More Than Just a Question: What Jesus Revealed in Mark 11:27-33

Jesus is walking in the temple when a delegation stops Him. The chief priests, the scribes, and the elders were the men who ran the religious life of Jerusalem. They come to Him with a question they have clearly thought through ahead of time.

“And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders, And say unto him, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?” (Mark 11:27-28)

On the surface it sounds like a fair thing to ask. By what authority?

But here is what is strange about this passage. Jesus never answers it. By the time the conversation is over, He tells them plainly that He will not.

He did not send them away empty, though. He gave them something they had not asked for. He showed them their own hearts.

That was more than just a question. And when you come to God with your questions, He may do the very same thing with you.

They wanted the upper hand, not the answer

Read through the Gospels and you’ll see a pattern. Almost every time these religious leaders question the Lord, they are trying to trap Him or trick Him. They were not known for being open to hearing what He had to say. They did not come to learn.

They sought more than the truth. They sought the upper hand. They were willing to sacrifice the truth to get it.

So the Lord turned it right back around on them. They thought they were probing Christ. It was Christ who was revealing things about them.

He still does that. When you go before Him, the Lord likes to try you and prove you and show you the thoughts and intents of your own heart. He will make it known why you do what you do.

What is the motive behind my approach to God? What is the motive behind my questions, my prayers, my service to Him?

God will draw it out.

1. God probes the heart

Look at how the Lord responds:

“And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things.” (Mark 11:29)

How many times have you gone to the Lord in prayer wanting something, only to find the spotlight turned back on you? You came with a request. He came back with a question. “Well, I have some questions for you.”

God cares about motives. He says so Himself:

“I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” (Jeremiah 17:10)

The reins are the innermost parts of a man, the deepest places of what he feels and wants. God searches all the way down.

And He does it through His Word:

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

What you hold in your hands is a book. But what God wrote in that book is alive. It pierces. It divides right from wrong. It discerns what you are really thinking and what you really intend.

You can keep a lot of things hidden from the people around you. You can even keep things hidden from yourself. We do that. We hide things and deceive ourselves. But you cannot in any way deceive God. He knows you better than you know yourself, and His Word bears it out.

God does not work in secret. He likes things out in the open. If I have to go about something in a secret manner, that ought to make me ask, “What am I doing? What am I hiding from?”

“No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.” (Luke 8:16-17)

I am thankful for that, even when it stings. If God is not for secrecy, that means He will tell me the truth I need to hear.

And many times why you go before Him tells more than what you go to Him about. I know this from my own praying. When there’s something I really want, the more I pray about it, the more God shows me my own heart. Then I find out that my motive is what He’s addressing, not the thing I was asking for.

If the Lord had only cared about supplying an answer in Mark 11, He would have just given it. He would have told them where His authority came from. Instead He wanted them to see that what was going on inside them was what God was interested in.

What is going on inside you is what God is interested in.

This doesn’t stop once you’ve been saved a while. No matter how long you have known the Lord, you will not reach sinless perfection on this earth. There will be times when your motives are wrong, when your attitude isn’t right, when your heart isn’t where it ought to be.

Even the man who could say he had walked in integrity still asked to be searched:

“Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide. Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.” (Psalms 26:1-2)

Suppose I went before the Lord and said, “Don’t bother examining me. Don’t question me. I’ve always served You faithfully.” That attitude by itself would call my motives into question.

2. God publishes what He finds

God does not only search. He makes known to you what He finds.

That is the part that’s not so much fun. When I go before God, I usually want Him to help me with whatever I’m facing. I want Him to answer my prayer. Instead He shows me, You’ve got some issues over here you need to address. And I think, “That’s not what I came for. I wanted this.” The Lord says, “No. You deal with this first.”

Watch it happen in the temple:

“The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me. And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed.” (Mark 11:30-32)

I believe they already knew the answer. When they reasoned among themselves, they weren’t asking, “What’s actually true here?” They were asking, “What’s the most advantageous thing we could say? Which answer costs us the least?”

That is what the flesh does. And it is an exact picture of what every single one of us is capable of. We look for the answer that brings us the least damage and the least harm.

The Lord already knew their hearts. He asked so that they would see. From what we can tell, they never learned the lesson. But that is why He does it. He shows you what’s in your heart so that you have the opportunity to make it right with Him.

Think about it the other way. If God simply handed me everything the moment I asked for it, where is the trust in that? Where is the faith? Where is the surrender? It would all be about me.

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)

If I say my motives are pure and flawless, there is no room for me to grow. But if I let the Lord show me where I’m not right with Him, then I have found a place I can change. I can surrender that to God and draw closer to Him.

It works the same way in the gospel. When you witness to someone, if they don’t see that they’re lost, they won’t see that they need saving. In order to be saved, you must first be lost. And for God’s children, in order to grow, you must first see that you need growing. You must come to the point of saying, My heart isn’t what it ought to be.

Then comes the promise:

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)

God is not exposing you to shame you. He is pleading with you to come home:

“Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel; Thus ye speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live? Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:10-11)

That plea comes first and foremost for salvation. But it carries on every day after that, too:

“And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” (Galatians 5:24) “And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

So where is your priority? Is your goal to win a victory for yourself, or to let God have His way in you?

I’ll be honest with you. I sometimes wonder how many lessons I’ve missed that God was trying to show me. There are things I still struggle with to this day. And yet He keeps having mercy. He keeps working on me. He has not cast me away.

The patience of God is an amazing thing.

3. What you do with it decides what comes next

When God shows you what He has found, you have a choice to make. The religious leaders made theirs:

“And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot tell. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.” (Mark 11:33)

“We cannot tell.” What they really meant was we will not say. They refused to surrender what they wanted to hold on to.

Now set that beside a man who chose differently. The apostle Paul had an infirmity in the flesh. He begged the Lord to take it away, and the Lord didn’t. But Paul gained a victory through it:

“And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

Paul did not get the answer he went looking for. But because he let the Lord work in his heart, he came out closer to God than he had been before. A refined heart is worth more than any answer you could ever be handed.

That refining never finishes. Paul, of all people, wrote this:

“For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” (Romans 7:22-25)

It doesn’t matter where you are in your walk. There will always be more for God to reveal.

The difference between Paul and the men in the temple was not how much God showed them. It was how they took it. Paul saw an opportunity to draw closer and glorify God. The religious leaders saw a personal attack.

How you receive God’s correction depends on where your heart is. He corrects in love:

“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” (Hebrews 12:6)

Receive it as love, and that is where you grow. Treat it as an attack, and something else happens.

If I hold back from God, God will hold back from me.

That is a frightening thought. If you have been born again, God will never take away your salvation. You cannot lose it. But you can drift. You can lose your fellowship with Him. He can seem distant, because you hardened your heart when He came close to correct you.

Notice what happened to the question those men started with. “By what authority?” By the end it didn’t matter anymore. What was going on in their hearts had made it irrelevant.

I don’t want you to take this too far, either. Not every time God holds something back from you is it because of sin in your life. God doesn’t owe anyone an answer. There are times He simply doesn’t reveal anything, and it has nothing to do with your failure.

But when He is silent, it is worth asking Him whether there is something He has been trying to show you.

When God answers your question with a question

Go back to the temple one more time. The most powerful religious men in Jerusalem come to Jesus demanding an explanation. They leave with only one, and it is an explanation of themselves.

You have questions for God. Everybody does. Why this? Why not that? When will You answer? Bring them to Him. He invites you to.

But don’t be surprised if He looks past the question and into your heart. And don’t treat it as an attack when He does.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalms 139:23-24)

What has He been asking you lately?

Have you answered Him?

Or are you still saying, “We cannot tell”?

Adapted from a message preached from Mark 11:27-33.