This week we welcome back to our pulpit the Reverend Ken Wagoner. Ken has been a great supporter of Hebron’s ministry throughout the years. Through Ken’s work with Chinese students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University a number of Hebron members have been blessed to help staff an evangelistic outreach over the Labor Day weekend at Summer’s Best Two Weeks camp. This event brings Chinese students to students (graduate and undergraduate students) from across the East Coast to Jennerstown, PA to hear the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ in their native tongue.
For years Ken has also been a main force with PRISM (Pittsburgh Region International Student Ministry). This is an outreach ministry that we have supported with our mission dollars over the years and Grove outreach. Ken has preached at Hebron several times in the past five years, including this past Pentecost Sunday. He is a sound, expository preacher from whom all of us have learned and grown.
Ken writes, “This Sunday I want to emphasize that being saved from the penalty of sin is a great thing. It is a gracious gift from God, not anything accomplished on our own. However, to stop there in our walk with Christ is to deprive ourselves of more that God wants us to enjoy, value, and receive benefit. Stopping at freedom from sin’s penalty prevents us from being saved from the power of sin in our lives.”
The companion text for this Sunday is from Exodus 14 where the Israelites are pinned in by the Red Sea on one side and Pharaoh’s army on the other. They are scared to death. They’re so scared that they begin to accuse Moses falsely saying, “You brought us out here to die. It would have been better for us had we stayed in Egypt.” When they were released from Egypt it was as if they were being freed from the penalty of sin, but God has more in store for them than that. He wants them to be freed from the power of sin and experience the joy of walking by faith, not by sight. Such freedom is only possible on the other side of the Sea. Getting there requires them to put their faith in God’s strength and not their own.
As we’ve seen in the account of Jesus calming the storm raging sea in Mark 4, faith, simply put is fixing your eyes on Jesus and His power rather than your own. How easy it is for us to get our eyes locked on ourselves and our circumstances rather than on Christ and His glory and strength. In Ken’s primary text – Mark 5:21-34 – we find a wonderful example of a broken woman who finds wholeness in only Christ. Here we see a faith concealed, rewarded, and revealed. She is a model of what Christ intends in healing us of our “Cainish” brokenness toward God.
In preparing for Sunday’s message you may wish to consider the following:
1. What does the Bible mean in Exodus 14:8 when it says, “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and he pursued the people of Israel…”?
2. What is the significance of including the number of chariots that pursue them?
3. In verse 10 it tells us where these saved people focused their eyes. What’s the product of that focus?
4. The Israelites are said to have “cried out to the Lord,” and yet, immediately (in the next breath) go on to excoriate Moses. What do you make of that?
5. What’s God’s remedy? We see it in His command to redirect their eyes (verse 13).
6. What’s God’s purpose in desiring to free us from the power of sin? (Hint: verse 17)
7. In Mark 5:21 Jesus again crosses the Sea of Galilee. Why do you think His disciples aren’t mentioned in this trip?
8. What does Mark mean by telling us that instead of getting better she got worse as a result of spending all she had in verse 26?
9. What’s the basis for her touch in verse 28? How is this “faith concealed”?
10. How is she a model of freedom for us in verse 29?
11. What is the reward in coming to Jesus the second time in verse 33?
12. How does Jesus’ message of freedom in verse 34 relate to living without the power of sin?
May the Lord bless you and Ken as you worship Him together this Sunday!
