Sermon Transcript
Mark 10:46-52.
And they came to Jericho, and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. And many rebuked him, him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me! And Jesus stopped and said, Call him.
And they called the blind man, saying to him, Take heart, get up, he is calling you. And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, What do you want me to do for you? And the blind man said to him, Rabbi, let me recover my sight. And Jesus said to him, Go your way.
Your faith has made you well. And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him on the way.
Today we wrap up our series in Mark. Like we said last week, this will be our last week even though we are only in the 10th chapter, but we will conclude our series here because really we already covered the ending of Mark way back on Good Friday and Easter. So today is our final installment in this series, and we end with the account of a man named Bartimaeus who finds Jesus. It’s particularly notable that Bartimaeus finds Jesus because Bartimaeus is blind, and especially in that time period, it would have been very difficult for a blind man to be able to find anything. Unlike today, back then they didn’t have Braille, they didn’t have seeing-eye dogs, they didn’t have those beeping sounds on crosswalk signals.
So simply walking around anywhere would have been a huge challenge. In fact, that’s probably why he’s sitting by the road. His entire life is sitting, because if he was going to walk somewhere, someone would need to walk with him. So it is likely that he is sitting by the road because someone who cared about him maybe put him by the side of the road, maybe out of love for him. Someone probably said, hey, I really want to help you, but I cannot spend every hour of my day guiding you to where you need to go, so I am going to sit you in a high-trafficked area by the side of the road in hopes maybe that the community at large can help take care of you as they walk by.
I mean, if he was ever going to have a meal, someone would need to bring him the meal. He would not want to grope around on the ground looking for anything because he would be just as likely to find a snake or a scorpion as he would be to find something of value. He is wholly dependent on others to find anything, and yet And yet Bartimaeus of all people finds Jesus. So the good news for us is that being totally helpless and dependent does not exclude anyone from discovering life in Christ. In fact, being totally helpless and dependent, blind as it were, might actually be an asset in finding Jesus.
That’s a metaphor, of course. Bartimaeus’ physical condition can be a helpful metaphor to understanding spiritual conditions. Now, I’m not saying, of course, Bartimaeus wasn’t literally blind and he didn’t— and Jesus didn’t, like, literally heal him. Absolutely, that’s true. This is very much a literal, true story, but it is also, or can be, an illustration of spiritual conditions.
Because do you remember back, uh, in John 9, very similar story, Jesus heals a different guy from his blindness. And after Jesus heals that guy, Jesus is talking with the religious leaders, and Jesus says to these religious leaders, I have come that those who are blind may see, and also I have come to tell those who think that they see, to tell them that they’re really And the religious leaders immediately understand what’s going on and they say, are you saying that we are blind, Jesus? Because hello, our eyes work fine, thank you very much. And Jesus answers, yes, you are blind. Jesus tells them, your problem is that you won’t admit that you’re blind.
And because you won’t admit it, your guilt remains.
Jesus says, the guy I just healed was able to see better than you do before I healed him. And he’s the one, that blind guy, he’s the one who’s going to end up being forgiven. That’s what Jesus says in John 9. So Jesus himself, he mixes these concepts of physical blindness and spiritual blindness. He uses one as an illustration for the other.
So in our passage, don’t miss the story underneath the story that Bartimaeus is someone who had no hope. None. Zero. He didn’t even have hope of finding hope because again, he can’t look for anything on his own. He is totally, utterly, completely hopeless.
But he’s the guy in the passage who finds hope, similar to the guy in John 9 who found hope precisely because he He was hopeless, and he would admit his blindness. What that means for you and me is that if you think there’s no one— that there is no way someone like you could find Jesus, you are exactly the kind of person who can find Jesus. If you think you are too far gone, if you think you have too much of a past, if you think you’ve committed some unforgivable Or maybe if you think you’re wired in such a mathematical, like anti-touchy-feely, never went in for this spiritual stuff kind of person, so of course you can’t find Jesus. Or maybe if you’ve tried to find him before but it didn’t really work out, maybe you see other people have these kind of faith experiences and you think, well, that’s nice for them, but someone like me can’t get there. Someone like me can’t find him.
Him, Bartimaeus shows us, just like the blind guy in John 9, you too can find him. You can. In fact, I prayed for you this week, really every week, that this could be your day. That Jesus would be real to you today in a way that he has never been real to you before. That Jesus would come into your life in a revolutionary kind of way, like he does for the guy in the passage.
And when he does come into your life that way, whether it is today or some other day, the next step for you after that is to get baptized. Baptism is a way to say, my old way of living is gone, my new way of living is with Jesus. Baptism is a way to publicly identify with Jesus. You know, today There’s a lot of ways to identify yourself in our culture, but baptism is telling the world, I identify with Jesus. It’s saying to the world, the core thing that you need to know about me is that I’m with Him.
That’s baptism. And for anyone who is a believer in Christ and has not been baptized, you can come with us next week to the beach and we will baptize you. You at the beach. By way of reminder, we will not have a service in this building next Sunday, so don’t come here. You’ll be lonely.
We, including you, will be at Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz. If your GPS can get you to Seabright Beach, then you can’t miss us. As soon as you step out onto the sand, you’ll see these giant Bridges banners. That’s us. Can’t miss it.
So come out to Seabright Beach next Sunday, 11 AM. We’ll sing some songs. We will hear a report from our team that just traveled to Brazil visiting our mission partner. We’ll celebrate baptism in the ocean. Maybe you will be baptized.
For those of you who can’t make it to the beach, we will, of course, deeply miss you. But just for you, we will have a service posted online which you can view on demand. Command, and it will be available Sunday morning. That’s next week, okay? Today, now that we have our text set up, hopeless Bartimaeus finds hope.
Let’s jump into it. And as we study this passage, we will see barriers to finding Jesus, what Jesus does with those barriers, and then finally our response to Jesus’ work. Barriers to finding Jesus, what Jesus does with them, and then our response. First, barriers to finding Jesus are to be expected. The path for Bartimaeus to find Jesus, notice, was not without barriers.
He wants to get to Jesus, but he’s blocked because people tell him to be quiet. And then it’s Bartimaeus’ job to forge ahead anyway. He has to fight, in a sense, for what he wants. He has to deal with these naysayers or he may have never gotten to Jesus. And who knows?
I don’t know all of your stories, but you may have experienced something similar. I mean, if people find out you’ve been coming to church, would they give you a hard time? Would they say, oh, old Bartimaeus is trying to get some religion. Watch out, everyone. You know, pretty soon he’ll be a closed-minded bigot who rejects science.
I’m not sure what they might say. That’s not true, by the way, just as an aside. Scientific method arose out of a thoroughly Christian worldview. Science did not arise out of a Buddhist worldview, for example. It came from a Christian one, and there’s reasons for that, but it’s a different sermon, okay?
But I would be surprised I wouldn’t be surprised, I would not be surprised if one way or another people are less than affirming when you are trying to get to Jesus. Don’t listen to them. Push ahead anyway. Think about what Bartimaeus’ story would have been if he had listened to these scoffers. What would he have missed if he gave in to them?
Everything. He would have missed everything, which means for you it’s worth it to keep going, to keep calling out, to say over and over again, Jesus, I need you to come into my life. I’m not there yet. Like, help, I’m stuck. I can’t get to where I need to be, like, spiritually unless you intervene.
Please rescue me. Keep going. Keep at it. Fight through.
And by the way, as you likely already know, for those of you who have been Christians a long time, the presence of barriers between us and Jesus and the need for us to keep going in spite of them, that’s not something we only experience like once on our way to finding Jesus for the first time. It is also descriptive for those of us who discovered Jesus long ago, right? Because barriers that block our way to finding and experiencing Jesus, they keep popping up again and again long after we initially become Christians. There will be times over and over again that we feel stuck. There will be times that we can’t get to where we need to be spiritually.
There will be times that we feel hopeless. There, there will always be another one and another one. It’s not like there’s one barrier between us and Jesus and then we get through it and we’re done. It’s not like once we find, you know, goodness and wholeness in Jesus once, we have that experience of his goodness and wholeness, you know, uninterrupted forever. That’s not really the way that it works.
The world continues to throw things at us to block us from goodness of Jesus. I can think of a number of extended seasons in my life where I needed to work through barriers to get to Jesus after I was a believer. And I’m not talking about just daily sin, which of course is also a type of barrier, and we work through that barrier by confessing our sin and reminding ourselves of Jesus’ substitutionary work on our behalf, right? That’s a separation from God that I did deserve, that has been fully paid. I’ve been given the full status and access of Jesus into God’s presence.
In his eyes, I’m restored, I’m redeemed, I’m loved, I’m accepted, not because of what I’ve done, but because of what Christ has done for me. We, we need to do that every day, right? Preach the gospel to ourselves every day, of course. But that’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when our spiritual lives are shrouded in an ongoing kind of darkness.
We We are blind in a sense. We feel blocked from goodness and hope and wholeness that comes in Jesus. I mean, we’re entangled in something that we don’t feel like we can escape. Have you had those?
I keep having them. I’ll share just one with you, though there are many. Some of you know part of this story. But after I graduated from seminary, I eventually went back to Georgia Tech. Which is my alma mater, to start from scratch a campus ministry because I felt like that’s what I needed to do, like build a new thing from the ground up.
So not only start a student organization but also found a 501 to fundraise for our organizational activities, and I am the one and only sole fundraiser for all activities. So I had to cast vision for potential supporters to show why this type of ministry was needed at Georgia Tech and why I’m the guy to do it, right? I had to recruit students just from nothing. I had to invent all the content that we used, like, etc., etc., which I did. We got the ministry off the ground, but much to my embarrassment— I’ll say is the right word, frankly— the ministry I started did not grow to 4,000 people.
We grew every year, in fact, we grew, but we did not grow as fast or as big as I wanted us to grow. And more to the point of how twisted my heart was, we didn’t grow like I felt someone with my skills should be able to grow a ministry. You’re supposed to laugh, right? Okay, thank you. I’ll take your pity.
But really, like, I’ll confess to you, I had thoughts like, shouldn’t I have more success than this? Shouldn’t I have a bigger ministry than that guy over there? He doesn’t know anything.
See how messed up my heart was? Right? But as a result, I felt like a failure. I felt like a failure because I was looking to external metrics for validation instead of looking to Christ for validation. I was trying to confirm to myself that I’m doing okay in the world because of what kind of professional success I had, right?
I was looking to numbers, to influence for validation instead of looking to Christ. So of course I didn’t feel okay about myself, and again, really, I felt pretty worthless.
The revealing thing is, before that experience, I didn’t even know that’s what my heart was trusting in. If you’d ask me, what are you really trusting in? I’d be like, Jesus. I didn’t know it was something else. I didn’t know that I needed, like, must-have success and influence in order to feel okay about myself.
I didn’t know that until I didn’t have it. I was blind to the fact I was blind. Like the religious leaders in John 9.
But after I realized what was going on, right, after I heard myself say things like, surely I should have a bigger ministry than that guy, right, as soon as I said that, I thought like, uh-oh, you know, red alert. Um, what is happening in my soul? After I could see that I hitched my heart to the wrong lord, then I wanted to get out of it. Right? At least now I recognize I’m blind.
I didn’t want to need numbers and influence for validation, but my emotions wouldn’t let go of them. So I would, I mean, I would tell myself things like, I know I shouldn’t find my worth in whether we have a 4,000-person ministry or not. I know I shouldn’t need that in order to feel okay about myself. I know I should only find my worth in the fact that the God of the universe loves me so much he was willing to die in order to be with me. I know what he did for me should be enough to totally fill my tank.
I know that’s what it should be, but my heart is still longing for something that isn’t Jesus, right? And I can’t fix it myself. I can’t get myself to switch over. Like I was stuck. I was entangled in something I couldn’t get out of.
It felt like Bartimaeus. All I could do was cry out, like, Lord, help. Free me from my twisted heart. Like over and over and over again for months and months and months and months. Jesus, Son of David, like Bartimaeus, have mercy on me.
May I find worth in you alone.
I’ll say by God’s grace, By his grace, he never gave me the size of ministry I thought I needed in order to feel validated. By his grace, he just let me stew in what I considered to be failure until breakthrough.
But the breakthrough was not numbers and influence. I’ve never had that, actually.
The breakthrough was he really did move my heart to where I found worth and validation and significance only, exclusively, in the fact that he loves me.
And I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
I wouldn’t trade that for the biggest ministry and the most influence in the world because it is the ultimate security. No one can take it away from you. No one can take away His love for you. So if your confidence is rooted exclusively in His love for you, you know what that means? It means you will always have confidence.
Always. It’s fantastic. Highly recommend. 10 out of 10.
Moving to the place where I trusted in Him alone for worth and validation felt as significant as going from being blind to being able to see. It felt like that big of a shift. But getting there, it really did feel like a barrier. There was much crying out and waiting and crying out more and feeling hopeless to do anything about it, like it was a real barrier.
Now based on past experience, because like I said there’s been more than one of those, they have happened a lot, So I expect— my expectation is there will be more of those on the horizon. I don’t know what the next season of darkness might be where I feel blocked from Jesus, but I won’t be surprised when it happens, right? Just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you will always have a sense of the goodness and wholeness that comes from Jesus. The story of Bartimaeus will repeat itself in your life. There will be some type of darkness, some type of entanglement, entanglement, and you will need to cry out to Jesus who is the answer.
It will happen again and again. If you’re not in one of those seasons right now, one of them is coming.
But that shouldn’t terrify you, or that shouldn’t concern you because of the rest of this passage. The rest of this passage shows us there’s no barrier Jesus cannot overcome in order to heal you, so to speak. Because what does Jesus do with barriers? He knocks them down. Bartimaeus’ barrier was these people.
These people are telling him, be quiet, Bartimaeus. You’re being weird, yelling so much and so loud. Like, you’re making everyone around here feel awkward. None of us want to hear from you today, so stop bothering Jesus. Stop bothering us.
They were saying, you know, we try really hard not to notice you, Mr. Blind guy, our lives are much easier when we can pretend that you don’t exist, but when you’re over there shouting, it’s much harder to ignore you. So can you please just go back to being invisible?
That’s Bartimaeus’ barrier. That’s the thing in between him and Jesus. But that barrier in this passage, it just disappears. Just like that. Verse 48, they say, be quiet and go away.
Then verse 49, they say, take heart, Bartimaeus, get up. As far as we know, it’s the same they in verse 48 as it is in verse 49. So how does a frustrated crowd flip 180 degrees in one verse? How do they switch from saying, shut up and go away, to compassionately trying to help him? Like, what happens in between verse 48 and verse 49?
Jesus says to the crowd, call him.
2 words, call him. That’s all it takes. And Jesus knocks down Bartimaeus’ barrier. Jesus can always knock down what is between us and him so that we can experience his goodness and healing. Healing.
Always. He can always do it. And if you’re thinking, well, that’s nice for Bartimaeus, and that’s nice for some people, but I don’t think Jesus would do that for me. Jesus doesn’t— can’t really care about me getting to him. Do you know there’s not one example anywhere in any biography of Jesus of someone wanting to get to Jesus and Jesus refusing that Not one.
Jesus always welcomes those who want to get to him. Meaning, if you want to get to Jesus and you’re crying out to him, he will make it possible. He will. If you’re currently stuck in some kind of blindness, you know, maybe your story isn’t that dissimilar to mine where you have felt stuck in different seasons of your life. Maybe you thought you needed needed a certain amount of compensation to feel validated, or professional success.
Or maybe there’s something else you’ve pursued that you thought you needed in order to feel okay about yourself. You know, maybe relationships, right, or having children, or having your children behave a certain way, or maybe needing someone’s approval, or having someone who you think is pretty tell you that you are pretty, right? Something. Maybe you pursued something. Maybe you think you need a certain amount of health in order to feel okay about yourself.
And then you discovered that it didn’t provide what you thought it would. Instead of making you feel more filled, it made you feel less. It promised wholeness, but it provided emptiness, and now you feel lost. You’re thinking something like, I threw my life at this goal. I thought this was the thing that was going to do it for me.
Me, but it wasn’t. You found emptiness. So what do you do now?
It’s time to cry out to Jesus. Even if you only have a vague idea of who Jesus is, maybe this is your first time you’ve ever walked into a church, that’s okay. If we gave you a Christology exam, that’s the doctrine of Christ, you may get most of it wrong. That’s okay. I— my bet is Bartimaeus would have failed a Christology exam too, because what could he have known about Jesus?
Not much, probably. Probably only what he was able to piece together from overhearing people walk by on the road as they talked about Jesus. Bartimaeus hasn’t been following Jesus around. He hasn’t heard the claims Jesus made about himself. But Bartimaeus knows enough to be drawn to Jesus.
To believe somehow he’s the answer. And if you’re in this building, my guess is that you have heard enough about Jesus to know— at least you at least know— maybe he’s the answer I’ve been looking for. Maybe he can provide me with the validation or security or approval that I need. Maybe he can connect me to God, which means you know enough You know enough to begin to cry out to him. You can say, Jesus, come into my life.
You can say, I’ve looked so many other places for purpose or meaning or significance or worth. They’ve all been dead ends. Jesus, can you give me what I need? And he will. Do you know how we know he will?
Beyond the fact that he never turned anyone down, do you know how we know?
Because if he was willing to go to the cross for you, and He was, then there’s nothing He’s not willing to do for you. It’s Romans 8:32, He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?
When you see that Jesus knocked down the biggest barrier between you and Him, and you see the price He paid to do it, then of course He’ll knock down any other barrier between you and Him. If your sin was so great that it would have landed you in hell where there is total darkness, total emptiness, you know, cosmic abandonment where you would have felt infinitely ignored and invisible, and if Jesus said, which He did, if He said, I’m willing to endure all of that in your place. I will stand on your behalf and absorb all of that separation from the goodness and wholeness. I will take that abandonment for you. If he did that, and he did, then of course he will give you full access to his goodness and wholeness.
Every need you have for significance, every need you have to be known, or to feel like you matter. Really, he has already fulfilled. Because if he was willing to enter the ultimate darkness on your behalf so that you could come into the light, then you are significant. Somebody’s going to do that for you. You are significant.
You are known. You do matter. No matter what your career looks like, no matter what your relationships look like, no matter who else approves of you, you matter. Matter. You are seen.
You are esteemed by the God of the universe Himself. If you weren’t, He wouldn’t have gone to the cross for you. And if you were filled with that, if you are filled with who you are in His eyes, then you will always be filled.
I pray that lands on you today. I pray you receive it today. I pray you cry out to Him until you experience down to the very fibers of your being who you are to him and what he did for you. And if you’re not there, keep going, keep crying out. He will get you there because Jesus always knocks down barriers to get us to him.
Always.
Now lastly, to wrap up here, for those of us who have encountered Jesus in a transformative kind of way, what’s our response after he has come into our lives? What is our response? We follow him, right? Bartimaeus jumps up and follows Jesus. Nothing surprising about that, right?
His deepest hopes were fulfilled, so of course he followed Jesus. But what we should realize is that the pattern of jumping up and following Jesus will repeat itself each time Jesus knocks down another barrier for us. We will want to follow him all over again. When we see Jesus really meets our need for relationship, or we see Jesus really meets our need for approval, or we see Jesus really meets our need for significance or security, like each time one of those falls and Jesus bursts into our life in a new way, we say something like, I can see for the very first time, even though it’s not really the very first time. Time.
It just keeps happening, and each time it does, we’re invigorated to follow Jesus all over again. In fact, I’ll say in my life, the more Jesus does for me, the more I want to find other things for him to do. He improves and brings life to everything he touches. So I’m like, wow, what else can I hand over to you? What other areas of my life can you get yourself more in the center?
Like, what would it look like, Jesus, for you to be reigning over my leisure, my friendships, my purchases, travel, parenting, you know, health, diet, entertainment, right? If you have brought so much sight and clarity and wholeness to some areas of my life, right, what can you do with these other areas? Where I’m— it seems like I’m probably blind and don’t even know it. It’s like, Jesus, I want more of you in every area of my life. And I want that because unlike anything in this world, the more of Jesus we have, the more of him we want.
He never gets old. He just gets better.
So I pray for you. I pray for me that however long we’ve walked with him, however long it’s been. I pray he will continue to illuminate more and more areas of our lives that we can surrender to him, more areas of our lives where we may not even know that we’re blind.
I pray that he steps in and gives us sight. Let’s pray that together. Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you that he came here really to knock down barriers. Between us and you.
Lord, I pray that we would want those knocked down. I pray the deepest desire of our hearts would be more of Jesus in every nook and cranny of our soul, Lord, until we are really actually fully immersed in him. Wherever we’re blind and don’t know it, show it to us, Lord. And wherever we’re blind and do know it, help us to cry out. Out for healing.
We need it because we need you. Pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.
