Date: 03/20/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Is Alive
Scripture: Mark 15:40-16:8
Description: Mark concludes his story with an earth-shattering claim that launches the life of the church: Jesus was really dead, but now he’s alive. He leaves us to ask two questions. Is it true? And if it is true, if Jesus really is alive, what are the implications?
Date: 03/13/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Why Did Jesus Die?
Scripture: Mark 14:53-65
Description: Why must Jesus die? Mark’s telling of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion removes a couple possible explanations. Jesus didn’t die because he was guilty: the trial of Jesus shows no one found any legitimate, legal reason to kill him. And Jesus didn’t die because he was powerless: Mark’s readers know Jesus is innocent and has power to overcome his captors, but he doesn’t defend himself. So why then? Jesus died to establish a kingdom you could live in. Mark’s chief irony and his central message is that Jesus comes to power and invites us into his kingdom through his death.
Date: 03/06/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus, Our Substitute
Scripture: Mark 14:1-52
Description: Describing the events leading to Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, Mark tells us a great deal about what Jesus came here to do: He came to be abandoned so we won’t have to be. Jesus was abandoned by everyone—Judas, Peter, his disciples, even his Father—and, remarkably, he chose to have it that way. Why did he choose this path of excruciating isolation? Because through his death, the ultimate abandonment, he established a covenant relationship that will never break.
Date: 02/27/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus On The Future
Scripture: Mark 13:1-37
Description: In the longest section of teaching recorded in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus turns to questions asked by the religious and the philosophical since the beginning of time. What does the future hold, and how should we live now in light of that future? The details of Jesus’s predictions (about the destruction of the Temple in the near future and about his final return in power and glory) have always baffled interpreters. But the bottom line couldn’t be more clear: because Jesus is coming back in victory and judgment, and because we don’t know when, our responsibility is to trust Jesus and stay ready.
Date: 02/20/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Religious Hypocrisy And The Love Of God
Scripture: Mark 11:27-12:44
Description: After a parable of judgment that sets the stage for his confrontation with Israel’s religious leaders, Jesus fields challenges from each primary group of leaders: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes. In each case, Jesus’s answers turn the tables on his challengers to expose their hypocrisy. In the end, Jesus proposes the only solution to religious hypocrisy: a love of God for God’s sake and with everything you have.
Date: 02/13/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The King Has Come
Scripture: Mark 11:1-25
Description: Chapter 11 marks Jesus’s arrival at Jersalem, an event laced through with prophecy fulfillment. Here, by an “enacted parable” and by a dramatic confrontation in the Temple, Jesus shows more of what he’s come to do. As King, he’s come to purge and to restore.
Date: 02/06/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Kingdom Citizenship
Scripture: Mark 10:13-52
Description: To this point Mark’s narrative has promised that Jesus would, paradoxically, establish the kingdom of God through his death. So what does this mean for who belongs to the kingdom and how? Mark answers this question by contrasting stories on faith with stories on self-reliance. In short, the kingdom belongs to the desperate, not the self-reliant, because it belongs to those who rest only on Jesus.
Date: 01/30/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Marriage By Design, Marriage In Reality
Scripture: Mark 10:1-12
Description: Still on the road towards Jerusalem, Jesus shifts the focus of his teaching on discipleship to the subject of marriage and divorce. As so often before, he explodes standard religious convention. Jesus answers a question from the Pharisees about divorce with an explanation of God’s original design for marriage. Marriage viewed from the perspective of creation, in the eyes of God, is an unbreakable bond. But how do we square Jesus’s marriage ideal with our experience in a world deeply marred by sin?
Date: 01/23/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Living The Cross-Centered Life
Scripture: Mark 9:30-50
Description: As Jesus makes his way towards Jerusalem and the death that’s waiting there for him, he narrows his focus to teaching his disciples what it means to follow a Messiah who suffers. The cross sets the pattern for Christian discipleship, and this text offers concrete examples. A life modeled on the cross is a life that puts the interests of others above its own, and it’s a life that fights a radical battle with sin.
Date: 01/16/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Belief, Unbelief, And The Saving Power of Jesus
Scripture: Mark 9:14-29
Description: In this story of demon possession and exorcism, Mark returns to one of his favorite questions: what must we do to claim the saving power of Jesus? It’s a story that illustrates what we know from our own experience: unbelief comes from many sources and in many forms. But in the desperate plea of a helpless father Mark illustrates another, even more powerful truth. It’s a decision to rest on Jesus, not mathematical certainty, which constitutes the faith that leads to deliverance.
Date: 01/09/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Glory, Shame, And The Christian Paradox
Scripture: Mark 9:1-13
Description: Just after Jesus has told his disciples that he must suffer and die, and that following him means they will suffer too, Jesus reinforces their confidence in him with a glimpse of his glory, a mysterious event called the transfiguration. In this story and in Jesus’s discussion with his disciples about this event, Mark helps us understand a central Christian paradox: as Son of God Jesus is undeniably glorious, but his glory as Messiah comes through a death of unimaginable shame.
Date: 01/02/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Is The Christ
Scripture: Mark 1-8
Description: The stories of Jesus’s life and teaching in Mark’s Gospel are designed to answer three main questions: who is Jesus, what did Jesus come here to do, and what does that require of us? Already, in chapters 1-8, we’ve seen the shape of Mark’s answer to those crucial questions emerge. First, Jesus is the divine Son of God, as shown in his unmatched words and actions of authority and power. Second, he came to fix what was broken, to establish the kingdom of God by his life, death, and resurrection. And, finally, Jesus demands absolute submission from us: a repentance from all competing allegiances, a rest in the sufficiency of his power and love, and a willigness to follow him with a life of self-denial.
Date: 12/12/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Christ, The Cross, And Christian Discipleship
Scripture: Mark 8:31-38
Description: This exchange between Jesus and his disciples represents a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. Just after Peter’s climactic confession of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus explains what kind of Christ he would be and what that implied for all who would follow him. Jesus explains to his followers—and to us—that there is no Christ without the cross and resurrection, and there is no Christian discipleship without suffering.
Date: 12/05/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Seeing And Believing
Scripture: Mark 8:1-30
Description: In this cluster of stories Mark helps explain why people respond to Jesus in very different ways, some in faith and others with persistent unbelief. Contrasting the disciples’ struggle to believe even after all they’d seen with Peter’s dramatic confession of Jesus as the Christ, Mark shows us that spiritual sight is never the same thing as physical sight. Faith—seeing with new eyes—is a gift of God.
Date: 11/28/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus's Radical Message Of Sin And Salvation
Scripture: Mark 7:1-37
Description: In chapter 7, by relating Jesus’s confrontation with the Pharisees along with his ministry among the Gentiles, Mark exposes the two sides of Jesus’s radical message: the problem of sin is universal, but the promise of salvation is universal too.
Date: 11/14/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Overexposure And Underappreciation
Scripture: Mark 6:1-56
Description: In chapter 6 Mark illustrates how we should respond to Jesus by contrast to two more examples of unbelief. People in Jesus’s hometown were offended by his claims to authority because they’d been inoculated through overexposure. They were familiar with Jesus as brother and son and carpenter, but he seemed too familiar for them to accept his radical words or actions. Jesus’s disciples struggle with another sort of unbelief, which Mark illustrates with the stories of Jesus feeding 5000 people and Jesus walking on water. Confronted with vivid danger, the disciples respond in fear because, as Mark explains, they failed to appreciate the significance of Jesus’s miraculous provision in the past.
Date: 11/07/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Is More Powerful
Scripture: Mark 4:35-5:43
Description: Mark demonstrates in these stories that Jesus is more powerful than nature, evil, sickness, and even death. In each case, the person or group afflicted with their malady is paralized by fear. Jesus’s response to them is his message to us: “Do not fear, only believe.”
Date: 10/31/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: "The Kingdom Is Like"
Scripture: Mark 4:21-34
Description: In this batch of parables Jesus explains what the kingdom is like by analogy to familiar images, all of which aim to show why the kingdom doesn’t look like most expected. The kingdom is like a lamp which, though hidden initially, is ultimately brought in to be revealed. It’s like a seed that grows even though the farmer merely goes to sleep and wakes up again; in other words, kingdom growth is inevitable because God alone makes it grow. And the kingdom is like a mustard seed, small in its beginning but unmatched in its end. If this is what the kingdom is like, how do we respond?
Date: 10/17/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: What Do We Do With Jesus?
Scripture: Mark 3:7-35
Description: There is more than one way to respond to the claims and work of Jesus. Mark gives us three options. We can respond by calling him a crazy eccentric, an evil demon, or Lord.
Date: 10/10/10
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus And Religion-As-Usual
Scripture: Mark 2:18-3:6
Description: Mark begins to document the opposition that builds against Jesus, ultimately leading to his execution. Why did the religious leaders, who were experts of the law, fail to understand the signficance of Jesus and his kingdom? How do we avoid similar error?
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Sunday School (all ages) - 9:00am
Worship Service - 10:30am
Sunday Evening Service - 5:00pm (Monthly on 1st Sunday)
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Office Hours
Monday - Thursday
9:00am - 3:00pm
Phone - 615-730-7267
Email - mail@edgefieldnashville.org
Edgefield Church Nashville | 700 Russell Street, Nashville, TN 37206 | EIN 62-0550982