Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): Coming up next on Light on the Hill.

James Kaddis: As you approach every opportunity that God puts in front of you, you will not be affected by what I would call the proverbial politics that exist from within each and every sociological bent that you tend to walk down towards.

This is very important because these examples that you can read about in the Bible will absolutely change your life. If you look at it the way that it was intended to be looked at, then it will completely change the way you interpret everything that you run into, especially when you run into opposition.

Guest (Male): It's time once again for Light on the Hill. We'll be joined by Pastor James Kaddis shortly, who today resumes our series in Mark's Gospel. Pastor James is going to focus on a group of people that were living in unbelief. In fact, Jesus was amazed at their lack of faith. We'll see why in the minutes ahead. Turn with us to Mark chapter six as Pastor James begins.

James Kaddis: Now, I just want to start off by simply saying that when we get into the first verse here, it's already a bit ominous. The reason why it's a bit ominous is because there is a dynamic that exists within human nature that oftentimes is very difficult when met with certain circumstances.

I'll give you a little example of this, and maybe I'll open up with a little bit of a story or something that helps illustrate this before we even read the first verse. It centers around my time when I used to serve at the police department on a pretty regular basis. There was always calls that I would receive from officers, from the department, from personnel, from dispatch that were very heartbreaking calls.

If they would call me and they would say, "Hey, someone was murdered and we need you to do a death notification," or "This officer was injured," or "There was a shooting over here," those are the calls you take in and you begin to develop calluses to what you hear. But you are very saddened by those calls no matter how much you get them or how often you get them. They don't really stop affecting you in a negative way when you receive those calls.

And then there are calls that you receive that are just really exciting calls, like really great calls where maybe I'll get a call from an officer who's saying, "Hey, Pastor James, I'm in the hospital right now." You've got a smile on your face because you know he's expecting a baby at any moment and he's calling me to tell me that his baby was just born.

Or maybe you would hear news like calls that I used to get on a regular basis because I used to pressure guys to do this all the time even though they thought they couldn't. Then when I pushed them hard enough they finally did and it was great to be on the other end of it where they would call me and say, "You know where I'm at right now? No, bro, where are you? I'm standing inside my brand new house. I just got the keys. I walked in." I'd get those calls and I would be so overjoyed in my heart to know that these guys are able to live a part of a dream that they've always had. Those are always the happy calls.

Then I would get the calls that would make me happy but at the same time fill me with trepidation. They would make me happy but at the same time I would sort of tense up a little bit. This is almost every time what that call sounded like. "Hello? Hey, Chappy. Yeah, what's going on? Bro, I just found out that I'm now going to be a sergeant. I got promoted." In my heart I'm like, "All right, congratulations, we'll rejoice. That's good. I'll bring a cup of coffee next time I see you."

Then in my mind I start thinking, "Okay, brace yourself. Brace yourself because after I get this call, over the next several months, I'm going to start getting calls from all the guys that now have to work for this sergeant that used to work with him. Now they work for him, and their resolve to want to make his life miserable because they don't want to receive from his leadership is an absolutely terrible time."

As a matter of fact, I would get these calls on a regular basis and oftentimes I actually got to the point where I would tell some of these guys, "Do you know what I'm about to say next? No, I don't want to hear it, bro. I don't want to blankin' hear it." They're cursing. "Do you know what I'm about to say? Come on, say it, tell me, let me hear it. You're going to tell me that if I keep acting this way, then the time that comes when I get promoted, which I never will, but when I get promoted, they'll do the same thing to me."

That's right. You will get promoted one day. Don't say you never will. Just be careful what you do right now because the way you're treating them right now will be the way they treat you when you get promoted. "I don't want to hear it. I called you so I could complain and just let a load off," and blah, blah, blah.

It was always an interesting dynamic because the reality of it is you had two typical types of supervisors that came out. In Southeast LA County, you always got two types. The one that you got was the one who never wanted to push the line, never wanted to make anybody mad, so they would become one of two types of people. They would become a company man where they would do everything just like the brass wanted them to do and didn't really care about their troops. Or they did everything crazy like the troops wanted them to be and they didn't care about the brass. Neither of those guys lasted very long unless you became the second type of person.

The second type of person was, "I care about all the people that I work for and work for me, and I'm going to give my best to them. Even though they don't want to receive from me right now, I'm going to accept the fact that they don't want to receive from me because it's a part of human nature." Irrespective of what human nature communicates, I'm going to still be the best person that I can be, and those guys were pretty rare.

Now I bring all of this up because here's the plain and simple truth: mankind doesn't like authority. Mankind especially doesn't like authority when that authority seems to be exhumed by somebody who has always been in their life as a non-authority. Let's take it a step further. Mankind doesn't like to submit to anything under any circumstance because mankind was born with a sinful nature that desires to not only rebel against other mankind, but to rebel against a true and living God.

So the nature of the beast is ugly. When you begin to see the manifestation of what that looks like from within the context of Christ experiencing it, then it does a couple of things for us. The first thing that it does for us is it teaches us how to respond in an environment that is conducive to the very thing that we'll be looking at, which by the way might be one of the most valuable sections of the Gospels that you'll be able to go through.

The second thing that it does for us is it prepares us to enter into everything that we do with a completely different mindset that is absolutely contrarian to all that the world might teach you. It teaches you to prepare yourself, to prepare your way of thinking, to prepare your thought process, to prepare the way you take everything in in a completely different way so that as you approach every opportunity that God puts in front of you, you will not be affected by what I would call the proverbial politics that exist from within each and every sociological bent that you tend to walk down towards.

This is very important because these examples that you can read about in the Bible will absolutely change your life. If you look at it the way that it was intended to be looked at, then it will completely change the way you interpret everything that you run into, especially with when you run into opposition.

And that's very important. So let's look into this because it says, "And when Jesus went out from thence." Remember what's happening. Jesus has already just been challenged. Whether or not He's even God has already been an issue that's challenged. He's not even in the region where He was born in or familiar to, but He's close. He's in the Galilee region, but He's not in the area that He was raised up in. So He does what He does. He answers everything quite well and then He moves on.

When He moves on, again, there's a discussion that He ensues concerning beating death and so on and so forth. Of course we had that conversation because if you remember the story of this little girl who was dead and Christ rose from the dead and pretty much silenced the crowd and shut them all up, especially in light of the kind of doubt that they were showing to the point where they were mocking Him.

Then He moves on to the next place, but the next place that He moves on to is a place very familiar to Him and people are also very familiar of Him. That's really important. So let's look at this. It says, "And he went out from thence and came into his own country." Think about that. His own country. And His disciples follow Him.

Very important because going into your own country per se may be the most volatile place to go because when you go into your own country, you in essence will start interacting with the core of what exists within human nature that seeks to oppose that which is true and living.

If you were raised up with Jesus and you knew Him to be a good kid and you don't ever remember Him making a mistake or being flawed, even that, you will still have a hard time having Him walking around saying, "I'm God. I'm the true and living God. I will be the perfect sacrifice." He's already beginning to talk at that level. If you're confused as into whether or not He's teaching those things, you're about to find out right now what He did, especially as He went into this place familiar to Him.

Look what it goes on to say. "And when the sabbath day was come, he began to do what? He began to teach in the synagogue and many hearing him were astonished saying, From whence hath this man these things? And what wisdom is this which is given unto him that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?"

Now I want to stop because where most people will focus when they see this section of the passage is they will focus on the astonishment that the people were experiencing. Correctly so. They will oftentimes comment on the fact that what may be the greatest contributory variable to this feeling of astonishment may center around the idea that they all knew Jesus. They knew who He was. They were raised with Him. To see Him all of a sudden come forth with an immense amount of wisdom and discernment and understanding was very shocking, extraordinarily shocking to them because it was past any capacity that they had ever seen.

It was something that kind of woke them up a little bit. It jarred them. It caused them to realize, whoa, what is this that I'm looking at? Quite frankly, let me tell you something. That's a real interesting phenomenon that happens when you see people at one stage and then shortly a little while later, you see them accelerating beyond any stage that you can possibly imagine.

I've watched that happen on many occasions and it does a weird thing to your head. It really does. Like I remember this had happened recently, maybe a few years ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago, one of my nephews, we end up buying him like this build-a-robot set type thing. We got it for him and in my mind I was just thinking, oh well, this kid is a smart kid.

Honestly, I don't want to make fun of anybody or whatever, but when he was born, he was born with a head that was like extraordinarily larger than what you would see the average kid being born with and I used to tell everybody that means he's going to be insanely smart. Sure enough, I was prophetic because he is an absolutely brilliant young man. He reminds me a lot of myself in some ways and in other ways, he scares me a little bit. He's just a very smart young man and I'm very proud of all of my nephews and nieces.

So we give him this gift and I'm thinking, oh yeah, this kid loves building stuff. He's all into mechanical stuff. As a matter of fact, the kid actually works on the James Kaddis website, okay? He's a smart young man and we actually have a few young men that do that. So he's smart. We put this in front of him and it's a kind of a complicated set. I remember it being thinking like, oh yeah, this thing is in hundreds of pieces and there's no way in the world that this is going to be like an overnight project for him. This kid's going to take a few days and we on purpose wanted to buy him something that was a little bit more complicated so it would challenge him.

I got sick to my stomach because what I watched this kid do after he opened up all of his presents is sit on the floor next to me, make a makeshift table out of the box that this thing came in. I watched him pour out every single piece on the ground, look at the instruction manual just one or two times, just go over it, and then like a little factory worker. I mean that's the only way, like a factory worker can build something quickly because they've been doing it for years, they know all the pieces, they have them lined up. He looked like that to me. It looked like he was working in a factory and he'd been building these for years.

He sat there and before I could even finish eating the rest of my cake, like literally within minutes, maybe within 45 minutes, this kid put this whole thing together and it just shocked me. It was astounding because the last stage of his development that I actually was able to witness was some type of a transitionary phase where he was going from one level of cognition to a deeper level of cognition.

It's like when a kid walks up to you and finally says "Dad" the right way or maybe expresses whole sentences and you're shocked like where in the world did that come from? It's weird when you see them make these quantum leaps. But I don't ever remember watching my nephew go from the stage of, let's build five Legos, now let's build 10, let's build 20. It was more like, let's build two Legos, and then I see him a few days later and it's like let's build 5,000. Very interesting.

So you can imagine the emotion that comes from being surprised when you see a certain aspect of a person's development grow so quickly. It's interesting because that's the emotion that they're feeling in the moment. But I'm going to make something very clear to you. I'm going to make the assertion that that is not the intent of the author when he shares this with us. I am going to make the assertion that the intent of the author when he shares this with us isn't even to get us to focus on the fact that the people were astonished.

It's a fact that's pertinent to the storyline and it is something that is absolutely important to understand. But what he wants us to focus on is what Jesus did when He came back to a familiar place. See, he tells us that Jesus goes back into His own country and when He goes back into His own country, what you see happen immediately is that Jesus gets down to business. He's back in a place familiar to Him. What does He do? He immediately goes to the synagogue. He immediately goes about His Father's business.

When He's home and He's staying where He is and He starts to do the work that He's doing, people are astonished at the level by which He could do it. But the thing that should be the most astonishing here is the fact that Jesus is home and being home especially after a very busy leg of His trip, especially after being accosted by everybody, especially after the raging storms, the demon-possessed people, the dead girl, all the other things that He had to go through, you would expect that He would want to go to home to get a little bit of rest and relaxation and instead He went home to turn it up.

He went home and He got even more busy and I think it's interesting because there's a lesson that comes in that. The lesson is this: human nature for us tends to teach us that when we go to a place familiar to us, that place is oftentimes characterized as some kind of a sanctuary, and your home should be.

But isn't it unique that when people go to a place that's familiar to them, they literally just let it all loose? They rest, they relax, they don't really get involved, they're just sort of in a bit of a turtle mode. Yet Jesus goes to the place where He is the most familiar with, where they are the most familiar with Him, and what does He do? He gets busy.

He starts acting in a way uniquely stated here that is shocking to many people. Look what it says, folks, let me reread it to you. It's the sabbath day. It's the day for rest. The Shabbat is the day that they were supposed to be resting. It's the day where they're not supposed to be doing anything.

Yet on the Shabbat, the day where you would not expect people to engage, the day that you would expect for people to just pretty much... keep this in mind, folks, on the Shabbat, they're so legalistic about what they can do. So legalistic about what they can do to this very day. On a Saturday, you better not walk into any elevator in a big building in Israel without paying attention to what elevator you're walking into. And God forbid that you walk into a building that only has one elevator because they have these things called Shabbat elevators.

And here's the reason why they're called Shabbat elevators because they are designed to open the door at every floor so that you who's honoring the Shabbat doesn't have to push a button. Why is it that you don't have to push a button? Why is it that they don't want you to push a button? Well, according to their rules, pushing a button would constitute a spark and that spark would be equivalent to starting a fire and starting a fire is something that you can't do on the Shabbat.

You can't handle cash on the Shabbat, which is why on the Shabbat you can only use credit cards. And by the way, I just learned this recently. You can't use something like Apple Pay on the Shabbat or anything like that if it requires you to tap a button on your phone to actually make come up what needs to come up because it's the day of rest. You can't mess around with the day of rest. Isn't it funny how they all interpret that?

It's funny what Jesus tells us later. He says that the Shabbat was made for man and man not for the Shabbat. Isn't it funny how that works? So keep this in mind. The big point you should be drawing here is that Jesus goes back to His own country and He immediately starts putting His hand to the plow. He immediately gets to work. He goes to the place that He knows where He has been called to go.

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis and we're currently going through the Gospel of Mark. Listen to this study and more at LightOnTheHillRadio.com. Pastor James' teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at oneplace.com. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts as well.

When you have a moment sometime today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what He's doing. There's a place to contact us at our website, LightOnTheHillRadio.com.

We've been blessed by the feedback we've received thus far regarding Pastor James' new book, The Last Book. If you haven't ordered a copy yet, we'd encourage you to do so. This guide to Revelation covers the first half of the book, giving you what you need to know about the rapture and the end times in a clear and concise manner. Request your copy today at LightOnTheHillRadio.com or through Amazon.

If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there's also a place to make a donation at LightOnTheHillRadio.com. Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you to see current events with a biblical worldview. Look for these at JamesKaddis.com. Let's finish up our message now as we turn back to Mark chapter six.

James Kaddis: Look at what they're saying now after they observe Him. They say, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses and of Judah and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" And they were offended at Him.

By the way, it's interesting. I want to stop here to just point one thing out. Catholics hate, like literally hate this verse. And one of the reasons why they hate this verse is because this verse very aptly demonstrates to you that Jesus actually had half brothers and half sisters. The idea in their mind is that Mary stayed a virgin perpetually, which we know absolutely from the book of Matthew that that is not the case and Mark confirms it in other passages like this.

But what's funny is they're looking at Him and they're saying, "We know His brothers. We know His sisters. We know His mom. The guy's a carpenter. He's not supposed to be a super brainiac at least." They're shocked by what they're seeing.

Here's something else that's interesting that comes with understanding and knowing this. I believe that when a person chooses to do the will of their Father in heaven, that when a person chooses to act as God has called them to act and to stand out the way that God has called them to stand out, He will always bless them in ways that are beyond the capacity of most people to understand.

And when they begin to watch in that blessing that God has bestowed upon them in the most jealous and ignorant ways, they will condemn the people that continue to walk and strive in the will and the purpose of God. I've learned this, guys, and I'm going to make myself very clear. This is not a health and wealth Bible study. I'm not implying that at all.

But what I am saying is that when people walk according to the will of God in all sincerity and function in obedience to the call that He's placed upon their lives, God blesses them. I've never not seen God bless them especially in this country. I've never ever seen anybody walk with a curse on their head for obeying God and doing things God's way. It's never been the case.

One of the things that I find astoundingly exceptional is the fact that when God recognizes your willingness to honor His word because of the transformation that He's done in your life, He will always go beyond halfway. He'll meet you there and He'll uplift you and He will make you ready for the next thing. He'll put you together for the next thing that He has called for you.

So people will look at the blessing that is now upon Christ. They will look at His astute teachings. They will see the articulation by which He brings out biblical insight, not completely realizing that He is the one that was there from the very beginning. And in their jealousy, they'll put Him down. He's the King of the universe. Kind of a harsh position to be.

So they were offended at Him. In other words, they were stumbled, they were bothered by the fact that Jesus was doing so well. How's that for interesting? I don't know about you, but I want to teach you to do something I hope you do already. If you haven't done it, I want to teach you to do it. I want to teach you to start being happy when you begin to see other people be successful.

And I want you to be happy when other people are successful when they gain that success by doing righteously. When they gain that success by not doing righteously, you don't have to be happy for them. I'll tell you that right now. But when they choose to work hard and God blesses them, be happy for them.

Guest (Male): More from the book of Mark coming up next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This listener-supported program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.