Live What You Believe, and her most recent book, Don't Tell Anyone You're Reading This: A Christian Doctor's Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues, which offers a candid look into her sexual struggles and the grace that brought her freedom. EPISODE RESOURCES: Featured resource: Don't Tell Anyone You're Reading This: A Christian Doctor's Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues Ep. 110 How To Talk To Your Kids about Pornography (w/ Kristen Jensen) Good Pictures, Bad Pictures: Porn Proofing Today's Young Kids by Kristen Jensen What's Next? Stay tuned for our next episode, where Lina and I dive even deeper into purity culture, the impact of the prosperity gospel on views of sex and our parenting, and the role of shame in sin. This is a journey toward uncovering freedom and truth, one conversation at a time. Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

On today's Friday edition, we chat with Sean Wolfington! Sean Wolfington is a serial entrepreneur who has built 15 tech companies and had businesses in the film, ad-tech, automotive and real estate industries. Wolfington produced multiple feature films including Bella, Self-Medicated, The Mighty Macs, Little Boy, Sound of Freedom, Cabrini, City of Dreams, and The Prince. The most recent release, Sound of Freedom, is one of the biggest independent films of all time, generating over $250 million at the box office and outperforming blockbuster giants like Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible.  City of Dreams opened this past weekend.  Inspired by true events, City of Dreams follows Jesús, a young Mexican boy whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are shattered when he's trafficked across the border and sold to a sweatshop making fast fashion in downtown Los Angeles. Thrust into a world of exploitation and despair, he's forced to adhere to the grueling work schedule dictated by El Jefe. Despite Jesus's hellish existence, he finds solace in Elena, a girl who was similarly betrayed and sold into slavery. When she goes missing, and another co-worker Carlitos is severely beaten, Jesus realizes that the only way to save himself and the others is to fight back, even if it costs him his life. @seanwolfington @cityofdreamsmovie cityofdreamsmovie.com @christianmusicguys christianmusicguys.com

Monday, 12 August 2024   And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Matthew 2:11   “And having come into the house, they found the Child with Mary His mother. And having fallen, they worshipped Him. And having opened their treasures, they offered Him gifts: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh” (CG).   The previous verse noted that when the magicians saw the star that stood over where the Child was, they rejoiced greatly. Now, Matthew records, “And having come into the house.”   Being certain that this is where the Child was, they entered. The star, whatever it actually was, indisputably identified this abode. Once inside, it next says, “they found the Child.”   As with previous verses, it is understood that they were looking for a child, not an adult. Depending on where they got their information, they deduced that the sign indicated His coming. Moreover, depending on what Hebrew texts were available to them, they could have a general idea of the time of the Messiah's coming. That is laid out in Daniel 9.   There was a prophetic timeline given that revealed a certain number of years must pass before the Messiah would come. That timeframe had come to its fullness, and so it was logical that the sign was telling them about the Messiah's advent.    As for the word “found,” some texts read “saw.” The KJV et al. divert from their source text and say “saw.” There is no need for this. The word is used both literally and figuratively. The sense is no different than Matthew 26:40 where Jesus “found” the men sleeping while on watch. Likewise, these men who had been searching for the Messiah have found Him. Along with the Child, He was “with Mary His mother.”   It is a tender scene carefully included by Matthew. The Messiah of the world was being tended to by His mother. As for ability, He was in a completely subordinate position to His mother. And yet, it next notes, “And having fallen, they worshipped Him.”   Despite Jesus' reliance on His mother, it is to Him, not to her, that worship is given. He was sent to fulfill a role prophesied in the Hebrew writings. Through the star, these men were assured this was the Messiah, and so as an act of worship of God, they bowed before His Messiah, thus acknowledging God's hand in the entire affair. With that completed before God, Matthew next records, “And having opened their treasures.”   The Greek word, first used here, is thésauros. It signifies stored up treasure, “including (treasured) thoughts stored up in the heart and mind” HELPS Word Studies. It is the etymological root of our word thesaurus which is a modern storage of treasured synonyms. In opening their treasure, “they offered Him gifts.”   The Greek word is dóron. It signifies a gift, but it is one which is voluntarily given. The focus is on the gift's free nature. It is used in Ephesians 2:8 when describing the process of salvation which is by grace through faith. The gifts presented by the magicians are “gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.” Their significance is: Gold. The Greek is chrusos, being derived from a word signifying to make use of or take advantage of. In other words, it implies profound purchasing power. Gold is considered the finest of the biblical metals. It signifies deity. This is seen in the construction of the Ark of the Covenant. The acacia (shittah) wood pictured Christ's incorruptible humanity. That was covered in gold, reflecting His deity. It also signifies royalty, something appropriate for the King of the Jews.   Frankincense. The Greek is libanos. That is derived from the Hebrew livonah. That, in turn, is derived from lavan, white. One can think of the white smoke of its incense. However, the word lavan is derived from the verb lavan, to be white, a word that is then associated with the Hebrew levenah, a brick, because bricks turn white when fired.   A study of the word in the Old Testament consistently brings one back to the idea of works, meaning human effort. Thus, this is a picture of the works of the Messiah to redeem man from his own futile works that can never satisfy God.   Myrrh. The Greek is smurna. One can see the basis for the name of the location Smyrna. It is derived from the Hebrew word for myrrh, mor. That, in turn, comes from marar, bitter. Looking at the uses of myrrh in the Old Testament, the prominent idea is that it symbolizes love, but more especially, love in intimate union, but not necessarily sexual in nature.   The gift expresses the understanding of God's love for the people of the world which is conveyed in the sending of the Messiah to lead them back to Himself. However, there is also a sense of bitterness in the process. Christ would come and suffer through His earthly existence in order to accomplish God's purposes.   Life application: The presenting of these gifts, whatever the intent was on behalf of the magicians, is carefully recorded by Matthew, indicating that the Holy Spirit wanted us to research the meaning of them from a biblical perspective. Once such a study is accomplished, we can now see what God wanted us to know.   This is true with every such thing in Scripture. God places real, tangible things into His word that then carry deeper spiritual truths with them. They, in turn, will typologically anticipate other things that will be fulfilled by Christ Jesus, or that will apply to His work on behalf of His people.   The wisdom of God is continually revealed in this manner. He is giving us a map of how to be right with Him and the timing in which things will occur. Likewise, He is giving us a blueprint of how things are structured and ordered within the pages of Scripture.   Reading and contemplating the word of God is how to understand these things. Continue to read and study. And when you come to a commentary, don't just accept it at face value. Instead, compare what is being said with the rest of Scripture. Too often, unfounded or erroneous conclusions are made. This can only distract us from what God intends for us to see.   So be diligent and careful as you contemplate God's precious word.   Lord God Almighty, what an exciting adventure it is to read and consider every detail of Your magnificent word. It is a wonderful testament to Your workings in and through human history, bringing us back to Yourself through the giving of Jesus Christ. Thank You, O God, for Jesus! Amen.  

Coming down from the mountain where he was transfigured, Jesus finds a great crowd gathered around his remaining disciples. Those who need healing have come to receive it from Jesus' followers. But there is a problem. Despite Jesus having given them authority to heal and drive out spirits, the disciples are, to their surprise, powerless to help.It is wonderful for a believer to be given kingdom work in this world—work like loving God and others more than ourselves, forgiving those who sin against us, and proclaiming the good news of Jesus to the world. Yet how often do we find ourselves, like the disciples, powerless to move such mighty mountains?This Sunday, we will read in Jesus' own words, as he prepares for his death and resurrection, that if you have even a minuscule grain of faith in God, "Nothing will be impossible for you."

Coming down from the mountain where he was transfigured, Jesus finds a great crowd gathered around his remaining disciples. Those who need healing have come to receive it from Jesus' followers. But there is a problem. Despite Jesus having given them authority to heal and drive out spirits, the disciples are, to their surprise, powerless to help.--It is wonderful for a believer to be given kingdom work in this world-work like loving God and others more than ourselves, forgiving those who sin against us, and proclaiming the good news of Jesus to the world. Yet how often do we find ourselves, like the disciples, powerless to move such mighty mountains----This Sunday, we will read in Jesus' own words, as he prepares for his death and resurrection, that if you have even a minuscule grain of faith in God, -Nothing will be impossible for you.-

Coming down from the mountain where he was transfigured, Jesus finds a great crowd gathered around his remaining disciples. Those who need healing have come to receive it from Jesus' followers. But there is a problem. Despite Jesus having given them authority to heal and drive out spirits, the disciples are, to their surprise, powerless to help.--It is wonderful for a believer to be given kingdom work in this world-work like loving God and others more than ourselves, forgiving those who sin against us, and proclaiming the good news of Jesus to the world. Yet how often do we find ourselves, like the disciples, powerless to move such mighty mountains----This Sunday, we will read in Jesus' own words, as he prepares for his death and resurrection, that if you have even a minuscule grain of faith in God, -Nothing will be impossible for you.-

Did Satan Try To Tempt Jesus To Worship Him? Yes he did. Despite Jesus being God manifested in flesh and couldn't sin. Satan,the Devil still tried to tempt Him. This demonstrates just how deranged, wicked, evil, and rebellious Satan is, and why we must not try to lean on own ability in refusing him nor fall under his sway. Yes, we can resist Him and He will flee just as long as we are walking and being lead by the Spirit with the whole armor of God on. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/biblequestionsandanswers/support

Matthew 15.1-20. A delegation of Pharisees and teachers of the law arrive from Jerusalem to confront Jesus about the way he is carrying on. But Jesus replies that he is simply disregarding their man-made traditions, while they are finding ever-more ingenious ways of avoiding obedience to holy scripture. Despite Jesus being crystal clear on this matter, Michael shows us how the Church down the years has, at times, been just as guilty of elevating churchy rules above God's word. 7 July 2024.

Bobbie Frere | Mark 1:35-45  Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: ‘Everyone is looking for you!' Jesus replied, ‘Let us go somewhere else - to the nearby villages - so that I can preach there also. That is why I have come.' So he travelled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons. Far from seeking fame, it actually hindered Jesus' ministry. Despite Jesus' command, a man he heals is unable to keep quiet about it, and his failure to obey just makes things more difficult for Jesus. Bobbie encourages us to put Jesus first in everything, even if this goes against our natural desires and preferences. The recording begins with the reading from Pat Clayton. An edited video recording of the Sunday service can be viewed on YouTube.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Jesus predicting it multiple times, eyewitnesses were shocked to learn God had raised Jesus from the dead. And what God did for Jesus, he can do for you.

Join Julia Jeffress Sadler as she takes us on an incredible adventure in Episode 179. Jesus predicted that all His disciples would desert Him, specifically foretelling Peter's denial before the rooster crowed. At Gethsemane, Jesus prayed intensely, seeking His Father's will, while His disciples struggled to stay awake. When Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, leading to Jesus' arrest, Peter impulsively cut off a servant's ear, which Jesus healed, emphasizing peace over violence. Despite Jesus' calm surrender, all His disciples fled as He was taken to face the high priests and teachers of the law. Sign up to receive Kids Bible in a Year devotionals in your inbox every weekday: https://www.kidsbibleinayear.com/  Get ready to experience the Bible designed specifically for children with the official KidsBibleinaYear.com podcast, led by Julia Jeffress Sadler. This captivating audio series presents the age-old wisdom of the Bible in an engaging format that will captivate your kids. Each episode Julia translates biblical teachings into real-life applications, making Bible comprehension a breeze for young minds.  And if you want more Christian resources and content, you can download the Pray.com app. Pray.com is the digital destination for faith, offering over 5,000 daily prayers, meditations, bedtime Bible stories, and cinematic stories inspired by the Bible. For more resources on how to live a successful Christian life, visit Julia Jeffress Sadler's website at https://ptv.org/julia/. This episode is sponsored by Little Passports. Visit LittlePassports.com/blessed and use promo code BLESSED to receive 20% off. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Jesus initially showing indifference and making a hurtful remark, the Canaanite woman's steadfast faith and determination ultimately bring about her daughter's healing. From this story we learn that we are called to examine our own biases and preconceptions, and to extend God's grace to everyone we encounter. The gospel's powerful message of inclusivity, challenges us to embrace and welcome others with the same love and acceptance shown by Jesus. References: Map of Tyre & Sidon Structure of Matthew 14-15 Jesus Feeds the 5,000 Jesus Walks on Water Jesus Offends the Pharisees Jesus Offends the Canaanite Woman Jesus Feeds the 4,000 TRANSCRIPT

Despite Jesus initially showing indifference and making a hurtful remark, the Canaanite woman's steadfast faith and determination ultimately bring about her daughter's healing. From this story we learn that we are called to examine our own biases and preconceptions, and to extend God's grace to everyone we encounter. The gospel's powerful message of inclusivity, challenges us to embrace and welcome others with the same love and acceptance shown by Jesus. References: Map of Tyre & Sidon Structure of Matthew 14-15 Jesus Feeds the 5,000 Jesus Walks on Water Jesus Offends the Pharisees Jesus Offends the Canaanite Woman Jesus Feeds the 4,000 TRANSCRIPT

Despite Jesus initially showing indifference and making a hurtful remark, the Canaanite woman's steadfast faith and determination ultimately bring about her daughter's healing. From this story we learn that we are called to examine our own biases and preconceptions, and to extend God's grace to everyone we encounter. The gospel's powerful message of inclusivity, challenges us to embrace and welcome others with the same love and acceptance shown by Jesus. References: Map of Tyre & Sidon Structure of Matthew 14-15 Jesus Feeds the 5,000 Jesus Walks on Water Jesus Offends the Pharisees Jesus Offends the Canaanite Woman Jesus Feeds the 4,000 TRANSCRIPT

Heavenly Father, we come to You not on the basis of our righteousness. We come to You not on the basis of our uprightness or our morality. We come to You on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Jesus, we thank You that You made a way for us to have a loving relationship with God the Father, a meaning to experience this Person, to experience His presence and to experience His power. And we thank You, Jesus, because of Your work on the cross, because of Your death, burial, resurrection, Your ascension and You sent us the Holy Spirit. You offer the Spirit of God to each person who humbly asks. I pray, Lord, today, that You do unleash Your great power in our lives, in our homes, in our households, in our families, in our church and in our city. We do believe in You that You are a great God and You long for people to come to know You. You long to adopt many into Your household, to make those who are not Your children, Your beloved children in whom You delight.I pray, if anyone is far from You, far from the household of God today, give them the gift of repentance, give them the gift of faith and draw them to Yourself. And Lord, for the rest of us, I do pray that You embolden us to speak the gospel, give us opportunities to proclaim the gospel, unleash our tongues, to proclaim the gospel, the truth to the people around us. There's so many that don't know You and they haven't experienced Your presence and Your power and we believe on their behalf and we long to bring them to You, Lord. And I pray that You give us much grace in that. Lord, bless our time in the holy scriptures. Bless everyone who's here today. What a great way to start off the brand new year. And Lord, I pray that You prepare our hearts for holy communion, which we'll celebrate later. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.Well, good morning and welcome to Mosaic on this communion Sunday. We're continuing our sermon series through the incredible Gospel of Mark. We've called it Kingdom Come, the Gospel of Mark and the secret of God's kingdom. And in the gospel, Jesus is revealing, He's unveiling, He is regulating revelation. And those that do believe in Him, they take Him at His word. They begin to see that He really is who He is and His power is unleashed in their life. The title of the sermon today's Great Faith Unleashes Great Power. And what we've seen so far in the Gospel of Mark is that God, who created everything, the great God overall, He takes on flesh. The Son of God is sent by God the Father. He's anointed by God the Holy Spirit to establish the kingdom of God here on earth where God's presence and His peace reigns.And how does Jesus Christ, the Son of God, establish the kingdom of God? He does so with a message. And this is the good news, the gospel. It's the gospel that changes hearts because the kingdom of God is an inside out kingdom. God changes our hearts when we believe in the good news. He changes our desires. We begin to desire prayer. We begin to desire fellowship with God's people. We begin to desire to do the will of God, to live in submission to God out of love for Him and love for neighbor. And what was the gospel that Jesus preached? It was very short. His very first sermon is documented and it went like this.He says, "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe the good news that the King of the Universe has come to save us, save us from Satan, sin and death by laying down His life on a cross." And we are to repent and believe in Him, believe that He is God, believe that He is the King of the Universe. Now, how many people believed this message? During Jesus' three year ministry, how many people believed this message and how many people were saved? I think, statistically speaking, it was a very small percentage. If you look at First Corinthians 15, it says that the resurrected Christ appear to 500 people. 500 people, what a small percentage of all the people that He ministered to.And who believed? Well, those who were seemingly crazy enough to take Jesus at His word. He spoke, they believed, and all of a sudden, they were saved and God's power was unleashed in their life when they really believed that He was the Great I Am when they humbly believed. Those people experienced the power of God. His family, Jesus' family, we read, they thought He was out of His mind. The good folks back home and His hometown mocked Him as, "Oh, you're just a carpenter. You're just the Son of Mary." And the Pharisees we read that they joined forces with the Herodians to kill Jesus. Some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. Herod Antipas believed that. Some thought He was Elijah even when He fed the 5,000 miraculously. They understood that He was presenting Himself as the Messianic King, but they didn't realize what kind of king He was, the king of people's hearts.The religious establishment said that Jesus was demon-possessed, a sorcerer, a false teacher. And even the disciples we read who saw His power over and over and over had said that they were hardened in their hearts and they had trouble believing. Amazingly, the only ones that truly recognize Jesus for who He is all of the time are the demons. The demons understood. But the few who took Jesus at His word, they experienced His power and they experienced His salvation. And today, we come to such a woman. We come to a woman who amazed Jesus Christ with her faith. To her, Jesus said, "Oh, woman, great is your faith." And her great faith released great power in her life. And great faith does release great power. Why? Because God honors bold faith because bold faith honors God.So that brings us to Mark 7:24-37. Would you look at the text with me? "And from there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. 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. 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.' And He said to her, 'For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter.' And she went away and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.' And his ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, 'He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.'This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Second, great faith is humble hunger for God. And third, great faith is humble bringing and begging. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Chutzpah, it's from the Yiddish. It means nerve. It means courage. It means impudence. It means confidence in action. I like that word. And it definitely perfectly characterizes this woman's posture of heart. She comes boldly with confidence, yet it's humble confidence. So this is point one, the great faith is humble chutzpah before God.We saw the progression from chapter 7 verses 1 through 23 to this one, which is very logical where Jesus said, He called all food clean, meaning He removed the barrier between the Jews and the Gentiles, the barrier of the dietary laws that separated Jews socially from Gentiles. And now Jesus is positioned perfectly to enter Gentile territory, something a Jewish rabbi would have never done because they consider the Gentiles unclean. And Jesus said, "It's not what comes from the outside that makes you unclean. It's that which comes from the inside that makes you unclean and Jesus can cleanse all.So now He comes into Gentile territory. This is verse 24. From there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon and He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. The human, Jesus, God incarnate, He did grow tired at some points. He just had ministered to many people. He's exhausted and now He journeys into Gentile territory, tries to keep Himself hidden. He can't do it because His fame had already proceeded Him. Tyre had a long history of antagonism toward Israel. Josephus, the Jewish historian, he said, "The inhabitants of Tyre were notoriously our bitterest enemies." There was bad blood between these two groups of people, the Galileans and people from Tyre. So that's the context.So this woman who is from the other people, she's from the other religions, she's from the other socioeconomic status, she's from the other-other everything, she comes to Jesus and she comes to Jesus boldly. Verse 25, "But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet." The unclean spirit is a demon that's made clear in verses 29 and 30. So here, we meet a mother, a desperate mother. She comes to Christ. She's heard of His explosive power and she throws herself at His feet in an attitude, a posture of heart, of self-abasement and supplication. She prostrates herself before Him, which shows the level of her distress, her pain.The pain of her child had brought her to Jesus Christ. The pain of her child had brought her to her knees. And she's interceding for her child. A mother is praying for her child. And whenever I see texts like this, just a reminder that we are to intercede for our loved ones. We are to intercede in prayer for our children and for our siblings and for our families and for our neighbors, and for our city. We are to pray. And when we intercede, God hears those prayers, especially when they're prayed with this posture of heart. The mother prayed for her child because the child couldn't pray for herself and the mother persisted until her prayer was granted.We see that this woman is very similar to the woman that was suffering 12 years from a hemorrhage in chapter 5. The likeness has seen that they were both ritually impure. They both needed miraculous power from the Lord. And despite her impurity, the Syrophoenician, like the woman with the hemorrhage, comes boldly hoping for healing from Christ. Verse 26, "Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 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.'" The Matthew parallel calls her a Canaanite woman. The word for Gentile here, it's a word that means that she was Greek speaking or Hellenized. So she's a Greek-speaking pagan Gentile from Tyre and the woman hopes that Jesus is going to heal her. She asks, she begs, she pleads. And it seems like He says no. It seems like Jesus' response dashes her hopes in a very hard way. And what is Jesus doing here? Jesus is showing that He ... First of all, there was an order to the salvation process. There was an order to the revelation that, first of all, He came to the children of Israel. Romans 1:16 says, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but it's for anyone who believes."Or 1 Corinthians 1:22, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God." Why the Jews first? Because the Jews became the first rebellious children of God. He chose them as His people. They rebelled against Him. He sends His Son into this vineyard, so to speak, to then save them, save the elect from Israel. And Isaiah 1:2-3 explains or opens, reveals the Father's heart, "Hear, O heavens and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand."The word first is used in our text proton. It's always used in order to explain that in the eschatological timeline of God's revelation, there is progress. The coming of Elijah was supposed to come before the Messiah. The binding of Satan needs to happen before despoiling of His house. Jesus' ministry to His fellow Jews was first, but He's in Gentile territory, meaning He's there to bring home the elect as well. Jesus expands His gospel ministry beyond Israel even when He was here. Only after these events have occurred in their divinely ordered sequence can the end come. As Mark says in chapter 4, "First a shoot, then an ear, then full grain in the year." There's a pattern here.The word proton and the thought behind it are similar to those of Paul in Romans 1 and Romans 11. Jesus did come for the Jew first but also for the Gentile. And here, it seems very derogatory if you think about it. He's calling her a dog. He's like, "I'm going to feed the children first and then you don't feed the dogs before the children." And you read the commentaries and they're like, "Well, it's not that offensive. It's the diminutive. He's calling her a little dog." No, that's offensive. You call anyone a little dog in that ... In our context, we love dogs. Dogs are domesticated. I have a daughter that prays on just as persistently as a Syrophoenician woman for a dog and ... Long story.But in our context, we love the dogs. People even consider themselves dog parents. Back then, they didn't domesticate dogs. Dogs were wild. Dogs lived outside of cities. Dogs were considered unclean and the New Testament continues this negative attitude. St. Paul says, "Beware of the dogs." In Philippians, Jesus says, "Don't throw what is holy to the dogs or the pigs." In Revelation 22:15, "The dog is an outsider to the community of God's grace." So using the terminology dog, he's calling her a dog, is an insult. That's what's happening. He's insulting her so to speak.And the question really is, how is she going to respond? Is she going to say, "No, I reject your verdict. I reject your bad news. I don't want your good news because I reject your bad news about my current state"? She doesn't do any of that. She hears it and she desperately continues in her persistence. Despite Jesus' seeming cool indifference and silence, she got His no. And she's like, "Okay, great, but I still ask for Your yes." Matthew 15 in the parallel context, in Matthew 15:22, "And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.' But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him saying, 'Send her away, for she is crying out after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' But she came and knelt before Him saying, 'Lord, help me.' But He answered, 'It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'"You'd expect her to get angry. You'd expect her to call Jesus all of the isms and call him all of the ist names, but she doesn't get all huffy. She's not too proud to accept the verdict. She doesn't say, "How dare You? How dare You mock me? How dare You belittle me?" She could have said, "I didn't choose to be a Gentile. I didn't choose to be born here. I didn't choose to have a daughter that suffers. I'm not even asking for myself, Jesus. Do You know how much we've suffered together? We deserve something from You." She doesn't do any of that. She realizes that she cannot stand before Jesus, before Christ, before the Son of God, before God Himself on her rights, on her moral record.Even on the basis of her own suffering, she understands that God owes her nothing. She understands who she is in relation to the God of the universe. She remains humble. Even when she hears really hard words from Jesus, she gets a really hard no, but she continues asking. She continues believing, humbly believing, humbly understanding that she has absolutely zero grounds upon which to claim His favor. She says, "Yes, I am a dog. In relation to God, I am a dog. I'm unfit for the Father's favor. I have transgressed commandments. I have lived as though God does not exist. I have broken the first commandment, it's because I've broken the first one, I've broken them all. The first commandment is, 'Thou shall have no other gods before me.' I haven't worshiped Yahweh. Yes, I am a dog. Yes, I'm outside, but, but I see Your house is big enough even for me, but I see that there's enough bread on Your table even for a dog like me." That's her posture of heart.And when we present the gospel, we say, "Look, it starts with the bad news." The bad news is we have broken God's sovereign law. Whenever you break any law, there are to be consequences for the breaking of the law, especially when it comes to God. Whoever transgresses even one law deserves death. The word of God says, "Deserves eternal damnation." The word of God says, "That's the bad news. Apart from God, we are not children. Apart from God, we are sinners." "And yes, Lord, I am a sinner. I am a filthy, wretched dog. I am a dog. Can I be Your dog? I hear You're a good master." That's what she's saying. That's why I use the word for chutzpah, it's nerve, it's brass, it's confidence and actions gall. It's audacity.And this brings us to point two, great faith is humble hunger for God. And you see this, you see what she's doing. She's not just asking for the miracle. She's relating to Jesus. She's conversing with Jesus. She wants more of God in her life. She's hungry for God. Verse 28, "But she answered Him, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'" The Syrophoenician woman, she's like, "Yes, I am a dog," but all of a sudden, she's so smart, she switches everything. She puts the dog in the house. I don't know if you notice this. She's like, "I am a dog, but I'm a dog in Your house under Your table." That's what she's doing.And this reminds us, this whole encounter with a Gentile woman, a Gentile woman's daughter, it reminds us of Elijah. Elijah the prophet was sent to the people of Israel, but the people of Israel didn't obey. They didn't believe in God. So then he goes to the Gentiles. And Jesus, when He started His ministry in His hometown, He goes to the synagogue and He reminded them of that story. He said, "Look, I've come here to the children of Israel, but the children of Israel refuse to believe. So I'm going to the Gentiles, just like Elijah was sent to the Gentiles," Luke 4:24, "And he said, 'Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut up three years and six months and a great famine came over the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath and the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah and none of them was cleansed, but only Namaan the Syrian.When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath and they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, He went away." And you say, "Why did they get so mad? Why do they get so angry?" They got so angry because He reminded them that God loves Gentiles as well. And it's not your birth, it's not your DNA, it's not your ethnicity that makes you right with God. It's your humility. It's your humble repentance where you say, "God, I don't deserve to be Your child. God, I don't deserve a relationship. God, I don't deserve cleansing in Your power, but I'm going to ask anyway."After His rejection at Nazareth, Jesus gives a clear warning of the coming mission to the Gentiles that He's going to the Gentiles. And it is in light of this background that we must read the initial response to this woman. He went to the children of Israel who said, "We don't want You. Jesus, we don't need You. We're children of Israel by birth." And Jesus said, "No one's a child of God by birth. You can't be born into the Family of God physically, only spiritually. You need to be born again." And they didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to hear that they needed to repent, that they needed to follow God.And yet this woman, she's told, "You're not a child of God. You're a dog," and she doesn't get huffy. She continues the conversation. She calls Him Lord, "Yes, Lord. Even the dogs on the table eat the children's crumbs." She says, "Yes, Lord, but there's plenty on that table even for me." She lays hold of Christ's word and bases her plea upon Him. The woman's response transforms the dog of Jesus metaphor into a domestic dog in the house. She, here in the stories, part of the household of faith. One translation says, "Since then, I am a dog. I'm not a stranger. I'm not outside." Another translation, she says, "Let me be a dog. I'll accept that I am, but even a dog has his day or her day. Yes, I'm a little dog, but can I still have some crumbs from the table? Yes, I'm a little dog, but I'm Your dog and You're my master."She calls him, "Lord, I am a humble part of the household. I don't deserve to be here, but I'm just asking for a crumb. I'm just asking for a little bit of your grace." And Jesus hears that. Jesus hears her plea and her plea is actually based on a promise from the Old Testament, a promise that God gave to Abraham. When He blesses Abraham, He says, "I'm going to extend the blessings I'm giving you to the rest of the world." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. All of the families. All of the families shall be blessed. All of the families, all of the people that come to God and say, "God, I don't have any rights to assert, that I'm coming to You with a right less assertiveness. I'm not coming to You on the basis of my goodness. I'm coming to You on the basis of Your goodness and Your generosity."Thomas Cranmer, in The Book of Common Prayer, he says, "We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." Jesus hears her and He likes her response. In verse 29, He said to her, "For this statement," another translation says, "Good answer. Good answer." I wish I was there to see the twinkle in His eye, "Good answer." "For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter," and she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.In response to the woman's audacity, her impudent faith, She wrestles a blessing from Christ. And in this, she reminds us of someone else's scripture. She reminds us of Jacob. Jacob, when he wrestled with God, when he took hold of God, and most likely, that was a Christophany because it says that he wrestled with God and it said that he wrestled with a Man. It was a Man God, the God Man, Jesus Christ. This woman is much like Jacob in her persistence, her refusal to take no for an answer. She's content to get the no, "Yes, I am a dog," but she still keeps asking for the yes.And Jacob did the same thing. Jacob in Genesis 32, he was a man in need. The next morning, he was going to meet his brother, Esau, his estranged brother, Esau, and he thought he was going to meet Esau with murderous intent, that Esau wanted to kill him. He feared for his own life, Jacob did. He feared for the lives of his wives and children. So he prays. He sends them ahead and he prays with God. And the Lord appears to him as a man and wrestled with him through the night. And of course, the Lord was play wrestling. He's not really wrestling with Jacob. Jacob thought He was wrestling. Jesus was playing.This is Genesis 32:24, "Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. And when the man saw that He did not prevail against Jacob, He touched his hip socket and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as He wrestled with him. Then he said, 'Let me go for, the day has broken.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let You go unless You bless me.' And He said to him, 'What is your name?' He said, 'Jacob.' Then He said, 'Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.' Then Jacob asked Him, 'Please tell me Your name.' And He said, 'Why is it that you asked My name?' And there, He blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been delivered.'"And you say, "Why did Jesus tell a woman no in the beginning? What is He doing? Did she change His mind from a silent indifference to helping her?" I don't think that's what's happening. When He says for this statement, He's not saying, "Because you have said this or because you have changed My mind," He's saying, "Because you've passed the test." He was testing her. He said, "No," to test her. "Is she going to persist? Is she going to continue asking?" It was a ploy designed to evoke even greater levels of faith on her part. Martin Luther commenting on this text, he said, "Christians need to persist in trusting God even when He seems to turn His back on them. We must learn to see the yes hidden in His no."I think that's really powerful, especially if you meditate on or you apply it to your life. We must work to see His yes and His no. If He says no, now He has a better yes for us. So we keep asking, we keep asking, we keep asking, and obviously, in all the Lord's will. Matthew 15:28, "Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly." Her faith delighted Jesus Christ. My daughter, sometimes they come to me and they test me to see how strict I am regarding grades. And they're like, "Yeah, but if I get an A-, is that okay?" "Oh, yeah, that's fine.""What if I get a B+?" "You're pushing it. You're pushing it." "What if I get a B ..." And my conversation is, "Look, I don't care about your GPA honestly. I can't tell you that I just did, but I really don't care. I don't care. I do. Do your best in your sports. Do your best. I care about your soul above all else. I care about your faith. I care that you grow in your relationship with the Lord. I care about you growing in wisdom." And Jesus is in the same way. He's delighted by this woman's faith. May your faith and may my faith delight the Lord in the same way. She took Christ at His word, and when He said, "You're dog," and then He blesses her like a child.And this is really how God speaks of salvation, that when we repent of our sins and turn to Christ, we get regenerated, we get a new heart, but we also get a new identity. We become a child of God. God adopts us into His family. God says, "You are not My children, but I'm going to make you My children," and it's all because of His Son, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11:6, "And without faith, it is impossible to please Him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him." He rewards those who seek Him. Do you seek Him with the same posture of heart persistently, "Lord, I want more of You. Lord, I want more of Your presence. Lord, I want more of Your power."And that's why Jesus is called the Bread of Life, and we are to hunger, our souls are to hunger for Jesus as the Bread of Life. "Lord, I'm starving. I am famished for You." What do you do when you're hungry? You can't stop thinking about food. You're just salivating. You're thinking about that next meal that's coming and this is ... What is humility? It's recognizing, "Lord, apart from You, I'm starving. My soul is starving. Lord, I seek you." And the word of God says, "Whoever seeks God will be found. He will be found by them." Her faith is dramatically contrasted with the heartened unbelief of the Pharisees who were Jewish. They consider themselves children of God, but they weren't because they had no faith in Christ. And her faith even outshines the understanding of the disciples whose hearts were hardened at times. And God loves persistent pursuit of Him and He rewards this lavishly.Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force." What does that mean? He's talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist, he sacrificed everything to proclaim that Jesus Christ is God, to proclaim that, "Jesus Christ is here. He's willing to save people." John the Baptist sacrificed everything for the kingdom of God to expand. The violent, he took it by force. It took effort. It took work on his part and the same way, if you pursue God, if you sacrifice to pursue God. And yes, this does take sacrifice like, "Rain, snow, whatever, I'm going to church." That's who you are. I commend all of you. You're here at first service. Praise be to God.I had a phone call from a pastor and he's like, "Are you guys canceling church?" I was like, "This isn't public school. We don't believe in snow days. Forget that. We're going to church." Yeah, we'll get a little wet. That's fine. We do close church if the tea's not running. That's because of the temple situation. But what I'm saying is, yes, it does take effort. You want to experience more of God? It takes effort to wake up just to study the scriptures. It takes effort to pray. It takes effort to pursue the Lord. Like the paralytic friends, remember that the house is full, they couldn't get through to Christ. They climb into the roof. They break through 18 inches of sod and branches in the roof lowering the man and the man is healed and Jesus forgives him of his sins as well.Jesus delights in persistent faith like that of this woman. Another example is Luke 18 and Luke 18, there's a woman who keeps returning to a judge, pleading her case over and over and over. And verse 4 of Luke 18 says, "For a while, he refused, but afterward, he said to himself, 'Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.'" And this is a comparison, opposites of course, that God, He wants to give us mercy, He wants to give us justice, He wants to pour out His power in our life, but do we keep coming to him persistently, doggedly, voraciously, yet humbly like this woman does?She depended on Christ's goodness, not her own, so she finally understood grace. She understood grace. "It's not because of anything in me, Lord. I plead Your mercy. I plead Your grace. And faith is such a picture. It's not this bloodless, flaccid, distracted, half-hearted acceptance of certain propositions or theorems of theology about God. No, you realize that God is a person and that God does bless those who pursue Him. Faith is driven. It's determined. It's an unyielding grip upon God Himself and that's why hunger is such a good metaphor. Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."Matthew 5:3-6, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." And we continue the text, point three is great faith, humble bringing and begging. And verse 31, "Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." Who are these people that brought this man that needed healing to Jesus? We're not told. We just know that these people heard about Christ. They heard that Christ has power to help, so they bring their friend and they beg God on behalf. They beg Christ on behalf of their friend."Lord, just Your hand, one hand touch our friend. Heal him." Verse 33, "And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue." Why does Jesus do this? I think the simplest explanation is probably the best one. He's speaking with this man, communicating with this man in the only language the man can understand. He puts His finger in his ears as though He's saying, "I'm going to do something to your hearing. I'm going to do something with your tongue, with your speech." Jesus is entering the man's world, the Great King of heaven, the Great Creator of heavens and the earth. The Sinless Lamb of God is coming down. He's identifying with this man and his condition and all of its wretchedness and all of its agony and angst. Jesus is coming right down to where the man is.Verse 34, "Looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' which is an Aramaic, "that is, 'Be opened.'" He looks up to heaven, so he's invoking God's power. He sighs. Why does Jesus sigh? And this is a sign of His deep feeling, His compassion for the sufferer. If you remember when He comes to Lazarus' tomb, He knows He's about to resurrect Lazarus, but before He does, He reveals His emotion in John 11:33, "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled. And He said, 'Where have you laid him?' And they said to Him, 'Lord, come and see,' and Jesus swept." So the Jews said, "See how He loved him."The phrase for deeply moved or greatly troubled, that phrase is a word used in another context to describe a horse snorting. One translation says, "He gave way to such distress of spirit, has made His body tremble." One commentator says, "This great sigh came out of His wounded heart." So what's happening? Jesus is moved by Lazarus' condition. He's moved by this man's condition. It offends Him, "This is not the way the world was supposed to be. The world was created and it was perfect and we were supposed to live in perfect harmony, perfect shalom, but we rebelled against God and sin entered the world and the ravages of sin, the consequences of sin are felt by each one of us." And when Jesus dies, He knows, this isn't the way it's supposed to be and everyone knows this.If you ask even an unbeliever, someone that doesn't believe in God, you ask them, "Is the world the way it ought to be? Are you the way you ought to be?" And everyone says, "No, because everyone knows deep down inside there's something wrong, something wrong with us, something wrong with the world." Where does that knowledge come from? The knowledge of a perfect reality and knowledge of a perfect world. It's written on our hearts. This is not how creation was meant to be in all of its beauty and all of its glory and now it's marred with sin. This man was made to reflect the image of God, the glory of God, and here, he's a poor wretch of a man suffering and Jesus is moved by that. He sighs and he says, "Be opened," and this is called a divine passive. He says, "Be opened by whom? By God." That's what he's saying. He's invoking the power of God. In verse 35, "His ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly." The ears were opened. That's another divine passive. His tongue was released by whom? By God. His tongue was unshackled, so to speak. The bond of his tongue was released.Jesus is creating a new world. That's what bringing the kingdom of God into the world means, that He's recreating things from the inside out and it starts with the message of the good news and it transforms our hearts from the inside. And then everything in the world, little by little, becomes transformed. Verse 36, "And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, "He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. He has done all things well."And this echoes Genesis 1:31 where God creates, He sees everything He's made and he says, "It is good." They say, "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak," and that's an illusion to Isaiah 35, talking about the Messianic kingdom, verse 5 of Isaiah 35, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and shall the lame man leap like a deer and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." Of course, Jesus' miracles weren't just miracles for miracle's sake. His miracles were always a sign, a sign of a deeper reality, a sign of who Jesus is, a sign of what Jesus has come to accomplish, which is to redeem people, to redeem the world, to save souls. And this motif of the opened ear is a symbol for revelation.Same people hear the same message and someone's ears are opened and they believe and they know that this is the truest truth in the universe. This is the truth beyond any truth, underneath every single truth. And some people, they hear the same message and they walk away and they're like, "That was nice. That was a good message. What's for lunch?" The opening of the man's ear is meant to be understood as a symbol of the way in which a person is made receptive. So this is the miracle, the greater miracle. It is a great miracle that the woman's child is freed from the demon. It is a miracle that this man is healed of his deafness and his muteness, but the greater miracle is the miracle that these are pointing to and that's the miracle of the ears being opened and you hear the good news, "Oh, yes, I am a sinner. Oh yes, I have transgressed the law of God. Yes, I am guilty as charge. Yes, I accept that verdict, and yes, Jesus Christ is the only one who could save me."The problem was that Jesus wasn't clear in His teaching. You say, "Why didn't more people get saved?" The problem wasn't that His message was confused or complicated. The problem was that these people's ears were not receptive to the message. That's why Jesus often said, "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear." He means that there was a kind of supernatural hearing or understanding that many people are incapable of. The unbeliever certainly hears the words physically spoken, certainly maybe even understands them to an extent. They're perfectly ordinary words. We have done wrong. A great deal of wrong. We do need forgiveness and God will forgive you for all of the sins that you have ever committed only if you believe in His Son who is sent into this world to die on a cross precisely to secure forgiveness for those who trust in Him. Those who are in Christ will go to heaven when they die and only those.Nothing in those English sentences is difficult to understand, but the unbeliever does not understand them not in a way that saves them. Why? Because the unbeliever doesn't understand that they cannot come to God whenever they want. They can't come to God on their own timetable. It happens as a miracle. When you hear the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart, when you hear the Holy Spirit saying, "Repent of your sin. Come to Christ," at that moment, do not stop up your ears. At that moment, say, "Yes, Lord, I believe. Yes, Lord, I repent. Yes, Lord, save me."Therefore, it's important for us, for those who have been given ears to hear to bring people to Christ. We're not the ones that can save. Just like the friends that brought the deaf person to Jesus, they brought Him, they begged Him, but it's Jesus that does the work, not them. Verse 32, "They brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." And that's our job as believers. We are to bring people to Christ. We are to have gospel conversations with people. Any opportunity I have to speak about the Lord, I am going to use, I'm going to take. That's our job, but I can't transform a heart. I can't give ears to hear. Only the Lord can do that.In the same way that this man's tongue was unshackled, in the same way that this man's ears were opened, that's what the Lord has done for believers. Some of you have had your ears opened. You understand the gospel, you love the gospel and you love sermons, you love church, but your tongue is still shackled when it comes to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. You've heard it, you understand it, but you can't really speak about it. And I'm telling you why, because you feel a little ashamed. There's just a shame like, "I don't want them to think I'm a believer Christian like those Christians."I pray that the Lord unshackle our ... You know how Jesus tells these people, they saw the miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone," and then they go and they tell the whole world? And now I'm like, "Jesus, why do You do it? Is it like reverse psychology?" It's like in the great commission, Jesus went to us and said, "Do not go and make disciples of all the nations. Do not do that. We'd be making so many more disciples." Whatever it takes, this is our job. We are to unshackle. We are to speak. We are to bring people to church. We are to bring people to community. We have to bring people to read scripture together. We are to bring people to have conversations about the Lord. We are to pray for people.If you have unbelievers in your life and they have needs, ask if you can pray for them. So easy. So easy. And pray to Lord and like, "Lord, can You please flex? Lord, reveal Yourself to these people." And in the same way that these friends, anonymous, they drag their friend to Christ, the friend gets the miracle. We are to do the same here. We're meant to see the Lord's power to heal the spiritually deaf and He can give the chief of sinners even, that was what Paul called himself, a hearing ear. He can save absolutely anybody. When Jesus pours forth His Spirit, nothing is impossible and we must never despair of others. We must never regard our own hearts as too bad to be changed.You are not too much of a sinner for Jesus. Every single one of us can receive grace, can receive the crumbs from the Lord's table. All we need to do is ask. All we need to do is what this woman did. Matthew 15:2, she comes to Jesus, gets on her knees and what does she say? "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David." May that be the constant cry of our hearts, "Lord, have mercy on me." And if you pray that today, if you pray to Jesus Christ, "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me," the word of God says that you are saved, that you have received eternal life. Now, follow the Lord Jesus Christ the rest of your days.This woman asked for a crumb from the Lord's table and she received what she received. She received power of God in her life. For the power of God to be unleashed in our lives, for the crumbs to fall from the Lord's table, what did Jesus Christ have to do? The Bread of Life had to come into this world and that His body was broken. And that's what today we're celebrating in the holy communion, we are remembering the suffering of Christ. His body was broken, so that we could get the crumbs from the Lord's table to be saved. His blood was shed in order to cleanse us, to redeem us, to ransom us from our sins.With that said, I'm going to transition to holy communion. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you've repented of your sin, you are welcome to partake, even if today for the first time you repented and believe in Christ. If you do not believe in Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service, or if you are living in unrepentant sin, also please refrain. I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 11:23-32, and while I do that, if you would like to partake and you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring them to you.1 Corinthians 11:23, "For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way also, He took the cup after supper saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of Me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died, but if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."Would you please pray with me over communion. Heavenly Father, we thank You that You, the Great God of the Universe did not leave us in our sins and trespasses and You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus, we thank You that You live that perfect life. You obeyed the Father's will perfectly from the heart at all times, every second of Your incarnate life. And Lord, You were sacrificed. You sacrificed Yourself on the cross. You gave Your life in order to save us. We thank You that on the cross, You took our sin upon Yourself. You became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.Lord Jesus, we thank You that You offer us mercy. You offer mercy to whoever would plead Your name, the name of Jesus Christ. Lord, have mercy on us and You extend it graciously, willingly. And I thank You, Holy Spirit, that You are with us and I pray that You help us meditate now in the suffering of Christ to remember that His body was broken and His blood was shed in order for us to be healed from the inside out and given new hearts in order for us to be cleansed from shame and guilt. Lord, bless our time in the holy communion now. We repent of any sins, known sins and unknown sins, and we come to You with complete contrition of heart, asking for mercy and grace as we remember Your sufferings in our behalf. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.If this is your first time taking communion with us, there's two lids. If you open the top one that opens the cup and then the bottom one opens the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, He took the bread, and after breaking it, He said, "This is My body broken for you. Take, eat and do this in remembrance of Me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is the cup of the new covenant of My blood, which is poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink and do this in remembrance of Me."Lord Jesus, as we meditate on Your sufferings and we think of what a great miracle that was, the Son of God, Son of Man dying on our behalf, we also thank about the great miracle of the resurrection, incredible that You rose from the dead verifying everything that You taught to be true. And Lord, we think of our own conversions, our own regeneration, our own salvation. What a miracle that is, that we were given faith, we were given ears to hear. And we pray that we don't take that for granted, Lord, and we pray that You, in the same way that You've saved us, in the same way that You made the great miracle of our salvation, I pray that You save many around us. Save them miraculously. We believe in a great God. We believe in your great power.And with our faith, Lord, we believe, help our own belief, but we pray that you pour out Your Spirit upon our city and upon this region, upon New England. Pour out Your Spirit in a way that the world has never seen, that I pray save hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and more. And Lord, as this woman pleaded with You, we plead, Lord. We plead for our neighbors. We plead the blood for our loved ones. We plead the blood of Jesus Christ for our city. Lord, we thank You in advance for the great revival that is coming and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

Heavenly Father, we come to You not on the basis of our righteousness. We come to You not on the basis of our uprightness or our morality. We come to You on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Jesus, we thank You that You made a way for us to have a loving relationship with God the Father, a meaning to experience this Person, to experience His presence and to experience His power. And we thank You, Jesus, because of Your work on the cross, because of Your death, burial, resurrection, Your ascension and You sent us the Holy Spirit. You offer the Spirit of God to each person who humbly asks. I pray, Lord, today, that You do unleash Your great power in our lives, in our homes, in our households, in our families, in our church and in our city. We do believe in You that You are a great God and You long for people to come to know You. You long to adopt many into Your household, to make those who are not Your children, Your beloved children in whom You delight.I pray, if anyone is far from You, far from the household of God today, give them the gift of repentance, give them the gift of faith and draw them to Yourself. And Lord, for the rest of us, I do pray that You embolden us to speak the gospel, give us opportunities to proclaim the gospel, unleash our tongues, to proclaim the gospel, the truth to the people around us. There's so many that don't know You and they haven't experienced Your presence and Your power and we believe on their behalf and we long to bring them to You, Lord. And I pray that You give us much grace in that. Lord, bless our time in the holy scriptures. Bless everyone who's here today. What a great way to start off the brand new year. And Lord, I pray that You prepare our hearts for holy communion, which we'll celebrate later. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.Well, good morning and welcome to Mosaic on this communion Sunday. We're continuing our sermon series through the incredible Gospel of Mark. We've called it Kingdom Come, the Gospel of Mark and the secret of God's kingdom. And in the gospel, Jesus is revealing, He's unveiling, He is regulating revelation. And those that do believe in Him, they take Him at His word. They begin to see that He really is who He is and His power is unleashed in their life. The title of the sermon today's Great Faith Unleashes Great Power. And what we've seen so far in the Gospel of Mark is that God, who created everything, the great God overall, He takes on flesh. The Son of God is sent by God the Father. He's anointed by God the Holy Spirit to establish the kingdom of God here on earth where God's presence and His peace reigns.And how does Jesus Christ, the Son of God, establish the kingdom of God? He does so with a message. And this is the good news, the gospel. It's the gospel that changes hearts because the kingdom of God is an inside out kingdom. God changes our hearts when we believe in the good news. He changes our desires. We begin to desire prayer. We begin to desire fellowship with God's people. We begin to desire to do the will of God, to live in submission to God out of love for Him and love for neighbor. And what was the gospel that Jesus preached? It was very short. His very first sermon is documented and it went like this.He says, "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe the good news that the King of the Universe has come to save us, save us from Satan, sin and death by laying down His life on a cross." And we are to repent and believe in Him, believe that He is God, believe that He is the King of the Universe. Now, how many people believed this message? During Jesus' three year ministry, how many people believed this message and how many people were saved? I think, statistically speaking, it was a very small percentage. If you look at First Corinthians 15, it says that the resurrected Christ appear to 500 people. 500 people, what a small percentage of all the people that He ministered to.And who believed? Well, those who were seemingly crazy enough to take Jesus at His word. He spoke, they believed, and all of a sudden, they were saved and God's power was unleashed in their life when they really believed that He was the Great I Am when they humbly believed. Those people experienced the power of God. His family, Jesus' family, we read, they thought He was out of His mind. The good folks back home and His hometown mocked Him as, "Oh, you're just a carpenter. You're just the Son of Mary." And the Pharisees we read that they joined forces with the Herodians to kill Jesus. Some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. Herod Antipas believed that. Some thought He was Elijah even when He fed the 5,000 miraculously. They understood that He was presenting Himself as the Messianic King, but they didn't realize what kind of king He was, the king of people's hearts.The religious establishment said that Jesus was demon-possessed, a sorcerer, a false teacher. And even the disciples we read who saw His power over and over and over had said that they were hardened in their hearts and they had trouble believing. Amazingly, the only ones that truly recognize Jesus for who He is all of the time are the demons. The demons understood. But the few who took Jesus at His word, they experienced His power and they experienced His salvation. And today, we come to such a woman. We come to a woman who amazed Jesus Christ with her faith. To her, Jesus said, "Oh, woman, great is your faith." And her great faith released great power in her life. And great faith does release great power. Why? Because God honors bold faith because bold faith honors God.So that brings us to Mark 7:24-37. Would you look at the text with me? "And from there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. 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. 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.' And He said to her, 'For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter.' And she went away and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.' And his ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, 'He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.'This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Second, great faith is humble hunger for God. And third, great faith is humble bringing and begging. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Chutzpah, it's from the Yiddish. It means nerve. It means courage. It means impudence. It means confidence in action. I like that word. And it definitely perfectly characterizes this woman's posture of heart. She comes boldly with confidence, yet it's humble confidence. So this is point one, the great faith is humble chutzpah before God.We saw the progression from chapter 7 verses 1 through 23 to this one, which is very logical where Jesus said, He called all food clean, meaning He removed the barrier between the Jews and the Gentiles, the barrier of the dietary laws that separated Jews socially from Gentiles. And now Jesus is positioned perfectly to enter Gentile territory, something a Jewish rabbi would have never done because they consider the Gentiles unclean. And Jesus said, "It's not what comes from the outside that makes you unclean. It's that which comes from the inside that makes you unclean and Jesus can cleanse all.So now He comes into Gentile territory. This is verse 24. From there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon and He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. The human, Jesus, God incarnate, He did grow tired at some points. He just had ministered to many people. He's exhausted and now He journeys into Gentile territory, tries to keep Himself hidden. He can't do it because His fame had already proceeded Him. Tyre had a long history of antagonism toward Israel. Josephus, the Jewish historian, he said, "The inhabitants of Tyre were notoriously our bitterest enemies." There was bad blood between these two groups of people, the Galileans and people from Tyre. So that's the context.So this woman who is from the other people, she's from the other religions, she's from the other socioeconomic status, she's from the other-other everything, she comes to Jesus and she comes to Jesus boldly. Verse 25, "But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet." The unclean spirit is a demon that's made clear in verses 29 and 30. So here, we meet a mother, a desperate mother. She comes to Christ. She's heard of His explosive power and she throws herself at His feet in an attitude, a posture of heart, of self-abasement and supplication. She prostrates herself before Him, which shows the level of her distress, her pain.The pain of her child had brought her to Jesus Christ. The pain of her child had brought her to her knees. And she's interceding for her child. A mother is praying for her child. And whenever I see texts like this, just a reminder that we are to intercede for our loved ones. We are to intercede in prayer for our children and for our siblings and for our families and for our neighbors, and for our city. We are to pray. And when we intercede, God hears those prayers, especially when they're prayed with this posture of heart. The mother prayed for her child because the child couldn't pray for herself and the mother persisted until her prayer was granted.We see that this woman is very similar to the woman that was suffering 12 years from a hemorrhage in chapter 5. The likeness has seen that they were both ritually impure. They both needed miraculous power from the Lord. And despite her impurity, the Syrophoenician, like the woman with the hemorrhage, comes boldly hoping for healing from Christ. Verse 26, "Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 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.'" The Matthew parallel calls her a Canaanite woman. The word for Gentile here, it's a word that means that she was Greek speaking or Hellenized. So she's a Greek-speaking pagan Gentile from Tyre and the woman hopes that Jesus is going to heal her. She asks, she begs, she pleads. And it seems like He says no. It seems like Jesus' response dashes her hopes in a very hard way. And what is Jesus doing here? Jesus is showing that He ... First of all, there was an order to the salvation process. There was an order to the revelation that, first of all, He came to the children of Israel. Romans 1:16 says, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but it's for anyone who believes."Or 1 Corinthians 1:22, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God." Why the Jews first? Because the Jews became the first rebellious children of God. He chose them as His people. They rebelled against Him. He sends His Son into this vineyard, so to speak, to then save them, save the elect from Israel. And Isaiah 1:2-3 explains or opens, reveals the Father's heart, "Hear, O heavens and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand."The word first is used in our text proton. It's always used in order to explain that in the eschatological timeline of God's revelation, there is progress. The coming of Elijah was supposed to come before the Messiah. The binding of Satan needs to happen before despoiling of His house. Jesus' ministry to His fellow Jews was first, but He's in Gentile territory, meaning He's there to bring home the elect as well. Jesus expands His gospel ministry beyond Israel even when He was here. Only after these events have occurred in their divinely ordered sequence can the end come. As Mark says in chapter 4, "First a shoot, then an ear, then full grain in the year." There's a pattern here.The word proton and the thought behind it are similar to those of Paul in Romans 1 and Romans 11. Jesus did come for the Jew first but also for the Gentile. And here, it seems very derogatory if you think about it. He's calling her a dog. He's like, "I'm going to feed the children first and then you don't feed the dogs before the children." And you read the commentaries and they're like, "Well, it's not that offensive. It's the diminutive. He's calling her a little dog." No, that's offensive. You call anyone a little dog in that ... In our context, we love dogs. Dogs are domesticated. I have a daughter that prays on just as persistently as a Syrophoenician woman for a dog and ... Long story.But in our context, we love the dogs. People even consider themselves dog parents. Back then, they didn't domesticate dogs. Dogs were wild. Dogs lived outside of cities. Dogs were considered unclean and the New Testament continues this negative attitude. St. Paul says, "Beware of the dogs." In Philippians, Jesus says, "Don't throw what is holy to the dogs or the pigs." In Revelation 22:15, "The dog is an outsider to the community of God's grace." So using the terminology dog, he's calling her a dog, is an insult. That's what's happening. He's insulting her so to speak.And the question really is, how is she going to respond? Is she going to say, "No, I reject your verdict. I reject your bad news. I don't want your good news because I reject your bad news about my current state"? She doesn't do any of that. She hears it and she desperately continues in her persistence. Despite Jesus' seeming cool indifference and silence, she got His no. And she's like, "Okay, great, but I still ask for Your yes." Matthew 15 in the parallel context, in Matthew 15:22, "And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.' But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him saying, 'Send her away, for she is crying out after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' But she came and knelt before Him saying, 'Lord, help me.' But He answered, 'It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'"You'd expect her to get angry. You'd expect her to call Jesus all of the isms and call him all of the ist names, but she doesn't get all huffy. She's not too proud to accept the verdict. She doesn't say, "How dare You? How dare You mock me? How dare You belittle me?" She could have said, "I didn't choose to be a Gentile. I didn't choose to be born here. I didn't choose to have a daughter that suffers. I'm not even asking for myself, Jesus. Do You know how much we've suffered together? We deserve something from You." She doesn't do any of that. She realizes that she cannot stand before Jesus, before Christ, before the Son of God, before God Himself on her rights, on her moral record.Even on the basis of her own suffering, she understands that God owes her nothing. She understands who she is in relation to the God of the universe. She remains humble. Even when she hears really hard words from Jesus, she gets a really hard no, but she continues asking. She continues believing, humbly believing, humbly understanding that she has absolutely zero grounds upon which to claim His favor. She says, "Yes, I am a dog. In relation to God, I am a dog. I'm unfit for the Father's favor. I have transgressed commandments. I have lived as though God does not exist. I have broken the first commandment, it's because I've broken the first one, I've broken them all. The first commandment is, 'Thou shall have no other gods before me.' I haven't worshiped Yahweh. Yes, I am a dog. Yes, I'm outside, but, but I see Your house is big enough even for me, but I see that there's enough bread on Your table even for a dog like me." That's her posture of heart.And when we present the gospel, we say, "Look, it starts with the bad news." The bad news is we have broken God's sovereign law. Whenever you break any law, there are to be consequences for the breaking of the law, especially when it comes to God. Whoever transgresses even one law deserves death. The word of God says, "Deserves eternal damnation." The word of God says, "That's the bad news. Apart from God, we are not children. Apart from God, we are sinners." "And yes, Lord, I am a sinner. I am a filthy, wretched dog. I am a dog. Can I be Your dog? I hear You're a good master." That's what she's saying. That's why I use the word for chutzpah, it's nerve, it's brass, it's confidence and actions gall. It's audacity.And this brings us to point two, great faith is humble hunger for God. And you see this, you see what she's doing. She's not just asking for the miracle. She's relating to Jesus. She's conversing with Jesus. She wants more of God in her life. She's hungry for God. Verse 28, "But she answered Him, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'" The Syrophoenician woman, she's like, "Yes, I am a dog," but all of a sudden, she's so smart, she switches everything. She puts the dog in the house. I don't know if you notice this. She's like, "I am a dog, but I'm a dog in Your house under Your table." That's what she's doing.And this reminds us, this whole encounter with a Gentile woman, a Gentile woman's daughter, it reminds us of Elijah. Elijah the prophet was sent to the people of Israel, but the people of Israel didn't obey. They didn't believe in God. So then he goes to the Gentiles. And Jesus, when He started His ministry in His hometown, He goes to the synagogue and He reminded them of that story. He said, "Look, I've come here to the children of Israel, but the children of Israel refuse to believe. So I'm going to the Gentiles, just like Elijah was sent to the Gentiles," Luke 4:24, "And he said, 'Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut up three years and six months and a great famine came over the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath and the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah and none of them was cleansed, but only Namaan the Syrian.When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath and they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, He went away." And you say, "Why did they get so mad? Why do they get so angry?" They got so angry because He reminded them that God loves Gentiles as well. And it's not your birth, it's not your DNA, it's not your ethnicity that makes you right with God. It's your humility. It's your humble repentance where you say, "God, I don't deserve to be Your child. God, I don't deserve a relationship. God, I don't deserve cleansing in Your power, but I'm going to ask anyway."After His rejection at Nazareth, Jesus gives a clear warning of the coming mission to the Gentiles that He's going to the Gentiles. And it is in light of this background that we must read the initial response to this woman. He went to the children of Israel who said, "We don't want You. Jesus, we don't need You. We're children of Israel by birth." And Jesus said, "No one's a child of God by birth. You can't be born into the Family of God physically, only spiritually. You need to be born again." And they didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to hear that they needed to repent, that they needed to follow God.And yet this woman, she's told, "You're not a child of God. You're a dog," and she doesn't get huffy. She continues the conversation. She calls Him Lord, "Yes, Lord. Even the dogs on the table eat the children's crumbs." She says, "Yes, Lord, but there's plenty on that table even for me." She lays hold of Christ's word and bases her plea upon Him. The woman's response transforms the dog of Jesus metaphor into a domestic dog in the house. She, here in the stories, part of the household of faith. One translation says, "Since then, I am a dog. I'm not a stranger. I'm not outside." Another translation, she says, "Let me be a dog. I'll accept that I am, but even a dog has his day or her day. Yes, I'm a little dog, but can I still have some crumbs from the table? Yes, I'm a little dog, but I'm Your dog and You're my master."She calls him, "Lord, I am a humble part of the household. I don't deserve to be here, but I'm just asking for a crumb. I'm just asking for a little bit of your grace." And Jesus hears that. Jesus hears her plea and her plea is actually based on a promise from the Old Testament, a promise that God gave to Abraham. When He blesses Abraham, He says, "I'm going to extend the blessings I'm giving you to the rest of the world." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. All of the families. All of the families shall be blessed. All of the families, all of the people that come to God and say, "God, I don't have any rights to assert, that I'm coming to You with a right less assertiveness. I'm not coming to You on the basis of my goodness. I'm coming to You on the basis of Your goodness and Your generosity."Thomas Cranmer, in The Book of Common Prayer, he says, "We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." Jesus hears her and He likes her response. In verse 29, He said to her, "For this statement," another translation says, "Good answer. Good answer." I wish I was there to see the twinkle in His eye, "Good answer." "For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter," and she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.In response to the woman's audacity, her impudent faith, She wrestles a blessing from Christ. And in this, she reminds us of someone else's scripture. She reminds us of Jacob. Jacob, when he wrestled with God, when he took hold of God, and most likely, that was a Christophany because it says that he wrestled with God and it said that he wrestled with a Man. It was a Man God, the God Man, Jesus Christ. This woman is much like Jacob in her persistence, her refusal to take no for an answer. She's content to get the no, "Yes, I am a dog," but she still keeps asking for the yes.And Jacob did the same thing. Jacob in Genesis 32, he was a man in need. The next morning, he was going to meet his brother, Esau, his estranged brother, Esau, and he thought he was going to meet Esau with murderous intent, that Esau wanted to kill him. He feared for his own life, Jacob did. He feared for the lives of his wives and children. So he prays. He sends them ahead and he prays with God. And the Lord appears to him as a man and wrestled with him through the night. And of course, the Lord was play wrestling. He's not really wrestling with Jacob. Jacob thought He was wrestling. Jesus was playing.This is Genesis 32:24, "Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. And when the man saw that He did not prevail against Jacob, He touched his hip socket and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as He wrestled with him. Then he said, 'Let me go for, the day has broken.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let You go unless You bless me.' And He said to him, 'What is your name?' He said, 'Jacob.' Then He said, 'Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.' Then Jacob asked Him, 'Please tell me Your name.' And He said, 'Why is it that you asked My name?' And there, He blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been delivered.'"And you say, "Why did Jesus tell a woman no in the beginning? What is He doing? Did she change His mind from a silent indifference to helping her?" I don't think that's what's happening. When He says for this statement, He's not saying, "Because you have said this or because you have changed My mind," He's saying, "Because you've passed the test." He was testing her. He said, "No," to test her. "Is she going to persist? Is she going to continue asking?" It was a ploy designed to evoke even greater levels of faith on her part. Martin Luther commenting on this text, he said, "Christians need to persist in trusting God even when He seems to turn His back on them. We must learn to see the yes hidden in His no."I think that's really powerful, especially if you meditate on or you apply it to your life. We must work to see His yes and His no. If He says no, now He has a better yes for us. So we keep asking, we keep asking, we keep asking, and obviously, in all the Lord's will. Matthew 15:28, "Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly." Her faith delighted Jesus Christ. My daughter, sometimes they come to me and they test me to see how strict I am regarding grades. And they're like, "Yeah, but if I get an A-, is that okay?" "Oh, yeah, that's fine.""What if I get a B+?" "You're pushing it. You're pushing it." "What if I get a B ..." And my conversation is, "Look, I don't care about your GPA honestly. I can't tell you that I just did, but I really don't care. I don't care. I do. Do your best in your sports. Do your best. I care about your soul above all else. I care about your faith. I care that you grow in your relationship with the Lord. I care about you growing in wisdom." And Jesus is in the same way. He's delighted by this woman's faith. May your faith and may my faith delight the Lord in the same way. She took Christ at His word, and when He said, "You're dog," and then He blesses her like a child.And this is really how God speaks of salvation, that when we repent of our sins and turn to Christ, we get regenerated, we get a new heart, but we also get a new identity. We become a child of God. God adopts us into His family. God says, "You are not My children, but I'm going to make you My children," and it's all because of His Son, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11:6, "And without faith, it is impossible to please Him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him." He rewards those who seek Him. Do you seek Him with the same posture of heart persistently, "Lord, I want more of You. Lord, I want more of Your presence. Lord, I want more of Your power."And that's why Jesus is called the Bread of Life, and we are to hunger, our souls are to hunger for Jesus as the Bread of Life. "Lord, I'm starving. I am famished for You." What do you do when you're hungry? You can't stop thinking about food. You're just salivating. You're thinking about that next meal that's coming and this is ... What is humility? It's recognizing, "Lord, apart from You, I'm starving. My soul is starving. Lord, I seek you." And the word of God says, "Whoever seeks God will be found. He will be found by them." Her faith is dramatically contrasted with the heartened unbelief of the Pharisees who were Jewish. They consider themselves children of God, but they weren't because they had no faith in Christ. And her faith even outshines the understanding of the disciples whose hearts were hardened at times. And God loves persistent pursuit of Him and He rewards this lavishly.Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force." What does that mean? He's talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist, he sacrificed everything to proclaim that Jesus Christ is God, to proclaim that, "Jesus Christ is here. He's willing to save people." John the Baptist sacrificed everything for the kingdom of God to expand. The violent, he took it by force. It took effort. It took work on his part and the same way, if you pursue God, if you sacrifice to pursue God. And yes, this does take sacrifice like, "Rain, snow, whatever, I'm going to church." That's who you are. I commend all of you. You're here at first service. Praise be to God.I had a phone call from a pastor and he's like, "Are you guys canceling church?" I was like, "This isn't public school. We don't believe in snow days. Forget that. We're going to church." Yeah, we'll get a little wet. That's fine. We do close church if the tea's not running. That's because of the temple situation. But what I'm saying is, yes, it does take effort. You want to experience more of God? It takes effort to wake up just to study the scriptures. It takes effort to pray. It takes effort to pursue the Lord. Like the paralytic friends, remember that the house is full, they couldn't get through to Christ. They climb into the roof. They break through 18 inches of sod and branches in the roof lowering the man and the man is healed and Jesus forgives him of his sins as well.Jesus delights in persistent faith like that of this woman. Another example is Luke 18 and Luke 18, there's a woman who keeps returning to a judge, pleading her case over and over and over. And verse 4 of Luke 18 says, "For a while, he refused, but afterward, he said to himself, 'Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.'" And this is a comparison, opposites of course, that God, He wants to give us mercy, He wants to give us justice, He wants to pour out His power in our life, but do we keep coming to him persistently, doggedly, voraciously, yet humbly like this woman does?She depended on Christ's goodness, not her own, so she finally understood grace. She understood grace. "It's not because of anything in me, Lord. I plead Your mercy. I plead Your grace. And faith is such a picture. It's not this bloodless, flaccid, distracted, half-hearted acceptance of certain propositions or theorems of theology about God. No, you realize that God is a person and that God does bless those who pursue Him. Faith is driven. It's determined. It's an unyielding grip upon God Himself and that's why hunger is such a good metaphor. Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."Matthew 5:3-6, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." And we continue the text, point three is great faith, humble bringing and begging. And verse 31, "Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." Who are these people that brought this man that needed healing to Jesus? We're not told. We just know that these people heard about Christ. They heard that Christ has power to help, so they bring their friend and they beg God on behalf. They beg Christ on behalf of their friend."Lord, just Your hand, one hand touch our friend. Heal him." Verse 33, "And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue." Why does Jesus do this? I think the simplest explanation is probably the best one. He's speaking with this man, communicating with this man in the only language the man can understand. He puts His finger in his ears as though He's saying, "I'm going to do something to your hearing. I'm going to do something with your tongue, with your speech." Jesus is entering the man's world, the Great King of heaven, the Great Creator of heavens and the earth. The Sinless Lamb of God is coming down. He's identifying with this man and his condition and all of its wretchedness and all of its agony and angst. Jesus is coming right down to where the man is.Verse 34, "Looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' which is an Aramaic, "that is, 'Be opened.'" He looks up to heaven, so he's invoking God's power. He sighs. Why does Jesus sigh? And this is a sign of His deep feeling, His compassion for the sufferer. If you remember when He comes to Lazarus' tomb, He knows He's about to resurrect Lazarus, but before He does, He reveals His emotion in John 11:33, "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled. And He said, 'Where have you laid him?' And they said to Him, 'Lord, come and see,' and Jesus swept." So the Jews said, "See how He loved him."The phrase for deeply moved or greatly troubled, that phrase is a word used in another context to describe a horse snorting. One translation says, "He gave way to such distress of spirit, has made His body tremble." One commentator says, "This great sigh came out of His wounded heart." So what's happening? Jesus is moved by Lazarus' condition. He's moved by this man's condition. It offends Him, "This is not the way the world was supposed to be. The world was created and it was perfect and we were supposed to live in perfect harmony, perfect shalom, but we rebelled against God and sin entered the world and the ravages of sin, the consequences of sin are felt by each one of us." And when Jesus dies, He knows, this isn't the way it's supposed to be and everyone knows this.If you ask even an unbeliever, someone that doesn't believe in God, you ask them, "Is the world the way it ought to be? Are you the way you ought to be?" And everyone says, "No, because everyone knows deep down inside there's something wrong, something wrong with us, something wrong with the world." Where does that knowledge come from? The knowledge of a perfect reality and knowledge of a perfect world. It's written on our hearts. This is not how creation was meant to be in all of its beauty and all of its glory and now it's marred with sin. This man was made to reflect the image of God, the glory of God, and here, he's a poor wretch of a man suffering and Jesus is moved by that. He sighs and he says, "Be opened," and this is called a divine passive. He says, "Be opened by whom? By God." That's what he's saying. He's invoking the power of God. In verse 35, "His ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly." The ears were opened. That's another divine passive. His tongue was released by whom? By God. His tongue was unshackled, so to speak. The bond of his tongue was released.Jesus is creating a new world. That's what bringing the kingdom of God into the world means, that He's recreating things from the inside out and it starts with the message of the good news and it transforms our hearts from the inside. And then everything in the world, little by little, becomes transformed. Verse 36, "And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, "He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. He has done all things well."And this echoes Genesis 1:31 where God creates, He sees everything He's made and he says, "It is good." They say, "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak," and that's an illusion to Isaiah 35, talking about the Messianic kingdom, verse 5 of Isaiah 35, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and shall the lame man leap like a deer and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." Of course, Jesus' miracles weren't just miracles for miracle's sake. His miracles were always a sign, a sign of a deeper reality, a sign of who Jesus is, a sign of what Jesus has come to accomplish, which is to redeem people, to redeem the world, to save souls. And this motif of the opened ear is a symbol for revelation.Same people hear the same message and someone's ears are opened and they believe and they know that this is the truest truth in the universe. This is the truth beyond any truth, underneath every single truth. And some people, they hear the same message and they walk away and they're like, "That was nice. That was a good message. What's for lunch?" The opening of the man's ear is meant to be understood as a symbol of the way in which a person is made receptive. So this is the miracle, the greater miracle. It is a great miracle that the woman's child is freed from the demon. It is a miracle that this man is healed of his deafness and his muteness, but the greater miracle is the miracle that these are pointing to and that's the miracle of the ears being opened and you hear the good news, "Oh, yes, I am a sinner. Oh yes, I have transgressed the law of God. Yes, I am guilty as charge. Yes, I accept that verdict, and yes, Jesus Christ is the only one who could save me."The problem was that Jesus wasn't clear in His teaching. You say, "Why didn't more people get saved?" The problem wasn't that His message was confused or complicated. The problem was that these people's ears were not receptive to the message. That's why Jesus often said, "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear." He means that there was a kind of supernatural hearing or understanding that many people are incapable of. The unbeliever certainly hears the words physically spoken, certainly maybe even understands them to an extent. They're perfectly ordinary words. We have done wrong. A great deal of wrong. We do need forgiveness and God will forgive you for all of the sins that you have ever committed only if you believe in His Son who is sent into this world to die on a cross precisely to secure forgiveness for those who trust in Him. Those who are in Christ will go to heaven when they die and only those.Nothing in those English sentences is difficult to understand, but the unbeliever does not understand them not in a way that saves them. Why? Because the unbeliever doesn't understand that they cannot come to God whenever they want. They can't come to God on their own timetable. It happens as a miracle. When you hear the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart, when you hear the Holy Spirit saying, "Repent of your sin. Come to Christ," at that moment, do not stop up your ears. At that moment, say, "Yes, Lord, I believe. Yes, Lord, I repent. Yes, Lord, save me."Therefore, it's important for us, for those who have been given ears to hear to bring people to Christ. We're not the ones that can save. Just like the friends that brought the deaf person to Jesus, they brought Him, they begged Him, but it's Jesus that does the work, not them. Verse 32, "They brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." And that's our job as believers. We are to bring people to Christ. We are to have gospel conversations with people. Any opportunity I have to speak about the Lord, I am going to use, I'm going to take. That's our job, but I can't transform a heart. I can't give ears to hear. Only the Lord can do that.In the same way that this man's tongue was unshackled, in the same way that this man's ears were opened, that's what the Lord has done for believers. Some of you have had your ears opened. You understand the gospel, you love the gospel and you love sermons, you love church, but your tongue is still shackled when it comes to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. You've heard it, you understand it, but you can't really speak about it. And I'm telling you why, because you feel a little ashamed. There's just a shame like, "I don't want them to think I'm a believer Christian like those Christians."I pray that the Lord unshackle our ... You know how Jesus tells these people, they saw the miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone," and then they go and they tell the whole world? And now I'm like, "Jesus, why do You do it? Is it like reverse psychology?" It's like in the great commission, Jesus went to us and said, "Do not go and make disciples of all the nations. Do not do that. We'd be making so many more disciples." Whatever it takes, this is our job. We are to unshackle. We are to speak. We are to bring people to church. We are to bring people to community. We have to bring people to read scripture together. We are to bring people to have conversations about the Lord. We are to pray for people.If you have unbelievers in your life and they have needs, ask if you can pray for them. So easy. So easy. And pray to Lord and like, "Lord, can You please flex? Lord, reveal Yourself to these people." And in the same way that these friends, anonymous, they drag their friend to Christ, the friend gets the miracle. We are to do the same here. We're meant to see the Lord's power to heal the spiritually deaf and He can give the chief of sinners even, that was what Paul called himself, a hearing ear. He can save absolutely anybody. When Jesus pours forth His Spirit, nothing is impossible and we must never despair of others. We must never regard our own hearts as too bad to be changed.You are not too much of a sinner for Jesus. Every single one of us can receive grace, can receive the crumbs from the Lord's table. All we need to do is ask. All we need to do is what this woman did. Matthew 15:2, she comes to Jesus, gets on her knees and what does she say? "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David." May that be the constant cry of our hearts, "Lord, have mercy on me." And if you pray that today, if you pray to Jesus Christ, "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me," the word of God says that you are saved, that you have received eternal life. Now, follow the Lord Jesus Christ the rest of your days.This woman asked for a crumb from the Lord's table and she received what she received. She received power of God in her life. For the power of God to be unleashed in our lives, for the crumbs to fall from the Lord's table, what did Jesus Christ have to do? The Bread of Life had to come into this world and that His body was broken. And that's what today we're celebrating in the holy communion, we are remembering the suffering of Christ. His body was broken, so that we could get the crumbs from the Lord's table to be saved. His blood was shed in order to cleanse us, to redeem us, to ransom us from our sins.With that said, I'm going to transition to holy communion. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you've repented of your sin, you are welcome to partake, even if today for the first time you repented and believe in Christ. If you do not believe in Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service, or if you are living in unrepentant sin, also please refrain. I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 11:23-32, and while I do that, if you would like to partake and you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring them to you.1 Corinthians 11:23, "For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way also, He took the cup after supper saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of Me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died, but if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."Would you please pray with me over communion. Heavenly Father, we thank You that You, the Great God of the Universe did not leave us in our sins and trespasses and You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus, we thank You that You live that perfect life. You obeyed the Father's will perfectly from the heart at all times, every second of Your incarnate life. And Lord, You were sacrificed. You sacrificed Yourself on the cross. You gave Your life in order to save us. We thank You that on the cross, You took our sin upon Yourself. You became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.Lord Jesus, we thank You that You offer us mercy. You offer mercy to whoever would plead Your name, the name of Jesus Christ. Lord, have mercy on us and You extend it graciously, willingly. And I thank You, Holy Spirit, that You are with us and I pray that You help us meditate now in the suffering of Christ to remember that His body was broken and His blood was shed in order for us to be healed from the inside out and given new hearts in order for us to be cleansed from shame and guilt. Lord, bless our time in the holy communion now. We repent of any sins, known sins and unknown sins, and we come to You with complete contrition of heart, asking for mercy and grace as we remember Your sufferings in our behalf. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.If this is your first time taking communion with us, there's two lids. If you open the top one that opens the cup and then the bottom one opens the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, He took the bread, and after breaking it, He said, "This is My body broken for you. Take, eat and do this in remembrance of Me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is the cup of the new covenant of My blood, which is poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink and do this in remembrance of Me."Lord Jesus, as we meditate on Your sufferings and we think of what a great miracle that was, the Son of God, Son of Man dying on our behalf, we also thank about the great miracle of the resurrection, incredible that You rose from the dead verifying everything that You taught to be true. And Lord, we think of our own conversions, our own regeneration, our own salvation. What a miracle that is, that we were given faith, we were given ears to hear. And we pray that we don't take that for granted, Lord, and we pray that You, in the same way that You've saved us, in the same way that You made the great miracle of our salvation, I pray that You save many around us. Save them miraculously. We believe in a great God. We believe in your great power.And with our faith, Lord, we believe, help our own belief, but we pray that you pour out Your Spirit upon our city and upon this region, upon New England. Pour out Your Spirit in a way that the world has never seen, that I pray save hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and more. And Lord, as this woman pleaded with You, we plead, Lord. We plead for our neighbors. We plead the blood for our loved ones. We plead the blood of Jesus Christ for our city. Lord, we thank You in advance for the great revival that is coming and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

Shownotes and Transcript The question 'who is indigenous' comes up a lot while discussing demographics and immigration.  And no country has this been asked more than Israel. Brian of London joins us to discuss a Twitter/X post and article titled "Israel Palestine: Who's Indigenous?". For some reason this question is contentious. Brian breaks it down (according to anthropologist Jose R Martin-Cobo) under a series of headings of Land, Culture, Common Ancestry, Language, Religion and Blood. Basically we are looking at a historic continuity. Brian uses these headings to look at whether it is the Jews or the Palestinians that fit this indigenous definition  Brian of London completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging. But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business. Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows. Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked! In his spare time, he assists with a gigantic class action lawsuit in Australia on behalf of the entire crypto industry. Interview recorded 2.1.24 Connect with Brian... X                        https://x.com/brianoflondon?s=20 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  Transcript (Hearts of Oak) And it's wonderful to have Brian of London join us once again. Brian, thanks so much for your time today. (Brian of London) Well, thank you very much for having me on.  Not at all. There's lots to discuss in your neck of the woods, as they would say in the Brits, in your part of the world. And obviously we have had, we have a Tera Dahl who was just back from Israel. She'd been there three, four weeks for Real America's Voice reporting. We had Bridget Gabriel on actually discussing. But I think we want to go on a slightly different tact, and it was one of your tweets looking at, and I think part of it was from another article, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? and I've always had a very firm understanding because of biblical history and where I come at this from a Christian but even there's confusion amongst parts of the Christian world and community but that may mess this conversation up even more. But let's, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous? Maybe tell us why this was of interest to you, and then we can go with some of the categories and how you define this term indigenous. Yeah, and I just realized I've got my window open. So if you're hearing background noise, tell me, otherwise I'll leave it open. I'm in my bomb shelter, which everyone should know. And fortunately, we actually haven't been in it for about 10 days now and the last major barrage of rockets was just to the south of us on midnight on new year's eve obviously they did the fireworks for us and that.  We we had our Muslim mayor, Sadiq Kahn do the fireworks for us as well in London but it was different firework.  Different and the thing with that was actually it was, they fired them. They always fire them at exactly on the hour. In fact, there's a joke that the guy controlling the missiles, his name is Abu Dekar. Dekar means on the minute. So we say, oh, Abu Dekar is firing again. Because they fire at exactly 12, so then the alarm goes at sort of 12.01, and the missiles arrive at sort of 12.01 or 12.02. Anyway, I didn't hear an alarm because it was south of me. I just heard the booms when we intercepted.  But yeah, I'm in my bomb shelter. But what I sent you, I sent you an article which actually was published in 2014 by a friend of mine. And I helped get this published because Israeli Cool, the blog that it's on, the guy who runs that and me both found this guy who is a Métis Canadian indigenous person. Or they call them First Nations in Canada. That's the politically correct term. He doesn't mind being called an Indian. He's quite happy with that or whatever terminology, but he's Métis, which is a tribe that its original area was sort of somewhere in Canada. But he put out this article in a very obscure kind of place, and I just grabbed it and I said to him, can you just say all of this stuff again for the Israeli audience? And that's what we did. And because he has studied properly the way the UN came to regard what an indigenous person was. Because indigenous means something completely different from people than it does for plants and animals. Plants and animals are indigenous when they've been in the same place for thousands or millions of years. But people is a totally different beast. We have moved around the world ever since we were people. Vast migrations out of Africa. The term indigenous just doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean the same thing for a person as it does for a plant. The kind of way that this is seen in the academic literature, and remember, this is infused with leftism, so we're picking and choosing here a little bit. And this guy, Jose Martinez Cobo, he came up with this definition. And this has stuck. And this really is the way the entire field looks at indigenous. And I'll just read or direct from the summary of his work what these rules are. Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and acceptance as a member by the community. Okay, so you have to actually feel that you're indigenous, okay? Historical continuity with pre-colonial and or pre-settler societies, okay? I'll read them off and then we'll sort of go through them and what they mean for Jews and Israel and what they mean for Palestinians, for example, and then we can sort of look at this in relation to Brits and Irish people and, you know, English, Welsh, Scottish, and, strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social, economic, or political systems, distinct language, culture, and knowledge. I'm going to skip one, and then I'm going to say resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities. Okay, this is anthropology language. But the basics are, and my friend summarizes them like this, land, language, culture, spirituality, and the last one is blood. And we'll get back to that because that's actually that's the one that's just the least important actually for Jews, especially for Jews. So Jews self-identify this is obvious it's like, we've been three and a half thousand years or so I mean the the numbers claim there's a book to my right, if you go full screen there's a book the atlas of Jewish history just behind me. And in that, this one here, the Atlas of Judaism, okay, we can go back to. If you go back to that, if you start looking for dates, Abraham kind of is dated at about 4,000 years ago, to 2,000 BC. He walked from Mesopotamia all the way down across the Middle East, Iran, Iraq. It's mixed up because none of those are real. Well, Iran and Persia became real soon, you know, later. Basically, none of it is what is there today. And he walked across that. And then he walked down through Israel. And he walked on a road that we have in Israel today called Highway 40. It's the road that runs down the backbone of what we call Judea-Samaria, what the Jordanians renamed the West Bank, that road follows the path that Abraham took and is described in the bible as the path that Abraham took and when you when you drive quickly down that road today you see the road signs in the order in which they appear in the bible. It's as real as that and that is 30 or 40 kilometres that way I'm pointing off to the east, the sea is that way that's my west, this stuff is real. Now, whether you believe the story of Abraham was real or not to the Jewish people, it is foundational. It is our ethnogenesis. It's the start of what led to being Jewish, but that's really. But I just want, actually, when you say it, it depends what you believe is real or or not, the level of documentation to actually prove that actually the Old Testament story and New Testament story is more documented than nearly any other historical event. And yet the world believes parts of history, but you've got this mountain of evidence and they say, oh no, that's just fables. So when you say, if you want to believe it or not, actually, it's there staring you in the face that there is no more evidence for the biblical events than there is for anything else in the world. Correct. And it's even more than the biblical events. It's that the book that was woven around it, the Hebrew Bible, it was something that Jews preserved through an enormous act of preservation that I don't think has a parallel in the world. Okay. The Torah, as we call it, the way it is passed down is we write it out by hand. And the people who write the Torah, they write it without making a mistake. And if they make a mistake, they throw it away and start again. And there's no tippex and there's no scratching it out and there's no backspace key. This is and this document is so unbelievably well preserved that when you dig up the dead sea scrolls that were that were, you know in the caves of Qumran for three thousand years or two and a half thousand years when you dig those up, actually I don't know they might be a bit more modern than that but when you dig them up I can go and look at them and my Hebrew is not great but I can read the words. Biblical Hebrew is different from modern Hebrew, but I recognize the words. And if I open a modern Torah, they are the same. The transcription errors down the Torah is… We have this record. Abraham ends up in Hebron. He buys a cave to bury his wife in. That purchase of the cave in Hebron again. It doesn't matter whether you believe it happened exactly. That purchase forms the basis of our property rights in the modern world. That purchase of a cave is the oldest recorded land transaction that follows the modern form of transactions, offer, consideration, acceptance. Our whole edifice of modern contract law is built around that cave purchase. And that's part of Judaism. Judaism, then, of course, and I'm no biblical scholar, but Joseph goes to Egypt, the children of Israel become numerous, they leave Egypt in a hurry, which is also a story of the emancipation of slavery. Again, Jews led the way in that. What's interesting about our civilization today is not that we had slavery. It's not that the Americans had slavery. It's that it was abolished, and Jews abolished slavery within their own systems a millennia before. What's interesting about the West is not having had slavery. What's interesting is having got rid of slavery. I'll put forward that that's a Jewish. You get that because eventually, and it took the South Africans a lot longer than anyone else to realize this, but when you read the Bible and you read all men are created in the image of God, you just have to get rid of slavery. It doesn't work. Again, a Jewish thing. All of these stories, and then the Jews come back to Israel, and yes, there's wars and stuff, and there's Canaanites and Philistines and battles and Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down. All of these phrases I can just throw at you. The majority of a reasonably educated Western populace, they just understand those cultural references in a way. I don't need to explain Jericho. You know, I don't need to explain a lot of this stuff. David and Goliath, that's David the Jew versus Philistine Goliath. It happened actually near Gaza. Well, in the hills, sort of inland from there. But Samson, Samson and Delilah, that story is in Gaza. All of these foundational stories for Jews, which Christianity also adopts, the whole of the Hebrew Bible is basically part of the Christian canon. That happens here. Those are place names. Into the New Testament, Armageddon is Megiddo. It's 80 kilometres that way. I can drive there. Yes, I think I can still drive there. It's not closed. We have such ties. We have our ancestors buried. The reason why Hebron is special today and why Jews want to live there is because there's a massive building that Solomon built. It's the same era as the famous Western Wall, the Temple Mount. That building is built on top of this cave that Abraham bought. That's why it's there. That's where we buried our matriarchs and our patriarchs. This is a, and you know when when Martinez talks about historical continuity and strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, the strongest link you can have is ancestral burial sites, you know everybody sort of knows the kind of, from America, the you know, how, oh this is this is ancient burial lands, well Hebron is the burial site of Abraham's family, basically. Nablus, who is the modern name. The old biblical name is Shem. That's actually closest to me. That's literally inland from me now. That's the burial site of Joseph. There's a building there called Joseph's Tomb. Now, the Muslims sort of revere it because they stole our prophets and stuff. But they only revere it because we do. The site of the temple in Jerusalem is the site on which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac, where the whole story of the ram and the burning bush, the.. sorry, the ram caught in the bush, not the burning bush, that's Moses. That story happens on what is now today the temple mount. That was the position of the high holies. That's why we built the temple there, twice. That's why the Romans destroyed it. That's why the Muslims came along when they conquered it and built a mosque and a mausoleum on that spot, because it matters. Those are elements of colonization. These other components like distinct language, culture, and knowledge. Now, yes, we revived Hebrew as a modern language. That was controversial because some very religious Jews would say that Hebrew is the language of prayer. It's the language of the Torah. are we shouldn't use it for day-to-day stuff when we're going to be obscene and tell jokes and in fact what tends to happen is we use Arabic for the worst stuff but um, that was controversial but it was also hugely important that there is continuity that any Jewish child living in Israel, any Israeli child, can pick up an ancient scroll that was buried in the desert, and all the letters look familiar. That's amazing. Nobody reads hieroglyphics. The Roman Catholic Church teaches their clergy to read Latin, but it's not a day-to-day language anywhere. Hebrew is a day-to-day language, and it has biblical continuity back 3,000 plus years. Now, when I read through this list, which we'll post later, I missed one. I said I was going to miss one. In the UN, they've got this one line, status as a non-dominant social group. I can't help, and I've discussed this with Ryan. Ryan Bellerose is the Métis Canadian. That's almost like they had to put that in to try and find some way to make Jews not indigenous in Israel. Because we are, Jews are now the dominant social group in one place in the world, Israel. It's like we we won, we're the only ones actually, we're really the only indigenous people that lost our land and got it back and that is essentially, Zionism is that, it is the return of Jews to Zion, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, where, you know, that psalm, that's, what, 600 years BCE? That's Zionism. We've been trying to get back to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, for thousands of years, ever since we were cast out by the Romans. I think the last time Jews really ran the place was up until when we revolted too much and the Romans kicked us out on 135 or 132 or whatever it was, and changed the name. And again, this is colonizer versus indigenous. What do colonizers do? They bring a new language, they try to crush whatever markers there are of indigenousness. And then they destroy, they build their new stuff on top of old stuff. They try and erase indigenous identities. And that's what's actually happened all over the world. You know, Native Americans cling on in America. Across Europe there are sort of lots of indigenous identities that were crushed by the Romans that never reappeared. I would say that the EU itself was trying to do this, it's it's trying to sort of flatten Europe and you all become Europeans in a horrible Marxist sense and I think that's one of the reasons why Israel is so hated by this globalist elite type thing, is that we are just this total exception. We are the indigenous people that came back, made it work, and made it work. And it doesn't mean, and let's just sort of circle back to the blood, and then I'll let you get a word in edge ways. Blood. This is the bit that gets thrown at us all the time on the internet. Okay? Every time I post indigenous, oh, you're from Europe. Well, actually, I was born in South Africa, so I'm African. You know, bite on that, you chumps. I'm second generation. My parents were born in Africa. I'm second generation African. So I don't know where you think I should go back to. I grew up in London. Yeah, that's true. My accent is London, but I never felt English actually. I've got my British citizenship, but am I English I don't think so. I'm Jewish, Jews belong here, so blood is uniquely unimportant to Jews for one good reason and the reason is Ruth, the story of Ruth in the bible is the story that actually to this day means that Jews accept converts. As soon as you accept conversion, it means blood doesn't matter. Now, we do not have an easy conversion process, okay? And in fact, you know, whenever I've, and I know some of my best friends here are converts, and they're more orthodox than me, more, you know, they observe of Sabbath, Shabbat, more than I do. And in many ways. But there's no hint or there's no feeling for me personally, or you don't find it anywhere in Israel, that if somebody has gone through the process of an Orthodox-recognized conversion, nobody here looks down upon them. In fact, many of us realize that's a lot harder than just being born. So blood. I don't know where his blood is from. In fact, I think the two converts I know the best, Australians and both, I think, from Catholic families, doesn't matter. So I don't care about blood. Now, it turns out I actually am Kohanim, and you can check, but there's DNA markers. But that's not what makes me Jewish. What makes me Jewish is self-identification, keeping the rituals, doing Shabbat dinners. And it doesn't even matter the level of observance. It's some level of observance and some recognition that it means something to be Jewish. So when they throw at you this Khazar crap and go back to Europe, and I mean, even that is ala panim, on its face. That doesn't mean the same thing. On its face, it's just ridiculous, because more than half the Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern backgrounds. Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria. All of these places is where Jews came from. Right now, and Ethiopia, of course, we've airlifted them. All of these things mean that we're just a mongrel mix these days. And our kids are all meeting and intermarrying between different... There really isn't a level of racism that I can certainly recognize in America. So blood, what does blood mean? It doesn't... It's important. It's one of the markers. But it is not who makes you a Jew. Well, I think, yeah, there are a lot of points to pick up. For me, actually, it's the history. Abraham 4,000 years ago, David 3,000, establishing Jerusalem as the capital. So you've got 2,000 years of history on the land, in effect, before the Romans took over. The renaming of that land as Palestine to remove Israel off the face of the earth, just like Iran want to do..  That's deliberate.. Just exactly. Syria, Palestina and yeah of course the word came from the Greek from palash invaders from the sea, you can, it's like you can get you can get locked in all that crappy silly detail, it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the kingdom of David, it was or Judah or Samaria. Today it's Israel because when you form a modern nation, within the framework of modern nations that arose in the 1850s onwards. I can't remember the philosophical name for this, but Israel slots in within modern nationhood as the land of the Jews. Should there be a Kurdish nation? Yeah, sure. I just want to tell you something else about this. indigenous status is not zero sum, because there are indigenous people does not mean that nobody else is indigenous. Now, and I'm not coming to the Palestinians by any means next. We have Aramaic Christians living in the Galilee region. They are following a kind of Christianity that emerged very soon after Jesus died. And they are speaking Aramaic, or they're doing their liturgy in Aramaic. I've met one. There's a famous picture of Tommy Robinson standing next to a bearded guy with a big hat wearing his Mossad t-shirt. That's Father Nadav, and we went to meet him in Nazareth. That's in Nazareth. He lives there. There's a community of Aramaic Christians. The only place you can be an Aramaic Christian safely in the whole Middle East is Israel. And then we've got Druze. Druze is a kind of, it's wrong to call them completely Muslim. They're something else entirely. And their geographic region encompasses Syria and Lebanon and Israel. But where are they best off? Most of them, realize, in Israel. We've got some Baha'is who came from Iran, settled here. They're up in Haifa. We have Samaritans, actually. That's very close to me. This town of Nablus, okay? What's the Palestinian town of Nablus? Well, it comes from Neopolis, the Roman for new city. So even their name in Arabic of Nablus, it's a corruption of a Roman word. It's not Arabic. And you know this because Neopolis, anything with a P is not Arabic.  So the P gets converted to a B. It's just like the Palestinians, when they say it, they call it a phalestini, because they can't say P, so they change it to E. So Nablus, which is the place of Shem, again, Romans, they knew Shem is in the Bible many times, but they have to rename the place Neopolis to assert Roman dominance, and that's what you do. The Samaritans live on a place called Mount Gruzine, which overlooks that. They're there. We've got Bedouin Arabs who have lived here for a long time, but Bedouins have moved across the whole Middle East for centuries. To call them indigenous, they have parts of their culture here, but it's not unique to Israel. That's the point, the Bedouin culture is across the whole of the Arab peninsula all the way out. So did any part of their culture arise in Israel? Not really. But they have something called rights of longstanding presence, for sure. And they serve in our armed forces, and we have all sorts of internal political disputes over where they live and how they live and what their place. But again, that's stuff we can deal with. It's not sort of virulent hatred all the time. But this point of, is Islam indigenous to Israel? No, nothing of it. The only bit that they talk about is the farthest, there's a passage in the Quran that talks about the farthest mosque, and that has been reinterpreted. And there's a very famous clip from Al Jazeera from years and years ago. Professor Mordechai Kadar, he went on Al Jazeera in Arabic and he asked the host, how many times is Jerusalem named in the Quran? And the Quran was written 700, 800 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. Everybody in the whole world, the known, educated world, knew the name Jerusalem. But yet it does not appear once in the Quran. Not once. There's an oblique reference to a night journey by Muhammad to the furthest mosque. And he tied his horse up outside and ascended to heaven. That is the entire basis for Islamic claim to Israel and Jerusalem. Other than the fact that they assume everything. They're a replacement theology. So they brought in all of Christianity. They brought in all of Judaism. They then tell us we forged it to take out Muhammad. And they write their book, the Quran, which they then say, we're the corruptors of. Jews are worse than Christians because we went astray. Jews are the ones who went astray. Christians are the ones who were just led astray. You followed us instead of the Muslims so we're both cursed but Jews are cursed a bit more. But that's that's not the claim, that's the claim, that's what we're fighting over. And of course well yeah and of course you'd, you've got the period of the Romans and then the period of Arabs or Muslims from what 600... And crusaders, Sala in the Kurd, This history just goes, but all of it, the constant theme throughout is, one, there were Jews always here. Jews never left. There were Jews in Sfat. They came back in 1200 and 600. The only people who ever regarded this land as the place of genesis of their entire civilization is Jews.  Yeah. And then you go through, you're right, all those histories with the Ottoman Empire, whatever morphing of Arabness or Muslimness there was on there. And then you're right that Muslims tie Jerusalem to a story about a flying donkey, but we'll not even go into that. We'll not have to base what you believe in that. But the issue, I guess, you have now is that the clash between Romans and the Jews living there was a land grab and dominance. It's something much deeper in terms of Islam, and I 100% believe that Islam was started. One of the main reasons is to eradicate who Jesus is. You can't say Jesus, son of God. You cannot, that he was simply a man. And at its heart, and that means at its heart is also hatred of the Jews and the Jewish people, because without Judaism, you do not have Christianity. It's impossible. But that hatred we have seen over the whole time, and 1948, it is an absolute miracle to see what happens. I think maybe the hatred is from, one, the hatred that Islam has against Judaism. That's one. But also there's a second hatred that I think the miracle of modern-day Israel, that many people cannot accept that, and they look for something darker. You know, Israel being the centre of everything, being in control. And they come up with this idea to remove any understanding that actually you can't explain. 1948, when you read about what happened, I've read it in 67, 73, and all of those, it is a miracle. It could not happen, should not happen. And yet Israel stands there as a proud country, hugely successful in the midst of basket cases of countries. But yeah, talk to us about that level of vitriol against Israel and against the Jewish people that exists not only in the Middle East, but actually exists in the media and across the world, really. Well, I, you know, every Jew does, you know, I guess my kids are starting to do it now. You start, you know, when you're brought up Jewish, eventually at some point you understand that this thing called the Holocaust happened.  And what it does to a lot of us is you go through a phase where you try and, why? What's with the hatred? Why the hatred? And Islamic Jew hatred, I can see that in the Quran. I can see the hundred and whatever verses it is that mention Jews. And whereas we start off a little bit favourable in the early stuff, once Jews reject Muhammad and say no you're not a prophet we're done with our era of prophets, that was a thousand years ago, you're not one of them, once that happened he really then just goes on a the rest of his life is like, how can I f these Jews? And you know he kills a lot of Jews in Khaybar he takes their wives, their daughters, their and then also in Khaybar this other story, this very pivotal battle, after the battle when he kills all the men and he's got the women and one of the stories that's not well, it pretty authoritative, but again this doesn't matter whether it happened or not, it matters whether Muslims believe it, is that he was poisoned by this Jewish woman that he'd taken prisoner before he rapes her and that he died five years later from the poison he was was given then. Now, again, you get all sorts of scholars saying this is unlikely and it probably didn't happen. It doesn't matter. Do Muslims teach their children that a Jew killed Muhammad? Yes, they do. In large numbers, very large numbers. And so Jews rejected the prophet Muhammad. We don't call him a prophet. He isn't a prophet. He's their prophet. He's not our prophet. We rejected that. He fought lots of battles against us. He killed a lot of Jews, and eventually he was poisoned by a Jewess. These are not good things to teach your kids for coexistence. That's what they do. That kind of antisemitism, I understand that. That's ancient and it really hasn't changed. It can be dialled up or dialled down depending on the authoritarian rulers. UAE today might be dialling it down a lot. Great. In two or three generations, I'll feel a lot happier. Now, Nazi anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, again, Christianity had its creation stuff, and Christianity for a long time said that Jews killed Jesus. Despite Jesus being one of us, we, you know, and it took until, when did the Catholic Church change that? I mean, it was like in 1960 something or other, was the papal, you know, it's like, okay, thanks. It was the Romans. We can all agree on the Romans, but yes, Jews are stood accused of killing Jesus. That was one thing. Jews are successful. I don't know what it is. I personally have come to believe that Intel, the guy who founded Intel, Andy Grove, his autobiography was called Only the Paranoid Survive. I think Jews have been bred to be paranoid. There's other reasons which are genetically passed down. Whereas the Catholic Church, for a lot, makes its priests celibate, they become the most highly educated members of society, but yet they don't procreate. Jews did the opposite. You become a rabbi, the town supports the rabbi, and the smartest people who become rabbis then have 18 children. Perhaps that's the reason why we've got higher IQ. I don't know. We certainly value, as a culture, we value learning. We value books. We value, the fact that we've got troops in Gaza. What do they do at the weekends? Some of them, they drive armoured personnel carriers into Gaza with a gigantic Torah scroll so that they can stand in some house with bullet holes all around and do the Shabbat service with a real giant Torah scroll. First, they take in little ones, but once the roots are secure, what are we doing? Are we taking a book? This is the most ridiculous. And then what we do is, we do Talmudic rituals, as the Nazis and the anti-Semites would say. We're not doing it. It's not because, we're not out looking for the blood to drink and make my matzah. That's just utter crap. We're doing it because we value these traditions. We passed them down, and the continuity of Jews as a people has depended on us revering those words. That's why copying the Torah accurately for 3,000 years by hand, that's an astonishing cultural achievement that no culture on earth has managed. You know, Aborigines in Australia might have told stories orally, and that's a great sort of pass down. But we wrote it in a book, and the story of Abraham buying the cave becomes the root of Western civilization. So, you know, you can argue Judeo-Christian civilization for sure. And, you know, some people will say that democracy comes from the Greeks or whatever.  Much more of our morality comes from the Jewish Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, than any other foundational thing. And again, the Americans, I'll criticize the Americans and I'll criticize the West in a very specific way. Rights versus responsibility. Okay? If you read the Ten Commandments, what you are reading is not a charter of rights. You do not have the right to life. You do not have the right to property. You do not have the right to your wife. You read a responsibility. You read about honouring your parents. You read about not murdering people. You read about not coveting the other guy's ox or wife. Those are responsibilities. You follow those responsibilities within your tribe. Your rights are implied. And I think America and the whole Western notion of human rights and stuff, it puts the cart before the horse. What are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is not to lob rockets at civilian areas on midnight of new year's eve, your responsibility is not to break out through a fence and go murder and rape people in the most horrible way, if you follow the responsibility of not being complete and utter bleeps then you can have a right to life, we are going to remove we, you do not have a right to life when you commit those acts against us. That's what we're seeing now. We're not Christians, and the whole turn the other cheek thing, it's not in our book, and quite rightly. There's too much of that, and the modern Western Christianity has gone too far. Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting. Here, I'll not go down that route, but actually, I want to finish off with, I'm sure you've had, well, you face, I'm sure, a lot of abuse. And if you are a Zionist Shill, maybe you can share some of that, Brian, because I'll happily be a Zionist, but never get paid for it, which is a bummer.  None of us get paid for this. It costs me a fortune living here.  I know it would be much easier if we did get paid, but that's not how life works. But it's interesting what's happened. Maybe the backlash you get whenever you talk about Israel's existence and the history and that clash, and also what we are seeing at the moment. It's interesting, what's the term? Proportionality is the term that's used. And I always wonder, what's proportional to rape or murder of children? Do you really want to go down that? Because that's a very perverse path if you want to go down that. But yeah, tell us about that, the backlash, but also then Israel doing what it has to do to exist. And if other countries want to be peaceful, then that makes life a lot easier for everyone, including the Arab countries around. Well you know the backlash, first of all, hurty words on the internet doesn't doesn't hurt me, you know I'm very much a bit of a free speech absolutist, I'll block and I'll mute if they're boring. I mean but mostly I like, you know and I'll spar with a few of them you know. I'm just looking to my left, I've got a screen here, sort of one of these things that kicked this off was because someone said, so I get that a lot of Israeli Jews are scared right now. So here's an idea. Why don't we offer them refuge in our own countries? Invite them to Britain, the States, and Canada. It's a win-win. Israelis get to live somewhere they feel safe, and the locals get their land back. Now, after everything I've just said to you, firstly, we've tried living in other people's countries. It doesn't always go so well. You know, German Jews felt great in 1929, and Polish Jews felt great also. This was not a long-term, tenable solution. And so what I replied was, lol, no, we're home. When you dig up London, you find Roman stuff. When we dig up Jerusalem, we dig past that crap to the city of our Jewish King David. Pithy, short, you can't put all the history of the Middle East in a tweet or an x-post or whatever we're supposed to call it. Praise be to Elon. Now, so I get this back. This isn't how the world works. Just because you've owned something thing doesn't mean you always will. Also, the Celtic tribes inhabited London long before the Romans, and Canaanites existed in Palestine long before Israel. Well, as and when some Canaanites show up, and as long as they're not still doing the child sacrifice shit, we will give them a nice little bit of the country, and they can live and practice their whatever Canaanite religion. But the point is, there is no continuity of Canaanites, because probably because Jews genocided them, whatever, I don't care. Canaanite was absorbed into the Jewish tribes. That's what happened. There's nobody doing Canaanite today, so they don't exist. The Palestinians are not Canaanites. They're not Philistines either. They don't know anything about Canaanites or Philistines. But, you know, you get all of this stuff. David, this is a good one, actually. Chrissy, David was a corrupt criminal whose family came from Iraq. That's the Koran version of David. I was wondering. I missed that. I know. I know. That one's just brilliant. And it's just very simple. And it's with a little Canadian flag. And Chrissy is the name. Compassion, confidence, something about a sire. 170,000 followers.  You kind of and then you know you get from sama Lebanese when you check your DNA it's east European, okay my yes yes my DNA did come a bit, because before South Africa we were somewhere in northeast Europe but again and then you know when I look through all of this telling me that I don't belong where I know I belong. Look, I came to Israel when I was 39 years old. I married my Israeli wife some years before that, tried to learn Hebrew in London. I'm crap at Hebrew, okay? I can barely read. I can sort of read, but more often than not, I'm copy-pasting into... Oh, Apple. Apple does not translate Hebrew by default. It's like not not one of their default languages. It's like, get with this. Anyway, I arrive in Israel as a 39-year-old PhD physicist, basically illiterate, but I feel more at home than I did in London. Explain that. I can't explain that. There's this woman, Eve Barlow, she's here visiting right now. She lands and she immediately feels at home. She lives in LA, She's a writer or she wrote, and writes about music. Why does she feel at home? And so many Jews you talk to, and this is a funny thing, when non-Jews come here and feel at home, they then start looking through their family tree and discover that four generations back, they are Jewish. And they start questioning their self. There's something that I can't explain to you that is is magical about being in Israel. Because it's tough. It is more comfortable to live in America and Britain. It really, it wasn't the easiest place to move to, but it just felt better. 100%. I think we'll finish it there. I think it's good to get a short conversation about this in Israel. And of course, you could take it wider into other countries. But that makes it very convoluted. And I think this perfectly fits to this current time. But, Brian, thank you so much. All the links for these will be in the description and our social media posts so people can follow the article and your post on it and have fun at the replies, which is sometimes the best part of Twitter posts. It certainly is. Anyway, yeah, we can do updates about the whole situation another time. But, yeah, thank you. This was really good. This is stuff I like talking about. This is positive. This is the reasons that people need to understand why Israel's not going anywhere. And that's the other. The last thing I'll say is this. You know, for 75 years, the Arabs have fought the correct, well, since 67 in particular, and through the 60s, basically, with the rise of Arafat and the PLO, which was a creation of the Soviet Union, the whole Palestinian identity. That's another point, but I'll just finish with this. They fought the correct battle to remove a colonial occupier from land. They fought the right battle that would have got the British out of India. Or the French out of Algeria, or half a dozen European countries out of bits of Africa. They fought the correct guerrilla warfare tactics, sort of terrorism, murders, all of this stuff. And it spectacularly fails to move Jews out of Jerusalem and Israel, because we are not colonial settlers. We will never be colonial settlers. The mindset, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when the Americans come here and tell us that we're not fighting the ground war in Gaza the correct way, and they're going to tell us how well they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were fighting thousands of miles from home. Our soldiers can actually stand at the top of a building with binoculars and see their homes. They go home, you know, if they're released at the weekend, they get taken to the border and they're home in 25 minutes. We are not projecting power as an imperial conquering army trying to make Iraqis be Democrats. It's not that. And so that the whole way in which the Palestinians are fought, encouraged by the entire world, encouraged by people shouting free Palestine from the river to the sea. When you do that, you encourage millions of poor Arabs to fight a war that they will never, ever win by the methods that they're fighting. They will never, ever win. They will never commit an act so atrocious that I will wake up in the morning and say, because believe me, October 7th was that act, that I will wake up in the morning and say, you know what? I think I'm going to go live in Berlin. That's not going to happen. You're not going to force me off my land with these acts. They don't work. it's wrong it's just totally the wrong approach, killing us doesn't matter, how many you rape, how many you kill, the only thing that will happen is the scale of our response and the sheer biblical nature of the response will come out, go read the story of Dinah, the men of Shechem, that's the story that's what's going on in Gaza right now, go read that story if you don't know your Bible. One woman was raped in the Bible. Dinah, go read that. Well, maybe those who live in Gaza, the Muslims or the Arabs, if they took this indigenous rights, then maybe they can move the refugee camp to Mecca. I'm sure it would be wonderful and they can enjoy that.  Here's a little bit about Yemen. Yemen is Arabia, Arabs to Arabia. 

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus' amazing miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Jewish rulers refused to accept Him as their Messiah. They hated Jesus because He stood in the way of their power and prestige. Therefore, they decided to put the life-giver to death as soon as possible.Year B Quarter 4 Week 42All Bible verses are from the NKJVFind the Lessons Here: https://mybiblefirst.org/?module=products&func=product&id2=25Connect with Us:Website: https://startingwithjesus.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingwithjesusFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/startingwithjesus

Despite Jesus fulfilling all Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah, the  religious leaders still wanted Him dead.

Despite Jesus' crucifixion being a deadly and torturous experience, it was still a good Friday. Because without this sacrifice, without Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, we would not be able to be in a relationship with God!–Stay connected!Website: inspirechurch.comFacebook: facebook.com/inspirechurchInstagram: instagram.com/inspirechurchLove People. Love God. Inspire Our World.Support the show

Jesus' state of humiliation was the time during which he did not make full use of his heavenly power and glory. To many, he looked weak, and he died a criminal's death. Palm Sunday was a day of humility; Jesus' triumphal entry was overshadowed by the details of glory that it lacked and by what was coming. Daniel 12 gives answers to those who ask whether their humiliation is part of God's plan and how long it will endure. Despite Jesus' humility, he rose, and everyone will eventually acknowledge him as Lord. Vindication was already God's plan 570 years before Jesus died. Let's study Daniel 12 and find out what it means for you.

JESUS IS LAID IN THE TOMB – Jesus Walking in the Way of the Cross (VIDEO)   LYRICS TO MUSIC: Go on brothers lay him down Go on brothers lay him down Wrap his body with a clean white shroud Roll that stone leave him in the ground Go on brothers lay him down   Go on sisters cry for him Go on sisters cry for him But wipe your eyes and dry your skin The crying will be done in three mornings Go on sisters cry for him   Hold on children wait and see Hold on children wait and see The death that's come is a death too weak Can't take my Jesus cannot take my King So hold on children wait and see   Oh glory glory won't you come for me Glory glory won't you come for me I know your slumber is a momentary sleep I feel you rising up from the deep Oh glory glory you will come for me   MESSAGE SUMMARY:  Some of the most expensive, elaborate, and impressive structures in history are tombs. Throughout humanity great energy has been spent constructing a final resting place for the prestigious and powerful. The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, the pyramids of Egypt, and the terra cotta army in Xi'an, China are some of the most notorious. They stand as feats of architecture, design, and craftsmanship - each fueled by countless hours of work by a vast number of humans. Some of these structures are still visited today by hundreds of thousands each year. Jesus too was laid in a tomb. And though purchased by a wealthy disciple, it seems to have been no more than a small, man-made cave. When Joseph of Arimethea asked Pilate for Jesus' body, his request was surprisingly granted. After being wrapped in linen, Jesus was placed into a room ‘cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid' (Luke 23:53). Today, there remains uncertainty as to which specific site held the body of Jesus. Notwithstanding this fact, many travelers still seek out Christ's tomb. Unlike many of the famous burial monuments however, those who make this journey do not come to be amazed by the architecture or awed by the craftsmanship. The spectacle itself is rather unimpressive - no more than a small hole cut into the side of a hill, void of any adornment. Despite Jesus' position, despite his seat ‘at the right hand of God' (Mark 16:19), he was buried in a common tomb. Despite the ‘riches' of his glory and grace (Colossians 1:27, Ephesians 2:7), Jesus' body was laid to rest in a cave. How he continually clothed himself in humility! So why then do countless Christians travel across the world each year to see where Jesus walked? Why spend the time and effort to visit a hole in the ground, that quite possibly Jesus' body never actually entered? People come because of who Jesus was, not any place where he may have laid. They come to gain perspective. They come to refresh their spirits. They come because Jesus was real, and most critically, that three days after his death, the tomb stood empty. Hallelujah! Death was beaten as God's perfect plan for his Messiah was fulfilled. The tomb could not hold him. “He has risen, just as he said,” (Matthew 28:6), and he is alive now and forever! Written by Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper golgothamusic.com // poorbishophooper.com // Second edition ©2022 Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper   TODAY'S PRAYER: Praise Jesus for his death and resurrection. Ask Jesus for a fresh revelation of what the empty tomb means for you today. Thank him for how he has saved you. Pray for those who do not yet know the One who has conquered death, and do not understand what Jesus' resurrection means for their lives. Give thanks that God's perfect plan was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and that his love for you is unfailing and everlasting Today's Affirmation: I affirm that because of what God has done for me in His Son, Jesus, I AM FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT: If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13). SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): Mark 15:42-47: “It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.”. Further Reading: Matthew 27:57-61; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42; Isaiah 53:9-12. A WORD FROM THE LORD WEBSITE: www.AWFTL.org. THIS SUNDAY'S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach's Current Sunday Sermon: “Contemplating the Mighty Acts – Palm Sunday and Holy Week”, at our Website: https://awtlser.podbean.com/ DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB

Despite Jesus' arrest, he is in the complete control and all will lead to His Glory.

Every single one of us miss the mark. As inventive, creative, and successful as humans can be in many aspects of life to overcome issues, the only way to overcome our sin is through Jesus. In this message, we will introduce the disciple Peter. Despite Jesus believing, entrusting, and investing in Peter, Peter failed Jesus at His most critical time of need. Rather than Jesus casting Peter aside, we will find the truth that any of our failures simply become an opportunity for the grace of Jesus to appear again and again and again in our stories. When our stories appear over, God simply appears again to write a chapter.

Despite Jesus being very clear to his followers that he wanted the gospel to go into every culture and to all people groups, the early church was still almost exclusively Jewish. That's why this story of the conversion of Cornelius and his household is so significant and a turning point, not just for Cornelius, but the entire mission of Jesus. 

Despite Jesus' frequent words of warning to the Jews and the Jewish nation, by and large, He was rejected as the Messiah. That rejection was not without consequences. So it is today. Final rejection of Jesus as Messiah will result in eternal condemnation.

JESUS IS LAID IN THE TOMB – Jesus Walking in the Way of the Cross (VIDEO) LYRICS TO MUSIC: Go on brothers lay him down Go on brothers lay him down Wrap his body with a clean white shroud Roll that stone leave him in the ground Go on brothers lay him down Go on sisters cry for him Go on sisters cry for him But wipe your eyes and dry your skin The crying will be done in three mornings Go on sisters cry for him Hold on children wait and see Hold on children wait and see The death that's come is a death too weak Can't take my Jesus cannot take my King So hold on children wait and see Oh glory glory won't you come for me Glory glory won't you come for me I know your slumber is a momentary sleep I feel you rising up from the deep Oh glory glory you will come for me MESSAGE SUMMARY:      Some of the most expensive, elaborate, and impressive structures in history are tombs. Throughout humanity great energy has been spent constructing a final resting place for the prestigious and powerful. The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, the pyramids of Egypt, and the terra cotta army in Xi'an, China are some of the most notorious. They stand as feats of architecture, design, and craftsmanship - each fueled by countless hours of work by a vast number of humans. Some of these structures are still visited today by hundreds of thousands each year.   Jesus too was laid in a tomb. And though purchased by a wealthy disciple, it seems to have been no more than a small, man-made cave. When Joseph of Arimethea asked Pilate for Jesus' body, his request was surprisingly granted. After being wrapped in linen, Jesus was placed into a room ‘cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid' (Luke 23:53).   Today, there remains uncertainty as to which specific site held the body of Jesus. Notwithstanding this fact, many travelers still seek out Christ's tomb. Unlike many of the famous burial monuments however, those who make this journey do not come to be amazed by the architecture or awed by the craftsmanship. The spectacle itself is rather unimpressive - no more than a small hole cut into the side of a hill, void of any adornment.   Despite Jesus' position, despite his seat ‘at the right hand of God' (Mark 16:19), he was buried in a common tomb. Despite the ‘riches' of his glory and grace (Colossians 1:27, Ephesians 2:7), Jesus' body was laid to rest in a cave. How he continually clothed himself in humility!   So why then do countless Christians travel across the world each year to see where Jesus walked? Why spend the time and effort to visit a hole in the ground, that quite possibly Jesus' body never actually entered? People come because of who Jesus was, not any place where he may have laid. They come to gain perspective. They come to refresh their spirits. They come because Jesus was real, and most critically, that three days after his death, the tomb stood empty.   Hallelujah! Death was beaten as God's perfect plan for his Messiah was fulfilled. The tomb could not hold him. “He has risen, just as he said,” (Matthew 28:6), and he is alive now and forever! Written by Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper golgothamusic.com // poorbishophooper.com // Second edition ©2022 Jesse Braswell Roberts / Poor Bishop Hooper   TODAY'S PRAYER: Praise Jesus for his death and resurrection. Ask Jesus for a fresh revelation of what the empty tomb means for you today. Thank him for how he has saved you. Pray for those who do not yet know the One who has conquered death, and do not understand what Jesus' resurrection means for their lives. Give thanks that God's perfect plan was fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and that his love for you is unfailing and everlasting Today's Affirmation: I affirm that because of what God has done for me in His Son, Jesus, I AM FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT: If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13). SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): Mark 15:42-47: “It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.”. Further Reading: Matthew 27:57-61; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42; Isaiah 53:9-12. A WORD FROM THE LORD WEBSITE: www.AWFTL.org. THIS SUNDAY'S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach's Current Sunday Sermon: “Contemplating the Mighty Acts – Palm Sunday and Holy Week”, at our Website: https://awtlser.podbean.com/ DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB

God often visited with His people. Often, these visitations were to reveal to man the reality of their circumstances and realign them with the path He wanted them on. In other times, the visitation from God was restorative. Amid his trials, Job credits a visitation from God for encouragement to keep going. Luke writes about the most profound of visitations. Jesus looked over the city and the bible says he wept over it. Despite Jesus’ ministry and trying, they missed the importance of His visitation. They rejected Jesus and it grieved Him because they had missed everything that could have been theirs. Another example of visitation comes in our scripture text. After the cross and all the failure that Peter experienced, Jesus asks Peter, “do you love me?” Jesus asks this three times. Jesus asked the question fusing the highest form of love, but Peter answered him from the lower forms. Finally, Jesus uses the lower form of love to ask HIs question. Jesus was trying to elevate Peter to a higher level but came down to his level. God wants us to come higher but will come to our level when necessary.

God often visited with His people. Often, these visitations were to reveal to man the reality of their circumstances and realign them with the path He wanted them on. In other times, the visitation from God was restorative. Amid his trials, Job credits a visitation from God for encouragement to keep going. Luke writes about the most profound of visitations. Jesus looked over the city and the bible says he wept over it. Despite Jesus’ ministry and trying, they missed the importance of His visitation. They rejected Jesus and it grieved Him because they had missed everything that could have been theirs. Another example of visitation comes in our scripture text. After the cross and all the failure that Peter experienced, Jesus asks Peter, “do you love me?” Jesus asks this three times. Jesus asked the question fusing the highest form of love, but Peter answered him from the lower forms. Finally, Jesus uses the lower form of love to ask HIs question. Jesus was trying to elevate Peter to a higher level but came down to his level. God wants us to come higher but will come to our level when necessary.

Throughout the length of our current sermon series, one of the main emphases has been the fact that the good news about Jesus just cannot be contained. Whether it was the religious leaders of His day trying to squelch His message or undermine His ministry or even Jesus himself telling someone to "keep it to themselves," the word of Jesus' teaching or ministry continued to spread and grow. ---------- Such is the case this week with our text for Frank's message. Despite Jesus' instructions to a group of people to "tell no one," after an encounter with Jesus, they couldn't help sharing the good news--not matter how strenuously he told them. ---------- Isn't that the way it is with truly good news? Something amazes us or causes us to be captured in wonder at it and we cannot wait to tell those closest to us and then, in many cases, whoever is willing to listen to us all about it.

Throughout the length of our current sermon series, one of the main emphases has been the fact that the good news about Jesus just cannot be contained. Whether it was the religious leaders of His day trying to squelch His message or undermine His ministry or even Jesus himself telling someone to "keep it to themselves," the word of Jesus' teaching or ministry continued to spread and grow. ---------- Such is the case this week with our text for Frank's message. Despite Jesus' instructions to a group of people to "tell no one," after an encounter with Jesus, they couldn't help sharing the good news--not matter how strenuously he told them. ---------- Isn't that the way it is with truly good news? Something amazes us or causes us to be captured in wonder at it and we cannot wait to tell those closest to us and then, in many cases, whoever is willing to listen to us all about it.

Throughout the length of our current sermon series, one of the main emphases has been the fact that the good news about Jesus just cannot be contained. Whether it was the religious leaders of His day trying to squelch His message or undermine His ministry or even Jesus himself telling someone to "keep it to themselves," the word of Jesus' teaching or ministry continued to spread and grow. ---------- Such is the case this week with our text for Frank's message. Despite Jesus' instructions to a group of people to "tell no one," after an encounter with Jesus, they couldn't help sharing the good news--not matter how strenuously he told them. ---------- Isn't that the way it is with truly good news? Something amazes us or causes us to be captured in wonder at it and we cannot wait to tell those closest to us and then, in many cases, whoever is willing to listen to us all about it.

When I was young, my mother always told me to eat my peas because they were good for me. As an adult, I know she’s right. Green vegetables are an important source of protein, fiber, and vitamins...and they help lower cholesterol. Canadian researchers recently reported a new benefit: Peas can help fight high blood pressure and chronic kidney disease! Just as physical nutrition is part of a healthy lifestyle, spiritual nutrition is part of growing in Christ. Good leaders know how to feed their flock spiritually nutritious food. This is what Jesus commissioned Peter to do in today’s reading. Before the Crucifixion, Peter had crashed and burned. Despite Jesus’ explicit warning, he had denied his Lord three times. When the rooster crowed, Peter “broke down and wept” (Mark 14:72). He’d failed miserably. Although he felt joyful at seeing Jesus resurrected, he returned to his old fishing job in despair. As He so often does, Jesus met Peter right where he was—with a hot breakfast, no less (v. 9)! After the meal, they went on a walk, and Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” (v. 15), meaning more than the other disciples. After all, Peter had previously claimed greater loyalty than them (Matt. 26:33). This was an indirect rebuke by Jesus, accepted by Peter. The third repetition of the question parallels Peter’s three denials (v. 17). But Jesus wasn’t rubbing it in. He wanted Peter to know he was fully forgiven, and to know He had work for him to do. The three commands to “feed my sheep” might be paraphrased, “Be the kind of shepherd God wants and I have modeled.” Peter’s story began anew with a fresh call from Christ, “Follow me!” (v. 19). >> Are you glad that our God is all about redeeming and restoring failures? The Lord gave Peter forgiveness and an opportunity for a fresh start, and He can do the same for you!

LIVE from the Palladium. Despite Jesus being rejected, he still shows love to his people. Tune in for our special Easter Sunday!

Mary, the sister of Lazarus, honored Jesus with an extravagant offering when she poured an expensive perfume on Jesus' feet. The disciples objected: couldn't this have been sold and the money given to the poor? Despite Jesus' concern for the poor, he came to Mary's defense. We considered how this story can remind us of a fundamental truth that's easy to drift from.

Luke 24:5b-7 NLT 'Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.' Throughout my life, since leaving my parental home, I have carried a box of precious things. These are items that carry special meaning for me. There is nothing remarkable among them, save the personal memories they carry. That box is now in my loft, since I do not return to it on a regular basis. I know where it is, just as the women thought they knew where Jesus was. Dr Luke reminds us that the presence of God is ever-moving. We have to remain alert to ensure we are pursuing that presence and not assuming we can settle for what we think that we know. Whenever we assume that we have taken hold of God, we are in danger. We can easily move our gaze from God to the many distractions life presents, and wake up one day to the alarming discovery that God is not where we thought he was. Despite Jesus’ teaching, these women, along with his closest friends, failed to grasp his message of resurrection. Many of us become distracted and lose sight of the risen Christ. In such moments we can seek to reconstruct our understanding of God to marry with such worries and contradictions. To do so is to seek to incarcerate God in a tomb of our design and consign the creator to a special box carefully stored in the loft of our imagination. Or, with these women, we can pay heed to the voices of the angels, revisit our understanding of God and listen again to the voice of God so that we go in search of the living, not the dead. QUESTION: Have you reduced God to something stored in a spiritual box of special things? PRAYER: Like those women, may I go in search of God’s presence today and every day.

The disciples are still confused about the road that lies ahead for Jesus. Despite Jesus warning them time-and-time again, they just haven't truly understood that he must go to the cross in order to save the world. But Mary (who is not named here, but features in John 12:1-3), in this extraordinary act of generosity and beauty, anticipates Jesus' death much to the indignation of those watching on! It's important to understand that carved jars of perfume like this would have been extraordinarily expensive. That's evident in the response by all of the disciples - they're indignant, which means that they're angry at the “waste” that they're witnessing. But of course they only think that this is a waste because they don't understand the significance of the act. And so, aware of their response, Jesus says, this isn't a waste for, “the poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me”. Jesus' point is of course not that we shouldn't prioritise the needs of the poor and the use of our resources (that's evident all throughout Matthew), but that the woman is recognising what is right before them: that Jesus is God's anointed one who will die in service of God's mission to the world! The disciples thought that act brought no honour to God, when in reality she has greatly honoured her Lord! The disciples thought that she had done something of no significance, yet Jesus tells them that it's of such great significance that it will be told alongside the Gospel throughout the world. Jesus' death wasn't a failure or an unanticipated outcome. It was God's gracious and loving plan that has brought us life. As we seek to follow Jesus, he doesn't require us to always understand, but he does call us to be faithful. I'm so thankful to God for the obedience of Mary, who even at great cost, was willing to recognise the identity and mission of our Lord. AL Questions If you witnessed this event, how do you think you would have responded? What makes this action so extraordinary? Prayer Heavenly Father, we thank you for your costly and extravagant gift to us through your Son. Please help us to lay our lives down for you, whatever it takes, that we might recognise you for the King who you are. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Jesus reveals that he is God through his power and compassion True disciples hear, believe and come to Jesus (27-28) Above healing her physically, Jesus declared her his daughter, whole, and at peace. (34) Mark 5:35-43 – Jesus cancels a funeral Vv. 35-36. The daughter died – why trouble the teacher. Jesus says “do not fear, only believe.” Jairus just had an example of faith in the woman. Nothing could keep her from Jesus, not embarrassment nor the crowd. She believed Jesus could heal her. She exemplifies and defines faith for Jairus – trust Jesus despite everything to the contrary. That faith knows no limits – not even the raising of a dead child. No matter the circumstances, trust in Jesus – in hopelessness, in long-suffering, even in death – trust in Jesus. He is the Deliverer. v. 37 Jesus allowed smaller groups at times – Peter, James, John v. 38. In ancient times families hired professional mourners. Perhaps they were already there v. 39. “she is only sleeping”. In Christ, death is more like sleep, temporary. We may die in this life, but we will rise to eternal life. v. 40. “They laughed at him.” This was nonsense if Jesus were only a man, a teacher. v. 41. Jesus takes the little girl’s hand and says, tells her to arise. Jesus takes on the uncleanness of the demoniac, of the woman with a bleeding issue, now he takes on the uncleanness of death in this little girl. v. 42. Immediately she got up – they were overcome w/amazement. Jesus’ power brought healing to a bleeding woman. His word “arise” raised a dead girl out of death back to life. Jesus said to Martha at her brother Lazarus’ death in John 11: 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Jairus and the woman had little in common: one a ruler, the other an outcast. They were both desperate, without hope apart from Jesus. Trust Jesus despite everything to the contrary. Believe, do not despair. Mark 6:1-6A – A Prophet without Honor vv. 2-3. They see only a man, only a son, only a carpenter. They wanted something different from what God has given. Despite Jesus’ demonstration of compassion and supernatural power, he will encounter people from his nation, his own home town, his own family, and even a disciple who will not believe that he is the Son of God, that he is the Messiah. v. 6. In Nazareth it is not the crowds or disciples who are amazed, but Jesus. He is amazed at their disbelief. There are so many that are hard-hearted and refuse to believe no matter what they see or hear. “Humanity wants something other than what God gives. The greatest obstacle to faith is not the failure of God to act, but the unwillingness of the human heart to accept the God who condescends to us as only a carpenter, the son of Mary.” - James R. Edwards

Hey, there! Welcome to Bold is where we have made it our goal to help you learn the Bible verse-by-verse. Today, we are continuing in our study of Mark with chapter 10! If you are new to our podcast, we are glad you’re here! Just so you know, I will be reading from the English Standard Version (also commonly referred to as the ESV) today if you are interested in following along. Let’s get started.This is Mark chapter 10...10 And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them. 2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Marriage and divorce were in Jesus’ day, as they are in ours, matters of great interest and controversy. In ancient Judaism, marriage was not regarded as a union of equals for the mutual benefit of both husband and wife but rather as an institution whose chief purpose was the establishment and continuance of the family and whose chief enemy was childlessness. Mark’s placement of Jesus’ teaching on marriage at the beginning of this section signals the importance of the marital union in the kingdom of God. In Judaism the foremost responsibility of an observant Jewish male was knowledge and mastery of the Torah, under which he was expected to order the necessities of life, among them marriage. Jesus, however, teaches that marriage is not a male-dominated institution but a new creation of God, to which both husband and wife are equally responsible to practice discipleship in lifelong obedience. Edwards, J. R. (2002). The Gospel according to Mark (pp. 297–298). Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos. This final phrase was the crux of the controversy over divorce in Jesus’ day, as is reflected in a celebrated passage in the Mishnah:The School of Shammai say: A man may not divorce his wife unless he has found unchastity in her, for it is written, “Because he hath found in her indecency in anything.” And the School of Hillel say: [He may divorce her] even if she spoiled a dish for him, for it is written, “Because he hath found in her indecency in anything.” R. Akiba says: Even if he found another fairer than she, for it is written, “And it shall be if she find no favour in his eyes.” (m. Git. 9:10)As this passage indicates, Jews and Jewish law were agreed that divorce was permissible. The more conservative school of Shammai argued that the sole ground was “indecency,” that is, adultery, whereas the liberal school of Hillel argued that divorce could be granted “for any matter” (NIV, “for any and every reason”; Matt 19:3), that is, for many causes beyond adultery. Not even among the Essenes at Qumran, the most conservative faction of Judaism in Jesus’ day, was divorce expressly forbidden. Edwards, J. R. (2002). The Gospel according to Mark (pp. 299–300). Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos. So, the Jewish teachers were asking which side of the fence Jesus stood on but not just to get His opinion but because they were in the territory of Herod Antipas who had beheaded John the Baptist for questioning Herod’s marriage to Herodias. So, they are attempting to get Jesus in trouble with the ruler! The Jewish teacher at the time saw marriage as a non-binding contract but Jesus takes them back to creation! Jesus teaches that permission to divorce given in Deuteronomy was one of concession not intention! The view at the time was that the man was the lord of the household but Jesus corrects this notion by teaching that God is at the center of the home. Jesus is not teaching that no grounds for divorce exist but that God’s will is what is to be kept foremost in mind. He does not mean that divorce, even if done against God’s will is unforgivable (see Mark 3:28) but that is must be taken more seriously than a non-binding contract determined solely by the husband. 13 And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. 14 But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 15 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” 16 And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them. The Greek word translated “rebuke” is extremely harsh! Jesus’ response in verse 14 is one of anger! Jesus is not teaching people to be child like. Children were helpless and this is what He is stressing that we come to God with nothing. 17 And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’ ” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22 Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. 23 And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” 27 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” 28 Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” 29 Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, 30 who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. 31 But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” Why does Jesus say no one is good but God alone? One, He may have been testing the “rich young ruler” to see if he recognized Jesus as God. Second, He is reminding all those listening that only God is righteous, which means they have no bargaining power with God. The young man asks what he “must do” to earn salvation but salvation cannot be earned, only accepted through the work of Jesus Christ. It is important to note that Jesus is not condemning wealth in and of itself. He commands this particular person to sell what he owns but he does not command that of everyone. In that day and age, typically under a corrupt Roman system, in order to be rich, one had to bribe and play by Caesar’s rules. However, it may also be that this young man had made wealth a false god. If he is not willing to give it up to follow Jesus, then he loves it too much! In verse 27, Jesus makes it clear that a wealthy person can be saved by the grace of God but those who love untying more than God are at risk. 32 And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, 33 saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. 34 And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.” Jesus goes from confronting idolatry to speaking of His own sacrificial death. As Eduard Schweizer notes, “Here he is the Master who goes before his disciples, whose responsibility it is to follow him.” When it comes to humility and suffering, Jesus does not only teach: he leads the way. Edwards, J. R. (2002). The Gospel according to Mark (p. 318). Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos. 35 And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came up to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36 And he said to them, “What do you want me to do for you?” 37 And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38 Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” 39 And they said to him, “We are able.” And Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized, 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” 41 And when the ten heard it, they began to be indignant at James and John. 42 And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 43 But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. 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.” Despite Jesus’ sacrificial life and death, the disciples jockey for position! How many times do we see this in the church where envy rears its ugly head even though we follow a King who was poor, homeless and gave His life for us? 46 And they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. 47 And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart. Get up; he is calling you.” 50 And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.” 52 And Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him on the way. Jesus asks Blind Bartimaeus the same question He asked the disciples but the response is very different! The disciples want power, prestige and position but Bartimaeus only wants to be whole for which he follows Jesus in gratitude. The disciples, and all of us, should view things (pun intended) the same way. Wooh! Alright, we are done! We cannot thank you all enough for being part of The Bold Movement. We wanted to let you know that everything we do in this ministry is 100% free with the exception of a few incentives for our financial supporters. These include discounts on our merchandise, additional resources on our website, and early access to all of our content. If you believe in what we are doing and would like to consider helping a few girls out, would you pray about joining us as sponsors?! We have plans ranging from $1/month to $25/month. With your donations, you are ensuring that we can give you, among other women, content to help you better understand your Bible. If you cannot afford to help, we can def. Use your prayers! If you like us, would you rate and review our podcast?! This helps get us out there so that others can find it too. Also, please check us out at www.theboldmovement.com. Ladies, remember – go out and be bold.

Whose report will we believe? Will we believe the words of the prophets concerning Jesus? Despite Jesus doing many miracles in the midst of the people of Israel many refused to believe that He was the Messiah.

Whose report will we believe? Will we believe the words of the prophets concerning Jesus? Despite Jesus doing many miracles in the midst of the people of Israel many refused to believe that He was the Messiah.

  Exploring Islam 11. The Jesus of Islam Part 2 - Jesus remains a man not a god Despite Jesus’ unusual birth to a virgin Islam still considers him to be simply a man chosen by Allah to be a prophet. He is viewed as a created being from the dust just as Adam was (Qur’an 3:59). To consider Jesus as anything more than his humanity would be to ascribe to him some status of divinity, and as we have seen previously this is a serious sin. Allah reveals himself through the Qur’an as being one, and in being the only one. He is if you like singular in construction and the only one of his kind. During Muhammad’s life the early Church was spreading rapidly throughout the world and he would have heard of their radical concept of a Trinitarian God – that is a God which is three in one. Such a paradox, which is accepted in Christianity through faith and the testimony of the Bible, seemed to simply be a wilful act to distort the truth about Allah and elevate a man into a deity. If you remember from one of the first podcasts in this series at the birth of Islam Muhammad was reacting against an Arab people who were polytheists, that is belief in and the worship of many different gods and spirits. Muhammad placed the Christian view of Jesus into this category. The Qur’an summarises all of this in the following: Qur’an 4:171 – ‘O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion nor utter anything concerning Allah save the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of Allah, and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers, and say not "Three" - Cease! (It is) better for you! - Allah is only One God. Far is it removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a son.’ Interestingly, there are two aspects regarding the Islamic view of Jesus which are not fully explained. In the previous verse you may noticed that Jesus is referred to as a ‘word’ and a ‘spirit’ from Allah. What exactly does this mean? The Qur’an does not make any further reference to it and they are unique to him. From a Christian perspective Jesus being described as a ‘word’ is familiar as it is found in the opening verses of John’s Gospel to denote his divinity. Alongside this, the Qur’an also makes the unexpected claim that Jesus was holy, faultless, pure, or righteous depending on your translation from the Arabic in Qur’an 19:19. These characteristics are commonly associated with divinity outside of Islam and offer a stark contrast to Muhammad who required forgiveness for his sins (Qur’an 48:2). Many Muslims are not aware of this last verse and can take offense at the suggestion that their greatest prophet is in fact sinful, so refer to it with care and respect. Right Mouse click to save this as an audio mp3 file   This now is available to buy as a book on Amazon : UK/Europe - £5 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Exploring-Islam-exploring-diversity-Christian/dp/1507774567/ USA - $7 - http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Islam-exploring-diversity-Christian/dp/1507774567/ Click or tap on the appropriate link below to subscribe, share or download our iPhone App!

9Ten 20/10/2013 | Part 1 | Despite Jesus suffering immeasurably on the cross, surrounded by two criminals, and in His final moments of life, He extended His love and salvation. The significance of this is the words of Jesus, “Today you will be with me in paradise” and the response of the two criminals. For us, this is our chance to respond no matter where we are on our journey.

Despite Jesus clearly foretelling it, Peter didn't think he would deny Jesus. But just as Jesus knew Peter would fall, he knew he'd get back up again too.

Despite Jesus clearly foretelling it, Peter didn't think he would deny Jesus. But just as Jesus knew Peter would fall, he knew he'd get back up again too.

Despite Jesus clearly foretelling it, Peter didn’t think he would deny Jesus. But just as Jesus knew Peter would fall, he knew he’d get back up again too.

Despite Jesus clearly foretelling it, Peter didn’t think he would deny Jesus. But just as Jesus knew Peter would fall, he knew he’d get back up again too.

Despite Jesus clearly foretelling it, Peter didn’t think he would deny Jesus. But just as Jesus knew Peter would fall, he knew he’d get back up again too.