As you're taking your seat, we're going to be in Mark chapter 6, verses 1 through 13. We see that Jesus, this is a bit of Jesus' homecoming here. He's not yet, at least in Mark, been in his hometown as far as his public ministry goes, but he's going to find that the hometown reception is going to be a little cold. So this is the word of the Lord coming from Mark chapter 6. He went away from there and came to his hometown. And his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him, rather? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, and Joseph and Judas and Simon? Are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household. And he could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. And he went about among the villages teaching. And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff, no bread, no bag, no money, and their belts, but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. And he said to them, whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. And if any place will not receive you, and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them. And very quickly pausing. The earliest manuscripts do not have anything about Sodom and Gomorrah after that. We can talk about that some other time. So moving on to verse 12. So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. And they cast out many demons, anointed with oil, many who were sick, and healed them. The grass withers and the flower falls. The word of our Lord stands forever. Let's ask for his blessing upon it. Heavenly Father, I pray that you would show us the goodness and the mercy of Jesus Christ, even in the midst of a hard word. Lord, we need comfort. We need your presence more than anything else. Lord, I pray that your love would become precious to us, more precious than life itself. Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight. Oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. Well, I said I would talk about it later. I'll just quickly discuss it now. I realized when I said that, I was like, I should probably discuss that now. So your new King James, many of you have new King James. Many of you have King James. Back when that King James was delivered to us, we had less manuscripts. And sometimes the manuscripts you have don't always match up with what you see in the NIV or the, the NLT, ESV, you name it. So there's a difference here. But it's not that Jesus... Jesus did say that. In Mark's case, he just may have not said it as far as Mark recorded it right there. So it's not a huge deal. We can talk about that at length. Just know, I'm not skipping a part of your verse and your Bible on purpose. Okay. Hometowns. Hometowns are part of the Southern identity. Really, they're part of the rural identity, whether you're above the Mason-Dixon line, but it particularly seems like in the South, the hometown matters quite a bit. You know, we have a TV show on H- I think it's HGTV or TLC or something. I don't really watch those channels. But you have the show hometown, down in Laurel, Mississippi, the deep part of the Deep South. Or is that here in the Delta where the lowland is? Did you guys get the point? We market things to hometown cooking, home cooking, you name it. It carries a special place in our hearts. Now the idea, the memory of a hometown may not always match the reality of it when we come back to it or as we live in it. Lost count of the number of times that some of you have said, oh, you should have seen Belzona 40 or 50 years ago. I believe you, truly. And now it is what it is, but you're not going to let some outsider come and spit on it. Not while you're still breathing. You're going to fight for your hometown. Now, the ministry of Jesus made this group of Nazarenes, Nazarites, whatever you want to call them. about a town of 1,000 people, 500 to 1,000 people, Jesus made them feel special. Here's one of our own doing mighty things all over Galilee, even up in the feasts in Jerusalem in the Gospel of John. But when Jesus comes to them, they're expecting, I don't know what quite they're expecting, but they don't get what they are expecting. And when Jesus gives them a hard word, as he's teaching about repentance, that's his message, They don't believe him. They will not believe him. They can't receive it. But we're going to see throughout that, throughout our entire text, the truth revealed to us is that Christ's ministry bears witness against unbelief. Even as he's preaching, that ministry bears witness against unbelief. Unbelief rejects two things about Christ. It first rejects his message. And second, unbelief rejects Christ's messengers. Unbelief rejects the message and the messengers, and we will see each of those in turn. So unbelief first rejects Christ's message. See, in verse 1 and 2, it says, he came to his hometown, his disciples followed him, and on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue. Many who heard him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get these things? From what source, in other words? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? They were seeing divine things, but they couldn't place the divinity in it. They couldn't source it. It was confusing to them. They couldn't see the power. They couldn't see the word and the wisdom with which Jesus did everything. They didn't recognize it. Their eyes were closed to it. They're overwhelmed by it. This is why they're overwhelmed. If they're missing the word, spirit, and the works that comes from God himself, they're gonna miss the divine person with it. See, in verse three, it says, is not this the carpenter? The construction worker, in other words. The son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joseph, and Judas, and Simon are not his sisters here with us." They took offense at him. They don't recognize what he's doing with what they know who he is. What they're doing here is something I'm going to call social triangulation. Now you're thinking, what on earth is triangulation? Back in the old days when people used to navigate by the stars on a ship, they could have star charts to help them know where they were, but they could take the movement of two points based off of where they were and where they were, and they could figure out roughly just where they were. with triangulation. And if Mark Nixon were here sitting with us, he'd tell you about his radar days up in North Dakota and how they had to have four radar towers, three to triangulate and one as a spare in case the Ruskies came over Canada and tried to drop bombs on the U.S. with nukes. Because you need at least, I think, actually you definitely need three But you most certainly have to have, back in the old days, lots of radar going to give you up-to-date picture on where things were. Because if you don't, you won't know where they were or where they came from. That's triangulation. Now, the social triangulation, you all actually know what this is. I know it because you all do it all the time. What do I mean? When you say, oh, so-and-so, well, who's his mama? You know, who are his brothers and sisters? Where did he work? Where did he farm? Did he work catfish farms or, you know, plant farms? You know, when I hear you guys talk to each other, I'm not even involved. That's what y'all are doing, especially if you're with Bill Allen. Bill Allen's great at social triangulation. So you guys are constantly trying to figure out who's related to who and how, but you're trying to find that person on your social fabric to which you are all connected. That's what's going on. And then when those things do come to me, they go, usually people hear me talk. And I have a little bit of a twang since I've developed, since moving down here, at least to Jackson and here. But they hear me talk and go, where are you from? Because I have a little bit of a twang, but my mannerisms are probably pretty Yankee, if I'm honest. And people are like, where are you from? Virginia? Oh, OK. So they can't ask me any of the other questions about my mama and all that. But they're triangulating me and they go, okay, you're just, you're from, you're from over there. You're from the, you know, the South and, you know, you know, Virginia is South, but it's like South. This is real South. I got called the Yankee by someone from Alabama because I wasn't from the deep South. I took offense at that and then I realized, no, he was probably right. That's okay. Social triangulation. But that's what they're doing. They're saying, where is this teaching coming from? This ministry? Don't we know you, Jesus? You've worked on our houses. We do business. We hang out at the well with your brothers. You know, your sisters. They go to the park with our kids. Who are you? This doesn't, and it does not compute. It doesn't make any sense. It'd be like if someone you knew and love on your social fabric came back in and they were trying to tell you what for, and it was completely different than what you had always done. You'd be greatly offended by it. Who does he think he is? We know you, and notice in that list of relations in verse three, they don't list his father, Joseph. You know, that kind of indicates to us, and you kind of see in John chapter 8, that there was talk about where Jesus really came from. They didn't, obviously didn't believe in it. He was born of a virgin, like we confess. But it's kind of one of those, you know, you social triangulate people's relations, you know, who their mama was and their brothers, what they farmed and what they did, but also people's sins or people's, you know, kind of the skeletons in their closet. You triangulate on those kinds of things too, and they're offended. They cannot believe it. Oh, they're overwhelmed by the teaching. They're scandalized by it. That word offended, you could also translate it, scandalized. That is kind of, it gives you a sense of what Jesus was saying to them, and based off how they knew them. But Jesus puts it in perspective for us. In verse four, he says, a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household. If you know somebody and you've known them for a long time, and then they come at you with divine words that they've been commissioned to say by God, quite frankly, you might not quite be as open to it. It's kind of like this, if, let's say, someone who'd grown up in the church, this church for a long time, went off to seminary, and then came and tried to be the pastor here, would you guys listen to him as well as you did, unless you brought in a Yankee from Virginia? I would guess probably not. You're like, I know, I watched that kid pick his nose. I watched that kid roll under the pew. It comes hard to take them seriously, I'm guessing. But even if I become familiar enough around you, I may just have the same problem. A prophet's not without honor in his home country. So they can't triangulate on Jesus. But because Jesus is from Nazareth, here's where the scandal probably comes in, because he knows, not just because he's God, but because he's lived there for so long, Jesus knew where all the skeletons were. He knew how to write a good sermon and deliver it. in a very relevant and applicable way. So they couldn't triangulate on him, they couldn't place him, the radar's going haywire, but Jesus has missiles locked on target, and he's firing. Jesus is merciful and loving, his teaching is divine, but it's probably gonna hit them where it hurts. He's locked in. And so Jesus experiences rejection, unbelief, and that unbelief is stifling to the rest of his time there. Verse five says, and he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. Now, I don't think this is a matter of their faith or unbelief stifling or deactivating Jesus's power. That's not the way God works. Practically speaking, if they're already scandalized, if Jesus does more, it's probably just gonna make things worse. Jesus is not gonna aggravate their unbelief, aggravate their sin further. It's better, in this case, if they're scandalized and they're sinning because of him, just go, okay, all right, we're gonna back off. And practically speaking, in Luke's account of Jesus going to Nazareth, he probably couldn't do a mighty work there because they tried to throw him off a cliff. Luke 4.28 says, when they heard these things, all the synagogue were filled with wrath. They rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of a hill on which their town was built so they could throw him down the cliff. Yeah, I bet you you couldn't do any more mighty works there, because he's about to get thrown off a stinking mountain. Sifling unbelief can make it worse. They are threatening his life. When Jesus gives them exactly what they want, they're not going to listen to him, so he gives them distance. Okay, have it your way. I'll go. He leaves. Unbelief wants distance from Jesus just about more than it wants anything else. Matthew Henry says, The day of salvation, beloved, is a limited window of time. You may hear preaching of the cross. I hope you always hear preaching of the cross, especially while I'm here. You've heard the gospel for years, I'm assuming. If I know Richard, I know you've heard the gospel. And even before Richard, if you've been around long enough. All this time, the day of salvation has been presented to you, but that day, one day, God could say, okay, have it your way. It's over, no more. The window may close, whether that's death, or just like we talked about a little bit in Revelation in Sunday school, maybe the candle is snuffed out, or Christ takes away the lampstand. It's a sobering thought. Unbelief. Unbelief desires itself. It does not want to be trifled with. It does not want the social fabric, good and bad and all, to be broken by the insertion of Jesus Christ into it. There's varying degrees of unbelief. There's different forms it takes, hostile or apathetic. We've talked about that before. And even among us who do believe, there are sections of our life maybe that we cordon off from God. Don't touch here. I'd like this. This can be the side you control and I'm going to have this side over here. I'm going to have idols at work or on the internet, sports, you name it. You could go all sorts of places with that. So it takes various forms. But when we hear the same message over and over and over again, unfortunately, it's a terrible truth that in religion, more than other places, familiarity breeds contempt. That's a truism. The more familiar we become with something, the less serious it becomes to us, and that's part of our human weakness. We have to be very careful that the familiarity that breeds contempt is not contemning the thing that we need the most. It can happen with anything, but it especially happens with the Gospel. And that message Jesus preaches, that He tells them to preach, in this coming section that He preaches, starting in Mark 1, is the same message to preach now. Repent. Turn from sins. Even if you're far from God, turn from your sins. Just begin looking in the right direction and start walking toward Him. Repent. Turn from idols. Turn to the living God through Christ Jesus. Our enemy is time. How much time will God give for that repentance process? I don't know. He could come back in the next five minutes. That would be quite a thrill for many of us. It would be quite terrible for others, perhaps. But time, given enough time and no response, it will harden our hearts. We need to be careful. Because if we are Christians, The more we ignore God's loving, fatherly nudges of our conscience, we're inviting chastisement or inviting discipline, perhaps, in our lives. And then for those who do not believe at all, we're inviting all sorts of eternal trouble that we cannot fathom. Time is our enemy because time will harden us. We need to like the church again and revelate. It was a great Sunday school class, I thought. Maybe it blessed me. no one else, but we need to return to our first love, the pure gospel principles, the love of Christ for sinners, that because of the great love of God, he sends his son into the world and to the cross and into the tomb and up from the tomb for us, all in love, but that love can only be spit on for so long. Beloved, Christ ministry will bear witness against it. as it does against all unbelief, because unbelief rejects Christ's message, and second, unbelief rejects Christ's messengers. So, in verse, rest of verse six says, and he went about among the villages teaching. They reject him, he widens his ministry from that area. And it says, and he called the 12, and he began to send them out two by two, gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except the staff, no bread, no bag, no money in their belts, but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. They were to trust these men that had been vested with the authority to teach and to preach and to cast out demons and to heal by Christ. He gives them authority, but also a simple call to trust. Don't take too much with you. I'll be with you wherever you go as you witness across this countryside. So he commissions these messengers with a simple message. Verse 12 it says, so they went out proclaiming that people should repent. It's the same message Jesus is preaching. He is just multiplying that ministry. He's widening the net of mercy in response to his hometown's unbelief. That unbelief triggers a widening of mercy. One man's rejection is another man's mercy in this case. You see it in Acts 13. Paul and Barnabas are in Pisidian, Antioch. They're preaching in a synagogue week after week. And then eventually the opposition becomes so much that they say, it was necessary that the word of God be first spoken to you. But since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. The Jews aren't going to take it. The majority of them, some of them did. We're going to the Gentiles. This is for you, but if you're not going to take it, we're going elsewhere. And then later they shake off the dust of their feet against them there. And we'll get to that in a second. It's the same pattern and acts as what we see here in Marks 6. One man's rejection is another man or multiple crowds, multiple villages, mercy. A good story that kind of illustrates this idea is there's a fella in South Vietnam, I guess it became, after it became just in Vietnam after the U.S. pulled out all the way. His name was, I'm gonna butcher this, Hien Pham. So he was a interpreter for the Americans while the Americans were there. And then he became a Christian through that time. And then the Americans left and he got put into a communist kind of re-education camp. And they were hitting him with propaganda left and right, Marx, Engels, atheism, the full spread. the charcuterie board of economic and atheistic unbelief. And it so beat him down that he said, you know, tomorrow, tomorrow's gonna be the first day I haven't prayed. I'm just not gonna pray. I can't take it. Maybe it's all, maybe it's all fake. This Christianity, this God I've trusted in, maybe it really is fake. He's doubting. The next day, he's given the job of cleaning the latrine. Gross, the worst possible job. The cleaning and treating, like, it's not like, you know, you get a hose. It's like you go into it. Well, he found, he found a page written in English. He didn't have time to read it, so he stuck it in his pocket for later. And he went back to his, where he stayed that night, and he read it, and he discovered it was Romans 8. As God works together all things for the good of those who love Him, those who are called according to His purpose, all the way through, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. Truths he needed so badly in the nick of time, God provides it. But what had happened, the reason he had it, is because some communist official decided to use the Bible as toilet paper. He rejected the beautiful, eternal word of God and treated it worse than filth. But what that man treated as filth and rejected became the saving grace for a man who needed the Word of God the most. You know what he did? He volunteered to clean that lavatory every single day after that. He found most of the Bible over time, was able to share it with his fellow inmates, and salvation came to a whole group of people who never would have had it. All because one communist official decided he hated God enough to use the Bible in such a way. What a mercy for them. One man's rejection is another man's salvation. So they have vested authority. They have a message. They're to trust God to be with them, Christ. They're given His power and ability, finally, in verse 11, to declare, not execute, but declare judgment. He says, and if any, we'll read verse 10 too. And he said to them, whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them. Now, as God's messengers, as God's faithful witnesses, not just pastors and elders, but all of you, you have the power and the right, like them, not to, I condemn you to declare final judgment, but to say rejecting this is death. And especially this preacher, he's saying, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony, as a witness against them. The dust does a few things. Remember that we are made from dust. God himself tells Adam, after Adam sinned, he says, you are dust, and to dust you will return. It's a sign to us when we reject God, this dust off the feet, that you are dust, who are you to reject God's message? Do you know where you are going back to? Dust. And the act of shaking it off the feet should be similar to Johnny Cash singing, God's gonna cut you down. God's gonna tread you underfoot and wipe the dust of you off his own feet. So as a witness, You know, witnesses went out two by two, let not a charge be established except by the testimony of two or three witnesses. They're going out two by two and makes the dust three, testimony against thee. A little rhyme I made for you. It's a witness to reject the messenger. is to reject the message, and to reject the message is to reject Christ, and to reject Christ is to reject God. Nazareth provides the paradigm. They rejected all of those things in the process of rejecting Christ, and as the mercy widens, so does the unbelief as well. Presumably many believed, but also the fact that Jesus felt the need to give that instruction shows you that not everyone did. A scary thing. Unbelief, in this case, is never an intellectual misunderstanding about eternal things. The gospel truths cannot be misunderstood very easily. You have to have effort to do that. Unbelief is always a moral issue. Jesus tells us in John 7, the world, he's telling his brothers this, the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. We will, we cannot come to Christ if we disbelieve because we will not. We love darkness more than light. John 3, four chapters earlier, Jesus says, and this is the judgment that light has come into the world and people love darkness rather than the light because their works are evil. What I want you to know is if you do not believe, You can't use the excuse of, well, God didn't make it clear enough, or there was something that's stopping me. It's always us that is stopping us from believing if we will not come, because the dead heart hates being exposed. It hates righteousness, and we love our sin more. I've used the example I think about a year ago, I'll use it again. The deadness of the heart is like a carcass. Maybe a deer carcass that you see in the woods as you're hunting or a pig carcass, you name it. It's dead. It ain't moving. You could hit it with a stick and nothing will happen. But boy, it is an active dead. There's a bunch of things in there that are living and moving and breeding and it breeds disgusting smells and you name it, sights. The deadness is a carcass, it's a corpse. We need life and life from the sun. Unbelief is the fruit of sin's deception. Unbelief is a belief about a lie about ourselves. We don't need God. And it pleads two things, a good opinion of ourselves and a bad opinion of God and his message. Unbelief, when you do not believe, you are believing something else. It's not an aspect of neutrality. It's an aspect of God is not right and I am. God is not right. Our sin is gradual, too. It comes on you like slowly, like a disease. We make small compromises here, and then those compromises snowball on us as we go. No one wakes up, just as an example, no one wakes up in the morning and decides, today's a great day to destroy my marriage. I think I'll do that. No, it's compromise to start. And then they grow and they grow and they grow and they get away from us. Sin captures our heart and then it hides its own severity and how much it's spread. And then it stokes our pride that we don't need help. It's okay. Sin is deceptive and sin will kill us. And that's Jesus's message. Sin is killing you. It's what his message was then and it's what it is now. Sin is killing you. Will you not turn instead and be healed? Sin will destroy you every time and twice on Sunday. And what I can say is that with the passing of beloved saints in this church, is that their lives are witness to the power of Jesus Christ to overcome sin and death. If you're wondering if it's worth it or can I do it, look at Paul Townsend. The man from the beginning of his life to the end, more and more faithfully over time, growing together and with Jan and conquering sin, conquering death. It was hard for him and Jan at the end, but he conquered and because he conquered, he wears the crown of life all because of a decision through the mercies of Jesus Christ to turn The message Jesus preached, the message that's not being believed the way it should, Paul did believe it. Many of you have, need to believe it more and more. I can tell you where Paul is now. He would, if he could scream down and tell us to believe it, he would. It is far better than you could ever imagine. So as we bear witness, expect rejection, but know that the witness is worth the trouble. All God calls us to, as we turn to repent, and our lights in the world is to be faithful. Like I told the kids, you don't need to change the world. That's a message that was fed to my generation as kids, that if we, with a little bit of energy, a little bit of luck, and a little bit of forethought, and just, you know, go get them energy, try hard, we can change the world. We can't. The kids don't need to change the world. Christ has already turned the world upside down, or if you prefer, right side up. Be faithful to Christ and he will bear you up to the end. There's no middle ground. There's no neutrality. You're either sowing to eternal life or sowing death. And to wait, to not respond to that message is to reject ultimately that message. And Christ will marvel at your unbelief. Sin is suicidal. J.C. Ryle says unbelief is so suicidal and unreasonable a sin that even the Son of God regards it with surprise. Would you not just turn and live, beloved? He'll marvel, but we'll marvel too if we do turn and live. How could God save such a man as I? And yet he has. If we could see each other's sins, we would be shocked and appalled at the state of our hearts and where they were, maybe even where they are. But even more marveled at ourself that God would see every ounce of me all the way through and love me still and save me. My unbelief has no place in the face of such mercy and grace. This is held out to you, beloved. I'm gonna keep holding out to you as long as I have this pulpit. Trust in Christ, marvel at his beauty and his mercy, and let him not marvel at you in unbelief. Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, you are far better than we could have ever thought, and your Son reflecting the beauty of your person to us, the mediator. Lord, if any here have dead hearts or even have cordoned off areas, they do not want you to go, which is all of us in some way, I'm sure, that we would lay down our guard And we would call you, Lord, that we would trust you for salvation, as those who have gone before us have trusted you as well. Lord, let them be a good witness to us. Let their lives, though they are gone, speak to us and continue to speak to us by the Spirit, that we would run the race that they have finished and take it up, even if we feel like it's too late. Lord, it's never too late, as long as we are here to begin running by turning to you and trusting in you. And Lord, we ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen.