Mark 3:7-19

Sermon Transcript:

(transcribed with AI)

Promontory Community Church exists to make disciples of Jesus who know, live and share the gospel for the glory of God.

Good morning everyone. My name is John Neufeld. My claim to fame is that I'm Pastor Jonathan's dad. I'm delighted to be here. I want to ask you to open your Bibles to Mark chapter 3. If you didn't bring a Bible, there is a place in the back where you may repent and get that straightened out by next week for sure.

Brothers and sisters, I'm going to read from Mark chapter 3, all the way back to verse 9, all the way to the end of verse 19, so 10 verses:

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. And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him, and he appointed 12 whom he also named apostles so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach, to have authority to cast out demons. He appointed the 12: Simon to whom he gave the name Peter, James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is sons of thunder, Andrew and Philip and Bartholomew and Matthew, and Thomas and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus and Simon the Canaanite and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

Father in heaven, as we give ourselves now to hearing and understanding the word and its implications and what you're doing in this world, I pray, O Lord God, that you would shake away the dullness that sometimes exists in our soul to listen. Father, I pray that Your Holy Spirit would attend to our lives so that we would find the word of God to be the fascination of our lives. Lord, without Your Holy Spirit, we would reject this word utterly. But with your Holy Spirit, you've changed our hearts. You've regenerated us so that we are indeed the people of God and that we are indeed leaning into this. O Holy Spirit, I pray, give us joy in what we hear. Amen.

I want to say congratulations to Pastor Jonathan because he's given me another grandson. I now have 8 of them and I'm very happy about the whole situation and how it's turned out.

You're concentrating on missions here, and what I want to do is less of a sermon and more just an analysis. Jonathan asked me whether or not I might do that, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I'm doing and how, as a speaker at Back to the Bible Canada, I'm involved in world missions at the same time. This year I've been 50 years in pastoral ministry, 11 at Back to the Bible Canada, and when I first began at Back to the Bible Canada, I kind of thought I'd do it for a couple of months and then go back to pastoral ministry, not realizing that that's precisely where the Lord wanted me to be. Back to the Bible has been in Canada now for 70 years, and I'm the 4th iteration of it. When I came it seemed to have been faltering and it looked like the ministry was going away, and then inexplicably it seemed to catch wind and began to grow. Right now, Back to the Bible Canada — which really should be called Back to the Bible International — is downloaded in over 140 countries in the world. We are on radio and other forms of public media in over 30 countries, and it's very hard to track how many listeners we actually have, but we have grown to have millions and millions of listeners worldwide.

Let me share with you a little bit of what I've learned in my travels, because nowadays I'm not only putting together a Bible message every day and making sure that it's recorded and travels the world, but also visiting the various places where the ministry is heard, and I'm a little overwhelmed by what I'm seeing.

The first country that we began to go to after covering Canada was India. Not long ago I was in India doing a pastor's conference, and I met three young guys in their early 20s — sharp looking guys. All three of them looked like they were going into ministry, and they told me that they were. I said, Tell me your background, and they told me that all three of them had come from a Hindu background. I was fascinated to know how they had found their way to the gospel. They said they all came from Hindu homes, and their parents had forbidden them from ever entering into a Christian church. So I said, What happened? And all three said, We listened to Back to the Bible. There is something going on far beyond what I'm able to comprehend.

But let me also say that even while there is great growth in the gospel all over the world — and I'm thankful for the little part that Back to the Bible plays in this — at the same time I'm seeing remarkable things. Speaking again of India, we know that most of the Indians here on the Lower Mainland come from the Punjab. They come with a Sikh religion or a Sikh background, but now in the Punjab among these Sikhs there are such great Christian revivals that 15% of the Punjab now confesses faith in Christ Jesus the Savior and Lord. We are seeing some amazing things happening. These are remarkable days to be alive and to see what God is doing in so many different countries.

Many of you may or may not be aware of this, but one of the things that did happen in India is we'd hardly begun when my visa was canceled and we were taken off the air. Then through a number of events we got on a bigger station that covered the entire country, which also goes into places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and into Iran. If you don't know it, Iran today has the fastest growing church in the world. We need to be praying with greater fervency, especially because we know that it's a war-torn country today, and we also know that it's hard to get any news out of it, and that Christians may be targeted during this time. So every one of us should be praying most earnestly for that.

The reason I read the passage that I did — the choosing of the 12 apostles, whom Mark calls apostles here — is I want to tell you a little bit of a story. Not long ago I was in India, where I normally go once a year and do pastor's conferences in three large cities. At the end of one of the conferences, a group of pastors came to me and said, Help us. I said, What's the issue? They said, Even though our churches are growing, we are now being flooded by people who claim to be both apostles and prophets, and they're dividing the churches. We need theological help to instruct our people as to what to do in the middle of this.

Three months later I was in Jamaica doing a pastor's conference, and I had the very same thing said to me: We're having people who claim to be both apostles and prophets, and they're creating a great deal of disturbance all over the island. We need to know how to respond. Can you help us?

So I began to think about that, and I began to remember that what we're having today is really a global phenomenon that is shaking the church in a number of places. In the very places where the church is growing strongly, there is at the very same time a movement that grows alongside it that is shaking the foundations of a church that should be solid.

Many of you might not be surprised by that. It may well be — and it's hard to say, but I kind of lean in that direction — that the first New Testament book that was written is the book of Galatians. If that is the case, and I know there's some debate among scholars about that, you'll know Paul had just completed his first missionary journey. There were now Gentiles flooding into the church, and suddenly the church was exploding, and it found out that this Jesus movement was going to be a global phenomenon. Paul is rejoicing, and at the same time he writes to the Galatians because he knows that a group of Judaizers, false teachers, have followed him there. And how does he write in Galatians:

O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

You see, it's not a new phenomenon. Wherever the church grows, there are false teachers who come at the same time and confuse, bewitch, and lead many astray. We know that is the case.

This is not only the case all over the world — it's in North America, it's in Canada as well. You may or may not know that the Protestant and evangelical historic movement was based on a principle called sola scriptura — Scripture alone. This is the authority of the church. We separated from Romanism because Romanism said the Pope, the bishop of Rome, is himself an apostle, and we said no, he's not. However, not that long ago we had a denomination within the charismatic rank of wider evangelicalism called the apostolic denomination, believing that there is in fact a growing number of apostles today. And some of you may be aware of something called the New Apostolic Reformation, which has become worldwide in its growth. It's founded on a number of principles, and one of those principles is called open theism.

I'll get to the text in a minute. We're going to talk about open theism. Open theism is the belief that the future is open for God — that He doesn't know what's going to happen, and God could not have predicted our day. So everything that's in the Bible doesn't cover our day, and God needs to raise up new apostles who speak with equal authority to Scripture. You have to understand that there is a movement today that looks, at least to some, as vibrant, and the rest of us are kind of stuck in the past. Somewhere there needs to be an answer that is spoken, that's reasoned, that's biblical, and that gets back to the foundation of our faith — that continues to press the gospel movement worldwide as it is advancing today, and at the same time safeguarding that which, as Jude says in verse 3, was once for all given, should not be eroded but defended.

So I'm going to get back to Mark, but if you have your Bible with you, I want you to follow with me through a number of scriptural passages as I make the case for apostleship. It's such an important thing.

I want you to go first to John chapter 14. I'm going to begin reading from verse 25. Some of us know this passage quite well, especially around Pentecost and other times when we talk about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. John chapter 14 verse 25 begins by saying — and these things Jesus is speaking to His apostles:

These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you.

Now stop here. Whenever you read the Bible and you hear "I've spoken this to you," you ought to ask who the "you" is. If we're not careful, we're going to say, well, it's all of us. No — in fact, Jesus is with the 12 here and he's speaking directly to them. It's very important to grasp that.

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.

Who is the "you"? It's the 12. Now please don't hear me saying the Holy Spirit is not given to all believers — of course the Holy Spirit is given to everyone who confesses Christ as Savior and Lord — but here is a direct teaching to the 12 and their unique place in the body of Christ. That's the promise to the 12: they will be able to accurately recall all the teachings of Jesus along with the implications of those, so that without error, not allowing time to erode their memory, the Holy Spirit will safeguard that the things they teach are in fact the very things that Jesus did and said. Now you and I might not be able to do that, and we can't. How many of you can say, Well, I remember everything that Jesus taught? But they did, because there was a promise given.

Now I want you to go forward and see it again in chapter 16, where Jesus repeats himself. We find this beginning at verse 12:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He, the Holy Spirit, will glorify me — that is Christ the Son — for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. Therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

He repeats himself so that they might hear it. Now this is the promise given to the 12. Jesus is about to go. He has not left behind a written account. I know some people call themselves Red Letter Christians — in other words, the stuff they're really paying attention to are the words of Jesus, and all the rest is lesser. Let me say this: Jesus never wrote a word except what he wrote in the sand that day with the woman caught in adultery, which we find in John chapter 8, and that was washed away. He left it to his apostles, whom he appointed, to write what he had said and to declare the implications, and the promise that he gave them is that the Holy Spirit would superintend and safeguard that they would accurately record what was given.

With that in mind, I'm going to do a little working through the Bible. I want you to go to 1 Corinthians chapter 12 beginning at verse 27. Paul has been talking about spiritual gifts here, about how all the gifts given to the body of Christ — to every local body of Christ as you are — are given by the Holy Spirit, and not all of your gifts are like the other's, which makes us rely on each other. Then in verse 27, Paul describes how the Holy Spirit binds the church together with these very gifts:

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and all the other gifts.

Oh yes, there is a hierarchy in the church. First, apostles — they come first. Second, prophets — I'll get to them in just a little while and identify who they are. Third, teachers. After the first three, there is no further hierarchy. The hierarchy ends at the first three, and then you have the miracles and the gifts of healing and helping and administrating and all of the other gifts that Paul has been mentioning, because they are all found in the body of Christ.

God has appointed in the church a hierarchy. The apostles come first, and I'm going to say that they are once for all — they are the ones that Jesus appointed. Then come the prophets, and I'll describe who they are in just a moment. Then after that are the teachers, the pastors and teachers, whose job it is to become so familiar with the writings of the apostles and the prophets that they don't have anything else to say. Every good pastor has nothing to say of his own — and has limited his thoughts when he's here. He's got opinions on everything else — how good the Canucks are going to be this year, and so does my son, I've been around him — but when he's here, he's got no opinions. The only opinion he has is to make sure he so familiarizes himself with the writing of the apostles and the prophets that when he speaks, it sounds like the apostles and the prophets are among us. That's what we mean by sola scriptura — Scripture alone is our authority. We don't vest the authority in the teacher, only to the extent that he has become such an expert in the Scripture and in knowing how to apply the word that he is able to make the word real to our lives. That is our authority.

And if you don't know this, for the first 500 years of the life of the church, no matter what church you would have gone to, all you would have heard was expositional, verse-by-verse Bible teaching based on what was left to us by the apostles and the prophets. This is so important for us to hear.

Now, I'll just let the cat out of the bag about what I think Paul means when he talks about the prophets. In the New Testament that we've received, not all of the books were written by the apostles. You know that Matthew was an apostle, Mark was not — but Papias, who is a church father, says that Mark wrote the book of Mark under the tutelage of Peter. The next book after Mark is Luke, and we know that Luke was also under the tutelage of Paul, as well as of Peter. So the New Testament is a unified work: the apostles came first, and the prophets who filled out the rest of the New Testament worked under the authority of the apostles. The teachers teach what God has given us, because Jesus set up this system. And when we depart from the system that he set up, we depart from Christ Himself.

So having said all of that, let's go back to Mark chapter 3. I'll take you back to verse 13, and I want you to notice 5 characteristics of an apostle as they appear here.

You notice that just prior to this, the crowds have been around him — he's preaching to a large group — but now he takes the 12 from among the disciples and appoints them, already calling them apostles.

First, notice from verse 13:

He went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired.

In other words, he's the one who chose his apostles. That's the first mark of an apostle: they were directly appointed by Jesus. They didn't volunteer to be apostles. The way in which Jesus trained the 12 was not that much different than the way many leading rabbis of his day trained theirs. Rabbis of Jesus' day functioned with disciples following them, except for one distinct difference: rabbis took applications. Just as you would apply to get into an elite university, you would apply to a professor who would accept you into his program. But Jesus took no applications. He did something unheard of in his day — he didn't wait for applications, he went and chose those whom he called to be apostles. An apostle is not someone who senses an inner call to be one. It's someone whom Jesus physically walked up to and said, You're going to be an apostle. Remember Peter said, Depart from me, I'm a sinful man. Jesus said, I already know that part, but I've called you to be an apostle, and I'm not taking no as an answer. I have definitively chosen you. That's the first mark of an apostle — they had to be directly chosen by Jesus.

The second thing we learn here is that they personally witnessed all that Jesus did. Look again at verse 13:

He went up on the mountain, called those whom he desired, and they came to him, and he appointed 12 whom he also named apostles so that they might be with him.

The mark of an apostle is that they had walked with Jesus. You remember Peter talks about that in 2 Peter 1:16:

We did not invent clever tales when we told you this story about Jesus. We were eyewitnesses of His Majesty. We were there at the sacred mountain.

He's talking about the Mount of Transfiguration. When I'm relaying these things to you, I am not doing so based on hearsay or an inner prompting — I'm telling you what I actually saw because I was with Jesus. The accounts that we have in the New Testament are eyewitness accounts. You don't allow for a revelation from someone who is not an eyewitness. That's so important.

Someone might say, But isn't Paul an apostle? Yes. Paul himself says he is one untimely born. In Galatians chapter 1, verses 11-12 and 16-17, he makes it clear that the gospel he preached he did not receive in any other way except that he went to Arabia for 3 years, where the risen Jesus met with him and mentored him — as long as Jesus had spent with the others. He also spent that much time with Paul himself, so that Paul was an unusual apostle, the asterisk beside all the others, but he is included among them. And Peter himself, speaking of Paul in 2 Peter, says that Paul writes Scripture, saying, I know he is an apostle with us.

So, the first mark: they were directly appointed by Jesus. The second: they personally witnessed everything that Jesus did. The third: they were called to be with him, that is, individually mentored by him.

Number four: they were given unique power — not only to preach, but also to do miracles. Now please don't hear me saying I don't believe there are any miracles today, for I know there are. And please don't hear me saying there's no healing today in some kind of supernatural way, because I've witnessed this on a number of occasions. I'm not saying it happens all the time — looking around me, the majority of people who get sick and die, get sick and die. Once in a while Christ may intervene and raise somebody up. But there was something that happened during the apostolic era that has not been repeated since that time. Yes, there's a gift of healing. Yes, there's a gift of prophecy. But at the same time, there's something in superabundance among the apostles that was not given to any other generation. Do you remember that Peter's shadow would just fall on someone and they would be healed? In the same way that woman said, If I but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be made well — that's how it seemed to operate with the apostles, who were the ones that directly represented Jesus, declared Jesus to the world, and gave us the written record of what he said. They were given that same kind of authority to demonstrate that they were the individuals set apart by Christ to lay a foundation for the church which was not to be repeated.

So I've said four things: they were directly appointed by Jesus; they personally witnessed all that Jesus did; they were called to be with him, individually mentored by him; and they were given unique power that has never been repeated since. And there were 12 — not 15 or 18 or so forth. I'll also say that when the apostles died, there were no new apostles in the early church. Yes, there were bishops who oversaw the church in given areas — yes, that happened immediately — but what didn't happen is that no one claimed to be an apostle. And let me say it again: for the next 500 years, every single preacher would pore over the text that had been left to them by those who were eyewitnesses of the majesty of Jesus, and those eyewitness accounts were declared to congregations over and over and over again. It is not until the church became deformed — in which church canon law began to take equal authority to Scripture itself — that the church began to be twisted in a way which needed to be reformed, which did happen in the fullness of time.

Why do I make this point? I want you to follow with me one more time to Ephesians chapter 2. Ephesians 2:19:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple.

That's us — the church. I don't know how many builders are here, but you don't even have to be a builder to understand this: you don't lay the foundation of a building, begin to build on it, and then lay a foundation again. A foundation is laid in every single building once and for all at the base of it, and everything stands on that foundation. If the foundation is well laid, you can build a magnificent structure on top of it. But you don't say, We've come up to the 10th floor and now we're going to build a foundation again. That's not how building works. We are the building of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone — that one stone from which the whole foundation takes its bearings. Jesus is that cornerstone from which the foundation — that which the apostles left us in their writings — all takes its sizing. And in him the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple. Even to this day we are working on the temple, but the foundation is once for all laid. We return to the foundation because we know that no other foundation can be laid.

One more text. Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 to 14:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.

Isn't this so important? The point is that there are apostles and prophets who lay the foundation of the church, and I've already identified who they are. The apostles refer to the ones directly chosen by Jesus. The prophets — and I'm saying they are different from the gift of prophecy — are those who filled up the rest of the New Testament under the authority of the apostles. On this the whole church rises. This is our authority.

And everywhere the church grows around the world, and I'm having this marvelous opportunity to witness it. I had barely come back from India when my overlords — I call them that — our CEO and operations officer at Back to the Bible said, We need to get you back on a plane. We're going to Liberia right now, because we're on a station there, and we're being put on a station in Sierra Leone next door to it. The president of Liberia is so excited about Back to the Bible coming — he'd like to meet you. I said, I just got back from India and I want to go on a holiday with my kids, and I know my kids and I don't know the president of Liberia. I'm staying here. So those who must be obeyed weren't obeyed, and I stayed home.

But nonetheless, I have seen all over the world the importance of the gospel going forward, and we are living in these remarkable days. Brothers and sisters, remember when you meet together here in this place and you are being instructed out of the word of God, the foundation holds — for it will always hold regardless of what happens. You're being built on that foundation, not another one, but that one alone. It's Scripture alone. It's the eyewitnesses of Jesus alone that makes us followers of Christ alone, and because we're followers of Christ alone, we join hands and see the gospel carried by the missionaries and evangelists and church planters whom he has appointed, going all over the world, taking the gospel to places where sometimes it's underground and sometimes it's allowed to proceed freely.

Understand this: we are living in remarkable days. Sometimes I've been asked, Are these the last days? And I say, Absolutely — give or take a few thousand years, I'm sure of it. Christ is coming. I don't know the day or the hour. Don't think me carnal — Jesus himself said he didn't know it in his humanity, and because that's all I am, I don't know either.

So let me simply say this: be strong in the Lord. Stay in the Scripture. I thank God for your pastor, who is also my son — I'm very proud of him. He has committed himself to a lifetime of knowing nothing but the Scripture and teaching it faithfully to this congregation. As you're being built in the Scriptures, find out your gifts, utilize them, continue to be faithful as a witness throughout this entire area. Do everything that Christ wants you to do — that is His will for your life.

My word to you is this, and it is the word that God is giving all throughout the world: do not depart from the foundation. Don't allow anyone else to tell you there's a new foundation being laid today, or that there's a new apostle. You know, at one pastor's meeting in India, after I'd given all of this, one person put up his hand and said, So could you help me — how do I tell if someone is genuinely an apostle? And I said, Remember this one thing: if he hasn't been dead for 2000 years, he's not an apostle.

God bless you, brothers and sisters. Continue to stand strong in the faith.

Heavenly Father, I do pray for Promontory Community Church. O Lord God, I pray that this church would continue to be a light of revelation to Jesus in this community. I pray, Heavenly Father, she would never depart from the faith. I pray, Heavenly Father, she would be held strong in the word. I pray, Heavenly Father, that leadership would be unified, and I pray, Heavenly Father, that you would not withhold your power from this church, in the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.