Jesus disciples were sometimes so blinded by their own expectations.

They were so blinded that they failed to grasp the truth he was teaching.

They latched onto their own hopes and dreams rather than embracing the unthinkable message of the cross.

Could that be true of us?

Today on Truth For Life, Alistair Bagg begins a series titled,

They Just Don't Get It, Do We?

I invite you to turn to Mark chapter 8.

Father, thank you for the Bible, thank you for the privilege of turning to its pages,

thank you for the promise of the help of the Holy Spirit to understand and to believe and to obey its truth.

We look to you in humility now in Christ's name, Amen.

All of us at some time or another have known the embarrassment of being in a group setting and somebody in the group has either spoken or acted in a way that is so incongruous that it has brought the collective response.

I can't believe he just did that or I can't believe she just said that.

Or if we're very honest, the issue in our minds is not in the third person but it is in the first person and we have to say that it was just this morning earlier on that we said to ourselves,

I can't believe I just said that.

I don't know about you but I've had a number of these this week and it is a salutary reminder of how easy it is for us to take our food out of our mouth so we have got plenty of room to put the other food directly in.

I mention this because we're going to look at the three occasions recorded for us in Mark's Gospel where Jesus announces his passion, his suffering and his death.

And on each of these occasions we're going to discover that it introduces us to one of these I can't believe he said that moments.

It would become clear as we go along.

Now let's get straight to our business by looking at the context in which this unfolding story takes place and in which we discover this strange moment and this ill-conceived rebuke.

Let's start many places but let's just begin with the question that Jesus is asking in verse 18, do you have eyes but fail to see and ears but fail to hear.

The context you can read for yourself, there's been the feeding of the four thousand.

The preoccupation of the disciples is with bread.

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