So you've been searching for life's meaning but you haven't found what you're looking for.
There's your problem. You should be looking for a who, not a what. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah explains why Jesus is the only one who can bring real meaning to your life as he shares a special word of hope and encouragement. David introduces Jesus, the one who meets your needs. Thank you for joining us today. We are at the end of a series and a few days away from beginning the major series of the year.
We have just finished talking about some questions. The title of that series was God, I Need Some Answers. And before I forget it, let me remind you again that the resources for that series are available from Turning Point. You can go to DavidJeremiah.com. DavidJeremiah.org. There you will see the study guide and the CD package for that series.
You can get the study guide and the CD package and you will be ready to study this again on your own, share it with others, facilitate a small group. And that will be available to you from the website, DavidJeremiah.org. During these next five days, we're going to visit some individual messages that we have chosen because of the value of their encouragement to you. I think some people today need encouragement. That's always kind of a high note in the new material that we produce each year for that particular series.
But for today, we're going to talk about Jesus, the one who can meet your need. And we're going to study a passage of Scripture in the book of Mark, verses 14 through 34. We'll get to that in a moment, but I do need to remind you that we're closing in on the end of this month. And this is our calendar month every year.
We produce this series. This beautiful calendar for 2021. We present it to you in September so that we can get it to you because it's a 14-month calendar that actually begins in November of this year. So when you order it in September, you will get it sometime in October.
You'll be able to begin using it in November and have it all oiled up and ready to go for the new year when 2021 comes. I will tell you some more about this calendar later on today, but it's a beautiful presentation centered on the Word of God and the colors of creation. Right now, it's time for us to learn about this one who meets our needs, Jesus, the one who meets your need. In the wide world of poetry, the name of John Berryman soared among the elite of his century. He seemed to have made every conquest that a poet could make. I mean, he was a beloved university professor.
He had a Pulitzer Prize sitting on the shelf in his office. He was famous. He had friends. He had lots of followers. He had seemingly found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But one frozen day in 1972, he came to the final stanza.
He walked across a bridge in Minnesota, waved to a stranger, and leaped to his death in the icy Minnesota River. No one could figure out why such a prominent and successful man would do such a thing. At 55, half famous and effective, he said, I still feel rotten about myself. And in one of his poems, Berryman wrote these words, after all has been said and all has been said, man is just a huddle of needs. Every one of us understands that we have a vacuum in our lives. And we have an intense desire to understand why we are here. I suppose that's why Rick Warren's book, The Purpose Driven Life, was so successful. Do you know that that book has sold more than 30 million copies, more than any other single volume in history?
I was with Rick Warren recently, and he told me that when this book first came out and it got traction, it was selling one million copies a month. And that's only because it zeroed in on this need everyone has to know, why am I here? What is my purpose? In the introduction to The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren describes a survey that was conducted by Dr. Hugh Moorhead, philosophy professor in Illinois University. Moorhead wrote to 250 famous philosophers and scientists and writers, intellectuals, and he simply asked a question, what is the meaning of life? Some offered their best guesses.
Some even admitted later that they made something up. Still others honestly admitted they were clueless, and there were a few of the intellectuals who wrote back to Moorhead and said, if you ever find out what it is, would you please let us know? What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? What is my purpose? Here in these early verses of Mark's Gospel, the meaning of life has arrived. He's on the scene.
He does not waste any time introducing himself. He is the Son of God and the Savior of the world. We begin our study today in verse 14 as we talk about Jesus and his message, and here's what the Word of God says. Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe in the Gospel. Between verses 13 and 14, if you mark in your Bible, you should put one of those little sideways arrows. Because between verse 13 and 14 in Mark chapter 1, almost an entire year passes. As you know, the Gospels are four different accounts of the Lord's life on this earth, and they don't all carry all of the information. And Mark omits in his Gospel all the things that are recorded for us in John chapters 1 through 4.
In John chapters 1 through 4, we learn some things that we don't know from Mark. We learn about Jesus going to a wedding at Cana of Galilee and changing the water into wine. We learn about Jesus cleansing the temple. We learn about his encounter with Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria. That won't be found in the book of Mark because Mark is not going to talk about the things that happen in Judea and Samaria.
He's going to talk about what the Lord is going to do in Galilee. So the Scripture tells us in verse 14 that when John the Baptist was put in prison, Jesus went to Galilee. Now remember, John was put in prison because of all the things he had said concerning the leadership of his day.
He got put in prison because he spoke the truth about immorality. Ultimately, John, as you know, was beheaded. At the end of the first few verses of the book of Mark, John the Baptist sort of fades away and the Lord Jesus takes center stage.
John the Baptist is in prison. Jesus goes to Galilee. And when Jesus is in Galilee, he begins his ministry by preaching a short sermon. The first point of his sermon is, the good news has come.
The good news has come. Verse 15, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. These are some of the first words of Jesus in his ministry. And he announces to everyone something that people had been waiting to hear for 4,000 years. Jesus says the time is fulfilled.
He's creating a sense of urgency. Jesus' message concerning the kingdom of God is simply this. The kingdom of God is here because the King is here. The Lord Jesus Christ himself was the King of glory.
He'd come to this earth, born of the Virgin Mary. He wasn't ready to set up his kingdom yet, but he was still the King. And as he comes to the people in Galilee and begins to preach, he says to them, the kingdom has drawn near because the King has drawn near. The kingdom is at hand because the King is at hand. And one writer said it this way, the kingdom of God is within your reach.
And stop and think about it for a moment. Had you been there when Jesus preached, you could have reached out and touched the King, the King of glory, the one who one day will set up his kingdom upon this earth and every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he's the Lord of glory. So the first words out of the mouth of the Lord Jesus is it's time. It's here. It's urgent. The King has arrived.
This is serious. He uses a word about time that's a word that means it's sort of a crucial point, a climactic point in history. The King is here. The kingdom is here. Get ready.
Something important is going to happen. So he begins his message by telling us that the good news has come. But then he reminds us in that very same phrase that the good news has some conditions. He says repent and believe in the gospel. The first time Jesus appears in the first gospel, in the first instruction that he gives, the word is repent. And from then on in his most consistent message, Jesus continually calls upon people to repent. He doesn't just speak to the leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees and the philosophers.
He even says that to the poor and the oppressed. He says that repentance is the beginning of eternal life. And we don't hear much about repentance these days.
It's almost fallen out of the messages even in evangelical churches. But let me just be sure we all understand what repentance is. Repentance means to do a 180.
How many of you know what a 180 is? You turn completely around and go the other direction. Repentance is coming to a place in your life where you realize, I'm going the wrong way. And you don't subtly turn around. You immediately turn around. You repent. You do a 180.
A.W. Tozer once wrote that God will take nine steps toward us, but he will not take the tenth. He will incline us to repent, but God cannot do our repenting for us. He calls upon us to repent.
Now, often times when you use the word repent, everybody kind of slinks down in their chair and say, oh no, here we go. Here we go with sin again. I don't like to come to church and hear about sin.
Well, I want to tell you something that you probably never heard in a pulpit before. Sin is good news. Now, I don't mean that you should go sin. I don't really need to encourage you along that line anyway, I'm sure.
But sin is good news. Let me tell you why. If you come to me and you say, Dr. Jeremiah, I have serious problems. They're related to my heredity. I can't help you. You're stuck.
You can't go get new parents. Your heredity is your heredity. If that's your problem, that's your problem. Some of you may come to me and say, well, you know, the way I am, and the reason I am the way I am is because of my environment. I might be able to tweak your environment a little bit, but I can't change your environment. Your environment is where you are unless you move somewhere else or go somewhere else. That's who you are.
If it's your DNA or your environment, you're stuck. But I want to tell you something. If you ever come to grips with the fact that it's your sin, Almighty God's got an answer for it, and it can be cured. Amen? You know, that's the good news about sin. Sin's something you can do something about.
If you keep saying about all the things that are wrong in your life, well, it's what I was given by my parents, or I have a chemical addiction, or whatever it is, you know what, there's something really freeing about just saying, you know what's wrong with me? I'm just a sinner. I'm just involved in sin. And when you come to Almighty God with your sin and you repent of it, he can forgive you, and he can make it go away, and he can give the guilt to Jesus on the cross, and, oh, I want to tell you something. Don't be so hard on sin. Sin's good news. Because if you know it's sin, and that's always the hardest thing for us to admit. I mean, we want to give every name, you know, I've been rather ineffective lately. You know, give me a break.
You know, that's not ineffectiveness. It's sin, right? And the good news about sin is that Almighty God loves you so much, he created an incredible universal plan to deal with it.
And you can get help if you just, what do you have to do? Repent. Turn from it. And the Bible says when you turn from your sin by repenting, there's one other step that you need to take. It's not just enough to repent. In fact, if you just go around repenting all the time, all you're going to do is fill with despair and remorse, right? So repentance is just the first step. It says repent, and the second step is to believe. To repent means I'm going to renounce the direction I'm going and stop right here. I'm not going that way anymore. But to believe is to do the 180 and look toward Almighty God in Jesus Christ and go to him.
To believe is to put all your trust in Christ, to understand that what he did on the cross is for you as it was for me, as it is for us all. To say, I'm through with this life. I'm through with this sin. I'm through with the excuses and always propping myself up with psychological jargon.
I'm through with all of that. I am a sinner. I need to repent of my sin, and I need to look to Jesus Christ who paid the price on the cross for me and accept his forgiveness. And when you put your trust in Jesus Christ, as one writer said, you bet eternity on him.
You say, I believe with all my heart that he is the one who can forgive me, and you decide to accept his forgiveness. To believe in the good news means you take Jesus at his word about who God is, and you believe in him. So the Lord Jesus came with this message, and his message was, the kingdom of heaven is here. The kingdom of God is here. The king is here.
You want to get in on what's going on with the king? Repent and believe in the gospel. That was his first message. Basically, that's the only message that really ever matters, isn't it? That's the message we all need to hear. We need to be reminded of it often. God doesn't have really a lot of messages.
He has one message, repent and believe, and you can know everything that God has for you. Now, the Bible says that when Jesus got done with this message, he was in Galilee, and he's returning to a place where he probably spent many summer vacations. How many of you have ever spent a summer vacation near a body of water?
Amen. We do that, don't we? Well, when I was growing up, we did that. We had some lakes we went to, and when our family was young and we were still on the East Coast, we used to go to the other ocean on the other side of the continent where someone had given us permission to use their condo for two weeks every summer in August, and for 12 straight years, we took our little family to that place, and that was our vacation. Last year, we went back to see if we could find the place, and it's not there anymore.
They tore it down and built some high-rise there. It was really disappointing, but it reminded us of all the joy we had when we went to our vacation spot. Well, I believe that Galilee was Jesus' vacation spot. He lived in Nazareth, and if you've ever been to Galilee, there's no more beautiful place you could ever go for a vacation.
It's the most beautiful place. You will see when you go to Israel. The Bible says he went to Galilee. He was walking along the shore.
Let me pick up the reading here. Verse 16, and as he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men. And they immediately left their nets and followed him. And when he had gone a little further from there, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who also were in the boat mending their nets, and immediately he called them.
And they left their father, Zebedee, in the boat with the hired servants, and they went after him. Now, in the first part of this message where we see Jesus speaking about the gospel, we learn to understand that the greatest need we have, every one of us, is that we need to know, first of all, before we begin to understand the meaning of life, that we're forgiven, and that we have a relationship with God, that God created us with this vacuum in us that only he can fill, and when we repent and believe, Jesus comes to live within that vacuum, and we begin to fill the sense of joy that comes with salvation. But after we're saved, how many of you know that after you're saved, there's still some longings in your heart, and those longings usually are longings to be involved in some way with the kingdom initiative. So here we have not only Jesus and his message, but here we have Jesus and his men. And isn't it interesting that the Lord Jesus Christ, from the very beginning, lays out his plan of succession? He knows that one day he's going back to glory, and so he's developing disciples who will carry on the mission of the gospel long after he has left this earth. And here in Mark chapter 1, he's beginning to select those crucial people who will go with him, and the first two that he selects are Simon, Peter, and Andrew. Now, I want to remind you again that Simon Peter's behind the book of Mark, so he's going to make sure his story gets told first before anything else happens.
I just want to throw that in here. The Bible says as Jesus is walking along the shore, he sees Simon and his brother Andrew, and they're casting their nets into the sea. And Jesus calls them to follow him.
Now, I want to just take a moment for all of us, especially us men, and ask this question. What kind of men does Jesus call to serve him? What kind of men is he interested in employing?
What kind of people does he recruit? And I'd like to suggest to you, first of all, that Jesus recruits diligent men. What were these guys doing when Jesus found them? They weren't sitting around praying that something would happen. The Bible says they were doing what they did. They were fishermen. In fact, in the book of Mark, in the study of the Sea of Galilee, fishing was the main thing. There may have been as many as 131 boats in the Sea of Galilee, according to Josephus, when this happened. And Simon, Peter, and Andrew were just a couple of them.
They were casting their net into the sea. And when Jesus walked by, he just looked at him, and he said, hey, you, you, follow me. He didn't choose them from a life of passivity. You know, I think sometimes when people think, well, I don't know if God wants me to serve him or not, so I think I'll take a couple of years and pray about it. You know, that doesn't usually happen. You know how God collects his people? He finds somebody that's serving the best they know how in what they're doing, and he grabs hold of them and promotes them to a different place. Do you want to know how to get engaged with the things of God?
Get engaged with whatever you know you can do now. You say, well, I'm an usher. I'm a Sunday school teacher.
I drive a shuttle bus. Whatever it is, get engaged in what God wants you to do now. Just find out what it is. It should be simple. If you don't know what it is, pick something and watch what happens. God selects and recruits from people who are already diligently doing what they know to do.
Have you got that? These men weren't in a class on discipleship. They weren't in a prayer meeting asking God what they should do, although that's sometimes very important to do.
They were fishing, because fishing is what they knew. Now, let me just remind you that Jesus had already met these men. He'd already met all four of these guys. He had met Peter, Andrew, James, and John. If you go to John chapter 1, the other gospel, you will see that he's already met them.
They've already become, as we would say today, Christians. The call to salvation for those four men's already happened. This isn't a call to salvation.
This is a call to service. This is a call to discipleship. And so he comes to where these men are, diligently serving, and he calls them. God's given you intelligent mind.
He's given you a great engine, as they say in sports. God wants to take what you have and employ it for his purposes, and if you'll listen, Almighty God will put his call on your life. He calls diligent men. Then he calls decisive men. He comes to these men and he says, follow me, and immediately they left their nets and followed him. And it says down in the next verse about the other two guys, they left their father Zebedee in the boat and went after him. By the way, I've already gone through the first chapter and underlined immediately. It's in the first chapter 11 times.
I mean, this book is an immediate book. It says Jesus came to where these men were. Two of them were casting their nets.
Two of them were mending their nets. And Jesus just looked at them and said, hey, you, you, follow me. We'll have the final part of that message tomorrow here on the Thursday edition of Turning Point.
I hope you'll join us. And let me remind you again that the resource for the month of September is this beautiful color of creation calendar. Throughout history, authors and artists have endeavored to describe and duplicate the beauty that is found in creation. They use vibrant colors, unique and meticulous features, and a design that only God himself could ever create, and they try to replicate it.
They never get to the final replication, but they approach it, and in the approaching of it, there is beauty. The new colors of creation calendar is a reminder of the majesty of God's creation. It's a beautiful calendar that we want to send to you as a way of saying thank you for your investment in this ministry during the month of September. We have just a few days left for us to make this available to you.
When you send your gift and you ask for the calendar, it will be packaged up and shipped to your door, and you will have it very soon. I tell you, friends, it's a beautiful calendar you'll enjoy having in your home, and I'm sure you'll use it. We'll see you again next time right here on This Good Station. For more information on this special message from Dr. Jeremiah, please be sure to visit our website, where we offer two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly magazine Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. And when you're doing that, you'll find a link to our website at DavidJeremiah.org forward slash radio. And when you do, ask for your copy of our 14-month 2021 calendar, Colors of Creation.
It highlights God's breathtaking handiwork, and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard and New International versions, as well as in Standard or Large Print in the New King James, with helpful notes from over 40 years of study by Dr. Jeremiah. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details.
I'm Gary Hoogfling. Join us tomorrow as David shares a message of encouragement. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au
