Warned (Part C)

Faith has got to be anchored in the word that I am entrusting my apostles with in the age of the church, the age of grace. And when you find Christians who can't believe without miracles, you usually find kooky Christians.

Just be careful. It's okay to be emotionally in love with Jesus Christ. You cannot have your emotions dictate to you what the scripture says.

Faith and intelligence is necessary. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Gospel of Mark.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will conclude his study called Warned. He'll be teaching in Mark chapter 13. God's not fooling around. He said this on the subject of the end times.

Remember Lot's wife? And just left it like that. He expects us to figure it out when there's enough information to connect the dots because they're there. And so he says, Watch. Then he says, Pray.

Well, before I get to the pray, one other verse I want to talk about in connection to take heed and watch. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. So everybody's got a way out. It's not as though God is saying, I'm just going to judge sinners and you're stuck.

There's nothing you can do about it. No, God says there's a way out through Jesus Christ. He's not appointed us for wrath.

And that's what the extraction is all about. He says, Pray. Pray means to serve with God, not apart from God. You know, Martha was just serving until she got corrected. She was serving in her own strength. She had made the minors become major. Mary kept the majors the majors.

She sat at the feet of the Lord. Jesus said, You know what? I can get food somewhere else. I don't really need you, Martha, to make a meal for me.

I will eat it if you bring it. But understand it is the preaching of the word that is paramount. And Mary has chosen this and I'm not taking it away from her.

Mary, Martha never complained again to the Lord about such things. So the word is part of it. Praying is essential. Serving is critical. Getting up when you've been beaten down is routine. There's not a Christian that does not have to deal with sin in themselves and sin in others.

And it's ongoing. And if you're waiting to reach the state of perfection in this life, it's not going to happen. However, you can be matured and developed and learn how to deal with these things in a biblical way that is pleasing to the Lord. And this is why some of the sins of the New Testament saints are captured for us, but many of them of the Old Testament saints. Again, look at King David. I mean, he's an old man. He's written so much of the Bible and in the Psalms.

And he's still falling on his face. And God is still forgiving him. But there are great consequences to his sin, too. And I don't think any of us want to have the consequence of sin upon us. And so we strive to be Christ-like. Well, to do that, you're going to have to be in fellowship with him and praying is a part of it. I pray primarily at this stage in my life because I don't have a choice. I have this relationship with Christ. And even when I feel like pouting and just, you know what, I'm just, I don't know why God has done this. I don't like that he's done this.

I'm not saying anything. And that's the thing, you know, I'm praying to him. Because I know him. He is my God. And I am his servant. And I can't help but talk to him no matter what. And I talk to him about a lot of you, too. You know, it's too much to pray for.

It's just too much. I try to sneak some prayers in for every meal. Or any time I eat something, I try to offer up a prayer. And Paul says, I make mention of you in my prayers.

Because it was too many people. But it counts. And the righteous, they willfully have no choice but to pray. So I encourage you, talk to God. Verse 34, he says, it is like a man going to a far country who left his house and gave authority to his servants and to each his work and commanded the doorkeeper to watch. Well this, again, in the upper room, he tells them, I'm going to leave you. I'm going to prepare a place for you. And I will come back and I will receive you. John 14, 3, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself that where I am, there you will be also.

And so this little parable that he's given, this parabolic illustration, he says, it's like a man going on a journey to a far country. Well, from the perspective of his disciples, heaven was a far country. Not to God, of course. He would be gone.

He'd be gone for a long time. He's telling his church. At the end, he's saying, what I say to you, I say to all. We read that when we stood and read.

Verse 37, what I say to you, I say to all. Watch. Well, he's been gone 2,000 years and he's never walked back.

Watch. There's so much work that gets done in that. He says, like a man who's going to a far country who left his house and gave authority to his servants. That's the church age. This is exactly what he's talking about.

Nothing else fits so smoothly. In Luke 19, in a parable, speaking about his servants, serving while the master was away, he says, do business till I come. The old King James, I like its language more in this verse, it says, occupy until I come.

Because I think of an occupying force. Anyway, we are now in the times of the Gentiles, which produced the church age, the age of grace, by faith in the word. We're not in the age of miracles. And as I've been saying, the fig tree signals the approaching conclusion to the church age. The time of the Gentiles, it began in, well, 586 years before Christ came. The glory departed from Israel. Jerusalem was trodden by a Babylonian army.

When Nebuchadnezzar came and conquered Jerusalem, Ezekiel chapter 10, he talks about the Shekinah, the presence of the Lord, reluctantly and in phases, departing the temple until it was gone. And this is the age where the Gentiles have domination over Jerusalem, over Israel. And though that is now going away, it's still there to some degree, but it is nowhere like it was before 1948. Before 1948, the Jews just had no say so. Now they're a sovereign state. God terminated, when Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem 586 years before Christ was born, God terminated their secular supremacy in the region. Remember, David conquered Solomon and they held all the people in check and they paid them money. Well, not only that, both the king, the office of the king, and the priesthood were lost to Israel. And the Gentile domination began. Now they got back some of the priesthood.

It largely stayed corrupted. But in Christ's day, the priesthood was corrupted. Luke 21, verse 24, and they will fall by the edge of the sword and be led away captive into all nations and Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Again, the times of the Gentiles started back when Nebuchadnezzar trampled Jerusalem and they really never got back their kingdom. They have not had a king on the throne in Jerusalem since that time. Romans, chapter 11, verse 25, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion. That blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

And that's where we are right now. This is the church age. The church age started with, of course, Pentecost, but the times of the Gentiles started before that with Nebuchadnezzar. Israel will be fully restored when Messiah returns. Gentile domination stops completely at Armageddon. So the fullness of the Gentiles will have seven years left at the rapture. Then God will again begin to speak to the world through the Jews. Romans 11, verse 26, And so all Israel will be saved as it is written. The deliverer will come out of Zion and he will turn away ungodliness from Jacob. I hope none of you believe that kingdom theology stuff. That's so unbiblical.

It just kind of gets rid of Israel and denies Israel from being Israel. This is madness. I don't want to deal with that right now. Really, I don't want to deal with it ever. It's so dumb.

But a lot of people like it. It's Satan because it makes you an enemy of God's chosen people as his time clock, which is Israel. The Greek language, the Greek has been the language of scripture ever since the apostles. Before that, it was the Hebrew for the most part, with some exceptions in Daniel and Ezra. The Jews lost their secular supremacy, as I mentioned, when Nebuchadnezzar came. They lost their spiritual supremacy when they murdered Christ, when they had him crucified.

And until the rapture, at the rapture, the church age stops. And then the Jews begin to move into the forefront again of carrying the scripture. Once upon a time, if anyone had anything to say with authority from God, it was said through the Jew, the prophets, the Old Testament prophets. They were mostly Jews. You could say that Enoch was not a Jew and Noah was not a Jew.

You can really cut it down and get kind of tangled up there. But overall, the scripture comes to us, the stories about those men come to us from a Jewish man named Moses. Moses is the one that has given us the book of Genesis.

Without that Jewish prophet, there would be no knowledge of, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and all that we have. This is not anti-Semitic. This is biblical. If God spoke to men, in those days, he spoke in Hebrew. But after Pentecost, he began to speak in Greek, in the Greek language, in the language of the Gentiles, the church age.

It is a parenthesis in God's dealing with mankind, and it ends at the rapture. Once the church age is complete, the focus of God and his dealings with sinners and saved alike reverts to the nation Israel. And that's why we see them again, the two witnesses in Revelation, 144,000 and then many Gentile converts that will come from their preaching as well as Jewish converts. So for the past 2,000 years, if you wanted to know about God, it has been through the church, but prior to that, it had come through Israel. John's Gospel, Chapter 1, says something very interesting because the Gentiles came from the world of visible gods when they joined the church. They renounced their false gods that they could see, their little idols, and they came into the church.

Israel, the Jews in Israel, they did not believe in a visible God. But when Christ came, everybody could see God. We see him in the Scriptures in this way. John, Chapter 1, Verse 18, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. I find these things very exciting and easy to understand. I find them a little tricky to preach because you have to factor in how much other stuff have the people heard and how many questions you're going to get at the end of the sermon that will say, well, I don't agree with that, or I see it this way, or I never heard that before, are you out of your mind?

So that kind of makes it a little complicated, but not too much. And so, our Lord Jesus assumed the role of the Savior when He came to save our souls. After the resurrection, He resumed the role as ruler. And so when He came, Mark 10, Verse 45, For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life ransom for many, the days of His limitations, the days of His humanity, when He subjected Himself to things that He will never subject Himself to ever again. We are not in the age of miracles. We are in the age of faith through the Word of God.

Not the age of sight, but the age of faith. And they overcame Him by the word of their testimony because they did not love their lives until the death, and this will be said of those tribulation martyrs. And so we have a special beatitude for the church from Jesus Christ after His resurrection. After His resurrection, He gave a beatitude just for the church, really, in this sense. John's Gospel, Chapter 20, Verse 29, Blessed are those, there's the beatitude, who have not seen, yet have believed. He said, More blessed.

He put emphasis on it. Thomas, it's great you can see me, but they're coming, those after me, and I'm not going to walk around parading my wounds and showing everybody. They're going to have to believe by faith, and that faith has got to be anchored in the word that I am entrusting my apostles with in the age of the church, the age of grace. And when you find Christians who can't believe without miracles, you usually find kooky Christians, and then it comes, just be careful.

It's okay to be emotionally in love with Jesus Christ, but you cannot have your emotions dictate to you what the Scripture says. Faith and intelligence is necessary. You have to learn these things. Anyway, some people are afraid of that word, intelligence. They think it means you have to be really smart.

No, it just means you've got to use your brains in the way I'm using it. And to each his work and commanded the doorkeeper to watch. And so as going back to the beginning of the verse 34, it is like a man going to a far country who left his house and gave authority to his servants and to each his work and commanded the doorkeeper to watch. And if you come here and you listen to a sermon that lasts for 50, 55 minutes on a Sunday morning, it's because that's what it takes to go through a section of Scripture and try to hit key points. Just think of how many points I'm leaving out.

We'd be here another two hours. And to each his work, he commands the doorkeeper. We are the ones that are entrusted with this great responsibility. We must not embrace the words of Jesus concerning salvation only and at the same time ignore his other words. So if he tells you to be saved, you renounce your sins, you come to me and you make your confession known. Okay, we get that.

We want that. But what about when he says, I'm telling you to watch. We have no right to say, nah, I'll just keep the salvation. That heeding, praying, watching stuff is too much work for me. No word of Jesus is casual and we have to take it all. We continue now, verse 35, he says, Watch therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, in the evening, at midnight, at the crowing of the rooster, or in the morning.

That covers pretty much the whole day. He's pouring it on pretty thick. Again, he says, watch, knowing that it is not for those that are going through the tribulation, but those leading up to the tribulation. And how do I watch as a Christian? Well, I abide in Christ.

I try to do everything that he tells me to do, as best I can. And when I, again, when Satan trips me up, or my flesh trips me up, I get back and I go at it again. But I do not become an apostate. I do not become one that says, I tried Christianity and I couldn't pull it off, so I'm leaving the faith now.

I mean, again, Charles Templeton was one not too long. We've had a few of them, you know, these Christian authors, and now they've renounced their Christianity. Why do they think they have to announce that they have renounced?

Who cares? Why do you think your voice is so important that if you leave Christ, you have to tell everybody? Because Satan is pulling the strings now.

You've sold out. You've given yourself over to the enemy. And if you want to walk around and hide behind, well, they were never saved, then you have at that. Because if it is that fragile a situation, how do I know I'm saved? I know I'm saved because I abide in Christ. I believe He's my Lord. And nobody can take that from me. No one will snatch me out of His hand.

And I'm not jumping. And so we have to have this sort of a militant attitude towards the things that are against salvation, that are against Christ, that is abiding in Christ. If I had a militant attitude, Christ would go into a synagogue. He'd see somebody that was in need of a miracle. And He knew it would bother them to do it on the Sabbath day.

So He did it. He picked fights. Now, I'm not saying we should go out here with a can of spinach and pick fights and start turning over tables. But I am saying we should have an element of militancy in our faith that says, I'm not going to take that from you. When I hear somebody telling me all the reasons why I shouldn't believe in Christ, I know that's the voice of the devil.

I have no doubt about that. And there are times when, again, Christ allows things, and I know what other people have to suffer. And I don't have the answers to those individual problems, but I have the answer to the individual God.

And I am good with that. You show me a church that does not believe that the Bible is the Word of God, the inerrant Word of God, given to us, and I'll show you Babylon. You show me a church that's still calling itself Christian, calling itself a church, but doesn't believe God's Word, and there you have Babylon, the great harlot. 2 Timothy 2, chapter 3, verse 16. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable.

It is profitable. You get something out of God's Word. For doctrine, that is right thinking. For reproof, that is correcting wrong thinking. For correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. You either believe that or you don't.

And if you struggle with it, that's better than rejecting it. John, chapter 17, verse 6, Jesus said, He's speaking to the Father, I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours. You gave them to Me. And they have kept Your Word.

Huh. So in this important conversation with God, what's important to Jesus Christ, because He knows this is important to His Father and He knows this is going to be recorded and preserved and that we're going to read it and learn from it, what's the big deal is they've kept Your Word. As He says to the church in Philadelphia, because you have held to My Word, I spare you from the tribulation that's coming upon the whole world. Again, Satan doesn't want you to believe this.

He wants you to doubt. He does not go down or away without a fight. That's why James says resist the devil, because he doesn't go any other way. If you don't resist him, he's going to dominate you. Verse 36, he says, Let's coming suddenly he finds you sleeping.

Again, court martial offense. It will be shocking when Christ comes. The now absent Lord is going to return. And He gave a parable about the ten virgins. And He said the foolish ones took no extra oil. They just had the oil in their lamps. That's all they took. And then when they burned up their oil, because of their lack of foresight, because of their lack of care for what was coming and the possibilities, they began to go to the others and ask them for oil, making them feel guilty for saying no.

Then I won't have enough for us. But the point is, in that parable, they all slumbered and slept, but still five were ready and the other five were foolish. It was dark. He was going to take the bride home.

The bride is the church. The virgins were those who were invited. The oil is the Holy Spirit, the filling on the inside that gives the light. The slumber in that they all slumbered, that's the flesh. The wise are ready on arrival.

Imagine if a fire truck showed up not ready on arrival, or the ambulance shows up not ready on arrival, or whoever else. Verse 37, And what I say to you, I say to everyone, watch. He repeats this word three times in this short section for emphasis. Luke's Gospel, I'm almost done. Chapter 21, verse 28. Now when these things begin to happen, look up, lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near. The end's coming.

You need to be ready. Well, that concludes our end times analysis in the Book of Mark. We will, going forward, be doing less teaching and more preaching, because now we're coming to the crucifixion and the resurrection. Thanks for tuning in to Cross-Reference Radio for this study in the Book of Mark. Cross-Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross-Reference Radio. You can search for Cross-Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the Book of Mark, just like here on Cross-Reference Radio.