's wonderful to be back in the gospel of Mark and I want you to open your Bible to Mark chapter 3 this morning as we look at the gospel of Mark. We are going to be looking at a very simple section of the gospel of Mark that essentially has to do with identifying the Apostles...identifying the Apostles. It's not a complex passage, not a doctrinal passage and yet I think it's one of the most encouraging passages in Scripture. It was many, many years ago, of course, that I preached in Matthew and we came to the listing of the Apostles in Matthew chapter 10 and some of you will remember, we spent about three months going through the Apostles, every one of them, all we know about them from Scripture and all about their history and all that. And then not too many years ago we went through the gospel of Luke and when we came to the Apostles' listing in Luke chapter 6, we essentially did the same thing again. I took the time for months to go through every life, every Apostle, all the details. Out of those two series came a book called Twelve Ordinary Men. Twelve Ordinary Menhas been a well-received book and encouraging to see how the story of how the Lord uses very, very ordinary people.But in the consistency with the plan that I have in the gospel of Mark, we're going to have one message, and that's this morning, on these twelve men. As you know, Mark is kind of the newspaper approach to the story of Jesus, want to keep it condensed, keep it fast paced as Mark intended for us to do. And so, we're just going to look at this in a broad and a general sense...
