Fruitfulness

Welcome to our Women's Bible Study on the Book of Mark, which we're calling Following Jesus. And today we're going to cover all of Chapter 11 and part of Chapter 12. We are in week nine in our Bible study, and out of our 12 weeks, the first eight weeks, or I should say the last four weeks that we're entering into now, these last four weeks are all about the final week of Jesus' life. And so there's a big section, and the Gospels are like that. They have a big section on just this final week. So I've made our roadmap very simple for today. Let me show it to you. We're going to divide our study into just two parts. And the first half of our lesson will give us some insights into the beginning of what we call Passion Week. And so I've titled the first half, Jesus, Jerusalem, and the Temple. And the other half of our lesson is going to give us insights into what Jesus had to say about his authority. So I called this section, Jesus, Authority, Death, and Taxes. Now, you might notice if you look at those verses carefully, that there are a few verses missing. And so I'm just going to keep you in suspense about those verses until a little bit later. But what I want to do is I want to set the stage properly, because chapter 11 begins with the words, now when they drew near to Jerusalem. We're not ready to move on yet, but I just want to talk about this, when they're drawing near to Jerusalem. And I want to talk about what Jerusalem was like, because we don't find out in the book of Mark until chapter 14 that it was Passover. But we do know that it was Passover, because we probably know the story, and we find out from other gospel accounts. But Mark is not going to tell us this was Passover. But Passover made a big difference in the city of Jerusalem. What was the difference? Well, the population swelled to about three times its normal population, kind of like McCall in the summer. You know, it's a different town than it is in March. Also, the sheer volume of people elevated the Roman military presence. So that added another interesting aspect to the feel of the town. Not only is there kind of chaos because of all the people, but there's a bigger military presence as well. Now, throughout our study, it has seemed to us that the larger the crowds of people Jesus was in, the more he told everybody, I just healed this, don't say anything, don't, right? Okay, if they're in a big group, Jesus would say, tamp it down, don't tell anybody about this. Not now. It's all different now. For some reason, Jesus is going to allow them a public declaration in his honor. And so a reader might say to themselves, hmm, I wonder what's different here. And we'll find out what's different. So chapter 11. Now we're going to read.

Now, first of all, it must have been a thrill for the disciples to go on this little mission and find it turns out exactly the way Jesus said it was going to turn out. That's kind of cool. Second of all, we want to see in this the symbolism of the colt, the symbolism of being in Jerusalem. And in your study guide, I took you to a prophecy in Zechariah. I'm going to go ahead and put it on the screen again here as well.

This was an extraordinary display of honor that day for Jesus, the son of David riding into the city of David in exactly the way it had been prophesied in the Old Testament. Really an extraordinary thing. I want you to note a couple of things that we don't find out about in Mark. Jesus had been in the area of Jerusalem before. Now, we didn't read that in Mark's account, but if we were to read through John, we would find out that Jesus had come up to the Passover in years prior. In fact, Jesus had followers in Jerusalem, not just up in Galilee. So here he is in Jerusalem. He has followers here. Also, the other thing we don't find out about in Mark is he had just raised Lazarus from the dead. And so now there are a lot of people interested in following because of this going on. And then we also have people from Galilee that had come down who were his followers. So this day when he rides into Jerusalem and what we call the triumphal entry, there's a lot of people who are giving him honor. And it says in verse eight,

How fitting it is that Jesus rides into Jerusalem. And the first thing that he does is he assessed the temple, the house of the Lord. And so we ask ourselves the question, what did he find? What did he discover when he did that? How did he process what he discovered? Did he find a house of worship as it was intended to be, or did he find something else? Well, the rest of this chapter answers those questions of what he saw, what he heard, and what he thought about it. So we're going to move into the next passage. Interesting story about a fig tree. In your study guide, I led you to look at a few verses that gives you the understanding that often in scripture, a fig tree is symbolic of Israel. So you looked those up. It's on page 84, if you didn't have a chance. And that is an important understanding to have before we read this. Otherwise, we're going to read these passages and we read, oh, the fig tree. And then this, they seem unrelated. Oh, no, they are related for sure. So look at verse 12.

So that describes for us the unfruitfulness of the fig tree. We're going to move on. Verse 15.

And that describes the unfruitfulness of Israel as evidenced by what he found in the temple. So we have these two things, the fig tree and the temple, which both display unfruitfulness. In the temple, the money changers set up with selling birds and all this thing. Look, they were exchanging currency. This was a needful thing. This was a good thing, in fact, but it had its place. Its place was out in the margins. Its place was in the marketplace. It was not to be in the temple. That's what was wrong. It wasn't that they were doing it. Now, underlying all of this was a whole bunch of corruption as well. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have said, you've made it a den of robbers. They were profiteering on this. But the big thing is that it had consumed the space of the temple and the purpose for which the temple had been created. So Jesus sent him away. And he even stopped people from walking through that area because they were treating the temple grounds so nonchalantly. It's like, I have this stuff I want to carry. I don't want to carry it all the way around to get to the Mount of Olives. I'm just going to take this shortcut through the temple as if it's no big deal. And Jesus wanted to put a stop to that. Now, what I see in this, I think what we can see in this is human nature. Something starts off well, but left unchecked. Everything in its path, it kind of becomes corrupted, okay? A thing or a person or event. I think weddings are a good example of this. Like it starts off well, these two people are going to say their vows in front of witnesses, and by the time the event happens, what can it turn into? A fashion show, and a culinary show, and all this kind of stuff. Sometimes this happens in life. Something that starts off well becomes corrupted because all the things that are good and necessary evade, invade, I should say, the central purpose for which that event or that thing was created. It happens all the time. So how do we see the lesson of the fig tree and the temple related? Again, God had an original design for the temple. We studied this in 1 and 2 Kings, part one, which we called Solomon and the house of the Lord. We studied in depth the purpose for which the house of the Lord, the temple, was created. It was created to tell a story of redemption. It was created to lift up people's eyes beyond their normal situation up to God. That was the purpose of the temple. Is that what was being fruitful? Was the temple space being fruitful in its purpose? No. Everything from the margins had come in and invaded it. So how do you think the religious leaders would respond to someone who was uncovering the problems, uncovering the corruption within the temple? Would they be grateful that somebody finally had the guts to expose it? Or did they say, no, we're coming after the one who's exposing it and we're gonna kill him? Well, verse 18, the chief priests and the scribes heard it and they were seeking a way to destroy him. For they feared him because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came, they went out of the city. And here in this next passage that we're gonna read, we, as we approach it, we know that Jesus never leaves a teaching opportunity unused on the table. And so he's gonna use this as a teaching opportunity. Verse 20,

And Jesus answered him, have faith in God. Which seems like a very odd response. You would think Jesus would say, yep, it sure has withered because I cursed it. And so now it's withered. You would not expect the words, have faith in God. Now I'm gonna do something that I rarely do because that is a whole different kind of animal that we're approaching here. I'm gonna take these next verses, 22 to 26, we're gonna scoop them up and we're gonna put them up on our shelf and we're gonna come back to them later because it'll make more sense for us to do it that way. So we're gonna move on to part two, which I call Jesus, his authority, death and taxes. Verse 27,

I love that Jesus uncovered here, the religious leaders dependence on politics and public opinion, because that's what they were dependent on. That's how they said anything was like, what is somebody gonna think about what I say? You know what? We can fall into that trap too, can't we? Like only answering based on how are you gonna think about what I'm just about to say? But Jesus was never like that. And neither should we. Look, truth is truth. And if we need to speak truth, we need to speak truth regardless of how somebody else is gonna perceive that. If it's true, it's true. So, but not the Pharisees because we learned in verse 18, it said they feared Jesus, they wanted to destroy him. And then here in verse 32, it says they were afraid of the people. And so we're finding out the character of them. They're very politically motivated, very public opinion motivated. So Jesus was smart enough though to avoid entanglements with these people, avoid spending his time dialoguing with them. Instead of engaging with the Pharisees, Jesus used this opportunity to really explain where his authority came from. And we're gonna read it in a minute, but he does it with another parable. What do we learn about parables? Parables cause a person to have to think a little bit more deeply to understand. Parables also sort out those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, those who are spiritually motivated from those who are not. And this is a mixed group here that Jesus is talking to. So he cleverly uses a parable to explain his authority. Those with spiritual eyesight will understand and those who don't will not. Now, I just wanna say too, he's already told his disciples three times plainly about this, but now he's speaking in a parable and it starts in chapter 12.

My husband often cautions us when we're reading a parable not to get too fixated on every single symbol in the parable, but to stand back and take it as a whole. And in this situation, the meaning is very clear to take it as a whole. God had chosen a people to be his special inheritance. He had set them up for the best possible success with a land of their own. They squandered his resources. They mistreated his prophets. And what would they do to his son? Jesus is predicting this about himself. They would kill him. And then how would the owner respond to that? Justice. Look at what Jesus said. He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyards to others. And so Jesus was foretelling that he, the son of God, would be killed, shockingly, by the tenants themselves. And then the owner of the vineyard would no longer keep the inheritance exclusively for his chosen, but would now open up the way for others to enjoy that inheritance. And as New Testament Christians, we see this understanding. We see that Jesus was rejected by his people, and this opened up the door for the Gentiles to enjoy the salvation that God had intended, that plan of redemption that the temple was supposed to explain. Now we enjoy that. And so what was told to Abraham way back in Genesis chapter 12, and you, Abraham, through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. Now we see this coming. So you can imagine how the religious leaders responded to that parable. Did they have spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear? No. Verse 12, and they were seeking to arrest him, but they feared the people. Fears their motivator, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. And he did. They caught that part. So they left him and they went away. That was the third time we're told in today's lesson that they feared the people. Now, we titled this second section Jesus, Authority, Death, and Taxes. And we talked about the authority part. We're going to get into the death and taxes. It's really going to be taxes and death, but that doesn't handle as nicely because that's not how we say it. But here comes the taxes part in verse 13.

And I think we still marvel at that answer, so brilliant. Their earlier question had been, by whose authority do you do these things? They're asking about authority here. And so it's interesting to consider where Jesus drew their attention. Whose authority is on that coin? Caesar's image was on the coin. The money was his realm of authority, right? And so by simply using the coins in life, they agreed to that authority. So like they should just honor the system that created the coins. But then Jesus answered to cause them to think more deeply. And he said, he answered with this thought-provoking statement about, but who has been created in the image of God? Did they believe that? And are they willing to honor the authority of those who are created in the image of God? Which they were currently rejecting, by the way. So that's the question about taxes brought by the Pharisees and Herodians. And now here comes the question about death, which is brought by the Sadducees. Now the Sadducees are only mentioned this one time in the Book of Mark. It's the only place we hear about this group, but they were just another sect of the religious leaders. But the Sadducees were different in that they only held to the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. If it was in there, they believed it. If it wasn't in there, they didn't believe it. So they had conjured up their own theology that did not include a person's soul. It did not include an afterlife. It did not include a resurrection. And that is why they were sad, you see. Because if you don't believe in heaven, it makes a person sad. So that's the Sadducees. Thank you for just a little, a little grin there. Verse 18,

So Jesus used the scriptures that they held to to explain this, to talk about this and say, see, you're wrong. You don't even understand the scriptures that you say that you're holding to. And so he was poking a hole in their theology. But I think the point for us to hear from this death and taxes thing is that Mark wants us to contemplate how it was that all these religious leaders got off the main point. Because all the things that they're bringing up are not the main point at all. They got hung up on peripheral things like death and taxes. And can we say that maybe that contributed to them being unfruitful? Getting hung up on peripheral things. Allowing the marginal things to take center stage. Like the marginal things had taken center stage in the temple itself. And so this is where I wanna, I'm gonna put up our roadmap again. And this time we're gonna add this third section where we're gonna go back to these verses that we put up on our shelf. And I call this Jesus, you and your fruitfulness. And we're gonna dive right into some application for our lives. Because here's where we can ask ourselves the same question in our lives. Do we ever get hung up on things that are not the main point? Absolutely. Do we ever allow the marginal things in our lives to invade and take center stage? Yes. I'm gonna use words from one of Jesus's earlier parables. Do we ever allow the cares of this world to come and choke out the seed that the Lord has grown in us? I like to call it the purpose for which we were created. And we know that all of our purpose is to glorify God. That's what the temple was supposed to do as well, right? To glorify God. That's what our lives are to do is to glorify God. We have additional purposes that the Lord gives us that are unique. But that one purpose is the same. But if we allow the marginal things in, and if we allow the cares of this world in, could this possibly also make us unfruitful, not fulfilling the purpose for which we were created? And this is exactly what we see had happened with the temple and the fig tree. So I want us now to return to that portion of scripture. It's chapter 11, verse 22. When Peter pointed out the unfruitful fig tree, the context of these words of Jesus is the fig tree in the temple and unfruitfulness. So I'm gonna title this message fruitfulness, okay? Because this is the context. We know that Jesus wanted his followers to be fruitful. And he wanted them to think about these events and say to themselves, I sure don't want to let all these peripheral things invade the main point of my life to cause me to be unfruitful, okay? And so now with that in mind, let's start reading Jesus's answer in verse 22, when he answered Peter and said, have faith in God. Oh, this makes, this is beginning to make a little bit more sense than it did the first time that we read through it. What would one do if they were trying to be fruitful, trying not to let the peripheral things come in, the cares of the world? Maybe they should have faith in God. Maybe they should ask for God's help in their lives, right? Because what did we learn about last week? What did we learn from Jesus's words? With God, all things are possible, even fruitfulness in my life. Okay, so let's read his words.

When Jesus said that statement, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. It's very important for us to say, oh, that's fantastic. But somehow I'm suspicious that's not a, just ask for stuff and I'll give it to you. verse because what is the context of the passage in which he said that? Bearing fruit. Fruitfulness is the context, not having stuff, okay? So we need to keep those words in the context of what is being talked about, okay? Was the fig tree demonstrating fruitfulness? No. Was the temple demonstrating fruitfulness? No. Are we currently demonstrating fruitfulness in our lives? And that's why I wanted to put this at the end so that we could consider an application for our lives from this. If not, or if not as much as we want, what are the barriers? What are the barriers in my life to really expressing fruitfulness? Jesus talked about it in terms of mountains, moving a mountain that is a barrier to bearing fruit, okay? In what ways have the peripheral things in my life invaded the central stage? Because glorifying God is what I'm supposed to be doing. But look, oh, the cares of this world. All the stuff that has to be done. I start off by saying there was nothing wrong with exchanging money, right? Think about all the things that we, there's nothing wrong with in our lives. We have to go buy groceries. We have to prepare food. We have to maintain the stuff that we have. Can you see how easy it is to allow? And then there's hobbies and there's vacations and there's family things. All these possibilities that are not bad things to work their way into the courts of the temple. And all of a sudden, that's what our life is all about. We're not even thinking about the purpose for which we have been created. We're not thinking about bearing fruit. We're just thinking about the next vacation and the next this and the next that. And so this is a really good lesson for us to consider. What has it invaded? What are the marginal things that we've made a big deal about that need to get pushed back out into the marketplace of our lives and kind of cleared out a little bit? I want to see some, I want us to look at some strategies from Jesus's words. What we don't want to do if we feel a little bit of conviction, go, oh yeah, bearing fruit. I forgot about that. I need to get back to that. So we don't want to be like I said last week, that little kid that goes out and gets crashed on the bike and quietly runs into the bathroom and rinses everything off and puts on the band-aid and goes away. That's not what Jesus is saying here. He says, ask for God, ask for God's help in this. And so we need to be transparent with the Lord about the things. And there's three things that he says here that he's teaching his disciples about bearing fruit. Number one, we are to label the problem, identify what has come in from the outside and is not supposed to be there and needs to be pushed back again. And that's when Jesus says, say to this mountain, whatever it is, whatever barrier has invaded, say to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea. Off you go. Out you go. I still need to do you. I still need to take care of you, but out you go from center stage, right? Number two, we are to have confidence in God's ability to help us. Have confidence that he wants to help us clear these things out. Jesus said, do not doubt in your heart that God will help, but believe that what he says will come to pass. And the third thing is that we should check the purity of our own hearts as we're doing this as well. Because Jesus said, you need to forgive. You need a pure heart when you do this. When you believe and ask God to move mountains, you need to do it with a purity of heart. So if you're holding grudges and if your heart is not pure and you have not forgiven other people, that's going to be a barrier here to this whole situation. So Jesus said, forgive if you have anything against anyone. So I think that that's a really good ending for us to contemplate and to think about. We know that bearing fruit was on Jesus's mind this last week. Just go read John chapter 15, which is only just a day or two in the future of this passage. And John records Jesus talking about this, you know, desiring us to bear fruit, much fruit. This is what the Lord wants from us. But what I saw in this passage is, oh, I do not want to be unfruitful like the fig tree. I do not want to be unfruitful like the temple. I do not want to make the little things, the marginal things, the death and taxes things invade the space that that's all I think about. I want to glorify God and I need his help to do that. And he is more than willing to help me do that. So let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for this lesson. Some really interesting things that we learn and I thank you for the clarity. Lord, we're in a really somber section of this gospel where we know you are headed to the cross. We know what's coming, Lord, and there's a lot of soberness. But yet here we see in this passage a lot of personal application. So we just want to end this by saying thank you so much for making the sacrifice on the cross that atones for our sins, for opening the door for any who would believe, Lord. And Lord, we trust you to help us to be fruitful and not to be just overcome with the cares of the world. So Lord, for each one who's considering things that really need to be put back in their place, I just pray that you would help them, help them connect with you, help them to dialogue with you over that. And Lord, would you help each one of us to be fruitful and to fulfill the purpose for which you have created us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.