How We Receive New Life — Handed Over to the King

How We Receive New Life — Handed Over to the King

Mark 1:14–15, the word that carries Mark’s Gospel, and the hands we were made for

By Michael A. Graham

Should politics and religion mix? Everyone has an answer. What is yours? More important: what do you think Jesus would say? What does Mark 1:14–15 say? And the question underneath them all, the one this sermon’s title carries: what do politics and religion have to do with the way we receive new life — with repentance and faith?

Mark 1:14–15 tells how the new life becomes ours. Jack Miller opened his book Repentance with what is at stake: to be near God and to have God near us is the whole purpose of human life. His booklet A New Life — the one this series walks through — begins with the promise — a loving God sent his Son to bring us a new and abundant life — then asks: why are so many people without this new life? Facts 2 and 3 are the answer. We are self-centered, not God-centered, and our self-centeredness raised three barriers between us and a holy God: a bad record, a bad heart, and a bad master. Last Sunday God showed us his solution in the suffering servant: a perfect record, a new heart, a good master. Now Fact 5 asks: if God has done all this, how does it become mine? The booklet answers in two words: repentance and faith. Receiving is this week; continuing is next week.

This week the Cayman Islands buried a National Hero. Mrs. Francine Jackson — one of the “Phenomenal Four” who stood for election in 1959 — lay in state at Parliament, ninety-seven years old, before her official funeral. At the service, several of the island’s political leaders learned I was the new pastor at Boatswain Bay Presbyterian Church and wanted to give me their answer: the church should stay out of politics. One of them explained what he meant: he remembered a church that restricted dancing. That same week England gave a harder answer at the Heathrow border: a Finnish parliamentarian turned away over a pamphlet she co-wrote on the Bible’s view of marriage. And the United States has been giving its answers for years, lined up under two banners: one side wants the nation’s laws and public life to honor the Christian faith again — its critics call it Christian nationalism. The other wants faith kept private and the public square secular.

I do not stand above these questions. I sit inside them, still sorting, the way you may be sorting. My own part of the story goes back to an April Fools’ Day in 2004; I will tell it before we are done. But one thing is certain: Someone knows exactly how politics and religion go together, and he is the subject of this week’s text. The heavens were torn open, and he came down.

One word keeps returning in the text: handed over. We were made for God’s hands. We keep handing ourselves over to other hands. The Son went into the hands of sinners to bring us into the hands of God. And receiving the new life means resting in his hands, by repentance and faith.

What do we do with a passage that opens on God’s herald, John the Baptist, sitting in a king’s prison, and Jesus walking into Galilee to announce that a kingdom has drawn near?

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

— Mark 1:14–15 (NIV 1984)

P — Movement 1: Everyone lives handed over to something (Mark 1:14).

P — Movement 2: We are in the wrong hands (Mark 1:14).

G — Movement 3: Jesus went into the hands of sinners to bring us into the hands of God (Mark 1:15a).

R — Movement 4: Repent and believe — rest in His hands (Mark 1:15b).

Movement 1 — Everyone Lives Handed Over to Something (Mark 1:14)

Everyone lives handed over to something.

Mark says Jesus began preaching after John was put in prison. In Mark’s own word, John was handed over — paradidōmi. Who did the handing over? Mark does not say. It was Herod, of course — he had John bound and put in prison to silence him (Mark 6:17). But Mark leaves Herod’s name out of our verse on purpose, because he will use this same word, in this same way, for Jesus. The Son of Man will be handed over into the hands of men (Mark 9:31). He will be handed over to the chief priests, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles (10:33). Judas hands him over (14:10). The Sanhedrin hands him to Pilate, and Pilate hands him to the cross (15:1, 15). The word John’s story begins with is the word that carries Jesus all the way to Golgotha.

Behind all those human hands, Scripture shows another pair. Paul writes that God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all (Romans 8:32) — gave him up, handed him over, the same word. The Greek translation of last Sunday’s passage uses it three times: the Lord handed his servant over for our sins (Isaiah 53:6, 12). So the unnamed agent is no accident: human hands did it, and God’s hands were underneath it, working salvation. And in Scripture, to be in someone’s hands is to belong to them — under their power and in their keeping.

Why does Scripture talk this way? Because we are creatures, and the true hands come first. The psalmist prays, Your hands made me and formed me (Psalm 119:73). Not everyone will grant that prayer. Paul knew it: in Athens he stood before philosophers who did not share his Scriptures, so he began with breath — God himself gives all men life and breath and everything else (Acts 17:25). People dispute this daily, under the same two banners. Donald Trump, our era’s Confidence Man, built his brand on the self-made man; Barack Obama’s famous answer — you didn’t build that — handed the credit to the crowd that built the roads and schools. Both answers hand the credit to creatures. And God gives breath and heartbeat to every person in the argument, all day long.

Scripture names what is true of every one of them: a creature, made by God’s hands and carried in God’s hands, made to live near the God who holds him and to love him in return. Jack Miller said it plainly: “God deserves man’s love. God deserves man’s adoration. And it is an awful thing to love yourself instead of God. It is a dreadful thing.” From his first breath there are hands under a man. His only open question is whose hands they will be.

Everyone lives handed over to something (Mark 1:14).

Movement 2 — The Wrong Hands (Mark 1:14)

We are in the wrong hands. The text’s first scene is God’s herald sitting in a king’s prison.

Why was John in that prison? For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). One sentence about the king’s marriage. Herod faced a choice: give up the marriage, or silence the preacher. He kept the marriage and jailed the preacher.

Jesus’s own words make the diagnosis (Mark 1:15): The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. God’s throne rules over all (Psalm 103:19) — so Jesus must mean something more particular: God’s saving reign has arrived in person, come near to land it means to take back. The announcement tells us what Galilee was, and what we are: territory under another rule. Under what authority have we been living?

Mark has already shown us who stands behind the smaller hands. In the wilderness, just before our passage, Satan showed Jesus the kingdoms of the world and claimed them for his own: it has been given to me (Luke 4:6) — handed over to me. Is it true? The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it (Psalm 24:1). Satan has never owned anything. He is a thief, and Jesus treats him as one. Jesus described this world as a strong man’s house with stolen goods inside, and said he had come to tie up the strong man and carry the goods out (Mark 3:27). The stolen goods are people. The theft is real even though the title is false — Paul calls this present order the dominion of darkness (Colossians 1:13).

The Bible calls this captivity slavery, and it is — everyone who sins is a slave to sin (John 8:34). What is the chain made of? Augustine studied his own bondage and found that the enemy had held his will and made a chain out of it — bound, he said, not by another’s irons but by his own iron will. Every link is a handover, and the handing over is something we do every day. We hand our days over to work, our worth over to what others think of us, our security over to money, our comfort over to our appetites, our futures over to our plans. Each one is an act of trust: we place ourselves in some pair of hands and count on them to keep us. Paul uses the text’s own verb for it: they have given themselves over to sensuality (Ephesians 4:19). Even the man who trusts nobody has done it; he has handed himself over to himself.

Here the dreadful thing Jack warned about shows its face. What happens when I love myself first? I take on three jobs no creature can do: my own fountain, supplying my life; my own judge, declaring myself acceptable; my own keeper, holding my future. We were never built for those jobs, and we buckle under them. Fact 3 already named what the buckling produces: a dry, unsatisfied life; a guilty, accusing conscience; a dying body.

How did we come into these hands? Two ways, and both are true. We handed ourselves over: Adam took the fruit, and every one of us has repeated his choice in our own small daily transfers. And God handed us over — the text’s own word again, in its most sobering use. Paul says three times in one chapter that God gave them over to the desires of their hearts (Romans 1:24, 26, 28) — the same verb. That is God’s judgment. Underneath it all, Paul names the root. The first charge in Romans 1 is not murder or theft: although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him (Romans 1:21). We were made to love the One who holds us, and we kept the love for ourselves and spent it elsewhere. Everything else grew from that.

The old theologians had a name for that triple gave them over: judicial abandonment. Judgments like exile and plague strike from outside, and everyone recognizes them. This judgment comes first, comes quietly, and feels like freedom. It grants man’s own wish: we insisted on ruling ourselves, and the Judge hands us over to the rule we chose. But self-rule is the lie inside the wish. The self on its throne still takes orders — from the world, from its own flesh, and from the devil, who does his governing through every man who believes he governs himself. The louder judgments grow out of this one: So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts (Psalm 81:12) came first; Babylon came later, as the harvest. That is why Paul lists a society’s sins as the results of God’s judgment, and writes the wrath of God is being revealed — present tense (Romans 1:18).

This is courtroom language. The Judge has already ruled. The sentence he pronounced is the handing-over itself: guilty of demanding self-rule, sentenced to self-rule. And the sentence is being served right now, wherever a self is left to itself. People have a name for the worst of it: hell on earth. The name is truer than we know. The wreckage of self-rule here is a foretaste of the same sentence served forever.

Hell is that sentence carried out to the end — real punishment, imposed by the Judge: punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord (2 Thessalonians 1:9). The self that demanded its own rule receives it forever — left to itself, still sure of its own goodness.

People say it all the time: “I’ve got a problem with God.” Jack would answer, “God has a problem with you. He loves you, and his wrath is ready to burn.” The surprise is the point: we spend our whole lives on our side of the problem and hardly a minute on his. Our side: we will not come near him, and our reasons are unholy — men loved darkness instead of light (John 3:19). His side we never consider: he will not let us come near as we are, and his reasons are holy — your eyes are too pure to look on evil (Habakkuk 1:13). He told Israel, I will not go with you… I might destroy you on the way (Exodus 33:3).

We have a brighter phrase too: heaven on earth. Every utopia has promised it, every one has built it on self-rule, and every one has delivered more hell on earth. The failure begins in the definition of heaven. Take heaven to mean the world’s goods gathered to the self, and a world of selves each gathering to itself is the hell on earth we keep building. God’s definition is the life he blesses: loving him with all we have, and our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30–31). That heaven is real, and it arrives the way our text says the kingdom arrives: as a gift coming near — the holy city comes down out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:2). That is what Jesus stood in Galilee announcing. And his announcement lands on eight billion one-man thrones; it is news to every one of them.

We are in the wrong hands (Mark 1:14). And God himself has made a way out of them.

Movement 3 — Into the Hands of Sinners, Into the Hands of God (Mark 1:15a)

Jesus went into the hands of sinners to bring us into the hands of God.

Mark says Jesus came proclaiming the good news of God (Mark 1:14). The word is euangelion — gospel — and in Jesus’s world it belonged to heralds: the public announcement of an accomplished fact, above all a king’s accession or a king’s victory. Galilee had heard announcements like that before, and they came from Rome. But Isaiah had promised a greater one. In the verse just before last Sunday’s Servant Song, he wrote: How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news… who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7). That is the announcement Jesus came proclaiming — news, not advice: your God reigns, and he has come. And it is the good news of God in both senses: God is announcing, and God is announced. Jesus is carrying the news, and Jesus is the news. I know the herald’s job from the inside. The news is not mine to edit or shelve — mine only to deliver. And I needed it before I ever carried it.

The announcement names its hour. “The time has come” (Mark 1:15) — filled up, Mark’s Greek says, the way a cup is filled. Every promise God made — to Eve about her seed, to Abraham about blessing, to David about his greater Son, through Isaiah about the servant — has reached its appointed hour at once: when the time had fully come, God sent his Son (Galatians 4:4). The same God who handed John over filled the time to the brim. He was in charge all the way. And the announcement names its fact: “The kingdom of God is near.” Mark’s verb is a perfect tense: the coming-near has already happened, and the nearness it created remains. The kingdom is near because the King himself is present — in a real body, speaking out loud, in a province of a real empire. And Mark’s “come near” is the temple’s word — the priest’s guarded approach to the Holy Place, hedged with blood. The temple’s old question was Who may ascend the hill of the LORD? (Psalm 24:3), and our whole Problem answered: no one. Now the approach runs the other direction. God has come near to us.

This announcement of God’s gospel lands on a people who have surrendered themselves into the wrong hands — and under a Judge who has already ruled: God gave them over. Guilty of demanding self-rule, sentenced to self-rule. For rebels under that sentence, a King’s arrival should be terror. Amos said so: the day of the LORD is darkness, not light (Amos 5:18). But that is only half of what the Judge has to say. The Last Judgment holds two verdicts, and God is bringing both of them forward into history. The wrath is being revealed (Romans 1:18) — that is the handing-over we live under. And in this gospel a righteousness from God is revealed (Romans 1:17) — the acquittal of the Last Day, won in the finished work of Christ, received through faith alone, arriving ahead of time.

How can that nearness be good news for people like us? Because of who has come, and why. The beloved Son has come, fresh from a baptism of repentance he did not owe — standing in the water with sinners, already taking our place — and fresh from the wilderness. There he faced the test Adam failed in a garden with every tree full. Jesus faced it in a desert, fasting and alone — and he stood. He has met the strong man and held his ground; the binding has begun, and he has come to carry the stolen people out of the house (Mark 3:27). And why? The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). The King has come near in order to pay.

The announcement Jesus made in Mark 1 had a destination, and Mark 14 reaches it. In Gethsemane, Jesus announced his own arrest with the same word, in the same form, he had used in Galilee to announce the kingdom: the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners… Here comes my betrayer! (Mark 14:41–42) — my betrayer has come near. The text’s two words meet in that one breath: the handing over, and the coming near. Mark is not playing with vocabulary. He is showing what the first announcement was always going to cost. God will not let us come near as we are, and his reasons are holy. So for God to come near to us anyway, the swords had to come near to him. Gethsemane is where the King, knowing the price, stood up and went to meet it — into the hands of sinners, to bring us into the hands of God. Peter preached both pairs of hands in one sentence: this man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death (Acts 2:23) — sinners’ hands taking him, God’s hands giving him.

The swords that came near him in the garden fell on him at the cross. There God presented his Son as the sacrifice of atonement, so as to be just and the one who justifies (Romans 3:25–26) — sin punished, the guilty forgiven and declared righteous in God’s sight through faith in Jesus, and all of it begun in the Father’s love. And at the moment he died, the temple curtain tore from top to bottom (Mark 15:38). The guarded border between a holy God and sinners stood open: since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus… let us draw near to God (Hebrews 10:19–22).

Paul says what happened to us in that opening: he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves (Colossians 1:13). Other kings defeat their enemies by killing them. This King defeated his by letting them kill him. And when he won, he did not execute the defeated. He pardoned us. The overthrow itself is the rescue: self-rule was the sentence we were serving, and he lifted us out of it. The King has not come near to carry out the first verdict. He has come near to bring the second.

So do politics and religion mix at the cross? A king taking back his territory is politics — that half of the question stands. The other half needs a better word, and Tim Keller supplied it. Religion is what we unholy people do to try to draw near to the thrice-holy God. The gospel is what the thrice-holy God has done to draw near to us. Religion climbs. The gospel comes down. What meets politics at the cross is not religion but the gospel: the King took his territory back by drawing his rebels near, at his own cost. Jesus won his kingdom by dying for the rebels who held it.

Jesus went into the hands of sinners to bring us into the hands of God (Mark 1:15a).

Movement 4 — Repent and Believe: Rest in His Hands (Mark 1:15b)

Repent and believe — rest in his hands.

Repentance and faith are how we receive the King, and receiving him is the deepest political event of a human life: a pretender overthrown by mercy, an exile brought home — through the border his own blood opened — into his eternal country and his people. Repentance and faith are not two separate steps. They are one motion. Repentance names what I turn from. Faith names whom I turn to. Nobody does one without the other.

But within the one motion, faith is the root, and Jesus’s own sentence shows it. He does not begin with the commands. He begins with the announcement they stand on — and the English hides how firmly it stands. The NIV reads “the kingdom of God is near.” Mark wrote a perfect tense: the kingdom has come near, and it stands having come near. The arrival is finished. The nearness holds. That settled fact is the ground of both commands: the kingdom stands near — therefore repent, and believe. If I do not believe the arrival has happened, I will not turn from my throne toward it, and I will not keep turning — both commands are present imperatives, keep on repenting and keep on believing, a life resting on what stands accomplished. God’s kindness leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). John Calvin said the same: repentance is not only joined to faith but born of it. Nobody turns from the old kings except toward a King he trusts to be there.

Repent — the Greek word is metanoia, a change of mind. What changes first? Not this habit or that one — those come later. The first change of mind is about who gets to say what a good life is. My particular sins all grew downstream of my answer to that question. So repentance, in the language of this text, is a change of kings: stepping down from a throne I only pretended to hold, and coming under the King who has come near. The booklet’s definition guards the word from its counterfeits: “Repentance is… not our suffering or our good works to earn our salvation, but a turning from our sins to the living God through Jesus Christ” — with Isaiah’s verse for the turning: let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon (Isaiah 55:7).

The two words have to be said carefully, because the church has a long record of saying the first one wrong. When Martin Luther opened the Ninety-five Theses, he stood on this command: when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. He wrote it against the Latin Bible of his day, which rendered Jesus’s word “do penance” — and the difference between those two readings is the difference between two roads.

A woman once questioned me about repentance. She had seen “enjoying repentance” listed among my core values, and she waited for a private moment to tell me the truth: she hated repentance. She had her reasons. What she had been handed was penance — sorrow doing the paying, the religious project again. Paul set the two roads side by side: godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death (2 Corinthians 7:10). And that core value was not my own discovery; someone had to share it with me. So I passed on to her the test that was once given to me: if repentance does not lead to joy, it is not true repentance.

Repentance turns from both of our self-salvation projects at once: the irreligious one, where I openly rule myself, and the religious one, where I perform and comply to put God in my debt. Faith receives what God has done. It stops trusting the self that was sinking me and rests on the One who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).

It was April Fools’ Day, 2004. April Fools’ Day usually escapes my attention; this one I will never forget. The shrimp business was in its off-season, and my day was supposed to be filled with practical work — selling off remaining inventory, clearing credit lines for the new season, collecting receivables. Instead I walked into my office and found something on my desk: a personal invitation to a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate Democratic fundraiser hosted by Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader. I froze. Me? A staunch conservative Republican with a libertarian streak — an Ayn Rand devotee who had read Atlas Shrugged not once but twice, practically treating it as a second Bible — invited to a Democratic fundraiser?

I abandoned my work for the day and launched into action with all the self-righteous energy of a man on a mission. I called Daschle’s office. I called my own representatives — Jeff Sessions, Richard Shelby, and Terry Everett, men I had supported with words and votes and money. I called both national committees. How had I ended up on that mailing list? I wanted an explanation, and I wanted it now. All day long I ranted and raved to anyone who would listen, proclaiming my political identity as if my life depended on it. I was completely obnoxious and insufferable. My coworkers occasionally passed by my office door, and no one said a word. They did not need to; my loud, demanding voice carried every indignant word through the building. I did think it was strange to see so many people pass by and look in. But I was hyper-focused on making sure no one ever mistook me for a liberal Democrat again.

As the workday ended, the entire office crowded into my doorway. “April Fools!” The invitation was real — originally addressed to my boss. Someone had intercepted it and readdressed it to me, knowing I would not be able to resist a full-day tirade. I joined in the laughter. But I have never laughed easily at myself. I have always been a most intense person, and what I managed in that doorway was the uncomfortable laughter of a semi-public humiliation. Luther is credited with saying that you have as much laughter as you have faith. There was not much faith in mine. The joke was on me.

But on the drive home that evening the laughter faded, and a deep conviction settled over me. The fury of that day was not new; it had a lifetime of arguments behind it. I had left many of those arguments with an uneasy feeling — that I had wanted to be right more than I had wanted to love the person in front of me — and the feeling had always passed. This time the Holy Spirit did not let it pass. He cut in a place he had never cut before, with a question I could not ignore: all your coworkers know exactly where you stand politically — what do your coworkers know about Jesus? They knew I professed to be a Christian. But they knew far more about my politics and my conservatism than they knew about the Jesus I professed as my trust. That imbalance hit me like a ton of bricks. My political views had become my gospel. They were the message I proclaimed most passionately, the identity I defended most fiercely. I had been loud about my politics and quiet about Jesus.

The next morning I walked into the office and apologized. And I thanked them for the prank, because it had shown me something I could not have seen on my own.

April Fools’ Day was not the day I was born again; God had already done that. It was the day my politics were born again. I call myself a repentant conservative now.

When conservative Christians hear that, many assume the word repentant must cancel the word conservative — that I have gone soft, or gone over. It cancels something else: my politics were fired from a job they could never do — justifying me. I wish I could say I have gotten a lot better. Grace takes a long time to seep in, and dealing with my pride is like pulling meat off my bones. I am still the most prideful and arrogant person I know; if Jesus can save someone like me, no one is beyond his mercy.

Keller — whom I love — counseled preachers that the people in their congregations should not really know their political views. That counsel has never sat comfortably with me. My instinct runs the other way: get my views, whatever they are, on the table. But if my views go on the table, two confessions go on the table with them. I am wrong about so many things, so often. And I know so little about how to love the people who disagree with me. The thing I most want to be right about is God’s gospel.

Jack had the secret I am still learning. Everyone who knew him tells the same story: he could say the hardest things, and the words cut deep, and people could still hear him — because they knew he loved them, and they knew he was a sinner himself. He learned it from his Lord, who said the hardest words in Scripture to the self-righteous like me, and said them loving the whole way.

Believe the good news — the Greek word is pisteuō, to trust. And Mark writes “believe in the good news”: not just believe that it happened, but put your trust in it, rest your weight on it. In the language of this text, faith is handing yourself over — into the hands that were handed over for you. The booklet’s definition guards this word too: “Trust in the Lord Jesus is… accepting, receiving, and resting on Him alone as the Savior from our sins.” Accepting, receiving, resting — all receiving words. Faith brings nothing of ours along, and it receives everything of his.

And the verse the booklet attaches to that definition was first spoken in a prison. The Philippian jailer held the keys. Paul and Silas wore the chains. And at midnight it was the jailer who fell trembling and asked, What must I do to be saved? The answer: Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31). The man who kept the prison was the man in the wrong hands.

How does a person come to that question? Jack learned a distinction in a prison too. His prison ministry taught him that being arrested is not the same as being convicted. Many people are arrested by the gospel — stopped, interested, even moved — and never convicted by it. Herod is Mark’s picture of the arrested man. He feared John, protected him, and liked to listen to him (Mark 6:20) — for years. He never gave up the marriage, and he never let the preacher go. A man who will not be convicted by the message puts the messenger on trial instead. Herod did. The council did. And no preacher can move a single hearer from arrest to conviction. That work belongs to the Holy Spirit. Jesus said it on the night he was handed over: When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment (John 16:8). It was the Spirit who did it to me on that drive home. I stopped defending myself. The charge was mine.

But in God’s court, conviction is not the doorway to sentencing. It is the doorway to settlement. Paul describes his conversion in the very picture of our text: I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me (Philippians 3:12). The King who came near came all the way — near enough for his hands to take hold of a man. Surrendering to him is not a prisoner giving himself up to a prosecutor. It is handing yourself over to the One who was handed over for you, into his loving embrace. And the Spirit who convicts does not stop there. He also enables us to believe, and to keep on believing. Christ’s grip came first. And the case our conviction opens, the cross closes: there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).

Are the new hands safe to rest in? Jack answered from the opening pages of Repentance: “The Father, in the gift of His Son, has put Himself under eternal obligation to returning children. Having satisfied the demands of His own holy law, the Father must open His mighty arms and embrace every returning child. And He must do it every day. He has promised to do it, and God cannot lie.” The father in Jesus’s parable does not stand on the porch reviewing the prodigal’s speech; he runs to him (Luke 15:20). And Jesus says of everyone the Father gives him, no one can snatch them out of my hand (John 10:28).

Repent and believe — rest in his hands (Mark 1:15b).

Conclusion

Both commands in verse 15 are present tense — continuing action. The verse that tells how the new life is received tells, in its own verbs, how it goes on: just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him (Colossians 2:6). Receiving is this week; continuing is next week.

Mark keeps the question for the end of his Gospel, and puts it in a governor’s mouth: What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews? (Mark 15:12). Pilate answered with our word: he handed him over (15:15). Here this week’s question comes all the way back around. Should a preacher stay out of politics? How can I — in view of Mark 1:14–15, and in view of the most political and religious question anyone could ever ask? It comes with the announcement to every person who hears it, and even waiting is an answer. What have you done with the Lord Jesus Christ? What are you doing with him now? What have you ever started doing, or stopped doing, just because you love him?