Year 5, Day 151: Mark 4

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Teacher

• Teacher: One who holds forth the truth and is excited by it. The teacher looks for ways to explain, enlighten, and apply truth.  A teacher's authority doesn't come from how smart they are but from the Word of God and the power of a transformed life.

In Mark 4 we get a great glimpse of what it looks like to be a teacher.  Here’s the cool thing about this chapter.  In Mark 4 we get to see how Jesus taught the crowds and how Jesus taught His disciples.  And you’ll notice that these two are not the same thing.

In His infinite wisdom, Jesus knows something that has taken me the better part of 40 years to figure out.  You can’t teach large groups intimately.  You can only teach people intimately when you know them well.  When you are teaching people who know of you but who don’t know you well, you can only teach truth generically.

This is why we see Jesus teaching in parables when we see Jesus among the crowd.  Jesus is teaching generic truth because that is what the people will understand from Him.  He uses His opportunity with the crowd to plant seeds of truth that others will be able to take to greater root in depth and bring forth greater harvest.

But the truth is that Jesus doesn’t have the connection with the masses to speak truth deeply into all of their lives.  This is an important point to remember.  Because when we speak both truth and challenge into the lives of people with whom we don’t have the relationship to endure the level of challenge it ends poorly.  People become easily offended when we expose faults without having the relationship to sustain it.  Jesus knows this.  He teaches the crowd differently because of this.

However, when we observe Jesus in situations with His disciples, we see Jesus speaking truth at a very deep and challenging level.  How many times does Jesus challenge His disciples with the idea that their faith is still weak as we see in Mark 4:40?  How often do we hear Jesus tell the disciples that they should be at a point in their life where they are understanding more deeply as we see in Mark 4:13?

Jesus has the relationship with the disciples to push them hard and challenge them.  He has the depth of relationship to expose their failings.  He can teach them more deeply because the depth of the relationship can sustain the revelation of imperfection and the specific areas of change that need to happen in the disciples.

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