Mark 9:9-13

Picking and choosing what we will and will not believe from God’s word is a dangerous activity. We get a false view of God and His plans for us and His world and we create a morality opposite or opposed to what God created. We must choose if we will strive to follow all of God’s word or attempt to pick and choose, which always has negative results.

Mark 8:1-30

If we are not careful, sin can lead us to having hard hearts. Hard hearts keep us from understanding God’s word and plan for our lives and submitting to His loving authority over our lives. In the passage today, we see Jesus dealing with the hard hearts of his disciples and leading them to the cure, recognizing and submitting to Jesus for who He is.

Mark 7:14-23

It is often easy to limit our view of our sinfulness to the external. If we could change our actions, then we could feel better about being good people who occasionally mess up rather than being sinners who have no hope to fix ourselves. That is what the Pharisees thought. In this passage, Jesus teaches that our sin is not limited to what we do or the external, but sin starts in the heart, at the core of who we are… this is why we need a Savior.

Mark 7:1-13

It is God’s will that we obey Him with our whole heart and not just our actions. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they acted like they loved God with through their actions but their hearts were far from Him, wrapped up in selfishness and self-righteousness. As Christians and as the church, we must make sure we are following Jesus from our hearts and not just going through the actions.

Mark 6:14-29

Sin has the ability to have a huge influence on our lives, and it is never good. Our sin not only affects us but it can also affect others. As believers, we must be constantly fighting against sin and temptation and confessing and repenting of our sin because sin doesn’t just want to exist in our lives, it wants to rule.