Sermon Notes / Transcript

Mark 13:1-8 — Do Not Be Misled or Frightened

Speaker: Daniel Coughlin
Date: September 27, 2026

Scripture Reading

Our sermon today is from Mark 13, the first eight verses. This is the word of the Lord, and it's eternally true. As he was going out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, Teacher, behold, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!

And Jesus said to him, Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another, which will not be torn down. And as he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew were questioning him privately. Tell us when these things will be, and what will be the sign when all these things are going to be fulfilled?

And Jesus began to say to them, see to it that no one misleads you. Many will come in my name, saying, I am he and will mislead many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened. Those things must take place, but that is not yet the end.

For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pains. This is the word of the Lord.

Prayer

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Perhaps because of all the hospital time, but death and goodbyes are on my mind a lot.

And and reading this passage, it seems like Jesus is saying goodbye to the temple. You know, he when he came to Jerusalem, the first thing he did was he he went in and examined it and saw how people were mistreating it. And so he went in. It's easy to think when he overturns the money changers tables and and creates his cord into a whip.

This is this is anger and and malice and judgment. And it is. It is. Anytime you see something that you love being mistreated, don't you get angry? Shouldn't you get angry? From From man's standpoint though, we tend to we tend to think whatever situation we're in is always gonna last forever.

Right? Like do you do you remember back in high school? You get this sense that you're always gonna be in high school, right? Like there's these adults and they're old, you know, those 40-year-olds, those thirty, you know, those old people there. But you know, this is life, right?

The confines of the high school walls, the bus trips, the sporting events, you stay busy enough and it's easy to think this is what life's always gonna be like. And then and then Lord willing you you grow up a little bit and and you meet someone, you get married and you have kids, right?

And these kids, they demand everything of you, right? There's they need to be diapers changed, they need to be fed, they need to be strapped in the car seats. And so it's like, all right, now this is your world. Like and it's always gonna be this way.

There's always gonna be little ones pulling at your pant legs, and there's always gonna be someone needing something like mouth wiped or bottom wiped or you know something wiped. And then the kids grow up. And I don't know, maybe someday you get out over the idea that life's always going to be like this, but I don't think so.

I think even empty nested with your husband, with your wife, it's like okay, life's always gonna be like this. And then sickness comes. And all of a sudden it doesn't seem like life's always going to be like this anymore. And here's Jesus looking at his temple.

You know, we live, what, 70 years, 80 years? The temple, God's presence. It had been around for so long, Phil read to you out out of of Ezra, that was the building of the second temple, right? The first temple had been destroyed. And the temple is not—it's a little bit like our church buildings, right?

Like we're sitting here in a lovely church building, 100 years old. Right? It's got some history. For America, a hundred-year-old churches is some history. The temple's not like that. The temple, you know, just I want to impress upon you the history of God's presence with his people.

God’s Presence With His People

Right? Because if you if you know your scriptures, you know when God created man, God walked with man. With Adam and Eve, God walked through his garden with them. He was physically present with Adam and Eve walking through the garden. But then sin came.

Sin came and it changed our relational nearness to God. Right? God no longer walked with man. What did man do? Man hid from God.

We knew it, God knew it. It was clear there was this relational distance between God and man. But God in his grace didn't leave man on his own, he continued to be present. Right? We can fast forward to Moses.

And Moses is walking through a mountain one day, and there's a bush on fire that won't burn up. And so Moses gets curious and goes and looks at it, and the bush speaks to Moses. The bush speaks to Moses, God speaks to Moses through the bush and says, and gives them instructions, right?

God's presence came to that burning bush, didn't consume it, but was there. Then God speaks through Moses, he speaks through Aaron. They go to Egypt, they pull the people, the Israelites, the Jews, out of the land of Egypt, and they start wandering through the wilderness, and God leads them, right?

Do you remember how he leads them? He leads them by day with a cloud, a pillar of clouds, and then at night with a pillar of fire. And God says, Listen, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you my presence in a predictable place. I'm gonna you're gonna build me this tabernacle.

You're gonna build me a place for my special presence, my holiness to rest. And it's going to go with you and be with you. And there's going to be, you know, different areas that different people can go in, all the way to the holy of holies, where my special presence is going to be specially felt.

Especially there. So that's in in the middle of the wilderness wanderings, they build this giant tabernacle structure, portable, modular, but God's presence is going to be there with these people. They are his people, and they carry around the tent of his presence with them. Okay, so they do that for a long time, and then they settle in the in the promised land, and we we we go through the promised land time, you know, the the the establishment in the promised land, and we go all the way through through the kings, through the judges, into the kings, and David sets up his rule.

And he he has his palace in Jerusalem, and he looks and he says, you know, it's not right that I have such a nice house and God lives in a tent. Right? Because while we like to go tenting, we all know that a house is better than a tent.

Okay? And so David has this beautiful house, and and God's dwelling place is this tent. And so he says, God, I'm gonna build you a house. And God says, No, you're not. No, you're a man of war, David.

You don't get to build me a house. But one of your descendants will, and your descendants will rule on the throne over my house for eternity. And so this gets partially fulfilled through Solomon who who builds the temple, the first temple, right? And he cuts these grand stones.

If there's any this might be an overstatement, but there there is some some amount of Solomon that I view like President Trump. Like I can just see him like, all right, it's gonna be this grand beautiful temple, right? Like gold and blocks, and and God gave the instructions, but Solomon carries it out.

And so you have this grand, magnificent temple, right? Worthy of showing off to all the nations. I mean, it is a glorious place. But the people of Israel turn away from the Lord, and God brings his judgment on them and their families, the whole nation of Israel.

And what happens to the temple is it's destroyed. It's destroyed, and the people are sent out, they're scattered away. God removes his glory from the temple and the people are sent out. They're dispersed to the nations.

Right? But God doesn't leave them there. God gathers his people back and, this is what Phil read in Ezra, and the people get permission to rebuild the temple. And did you did you hear? Did you hear what he read?

This always stands out to me. If I find the scripture. So here's they're laying these massive stones. Think of this. Like they've they've come back to Jerusalem, they found the remains of the original temple complex, and they're starting to like rebuild back up. And this is this is their their you know their their celebration the second year the coming to the house of God and they sang praising and giving thanks to the Lord this is Ezra 3 verse 11 saying, for he is good, his loving kindness is upon Israel forever.

And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. So think about this. Just the foundation, right? We haven't even gone to the walls yet.

There's no like fancification going on. It's just the foundation, but we're like big blocks. Have you been to the Capitol building? and gone in through the main entrance where you see like the foundation stones, and you see these giant slabs of like immovable stone. It's still impressive.

This is verse 12. Yet many of the priests and Levites and the heads of fathers' households, the old men who had seen the first temple, they wept with a loud voice when the foundation of the house was laid before their eyes. So they built the second temple and they started worshiping back in the second temple, right?

And God's presence comes back. The temple was rebuilt, and God again established worship there among his returned people. And now here's Jesus walking through it. And he sees he sees the money changers and he sees those selling, buying and selling right there in the temple.

The place that was supposed to be a house of prayer is again, despite being rebuilt, is again turned into just a common marketplace. And here's Jesus. Now the reason that we we read the the the Chalcedonian creed today is because there's just this irony of Jesus, the God-man, the presence of God in man walking through the temple, which was supposed to be the special place of the presence of God.

And people had rejected the worship of God in the temple and they'd rejected the worship of God in flesh through Jesus Christ. And here's Jesus knowing that the the days of temple are over. The days of needing sacrifices, right? Because the tabernacle system and the and the and the temple, they were made for the sacrifice system, right?

All of this was pointing forward to the ultimate sacrifice needed in Jesus Christ. And so here is Jesus Christ come to earth, born of Mary, put on flesh, incarnate word of God, and he is going to be the final ultimate sacrifice. No more forward-pointing sacrifices are needed.

And he looks at the temple and he knows what's coming. He knows the judgment coming. Jesus knows that the temple is going to be overthrown such that not one stone is left upon another. And about 40 years later, this came to pass.

Right? Jesus was crucified. The veil of the temple was torn in two. But the destruction, the judgment coming on Israel was not yet complete. The temple, 40 years later, was totally destroyed. Its walls and its towers were torn down.

And you can read the account of this in a non-biblical book called Josephus, The History of Josephus. And he is a Jew, not a Christian, a Jew who lived through that time and wrote the history of the destruction of the temple. But at this time, right, the disciples sitting there, sitting on on the mount across from the temple, looking at it could they they couldn't fathom like all the changes that were gonna take place all the changes of of the whole sacrifice system of of of the rejection by and large, of the Jews, of Jesus being the Messiah, of him being the resurrected Lord and King.

You see, they were a lot like us. They were enamored. They were captivated by the beauty and the glory and the majesty of the system that they had, of the buildings that they had, of the power, and even though they were under the Roman government, like they still had their own semi-autonomous nation that they had there.

Just like we are, right? It's easy to be captivated by big buildings, by success, by fanciness. Like you ever look at a book and you're like, ooh, that looks like an important book, because it it's, you know, it just looks good. Right? Or you drive by a church, a church builds a brand new building, and it's like, oh, they must be successful.

Or you watch them online and they've got fancy, you know, ever like it's easy to get caught up by bigness, fanciness, even oldness. it's it's not uncommon for people to love churches for something other than the word, something other than the fellowship, be it the robes or the incense or the sac the way they do the sacraments, the way they play their music, the number of instruments they have, the the lack of instruments they have, right?

Like you have conversations with other people who call themselves Christians and and you start to hear all the ways we care more about the the the circumstances of worship than the object of worship. Does that make sense? the the the beauty of the building, the beauty of the worship, the beauty of the music, the and it cuts both ways, right?

It's either the power of the organ or it's the complete absence and the the the soul voices of man. Right? There's there's all these ways that we put our our preferences as what should be the really important thing. Just like just like the disciples walking through the temple and being like, what a beautiful, can you imagine this is so beautiful it's like Jesus had just gone through and flipped things over and kicked people out and they're sitting there just being stunned by the beauty of the stones.

Do Not Be Misled or Frightened

We're getting to a point in Mark of prophecy, and here we see Jesus trying to disentangle the disciples for the disciples, the destruction of the temple, the coming of Christ's kingdom and its reality, and the end of all things, right? Because Jesus knows what's coming, and he doesn't want his disciples to put their hearts and their trust in the wrong things.

The church building was the wrong thing. And as we look into these prophecies, starting this week and continuing on for the next couple, we'll see that some things are really clear and easy to understand. Some of the things that Jesus is warning them against, super clear. Don't put your trust in this temple because guess what, guys?

It ain't gonna be here for long. Okay, so don't be so captivated by its beauty. You have to see through what this religion is, what this kingdom is. It's not about the temple.

Other things that Jesus starts to warn about are not quite so clear. And this is where it's it's gonna it's gonna get interesting in the next couple weeks. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna on the clear things, we're gonna be very clear, and on the not so clear things, we're we're I'm I'm probably not gonna add a whole lot of clarity, right?

Because it's not clear. What is clear though is that when Jesus said the temple is going to be knocked down, it was. It was destroyed. It's clear that Jesus knew that this was going to take place. And so part of Jesus' prophecy here is to warn the disciples about what was going to happen during their lifetimes.

It's easy for us to read some of these prophecies and try and put it all right now in in in our lifetime, but we have to realize that Jesus was speaking to real people about real events that were really happening in their lifetimes. But then where it gets interesting is there's also these, like echoes is the wrong word, but there's these ways in which these are types and anti-types of things that are going to happen throughout history culminating in the end.

The end of all things, the day of judgment. And this is, as the disciples pressed him, they pressed him to tell us the signs of these things That are gonna happen, we start to see this like this mixture of things that are in the present and things that are in the future.

Right? Jesus says, You should expect false teachers. And some of you are going to believe them. Many, this is verse six. Many will come in my name saying, I am he and will mislead many.

And will mislead many. Which means we have to be careful. We have to be careful as a church because guess what? There is deception. There are false teachers.

There are people who falsely claim the name of Christ to deceive you. So you have to use discernment. You have to use scripture. You have to be guided through more than just someone coming in the name of the Lord.

Jesus warns we are not to be led by false messiahs. Jesus also says, you're going to hear about wars and rumors of wars, and you're not to be frightened or misled by wars or rumors of wars. Why is that the case? Because you know think about think about your nation being overthrown by a war.

Think about your nation overthrowing another nation in war. You know, either one of two things are gonna happen. Either you're going to be frightened and misled into thinking that, oh, this is the end of the world when it's only the end of your nation, or you are going to be frightened and misled that, or misled, that you are the conquering nation, that somehow you are the same thing as the kingdom of God, which is also dangerous and also able to be misled.

Like there's wars and rumors of wars have real consequences on real nations, and we've lived with such security in the United States, I worry that we've we underestimate how significant the reality, the daily reality, the life-changing reality of wars are. Jesus says you should expect to hear about earthquakes.

Don't be frightened or misled about earthquakes. Again, we don't have a whole lot of earthquakes here in Kansas. But you can imagine, right? All of a sudden there's like an earthquake, and all the buildings around you fall down, and the earth opens up over there, and there's a new mountain range over there and and like that's that's a little disconcerting that that is that's that's my land changing my nation changes my temple changes my land changes how about famines?

What causes famines? Well, pests or weather, right? So I don't have any food. The weather's changed. The climate's changed. You hear anybody talking about the end of the world from climate change lately? Like it's easy to be frightened and misled by these kind of things, by the world changing all around you.

No, he says, wars and earthquakes, famines, and false Christs are merely the beginning of the birth pains. You guys ever been around or had a child? it takes some time, right? and what's what's what's difficult is is not predictable, right?

Sometimes labor goes fast, sometimes labor goes slow. You don't always know. Jesus doesn't say that these events are unimportant, earthquakes, famines, false Christs, but he says they're not reliable calendars of the end. They are reasons to remain watchful and faithful, not reasons to surrender to panic or speculation.

We know, for instance, that it takes nine months for a baby to be born, and even then, like there's days or weeks, and you know, sometimes at least weeks, where you just don't know if if if things are gonna happen or not. How long the birth pains of heaven of the kingdom of heaven are for, we don't know.

And anyone who tells you that they do know is a liar. Just like saying goodbye to a loved one who seems to be at the end of their life, though, we know there will be an end. Right? We know that it is appointed unto man a day to die and then the judgment.

But there's so much we don't know. Will this treatment work? Will they get out of the hospital? Will he have the strength to hold on for days or weeks or months or years?

The Confidence of the New Covenant

You see, the time of the temple has passed away. We know that has happened. The time of sacrifices and temple worship is no more. God Himself did not change, but the way He dwelt with His people reached its fulfillment in Christ, and Christ going up to be with the Father, and the Holy Spirit coming in and dwelling within us.

We no longer draw near through an earthly sanctuary and repeated animal sacrifices. Through the blood of Christ, our great high priest, believers now draw near to God, and by the Spirit they are transformed into Christ's image. Listen to how the apostle Peter wrote to the Corinthians. This is 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 12 through 18.

Therefore, having such a hope, we use great boldness in our speech, and are not like Moses, who used to put a veil over his face, so the sons of Israel would not look intently at the end of what was fading away, but their minds were hardened. For until this very day of the reading of the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ.

But to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts. But whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

This is the benefit of the new covenant. That we approach the glory of the Lord directly through Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ, we are being transformed day by day, growing in holiness and glory and transformed into the image of Christ our Savior. Growing in holiness and glory is a truer mark of the true church than any sort of building or program or fancy technology, having our minds and our hearts set free from worries about war and famines and earthquakes, not that we're set free from the reality of them, but we're set free from the anxiety and the deception of them.

Learning to trust the true and living God, knowing that liberty is in Christ, freedom from condemnation, freedom to see our sin and our guilt and our shame and to repent and to turn away from it, to pursue those things that are good and holy and true, to know our true Savior, so that we're not deceived by false prophets.

Trust Christ, Not What Can Be Shaken

And so, brothers and sisters, don't put your trust in things that look permanent but aren't. Right? Buildings fall down. This building one day is gonna fall down. I don't know what day, hopefully not anytime soon. This building is going to fall down nations rise and fall we just celebrated 250 years. That doesn't mean we're guaranteed another 250 years.

Nations rise and fall. Wars come, earthquakes strike, famines afflict, false teachers appear and promise secret knowledge. But Jesus Christ isn't shaken. The one who foretold the fall of the temple also went willingly to the cross, rose from the dead and now reigns at the Father's right hand forever.

Therefore don't be misled and don't be frightened. Don't trust in stones. Don't trust in institutions. Don't trust in teachers who claim to know what Christ has not revealed.

Instead, trust Christ, hear his word, and remain faithful in worship and prayer and repentance and love for one another. And when the world appears to be coming apart, which it does on a fairly regular basis. Remember that these things are not evidence that Christ has lost control. They are the beginning of the birth pains, and the king is bringing his kingdom to its appointed fullness.

Closing Prayer

This is our confidence and our hope, and this is this is what Jesus is bringing about. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, help us to not put our confidence in things that change, things that look permanent. Help us to see beyond ourselves. For the young men and women, help them to have a perspective beyond their years.

Father, it is it is a joyful thing to have young children, young adults, middle age adults, and those who are elderly, all worshiping and fellowshipping together because it it brings us out of the immediacy of our circumstances. Help us to see and honor those who have gone before us.

Help us to see that this state of life that we're in right now will not last, and that there is a day coming. There is a day appointed a man to die, and then the judgment. And so, Father, give us this kind of gravity, this kind of perspective.

Teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Heavenly Father, we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Carl, would you lead us in?