Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Chemistry
- Chemistry asks whether the person in question can work with the other people that God has called.
I think
that taking a look at Mark 3 through the lens of Chemistry will be profitable
today – especially in the light of protection that we discussed yesterday. After all, today we have more people come to
Jesus and question his ministry. More religious
leaders come to question Jesus about the healing of the man with the withered
hand. They come and accuse Him of being
in league with Satan, even! And then
twice we hear about Jesus’ family coming against Him because they think he has
lost His mind! So taking yesterday’s
context and bringing it forward into today’s passage, we see that people
continue to speak out against Jesus.
But that’s
not the whole story, is it. Crowds begin
to follow Him. The people in the world
who are actually seeing people’s lives change are coming to Him. Sure, some of those people are just coming
for the show or they are coming for temporal healing and relief from their
present circumstances. But Jesus doesn’t
seem to mind that. In fact, seldom in any
of the Gospels does Jesus speak out against the crowds. They come, and He uses the opportunity to put
God’s power on display. But the truth is
that even this doesn’t really speak to chemistry. It speaks to opportunity but not chemistry.
In the
midst of all of the persecution and the crowds gathering around Jesus to use
Him we get a really neat story of chemistry.
Jesus calls the Twelve. There are
legitimate disciples that are gathering in the midst of the persecution and the
crowd’s gathering for the show. In fact,
if we think back to yesterday, remember that Jesus called Levi into
discipleship in the midst of the religious attack!
That’s
the interesting thing about chemistry.
Jesus uses the situation around Him to see who is really interested in
following Him. Jesus uses the conflict
with the religious leaders to speak into the lives of whoever might be
listening. Jesus uses the opportunity of
the crowd to speak into whoever might be listening. That’s how chemistry seems to work. We speak into the situations around us and
see who is willing to listen. Then we
find out with whom God has created the chemistry to work together.
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