Get Up and Walk · Week 3 · Saturday Recap

Get Mark

I have spent this week sitting with John Mark.

The young man who quit his first mission. The young man who caused the fight that split the most consequential leadership team in the early church. The young man Paul refused. The young man Barnabas spent his credibility on. The young man Peter took under his wing and called “my son.”

And the young man Paul, decades later, in his last letter from a Roman prison cell, asked for by name.

Get Mark.

What I Spent the Week Noticing

I have been thinking about the places I have written myself off.

The seasons in my marriage I have been certain were the final word on me as a husband. The places I have been absent from my sons in ways I am still trying to come back from. The professional rooms I have decided I cannot walk back into. The community circles I am sure I have burned. The prayer I stopped making years before I noticed I had stopped.

In each of those places, I have heard the same voice. This is who you are now. The failure is the verdict. The chair is gone. The bridge is burned. You had your chance.

The voice is loud. It has been loud for years. It feels like the voice of common sense. It feels like the voice of a realist. It feels like the voice of a man who has finally stopped lying to himself about his own limits.

This week made me notice something.

That voice is not the voice of God.

One Verse I Keep Coming Back To

I have read that verse before. I have never read it as slowly as I have this week.

Get Mark. Two words. The Greek for “useful” later in the verse is euchrēstos, from eu (well) and chráomai (to use). The opposite is achrēstos, useless. Paul, in his last letter, takes the man who had been the cautionary tale and uses the word “useful” of him. Not tolerated. Not graciously received. Useful. Sent for. Necessary at the end.

This is the same Paul who, decades earlier, in Acts 15, had refused to take Mark on the second mission. The same Paul who had been so emphatic about the disqualification that he had a paroxysm with Barnabas about it and they had split over it. That Paul, at the end of his life, writes get Mark.

God did not let Paul’s verdict in Acts 15 be the final word on John Mark. God spent decades on Mark, through Barnabas, through Peter, through the slow work of restoration, until even Paul came around. The voice that said “John Mark is finished” was a voice God overruled.

What I Want for You This Morning

I want you to do one thing today.

Take the place in your life where you have been sure the failure was the final word. The marriage moment. The son. The job. The friendship. The faith. The community. The version of yourself you have decided cannot be redeemed.

Hold it for a minute.

Then ask whether the voice you have been listening to about it is the voice of Acts 15 Paul (“he is not fit for the work”) or the voice of 2 Timothy 4 Paul (“get him, he is useful to me”). Both are Paul. Both are scripture. But only one is the voice of God at the end of the story.

God spent two thousand years collecting men named Mark. Men who quit. Men who failed. Men who got written off by people whose opinions mattered. Men who were sure their useful days were behind them. He calls them back. He gives them second missions. He hands them Gospels to write. He names them in prison letters.

There is a place in your life God is calling for the Mark in you.

Get Mark. He is very useful to me.

The failure was not the final word.

Next week we sit with a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul calls him “useless” and then “useful” in the same letter. We are going to talk about going back to face what you ran from.

— Lance
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