Adult Sunday School - February 22

Today we discussed the second part of Mark III – The Gospel. We looked at Devers’ last two points in the chapter – that the Gospel is not simply that Jesus wants to be our friend, and not simply that we should live right.

Most of our discussion centered around the second point – about living right. Clearly we need to live right. But we are sinners, and there we considered three responses to sin. One is to embrace it. Many people do this, and live for the pleasure of sin, believing either that there are no eternal consequences for sin, or that they are still good enough. A second response is to try to live right to make yourself acceptable to God. This is the path of most religions, but we know from the scriptures that no one will be found righteous by works of the law (Gal 2:16). Finally there is the path of repentance. This is the path of confession and turning. The difference between repentance and self-righteousness is admitting your sin, confessing it, and putting the sin to death by the Spirit (Rom 8:13).

We also discussed the nature of this struggle with sin. God never promises us healing – we are not promised that we will ever overcome any sin so that we are no longer tempted and no longer struggle. But we are promised that we will never be tempted beyond our ability (1 Cor 10:13).

What does this mean for us as a church? We need to be broken people with each other. All of us are sinners; none of us has overcome sin. Too often we arrive at church putting on our smiles and pretending that we have it all together, but this won’t help any of us. We need to be able to struggle together for righteousness – sharing each other victories and struggles. We also need to be honest about our brokenness so that unbelievers in our midst will see that we are as broken as they are, but made whole by Christ.

Next week we will begin our discussion about Mark IV – a biblical understanding of conversion.

Posted by David Fenton on Feb 22, 11:31 PM