Who do you say I am? | Mark 8:22-9:1 | 21 April 2024

“Who do you say I am?” We are in the Messiah’s family!

Introduction:

• Jesus’s title of Messiah is a really big deal! Because this had massive implications for how Jesus lived his life and ministered, this has big implications for how we follow and obey Jesus. 

3 Major questions that we must wrestle with: 

1. Who is Jesus and why is this important? 
2. How should Jesus being the Messiah change your life right now?
3. How should this shape and change the way we life as God’s family in community?  

8:22-25

• Jesus regarded Bethsaida as place renown for its spiritual blindness, even after having so much going for it. 
• The lack of spiritual perception was reflected even among his disciples who witnessed such great things. 
• Jesus’s questions to the disciples in verses 17-18 are connected to this spiritual lack of perception. 

8:27-30

• Jesus asks the pointed question, “who do you say I am?”
• Peter makes the bold and radical confession that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the son of God. 
• This is a pivotal moment in Mark because it answers the Mark’s first half big question of who is Jesus? With this revelation Jesus moves to the Mark’s second half’s big question: what does this mean?

8:31-33

• There was much idolatry wrapped up in the idea of who the Messiah was meant to be in the minds of the Jews in Jesus’s time. Jesus paints a very countercultural picture.
• Jesus is assertive that the Messiah must suffer and die.
• God’s people must get this right, he severely rebukes Peter for getting it wrong.
• Don’t settle for a weak Messiah.

8:34-9:1

• Jesus warns against those who would be ashamed of him. Are we ashamed or embarrassed to spread this news? 
• Mark encourages us to take the Messiah very seriously and we must follow Jesus’s example, we must take up our cross and follow him to die to ourselves. 

Conclusion and Challenges:

• We have been grafted into God’s family and commissioned out to go and make disciples. 
• Are we treating our church members as our own family? 
• Are we urgently spurring ourselves and each other on to make disciples of all nations? 
• This is the call, this is the cost, will you still follow Jesus after counting the cost?