Not a Minute to Waste
Come and join us as we explore Mark’s Gospel together in March and April.
Mark tells us the purpose of him writing in the very first verse in chapter 1 – ‘The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’
“Mark wastes no time in getting down to business—a single-sentence introduction, and not a digression to be found from beginning to end.
An event has taken place that radically changes the way we look at and experience the world, and he can’t wait to tell us about it. There’s an air of breathless excitement in nearly every sentence he writes. The sooner we get the message, the better off we’ll be, for the message is good, incredibly good: God is here, and he’s on our side.
The bare announcement that God exists doesn’t particularly qualify as news. Most people in most centuries have believed in the existence of God or gods. It may well be, in fact, that human beings in aggregate and through the centuries have given more attention and concern to divinity than to all their other concerns put together—food, housing, clothing, pleasure, work, family, whatever.
But that God is here right now, and on our side, actively seeking to help us in the way we most need help— this qualifies as news. For, common as belief in God is, there is also an enormous amount of guesswork and gossip surrounding the subject, which results in runaway superstition, anxiety, and exploitation. So Mark, understandably, is in a hurry to tell us what happened in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus—the Event that reveals the truth of God to us, so that we can live in reality and not illusion. He doesn’t want us to waste a minute of these precious lives of ours ignorant of this most practical of all matters—that God is passionate to save us”. (Introduction to Mark taken from the Message)
Mark tells us the good news (‘gospel’) of Jesus Christ. His Gospel is not just the life story of Jesus. It is about the good news of:
• who Jesus is
• why Jesus came
• why Jesus died
This is Mark’s big message, and as we journey through and dig deeper into this book together we will learn how Jesus upsets our expectations in order to give us something better than we could imagine. Our prayer is that each of us would grow in Christlikeness through a life-changing encounter with God’s Word.
*Small Groups run on alternate Sunday evenings.