Hey everybody, I'm David Bowden and I just wanted to thank you all for the great responses that we've gotten to uploading some of my sermons that I preach at my local church onto our podcast here.

And so to thank you for that and to hopefully continue to give you things that you enjoy.

We wanted to do four more sermons on the spoken gospel podcast here from our Mark series at our local church

that I preached. And we're going to start today way back at the first sermon I preached

when we started this series on Mark, looking at the life of John the Baptist and the ministry

of John the Baptist. Because I think it really sets up a lot of the core themes that you need to understand

to see how Mark is presenting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and the fulfiller of all Scripture.

And so I think it will be really interesting for you to take a unique look maybe for some of you

at the ministry and the role that John the Baptist plays,

not only in redemptive history, but also in the narrative of Mark's gospel, particularly

with how he fulfills the role of Elijah and the people's expectations of who Elijah was,

who he would be in Israel's future, and what that meant for preparing the way for the Messiah.

So I hope you enjoy this four-part series on my sermons on the Book of Mark,

and especially that you enjoy today's episode looking at the ministry of John the Baptist

preparing the way for Jesus.

We are starting a new series through the book of Mark, and that series is called Who is Jesus?

And we're doing that for a few reasons, and we've titled it that for a few reasons.

One reason is this deep desire that those of us on the teaching team have kind of felt of just like,

can we just put Jesus in the pulpit week after week after week?

Can we just behold him and see him and fall more in love with him?

I know I need that so desperately in this season.

I'm sure your heart's due too.

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