Lake Martin Presbyterian Church May 17, 2026 Podcast

Join Rev. William Skinner for this week’s message from Mark 6:1-13, "Coming home and sending out". Explore Scripture, hear thoughtful teaching, and be encouraged in your walk with Christ. For more information and resources, visit lakemartinpca.com.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Lake Martin Presbyterian Church Podcast. We're glad you're listening. Lake Martin Presbyterian Church is a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, located near Lake Martin, Alabama. Each week we share the preaching ministry of our church and pray it encourages you in your walk with Christ. Here's this week's message.

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If you would, please turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6. Mark's Gospel, chapter 6, beginning in verse 1. As we come to chapter 6, we're reaching another transition in the Gospel of Mark, and I briefly want to summarize where we've been so far in Mark's Gospel. Mark began his gospel with the preparation of Jesus' ministry in the wilderness, with John the Baptist preparing the way for the Lord. Jesus was baptized and tempted in the wilderness by Satan, baptized by John, tempted by Satan. And he started preaching soon after in Capernaum and the surrounding regions of Galilee. He was preaching, he was teaching, he was healing and casting out demons. And as he did so, Jesus' fame quickly spread. And as it spread, we saw various groups of people coming and attempting to define who Jesus was. That the Gospel of Mark is really asking the same question, and all these people have been asking it, who is this Jesus? Who is Jesus? But remember that no one was able to correctly define and identify who Jesus was or what he came to do. And remember there's a section of conflict that Jesus encountered in Galilee, the scribes, his own family, the demons. And then Mark recorded for us a selection of Jesus' teachings, where Jesus emphasized the sowing, the growing, and the spreading of the kingdom of God. A kingdom that comes from heaven to earth in the power of God. And then we saw after that the power of God on display, the very power that Jesus had just taught about, displayed by Jesus over nature, as he calmed the storm upon the Sea of Galilee, and over demons, as he cast out legion, the many demons who were inside the man in the hill country of the Garosenes, and death itself, as he resurrected Jairus' daughter, the ruler of the synagogue, showing that he himself is the sovereign God, the Son of the Living God, and He is a gentle Savior. So in summary, Mark's gospel has been asking one fundamental question: Who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? And so far we've been told he's the Son of God, sovereign over all things. He's good, he's loving, he's gentle. And he's bringing the kingdom of God from heaven down to earth. That's who he is, and that's what he's doing. That's his mission. He's the eternal Son of God who's bringing the kingdom of heaven down to earth. And so with that, we transition to chapter 6, and he's taking that mission and that message to his hometown, to Nazareth, the place where he was raised. He's not going there for a visit home, a visit to see family and friends. He's going on mission to bring the good news of the kingdom to the city of Nazareth, to bring heaven down to earth. But the citizens of Nazareth, the men and women that Jesus grew up with, don't receive him as the eternal Son of God, the sovereign Lord over nature and demons and death. The people of Nazareth who had had the incredible privilege of growing up in the same town as God incarnate rejected him. And despite the pain that this rejection must have caused Jesus, he wasn't deterred in his mission. When he was rejected by family and friends, when he was rejected by the people that he knew best, he simply turned and went to the surrounding villages and commissioned his disciples to go out and to spread the seed of the word into the hearts of men wherever they went. That's the main thing for us in this text this morning. That's the main thing I want you to see this morning is that despite rejection, the kingdom of God must advance. Despite rejection, the kingdom of God advances. It doesn't matter if it's Jesus' hometown, it doesn't matter if his own family rejects him, the kingdom of God will advance and the mission will proceed. And the question for us, the question for you, in light of that, is how will you respond to Jesus? The kingdom is advancing, the message will continue to go out, how will you respond? And as we consider this text, I want to draw your attention to two headings. First, in verses one through six, blind men. Blind men in verses one through six, and verses six through thirteen, bold missions. Bold missions in verses six through thirteen. Before we consider these two headings, let's pray and ask God's help upon the reading and preaching of his word. Abba Father, Holy God, we thank you for your word. A lamp to our feet, a light to our path. It's able to make us wise unto salvation, and it's powerful, it will not return void, it's sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide between soul and spirit. And we ask this morning that you would accompany your word with your Holy Spirit, that you would give us ears to hear, that you would plow the soil of our hearts, that we might be the good soil, willing and able to receive the seed of your word. Help us not to reject the Lord Jesus Christ, but to receive him by faith this morning, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. Mark chapter six, beginning in verse one, this is God's holy, inerrant, inspired word. Give careful attention to the reading of God's Word. He Jesus went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get these things? How is this wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joseph, and Judas and Simon? Are these not his sisters here with us? And they took offence at him. And Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his home town among his relatives, and in his own household, and he could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them, and he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went about and he went about among the villages teaching. And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff, no bread, no bag, no money in their belts, but to wear sandals, and not to put on two tunics. And he said to them, Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there, and if any place will not receive you, and they will not listen to you, when you leave shake the dust, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them. So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent, and they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick, and healed them. This is God's word. Look with me first at verses one through six. Verses one through six, blind men. Jesus takes his disciples with him and goes to the small town of Nazareth, the town where he was raised, to spread the message of the kingdom of God. And initially, this visit sounds promising. He came back, and on the Sabbath the leaders of the synagogue had invited Jesus to preach. The people of Nazareth had apparently heard enough of the reports of Jesus, his power over sickness and death and demons, and the fame and his preaching, and they knew we don't want to miss this. We have to hear what all the hype is about. So Jesus begins to preach. And as he preaches in the synagogue, the people are astounded. You can hear them asking, where did this boy get all this education? When did he get so smart to preach like this? How does he understand the scriptures in this way? Where does he get the authority to preach this way? They even begin to ask about the rumors of his miracles. How does he do these things? And as he continues to preach, it only goes downhill in the synagogue in Nazareth. The people start thinking about the Jesus that grew up there amongst them. The people wonder how could that boy be preaching to us like this? How could he ask us to repent? How could he be doing miracles? He's just one of us. He's just one of the people of Nazareth. Who does he think he is? And they begin to hurl these insults at Christ. And some interpreters and scholars of the text are wondering if the text is trying to tell us that they didn't even let Jesus finish his sermon. They seem to have cut Jesus off, asking questions. Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's boy? Aren't his brothers and his sisters still here among us? And some of these may sound like innocent questions, but I can assure you that they're not. Asking, isn't this the carpenter is claiming that this is Jesus' role, that all he could ever amount to was the profession of a carpenter, the profession of his stepfather Joseph, and presumably Jesus had been trained in the skill of carpentry. Now carpentry is not a bad profession, and it certainly was not a bad profession in this day, in this culture. A carpenter was a skilled craftsman, vital to the economy. But the Nazarenes were asserting that Jesus was limited to that function. His stepfather, Joseph, was a carpenter, and therefore he must be a carpenter. He was no prophet, he was no preacher, no teacher, he was a carpenter, a worker with his hands. And then when discussing his identity, his lineage, they insult him further. Isn't this Mary's boy? Isn't this Mary's boy? Now, if someone asked you, aren't you so-and-so's boy or daughter, that wouldn't be insulting to you. That's not offensive in our culture. But in this culture, in Nazareth, where Jesus was, you would never call someone as the son of their mother. You would never refer to them as the son of their mother. It was disrespectful to a man to call him the son of his mother. You always call someone by their father's name, the son of Joseph. In fact, there's a good chance even at this point in the text that Mary is a widow, that Joseph had died by this point. There's some historical evidence of that. And even if that was the case, even if Joseph was dead, it would be highly disrespectful to call Jesus the son of Mary. This is a direct insult to Jesus, claiming that Jesus is an illegitimate son. The gossip mills, the rumor mills, the gossip circles of Nazareth had not forgotten that Mary had gotten pregnant before she was married to Joseph. She was pregnant before she was married to Joseph, and clearly no one in Nazareth believed that this baby had been conceived in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit. So they call Jesus an illegitimate son. And then they reference his brothers and his sisters saying, What makes you any different from these who are still here among us? What makes you any different? And what they're doing is they're attempting to answer the same question that the whole gospel of Mark has been asking. Who is Jesus? And in Nazareth, they're not willing to admit that he ever could be anything besides the boy who grew up in their town. He's just the boy who grew up in their town, the illegitimate son of Mary. That's who Jesus is in Nazareth. And they're so put off by his person and his work, his authority and his teaching and his preaching. They're so put off by who he was claiming to be that they took offense. They were angry at Jesus for his claims to authority, for claiming to be something special. We have to ask the question: where does this hostility and this unbelief come from? Where does this anger come from? Of course, the broad answer is sin. Sin in our own indwelling rebellion against God is the root of all unbelief. But this particular rejection is harsh. You would think of all the towns in the world that God had been gracious to, this might be one of the most. You think of all the towns in the world, this might be one of the most blessed towns. They got to grow up with Jesus. Jesus lived almost 30 years of his life in Nazareth. They got to be with God incarnate for almost 30 years. But it seems that in the end, Jesus' presence growing up there, instead of breaking their hard hearts, instead of prompting them to believe, it had done the opposite. It had hardened them in their unbelief. You see, the issue here is familiarity. They had been around Jesus their whole lives and in their unbelief, in their hard hearts, their hearts had grown harder. They had become so familiar with Jesus that they couldn't believe anything else about him. There's a warning here for you and for me, is there not? There's a warning here for us. And it's a very sad, sobering warning that you can be surrounded by the means of grace. You can be surrounded by the Word of God. You can be surrounded by the gospel of Christ and His Word your whole life. Thirty years or more, and still live in unbelief. In fact, if you are living in the sin of unbelief, if your heart is hardened to the gospel of Christ, then the familiarity to God's word, the familiarity of God's word, of God's worship, of the person and work of Christ, could only serve to harden you in your unbelief. It's kind of like a little boy or girl who so desperately wants a certain toy. It's the best toy, it's the newest toy, and they they get the toy. And they play for it really hard for two days, and then they play for it a little bit less, and then a little bit less, and then the toy sits in the shelf, it has its premier place on the shelf, and they stop playing with it, and they eventually never play with it. And this thing, this thing that was so valuable, by familiarity, ends up just sitting on the shelf, and we can be the same way with our own toys, can't we? Things that we think so highly of, once we have them, we're not interested at all, and familiarity can can be the same way. Familiarity combined with a hard heart and unbelief is a dangerous, dangerous thing. You must never let the things of God grow dull or familiar to you. Never let the person and work of Christ become mundane to you or irrelevant to you. This is the infinitely holy God, the one who made the heavens and the earth, who created all things. And you were guilty in his sight. Guilty in his sight. This is the God who himself, because of the debt that you owe, because of your sin in his sight, took on flesh and died on a cross because he loves you. This is the God who controls all things, who controls nature and demons and death, who stoops down to your infirmities, who gently pulls you along, strengthening your weak faith with gentle words. Never let that become ordinary. Never let that become mundane. That is extraordinary. That the God who created heaven and earth cares about your weak faith and comes down and puts his arm around Jairus and says, Keep going, Jairus, don't listen to them, listen to me. As we heard last week. Cry out to God, pray to him, I believe, help my unbelief, strengthen my weak faith. Give me fresh eyes to see the wickedness of my sin. Give me fresh eyes to see your holiness. Show me your glory. Show me the loveliness of Christ. Pray that every morning God would give you a fresh taste of his grace, new morning mercies, that you might never grow tired of it, that we might be able to sing. I love to tell the old, old story, because those who know it best are hungering and thirsting, hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. This sin of familiarity, this sin of unbelief is dangerous. And we have to be on guard against it. Do not grow comfortable with the gospel. Be amazed by it every day of your life. Let's see how Jesus responds. In response to such stark rejection, to such hard-heartedness to unbelief, Jesus tells them a Jewish aphorism, a wise saying, a classical proverb, and they would have all known this. This would have been something that they would have said to one another. A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, amongst his family, his relatives, and his own household. Now, what Jesus is doing here is he's not introducing a new teaching. He's not telling you that preachers shouldn't preach in their hometowns. What is Jesus doing here in the text? He went to his hometown to preach. Okay, so we don't need to read this verse and then go start some form of itinerant preaching where we send pastors far away from their homelands to foreign places in hopes of a better reception. Jesus is pointing out the irony, the irony that he goes to the people who should have known him best and who knew him the least. So first he tells them this phrase that they would have known, saying, Don't you know that you're missing it? You're missing it. He attempts to break them out of their hard hearted stupor. And then he does something very interesting. Very interesting. He performs very few miracles, very few healings in the region of Nazareth. The text reads, He could not do mighty works there. Now that's a strange verse. Was Jesus limited? Was his power limited? No, absolutely not. He was limited by the unbelief of the people. These people in Nazareth had heard about his power. They knew the stories. Some of them had probably witnessed things that he had done. There's no need to demonstrate his power to them again. They had enough evidence. They had all the facts. They had all the data. The problem was their hearts. They rejected him. They had rejected Jesus. Even if they had a little bit of faith, a weak faith, Jesus would have strengthened that faith. Remember Jairus, the one who had a weak faith. And Jesus says, Look at me, keep going. Don't fear, believe. But here, the citizens of Nazareth reject him. And this is a sobering picture of what Jesus has already taught us in Mark chapter 4, verses 24 and 25. Remember the parable of the measure, where Jesus said, With the measure that you use, it will be measured to you. The one who has not, even the little he has, will be taken away. The Nazarenes were familiar with Jesus. They thought they had it all figured out. They thought they knew who Jesus was. And so Jesus does not perform any more miracles there. And he moves on. The word of God was removed from Nazareth. And once you learn from their mistake, once you gain wisdom cheaply from the mistakes of the Nazarenes, and repent of unbelief, with the measure that we use, and really it's with the measure that you receive, more will be given to you. The blind men of Nazareth did not receive the word of God, and it was taken away from them. And so this is the sad tale of the blind men of Nazareth. Now let's consider the bold mission which follows. Look with me at verses 6 through 13. Verses 6 through 13, we see bold missions having been painfully rejected in his hometown of Nazareth. Jesus doesn't sulk. He doesn't go back to the drawing board and develop a new plan of attack. He doesn't go to tweak the mission or the message saying, something's wrong with the message. We have to change that, or something's wrong with our methods, we have to go change that. None of that. Without skipping a beat, verse 6 tells us that Jesus moved on to the other villages and he was teaching there. And as he did so, he decided it was time to send out the disciples to do the same. So in this reaction, we're already seeing the urgency of Christ's mission and the necessity to respond to his message. Christ is confident in the mission, in the message. There's nothing wrong there. We're going to continue to get the word out. The blind men of Nazareth reject Jesus and he moves on. With the measure they used, it was measured out to them, and Jesus moves on. So Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs of two to take on this new bold mission. And he granted them authority over the unclean spirits, and then he gives them some rather interesting commands. Let's look at these commands briefly. They were to take nothing with them except a staff, sandals, and one pair of clothes. They were to stay with the first hospitable person in each village that would receive them. And if a place, one of these villages, rejected their message, rejected their mission, they were supposed to shake the dust off their feet, shake the dust of that village off of their feet. Now those are some interesting commands. This bold move in the mission of Jesus to reach more villages is to be carried out in his authority. As his disciples go out, they are witnesses of him, and they're to do things the way that he did things. Minimalistic stuff, one home base. And when you're rejected, you move on. And it shows us the urgency of the mission. You're not on a long-term trip, you're not moving to a new city. You're just passing through. To get the message out, you must get the message out. You must preach to God's people. The Messiah is here. Repent and believe in Jesus. So the lack of provisions reminds us that the mission was not a long-term mission. This was a short, bold, calculated move to get the message out to the villages of Israel. Then staying in one home showed the disciples that they weren't to get too comfortable in any town. They weren't to go around socializing. They weren't to get too comfortable. They were going to find a home with a receptive family and use that as a base camp. And where have we seen that before? That's precisely what Jesus did. He went to Capernaum, he found Peter's house, and that's become his base camp. Poor Peter and his family who have now just sacrificed their home to Jesus' base camp. I'm joking, of course, that was a great privilege. And from this base camp, they would preach, they would cast out demons, and they would heal people. But what about this shaking the dust off your feet? What is that about? This was a orthodox Jewish practice that when you encounter someone who is unclean, you would shake the dust off your feet, essentially saying, when the judgment comes, I don't want to be associated with you. I don't want to be anywhere near you. I don't want the dust from your place to be anywhere close to me because God is going to burn that thing up with fire. I don't want to be anywhere near you. Your judgment is on you. I'm getting away from you. That's what shaking the dust off your feet was doing. So the disciples, when their message was rejected, when they themselves were rejected, they would shake the dust off your feet, saying, You are unclean, you are rejecting the message of God, you are rejecting the kingdom of heaven. And they would move on to the next village. And this bold mission strategy that Jesus sends his disciples out on, this bold mission strategy preaches to us the confidence that we need to have in the mission and message of the kingdom of God. The confidence that we ought to have in this mission and message. In the face of utter rejection from the people that he knew best, Jesus launches the most aggressive stage of his mission yet. Uncompromising, urgent. In this stage of his mission, he and his disciples would rapidly carry the message and the mission across the villages of Israel. Rejection is no reason to stop. It's no reason to reconsider the mission, no reason to reconsider the message. It's a reason to rally, to rally with boldness and carry the mission and the message to new ears, to new soil, where the word might flourish and grow. So this move by Jesus in the face of rejection preaches to you and to me the confidence that we need to have in what we're doing. It also preaches to us the urgency in responding to that mission and that message. The disciples were not lingering in any village. This was a quick and decisive mission. The people that they went to must accept or reject the word of God. And if they rejected it, then the dust was shaken off their feet and they moved on. It is a grace of Christ to deliver his word to us. It's a grace of the king to give us the invitation into his kingdom. And no one is guaranteed another opportunity. If the invitation is rejected, his servants will move to the highways and the hedges. They will move further out, and they will go find new ears to hear the invitation. And so we must listen to Jesus with urgency. We must respond. Don't reject the king. Don't reject this invitation. It's worth noting here that what we see here in chapter 6, verses 6 through 13, preaches confidence to us in what we're doing. But this is not the model for the continuing mission of the church. When Jesus ascended into heaven in Matthew 28, he gave his disciples a new commission to disciple the nations. And then he continued to instruct his church throughout the New Testament in how to carry out that mission. And that's good news because that means that we're no longer constricted to doing missions with nothing but a staff, one pair of sandals, and one pair of clothes. When we go on the mission, and when we go do missions, when we plant churches, we can pack our bags. We can live amongst the people that we're trying to reach. And we can change clothes every day and smell nice. And so praise God for that. And no longer do we have to shake the dust from our feet, but we can stay somewhere and pray earnestly that God would open hearts and open eyes and open ears to receive the seed of his word. The continuing mission, the mission that you and I are on today, has some differences from what we see here. This was a decisive, bold move from Jesus and his disciples. That much is plain. But what I hope that you do see here in this text is that in the face of rejection, a painful rejection, Jesus makes a bold move, an urgent move to advance the kingdom of God. The mission must go on. The question is how will you respond? How will the people of these villages respond? We're told in the last two verses that as the disciples went out, there were some who responded favorably. There were demons that were cast out, there were healed that were sick. There is faith that was found among some. Despite rejection in Nazareth, the kingdom of God will continue to grow, with or without the people of Nazareth. So let me tie these things together. We've seen the blind men of Nazareth, who through familiarity with Jesus had hardened their hearts in unbelief. And then we've seen Jesus' response in a bold mission that he and his disciples embarked on, taking the kingdom of God to all the surrounding villages with urgency. And the message for you and for me this morning is plain. The kingdom of God will advance. The kingdom of God will progress. The mustard seed, y'all remember the mustard seed? The mustard seed will grow to be the largest plant in the garden. The question is, how will you respond? Who do you say that Jesus is? Is he the illegitimate son of Mary? Is he simply a carpenter from Nazareth? Or is he the Son of God, the sovereign Lord of all, who came to earth to seek and save the lost? The kingdom will advance, the mission will go on, you must respond. Do not reject the king, he came for you. Let's pray. Abba Father, holy God, in your word this morning we see a sober warning to us of people who were so close to our Lord Jesus Christ and completely missed him. We pray that you would keep us from the sin of unbelief. Let your word be living and act living and active in us. Let it amaze us every morning. Let your grace astound us. Show us your glory. Remind us of your holiness and the heinousness of our own sin and the goodness of grace. Let these things never become stale to us, we pray. It's in Christ's name. Amen. Alright, would you please stand with me and we'll sing Blessed be the tie that binds.

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Thank you for listening to the Lake Martin Presbyterian Church Podcast. If this message encouraged you, please consider sharing it with someone else. To learn more about our church, including worship times and upcoming events, visit LakemartinPCA.com. We'd love to have you join us.