Mark 14:50 “Then everyone deserted him and fled.”

Following Jesus doesn’t make life easier or safer, does it. That doesn’t deny God’s providence or blessings for those who believe in him. Every believer can be confident of God’s promises. He will answer our prayers for daily bread. His angel encamps around those who fear him. The Lord himself will rescue us from every evil attack and bring us safely to his heavenly kingdom.

At the same time, those promises don’t change the fact that he lets us feel his loving hand of discipline. Jesus’ disciples sometimes had the idea that following him was going to make them national heroes, or land them in the lap of luxury. Modern day disciples sometimes share similar dreams. They believe that following him will make all their family problems go away. They think it guarantees a steady income or removes any need for doctors.

Bible history makes it clear that the enemies of God in this world have always outnumbered his friends. We’re on the wrong side, as far as this sinful world is concerned. Satan and his allies have no intention of leaving us alone. As soldiers in God’s army, we get shot at, too.

Sometimes Christians in other parts of the world understand this better. In Pakistan, the highest career most Christians can attain is taxi-driver or a janitor. Telling your friend about Jesus could cost you your life. In places like Sudan or northern Nigeria, entire Christian villages are wiped out, or they sell the women and children into slavery.

If we let our Christianity shine at work, our neighborhood, or at school here at home, we face our own possible consequences. What are they trying to do when they call you a Neanderthal or a prude for your old-fashioned morality? Isn’t this an attempt to commit spiritual homicide?

Don’t let it surprise you that Jesus lets it be dangerous to follow him. If being a Christian required no commitment, if it presented no troubles, if it didn’t call us to give up anything, would Jesus be the one we are following? He committed himself to us without condition. His life in this world was constantly plagued with trouble. He gave up everything to make us his own. Let’s not be surprised when following him brings us similar experiences.

When his disciples came to grips with the danger involved in following Christ at his arrest, they had a solution. “Everyone deserted him and fled.” At the moment, this seemed like a good plan. The more distance they could put between Jesus and themselves, the safer they would be. The less connected to Jesus they appeared, the more they could feel. They would run away and escape the danger.

Did they find the safety they were looking for that weekend? Did they feel secure once they had distanced themselves from him? Didn’t they spend the whole weekend huddled together in fear, reduced to a pathetic group of whimpering cowards? They were paralyzed and crushed by the guilt they felt over leaving Jesus alone.

The application isn’t hard to see. When we are together, we may be some Jesus’ boldest defenders. It’s safe in isolation. The question is, “how are we doing out there?” Do we resemble those the Apostle John wrote about, “They loved praise from men more than praise from God” (John 12:43)? We don’t literally get up and run away when Jesus’ teachings come under attack. We just bite our tongues and don’t say a word.

Part of the reason Jesus needed to suffer for sin was our own unwillingness to stand by him and defend him to others. And how does he react to those who have bailed out on him? Remember his first words to these men when he met them Easter evening: “Peace be with you.” He holds no grudges. He demands no restitution. He simply promises them peace.

That is the peace only Jesus could give. He had to suffer and die all by himself to secure that peace. No one could help him do it. No one did help him do it. Our own sin has always been a far greater danger to us than our association with Jesus. It is so dangerous it killed him. But now, he has taken the danger away. No matter what happens to us here, our souls are safe and secure in him. He will never desert us.

Mark 14:48-49 “Am I leading a rebellion,” said Jesus, “that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me.”

When Jesus was arrested, his enemies didn’t send the local sheriff to serve him with an arrest warrant. The mob of people in front of Jesus was a more like the ancient equivalent of a S.W.A.T. team. They came prepared for more than an unwilling captive resisting arrest. They looked ready for a small-scale military strike.

Why did they treat him as though he were so dangerous? Both before and after Jesus the Holy Land had had its share of anti-Roman Zealots, patriotic Jews with dreams of being some sort of Messiah, winning their nation’s independence back from Rome. They lived a “Robin Hood” sort of life. Sometimes they even stole from fellow Jews to support their revolution.

The Romans disparagingly referred to them as “bandits,” petty highway robbers who were no genuine threat to the power of the mighty Roman empire. Yet, they feared them enough to punish those they caught with crucifixion–the style of execution reserved for the most dangerous enemies of the state. Perhaps Jesus’ enemies were already laying the grounds for the political charges against him they would present to Pilate in the morning.

Jesus points out that he was not a quasi-terrorist on a mission of political salvation. “Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me.” They knew that Jesus’ was not campaigning to upset the political order. He preached no sermons about taking back the country. But they couldn’t believe that he was more sincere or selfless about his work than they were. They assumed that he was only interested in power over the people, because that is what they wanted themselves.

People still find Jesus dangerous because they fear losing power and control. Many Islamic countries ban all Christian witnessing. In some of them Christians must even worship in secret under the threat of death. Why? Jesus still wins the hearts of the people too easily.

Are we strangers to the attitude that lies behind all this? Isn’t it true that in our own country, at times in our own hearts, Jesus is resisted because we see him as a danger to personal freedom and control over our lives? People want to be captains of their own fate, and masters of their own souls. If we don’t understand the true and godly freedom Jesus brings us by faith, Christianity is seen as nothing but a set of new rules imposed on us from the outside. Jesus still meets resistance, like the people who once sent back an evangelism flyer I had mailed them. On the card they inscribed these words, “No thank-you. We prefer a self-defined religion.”

How sad for such people, and for the enemies of Jesus in our text, when we consider his words again, “Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts…” The main truth Jesus reveals is not about the people in front of him, but about Jesus himself. He preached the grace of a forgiving God. He lived that grace and forgiveness with both friends and foes. In a few hours, he was going to become the basis for that grace and forgiveness by laying down his life. If they had listened, they would know he did not come to take anything away except their sin and its consequences.

Every day he was with them. The Son of God cared enough about these souls, so lost in their search for self-fulfillment, so lost in their goals of earthly glory, so intent on building their own ladder to heaven (or dragging heaven down here to earth), that he didn’t stop at looking on them and try to help them from afar. He made his home with them. On days when it was too hot, he sweated along with the rest of them. He climbed the same hills to get where he was going. He paid the same taxes. He made his home with his own enemies to save as many as he could.

Can you imagine the high and holy privilege they had been given? What wouldn’t we give for a few hours, even a few minutes, with Jesus? They could have gone to him with their most disturbing questions, their deepest doubts about God. God himself was there in the flesh to answer them. Just when God was reaching out to them with his grace most powerfully, just when it was most clear that God desired them as his own, they despise Jesus as a danger to all that they hold dear. They arrest him to be rid of him.

Every day Jesus is still with us. He teaches us from his word. He lives among us in temple courts of flesh, the hearts and lives of those who know him by faith. Let’s watch and listen with hearts captured by his love.

Philippians 4:6 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

Anxiety and worry are sins we tend to minimize. They seem nothing more than natural reactions. Maybe we even regard them as appropriate in view of life’s realities. But does anything strike more closely at the heart of faith? If we trust God, if we believe his promises, then do we worry about the very things he has promised to take care of? That’s exactly what we do, and Paul tell us to stop.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus tells us not to worry about things like food or clothing. “Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.” In this part of his letter to the Philippians, Paul is dealing with a strained relationship between two ladies. And anxiety has a way of poking its nose into those situations, too, doesn’t it? We worry about how to fix it. We worry about being treated unfairly. We worry what the other person is saying about me. We worry about who is taking sides with whom. Maybe we worry that others will discover my own shameful part in the whole affair.

Such worries certainly spoil our joy. They also stand in the way of reconciliation. But worst is their toxic effect on faith. God calls us to replace such anxiety with trust. Trust the one who has cancelled the anxiety of sin and death by the giving them to his Son to deal with on the cross. Trust the one who invites the weary and burdened to come to him and find rest for their souls. Trust the one who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all. How will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Trust the one who has given us every reason for faith and joy.

How does such trust express itself? God will hear it in our prayers, won’t he? “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Instead of lugging our load of anxiety around and letting it destroy our joy, pass it off to God. Relieved of the burden, keep on living in joy.

Our Lord is happy to trade our worst for his best. With our fellow man he urges us to show our best. We let our gentleness be evident to all. But with our God we have an invitation to give him our worst. We unload our worry and anxiety on him with prayer. God will hear it, and he will do something about it. Then we are free to live our lives in joy.

Philippians 4:4-5 “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.”

A theme of joy pervades this entire letter to the Philippians. But immediately before Paul wrote this admonition to joy, gentleness, prayer, and peace, he addressed a problem between two women in the church at Philippi. Somehow these two ladies, Euodia and Syntyche, had gotten crossways with each other. He wants them to settle the issue and get along with each other. Then they can work together again. He asks the rest of the congregation to help them in this.

To this end Paul breaks in with this command: “Rejoice in the Lord always.” He expects that, with hostility giving way to joy, other changes will begin to appear as well.

The first fruit he expects joy to produce is “gentleness. There is more to this than meets the eye. “Gentleness” is about the best one-word translation for Paul’s Greek word in this sentence, if we are not going to use a whole paragraph. But since we have a moment to examine it here, I will give you the paragraph. People in positions of power (think of judges or kings) can often afford to show a measure of leniency and moderation. They can offer a controlled response to those below them. Just because those in high position enjoy personal security, and others can do little to hurt them, they are able to be gracious, calm, and generous. Neither fear nor force drives them to act. The sense of confidence their noble identity gives them, makes it possible. It is the way Christ our King has treated us.

We lose this sense of gentleness when we forget we are God’s children. We are royalty in his family. We possess utter safety and security under his protection. We have no reason to feel threatened and insecure. But if we do, protecting our now fragile self-image becomes more important than loving and serving others. We let them get to us and hurt us. We stop acting nobly in kindness and love. We behave more like the riffraff in the city jail—brawling, posturing, and competing.

No doubt Euodia and Syntyche slipped into this kind of behavior. They forgot who they were. Gentleness gave way to scratching and clawing. No doubt you and I have been involved the same kinds of clashes at church. Don’t overlook how spiritually dangerous this can be. In Galatians 5 Paul lists the kinds of sins that prevent people from inheriting the kingdom of God. We easily agree that sexual immorality, idolatry, drunkenness, orgies will do so. But he also includes discord, jealousy, envy, and fits of rage. They are the polar opposite of gentleness, and just as dangerous to our souls as the more “flagrant” sins he lists.

Paul’s solution? “Rejoice in the Lord always!” Joy will make a difference. This isn’t a manufactured peppiness. It isn’t the same as pasting an artificial smile on our faces. This positive and happy expression comes “in the Lord.” In the Lord all our sins are forgiven because Jesus paid for every one of them at the cross. The joy of relief replaces our guilt. In the Lord I already possess my own little piece of heaven. Jesus’ resurrection guarantees eternal life. The joy of that hope replaces our fear. It makes it possible to rejoice in the Lord all the time.

In the Lord I learn that I am not merely a spiritual survivor rescued from disaster. In the Lord we belong to the nobility of heaven. All things in heaven and on earth must serve us, even if they don’t seem to in the moment. We occupy a secure and privileged position. Our joy in who we are by grace, in whom God has made us, inspires our gentleness, even if others aren’t being so gentle with us.

“Let your gentleness be evident to all,” Paul concludes. By that he does not mean “put on a show for everyone to see.” He doesn’t want them to see it as though they were distant spectators watching through binoculars from the upper decks of the stadium. He wants all of them–all of them–to experience this gentleness from us. Let them see it making their own lives more pleasant. Let them feel it like a child getting to know Play-Doh by squeezing it through his own fingers.

How long could Euodia and Syntyche extend their grudge match while squeezing joy and gentleness through their fingers? How long can we maintain grievances when our joy and gentleness are evident to all? Nothing does a better job of burying the hatchet. When grace fills our hearts with godly joy, others will see it in our gentle lives.