In this episode, we think about Jesus' invitation to be a people who experience the presence of God through prayer and carry that presence out to people that we come across in our families, neighborhoods, and workspaces. At the end of the episode is an invitation to incorporate times in your daily rhythm where you can connect to God's presence through prayer.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Pine Hills church podcast. My name is Aaron. So grateful you are with us in the conversation again today as we continue to go through Mark together. Jesus has come on the scene in the gospel of Mark and it's been beautiful because Mark's been teaching us who is Jesus? What was Jesus like and why that matters for our life?

And Jesus arrives on the scene, he begins to claim the kingdom of God. And then he spends kind of the bulk of Mark just showing what the kingdom of God is like. And tension has been building towards this final act as Jesus has been traveling around the region doing miracles, proclaiming the goodness of God, inviting people into the family of God. And then it's all been building up to this final act in Jerusalem where things finally come to a head with the religious leaders as they follow through on their plans to have Jesus falsely accused of killed. And Jesus knows this.

He's been warning his disciples multiple times through the gospel that death is on the horizon. But not to worry, because although he's going to suffer, he's going to rise again, because this has been the plan all along. Jesus knew that the way that he radically loved and extended the kingdom of God to people who the religious leaders did not like was going to ultimately get him killed. And yet, even knowing that death is waiting for him, he still travels towards Jerusalem. And as he does that, we pick it up at the very end of mark, chapter ten, where there's this small town encounter.

Just 15 miles outside of the city, there's a small town called Jericho. And Jesus has this encounter with a blind man named Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus hears the crowd kind of gathering around him. He cannot see and yet he senses all of these different people. He can hear the crowd talking that Jesus is here and just this building excitement.

And we know all across the area that the news is spread about Jesus, the miracles jesus has done, all the amazing things that he is using to demonstrate that he is the authority from God to be the messiah, that he's actually come to be the savior of the world. He's proving he was sent by God with all of the authority, by healing people, by forgiving sins, by doing all these amazing things. And as he can kind of probably perceive that Jesus is getting closer, he begins to shout, son of David, have mercy on me. And the crowd tells him to shush, like, be quiet, quiet down. And yet he yells out even louder, son of David, have mercy on me.

And Jesus calls the man, he says, bring him to me. And he asks the man what would you like done for you? And he says, I want to see. I want to see. He names the thing that he wants to have done in his life.

Mark 1052 says, and Jesus said to him, go for your faith has healed you instantly. The man could see. And he followed Jesus down the road. And this is the first person in Mark's story that associates Jesus with the title son of David, which is language for Messiah. It's all throughout the Old Testament that there would be a messiah that would come, the son of David, that would be in the line of King David, to be the deliverer of the people of God.

And it comes from the lips of a blind man, probably the least expected, right? Mark is using irony to contrast the religious leaders with this blind man, because it's the blind man who makes the truth claim about Jesus, while the religious leaders are the ones who can't see Jesus. In fact, the religious leaders are the ones who are beginning to plot, to carry out their plot to have him killed. And death is coming. But you wouldn't know it by the way that Jesus rides into the city.

Mark chapter eleven opens with this triumphant entry of Jesus. Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him to get a borrowed donkey. And as he gets closer to the city, he rides this donkey into the city. And news must have been breaking out in the region. Jesus is coming.

Jesus is coming. And it spread all the way into the city of Jerusalem, which was the religious epicenter of that area. And as Jesus mounts this donkey, they're laying their coats in front of Jesus. They're laying down palm branches in front of Jesus, and they're shouting praise as they're welcoming in a king into the city. Mark chapter eleven, verses nine through ten.

Jesus was in the center of the procession, and all the people all around him were shouting, praise God. Blessing on the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessings on the coming kingdom of our ancestor David. Praise God. In highest heavens.

They're pumped because they've been waiting on the messiah to come to deliver them. This has been the narrative, God all along. We have creation, where God creates everything good, but yet humanity rejects relationship with God, and we try to do it all ourselves. That's the fall. And yet God says, I don't want to leave people in a state of brokenness and relationship between us and between other people.

And so I'm going to bring a redeemer that has the ability to bring about, bring about hope. And so he begins to work through a family Israel, and he brings all these promises. I'm going to bring about a messiah, a son of David. He's coming. He's going to come in this line, and he's going to deliver God's people from all of their spiritual oppression.

And now is the moment. Jesus is entering the city. And this would have looked like the arrival of a conquering king in this new city, new powers at B, but he isn't riding on a horse, which would have been the symbol for power, and he didn't have an army around him. He was ushered in, very humbly, on a donkey, coming not to overthrow politically, but to overthrow the kingdom of darkness spiritually. He instead goes to, instead of going to, like, the powers that be, right, he goes to the temple, the place where people meet God.

And he simply, he takes in all the activity. So once you imagine, like, he's coming in the city, the city's buzzing, and he's just observing everything after that, seeing the activity around the city, around the temple, all the different things that are happening. And after a pretty exciting day in Jerusalem, Jesus and his followers retreat to Bethany. That's 2 miles outside the city. The city was bustling because many travelers had traveled into the city for a religious pilgrimage that occurred a few times a year.

And Jesus and his crew found an Airbnb outside of the city. And so as they're going to the Airbnb, they come across a fig tree. And then the next day, this, this odd temple visit. So I want you to hang with me through the next few stories. But beginning in Mark 1112 14, the next morning, they're coming back to Jerusalem.

And the next morning, Jesus is hungry, and he's still probably getting to sleep out of his eyes, and he sees this fig tree, right? Two mile hike back into the city. He sees this fig tree off in the distance, and he thinks, figs sound pretty good right about now, but when he gets to the tree, it doesn't have any fruit on it because it actually isn't quite fig season yet. It's a few months down the road. But Jesus responds by saying, may no one ever eat your fruit again.

Verse 14. The disciples are thinking, okay, like, that's a big reaction to something seemingly pretty small and normal. And as you will see, as the story unfolds, Jesus is using things around him to bring understanding and clarity to the disciples about things that were actually happening. We've got to hold these pieces together as we continue that. Jesus curses a tree for not producing fruit out of season.

And Jesus and the crew continued to walk into the city, taking in all the sights and sounds of people going about their business. Mark, chapter eleven, verse 15 through 18, says when they arrived back in Jerusalem after staying at the Airbnb outside the city, Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices. He knocked over tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He stopped everyone from using the temple as a marketplace place. He said to them, the scriptures declare, my temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have turned it into a den of thieves.

When the leading priests and teachers of religious law heard what jesus had done, they began planning how to kill him, like they're ready to follow through with what they've been hoping would happen. But they were afraid of him because the people were so amazed at his teaching and all these extra people that were in the area. And again, the tension had been building. In the book of Mark, we see even back in Mark, chapter three, where the religious leaders are starting to think about how they could get rid of Jesus. But it's this week in the story where the plans come together to falsely accuse Jesus and have him killed by the political authorities.

And this is a big hinge point right here in this moment where Jesus is correcting them, saying, don't use the temple of God as a marketplace. Now, what's really happening here? Well, those few times a year that people would travel in to offer sacrifices, worship in hopes of connecting with God, they would need to, you know, things to make these sacrifices and to make offerings and these sacrifices more convenient. People set up shop on the way into the temple, and they would sell things that. That they would need as acts of worship.

Which makes sense. You have people coming from farther to honor God and to connect with God, and yet there's this potential for human depravity, right? That happens in this moment when you have really high. When you have supply and then you have high demand, right? You have the opportunity to increase the price, to take advantage of that situation.

And the other potential problem was that the temple had a different form of currency, so people had to exchange money to buy the overpriced items, and there was potentially another opportunity to take advantage in the exchange rate. And Jesus was either upset at one of these two things, but it's the potential exploitation of the people that's happening that he's really upset about, or maybe it's all this stuff, this bustling stuff outside of the temple that had just caused a lot of confusion and chaos, taking people's attention away from the thing that mattered most, which was honoring God. And his response was to be upset. He had seen it the previous day, but this was the day that he had chose to come and to correct this. And he begins to flip chairs and he flipping tables.

He's driving people out, right? We don't typically think of this type of image when we think about Jesus. We typically think about Jesus is love, but this is a loving act, a loving act of anger, where he's trying to clear out the temple to refocus people's imaginations back on the thing that mattered most. Verse 17, it says, he said to them, the scriptures declare, my temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have turned it into a den of thieves. See, the temple is supposed to be the place for all people to connect with God, but they put a lot of rules about how only certain people.

Only certain people could come and gather. And then the religious leaders overseeing the temple lost sight of this is for the people to connect with God. They were either robbing people in an exchange rate, or they were selling things that were just too costly, that shouldn't have cost that much. The main thing was being crowded out with selfish ambition, with bartering, and Jesus was about restoring life around the temple to its proper place. But the temple, in his mind, was going to look different, which was going to radically transform every mental map of everyone in that day.

And if any of the disciples were non confrontational, they're probably feeling pretty uncomfortable. But disciples like Peter, which we know Peter loves confrontation. Peter's probably pumped about the tension that's happening in this situation. But Jesus takes them all again, and they travel back to the Airbnb outside of the city. The next day, when they wake back up to enter the city again, and remember, religious festivals are going on.

There's all this stuff that's happening through the week that they're wanting to be a part of, and so they're kind of traveling back, but traveling back into the city, it's like when people come into bend, right? They stay in airbnbs in the area, and sometimes you gotta be a little bit further out, but you keep traveling back into bend, right, to do all the things that bend has to offer. That's what's happening here, is they keep traveling out to the Airbnb to spend the night, but traveling back for all the things that are happening throughout the day. And the next day, as they're going back into the city, they see that tree again, remember it like, hopefully you didn't even forget it. But it wasn't producing fruit even out of the city.

And Jesus ends up cursing it. Well, the disciples noticed something profound. That tree that was budding, ready to produce fruit in just a couple of months, had withered and died from the roots up. And Mark has this really unique way of telling stories. It's known as the Markan sandwich.

It's where he takes a larger point that Jesus is making, and he sandwiches it between details of the same story. And the ends help us to understand the thing that's happening in the middle. And so what it's getting at is in between the story of a tree being cursed and withering and dying. You have the story about the temple and how Jesus is cleansing out the temple. And so what is happening is Jesus is bringing judgment on the temple with all the wayward activities, and he's doing something new.

Why? Because the temple was not producing fruit. It actually was forming people away from God's intentions. Look at the religious leaders. Life is oriented around life with God, but they are involved in a plot to have someone murdered.

They're the ones who should most represent the heart nature of God, and yet they're involved in a murder scheme. Like, you can see how the temple actually isn't forming people in the way that it should be. And let's be clear. The end goal in doing life with God is that you become people who don't actually murder people. So the roots have obviously died, and it's not good.

So you see how the mark and sandwich is revealing what Jesus is doing about the temple, which seems like bad news. But the good news is that Jesus has come to do a new thing unimaginable to everyone. Instead of having this temple filled with the presence of God that all people would come to a few times a year, Jesus was creating a new temple. Those who would accept the offer to follow him, he fills with his presence and he sends them out to the rest of the world. Instead of having a religious system internally focused, that always corrupts, Jesus is freeing us to be outwardly focused, to carry his presence out to the rest of the world, marked, marked by God's presence, as we are continually engaged in prayer.

Because remember, Jesus says, like, my house should be a house of prayer. They've lost sight of that. It should be the place where we connect with the presence of God and where we bring our request in prayer, and we engage with God in prayer. And that temple is going from the central place in Jerusalem now to being the people who would accept him would now be the temple of God that would carry God's presence present out to the rest of the world. Remember when a few weeks ago, we talked about this concept of heaven and hell kind of colliding?

And Jesus is wanting people to be filled up with what heaven looks like so they could carry that out into the world that typically mirrors hell, so that there could be more and more pockets of the presence of God, more and more pockets of heaven that are spreading out. And we get to take God's presence to other people. We get to engage with God not by traveling to Jerusalem at a particular time of year, but we get to engage with Goddesse daily because his presence lives inside of us. And we get to be people marked by prayer because we humbly know that we need God's presence, not just our own. We can't do it in our power.

We need his power. Mark, chapter eleven, verse 22, 25 says, and Jesus said to the disciples, have faith in God. I tell you the truth. You can say to this mountain, may you be lifted up and thrown into the sea, and it will happen, but you must really believe it will happen and have no doubt in your heart. And I tell you, you can pray for anything.

And if you believe, then you've received it, it will be yours. But when you are praying first, forgive anyone you are holding a grudge against so that your father in heaven will forgive your sins, too. And if I could be honest, this is a really difficult text. There's so many nuances here. There's so many things that are happening.

There's so many potential to kind of misunderstand. But the tensions that I want to point out in the text are this. Jesus. Jesus asked us to have the faith to move mountains. But sometimes it feels like faith doesn't move much.

Ever experience that in your life? Jesus is saying, have faith, and you can tell this mountain to move, and it will move. But sometimes we have all the faith in the world that we can muster, but it doesn't feel like it does much. And then Jesus says to not have doubt in our hearts. But at other times, Jesus responds, we've even seen him.

Mark to a man who says, I believe, but help my unbelief, help my doubt. Other times, we find it difficult to forgive people who hurt us. But Jesus here says, God will forgive in response to our ability to forgive others in our lives. So there's tension in all of these things, and I have nothing to help ease these tensions. I just simply don't.

And I don't want to ease the tensions either. It's not my job. It's actually an impossible job. I'm convinced that attempting to give overly simplistic answers when our felt life experience is incredibly complex actually hinders faith instead of helps build our faith. But praise God that he's complex.

He's just as complex as all the complexities that we face in life. And he's big enough to handle all of our questions, and he's relational enough to help sort it all out with us. And there's beauty to be found in the tension, but that is difficult for us, especially when we like the illusion of control, especially when we deal more with an idealized version of our life instead of reality itself. And if we're really honest, reality is actually, there's not much in our control. But even with that, even with all the complexity of this passage, there's still some invitations from a very beautiful and complex God.

The invitations, I think, are this. Maybe there's a few more that you can pull out, but I think that you're invited to believe in God for some really big things, like moving mountains, and God can do that at times. But I also think you're invited to enjoy seasons where faith feels just difficult to come by, where this doubt just feels like a much easier emotion to go to. I think there's times where we can just lean into God in those seasons and other seasons. It won't be like that.

I feel like faith comes a lot easier to us. I think we're invited to. To be to others as God has first been to us, as we slowly forgive and release people, as God empowers us to do, because that's a work of God in our life. We can't muster that in our own power, and we don't have to. But when that happens, we actually get to do to others as God has first been to us, because he's forgiven us us, and he's released us from all the things that we've done in our life.

I think we're invited to find beauty in life in these tensions between big faith and lack of faith, between the struggle to forgive and God forgiving us. Seasons where man faith is really easy to come by, in seasons where faith is really hard to muster up. There's beauty and intention, and Jesus invites you into relationship with him to hold that tension with him, and he helps us. And you're invited to bring everything to God. In prayer, Dallas Willard says God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.

To say it another way, God meets us where we actually are, not where we pretend to be. And so if you want to meet God today, it comes with just being really honest about what you're thinking, what you're going through, what you have going on in your life. And so if we bring everything that Mark is teaching us together today as best we can, we have seen the irony of a blind person seeing that Jesus is the savior when the religious leaders absolutely miss it, when they're blind to it. We have seen Jesus triumphantly enter the city to overthrow darkness, but it doesn't happen through violent opposition, but it comes by him giving his life. We have seen Jesus correct the religious system that had their eyes on the wrong things.

And we've seen Jesus invite us into relationship where we can hold the tensions of life and open conversation with God as we continually ask for his help and his guidance. And so if we could summarize it in just a quick statement, it's all about experiencing God's presence through prayer, and we need to do that continually, daily experiencing God's presence through prayer. And so let's just open our heart to what that might be, even now, in this moment. I just want you to take a moment just to breathe wherever you're at with these things. And I want you to think about maybe what the Holy Spirit brings to the surface as we think through these questions.

Where do you need God's help? Where do you need God's help? Seeing his presence in your life? Where do you need God's help seeing his movement in your life? Where do you need God's help?

Laying down distractions so that you can refocus on the things that matter most. And what tensions in your life do you need God's help with today? Because the journey with Jesus is beautiful and profound. But it's. It's hard.

It's hard at times, but in the midst of the complexity of life, we remember Jesus, who triumphantly enters, who's overthrowing the power of darkness. And he might do that in ways that we never imagined we might not want him to, but yet he does what is best, and we need to trust that he does what is best. So in the midst of all the tensions, we continue to recognize and honor that Jesus is king by coming to him. We don't have to be fearful about approaching who Jesus is. Actually, writers of the Bible say that we can approach the throne of the king with confidence because of all that he's done for us.

And he invites us into the room to have that conversation. And we can continually bring through prayer these tensions to God, saying, God, I need your help to sort it out. I need your wisdom. I need your help to be more like you, a little bit more each and every day. I want to be marked by your presence.

And that happens only when you continually make time to be with the king. And you can bring your prayers to him, where you sit in his presence and enjoy all that he's doing in your life. When you release the ability to need to control everything yourself and you get to release the control back to him, that's a beautiful place to be. And so that's an invitation for you today. And I would invite you whatever that looks like.

If you've never made that step, like, why don't you just put something on your calendar in the morning, even like five or ten minutes to be with God, to start with, gratitude, God, I'm thankful for where you've been doing these things in my life, bringing those requests to God, those tensions that might be there, and then simply sitting and enjoying his presence. And if you make that a habit, guess what? You'll become more and more marked by his presence. Presence and his spirit as you bring that to other people. Remember, we get to be the temple of God filled with his presence.

That gets to carry that out to other people so that they can get caught up in a new kingdom because they need that gospel, they need that good news, because so many of us are living in worlds that will never satisfy and only bring about depression, anxiety and darkness. But there's peace that's available through Jesus. We get to carry that presence to all kinds of other people. And if you've had consistently have that morning prayer time for just a bit, and then the invitations, maybe you extend that prayer time, or maybe you do something like a daily office prayer, or you have set times to pray throughout the day, and so you set a reminder on your phone, like maybe it's first thing in the morning, maybe it's midday, maybe it's evening before you come home and, you know, or with your kids the rest of the night, maybe it's one more time before you go to bed. So there's three or four opportunities right there to reconnect with God, who's always available to us, to bring the tensions to God, to be mindful about how God is moving in our life.

And we respond with gratitude when he's so gracious to us. So I just want to pray for you. I just want to thank you for engaging in this conversation. Thank you for listening. If you think this could be helpful for someone else, would you please share that and would you know that Jesus deeply loves you, wherever you might be at, with whatever questions, concerns or thoughts that you have in your life?

Good. And he's faithful. He'll meet you right where you're at. The invitation is on the table to engage with him in the midst of these tensions. So, Jesus, would you be with each and every one of us?

Would you mark us with your presence and your spirit? I pray that we have consistent times throughout our day, every day, where we get to reconnect with you. And out of that, that we would bring your presence to other people, and that would be a blessing to everyone else around us. So would you help us to consistently experience your presence as we engage with you in prayer every day? We need you.

We don't want to have to rely on ourself. So whatever is on our heart, we bring to you in this moment, we lay that at your feet, we get to breathe out anxiety and we get to breathe in your peace. So help us to even do that this moment, to lay down the thing that we're most anxious about and just to breathe deep in the presence of the spirit of God. Help us to carry that wherever we might be going, to, whoever we might be going to. In your name we pray.

Amen. I just appreciate you partnering with us, helping us, you know, in our journey, the mission that God has given us. Here in Bend, Oregon, if you need some resources to help you practice, to help practice the way, you have an app that you can download, the Pine Hills church Bend app. Just kind of search that in the app store. It'll come up, you'll see our black and white logo.

You can actually just go to pinehillschurch.org and there's a link in our homepage for you to find that. To download that inside that app, there's a few different tabs. One is the basics, where you get to look at the big story of God, where you get to learn more about how to have an encounter with God, where you get to start to learn what does it look like to live in relationship with Jesus. And then there's a practicing the way to add which will actually help you to go through a few conversations to help you to get rolling out. What does it look like to live this life connected with God, to be present to him.

And so we want to help partner with you and whatever that might be at you might be just exploring the faith, you might beginning to want to practice the faith or you might be all in to wanting to live like Jesus. And so wherever you might be in a journey. We want to partner with you. We want to be help to you because that's what God has called us to do. And if you feel called to maybe support that in any given way, would you pray for us?

Would you pray that God would continue to provide all that we need to do what God has called us here in the city? And God would continue to open that vision up before us as we see the opportunities that he's inviting us into. And then also, if you want to financially support us so we could continue to have these type of conversations, put those out for you online or for other people, or to even support what God is calling us to do here in the south end of Bend, Oregon. I'd be so grateful if you go to pineheartschurch.org, comma click the give tab and just give anything that God might put on your heart. But if that's not the call for you, we want to continue to challenge you to live the way of Jesus with the local community or with us.

If you're here in bend but can't wait to see you in the next conversation, have a great day. Bye.