Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Looking into the spiritual realm next on Light on the Hill.

The spiritual world is far more real than the physical world will ever be. And until you learn how to recognize that God operates uniquely and quite emphatically in the spiritual, you will never learn how to navigate in the physical. Navigating in the physical becomes a painful and difficult process if the spiritual is never taken into account.

Guest (Male): There's a physical world all around us that we're familiar with because our eyes can see it. But there's also a spiritual realm that is unseen and just as real. Failing to consider the spiritual realm leads us down a destructive path.

Today on Light on the Hill, we'll learn why it's necessary to look beyond the physical to the spiritual, just as Jesus did. Here's Pastor James Kaddis in Mark chapter 10.

James Kaddis: All right, we're going to start in verse 46. I want to preface what I'm about to share, which by the way, I do anticipate this not being a relatively long study. The reason why I chose to go over a short section here is because if I dig into the section that I wanted to in chapter 11, that is going to take a very long time. Instead of doing an hour and a half study, I thought I'd do probably something that lasts around a half hour or so because of the way it's broken up.

Nonetheless, this is important, and it is a very critical section of the Bible. Now, I have talked about this before with respect to the Gospels and how Jesus operates. We talked about his MO often times. One of the things that I've constantly spoken about, I've referred to, we've discussed on multiple occasions, is when Jesus interacted with people, he interacted on a completely different level.

You and I, when we interact, we interact with one another in a very different way. Perhaps the most common forms of interaction that exist between us is we deal with the words that are being spoken to us, or we deal with what appears to be the body language given to us. What we often times do is we provide reactions to the very actions that we see.

In other words, you say, "Hello, how are you?" I typically respond with, "I'm tired." I'm joking, but it's something like that. Or maybe you might walk up to somebody and say, "Hey, what was that all about?" And then you might say, "Well, what are you talking about?" And then there's a conversation that goes back and forth. But typically the way we converse with one another is based on that initial action, consequential reaction.

We see this happening quite a bit, and it is very interesting because this is the way we tend to operate in the physical realm. We see something tangible and physical, and we respond to what is in essence in front of us. Now, this is very interesting because there are certain variances of this type of interaction. Like for example, I meet people sometimes, especially if it's in a group setting, that they'll talk to me, but they'll talk over my head because they're looking for the next most important person to talk to.

I used to see that quite a bit at pastors' conferences, which is another reason why I don't like going to them. I have seen situations where you engage in a conversation and the conversation is a monologue. Many of us have seen those types of circumstances affect us. Then there's other situations where you begin to engage in what appears to be a reasonable, good faith conversation only to discern the fact that the person isn't really listening to you.

What they're actually doing is they're formulating in their mind while you're talking to them what they're going to say next. By the way, the most common place that this happens is when you are a father or a mother and you are interacting with your four-year-old or five-year-old or seven-year-old, especially when they got caught doing something they probably shouldn't be doing. They're not necessarily engaged in asking the question; they're more taking time to formulate what their next statement is going to be.

Of course, unfortunately, I see this amongst many adults as well. I had a conversation the other day recently over the phone that was exactly like that. It was like you did not listen to a word I said, but you certainly were thinking about what your response was going to be. The problem with doing that is I can see that a mile away, and often times the response that you spent all kinds of mental health trying to formulate became completely antiquated by the time we got to the end of the next sentence that was told. Those never are beneficial. They always become, on many levels, very frustrating and in many cases very difficult.

But then there's the kind of conversations that you see Jesus having with people. The conversations that he would have with people were so uniquely consequential that they could only be attributed to him. They could only be attributed to the way he acted, reacted, and interacted with people. This is sort of how it works. This is the status quo for Christ. This is his typical MO, if you were to call it that.

Somebody would come up to him, they would say something, and he would respond in a way that would be seemingly completely unrelated. You would go to him and you would say something, someone would go to him and say something, and then Jesus would say something that just completely appeared to not have any consequence, any relation, any fluidity with the conversation, or any continuity. It just all seems to be broken.

Like a woman goes up to Jesus and says, "Your fathers say that we should worship over here, yet my father says we should worship over here. What do you say? Where should we worship?" "Woman, go bring your husband." Wait, what does going to bring your husband have anything to do with it? How in the world does that have any relationship with the question that was just imposed? None.

You would at least expect Jesus to say, "What's your motive behind asking that question? Are you just trying to make small talk? What's the reason?" Jesus didn't do stuff like that. He did nothing like that. He would often times be approached with all kinds of statements, and those statements would in many ways be completely repudiated by a simple response that often times seemed out of place unless you are able to correctly contextualize it.

The reality of it is, if you understand the mechanism that Christ would deploy on a regular basis, contextualizing it becomes easy, especially once you begin to hear the response and then the response that goes after that. You see, what Jesus was doing every single time he interacted with somebody was he was focusing on the very elements that the average person could never see because they are physically incapable of seeing it, because what exists in that moment was in the physical realm.

Jesus was looking at the heart of the person that he was addressing. When he would respond, in essence, he wasn't really responding as much as what he was doing was speaking directly to the heart. He would observe the condition of the heart in the moment in which the person made their representation and then spoke to the condition of the heart which caused the representation to be made, often times addressing a subject that was completely unrelated to what was verbally being articulated.

Jesus could see right through. He could see right through it all. Why? Because Jesus was able to see through a set of eyes that very few people today have. Jesus was able to look at the spiritual matter far before he ever considered the physical. Now, I want to simply make this statement because I think it's important. I want to say that although you cannot viably, by any internal medical definition, observe through vision spiritual matters, let me say that those matters that are inobservable based on physical domains, based on vision, based on touch, or tactile, whatever you might want to call it, those undiscernible issues happen to be more real than that which can be physically discerned.

The spiritual world is far more real than the physical world will ever be. Until you learn how to recognize that God operates uniquely and quite emphatically in the spiritual, you will never learn how to navigate in the physical. Navigating in the physical becomes a painful and difficult process if the spiritual is never taken into account.

There are people who will hear this statement and will completely disagree because the premise to them is one that involves something that can be completely misconstrued if the Spirit of God is not living within them. There will be people who, even though they have the Spirit of God living inside of them, have learned how to harden their heart to his voice, that will still never understand how material a representation like this actually is.

Here's the reason why: because everywhere we go, we see replicable patterns in people yielding themselves to the physical realm while completely ignoring the spiritual, thus creating the consequence that often times produces results that create the conditions that we on a regular basis cannot seem to fix. Let me give you an example of this. This is a great tangible personal example of this.

I'm going to tell you this right now because I know that when I say this, I'm going to anger some people. I know I'm going to upset people and I'm going to be accused of being somebody who is insensitive, who is out of touch with reality, and every other thing that you can think about. I'm getting sick and tired of hearing conservatives—I hear it mostly from conservatives, I do hear it from leftists a lot as well—but I'm getting sick and tired of hearing conservatives complain about how hard it is for a young man to buy a house in this country because of the policy shifts that have taken place over the last 30, 40, or 50 years.

It bothers me. When my dad first came to the United States of America with nothing in his pocket, do you know what the prevailing interest rate was on a mortgage? The prevailing interest rate was roughly 22%. My dad got a remarkable deal at 18%, which by the way was not fixed, it was variable, and it capped off at close to 24%. That means if you were to buy a home at $200,000, by the time you got to the end of that 30-year term, you would be paying well over a million dollars.

In the early '80s, that's a lot of money. Actually, you would very likely be paying more than two million dollars depending on how the loan was structured. My point is, it doesn't matter how difficult it seems or appears to be. The issue is not the matter of policy that is set before everybody. The issue is the mindset that has been given to children that is anti-biblical.

It is a brainwashing that they have received. We live in a world today of buy now, pay later where people can go and they can get a pizza financed. You guys know that college kids can go finance a pizza? Pay it over three different payments over the course of a week. It's that ridiculous. Do you know the number right now per average American of debt? $36,000. Per family, roughly $100,000. And that does not include education, it does not include a mortgage, and it doesn't include any of that.

But here's the thing: the issue is not a reflection of bad policy. The issue is a reflection of a generation that refuses to listen to God's word and follow his principles. I just saw this article recently, actually heard it online. I heard a news story about this, how there's a lot of AI companies that are going to be encouraging what they call six days a week at 12-hour-a-day work schedules.

I am hearing people lose their minds over how that's abusive and how that's bad and you need work-life balance or whatever. I continue to tell myself, yep, that's how the world programs the mind. The world programs the mind to think that you have to work 40 hours, and if you work more than that, you'll die of a heart attack. You know what I think when I hear a story like that? I think, hmm, sounds like the covenant of the Shabbat. Sounds like an Old Testament biblical pattern. Sounds like you work six days and one day you rest.

The problem is the mentality that people have today is, "Well, I'm not making enough money, and that's because of how poorly I'm being paid, and it's because of the terrible situation that I'm in," and so on and so forth. The really truly prevailing understanding should be, if you don't have it, don't spend it. And if you don't spend it and you don't have it, then maybe the discipline you begin to incur will open up your eyes to understanding that maybe you ought to do a little bit extra work so that you can move in the direction that you're hoping to move in.

Now some people look at me and go, "Well, that's very insensitive." Actually, quite frankly, it's just a reflection of people who refuse to acknowledge God's word and the principles that we learn as a result of it. That goes down to not understanding the spiritual. It goes down to focusing on the physical more than you will ever focus on the spiritual. And that is the world in which we live.

It is why kids are being brainwashed. It is why kids are coming out of schools today paying $200,000 or $300,000 in school debt and having nothing to show for it. It's the reason why kids are being sent to college right now and being completely brainwashed because they were not prepared. They were not thinking through all of the issues that were related.

In this particular passage that we're going to read, I want you to think at that level. In this particular passage, you are going to gain insight into a world that is often times ignored. You're going to gain insight into a series of matters that often times don't get considered because they cannot be seen. And what I want you to do is I want you to meditate on an aspect that is often times understood to be invisible.

Because if you will focus on the characteristics associated with those things which you cannot see, you will find great victory in the areas that you can. It is aligning the mind and it's aligning the heart to deal with the area that sits in front of you physically and tangibly. That is a very difficult thing to explain to people. It's a very difficult principle for people to understand because they have been programmed to not operate in the spiritual; rather they have been programmed to accentuate themselves and encapsulate all that they think into the physical.

It's a broken way of thinking. By the way, this is the reason why I come down so hard on the types of activities that kids are giving themselves to today. This is why I come down so hard on the pure rush that these kids have for entertainment and for the culture that seeks to just be entertained on a day-to-day basis. Why? Because it's a tool that the enemy uses to numb your mind to spiritual things.

That numbing of spiritual things continues to set you up to experience grave failure here in this country where you are as well as the world to come. That's not how God intended for it to be. God intended for us to be spiritual beings who think on a spiritual level and place the priority in the area which cannot be seen. That's why we get the definition of faith that we get. That's why God speaks to us about thinking on those things, things that would appear to be intangible within the current context in which the world operates, but very tangible within the context that God sets forth in his kingdom.

So let's get into this because it's very interesting, and you're going to learn this very quickly what happens here. First and foremost, we'll start in verse 46. It says, "And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging." By the way, just so you can know this, Jesus's trip to Jericho would not even have been popular. For him to even go to Jericho probably would have been one of those trips that you just simply would not do.

Now, it was regarded as the pathway that would lead you into the ascent to the temple, and that's probably what Jesus was doing here. But to stop in Jericho certainly would not be something that would be typical of a Jewish rabbi, at least not in the context in which you would typically view one, especially one who was growing in prominence like Christ.

Nonetheless, he does this. Again, verse 47, "And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me." Let's just stop for a second because I want you to develop this picture. He is on a prominent highway. There is a blind man on a prominent highway.

The reason why he would be on this prominent highway is because it was a location that many Jews would find themselves feeling generous on because they're headed to the Temple Mount. They are ascending to the Temple Mount. Many of them are singing psalms of ascent, and those psalms of ascent often times carry within them very generous themes. If anybody who is not doing well for themselves, anybody who is disabled, anybody who is blind, or anybody who's dealing with any kind of functional or physical stagnation that would keep them from being able to earn would find themselves in a place to be begging, this would be the place to do it.

You would have people go through this area that were prominent who could help them a little bit. It was a place where often times you would find people in a spiritually generous moment because the activity that they would be giving themselves to, going along this road, would be one that was very spiritually based. They're ascending to the temple, and when people would ascend to the temple, the last thing that they wanted to do would be found guilty of lack of generosity or guilty of lack of any kind of reaching out to somebody who would be struggling.

By the way, this is why the story of the Good Samaritan becomes one that is so consequential in the New Testament, because it deals with this whole dynamic. It deals with the road on the way to the ascending road, basically the road that leads to the Temple Mount. So all these things become very consequential variables that you have to think through, and this is a man who is crying out desperately.

By the way, this is very important to note. The crying out that we're reading about here is connotative of something that would be very abnormal. This would not be a, "Hey, can you please help me? Can you hook a brother up?" It wasn't that kind of thing. This was a man who was screaming in desperation. This is a man who was extraordinarily desperate.

The impression that I get, by the way, when I read this specifically within the context that it was derived in its original representation language-wise, gives me the idea that this is a man who is consciously aware of how desperate his situation is and is equally aware of the person that he perceives to be able to fix it. I think those are two variables that often times are absent from the way we live our lives on a day-to-day basis.

I think most of us do not view ourselves or regard ourselves in a position where we think we should act desperately because we have been taught with the self-made sort of lie that continues on. We often times are blind of being able to discern how weak we are or how incapable we are. So as a result, in not being able to actively view how desperate our situation is, we get to the second area that is often times a weak spot, and that is the fact that we don't call out for whatever we feel like we don't need.

We do not call out for whatever we feel like we don't need. You're not going to ask a guy for help if you do not believe you need help. You're not going to cry out to somebody if you feel like you don't need that person. I think that's a very, very important principle to understand because there are two characteristics we see that this man uniquely holds that if the average believer held these characteristics, they would find themselves in a position of experiencing a whole lot more victory in their lives than they normally do.

Why? This man was desperate for help because he knew he needed it. He recognized his incapacity to facilitate the help that he needed was prominent. In other words, he recognized he could not help himself. The second thing was that he recognized that there was one person in his presence, even though he could not see him, that was capable of fixing the problem.

You're never going to look for who is capable of fixing the problem if you don't recognize you have a problem. I think most of us as believers, or a lot of us as believers, do not categorize ourselves as people who have a problem, and thus we don't motivate ourselves to call out for the solution of that problem. I think if most of us did that, we'd have a completely different way of looking at things.

Instead, we spend more time arguing about things that we think make us feel better, like intellectual discussions about theological points, instead of really understanding where the rubber meets the road and actually applying those things. It's very interesting to think about that, but that's what the Bible teaches us. We see the pattern being given to us quite clearly here.

Guest (Male): We'll finish up this message on the next Light on the Hill. Don't miss what Pastor James has to say on our next program. It's brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.