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What is my life for? I don’t know how often you have thought about that question. Probably a lot. What would it mean in our old age, to look back at the life we have lived, and be able to say- that was a good life, a purposeful life? Where we could say “Lord to you I commit my Spirit, because the life you gave me, I did not waste.” And it’s probably the most important question you could ever ask. As one evangelist friend of mine said, failure is success in the wrong things. What good is it to have a life if we waste it pursuing the wrong things? How you answer that question (what is my life for) is the most important question you could ever ask because it informs everything else. Why am I at university? Well what is your life for? Why do I have this job I currently have? Well what is your life for? Why do I spend my free time this way? Well what is your life for? Why do I have a family? Well what is your life for?

This would have been a vital question for our initial readers of Marks gospel. The opening to Mark’s account is like a mighty thunderclap. The King has arrived. God, in the form of Jesus, has stepped into history, heaven has touched earth and the Kingdom of God has broken in. Mark divides into five sections. With the first four being different portraits of who Jesus is. And in our section of Mark 1-4, Jesus is the King, the Psalm 2 Son; the Son who will shatter the nations like a potter’s vessel, has stepped into our world to declare an end to death and sin forever. All of history has been waiting for this moment. The Old Testament has built and built and built, a desperate search for the coming of God’s son. Silence has reigned for 400 years since the Old Testament breathed its last breath; waiting with baited anticipation. Will the King come? When will he arrive?

And here is King Jesus. He teaches with authority, and banishes Satan from the hearts of men. He resisted the devil in the wilderness for 40 days, where Israel failed. Heaven is ripped open and the Spirit descends on him like a dove; just as Isaiah 11 promised. He forgives sin and commands the lame to walk. He embraces leper. He declares an end to all religion and fasting because he is with them. He empties hospitals, calls men from darkness to light and turns the world upside down with nothing but his words.

The King is here. As Jesus declares, repent and believe because the Kingdom of God is at hand. Why is it at hand? Because the King is here. And so it begs the question if the King is here, what does he want? What are his aims? What is King Jesus trying to achieve? Because whatever the answer to that question, that is the purpose of our lives too. The King of heaven and earth is here. Whatever our life is for, he gets to tell us. What is my life for? Well it is for whatever King Jesus decides it is for.

1. Jesus is not here to heal the world (Mark 3.7-12)

The first thing Mark makes clear is what Jesus is not here for. And he does so by pointing out that the crowd want Jesus for the wrong reasons (Mark 3.7–12):

Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

Notice some key details in these verses. The first thing to note is why the crowd is following Jesus. In Mark 3.8 we are told the crowd are flocking to Jesus because they heard of all that he was doing. The point is a subtle one and yet clear. The crowd do not want Jesus because of what he is saying, or because they recognise Him as King - but they want Jesus simply for what he can do for them. If the crowd knew who Jesus was (who he really was) they wouldn’t be coming to him for him to do something for them, they would be coming to him to ask what they should be doing for him. Jesus is King, not a vending machine of miracles. Second, the crowd and the demons end up ‘doing’ the same thing to Jesus. The term in Mark 3.10:

For he healed many so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him.

The term pressed around is the same term as the demons who fell down before him in Mark 3.11. Hardly a ringing endorsement for the crowd. They are behaving just like the demons. In fact, you can see in Mark 3.9 that the crowd would have crushed Jesus if he hadn’t got on a boat:

It seems that the crowd are no better than the demons that Jesus is casting out. Except, thirdly, and this is perhaps the most damning of indictments against the crowd, the demons at least get the identity of Jesus correct (Mark 3.11):

And whenever the unclean spirts saw Him they fell down before Him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.”

And Jesus is at pains to make sure the Demons remain silent on this point (Mark 3.12):

And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

Why did Jesus silence them? Because the crowd had mistaken Jesus’ identity. They thought he was a King come to bring them joy and healing now. They couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that this is not the reason Jesus has come. Jesus has not come to heal the world. And this really matters because if we dn’t get absolutely clear on what Jesus came for then we will waste our lives on good things but not ultimate things. Remember, failure is success in the wrong things. And wonderfully yes it’s true that God can still work miracles of healing and absolutely Christians should be on the forefront of calling out and rectifying the world’s injustices. Our God loves justice afterall and we as his people love it too. But we need to get the priorities in the correct order - Jesus did not primarily or even ultimately come to heal the world.

When I was a student in the first year we had a thing called ‘Text a Toastie’ which was where you could text a number and get a toastie. I think the Newcastle Christian Union did ‘Text a Doughnut’ which shows they don’t care at all about the student’s physical health – obviously processed cheap cheese is way better! Basicially the way that it would work is that you would send out flyers around your halls and then a university student would text in and get a toastie, and then they could ask you their question about Christianity. But for whatever reason the Christian Union committee had decided in my first year to remove the question bit, so what we ended up doing for the evening was shelling out an enormous amount of cheese toasties for free. And it turns out we had 2-3 times more requests for toasties than we normally would because we’d removed the question aspect. And that’s a good thing to do – feeding hungry students. I remember my first meal as a student was dipping my finger into chocolate and then into some cereal because I didn’t have any cutlery yet – so that was a low point.

It’s a very good thing to feed students but as my student worker at the time pointed out, if that was all we had done and we’d never spoken to them about the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, about the fact that Jesus is King come to bring an end to death and Satan’s rule then all we would have done is a good thing but not an ultimate thing.

2. …But to make a new humanity through our preaching (Mark 3.13-19)

Having escaped the crowd, Jesus then goes and scales a mountain and calls to himself those he desired, and they came to him. With our Old Testament hats on, this is not just a quirky detail that Mark has added but deliberate. The mountain was where as one commentator described it, ‘Where heaven and earth meet, and where the holy man of God receives revelation from God to give to the people.’ The ark descended upon a mountain and out came a new humanity. The battle of the idols against the one true God and Elijah occurred at the top of Mount Carmel. The New Jerusalem is described as being placed on top of a mountain in Isaiah 2. But the most significant mountain in the Old Testament is Mount Sinai, where Moses went up to meet God, and then to come back down and speak for God. Exodus 19.1–6:

On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”

But did we notice the striking difference between our passage in Mark and this passage in Exodus? In Exodus, Yahweh calls Moses to himself. In Mark 3 it is Jesus who calls the disciples to himself. The point being, Jesus is equal to Yahweh. He doesn’t need a mediator like Moses. Jesus stands on the top of the mountain, the place where God meets man, and he calls mankind to himself. And on the top of that mountain they meet Jesus. They meet God. And what is Jesus the God-man doing? He is appointing a new humanity. Mark 3.14-15 again:

And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.

To Jesus’ Jewish readers the symbolism is obvious. Israel had twelve tribes. And here Jesus, standing at the place where God meets man, declares that there is a New Israel; a new humanity; a new people. The King has arrived and he is here to build a Kingdom. Jesus is not here to heal the world, but to build a new humanity. But there is one further, beautiful, and earth shattering detail. What is this kingdom, this new humanity, to do? Mark 3.14-15 again:

And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.

They’re given the exact same authority and commission as Jesus. Jesus tells us in Mark 1 that the reason he has come is not to heal, but to preach (Mark 1.38). And the purpose of driving out demons is to demonstrate the authority of his preaching and teaching as we saw in Mark 1.27. Jesus came to preach. His kingdom is built through preaching. Now Jesus’ mission has been passed into the hands of the disciples. In fact, Jesus is never recorded as preaching again after Mark 1.39. The only people in Mark’s gospel who preach from this moment on are Jesus’ disciples and followers. It’s worth making clear, that preaching here just means declaring. Not getting up into a pulpit. We all preach in that sense whenever we speak of Jesus, whoever we are.

Jesus is building a new humanity, and he does it through his disciples and through his followers preaching the death and resurrection of Jesus. Joseph Fraser arrived in China in 1908 with a burning ambition to build the Kingdom of Christ among an unreached tribe (called the Lisu) of about 2 million in north central China. He gave his life to that work, primarily through prayer and discipleship. He learnt their oral only language, and was the first person to write an alphabet for it (still in use today), and translated a Bible for them.
The tribe was considered unreached before he arrived, and Fraser went from village to village, sometimes trekking for weeks at a time through the mountains to get to just one village; evangelising and discipling. Once he had reached all the villages, he started all over again - returning to disciple those still Christian and establish churches with native leaders.

His main obstacle was animism, a form of terrifying demon worship and ancestor worship that demanded immense sacrifice each year to appease the spirits. And village by village, Fraser would preach Christ, and the Lisu would step into Christ’s kingdom, and down would come their idols, shrines and sacrifices and into that dark dark place would burst such glorious light. Today, the Lisu tribe is considered one of the largest Christian communities in China, Myanmar and Thailand. Their number is estimated at 1.5 million Christians, with many of them tracing their faith back to Fraser’s work. Oh what joy that Joseph Fraser must have in glory when he surveys the countless Lisu members of Christ’s Kingdom?

So for Mark’s readers, what is the King here for? He’s here to build a new humanity through the preaching, declaring, of his people. We began our time together asking the question ‘What is my life for?’ and we saw that that question is the most important one you could ever ask. Failure is success at the wrong things. The purpose of your life is to build Jesus’ new humanity. And realising that changes everything. Why are you at university? To get a degree? Wrong! To make Jesus known. Why are you in that office with those people? To earn a salary, go on holiday repeat? Wrong! To make Jesus known.

There are right now, 3.4 billion people on this planet unreached by the gospel. 3.4 billion people who will never hear of King Jesus unless we tell them. Could that be you? Jesus is building a people. He does it through you and me. Will we go? But of course, we don’t have to go very far to meet people who are not yet in the Kingdom of Christ; just as far as our office, or our lecture hall or the school gate.

One day, we will take our last breath on this earth. Our heart will stop. Our mind will cease. But our last breath here will lead straight to our first in the next. We will awake and look up at a clear blue sky on a warm summer morning. We will feel the cool grass between our toes, and the gentle breeze on our face. Then we will see just a little way before us, a hill, with a single figure framed on the top, a figure framed by incandescent light. And our hearts will jolt, could it be him? Is it him? And we will run towards that figure, and as we get closer and closer we will realise that Yes it is Him! The one whose voice we have only heard in the pages of scripture will call out our name. The face that we have imagined a thousand times over we will finally see, and the embrace that we have longed for all our lives in this cold place will finally be ours as we fall into the arms of our Jesus. And we will remain there, maybe for a moment, maybe for a year, maybe for 10,000 years. But at some point, we will begin to notice a noise; a great and swelling roar like the sound of many waters crashing and boiling together in a glorious symphony of praise. And we will listen and hear Holy Holy Holy is the lamb who was slain! Who was and is and is to come. And we will look beyond that hill with our Jesus and see a multitude upon multitude of saints clothed in perfect white robes; roaring at the top of their lungs for King Jesus.

We will see people from every tribe, every nation and every tongue. We will see loved ones that have gone before us, free from the ravages of sin and death and they will look more lovely to us than we could have ever seen them on this earth. But who else will we see there? The course mate we sit next to in Tuesday Physics. The Mum at the school gate we shared that tract with. The next door neighbour in our shared living accommodation. The person from Japan or Syria or Lebanon or Iraq that we gave up our life to be a missionary too. And together and forever we will sing praises to the lamb. 10,000 years will pass and we will have no less time to sing his praises. Friends is there anything more glorious, more beautiful more utterly worthy than the mission King Jesus has left us with? What is my life for? It is to make the Lord Jesus known.