Mark chapter 6, last week we looked at verses 14-29 and we saw the dangers of weakness, the dangers of sinful weakness in the life
of King Herod, weakness that stemmed from his sinful nature and then sins and weaknesses that were compounded and fed by his sinful choices, his sinful actions.
His lust led to the degradation of his stepdaughter, then led to him making a foolish promise, and then his fear of man stopped him from going back on that promise and correcting course and wound up leading to the murder of John the Baptist.
And there's only one solution for that kind of weakness.
There's only one answer for it, and that is repentance.
When you are bound by sin, there's only one way out, and that's to turn, to repent of your foolishness.
That's what John the Baptist had been calling Herod to.
He's telling him what you're doing is wrong, you need to repent of that sin, and Herod refused to do that.
But it's the only way to true freedom.
Though our world looks at the ability to choose, the ability to do whatever you want as freedom, what the scriptures tell us is that he who sins is bound by his sin.
He's a slave to sin, Jesus says in John chapter 8.
But John 8.36, Jesus says, he whom the Son sets free is free indeed.
So the only way to be free of that kind of weakness and bondage and sin is to
Look to Christ for freedom to repent of your sins and to trust in his sacrifice for your sins.
This week we're going to see another kind of weakness.
Namely our, and I mentioned it last week at the front end, but that's the weakness of simply being a human creature.
Having human frailty.
And this sort of weakness does not call for repentance.
Some of us carry around a false sense of guilt because of this sort of weakness.
But instead it calls for us to have a conscience, conscious dependence upon our creator, upon Christ's compassionate care for us.
Mark chapter six, beginning in verse 30 says this, the apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.
And he said to them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.
For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.
And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves.
Then when he saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them, he went ashore.
When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
And he began to teach them many things.
And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, this is a desolate place and the hour is now late.
Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.
But he assured them, answered them rather, you give them something to eat.
And they said to him, shall we go and buy 200 denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?
And he said to them, how many loaves do you have?
Go and see.
And when they had found out, they said, five and two fish.
Then he commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass.
So they sat down in groups by hundreds and by fifties, taking the five loaves and the two fish.
He looked up to heaven and said a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the people.
And he divided the two fish among them all.
And they all ate and were satisfied.
And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish.
And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.
What I want to argue this morning, contend for, is that though it only appears once, the word only is here once in the text, I think the central theme of this paragraph is compassion.
Christ's compassion for the needs of the twelve,
His compassion for the spiritual needs of the crowd and his compassion for the physical needs of the crowd.
First we see Jesus' compassion for the disciples in verses 30-32.
The apostles, it says, returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.
This is connecting us back to all that we looked at last week with that whole story about John the Baptist being beheaded.
It was like a flashback.
It's a cutaway from the narrative right after we've been reading of Jesus sending out the twelve and they're casting out demons, they're preaching with authority, they're healing the sick.
We see that in verses 7-13.
And then all of that with King Herod was he was hearing about this
and he thinks John the Baptist is back from the dead and so then Mark fills us in well here's how John died since you haven't heard about him since the first part of the gospel and now here we are we're back in the narrative as it were
And the apostles, they come back to Jesus.
And the word apostle here, I mean, we use it formally to speak of the twelve.
This is the only time it occurs in Mark's gospel.
And he just seems to be using it as what that word literally means.
It means a messenger, someone who's sent out.
And so these twelve are Jesus's appointed messengers.
They're the ones who've been sent out by him to perform these works.
And they come back, and they're excited.
They've been doing this ministry, amazing things are happening, and they're like, Jesus, here's what we've been teaching, and here's how people are responding, and we've been healing people, and we've been casting out demons, and like, we didn't know we could do this stuff.
And of course, they couldn't in their own power, right?
He's given them authority to do all of these things.
But it's a brand new experience for them, and they are excited about it.
I wonder if you've ever had a moment like that, like times where you've poured yourself into something and God does something through it.
And that's exhilarating.
It gives you, in a sense, like a high, like there's an adrenaline rush that comes from that.
And you're going, wow, I didn't even know that that was possible.
And sometimes that carries on beyond the very end of that.
But those mountaintop experiences
often have crashes at the end, right?
You see that in 1 Kings where Elijah's up on the mountaintop and challenges all of the prophets of Baal and God shows up, right?
The fire comes down from heaven.
And the next chapter, he is curled up in the desert, running for his life, crying because he's all alone, even though there's 7,000 other prophets of the Lord.
He's like, I'm all alone.
She's gonna kill me.
Oh, why God?
Why don't you just kill me now?
Right after the fire fell.
Here he is.
And the disciples aren't there yet, right?
They're still on this, wow, Jesus, look what happened.
But Jesus says, let's take a break, guys.
He sees that they have a physical need that's about to come.
They're about to crash.
And he calls them away.
He says to them, come away by yourselves.
to a desolate place and rest a while.
And this is compassion in action.
Jesus doesn't send them straight back to ministry.
He says, come away, let's rest.
Let's get a little bit of recuperation.
Even though as we read this, we know that that's going to get interrupted.
They still have this time to pause.
We don't know how long they're in the boat.
We don't know how long the trip was, how far they're going.
They have some time to just pause and be with Jesus.
That's important because they are creatures and they are frail and that kind of spiritual exertion is utterly draining.
Gums kids, you're gonna be like crashing at the end of the summer I'm sure, right?
Do you ever feel guilty over that kind of frailty?
When you feel like, oh Lord, I should be doing more
There's more things I should be doing for you.
There's so much I left leave undone every day, every week, every month, every year.
There's so much more I should have got done.
You should not feel guilty about that.
Your limitations are part of God's good design in making you as a creature.
You are not God.
There are only so many things you can do and are meant to do.
Jesus himself experienced such weakness in his pre-resurrection, sinless human body.
He was tired and he fell asleep in the boat, so tired that a storm did not wake him up.
In John chapter 4, he and the disciples are traveling through Samaria and Jesus is so tired, he says, you guys keep going on into town and get some food.
I'm just going to sit down for a while.
And the text tells us, I mean, there's a divine appointment there, right?
He's going to meet the woman at the well.
He stopped because he was tired.
And she comes and he doesn't have anything to get water with.
He's, have a drink.
He gets tired.
He gets thirsty.
He gets hungry.
He has all of these needs, this human frailty.
Jesus has compassion on that.
Do you feel guilty over your frailty?
Jesus has compassion and will give rest to those who follow him.
David writes in Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
In Matthew chapter 11, verses 28 through 30,
Jesus says, Jesus calls us to labor.
When he calls us, he doesn't just call us to come hang out with him and chill and do nothing else, right?
We read in Ephesians 2 just there that we're not saved by our works, we're saved by his grace, but then he saves us for good works, which he prepared in advance for us to do.
There is work to be done, but it is a labor that's not dependent upon our frantic activity.
It's labor where we work dependent upon his sufficient power.
His Sufficient Power.
So Jesus has compassion on the disciples' own limitations.
Second thing we see is Jesus' compassion on the spiritual needs of the crowd.
Verse 33, Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them.
Again, we don't know
exactly where they're going from or to, but at some point as the disciples and Jesus are out in the boat, somebody spots them and goes, I bet they're going to there and starts wrangling up all their friends, thousands of them, and beats him there on foot.
When he got, when he went ashore, he saw a great crowd.
And it says he had compassion on them because they were like sheep.
Without a Shepherd.
And we, we aren't given the emotional state, the emotional reaction of the disciples to this great crowd of people as they are coming away to a desolate place to spend time with Jesus.
I'm imagining it probably was somewhere between frustration, like, are you kidding me?
To outright anger.
What are these people doing?
Can't, don't they know that we are tired?
But we are given Jesus' reaction to the crowds.
And it says he had compassion on them.
And that word, compassion, literally means like in his guts, he was moved towards them.
In the West, we speak of the heart as like the center of our emotions.
But for the Hebrews, like that idea of the bowels, that's where you felt feelings of compassion and kindness and love.
And when you think about, like, how does your body feel in those moments, that's actually probably a better description than your heart.
You're not, like, feeling that necessarily up in your chest.
It is kind of like a stomach feeling of, oh, I just wish I could do something to help.
But Jesus doesn't have to wish, does he?
He just doesn't wish that he can help them.
He's moved towards them when he sees their need.
And what is their need?
Their need is that they are like sheep without a shepherd.
A shepherd is an important term in the Bible.
We often hear it said that in Jesus' day shepherds were looked down upon and that's true of Greco-Roman culture.
They didn't really value manual labor.
That was the sort of thing that slaves did to go out there and be with the sheep.
That's nasty.
That's uncivilized.
We live in cities.
We don't do things like that.
It's not true of the Hebrews though.
They did value the role of the shepherd.
I shouldn't say every.
Many of the major leaders of Israel were themselves shepherds.
All the patriarchs were shepherds.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
They were nomadic herding people that the Lord called to this particular land.
David, the great king of Israel, was a shepherd.
Think of the prophet Amos was called from the fields of Tekoa.
He was not a prophet or a son of a prophet,
He was a shepherd, and God called him and made him a prophet.
Shepherding was used as a metaphor for leadership over God's people, over God's flock.
They were a people who, like sheep, had a tendency to wander away.
And so literal shepherding was seen as fitting preparation for leading God's people, because if you could learn to lead these sheep, and sheep are not intelligent animals.
If you leave them alone out in the wilderness, they will find ways to die.
And yet, God describes his people as sheep.
That should probably, for one thing, tell us something about ourselves.
Right?
That's how God views us.
We are looking for ways to die.
We are looking for ways to get tripped up and to fail to move towards Him.
And yet He kindly, gently leads us like a shepherd.
And He calls the leaders of His people shepherds.
Kings were called shepherds.
The religious leaders were called shepherds.
You see this carried on into the New Testament, 1 Peter chapter 5.
Peter tells the elders there to shepherd the flock of God that is among them.
And even that language of pastor
It's the same word as shepherd, right?
We think of a pastoral setting as like a pasture, a place where livestock are kept.
The one who leads in that livestock setting is the shepherd, the pastor.
It's the same language.
All through scripture, leaders are described as shepherds.
And the failures of Israel's leadership were cast in terms of failures to properly shepherd his people.
I think one of the most striking examples of that is Jeremiah chapter 23.
Jeremiah 23 beginning in verse 1, God speaking, he says, Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture, declares the Lord.
Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people.
Care for my people.
You have scattered my flock.
And have driven them away, and you have not attended to them.
Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds, declares the Lord.
Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply.
I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord.
Jesus picks up that idea of a good shepherd in contrast to false shepherds in John chapter 10.
He speaks of those who are thieves and ultimately the Thief with, you know, it's not actually capitalized here but we might say Thief with a capital T being Satan.
The Thief comes, John 10.10, only to steal and kill and destroy.
And the contrast
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
I am the good shepherd.
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.
He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd.
I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.
And I lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that are not of this fold.
I must bring them also.
And they will listen to my voice so there will be one flock, one shepherd.
And Jesus in John 10 is drawing on that language of Jeremiah 23, where there's these shepherds who have been appointed by God to take care of the sheep and they're not doing it.
They're driving the sheep apart.
They're acting like hired hands.
They're acting like people who don't care about the sheep at all.
And Jesus says, unlike them, he's indicting the leadership of his day, the religious leadership of his day, because they're acting in the same way as those Jeremiah 23 shepherds.
They're acting like hired hands.
And Jesus says, I have come to lay down my life for the sheep.
I will put myself in harm's way and die even for them.
And I will bring not just the sheep of this fold, but there in Jeremiah 23, it had said he would gather, he would set shepherds over them who would care for them and would gather all of the scattered sheep of God.
And here in John 10, Jesus says, I have other sheep that are not of this fold.
One of the main themes in John's Gospel is that Jesus is bringing the Gentiles in.
And so Jesus is bringing not just the sheep of Israel, but all of the sheep of God, all of those who would trust in Christ, are brought together under Him.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd.
He came as the Good Shepherd who was compassionate toward His erring sheep, coming to bring abundant life.
Do you see yourself
as a needy and lost sheep apart from Christ.
If not, you need to more closely evaluate your life.
You are bumbling around, often wandering from the way of wisdom.
Isaiah 53, 6 says, and we all like sheep have gone astray.
Every single one of us, there is no exception to that.
On our own, we wander around like sheep waiting to get eaten.
So do you see yourself as a needy sheep?
If so, Jesus has compassion, and if you will trust in him, he will be your shepherd.
Second half of Psalm 23-3 says, He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
How does Jesus lead?
We see this in verse 34.
He has compassion on the crowd because they're like sheep without a shepherd.
And so what does he do?
And he began to teach them
Many Things.
That phrase translated many things could also mean that he taught them deeply.
He's going deep down into the things that he has come to teach.
He's come to teach concerning the coming kingdom of God, the kingdom that would come through his work on the cross.
And he comes to drill down here and he says they need shepherded and he's going to shepherd them, lead them, guide them by his word.
Jesus then shepherded the crowd by his teaching.
Today, he shepherds his church in the same way.
He leads his church through his word.
He does this in multiple ways, but the primary way he does that is by appointing under shepherds.
It's the language that is used again in the New Testament to speak of pastors and teachers are those who are shepherds, shepherds underneath the chief shepherd.
And their job is to preach and teach the Word.
In 1 Peter, Peter tells the pastors to shepherd the flock.
That's chapter 5 verses 1-5.
They do this by speaking the oracles of God, the Word of God with all authority, chapter 4 verse 11.
And this is because God's Word is what gives the new birth.
1 Peter 1.23 says, You've been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and abiding Word of God.
And it's also God's Word that doesn't just make us alive, but it gives us growth.
So, 1 Peter 2 says that we, through the pure spiritual milk of the Word, grow up into our salvation.
1 Timothy, or 2 Timothy rather, chapter 3, verses 16 and 17, many of us know, says that the Word of God is living and active.
It's not that it's living and active.
It is that.
That's Hebrews 4.
But 2 Timothy 3 says that it's God-breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Chapter 4, next verse says, speaking to Timothy, he says, I charge you in the presence of God and in Christ Jesus, preach the Word.
Be ready in season and out of season.
And he says, okay, here's what the Word of God does.
Now the response of the shepherd of God's people is to then proclaim it to them in season and out of season, whether they want to hear it or not, and then do with it the things that it does.
Rebuke, teach, correct, train with all authority.
We need God's Word authoritatively spoken to us.
And so if you would be led by Jesus, if you would have Jesus as your shepherd,
Read the Bible.
Read the Bible.
Memorize and meditate on the Bible.
Psalm 119 verse 11, I've hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
Meditate on it.
But also come and hear God's word.
Hear him speak as his word is proclaimed to the gathered people, not because any particular messenger matters.
but because as we gather underneath his word as his people, he speaks to us as a people.
He speaks to us corporately as his body.
In his compassion, Jesus sends to his people teachers of the word.
That's what Ephesians chapter 4 says.
Beginning in verse 11, he gave, like this is God's gift to the church.
Jesus is a gift.
Apostles, the prophets, the evangelists,
The Shepherds and Teachers, to equip the saints for the work and ministry for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
Some people could read that and then listen like, well, that's kind of self-serving for the pastor to point those verses out.
But it's really not, because that's the standard you're supposed to hold me to.
And you should.
Like, if I'm not teaching the word clearly, you should tell me that.
If you don't see growth in your life as you come week by week, you should say, hey, what's going on here?
Like, that's a real question you should have, because the whole
The point of what I'm supposed to be doing is to help you grow so that you can do the things that God has called you to do in your life.
We together need to be growing up into the image of Christ, increasingly mature as we sit together under his word.
Jesus has compassion on the crowd and their spiritual needs and so he teaches them.
The third thing we see is Jesus' compassion on the crowd and their physical needs.
You might think it's crazy that I just spent all this time on those first few verses and the whole miracle story, this amazing miracle, I've just left for the tail end.
Part of that's because the meaning of the miracle itself is picked up really in the section that we're going to look at next week.
But I do want to look at it here.
The day grew late.
It says, Jesus, he teaches them many things, verse 35, when it grew late, his disciples begin to have a very practical concern.
These people are getting hungry.
They're getting restless.
Daniel and I dealt with that this week.
If you get a little too close to mealtime, people stop paying attention to anything that you're saying to them because they're hungry.
Jesus, he's not unaware of that.
He says, well, why don't you guys give him something to eat?
And the disciples react to this.
This is ridiculous, Jesus.
200 denarii, you know, like eight months worth of wages is not going to buy enough bread for all these people.
And where would we go?
Like, there's no Sam's Club right down the street for these guys.
They're saying they need to scatter out to the surrounding villages and countryside and find homes to find enough food to eat.
And Jesus says, no, you just, you feed them.
And they say, we can't, we can't do that, Jesus.
He says, well, how much do you have?
So they go, okay, well, between us, we have managed to come up with five loaves of bread and two fish.
Maybe I was over-reading that when I read that sarcastically earlier, but I feel like that's probably how they said it.
Five loaves and two fish.
Good luck with that, Jesus.
It's so ironic.
They're so hard of heart.
They're so slow to believe.
And it's easy for us to judge that, but we're the same way.
How often in your life have you seen God provide for you?
How often in your life have you seen Him come through when you need it?
And yet the thing that's in front of you that you're worried about right now, you're going, I don't know.
And if you go and look back at it 20 years from now, if somebody wrote it down like this, you would say, wow, I was an idiot.
And it's easy for us to look at the disciples and say that, but
Really, if you're looking at five loaves of bread and two fish, these probably aren't like big loaves of bread, they're probably like personal loaves of bread, and two fish, and you're looking out at probably, this is 5,000 men, it's not 5,000 people, it's probably like the entire population of Lamars is sitting there in front of you, and you're just going, I don't see it.
I don't know what we're supposed to do here.
And Jesus has them group them up.
Okay, have everybody sit down.
And they group up in groups of fifties and hundreds and it's probably just so it's easy to kind of get a handle on how are we going to navigate with our five loaves and two fish to pass this out to all of these people.
It would be a lot harder to navigate if you're all just clumped together.
So they break them into groups of fifties and hundreds and they sit down and Jesus takes the bread and he lifts it up.
He prays a blessing over it, breaks the bread and says, pass it out boys.
and they start to pass it out.
And the most remarkable thing happens as they pass out the bread and the fish.
Verse 42 says, they all ate and were satisfied.
It doesn't say they had just enough to tide them over, just enough to keep them from starving, just enough to make it through to the next day, or enough to make do.
They all ate and were satisfied.
And then after that, after 5,000 men and however many women and children were there as well, had eaten to the point of satisfaction, there were 12 baskets of fragments left over.
Are you in need?
Jesus has compassion and will supply all of your needs.
According to His Glorious Riches.
That's what Philippians 4 says.
My God will supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
You may be in a situation that feels overwhelming to you and it may make sense for it to feel overwhelming to you.
It may well be beyond anything that you can handle.
It is not overwhelming to Jesus.
Jesus sees your need and He will save you
from that need or provide for you through that need if you look to Him.
I have written in the margin of my Bible here, Ruth 2.14.
This is a story that I'm sure most of you are familiar with, the story of Ruth.
She's a Moabitess.
She's an outsider.
She's part of a people that are an enemy of Israel.
She's not part of the in-group.
She's not part of God's people.
Naomi and her husband move to Moab in a time of famine and her sons Malon and Kilion, they marry a couple of Moabite women and Ruth is one of them.
But then Naomi's husband dies and her sons die and the one daughter goes back to her people and Ruth says, no, I'm going to stay with you Naomi.
I'm going to stay with you.
And so she comes to Bethlehem with Naomi, but she has no prospects.
She's a woman who's already lost her husband.
So she's probably not super young and she is an outsider.
She's not part of God's people.
And so who's going to marry her?
What good is going to come for her from this?
Probably nothing.
But she goes out to reap the edges of the fields as the poor people were allowed to do.
And the man in whose field she goes to, just happens into, happens into providentially,
is a man named Boaz.
And Boaz sees her working hard and he has compassion on her.
He has favor on her and he brings her over to have a meal afterwards.
Here, you eat with my crew.
And Ruth 2.14 says that as she ate this meal, she ate and was satisfied and there was food left over.
As I was reading through that a couple months ago and I had Mark on my head, I just wrote that down on my
The sidebar, like that language is almost identical.
She was satisfied and there was food left over that she was able to take home and share with her mother-in-law.
Jesus is the good shepherd who came to give abundant life to his people.
Jesus is the one who has compassion on all of those who are in need and will meet the needs of those who look to him.
Jesus is the greater Boaz who provides abundantly.
He will satisfy you and then some.
He has resources beyond what you need.
So trust in him, rely upon his compassionate care.
Second half of Psalm 23.
It says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I'll fear no evil for you are with me.
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
