This Sunday's Worship Materials can be found in the "Featured Sermon" below. We meet in person at Harper Park Middle School, and the service is also livestreamed on our YouTube channel.

Heart Prep for Sunday, February 2nd

This week, we’re in Mark 6:45-56. This is the famous passage of Jesus walking on the water, followed by a completely non-famous passage about his healing work in Gennesaret. And as we come to this passage, we will end up talking a lot about paradigms. Paradigms are funny things. They’re wildly important because they control the way in which we understand the world around us, but we rarely question the coherence and comprehensiveness of the paradigms that we live by. We tend to just live, making decisions and judgments as we go along. We don’t tend to think deeply about why we live the way we live, we just live. When we do sit down to think deeply about them, we find that it’s hard to break out of our own way of thinking

This is helpful to understand because it gives us a window into why the crowds and the disciples receive Jesus the way that they do. In short, they fail to understand who Jesus is and what he is here to do because they’re stuck in a paradigm that can’t comprehend Jesus and his mission. This is no surprise for Christians. The crowd and the disciples often are viewed as bumbling believers who can’t see what’s plainly in front of them.

But as we look at the end of Mark 6, we get to see Jesus’ response to our incomprehension. We get to see how Jesus meets folks as they consistently get stuck thinking in earthly terms. Hopefully, we will see the Lord’s consistent, faithful, and patient commitment to be gracious to them also reveal that same commitment to you and to me. I look forward to seeing you Sunday as we look to break out of our earthly paradigms and take up a heavenly perspective.