Amazing Belief (Mark 6:1-6)

(Preached at Rocky Creek Baptist Church, Forsyth GA, on July 8, 2018)

I wonder how much we really believe in Jesus. That may sound like a strange thing to ask people who have come to church, but it’s something we should give some serious thought to.

We may have more in common with the people of Jesus’ hometown than we care to admit.

When Jesus encountered the people in Nazareth, “he was amazed at their unbelief” (v. 6a). We may be amazed at it too. After all, they knew him. They had probably heard about his teachings and healings, and now he was coming home. We might expect them to welcome him as the hometown boy made good.

But they didn’t. They instead “took offense” at him. Given the questions they asked, we might express their attitude as something like, “Who does he think he is, anyway? After all, he’s one of us, and he’s no better than we are.” They even seem to put him down a little bit: “How can a man who works in construction also work miracles?”

The bottom line is that their familiarity with Jesus got in the way of their having faith in him.

Not all of us have been in the church for a long time. Some of us may have recently become Christians. Some of us may not be followers of Jesus; our seeking may have led us to try church. Others of us may have been coming to church for just a few years. And others of us have been in church for all of our lives.

It’s those of us who are long-time Christians that I’m thinking especially about.

Does our familiarity with Jesus get in the way of our having real faith in him? By “real faith” I mean utter trust in Jesus as he really is.

There is more than one kind of familiarity, and it can be a positive or negative thing.

Negative familiarity with Jesus makes us inattentive to him because we think we already know him as well as we need to. The people of Nazareth based their evaluation of Jesus on who he was and what he did during the early years of his life. No doubt he was an outstanding individual, but evidently he did nothing during his growing up years that gave them any indication of what he’d do after he left home. When he came home after beginning his ministry, they judged him on how they knew him before. They didn’t grow in their understanding of him in light of his newly undertaken ministry. Their perspective was held captive by their earlier, incomplete, immature understanding.

That can happen to us too. We can get locked in to our earliest understandings of Jesus and never grow past them. We are familiar with Jesus. We know him, we hear him talked about, and we may even talk a lot about him. But our faith is immature because we haven’t continued to seek, to learn, and to grow.

The people of Nazareth settled for the Jesus they had known when he was a child, an adolescent, and a young adult. We may have settled for the Jesus we knew when we were children, adolescents, or young adults. This isn’t to say that such faith is invalid, but it is to say that our faith needs to keep maturing. We need to keep learning more about who Jesus really is and growing in our faith in him as he really is.

It’s not that our familiarity with Jesus has bred contempt of him. We don’t out and out reject him like many in Nazareth did. It is rather that our familiarity with Jesus has bred complacency toward him. We don’t take him seriously enough, and because of that, we miss out on much of the joy, the wonder, and the challenge of being his followers.

We don’t want to have a negative familiarity with Jesus. We instead want to have a positive familiarity with him. We want to grow in knowing him as he really is rather than as we’ve always thought him to be. We want to grow in knowledge of him that is based on our own relationship and journey with him rather than on what others tell us about him.

I have said several times that we want to grow in our familiarity with Jesus as he really is. If we’re not careful, we will accept inaccurate portraits of Jesus that people have devised from unchristian motives such as greed, prejudice, hate, and the lust for power. I fear that we see that happening all too often.

Who is Jesus, really? He is the Son of God. He is the Messiah. He is the Savior. He is the Suffering Servant who died on the cross for our sins, who rose from the grave on the third day, and who ascended to the right hand of the Father, from where he will come to fully establish God’s kingdom. He is our Teacher and our Lord. He loves everybody. He died to give everyone the chance to know God’s love. He rose to give everyone the opportunity to have everlasting life.

Jesus cannot be locked into our little cultural, denominational, ethnic, political, and moral boxes. Jesus loved radically, and he calls us to love radically as well.

To grow in our relationship with, our knowledge of, and our following of Jesus leads us to ever greater wholeness in our own being. It also leads us to want others to experience such wholeness. Great faith, great hope, and great love give themselves away because Jesus gave himself away.

We don’t want to have amazing unbelief. We want to have amazing belief. Amazing belief dedicates itself fully to Jesus and never stops learning of him and learning how better to follow him.

Jesus was amazed at the people of Nazareth’s unbelief. We want him to be amazed at our belief. They rejected the validity of his ministry because of their familiarity with him. We know much more about his ministry than they did. We know that he gave himself completely away until he died on the cross. We know that he calls us to give up our lives as well. Amazing belief will grow in knowing and following Jesus in ways that lead us to have his mind, his heart, and his actions. We know that God raised him from the dead. We know that God will raise us one day too; we also know that God has raised us to walk in newness of life. Amazing belief will grow in knowing and following Jesus in ways that lead us to belief in and practice life even in the midst of death.

We have the opportunity to have and to practice amazing belief in Jesus. Let’s take full advantage of it!