Tonight we will finish up our journey through the book of Mark. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with myself when Mark isn’t a daily part of my life. As we talked about last week, the final verses of the book, 16:9-20 have some authenticity questions. They don’t match Mark’s writing style, they are not mentioned by any of the early church fathers and the earliest full manuscripts do not include them. They are not verses that are contradictory in any manner but they simply don’t feel as if they were originally written by Mark. Many scholars believe that they were added after the fact to try to give the letter a more complete ending, I tend to agree with that belief. With that said, the verses have value and we will go through some of them tonight. As we go through these verses we will wrap up our study. Three years of seeing Jesus the way Peter saw Him. Seeing Him sometimes from a distance and then also up close, seeing Him as the Messiah but then realizing that we don’t really know what the Messiah came to do; seeing Him as God’s Son but then learning that He came so that we could also be God’s children; seeing Him as the conquering king but then having to reconcile His arrest and death. Like the disciples we all follow Jesus from the first step of belief but then as we follow we learn that faith is far more than belief. Tonight as we close out the book of Mark I pray that we will all see clearly that following Jesus is the beginning of an eternal relationship with Him down a narrow path that reveals and then removes everything that competes with Him for our hearts. Peter literally rode very wave of emotion possible in His journey with Jesus and then he shared Jesus with us so that we could see His heart, His love, His power and His patience because strong faith only comes from a clear view of Jesus, we can’t build it within ourselves, the more we look at Him, the more we see Him, the more we hear Him, the more we trust Him the more He imparts faith. I honestly pray that we will end this study by simply being able and willing to cry out like the father in chapter 9, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”