October 9, 2016
Plundering Satan’s House
Jesus has power over Satan's kingdom; Christ reveals His grace by delivering people from demonic influence to serve the living God.
Scripture: Mark 3:7-35
Sermon Notes:
- Christ enters creation and demonstrates His Lordship over it.
- Blindness to who Jesus truly is enslaves us; it is one of the many things from which Christ has come to set us free.
- When modern Christians come to Scripture, and especially to the gospels, we see clearly that Jesus is depicted as the Son of God, but the first-hand witnesses did not often see things from that perspective.
- The error that modern Christians tend to fall into is to minimize the humanity of Jesus.
- In calling the twelve disciples, Jesus demonstrates that a personal, relational contact with a small group of people is necessary, not just influence over a large crowd.
- There is a two-fold purpose to the calling of the disciples: to be with Jesus, and to be sent out by Him as apostles.
- To rightly fulfill our office, we must recognize that we cannot serve God unless we have first been with Christ (cf. Acts 4:13).
- Many people besides the 12 disciples spent meaningful time with Jesus.
- We often overlook how blessed we are as a called-out people who have had our hearts opened to receive the Word of God and to be changed by it.
- The apostles are the foundation of a new people of God, in Jesus Christ, the last Adam.
- To speak of redemption pre-supposes that something has been lost.
- As God’s image-bearers, our redemption takes the form of being transformed to the image of Christ, who is Himself the image of God (cf. Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:15).
- Being an image-bearer is essential to our being. In our apostasy, we can distort the image of God in us, but we can never escape it.
- Jesus was fully man and fully God, and He perfectly shows us what it means to bear the image of God.
- God alone has the prerogative of making an image of Himself. This is why the Second Commandment forbids idols – God has already made His image.
- When man substitutes his image of himself for the image of God, alienation is inevitable.
- To say that we bear the image of God does not mean that we are divine; we are sacred, however, representing God to one another.
- Anyone who does not serve God by faithfully bearing His image is implicitly an idolater, and therefore a prisoner of Satan, the first idol-maker.
- All of us are called into a vocation, which is to say we are called into service to Christ the King.
- The world displays serious arrogance in claiming to administer and remake reality in its own image; Christians must understand that our authority is only valid as long as it reflects the image of God.
- Our authority is the authority to serve, to set lives free by the power of God; this is the service that plunders the prison of Satan.
- When we attribute the grace of the gospel to something evil, we place ourselves under condemnation.
Application Questions:
- What are some implications of Jesus’ nature as fully God and fully man?
- Why does God forbid the making of graven images?
- What does our vocation have to do with the image of God?
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