Sermon Transcript
Amen. Mark 9:1-29. And he said to them, truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power. And after 6 days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make 3 tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, This is my beloved son, listen to him.
And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only. And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean. And they asked him, why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come and And he said to them, Elijah does come first to restore all things, and how is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him.
And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them, and immediately all the crowd when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. And he asked them, what are you arguing about with them? And someone from the crowd answered him, teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute, and whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able. And he answered them, O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you?
How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me. And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, how long has this been happening to him?
And he said, from childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. And Jesus said to him, if you can? All things are possible for one who believes.
Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I believe, help my unbelief. And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, you mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again. And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, he is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, why could we not cast it out?
And he said to them, this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.
Thanks, Maylynn.
There are 2 drastically different accounts in our text today. They are miles apart from one another on the human experience spectrum. In one of them, some of us might be able to relate to it, but probably not exactly the way it happened in the text. The other one, all of us can certainly relate to in some way. The first one is an overwhelming, even terrifying encounter with the presence of God.
And some of us have probably experienced something like that, but probably not to the extent Peter, James, and John. The second account is of the relatively normal struggles, frustrations, doubts that we all deal with all the time. 2 accounts, 2 very different accounts. So what can we learn from these seemingly opposite experiences? How do they relate to one another?
Why did Mark put one right next to the other in his biography of Jesus? Because it’s a bit of whiplash going from one to the other. All great questions. Going to try to address each one of those in our time today, and to do so, we will first define what the mountaintop experience is. Second, we will see one way to definitely miss the power of Jesus in our lives, whether it’s on the mountaintop or anywhere else, one way to miss it.
And then finally, we will look at one clue for how to bring the mountaintop into the normal ups and downs of our life. What is the mountaintop experience? One way we will certainly miss the power of Jesus, and then a clue for how to bring the mountain into our everyday life. That’s where we’re going. So first, the mountaintop experience is seeing Christ’s glory.
Peter, James, and John had the mountaintop experience to end all mountaintop experiences. They see Jesus in all his glory, shining like the sun. Matthew describes it so intense it was that they wanted to cover themselves. It was too much to take in all at once. It surprised them to see Jesus this way, even though maybe it shouldn’t have, because all throughout the book of Mark, Mark has built more and more evidence of who Jesus is.
Jesus made claim after claim of his identity. He used the I Am name of God various times. There have been flashes of his sovereign power. There’s been calming of storms, raising of the dead, healings, casting away of evil. And Mark, the narrator, has made various parallels between God in the Old Testament and Jesus now.
He’s equating over and over again, he has equated Jesus to God, like Jesus providing food food for the masses as God provided manna in the desert for the Israelites. And even in this narrative, Mark once again goes out of his way to parallel this mountaintop experience with the mountaintop experience in the Old Testament when Moses receives the 10 Commandments on Mount Sinai. As, as God invited Moses up the mountain, so Jesus invites Peter, James, and John up the mountain. As God spoke to Moses from a cloud, God again speaks from a cloud. In Mark’s account, as Moses’ face lit up with brightness after he spoke with the Lord, so Jesus’ face begins to shine.
The difference, of course, is that Moses was only reflecting and absorbing some of the glory of the Lord, but Jesus was producing it. He is the glory of the Lord. Jesus no longer looked like an average guy. Before this moment, there was nothing special about his appearance that would have indicated divinity. But now, now his appearance matched the claims that he had been making about himself.
It’s just one more piece of evidence in the case that Mark is building of what Jesus’ true identity is. And for Peter, James, and John, the whole experience is so wonderful that the 3 of them were terrified, it says, verse 6, which we might think fear is a strange reaction to such a glorious vision, but it’s not that strange. We’ve talked about this in here from time to time, but have you ever seen someone or something so beautiful that you just wanted to cry? Maybe you felt like you needed to sit down, like it took your breath away. Ever seen anything like that?
I remember vividly when I saw Michelangelo’s David in person. It was stunning. My friend and I had been waiting in this long line. We were chatting with each other as we were kind of herded along with the crowd, inching closer and closer to David, you know, totally unaware of the magnitude of the glory that we were about to see. And then when we actually got up to it, and looked up, because this thing is huge, when we were in its presence, we just involuntarily shut our mouths.
We both just stopped talking mid-sentence. Before we got up to it, we passed all these other pieces of art in the hall and outside the building, which were fine, okay? No offense to those other works. I’m sure all of their mamas were very proud of of the artist who made them. But none of those pieces of art were David.
None of them had a physical effect on us. The statue of David was not far from knocking us over with its beauty. And now think about it, Michelangelo’s David is only a sculpture that one very talented guy created. As breathtaking as it is, it’s only an earthly beauty. And if it was about to knock us over, like, what would the glory of the Creator do to us?
Compared to David, you’d have to multiply that reaction by infinity. So of course it would be totally overwhelming. It says Peter’s so afraid he didn’t know what he was saying. You remember in the Old Testament it says if you see God, you will die. It’ll be too much for you.
So in the Old Testament, people always needed to shelter themselves from the glory of the from the glory of God somehow is probably why Peter thinks he needs to build a shelter, a tabernacle, because he’s thinking, I can’t handle what is happening. It is too much for me.
Have you ever sensed anything like that from God? Do you have any inkling of that kind of experience of his presence in your life? At all. For us, it probably won’t be as intense as it was for Peter, James, and John, and it won’t be all the time. It wasn’t all the time for them either.
And I know we can’t hold on to it when it happens. I know those, like, brief flickers of glory, that they are fleeting. But do you have a drop of it here and there?
We should desire it. We should seek it. We should ask for it. When you come to church, when we read our Bibles, when we pray, the reason to do any Christian practice ever is to behold the glory of Christ. We don’t read Scripture so that we can pat ourselves on the back for completing a Bible reading plan, although a Bible reading plan is a great idea.
I encourage you to get one and stick with it, but don’t do it only because you think you’re supposed to. Similarly, we don’t come to church only because the music is so amazing and professionally arranged and played and sung by the finest team that has ever been assembled, even though it is, right? It’s fantastic, but that’s not the reason to come to church. The reason we do any of these things is to behold the glory of Christ. He is the goal.
So, before you pray, before you come to church, before you read your Bible, ask, may I experience you? Say, God, when I’m at church today, can I behold your glory?
As leadership, that’s what we want for you, that’s what we want for ourselves, that we would see him. That’s what we’re aiming for. In fact, if you want to know how to grow in your Christian life, how to progress, It is by seeing him, by beholding his glory. Paul writes this, 1 Corinthians 18, and we with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord, there it is, by beholding his glory we are being transformed into his same image from one degree of glory to another. That is how we grow.
We behold the glory of Christ, and the more of his glory that we take in, the more glorious we become ourselves. All the way into eternity when we will become fully who we can be by fully taking in his glory. C.S. Lewis in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, worded it like this. It’s a fairly lengthy quote, but he says, at present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.
We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see, but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. And in there, in the beyond nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, he says, like in our world now, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us, that directly lives on God, but our minds, and still more our bodies receive life from Jesus 1,000 times removed.
It’s like little— the little sprinkles of glory we get are a million miles away from him. But what would it be like, he asks, to taste at the fountainhead, the stream of which even these momentary experiences of glory, these little drops that we get, even those are so intoxicating. So what would it be like to be at the fountainhead? Yet, he says, he believes that’s what lies before us. That’s end quote.
Peter, James, and John didn’t need to wait until eternity to be on the other side of the door. They took in the fountainhead himself on the mountaintop. So, no wonder it was too much for them.
So, I’ll ask you again, do you know anything of that kind of glory breaking into your life, even if it’s just a drop? Have you beheld any approximation of that? It’s out there. You should ask for it and long for it, and sometimes you’ll see it. And hopefully in the course of this message today, we’ll give you some ideas of where to seek it, where to get started, and maybe more importantly, where not to get started.
Okay, so Peter, James, and John experienced the glory of Christ, and then Jesus brings them down the mountain straight into a problem. They come back to the rest of the disciples and this crowd of people and they’re arguing and it’s loud and it’s distressed and it’s desperate, it’s a bit chaotic. And all of us can relate to that, can’t we? We’re like, stress? Chaos?
Yes! That’s like Monday to Friday, 8 to 5 for me. And then at 6 o’clock I go home and same story, stress and chaos. It’s the grind of life. So we might ask why Mark organized his biography of Jesus in the way he did.
Like, why put this difficulty, this tension immediately after such a heavenly account? I mean, for crying out loud, shouldn’t the heavenly account last a little longer? Shouldn’t the mountaintop change what happens in your life after you’ve been up there? I mean, we might want it to work that way. But it never works that way, does it?
We have some experience of the glory of God and then it’s back to life as normally scheduled. It’s actually what happened to Moses when he came down off the mountain after receiving the 10 Commandments. If you remember, he’s been in the cloud, he’s heard the voice of God, it’s transcendent experience, and then he comes down off the mountain, people have made a golden calf, there’s all this chaos, these problems to face, And Moses thinks, couldn’t I have just stayed on the mountain? Like, why do I have to deal with this? Jesus even seems to say something similar.
He’s like, this again?
Ugh. But that’s the way life is, isn’t it? Our high schoolers just went up to camp at Hume Lake week before last, and I’m sure many of the people in this room who grew up going to a Christian camp, those were some of the best weeks of your life.
Right? Because often in those settings it feels like God is almost tangible. There’s something powerful and transformative about those weeks, but then you have to go home and life is exactly the same as it was before you left. That’s the way it works. So Mark probably organized his biography of Jesus with these events right next to each other, one, because that’s the way how it actually happened, But 2, that’s because how life is, right?
We must return. The good news is this text gives us lessons about how to position ourselves, like, in the midst of our problems, in the midst of normal life, that can help us experience Jesus’ power within them. Specifically, this passage gives us one way we will definitely miss Jesus’ power in our lives. And then it gives us a clue about how to retain a sense of the mountain even when we come back down. So first, one way to miss the power of Jesus in your life: self-sufficiency.
The disciples are a wonderful example of how not to interact with the problems of life. They try to do life without relying on Jesus. They try to be self-sufficient and it doesn’t go well. This father brought his son to the disciples for them to cast out a demon and the disciples didn’t even pray about it. We know they didn’t pray about it because they later asked Jesus, hey, why couldn’t we cast out the demon?
And Jesus says, you guys didn’t pray. That’s the last verse in our passage, verse 29. He says, this kind cannot be driven out by anything other than prayer. You guys didn’t pray. Like, what were you thinking?
You believed you could handle this on your own? Jesus is telling them, you guys will certainly not experience my power working through you if you believe your power is sufficient, which is fairly obvious. But for some reason they needed to learn that lesson again, just like we do. If we want to experience God’s power at work in our lives, we will never see it through more and more effort on our part. We will only get there through dependency on him, through asking, through humbling ourselves, through saying, I can’t do this, I’m insufficient.
Will you show up? And I’ll confess to you, I still learn this lesson on a weekly basis. You think it would eventually stick, but more often than not, it doesn’t. In the course of my work week, I often try to be self-sufficient. Now I know, here’s your pushback, uh, we are not in the same industry.
True story, um, our weeks probably look Very different. But I can’t tell you how many times I’m working on one of these messages for Sunday, an example, for example, and it’s just going nowhere, right? I read the commentaries, I study the language, I try to think of life examples to convey what’s happening in the text in a way that we will understand it and in a way that I haven’t said it before. Got to do something new and nothing. Just banging my head against the wall, spinning my wheels, and then I start to feel anxious.
Because Sunday’s coming and I gotta say something. Like, what am I gonna do? Why am I getting nowhere on this?
And then there’s this still small voice, have you prayed about it, Dan?
Have you come before God and said, I can’t do this, I need help? And then I do. I mean, I was praying already about whatever else, but I hadn’t said, Lord, if you don’t bring something together, nothing is coming together. Help. And then that’s when something comes together over and over again, like over and over.
And again, I know you have different deliverables than I do. Our responsibilities every week look very different. But what would it look like for you to have a dependent posture before God? You’re about to meet with a client, you’re about to have a tough conversation with someone on your team, or a tough conversation with someone in your family. You need to figure out how to solve some problem, design something, code something.
What, what, what’s the narrative you tell yourself? Do you think, oh, I’ve got this, I mean, supposedly it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field, and you’re like, I’m way past 10,000 hours. All right, I’ve done this before, I can do it again, easy peasy.
Pride before the fall, okay? But the more you posture yourself acknowledging that you need divine intervention or you will not make it, the more you do that, I’m telling you, the further you will get. On the other hand, the more you try to like brute strength your way through it— I’m not saying you won’t have any success whatsoever, you probably will. All of you are super talented at what you do. We’re grateful for all the stuff you make.
But if you do brute strength alone, you’re probably headed toward burnout because we’re not made to be self-sufficient. Which means the more we try to be, the faster that we’re going to come apart. Why couldn’t we cast it out, Lord? You guys didn’t pray.
You notice the only person in the narrative who actually does have a dependent posture is the father who brought his son. The first thing we see of him, he’s crying out for help. Jesus, if you can do anything, just please, we need a miracle. And Jesus says, sure, I can do anything. All you need to do is believe.
Just believe and it’ll happen. And the guy responds, which is incredible. It’s like, Jesus, I’m trying to believe, but I’m not there. I’m even struggling with belief. My faith is all topsy-turvy.
Can you help me with that too? So now the father’s really asked for 2 things. Heal my son, give me faith. And then Jesus heals his son.
It’s surprising, right? Jesus says, your request will be possible if you believe. And the guy says, ah, kinda, but I even need help with that. Like, I’m dependent on you even to have faith in you. Help my unbelief.
There’s no limit to my dependence on you, Jesus. If healing my son takes faith, well, then you’ve got to provide that to me as well. I’m contributing nothing here.
And then Jesus heals his son. The guy gets his miracle. The disciples, on the other hand, got nothing.
It’s hard to know what the disciples were trusting in for their confidence, but we know it wasn’t Christ. They weren’t relying on him. Maybe they were trusting in their past success. We’ve done this before, we can do it again. Maybe they were trusting in how much time they had spent with Jesus.
You know, God, we’ve been in the system forever, we can do this. Maybe they trusted in their holiness, like, we’ve got our act together enough to merit a miracle. It was something. They thought something qualified them other than grace alone. So they miss the power of Jesus in their lives, which means if you’ve been coming to church and you’ve been trying to figure this whole thing out, it feels like you’re trying to climb a mountain in order to get somewhere.
You know, maybe you think, if I study enough, if I’m faithful enough, if I get enough sin out of my life, then I will see the glory of Christ. I will see him work in my life if I’m good enough, right enough, long enough.
You won’t get there that way. It’s not effort that’ll get you there. It’s dependence. It’s not holiness that’ll get you there. It’s not, I’ve cleaned myself up enough, so now I should be able to see God.
It’s not amount of time you’ve spent serving. It’s not past experiences, like I used to walk with God, so I should be able to now. It is nothing other than grace.
It’s when we say, I can contribute nothing. I can’t even really contribute faith. I’m wholly reliant on you, Jesus, to provide everything, that’s when. And as we sing sometimes, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling. Naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace.
Foul I to the fountain fly, wash me, Savior, or I die. That’s when Jesus commends us, works in our lives. It’s through dependence, not self-sufficiency. The irony is the more that you confess that you do not have what it takes, the more you have exactly what it takes.
Self-sufficiency, on the other hand, will always result in missing Jesus’ glory, okay? That’s what’s not to do. Now, one clue for how to bring the glory of the mountain into your life. And again, it won’t happen all the time until we are actually face to face with him, the fountainhead, for eternity. But it needs to happen sometimes.
And the clue for bringing the mountain into life is by seeing Christ lay down his glory for you. The clue is not only seeing him high and lifted up, shining in the light of his glory. It is that, But it is also simultaneously seeing that he gave up his glory at the cross for you. We can’t have one without the other. Do you notice here, even in the Transfiguration account, I mean, this is the peak of Jesus’ majesty on earth, but even then, Jesus is still talking about the crucifixion.
He says, verse 12, the Son of Man must, he uses that word all the time, must suffer and be treated with contempt before he rises from the dead. The crucifixion is inextricably linked even to the transfiguration. Jesus’ glory doesn’t stand by itself even here, even on the mountaintop, the highest of all high experiences. Jesus’ glory still runs through the cross. It always does, which means there’s no way for us to picture Jesus on the mountaintop without also picturing him on the cross.
I mean, Jesus wouldn’t even let Peter, James, and John have the mountaintop without also confronting them with the cross. It’s both of those images at the same time that will transform our hearts. It means, like, we should wrestle with the idea of the, you know, supreme sovereign King juxtaposed with Him hanging on the criminal’s cross in our place. We have to keep wrestling with those 2 images, keep asking, why would someone like that be there? Why would someone like that be there?
Peter, James, and John are wrestling with that question. It says they’re trying to figure out this business about, you know, suffering and raising from the dead because the cross is the last place you’d expect to find someone as divine and and worthy of worship and unlimited and powerful as Jesus is on the mountain, right? I mean, why would the statue of David be in the trash heap? More so, why would you say it must be in the trash heap? What is this?
It doesn’t belong there. How do these fit? Why would someone like that be there? Keep asking it. Don’t let it go.
Wrestle with it. It’s about to break on you because there’s only one answer.
He didn’t want the glory of the mountain without having you, and he had to go to the cross to get you.
It’s because of his love for you. That’s why he’s on the cross. The one without beginning, the limitless one, loves you like that.
And to the extent that your heart can grasp, the most glorious one gave up his glory for you, to restore you, to redeem you, to pay for your sin, to pay the penalty that you owe in your place, that he did that again, because losing all the glory in the world was worth gaining you.
He loves you that much.
To whatever extent that is real in your heart, which will come and go, but to whatever extent you can hold on to it, it’ll overwhelm you. To whatever extent it is real, you will be fulfilled in every way. You will carry the mountaintop with you into life. May it happen for you. If it never has, I pray you see him high and lifted up and hanging on a cross for you.
Let’s pray. Father, may we see Jesus. May we behold his glory. May that be the biggest desire of our hearts. May we ask for it every time we pray, every time we read Scripture, every time we interact with anyone, every time we come to church.
Lord, may the biggest desire of our hearts be to see You, to behold Your glory, to be transformed from one degree of glory to another ourselves. Lord, lead us there. Grant us that grace, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
