I will never forget a phone call that
our family doctor once made to us.
Catherine was pregnant with our fourth child.
She was in her third trimester, and we
at that point had a six-year-old,
a four-year-old, and an almost two
-year-old.
You could only imagine the incredible challenge.
Indeed, at times, the trial that it was
to carry this fourth child and have all
these other children around you.
Their needs, their hopes, their expectations always crowding
in, and at the same time, the challenge
of carrying this child.
And right at one of the more difficult
weeks in that season, to our incredible shock,
our doctor called us, and he said, Catherine,
I've been thinking about you today, and I
hope Stuart is giving you at least two
hours a day to take a long nap.
I hope you're being treated like the queen
that you are.
And he said, in all seriousness, don't forget,
you're preparing to do one of the most
important things that any human being can do.
You're bringing life to the world.
The fact that our doctor would call us,
the fact that he would call and say
what he said, gave Catherine that strength, that
perspective that she needed to carry on through
those last difficult weeks.
Indeed, it so influenced us, it so encouraged
us, that in part, it was what gave
us the strength and the calling from God
to continue on and to have a fifth
and a sixth child.
It had a massive influence on our life,
that phone call.
And that phone call almost didn't happen.
Our doctor, his name is Dr. Peter Rosey,
was a surgical student at the University of
Chicago, so gifted that he graduated valedictorian of
his surgery class.
Indeed, he was one of the finest medical
minds of his generation.
His advisors and everyone around him, because of
his incredible academic success, expected him, understandably, to
go into research.
But he felt what he would later call
a call from God, this compelling desire to
go into family medicine, to practice obstetrics, to
deliver babies for his life and his career.
When he went to his mentor, his advisor,
to tell him of his decision, his advisor
literally wept at what he perceived to be
an incredible loss to the medical research community.
Whose expectations guide your life?
Others' expectations, perhaps even understandable ones like Peter
Rosey's advisors, your own expectations, or God's?
Here in the gospel, we are given a
picture of Jesus, who is at this point
in one of the first dynamics, a dynamic
that will play out again and again and
again throughout his ministry, where there are warring
expectations on all sides of what he is
supposed to do.
Indeed, everyone has an expectation of Jesus.
Everyone has an expectation of this rabbi who
teaches with an authority unlike anyone else.
And indeed, it will get stronger and stronger
and stronger.
Indeed, he will so disrupt other people's expectations
that ultimately it will, in significant part, lead
to his execution and his death.
He is one who is caught in the
vice grip of expectation and of what he
is supposed to be doing.
And yet we see Jesus and we can
be given the power from Jesus to live
a life not for others' expectations of what
we're to be about or our own expectations
of what we're to do, but Jesus is
freed to live for the Father's expectations and
to do the expectations of the kingdom of
God and the kingdom of God alone.
How?
How does he live that life?
How does he have that freedom?
And how can we get that freedom from
him?
We'll look at the gospel together, so you
can look at Mark.
I'm going to break this small passage.
We'll look at the last verses of Mark
there, verses 35 to 39.
The first section is great expectations, verses 36
to 37, which really describes in many ways
the human condition, what it is to live
as a human being with the swell of
expectations all around us.
Great expectations.
And then verses 35 and 38 to 39,
greater expectation.
Now we read and read this morning that
there were actually people lining up at the
door of Simon or Peter.
It's the same name used for the same
person.
They're lining up at Simon's mother-in-law's
house.
What's happening is that people are beginning to
understand who Jesus is.
He is a rabbi.
They have a category for that.
It was like an ancient Near Eastern teacher.
They would have schools of followers who would
follow them to learn their teaching.
This happened in the Hebraic culture, happened in
the Greek culture.
But this rabbi is actually doing things that
other rabbis have not done.
He's actually able to lay hands on people
and unclean spirits come out of them.
If you're interested in how the Bible talks
about demons, unclean spirits, I taught on this
extensively last week.
He's able to lay hands on people and
when they have a fever, it goes away.
He teaches in a way that's so compelling,
you don't want it ever to end.
And when you know he's gonna begin teaching
again the next day, you'll do everything you
can to get to that teaching.
Hundreds will become thousands upon thousands who are
finding Jesus and wanting to hear from him.
They're literally lining up probably hundreds of them
outside of this door.
Jesus's ministry, his rabbinic school is seeing unparalleled
success.
The whole city has gathered.
And success always demands more success.
Why is it that he gets up very
early in the morning, verse 36, it's still
dark, he departs.
A lot of detail given to us by
a writer, Mark, who gives you very little
detail, because very likely he has to go
to all these measures so that he can
just get some time alone because everyone wants
to be with him all the time.
His success breeds more success, breeds more success.
Indeed, you can hear kind of the success
avalanche starting in Simon's tone.
Everyone is looking for you.
You have set into place expectations of your
wonder and your amazing abilities.
Success breeds success, breeds success.
A business writer, David Allen, in the book
Productivity, puts it this way.
The better you get, the better you better
get.
Isn't that a perfect way to describe how
many, so many of us feel in the
American life?
The better you get, the better you better
get.
Success breeds success, breeds success.
Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, right?
It's this massive locomotive train that's just moving
down the tracks faster and faster and faster
and faster.
As a preacher, especially as a young preacher,
I felt this all the time.
I wouldn't wake up exhilarated on Monday morning
from a great sermon where people told me
that they loved it.
I'd wake up going, how do I do
it again?
And then again.
I started doing the math and think, okay,
if I preach to a certain age, how
many more Sundays do I have to preach?
How can I keep this up?
Look at that railroad track with that locomotive
just down the street.
It's going to kill me.
As an athlete, as a runner, you run
a great race, and you know, the two
days later you should run a better race.
You wanted a better time.
You wanted to beat your competitor by more
than you did the time before.
Success creates profound expectation.
And if you've even had a little success,
you've even had a little productivity or fruitfulness,
perhaps you've known how that can begin to
develop immense pressure.
The better you get, the better you better
get.
Underneath all of that, for me, for so
many of us is this incredible terror.
I'm going to disappoint those who have incredible
expectations of me.
I'm going to profoundly disappoint others.
Often expectations come from those who know us
the best.
Simon is likely one of those who is
closest to Jesus.
So it's Simon who comes.
Simon has been given entrance into Jesus's life.
Simon, who knows him well enough to know,
he probably snuck out early and went to
a desolate place.
And I know his favorite desolate place outside
Capernaum.
That's the town that they're in.
So I'll go there and find him.
Now, to be clear, there are expectations of
those who know us, who are closest, that
are good expectations.
Parents can have right expectations of children.
Professors can have right expectations of students.
Employers can have good expectations of employees.
But often those who are closest to us
can have expectations that are mixed up.
Maybe some of it's good.
Maybe some of the expectations is built out
of their own life and disappointments.
And now they expect something of us that
they themselves couldn't do.
Maybe they're taking in expectations of the culture
and they expect of us what the culture
expects, as well as what they expect, as
well as what they may want to expect.
It gets all mixed up and can grow
in this kind of developing and stronger and
stronger pressure.
Catherine and I for several years, we worked
closely with second-generation immigrants, most of the
children of first-generation immigrants.
Their parents had sacrificed immense amounts of money,
time, energy, and have found a way to
get them to university or college.
And we would work with these college students
who were crushed by understandable parental expectation.
Most of the students were Christians, and they
didn't know how to work through the fog
of these expectations and their parents thinking, you
will do this profession.
You will be successful in this way.
You will have this GPA.
And they would say, how do I get
through this?
I mean, I want to honor my parents,
but I'm stuck.
And they would find that the only way,
the only way through that crushing vice grip
dynamic was to find some way in which
they could hear the voice of God and
live by God's call, yes, to honor their
parents, but also to do what God had
told them to do and to ultimately obey
God more than others.
We'll talk more about that in just several
minutes.
Now, Jesus doesn't struggle with the next piece,
but for many of us, it may not
even be that those close to us or
our own success is what creates this expectation
weight.
It's our own expectations.
Just generally, I think as Americans, we have
extraordinarily high expectations of ourselves, everyone around us,
and our conditions.
As a historian, David Borstein, he said this
about Americans.
I think it's very insightful.
He says, we expect to eat and stay
thin, to be constantly on the move and
ever more neighborly, to go to a church
of our choice and yet feel its guiding
power over us, to revere God and to
be God.
Never have people been more than masters of
their environment, yet never have people felt more
deceived and disappointed.
For never has a people, the American people,
expected so much more than the world could
offer.
Is it at all possible that the crush
of expectation is generated by yourself more than
anyone else?
You expect to be perfect mother.
There's a kind of specter ghost of what
that perfect mother would be, should be, could
be.
Perfect father, perfect employee, perfect, well-rounded, absolute
renaissance person who's an extreme in any way,
gifted in about 17 different things, perfect Christian.
Or maybe you've said, you know what?
I've observed this culture and it's a very
high expectation culture and I refuse to play
that game.
So I will live by low expectations.
Indeed, I will have such exceedingly low expectations
that I can't help but exceed them.
And when I exceed them, I'll give myself
points for it.
So I'm going to actually flip this whole
system on its back and have very low
expectations for my life and myself.
Of course, if you do that, which many
of us do in reaction, you're still in
the game.
You're just playing it a different way.
And you can still have that same crushing
sense of living by your own guidelines, your
own expectation.
How do we get out of this?
This is one of the most pragmatic ways
to understand the sinful human condition by which
these realities can be pressure for some of
us.
They can be challenges for some of us.
They can actually become idols for some of
us.
Others' expectations and our own expectations and pictures
and ideas of what we should be become
a kind of idolatry of our hearts whereby
we have to live up to this and
live by this in such a way that
those guidelines and those expectations guide our lives
far more than God.
How do we live by greater expectations?
What we see in Jesus is there's two
things that he employs in this short passage
alone.
It's not only provide a model for us,
they do, but they provide a way in
which he wants to empower us by his
presence to live.
The first is that his expectations were formed
in prayer.
And second, his expectations were formed by the
kingdom of God, the presence of God, the
reign of God.
That's what I mean when I say kingdom
of God.
Throughout the scriptures in the New Testament when
we read about the life of Jesus, he's
always slipping away to pray.
Is Jesus always slipping away to pray so
that he can show himself to be the
pious, reverent rabbi he's supposed to be?
Well, he was pious and he was reverent,
but I don't think that's why he was
slipping away to pray.
Jesus understood prayer and understood that in prayer,
the expectations of others that can come crushing
upon a person are reoriented to the expectations
of God the Father.
That indeed one of the reasons why we
have to pray and what happens when you
begin to understand prayer as communion with the
Father and bonding with the Father, friendship with
God, is that you are rushing to prayer.
You are waking up early or going late
or slipping out at your lunch break or
whatever you can do because you need your
expectations that are beginning to come from other
forces and other ways and beginning to crush
you and weigh you down.
You need them reoriented.
You need to hear from God the Father
yet again.
What are my expectations?
What am I supposed to live?
How am I living?
The prayer is a reorientation and a correction
of the expectations of others and our culture
and our society.
That's what happens in prayer.
You're reset in the kingdom of God.
Your mind is cleared as to what you're
living for.
Learn to ask this question in prayer.
Father, what would you have me do?
That's an extension.
That's the way to extrapolate on thy kingdom
come.
They were taught to pray in the Our
Father.
Father, what would you have me do?
And then learn to listen to his response.
Let him orient what he expects of you.
For it's a grace-filled expectation.
It's a mercy-based expectation.
He knows our frailty and our human condition.
And yet he knows what we can become
in Jesus.
He knows what a spirit-filled human being
can be, which is the realization of all
that we were meant to be from the
beginning.
And we can in Jesus over the course
of our life realize that and be free
from the expectations of others that actually confuse
us and cloud us and provide incredible barriers
to moving forward in the kingdom of God.
You may be part of a subculture that
has an expectation of you.
You need to be clear about those expectations,
name them for what they are, and then
reorient an expectation of God.
That's at the heart of prayer.
Father, what would you have me do?
And learn to listen to his response.
Now we don't know what happened in that
prayer time between Jesus and the Father, but
we know that when Simon comes and says,
everyone is looking for you, Jesus says, let's
go on to the next towns.
There were hundreds in Capernaum waiting for him.
Everyone is looking for you.
But somehow Jesus knew there was one who
is looking upon him that mattered the most.
And that one, the Father, had been about
a work that Jesus knew from the scriptures,
because he knew the scriptures and they fully
oriented and influenced his expectations.
That that one was about raising up Adam
and Eve, that they may be fruitful and
multiply.
That that one, this God, this God of
the kingdom, was about raising up Abraham, that
he may go out from Ur, not stay
but be sent out, that indeed all nations
would come to know who God was through
him.
That that one was the one who Joshua,
he called Joshua to cross that river Jordan
and move into the promised land, that again
there could be multiplication of the work of
God.
That this God was always about moving on
for the sake of the gospel and preaching
the reality of the love of God.
That indeed the gospel would be not about
staying but about sending.
And that our lives are not about staying
but about being sent again and again and
again, sometimes geographically, as in Jesus's case here.
He can't stay in Capernaum, as tempting as
it might have been, but he must be
sent out.
But it's true for us emotionally, it's true
for us spiritually, and sometimes geographically, that we're
always being sent.
We can never stay in one place.
This is a kingdom reality, and we orient
our lives around that kingdom expectation, and we
let ourselves be disrupted in our expectations of
what this life is to be.
Because we've oriented by the Father, and we
understand the kingdom culture.
It's a culture of reaching out and reaching
beyond.
Jesus knew this.
I'm so moved by the story of George
Herbert.
George Herbert was a 17th century poet, one
of the great English lyric poets.
He was top of his class at Cambridge
University, extremely gifted.
As a matter of fact, he won the
notice of King James, as in the King
James Bible.
And King James saw the giftedness of this
man for the kingdom of England, and he
wanted him as one of his very top
senior leaders, probably a kind of a secretary
of state position.
But Herbert knew this, he saw this, and
he was a man so grounded in the
life of prayer, a man so grounded in
the kingdom of the scriptures, that he actually
left all of this behind.
Imagine one of our top senior post officials
in the American government.
Imagine one of the folks who are probably
gonna run for president in the next two
years, all of a sudden say, no, you
know what I need to go do is
go pastor a church of 50 in Montana.
That's what, that's exactly what Herbert did.
He left London, he went to a little
town called Bemerton, in a tiny village that
could seat about 50 to 75 people on
a Sunday, and he pastored them for the
rest of his life.
He happened to write poems on the side,
and said to a friend at the end
of his life, it used to be helpful
to anybody, you know, pass them around, if
not just destroy them.
Because he was shaped by a kingdom expectation,
not the expectation of a kingdom on earth.
This has been a huge personal journey for
me.
First of all, I'm wired in some way
that would like to please every single human
being on earth, and I'm actually intuitive enough
to have a pretty good idea of what
you're expecting of me, which is a very
dangerous combination.
And I'm driven enough to try.
And then I'm put in leadership roles, where
I have a large family, and they all
have expectations of me.
I have a large church, they have expectations
of me.
And then I have a diocese, and they
have expectations of me.
I've basically put myself in a profound expectation
world.
And I lead, so everyone expects, as they
should, things of me.
It's been times where, as I mentioned earlier
on, it's been crushing.
Times where I've absolutely slipped up and sought
to please you or please someone else far
more than God.
What's begun to happen over the years, as
I try to live a life of prayer,
and a life of kingdom culture, and God's
Word.
And it isn't always this way.
But I've actually, as I've bonded to the
Father more and more, I've become more concerned
about disappointing the Father than disappointing others.
And that shift has changed, in many ways,
how I go about my life.
In many ways, you have to be clear
about the question, who am I most concerned
to disappoint?
The Father or others?
His expectation is that you'll give up your
life to gain it.
His expectation is that you won't stay in
one place, but that you'll go out and
share the good news of God.
Whose expectations guide your life?
Others, your own, or God's?
In the name of the Father, and the
Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.