Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Revelation chapter one is just where I'm going to cite.
Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
And then I'm going to talk a lot about the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:00:05]:
And this is why this is relevant.
Mark Clark [00:00:06]:
Because I and a few of you, if you've heard me preach here before, you'll know a couple of my stories. But I think they frame why this kind of conference is important.
Mark Clark [00:00:16]:
I grew up in a setting, an.
Mark Clark [00:00:19]:
Atheistic setting, which is the opposite to what we value here at this conference. We're saying the Bible is kind of the main thing. I grew up in a setting in Canada, in Toronto. Atheistic, agnostic.
Mark Clark [00:00:29]:
My father was so atheistic, so against.
Mark Clark [00:00:33]:
Christianity, that when my parents were having my older brother, my mom wanted to name him Matthew.
Mark Clark [00:00:40]:
And my dad was like, okay, but we can't spell his name with two T's because that would mean that it's spelled the same as the Bible, right? So literally my brother's name is Matthew with one T on his driver's license. And then four years later, they had me and named me Mark. Okay, so clearly these people, my dad had never opened up a Bible. All right, if I had another brother, Luke, I think Luke's a good name. We should name him Luke, like this guy. This was the setting I grew up in. No Bible, no church, no prayer, no nothing. And so when I started, when someone started telling me about Jesus late in high school, I started investigating it and then I realized that the main thing that this Christian faith is based on is the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:01:31]:
So I gotta go and investigate the Bible now. So I went and investigated the Bible and realized that it is this unbelievable thing where here's this 17, 18 year old kid smoking drugs, doing the party scene, all of the things you classically do. And I literally picked up a Bible and started reading it. And I met Jesus in the Scriptures, St. Augustine. Augustine talks about the idea that the Bible is the face of God for us now. And that's literally what I met. I met God.
Mark Clark [00:02:04]:
I didn't come to church Till I was 19, so I spent two years just sitting, smoking cigarettes, reading the Bible. And I'd walk around and tell people in my town about Jesus. And I'd be baptizing people in Lake Ontario, like years before I was ever baptized, which isn't even biblical. There's nothing ecclesiologically right about that at all. And I would just read the Bible and I met Jesus in it. And it would tell me like Jesus, I'd be reading the Sermon on the.
Mark Clark [00:02:33]:
Mount and I'd just be like.
Mark Clark [00:02:35]:
And I'd just Do whatever it said. It says, like, hey, someone wants your coat, Give them your sweater as well. Some guy be, hey, you want a cigarette? Be like, you know what? Take the whole pack. Jesus wants you to have it. I had no leadership, no understanding of what I was supposed to be doing at all. And it was only in the Bible that I found God. And this is what we gotta understand. Then when I planted a church when I was 29 years old in Canada, which is at least a generation or two ahead of America in regard to secularization, many people told me that the only way you're going to plant a church is in Canada and actually reach people for Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:03:17]:
Have anyone show up is you can't do the Bible thing cause everyone's bored of it. And so you just need to do, like topical stuff, like, hey, you're gonna get control of your finances and seven ways to be a good grandpa. And I'm like, no, that's so boring. So I started a church and I said, here's my plan. I'm just gonna teach through Bible books and yell at everybody and tell them that they're sinful and a disaster, but that Jesus is the hero of the Bible and their life. So I started with like the Gospel of Mark. 16 chapters. Should be quick, year and a half.
Mark Clark [00:03:58]:
Cause I got super excited about verses like, Jesus was standing. I'm like, guys, Jesus was standing. Are you crazy? That is life changing. And eight people would give their life to Jesus. Half a verse because. Because when the Holy Spirit grabs a hold of the Bible, listen. So over the course, then, then I was like, okay, what's next? Well, I'm not doing, grandpa. That's out.
Mark Clark [00:04:28]:
So let's do Matthew 3 and a half years in the Gospel of Matthew. And everyone said, this is not gonna work in Canada. And you know what happened? Sixteen people sitting in my townhouse became thousands, stretched across eight campuses and 2,000 baptisms. How is that a thing?
Mark Clark [00:04:55]:
Because the Bible is the power of God unto salvation, guys, not me.
Mark Clark [00:05:02]:
I'm a disaster. You guys know me. I told you that story a couple years ago when I told a woman that her husband was dead and I had the wrong guy. That's me. I'm awful. I'm the worst pastor you could hire. I don't even know how I still have a job. The Gospel, the Bible itself, that's where the power is.
Mark Clark [00:05:25]:
And so people started to get freed from addictions. Their marriages started to get healed because they met God through the things we. We're unpacking in the Scriptures. Now, here's the sad thing then. We're losing that. Not just in the culture. We know that culturally is biblically illiterate. Right.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
We know that.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
I'm talking about in the church. We're losing it. Guys are doing. I saw this massive church doing a sermon series. I wanna draw a crowd. He did a sermon series on sex. And it was him and his wife in a bed on the church roof. And it was.
Mark Clark [00:06:01]:
I mean, it gathered a crowd. The church grew. Yeah, listen, here's what the problem with the church is. We're obsessed with what works. And that works, but it's dumb. This kid's like, what the heck is going on right now? It is. It's dumb. Jesus told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Mark Clark [00:06:33]:
Some things are just dumb that the church in America does. And the church in Canada, you're like, I got it.
Mark Clark [00:06:41]:
I got it. The place and the power of the scriptures. Listen, how are you gonna have your life transformed and changed?
Mark Clark [00:06:55]:
Every single person in this room.
Mark Clark [00:06:56]:
You should want transformation in your life.
Mark Clark [00:06:58]:
You know how it's gonna happen? It ain't gonna happen through a politician. It ain't gonna happen through your app. It ain't gonna happen through dating the right girl. It ain't happen through your spouse. It's not happening through any of those things. Here's what one writer has said. If our problem was economic, God would have sent an economist. If our problem was entertainment, he would have sent an entertainer.
Mark Clark [00:07:23]:
If our problem was political, he would have sent a politician. If our problem was health, he would have sent a doctor. But he didn't, because our problem is sin. So he sent a Savior. Think about. Think about the guy on the mat who comes through the roof. And Jesus walks up to him and he says, what? The guy wants to walk. And what does Jesus lead with? Your sin is forgiven.
Mark Clark [00:07:55]:
And the guy's like, I didn't come here for that. I came here to walk. And Jesus is like, no, no, no. I'm gonna solve something you're not even asking for because you don't know what you don't know. So I'm gonna heal a sin problem. Because here's the problem. Your issue is not something that is going to derail your life for 80 years. It's the 80 billion after that that Jesus is trying to solve your soul problem, your sin problem.
Mark Clark [00:08:24]:
And that's why we need a savior, not an example. This is why. What would Jesus do? Crushes us because we ain't Jesus. I did young adult ministry for Six, seven years. And I watched young adults walk away.
Mark Clark [00:08:40]:
Walk away, walk away.
Mark Clark [00:08:41]:
Why? Because everything they wanted to do, the church just told them, you can't do that, you can't do that. And they were like, man, what would Jesus do? What would Jesus do?
Mark Clark [00:08:50]:
And they tried.
Mark Clark [00:08:51]:
And instead of Christianity being free, it crushed them.
Mark Clark [00:08:56]:
Because the reality is, it's not actually about that. Listen, here's what the Bible does. It takes the world and our experience and pulls the veil back and tells us what we don't know about reality. When we get that diagnosis of cancer and our world spins out of control, when our kid goes off the rails, when you look at America and think it's going down some morally corrupt road, when Covid takes happiness and joy and.
Mark Clark [00:09:27]:
Health and just strips it. And we begin to think evil is winning, sin is winning, discouragement is winning. We begin to look at everything because the world and the way it works is on video, high def. And here's the problem. God is working on audio and he's trying to get our attention and go, no, no, guys, I got something for you. Listen. I remember when we were planting our.
Mark Clark [00:09:54]:
Church, there was 16 of us.
Mark Clark [00:09:56]:
And for nine months we got together.
Mark Clark [00:09:57]:
In my house and planned and thought, how are we gonna reach people for Jesus? And in that nine months, three of our parents died.
Mark Clark [00:10:05]:
Three of them. So in that moment we're thinking, okay, we're either in a massive mistake and God's just taken out everybody cause it's.
Mark Clark [00:10:14]:
Gonna be an error.
Mark Clark [00:10:17]:
Or Satan is winning. He's trying to discourage us. He's trying to defeat us. He's trying and he's winning. He's taking three of our parents out. And I remember in that moment, in all of that discouragement, in my devotional life, I. I read Revelation 1, read Revelation 1. And here's what it said.
Mark Clark [00:10:40]:
I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands. And among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe, reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze, glowing in a furnace. And his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars.
Mark Clark [00:11:16]:
And coming out of his mouth was a sharp double edged sword. His face was like the sun, shining in all its brilliance. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. You know what happened when I started to think Satan was winning. And in my devos, I read Revelation 1. It pulled the veil back. And the Bible said, things are not as they seem, bro. The world looks like it's a disaster.
Mark Clark [00:11:42]:
The world looks corrupt. But there is one holding the seven stars in his right hand. See, in the ancient culture, those seven planets were seen as the thing that controls all of reality. And they would study the stars. And Revelation 1 goes, oh, you look at the. No, no, no. There's a guy with the white Gandalf hair and the fireball eyes. He doesn't even blink.
Mark Clark [00:12:10]:
He just stares at you, right through you. He knows everything. And he is the one holding the planets. Your sickness, your pain, your tragedy is not for nothing. He is still in control of all things. Things are not as they seem, guys. You watch Fox News. I can tell.
Mark Clark [00:12:44]:
Things are not as they seem, guys. Things are not as they seem. You watch the news, you think the world's a mess and disaster and it's going nowhere. And you get discouraged. And then you go, wait, wait, wait. The one with the eyeballs is holding all sovereign plan, even of your life. But how do you ever know that? It's the only way. You can't know it.
Mark Clark [00:13:13]:
You can't know it by looking around.
Mark Clark [00:13:16]:
You'll never figure it out without the Scriptures telling you this is the way to be truly human. The world is telling you, here's what marriage is, here's what success is. Here's what family is. And the Bible comes along and goes, no, no, no. Jesus actually knows what is best for you.
Mark Clark [00:13:32]:
He told you in the Bible how.
Mark Clark [00:13:34]:
To flourish as a human being.
Mark Clark [00:13:36]:
And you're listening to yourself, right? You're listening to your gut. You're listening to your emotions. You're listening to your uncle who thinks that the earth is flat, Tom Hanks eats babies or whatever. Like you're not. No, that is like. That is what we're all doing. We're all trying to figure out what's true. Like Francis was talking about, what's true? What's true? What's true? This will cut through all the nonsense and it will say, here's what's true.
Mark Clark [00:14:15]:
Here's what I think about your life. Here's what I think you should do with money. Here's what I think you should do with family. Here's what I think you should do with sexuality. Here's what I think you should do with success. All of it.
Mark Clark [00:14:24]:
But only if you read it, only if you understand it, only if you listen. There's this Missiologist Paul Herbert. He says this. Listen to this.
Mark Clark [00:14:31]:
He says, one generation believes a thing, the next assumes it, and the next generation denies it. One generation believes a thing, the next assumes it, the next denies it. So what is this conference about? It's about us getting together as a rammed full group of COVID super Spreader event. And as a Canadian, I'm freaking out right now. But anyways, what is this conference about, man? It's about a group of people sitting in a room looking around at each other and reminding ourselves that we ain't crazy, that we can't assume this anymore. We gotta hand this down to this kid and go, we're not gonna assume it. This is real. This is the power.
Mark Clark [00:15:27]:
And when your dumb friends tell you stuff, you say, shut up, demon. This is the truth. When you assume it, the next generation denies it. So what's the conference about? It's about not assuming anything. It's about coming back around to ourself and reminding ourself that this is true rather than assume it for an entire generation and never remind ourselves of it.
Mark Clark [00:16:01]:
And there's a whole generation like you that should give your life for it.
Mark Clark [00:16:08]:
Give your life for it.
Mark Clark [00:16:09]:
I said, though not, not.
Mark Clark [00:16:11]:
This isn't Safe Town, this isn't Instagram cute. Let me take my little photo, my devos in the morning and move on with my life. That is not what we're talking about. We're talking about giving our life for a thing. When I read the Bible for two years and I would read what the saints would do, I was very surprised when I finally entered the church because I thought, the saints, they're getting their heads cut off. They're going to jail. They're dying for this stuff. And I thought, when I go to church, it's gonna be jacked up, it's gonna be raw, it's gonna be real, it's gonna be dangerous.
Mark Clark [00:16:43]:
It's gonna be flares and whips. Sit down and shut up. We're gonna worship God, the lamb who is sleeping, slain. It's going to be bloody. It's going to be atonement. And I got to church and it was the worship slides had hummingbirds sucking pollen out of flowers. I'm like, what is happening right now? And I was so singing songs to Jesus as if he was my boyfriend. And I'm like, I don't need a boyfriend.
Mark Clark [00:17:27]:
I need a general. I need someone to tell me to follow him in the face of anything, in the face of all temptation that I was facing as a teenage Kid. Because here's the reality, guys. Here's what the Bible will reveal to you. Things are not as they seem. This is not peace time. This is war that we're in the middle of. Spiritual for your soul.
Mark Clark [00:18:03]:
It's a war. Some of you live like. This is a. If this was a movie. If your Life, if you're 82 years or whatever you get on this planet as a movie, you guys are living like. It's a JLO romantic comedy where you're just coasting through, you hope to have a few laughs before you die, gain some stuff, have some comfort, redo the kitchen, give your little tithe, move on with life. Listen, if life is a movie, this is Saving Private Ryan, guys. Not the Wedding Planner.
Mark Clark [00:18:34]:
This is. Every moment is kind of a war for your soul. This is why the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 says, you're in a spiritual battle. And then he says the Bible is the main tool to fight that battle. What does he call it? The sword of the spirit. This is what we'll tell you about reality. I don't know much of anything about fighting and war myself. I'm Canadian, so we're all pacifists.
Mark Clark [00:18:59]:
We let you do it. North Korea creates problems. It's like America. All right? But I've gotten two fights in my life. Two fights.
Mark Clark [00:19:18]:
One of them is with my best friend, Kevin James. We fought over something stupid. He punched me. He was really. He was much bigger. Punched me eight times in the face. I was like, wow, this hurts. This is crazy.
Mark Clark [00:19:28]:
And I was out.
Mark Clark [00:19:30]:
The second fight I won two or three chops to the throat down. Done. It was my cousin Cheryl. I don't know much about fighting men, but I know when I read the Bible that I am actually in a spiritual war, that the war isn't fought with just prayer. You New Agers love that. Just let me pray and walk around and talk and I'll figure out what I believe about stuff. That's not the war. The war isn't, you know, whether you can connect it.
Mark Clark [00:20:23]:
Church leaders and like them and follow them and their nice principles of life. It's not fought with worship music. It's fought with the sword of the spirit. All those other things too beautiful and good. But it's actually the Bible itself.
Mark Clark [00:20:43]:
And this is what's hard about it, is that sometimes it kicks against everything you believe and everything the world believes. And then what are you gonna do? Do? Who would have ever predicted that one of the most controversial verses in the entire Bible in a generation would be Genesis 1, he made them male and female. There's no way a generation before us could have ever predicted that. But it's real, so we got to nuance it.
Mark Clark [00:21:10]:
See, here's the question at the end of the day, this is what we're talking about. The question at the end of the day is if this thing is going.
Mark Clark [00:21:16]:
To be your authority or not.
Mark Clark [00:21:17]:
That's it. I remember, man, I was a 17 year old kid full of hormones. And then I become a Christian and I want to play the field. There's a lot of good looking women in high school. I'm ready to go. And then I'm reading because I become a Christian. So I'm reading 1st Thessalonians 4 and I'm like, and I'm like, it's telling me I can't be sexually immoral, which means it's in the context of marriage or I can't inherit the kingdom of God. And I just keep reading it like, I'm like, did I miss something? I'm not really sure.
Mark Clark [00:21:58]:
What does it say in the Greek? I got all the, all the message out. What does Eugene Peterson say? Maybe he says, well you kind of can, but try not to. And I look for every single thing. And then I was like, no, gosh, this is the thing. I have to wait till marriage. And then the conscious of marriage. And I'm like, I was like Luke Skywalker when I found out Vader is his father. I was like, no.
Mark Clark [00:22:26]:
But then I had to make a decision. Am I going to come under the Bible's authority or play my own life out? Even though it doesn't feel good in this moment, I don't get to do what I want to do because the Bible's like, yeah, yeah, what you want to do? Long game, bro.
Mark Clark [00:22:47]:
It's not how you flourish. And I'm going to trust God versus Uncle Joe around the table who thinks he knows everything. I'm going to trust God over myself because everything I think is driven by my own agenda over and over and over again. John Stott says our fight is a war of ideas. At the end of the day, that's what this is.
Mark Clark [00:23:13]:
Can you have biblical ideas to fight.
Mark Clark [00:23:16]:
The battle that you are in?
Mark Clark [00:23:17]:
It's a war of ideas at every moment. That's what you're in. Bad ideas lead to lack of flourishing. I was on a cruise a while ago and we were pulling up to Puerto Vallarta and it was a beautiful spot in Mexico. Been rain. I live in Vancouver, so it had rained for 14 months. Straight. And I was like, oh, we're pulling up to Puerto Vallarta's Mexico and we're gonna have tacos and we'll have all this beautiful culture and it'll be awesome.
Mark Clark [00:23:46]:
And I'm so excited. Everyone in the crew's so excited. And I'm sitting in the back with these two women and they're, they're like, I can't wait. I can't wait to get off the boat. Puerto Vallart, it's gonna be great. We can go to Walmart. Like, what? What's wrong? It's America, man. What is wrong with you people? It's like bad ideas, man, lead to.
Mark Clark [00:24:12]:
Terrible decisions in your life. Now, here's the fight, here's the fight you're always gonna have when you're trying to believe the Bible over your own opinions or over the opinions of the people around you. Here's what the fight is going to be. You've got to do.
Mark Clark [00:24:29]:
And if there's skeptics here, I'm going.
Mark Clark [00:24:30]:
To talk to you in a second.
Mark Clark [00:24:31]:
But you've got to be able to.
Mark Clark [00:24:33]:
Be self aware enough to know that you are a product of a cultural moment. And to take your cultural moment and transcend it above the Bible is a very dangerous thing. The problem is most of us aren't self aware enough to know that we're simply the product of a cultural moment. Let me give you an example of this.
Mark Clark [00:24:53]:
If you wanted to talk about the.
Mark Clark [00:24:55]:
Topic of sex or the topic of.
Mark Clark [00:24:56]:
Forgiveness, people in Sacramento, people in Western culture, for those of you online, they're going to say, you know, I think Jesus ethic on sexuality is too conservative. Male, female, in the context of marriage, don't really love it. But here's what I really love.
Mark Clark [00:25:13]:
This is classic Canadians.
Mark Clark [00:25:15]:
I love Jesus teaching on love your enemy.
Mark Clark [00:25:18]:
So nice, right? Again, as Canadians, we love that, like, everyone's our friend. Everyone loves Canadians, right?
Mark Clark [00:25:23]:
When I travel, it's like, I'm Canadian.
Mark Clark [00:25:25]:
They're like, okay, I thought you were American. Love you, bro. Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:25:30]:
And so it's like, love your enemy, right? Everyone in the Western world loves that. Every university student sucking on a latte in Starbucks, reading Kierkegaard, loves, love your enemy. But they don't like the sexual ethic of Jesus. Now grab a plane and go to Palestine, go to Saudi Arabia and sit down with a group of people and.
Mark Clark [00:25:55]:
Say, let's read the New Testament together.
Mark Clark [00:25:57]:
What do you like?
Mark Clark [00:25:58]:
Well, that sexual ethic, it's a little.
Mark Clark [00:26:02]:
Loose.
Mark Clark [00:26:06]:
Little loose there with the sexual ethic.
Mark Clark [00:26:08]:
We need to tighten things up. But I'll tell you what.
Mark Clark [00:26:12]:
I'm not forgiving my enemy. Because three generations ago, they killed my grandpa's grandpa's grandpa. And we still need that land. We still need that fight.
Mark Clark [00:26:21]:
So let me ask you who's right? Be very careful when your cultural moment becomes the arbiter of truth and the main filter and hermeneutic in which you start to live your life. Because the Bible will cut up every single one of your cultural moments and challenge them.
Mark Clark [00:26:42]:
The question is, will you let it challenge yours and actually listen to the scriptures when they call you out? So where's the power? I was asked to speak in Australia a couple years ago, and the guy asked me to do a series on Jonah at a conference. And I'd never preached on Jonah before. And so I opened up Jonah. You know what the beautiful thing about Jonah is? You know what the opening line to the book of Jonah is? Jonah, chapter one. Here's what it is. Listen to this. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, and you know something hit me. I was super powerful.
Mark Clark [00:27:19]:
You know, if you read the book of Jonah, his life sucks, right? Right.
Mark Clark [00:27:23]:
God calls him to go to Iraq.
Mark Clark [00:27:26]:
To his dreaded enemies whom he hates. And he jumps on a boat to.
Mark Clark [00:27:29]:
Go to Spain and chilling the beach. Then he gets in the midst of a storm, then he gets thrown over. Then the whale, a great fish, for all you Hebrew scholars love to point that out. He's not a whale, all right? Relax. He did half a semester at Bible college.
Mark Clark [00:27:51]:
That's what you walked out with.
Mark Clark [00:27:54]:
So, okay, the great fish swallows him up and then he starts to choke to death. If you read chapter two, and he's tapping out, I'm dying.
Mark Clark [00:28:03]:
I'm dying.
Mark Clark [00:28:03]:
Some people say that it's actually a poem about him dying. He's dead. He gets spit up. He goes and preaches the worst sermon ever preached in the history of sermons to a group of people he hates. And they all repent and come to know the Lord. And then he sits under a plan. He says, I hate my life. Give me a sunburn, I want to kill myself.
Mark Clark [00:28:19]:
That's Jonah's life. We forget that part, right? We stop and he pumped out of the whale. Awesome. The end of the story is, please kill me now. Now, here's what I noticed about the story of Jonah. Listen to me.
Mark Clark [00:28:34]:
This is a very important principle for life. God blesses Jonah's message, not Jonah, y'all. That's what hit me.
Mark Clark [00:28:44]:
You know what? He's gonna Do. He's gonna bless his message getting out into the world. He's going to bless his agenda, not you. In fact, Jesus actually said this. He talked about the idea that the Gospel will go forth in the world even at the cost of your life. So God may choose to expand the gospel in the world through your blessing or through your death. He doesn't promise safety. He promises security.
Mark Clark [00:29:18]:
And those are different. And so when you stick to the text now, he's gonna bless the text, he's gonna bless the Bible, because think.
Mark Clark [00:29:26]:
About your temptation life. Anybody in this room ever tempted, raise him up.
Mark Clark [00:29:34]:
Say to your neighbor, no, I'm just kidding. I don't.
Mark Clark [00:29:40]:
Do you know, when Jesus gets tempted in the wilderness, what does he do? What does he do in Matthew, man, He doesn't bust out. Francis Chan quotes. He doesn't quote Problem of Jesus, Problem of God on sale now in the lobby. Never does any of that. Doesn't quote Ray Johnson or any of the. He doesn't quote it. He quotes the Bible because he says, man cannot live on bread alone. Man cannot live on vacations, alone on sunny places, alone on square footage, alone on getting a new car alone.
Mark Clark [00:30:17]:
He's gotta live on every word that comes from the mouth of God. And so Satan hits him with this, and he hits him with Deuteronomy, hits him with this, hits him with Deuteronomy, hits him with this, hits him with Deuteronomy, all three times. The story about Israel in the wilderness failing to do the vocation that God has called them to do, which is the story of Deuteronomy, Jesus, Israel's representative, now does by quoting Deuteronomy and succeeding where they failed. But it's all here. He's doing this. So when you're tempted, don't just pray and put on hillsong. Read the Bible, because it'll say stuff to God that you need to say that you don't even know. You know, you don't even know what you need.
Mark Clark [00:31:08]:
Right? We Protestants, we love to make this faith like the individual faith of everybody. And you get to organically walk with God. You know, the Psalms have been the prayer book of the Bible for 5,000 years. And we go around and say, I can't read and pray to God through reading. Why not? Cause you're a Protestant who thinks it's all gonna come from you walking around talking to him out of your heart. Well, sometimes your heart is wicked and you need the Psalms to speak things that you're only gonna come to believe in two years.
Mark Clark [00:31:52]:
And this is why God has given us the Word. He blesses the Word. Now, here's one of the challenges. I was thinking of some of the challenges. One of the challenges is that we can mishandle the Word. So we gotta work hard, man. We can mishandle the Word. I remember this day in college.
Mark Clark [00:32:10]:
I was in the lobby, and this guy walks down. He's like, hey, you and your buddy, you need to come up to my room. I got a word from the Lord for you. I'm like, all right. Jonah said the word of the Lord.
Mark Clark [00:32:20]:
Okay, here we go.
Mark Clark [00:32:21]:
So I went up to the guy's room with my buddy. He's like, okay, sit down, sit down, sit down. I got a word for you. I got a word for you.
Mark Clark [00:32:25]:
And he just opened up his Bible, and he's like. Just went to the middle, boom.
Mark Clark [00:32:29]:
Have you ever done that?
Mark Clark [00:32:30]:
Right? Boom. So where do you think it hit? Ezekiel? Because Ezekiel's big and it's in the middle, right? It's not because God ordained you to. So he gives me some. He goes, kaboom. Ezekiel 21:13. It says this. When he, like, shoots off something. This has to do with you.
Mark Clark [00:32:44]:
I'm like, no, it doesn't. It has to do with Israel in Babylonian exile. Has nothing to do with me. And he's like, no, it does. And he starts speaking in tongues. Tie my boat. Tie. Tie my boat to.
Mark Clark [00:32:55]:
Should I buy?
Mark Clark [00:32:55]:
To hi on. And he starts to kind of go. And I'm like. I'm like, what is he doing? And then he starts to do this. I'm like, now I have Tourette's. So I'm like, okay, this is cool, brother. So. And he goes.
Mark Clark [00:33:14]:
And he goes, no, no, I'm shooting you with my Holy spirit machine gun. And I'm like, frick. I'm. What are you gonna do? Can I tell you a basic hermeneutical interpretive principle?
Mark Clark [00:33:34]:
The Bible was not written to you. It was written for you.
Mark Clark [00:33:38]:
The Book of Revelation has nothing to do with vaccines, helicopters, trump. It can mean nothing that it couldn't have meant to people living in the first century under the Emperor Nero, who would not let them worship, and they had to pinch incense to Caesar every time they wanted to do something. And your forehead, which was representative of your thinking, and your right hand, which is representative of your actions. You either belonged to the beastly ways of the world or you belong to the lamb who was slain. That's the question. Has nothing to do with a QR code that's gonna get put in Your hand so you can buy a watermelon at the grocery store. Nothing to do with that. And here's the problem with that.
Mark Clark [00:34:26]:
Some of you are waiting and you're.
Mark Clark [00:34:28]:
Not gonna get this, and you're not gonna get the thing in your hand. And you've already taken the mark of the beast and you think you haven't because your life is defined by the ways of the world versus the ways of the lamb who is slain. The Bible can't mean anything that it couldn't have meant to the people it was written to. The Bible was not written to you. It was written for you. There is a context, there's a genre, there's paragraphs. Context. And this is why you have to work at it.
Mark Clark [00:34:59]:
Just waking up and pointing your finger. It's like, all right, what's that famous story? Points his finger. Judas went and hung himself. I was like, let me try that again. Go and do likewise. Let me try it again. Whatever you do, do it quickly. That's not a good way to live your life.
Mark Clark [00:35:26]:
Okay, so let me. Let me hit a couple of things that I came to understand about the Bible because. Because I'm an evidential thinker, like some of you. You might be skeptics. You might say, I don't trust the Bible. There are so many ways and so many reasons to trust the Bible. I don't have time to get into them. All of them.
Mark Clark [00:35:44]:
You can read more about it in the Problem of God if you want to. But you gotta understand, historically, the Bible holds up.
Mark Clark [00:35:53]:
It holds up. Let me read.
Mark Clark [00:35:54]:
Let me read a Bible verse to you.
Mark Clark [00:35:55]:
Luke, chapter three. In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was.
Mark Clark [00:36:02]:
Governor of Judea, Herod Tetrarch of Galilee.
Mark Clark [00:36:06]:
His brother Philip, Tetrarch of Etore and.
Mark Clark [00:36:09]:
Triconides, and Lycina, Tetrarch of Abilene, during.
Mark Clark [00:36:12]:
The high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. Can't even say half those words. Listen, none of you have that Bible verse on your fridge. But you know why the Bible's sometimes boring? Because it's historically accurate. Luke lists seven rulers in order of their authority to frame it and say, I ain't making this up, man. And this is what skeptics constantly say. I came from skeptical background. I do church in a skeptical city.
Mark Clark [00:36:52]:
I was on a podcast of two guys got in touch with me, like, hey, we run a skeptics podcast.
Mark Clark [00:36:58]:
We are two ex Christians, ex pastors.
Mark Clark [00:37:01]:
But now we're scientists and historians, and we'd like to interview You. So you can defend Christianity to us for an hour on a podcast. I'm like, sure. Sounds awesome. Don't know why I do these things. So I get on, and one of their points was, Mark, don't you know all the passages in the Bible that are just made up? You can't trust the Bible because the Bible's made up. And you can't trust them because there's all these different things. And I'm like, no, no.
Mark Clark [00:37:26]:
I said, guys, there's literally two disputed passages in the entire New Testament. The end of the Gospel of Mark and John, chapter eight, the story of.
Mark Clark [00:37:37]:
The woman caught in adultery.
Mark Clark [00:37:38]:
Those are the only two passages out of all scholarship with all the manuscripts that anybody would say these two passages probably were not original to the text. And they said, no. And I said, and by the way, no one's trying to hide that. In fact, any Bible that you grab, it literally tells you that these are disputed passages. No, they.
Mark Clark [00:37:57]:
They don't.
Mark Clark [00:37:58]:
I said, no, no, no, they do. And they're like, no, they don't. I'm like, I was on zoom, so I did, like, put it up to the camera.
Mark Clark [00:38:08]:
Like.
Mark Clark [00:38:11]:
It'S right there. And they're like, oh. And one of the guys, it was beautiful because he said, if I had.
Mark Clark [00:38:21]:
Had a pastor admit that to me in the church I grew up in, I might not have left Christianity.
Mark Clark [00:38:28]:
That's what he said. Because we gotta deal with these difficult issues, but we gotta understand two passages in the entire New Testament are even disputed by scholars. Scholars, Scholars. People who actually had degrees. Not like the kind of research we do. Like, I did the research.
Mark Clark [00:38:45]:
I'm like, no.
Mark Clark [00:38:45]:
3 Facebook. That's not a research.
Mark Clark [00:38:52]:
Historically, it holds up. Literarily, it holds up. Archeologically, it holds up. You know, there was years at Oxford, Cambridge, where professors would say the Gospel of John was not historically accurate. And the reason they cited was because in John, chapter five, he talks about the Pool of Siloam, and there were five roof colonnades, and they did all the archaeological work, and those places were never found.
Mark Clark [00:39:16]:
So you can't trust the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:39:18]:
It's all made up. It's a group of people who wanted to create a religion, and they made it up. And generations of people left Christianity and didn't want anything to do with the Bible. And then in 1930, they did a little digging, and they found them all. Five roof colonnades, exactly as John describes it.
Mark Clark [00:39:36]:
In fact, you know that the. The historicity of the Gospel of John is actually the way we know how.
Mark Clark [00:39:43]:
Many years Jesus did ministry?
Mark Clark [00:39:45]:
John's the only one who tells us that he went to three Passovers. If we just had Matthew, Mark and Luke, we wouldn't know Jesus ministry was three years. He could have done all that in two weeks. John's the one who tells us he.
Mark Clark [00:39:56]:
Went to Passover 1, Passover 2, Passover 3.
Mark Clark [00:39:59]:
John is constantly citing places, people, rulers, leaders, to the point where Craig Blomberg.
Mark Clark [00:40:04]:
Actually wrote a book on this. The Historicity of the Gospel of John.
Mark Clark [00:40:07]:
Imagine though, you drop kicked your Bible and walked away from Christianity before they did a little more digging.
Mark Clark [00:40:18]:
And yet over and over and over again, Nelson Glueck, who's this renowned Jewish archaeologist, said it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever contradicted a biblical reference.
Mark Clark [00:40:31]:
Can you imagine that?
Mark Clark [00:40:34]:
The contradictions though. What about all the contradictions? One story says this, another one says that. I remember when I was in college, I was reading the Gospel of Luke and I was reading a parable of Jesus and he said, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then this. And then I was reading the same parable in Matthew and it differed in its details and I was like, contradiction.
Mark Clark [00:40:54]:
I can't believe in the Bible anymore. Matthew got it wrong. Luke got it wrong. They're making this up. They all got together, they made it up. And so I went to my teacher, I'm like, bro, it's made up. Look, this one had three sons and this one had two sons. It's all made up.
Mark Clark [00:41:05]:
And he goes, no, no, no, you don't understand. Stop projecting the way that you think.
Mark Clark [00:41:08]:
About biography back onto the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:41:10]:
You gotta understand something. That back then Jesus probably. Listen to me, this is very important. Jesus probably told these stories 200 times.
Mark Clark [00:41:20]:
Over the course of three years in hundreds of villages. So Luke's taking one and Matthew's taking another.
Mark Clark [00:41:29]:
In fact, some of the tensions that get brought up from a historical academic perspective actually legitimize the Gospels. Like when people say, well, there was this many angels at the Resurrection tomb, and then that story had this many angels. Go read N.T. wright's book, 800 pages in the Resurrection of the Son of God. He points out the fact that from a scholarship standpoint, that actually legitimizes the Gospels because if they were making it up, they would have all gotten a room and said, hey, idiots, two or one angel? Two. Two. We're going two. You better not go one.
Mark Clark [00:41:57]:
I know you, I know you. You look like a guy who's gonna go rogue. It's two. We all got to agree in the room. And there's tension.
Mark Clark [00:42:09]:
It's not contradiction, because where there's two, there's one.
Mark Clark [00:42:12]:
One's telling it from one angle, one's.
Mark Clark [00:42:14]:
Telling it from another. Over and over and over again, we see.
Mark Clark [00:42:19]:
But then skeptics come. They, yeah, but God changes. There's so many things in the Old Testament that are different than the New Testament. We couldn't get tattoos in the Old Testament. Now every Christian I know got the big tattoos. Worship leaders up there with tattoos, we couldn't do shellfish. We couldn't wear certain clothes. Now all Christians just walking around doing whatever they want.
Mark Clark [00:42:36]:
See, God changes. No, no. Yes. There was a theocracy in a particular geographic region. God had these people. But then in Christ, in the Spirit, it opened up to the Gentiles. And now some of those things were set aside because they had a particular moment and a particular reason. And so I meet people as a pastor, I've passed for 20 years.
Mark Clark [00:42:54]:
I meet people who wanna play the game. They wanna say, oh, I'm gonna forget.
Mark Clark [00:42:56]:
About the Old Testament. I'm only a New Testament person. And then the people who are like, I actually like the Old Testament.
Mark Clark [00:43:01]:
I met with a guy the other.
Mark Clark [00:43:02]:
Day, been divorced a bunch of times, really lot of dough, likes the ladies. And I'm shepherding him a bit. And he's like. I'm like, bro, you can't be sleeping with your girlfriend.
Mark Clark [00:43:13]:
You have to repent.
Mark Clark [00:43:14]:
You gotta marry her. You gotta stop. And he's like, man, I've been reading the Old Testament. These concubines, is this a thing still? And I'm like, what's going on right now? No, concubines aren't a thing anymore.
Mark Clark [00:43:36]:
You gotta be able to read the text the way it was. The counterproductive content that's in the gospels doesn't make any sense. If you're trying to make up a religion. Jesus on the cross says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Take that out.
Mark Clark [00:43:52]:
It's not good.
Mark Clark [00:43:53]:
When you're starting a religion and you want to show Jesus as the great hero who doesn't have any contradictions, he's not going to make my God. Why is he talking to himself?
Mark Clark [00:44:01]:
We just did 15 chapters on why he's God.
Mark Clark [00:44:04]:
Now he's talking about God abandoning him.
Mark Clark [00:44:09]:
When he's in the Garden of Gethsemane and he's saying, take this cup from me. I don't even want to do this. Just take that out. He's scared. He wants to Give up on his own mission in Mark, when he remember, he goes to that village and he drowns all the pigs. What? You get canceled, right? The squad would not like that. Jesus drown pigs. PETA not happy in Canada.
Mark Clark [00:44:46]:
I can't even read that text. It's illegal. I'm joking.
Mark Clark [00:44:49]:
I'm joking. Think of all the things that happen over and over again where it's like, you know what? Let's just not confuse everybody. Take it out. He can do no miracle there. Do you know when you're returning? Hey, are you God?
Mark Clark [00:45:09]:
Yep.
Mark Clark [00:45:09]:
Do you know everything? Yep. I'm omniscient. I know everything.
Mark Clark [00:45:12]:
Wow.
Mark Clark [00:45:12]:
When are you coming back? No idea. Ask me any other question, I'll know. But I don't know that one. Just cut that out. Delete it. It's going to confuse everybody anyway. Much more to say. But let me leave you with this.
Mark Clark [00:45:30]:
Let me tell you what the most terrifying verse in the Bible is for me. John, chapter five. You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very scriptures that testify about me. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. Can I tell you something? The point of the Bible is not to know the Bible. The point of the Word is to know the word behind the word. The big W word.
Mark Clark [00:46:00]:
That's what the Bible's there for. Not for you to know stuff, but for you to know the God of the universe. Jesus looks at the mo, the scholars in John chapter five and says, you've been studying the Scriptures your whole life and you don't even know me. You got born in church, you got raised in church. You had your wedding in a church. You served in church. You had your funeral in a church. And you can still wake up in hell because you don't actually know me.
Mark Clark [00:46:25]:
You don't know the word behind the word. You know the word and you don't commune with me. You don't love me. You don't like me. One of the scariest things we can do is to recognize that a person can read and study the Bible and find neither God nor satisfaction because they've never met the one behind the words on the page. So here's the scary part. Do we, in this room, believe everything I just said? Yeah, maybe. But so does the devil, and it doesn't save him.
Mark Clark [00:47:06]:
You know why? Because he doesn't treasure it above every other thing in the universe. He just knows it's true. He knows the Bible's true, but it doesn't save him. Some of you are like, I know the Bible's true. I'll base my life on. The Bible doesn't save you because you don't treasure it above every other thing. You don't know the one who came and lived a perfect life in your place. By the way, when you read your Bible, there's one way to read it that will crush you.
Mark Clark [00:47:39]:
And there's one way to read it that will free you. The way to read it that will crush you is every morning when you wake up and you have your coffee and you got that Instagram ready to go and you're gonna read your passage. The way it will crush you is if you approach the Bible as if it's about you. The Bible's not about you, it's about him. You don't have the courage of David or the courage of Samson or the courage of. That's not the point of the Bible. Those guys didn't even have that courage. It's that Jesus Christ had to be courageous for you.
Mark Clark [00:48:11]:
You can't save yourself, so he had to come and do it for you. That's why he says in John 5, you read the Bible, you don't even.
Mark Clark [00:48:17]:
Realize it's about me. It's not about you. If you make it about you, it will crush you because it's going to become religion. How can I be a good person so that God will love me? You don't have to be, because Jesus was perfect for you. That's what the whole Bible's about. Every story is about him, not about you.
Mark Clark [00:48:39]:
And so, Father, let us rest in that reality and actually find freedom in it. I know so many people who've walked away from the faith because they've been reading the Bible as if it was about them. It was crushing. It was discouraging. It felt boring. Ignite in us a passion. Change our affections on the spot for the very scriptures that speak of you and tell us to recognize that it is the story about Jesus. Every page, every verse is about you.
Mark Clark [00:49:07]:
And let that change us to the core of our being. And let us not only know it, but treasure it and trust to it for life itself. In your good name we pray. Amen.