Message preached Sunday, October 18, 2015 from Mark 8:13-21
Theme: Certain predispositions of the heart can hinder even our Lord’s most devoted students from learning His lessons.
(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)
I have had the experience of being on both sides of the teacher’s podium. I have spent a whole lot of time as a student, and I have had at least some experience in being a teacher. I have had, I believe, some truly wonderful instructors; and whenever I have had the opportunity to play the role of an instructor myself, I have tried to be effective in the ways that my teachers have been effective.
And I have discovered something important in it all—something that should have been obvious. Effective learning has a lot to do with the condition of the students’ inner-being. And as this morning’s passage shows us, even a great teacher cannot make effective learning happen unless the students are of the right frame of heart.
I believe you would agree with me that there has never been a greater teacher on this earth than the Lord Jesus Christ. He truly was the Master Teacher. But even He became—if I may dare to put it this way—’frustrated’ in His efforts to teach by the fact that His students were dull of hearing. There was a hardness of heart that prevented His disciples from learning as they should; and as a result, effective learning wasn’t happening.
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Mark 8 tells us about how the Lord Jesus had just performed a great miracle. It was the second great miracle of it’s kind. And I hope you’ll allow me a moment to remind you of it all. To fully appreciate this morning’s passage—and the lesson it has to teach us about ‘learning’ —you’ll need to know its context.
Back in Chapter 6, our Lord had fed over 5,000 people with just five small loaves of bread and two small fish. It was a truly great miracle. And then, in Chapter 8, we’re told of how He performed another, very similar miracle of feeding—this time of over 4,000 people with seven small loaves of bread and a few small fish. After each miracle, the disciples were able to gather up a large supply of leftovers—the first time gathering twelve small baskets full of fragments; and the second time gathering seven larger baskets full of fragments. It must have been quite an experience for them to have gathered these leftovers—particularly after having been eyewitnesses of the great miracle involved. Picking up those fragments would have been an experience that would have permanently impressed itself upon their minds.
Well; immediately after that, the Pharisees confronted Jesus. After all that He had already done—including these two very remarkable miracles of feeding—these religious leaders came to Him and demanded that He give them a miraculous sign from heaven. Imagine! Apparently, all that He had already done wasn’t enough for them. They were, of course, making this demand from out of an attitude of hard-hearted unbelief. Even if He had accommodated their demand, they still would have found reasons for not believing on Him. And so, He sharply refused them and left them.
And that’s where our passage this morning picks up. Mark tells us that Jesus denied the Pharisees’ demand;
And He left them, and getting into the boat again, departed to the other side. Now the disciples had forgotten to take bread, and they did not have more than one loaf with them in the boat. Then He charged them, saying, “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they reasoned among themselves, saying, “It is because we have no bread” (Mark 8:13-16).
Clearly, Jesus’ word of instruction was not getting through. They weren’t even in the ballpark. And then, you get a sense of His frustration as a teacher;
But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, “Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up?” They said to Him, “Twelve.” “Also, when I broke the seven for the four thousand, how many large baskets full of fragments did you take up?” And they said, “Seven.” So He said to them, “How is it you do not understand?” (vv. 17-21).
Apparently, not even the greatest of all teachers can teach effectively if His student’s hearts are not in a teachable state of being.
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Now; I believe that most of us here today truly want to be taught of the Lord Jesus. He is our Lord and Master, and we love Him. We sincerely want to be His ‘front row’ students, and to receive all the good things He has to give us.
And that’s why I think that this morning’s passage should be of particular importance to us. As much as we would want to be His students, I doubt that we could have possibly wanted it any more than those twelve apostles did (with Judas perhaps being excepted). No one could have had a greater opportunity to learn from the greatest of all teachers than they had! They were in His bodily presence; and had followed Him personally and intimately for a long period of time. They ate with Him, walked with Him, slept next to Him, served with Him, and listened to His every word. They even had the encouragement of one another in the process! Wouldn’t that have been an encouraging environment for an apostle to learn in?—surrounded by other apostles? But even they—with all their advantages—failed to learn as they should have from the greatest teacher of all time.
In this passage, we can see the nature of their misunderstanding. And I need to share briefly about the nature of their misunderstanding; but that misunderstanding is not the most important thing for us to notice in this passage. For us, I believe that the greater lesson is to be found in the reasons why they misunderstood—and in the conditions of heart that prevented them from learning the lesson that the Lord sought to teach them.
But let’s begin by considering the misunderstanding itself. You can see it, can’t you? Jesus was in the boat with them—perhaps thinking a great deal about the confrontation He just had with the Pharisees. Our Lord is fully human; and I believe He had a very human feeling of frustration over the wicked attitude of heart that the Pharisees just displayed. I believe He was even stewing about it a little bit. And that’s when He—perhaps suddenly—turned to His disciples as they made their way across the lake; and gave them the stern charge that we find in verse 15:
“Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (v. 15).
What did He mean? We talked about it a little in our last time together. Jesus—the Master Teacher—is using ‘leaven’ as an illustration of something. If you’ve ever baked bread—or been around when fresh bread was being baked—then you know that a small amount of leaven (or yeast) is first introduced into a lump of bread dough in the bowl. Once it is kneaded into that that lump of dough, it sits in it, and permeates it, and brings its fermenting influence upon the whole lump. That way, when the lump of dough is put on a pan and placed into the oven, the whole lump rises and makes bread. And Jesus is telling His disciples something very important to their spiritual well-being. They needed to beware of letting the “leaven” of the Pharisees and the “leaven” of Herod—that is, their seemingly small influence—get into them and contaminate their whole faith in Him.
What was the “leaven” of the Pharisees? I believe that it was their legalistic emphasis on religious rules and regulations. They believed that righteousness before God could be achieved by keeping true to the strict letter of God’s law. They followed a religion of ‘works’. And Jesus came into this world to fulfill that law for us perfectly; so that sinners could now be saved in the only way anyone could be saved—that is, by faith in Him. That’s why those Pharisees rejected Him so fiercely and would not believe on Him. And Jesus was warning His disciples not to allow themselves to be contaminated by the kind of thinking that characterized those Pharisees.
There was also the “leaven” of Herod. Jesus speaks of this as almost a separate kind of “leaven”. And I believe that the “leaven” of King Herod—and also of the Sadducees who had aligned themselves with Herod—was the philosophy of worldliness. It was the belief that spiritual things don’t really exist or don’t really matter; and that ‘the good life’ could be achieved apart from God through secular means such as politics or human reason or material prosperity. That’s why it was that, even though Herod and the Sadducees were hostile to the Pharisees, they were at least in agreement with each other in their joint hostility toward our Lord. Jesus warned His apostles to beware of both dangerous forms of soul-corrupting “leaven”.
And you’d agree with me, I’m sure, that that’s an important lesson for Jesus’ followers to learn. And yet, when Jesus told them this, they didn’t get it. They thought that He was talking about bread—simply because they had forgotten to take food along with them. They were completely misunderstanding Jesus’ instruction to them. When the Gospel writer Matthew tells us this story, he makes this very clear. He tells us that Jesus said;
How is it you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning bread?—but to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 16:11-12).
So; that was the nature of their misunderstanding of Jesus. But the thing that I am asking that we concentrate on the most from this passage this morning is the reasons why they misunderstood.
You see; I am taking it for granted today that the Lord Jesus is alive and very active in each of our lives as followers of His—teaching us individually the things that He wants us to learn about Him. You might be going through a challenge right now, or a trial, or a disappointment of some kind. And that challenge has not come into your life by accident. The Lord Jesus is seeking to teach you something important about Himself in it. He is tailoring the story of each of our lives in such a way as to teach us love Him and trust Him and obey Him more faithfully through the things we undergo. We are constantly in His school. He is the greatest teacher there ever was; and class is always in session.
The question is, are we of the right frame of mind to learn these valuable lessons as we should? It’s really up to us to be ‘teachable’.
So; let’s walk through this passage together once again. As we do, I suggest that we can see that certain predispositions of the heart can hinder even His most devoted students from learning the Lord’s lessons.
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First, I suggest we can be hindered in learning from Jesus as we should . . .
1. THROUGH FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON OURSELVES.
Now; I need to say this carefully. It’s not that it’s wrong to focus on ourselves when we’re learning from Jesus. Obviously, we’re going to have to focus on ourselves to some degree; otherwise we can’t learn anything at all. But I would say that the problem is that we focus on ourselves too much—or perhaps focus on ourselves in a misguided way. And when we do that, we can’t learn from Jesus as we should
I see this demonstrated to us in verses 13-16. The Lord Jesus had left the Pharisees without giving in to their demand. Perhaps the unpleasant circumstances motivated them to leave in a hurried manner. And as they reached the other side—and perhaps were growing hungry—the looked for something to eat and found that, in their haste, they had forgotten to bring food. They looked around; and all that they found was one small loaf of bread. Just one loaf for twelve hungry men!
Now; it must be that they had talked among themselves about it. It may even be that they began to complain to one another and blame one another. Their failure was much on their mind, because it colored how they interpreted Jesus’ words. When Jesus told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod, they “reasoned” among themselves that He said, “It is because we have no bread”.
And I wonder if you can see what was happening. They were focusing on themselves so much that they weren’t receptive to Jesus’ teaching. They were focused inappropriately on their failure to bring bread—and all while they were in the presence of Someone who could feed multiple thousands of people with just a few loaves of bread! Their self-focus on their own failures and shortcomings in one small, relatively unimportant matter had begun to cloud their thinking about Jesus; and so they weren’t listening properly to the greater thing He was trying to teach them.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ; I wonder if that is happening to us far more than we realize. I wonder if it’s even happening this morning to some of us in this room. You are focusing way too much on your own faults and shortcomings; you’re feeling far too overwhelmed at times with your own failures and fears; and you’re becoming distracted from Jesus’ sufficiency in your life, and are not focused enough on Him to hear Him and learn from Him. And if that’s the case, you’re not alone. I’m guilty of doing that too. I believe that even the greatest of Jesus’ followers are guilty of it at times. Clearly, even the apostles fell victim to it.
And please listen to me. It is not necessary that we be so distracted! You and I do not need to be so focused on our own failures that we fail to hear Jesus. Our failures never constitute a failure for Him. Our past does not hinder Him from bringing about His glory in us.
Do you know how the redeemed man or woman is described in the Bible? No matter what their past was, they are described as brand new creations in Christ. That’s how we should look at one another; and that’s how we should look at ourselves. In 2 Corinthians 5:16-17, the apostle Paul wrote;
Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new (2 Corinthians 5:16-17).
Paul really knew what he was talking about when he wrote this. After all, he had been a persecutor of Christians. He was a violent opponent to the Christian faith—dragging Christians away for imprisonment and execution. But Jesus Christ met him, and transformed him into the greatest Christian teacher we have ever had—second only to the Lord Himself. If he had allowed his faults and failures to become the main focus of his life, he might never been able to hear God’s call on his life and serve us. But as he Himself once wrote;
Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:12-14).
Dear brothers and sisters; let’s put ourselves in the right frame of mind to be taught of the Lord. And one of the ways we can do that is by ceasing from focusing too much on ourselves and on our failures and faults. We are made completely new in Christ Jesus; and there is now no way that we can ever blow it so badly that Jesus can not be glorified in and through us. Let’s turn our attention to Him; and let’s learn from Him like what we truly are—new creations!
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So; that’s one way that the apostles failed to learn as they should have. They focused far too much on themselves. We fail to learn when we do that too. And another way we fail is . . .
2. THROUGH NOT PUTTING OUR MINDS TO WORK.
In fact, I wonder if this isn’t one of the greatest ways that we fail to learn from Jesus as we should. It sounds like a simplistic thing to say; but I believe we often fail to learn from Jesus because we don’t work at learning. We tend to think that true growth in Christian maturity simply comes by letting God pour information down on top of our heads miraculously, and letting it just somehow soak into our brains passively. We tend to think that our growth into the image of Christ—the greatest enterprise any human being can ever be invited to engage in—just somehow ‘happens’. And nothing could be further from the truth! If we tried to learn in our vocational life in the way that we so often think we can learn in the Christian faith, we would soon be broke!
Look at what Jesus said to the apostles in verses 17-18. It’s one of the longest series of rebuking questions you will find Him giving to them in the Gospels. He said;
“Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember? (vv. 17-18).
Look that list of questions over carefully. You’ll find that it has much to do with the thinking process. Why, He asked, did they “reason” because they had no bread? They were reasoning about the wrong thing—something that they didn’t have to worry about at all. He asks them, “Do you not yet perceive”—that is, they did not yet comprehend things in a way He expected, by this point, that they should have been comprehending them. And similarly, He rebuked them for the fact that they did not yet “understand”; and the word He uses here means ‘to send things together’. They still hadn’t put the pieces together as they should. They hadn’t connected the dots. He asked, “Is your heart still hardened?”; and here, we can take Him to be referring to the inner man—the part of our being that is opened to spiritual truth. They weren’t opening the door and allowing truth in yet. They, of course, had the proper faculties for learning. They had eyes and they had ears; but they weren’t using them to see or to hear. And they weren’t using one of the most important faculties for spiritual growth—a sanctified memory. “And do you not remember?”
One of the greatest Bible teachers I ever had was my professor in ‘Inductive Bible Study’. I will never forget something he told us in class once. He said, “Men and women; I really don’t know any other way to tell you to study the Bible than by actually studying it. You have to do the work of hard study.” And that’s true! It’s true in every aspect of the Christian life. You must “study to show yourself approved”. If you don’t know what a word in the Bible means, you need to look it up. When you read about a place talked about in Scripture that you aren’t familiar with, you need to find it on a map. If you don’t understand the meaning of a command in Scripture, you must pray about it, and read more, and discover its meaning. You must work at the hard task of thinking and learning in the Christian life; and you must not quit—no matter how long you have walked with the Lord.
I really like something that the apostle Peter once wrote. It creates quite picture. In light of the glorious promise of salvation in Christ, and in light of the challenges we face in this world as His followers, Peter wrote;
Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ . . . (1 Peter 1:13).
I especially like that phrase, “gird up the loins of your mind”. Today, we might say, “Roll up the sleeves of your brain!” Don’t just sit there and hope that spiritual truth somehow drifts into your ears. Put in the effort of learning from Jesus. Have the frame of mind of being ‘ready to learn’. Those who do this are the ones who learn best from Jesus.
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So; this story shows us that we can fail to learn from Jesus as we should because we are too focused on ourselves. And we also see that it’s because we don’t actively put our minds to work. And here’s one more that we find in this passage. We may fail to learn . . .
3. THROUGH NOT LETTING OUR EXPERIENCES WITH THE LORD SINK IN.
Now; the Bible tells us that there is nothing that happens in our lives by accident. All things, we are told, work together for good for those who love the Lord Jesus and who are called according to His purpose. That means that there is nothing that ever happens in our lives as followers of Jesus—no trial, no challenge, no difficulty, no task—that is not, somehow purposeful. You can take that for fact! We are the redeemed of Jesus Christ—destined to share in His eternal glory. There is absolutely nothing that is mundane about us. And that gives us sufficient warrant to stop and examine everything that happens in our lives, think carefully and deeply about it, and ask, “What is this teaching me about the Lord Jesus Christ? What do I remember about Him from the past? How has He proven Himself sufficient before? And how is He proving Himself sufficient right now? How can I apply what I have learned about Him before to the situation I’m in presently?”
I see that very clearly in what Jesus next tells the apostles. They were all thinking that they were in some kind of trouble because they had forgotten to bring bread. They were so focused on that single failure that they couldn’t rightly understand what Jesus was teaching them. And so He urged them to go back to their previous experiences with Him and let them sink in. He said;
When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up?” They said to Him, “Twelve.” “Also, when I broke the seven for the four thousand, how many large baskets full of fragments did you take up?” And they said, “Seven.” So He said to them, “How is it you do not understand?” (vv. 19-21).
Didn’t they have sufficient experience with Jesus to see that bread is never a problem for Him? If they would just let it sink in, and reflect on it, they’d know that if He can feed several thousand men with a few, He can surely feed twelve men with one!
Dear brothers and sisters; a great new phase of progress in our Christian maturity begins whenever we make the conscious decision to meditate on our experiences with Jesus in the past, let the lessons of those experiences sink in and take root in our souls, and make permanent memorials in our minds of how wonderfully sufficient He is for our every need. That’s when we’ll really start learning from Jesus!
Our great elder brother Paul learned this. He wrote his second letter to Timothy as he sat in prison—awaiting execution. But he didn’t deny his Lord or shrink away from God’s call on his life. He wrote;
For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day (2 Timothy 1:12).
How did he “know” whom he believed with such certainty? It came through the discipline of letting the lessons he learned about Jesus’ sufficiency in his life sink in. He took inventory in the trials of life; and came to “know”—with rock-solid certainty—who Jesus is in them all and what He is able to do for him in the future.
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So, then; let’s gain a lesson from the disciples in the boat. Let’s not let the lessons of our great Teacher slip past us anymore. Let’s not fail to get the point. Let’s learn to truly ‘learn’ from Him by having the kind of mindset that can be taught by Him!