Clothed and Right-Minded

There is no one in your life, and no one in this world, who is beyond the reach of the cleansing and saving power of Christ.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

[00:00:00] Well, we are in for a strange one today. Funny story. Uh, after Easter, usually I try to pick a passage that’s a bit more accessible for our guests who came on Easter that may be joining us here again. And this year, I thought, you know, let’s just jump back into Luke. It’s about Jesus. How weird could it be? And then I realized I had stopped at the Gerasene demoniac. So here we go. Welcome back. Visitors. Uh, you’re just in time for the account in Luke that, I would say is the oddest and hardest to interpret. Uh, because not only does it deal with the demonic elements in this story, things happen with demons that just don’t happen anywhere else in Scripture. And it’s really easy to become intrigued by the mystery of those details and get bogged down wondering what they could all mean. Uh, I’ll mention these as we go through the story, but I don’t want to become so focused on details that we miss the purpose of this amazing display of Jesus power. What we have here today is one of the most dramatic displays of Jesus salvation that we find anywhere in the Gospels. It’s the story of a man who could not be removed further from holiness. He’s so far away from it. He’s a man far removed from the Lord, and he’s so far removed that his brokenness is even a problem for the pagan community surrounding him. This guy is so overwhelmed by evil influence that even his neighbors recognize that that he was lost, and that they didn’t even know how to help him.

[00:01:46] And Jesus is going to come into this man’s life and radically transform him. Radical means root. It’s the root of this man’s heart. And soul is going to be so transformed that when this man, uh, goes to the community around him, he’s going to be unrecognizable to them. And as we look at this today, I’d like you to do something for me. I’d like you to have someone in mind. Okay. As we look at this passage, I want you to have someone in mind. I’d like for you to picture someone that you know who seems very far from the Lord. And whose life is greatly impacted by that rejection of Christ. Okay, so they’re far from the Lord. And and you can see it in the way they live. This might this might be a person who is openly against the Lord in what he says. Maybe he’s a scoffer and a mocker of Christ in the church. Maybe this person is is nice enough, but he’s very into aberrant spiritual ideas or has a very pagan worldview. Maybe. Maybe they’ve embraced a lifestyle that’s opposed to Christ. Maybe this person is captured by by enslaved by addictions in substances. That’s that’s a huge problem in our society today. Perhaps they’re uncontrollably violent or narcissistic or manipulative. Perhaps they they they abuse people through relationships.

[00:03:12] You might be this person. You might be married to this person. Or maybe it’s a close friend or a family member. All of us have people in our lives that we would look to and say, that person is very, very far from Christ, and I want you to picture this person today. As we work through this account, because sometimes we have the feeling that people like this are very far gone. Beyond the reach of the gospel. It’s where we place them. We think they’re just outside the reach of the gospel. We feel that they’re so far removed from Christ, so riddled with problems and issues and false notions that they could never be transformed into a follower of Jesus. But we are people of the book. We are Scripture readers. We listen to God’s Word. And if God’s Word tells us that the gospel can transform the hearts of the most unreachable, unholy, and unexpected people, then we need to think that way too. Because to think that way is to think biblically. And so what I want you to do is we look through this passage. I want you to pray for this person that you’re thinking of as we as we learn the story. There is no one in your life and no one in this world who is beyond the reach of the cleansing and saving power of Christ. And I want to I want to walk out of here today celebrating Jesus and His power to transform people’s lives with with the courage to take that gospel to these folks that were thinking of.

[00:04:47] And part of that will be our willingness to identify ourselves as one of the people who were also lost without Jesus. And we’ve now been transformed by his grace. So if you have your Bible, go ahead and open up to Luke chapter eight. We’re going to be in verse 26 today. It’s a longer passage. It won’t be on the screen. So you want to follow along. You can use the pew in front of you if you want, or the the Bible in the pew in front of you. Uh, we’re going to look at Jesus transformation of this man in four parts. We’re going to look at his tortured state, then his encounter with Jesus, the reaction of the community and the new man and his new mission. So let’s start in verse 26 with the tortured man. Then they sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite of Galilee. When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he had not lived in a house but among the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, and said with a loud voice, what have you to do with me? Jesus, son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.

[00:06:02] For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For many a time it had seized him. He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles. But he would break free of the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert. Now. Just about everything in the first part of this story is is designed to show us just how far removed from the Lord that this man is. He’s a man in an utterly hopeless situation. First off, he is not part of God’s chosen people. He lives across the sea in the country of the Gerasenes. So that would have been outside of the Promised land and outside the place where Jesus had been doing his ministry to this point. And so already we’re thinking, well, what is the Jewish Messiah doing on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, among the pig farmers? And then who greets Jesus on the shore when he gets there? Well, of course it’s the naked homeless man from the graveyard. He’s the. He’s the welcoming committee. Do you remember? Do you remember when the prostitute, just a few chapters earlier, the prostitute came and found Jesus and went in and sat at his feet and washed his feet with with her hair? Do you remember how the Pharisees couldn’t believe how a teacher like Jesus could allow that woman to touch him? They would be losing their minds if they were here on this beach right now.

[00:07:28] This would be so far beyond even that. This this guy is described with dirty, animal like terms. That’s the visual here. He’s he’s naked. He lives outside. He’s unclean from a spiritual perspective because he lives among graves. To a Jewish reader, they would not see this man as just having an unfortunate situation. From the Jewish perspective, this man represents several layers of ceremonial uncleanness, meaning he would he would not be touchable. He he would be unable to stand before the Lord in any sense be included among God’s people. You heard that in the numbers reading earlier, right? He couldn’t you couldn’t go near him and he couldn’t go near them. He couldn’t go into the temple. He couldn’t be anywhere near the worship of the Lord. And in addition to being a non-Jewish, grave living naked beast who lives outside God’s Promised Land, he is also possessed with a legion of demons. Now, I want you to notice the community solution to this man’s problem. You see the community solution here? See where it says that he was under guard and he would break his chains and his shackles. That means the community tried to do something about this man there. Their solution was to to constrict him, to contain the problem, and then to keep an eye on him so that he didn’t cause problems for other people. And I’m not being critical of that solution. It’s the only thing that they could do.

[00:09:09] That’s all they had available to them. And their solutions didn’t work because this man would would break the chains and the shackles. He’d run off into the desert, says, into the wilderness. And the reason the community couldn’t actually help him, couldn’t control or limit. The problem is that his problems are spiritual problems. See societal answers always come up short because they attempt to use human powered solutions for spiritual problems. And that’s all we really have available to us human powered solutions. Think of think of our of our justice system and our prison systems. Right? Some of the best in the world, actually the greatest in the world. And yet they’re riddled with problems. We can work to make them as fair and as sound as we can, and we should definitely do that. But ultimately, the problem of injustice and reform can only be solved by a transformed heart. That’s the only way it actually gets solved. Think of the social movements that are so popular today. Racism in our in our world is is a terrible problem. But it won’t be solved by new laws. Laws can kind of constrict things can kind of contain things, can kind of watch over things. But laws don’t change hearts. Only God changes hearts. God’s grace changes hearts. Repentance and restoration driven by the other worldly grace of Christ. That’s what transforms people. God’s forgiveness and grace is what puts a person into their right mind, giving them a new heart and a new will to do Christ’s will in the world.

[00:10:51] When the man came before Jesus with a legion of demons inside of him, he said to Jesus, what have you to do with me? Jesus, son of the Most High God, I beg you, do not torment me. See, the demon understands. The demon gets it. This. This demon knows it is standing in the presence of the only solution to this man’s problems that could ever actually be effective. Chains. No problem. Shackles. Easy a guard, please. Come on. But when Jesus steps out on land, when Jesus steps out onto the beach and into this man’s life, a new, powerful, effective solution has arrived. Pick it up with me in verse 30. Jesus then asked him, what is your name? And he said, Legion. For many demons had entered him, and they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him to let them enter these, and so he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned. Okay, this is the weird part that I was telling you about. Okay? It’s right here. There are. There are people throughout the centuries who have taken elements out of this story and turned them into rules for exorcisms.

[00:12:23] So they’ll say things like, well, to get control of a demon, you have to learn its name. Presumably because Jesus asked for a name here. Church, let me tell you, we know almost nothing at all about the demonic world from Scripture. We know almost nothing at all. People love to take a little bit of scripture and a lot of conjecture and folklore, and mix it into a weird and spiritually dangerous concoction. Okay, people love doing stuff like that, and the only instruction that we are given in Scripture, the only one for dealing with the demonic world, is prayer. That’s it. In Mark chapter nine, Jesus tells the apostles the reason they failed to cast out a demon was because it could only be done with prayer. They had the one thing that they the one thing that they could do. They weren’t doing. Which means church, that the tool that we have for spiritual revival and healing is to call on God to do it. We can’t do it. We don’t have any. We don’t have any power in ourselves. We need God to do the work of rooting out evil with his power and with his grace. So don’t let don’t let Hollywood and folklore skew your biblical view of demons. Be careful to stay close to scripture on this one, because. Because this is an area where people have gone very far from scripture to sell books and movies. Okay. Jesus asks for a name, and he finds out that there are many demons residing in this man, and they know Jesus has the power to torment them and cast them into the abyss.

[00:14:02] This is most likely a reference to eternal punishment, although it’s not super clear exactly what they mean. They ask Jesus to instead be cast into a herd of pigs, and Jesus grants their request. They possess the pigs. The pigs promptly run over a steep cliff and drown in the sea. Okay, what just happened? What does that how how do we make sense of what just happened? I have a legion of questions. Why was it better to go into the pigs? Why did the pigs run into the sea? What happened to the demons when they did run into go into the pigs? Were they trying to kill the pigs or did they not see that coming? I don’t know. It doesn’t say. It doesn’t say in the story. And the reason it doesn’t say in the story is because it actually doesn’t matter. It’s not important. Now, my interpretation of what happened, and that’s all it is, it’s my best guess, is that Jesus allowed them to enter the pigs because pigs are unclean animals. And so it’s an allowable place for demons to go. The demons that probably didn’t know that when they entered the pigs, that they would be immediately driven into the sea abyss in Hebrew is a reference to the depths of the sea.

[00:15:20] And so I think the visual is Jesus casting uncleanness into destruction using a dramatic visual display so that it stirs up the whole town, like we’ll read in a moment. And that’s an important part of the story. Visually, Jesus is destroying the demons. What I know for certain, however. Well, that’s that’s a bit of conjecture, but what I know for certain. Is the point of the exorcism. Jesus is using his authority to separate this man from his uncleanness. Jesus is is performing the spiritual surgery that only he can. He uses the scalpel of his authoritative power to cut the legion of demons out of this man, so that he can be set free and saved. So Jesus. Jesus doesn’t contain the problem. Jesus doesn’t control the problem. Jesus doesn’t keep an eye on the problem. He removes the problem. And when Jesus removes the problem, it’s to bring life. It’s to bring healing and life. The demon drove the man into the wilderness. See, the demon wanted to destroy the man. Jesus authority saves the man by destroying the problem, not the man. He saves them. This is a vivid display of salvation. If someone ever asks you what Jesus salvation does, you can take them to this passage. Warn them it’s going to be weird, but take him to this passage and say, this is what it does. Jesus takes unclean, unholy, unacceptable people who are mired and controlled by the evil elements of the world.

[00:17:10] He removes the evil and presents those people clean, holy, and acceptable to God. That’s what salvation is. And this passage tells us Jesus power can do this for absolutely anyone. Anyone. There’s no one beyond the reach of the authoritative power of Jesus. No one is too far gone because even this guy was not too far gone. So how does the community react to this vivid display of salvation? When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. And those who had seen it told how the demon possessed man had been healed. Then all the people in the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. See the herdsmen tell the community and the people come out to see what is going on, and they see this guy who everyone knows is possessed by demons. If you’re the guy who lives naked in the graveyard, everybody knows you. You. You are well known to everyone. If the guy who breaks his bonds and runs into the wilderness, if you’re the guy that does that, that’s going to make you famous in the region all, all around.

[00:18:45] And this man would have been considered hopeless to all of them. And here he is. Here he is sitting at the feet of Jesus. It says, clothed and in his right mind. I want you to take a moment. Just put yourself in the position of one of those community members who came down there, one of those people from town. You’d think this is impossible. This is impossible. We did everything we could do. This is what I’m seeing is impossible. What kind of healing power could separate this man from his demons without killing him? And in fact, not only is he not dead, he’s back to normal like us. Twice. It says that their reaction is to become afraid. They even ask Jesus to leave town. Now, I know that seems odd because we think this is great, right? We would love this. And why wouldn’t you want Jesus to stick around if he can do this? But remember, these folks are not followers of Jesus. They’re not even waiting. They’re not Jewish. They’re not waiting for a Jewish messiah. Okay, this doesn’t look like the fulfillment of anything to them. All they know is this guy had violent demons, and this new guy who just got off the boat has even more power than those demons that we saw. And he has a tendency to kill all of our pigs. That’s all they know. From their perspective, fear makes sense.

[00:20:17] I liken it to the reaction today, when non-Christians see a drastic change in the life of a person who’s been transformed by Christ. They knew him before, and now they’re seeing a new person. They don’t understand the gospel, and so they’re not sure what to do with that transformation. What’s interesting is that Jesus gets into the boat and leaves. See, I kind of thought at this point of the story, this would be the part where Jesus would start to teach, right? That’s what we’ve seen him do all throughout the book. Here he does something miraculous, something very powerful, and then he begins to teach about it. And so that the miracle points to the to the teaching, and it illustrates his teaching. But here he never speaks to the people. He only speaks to the demon and then right at the end, to the man who was restored. From what we can tell here, Jesus never leaves the shore. He never enters town, and he never shares the gospel with the people. Does that seem odd to you? Well, that’s because Jesus actually does something better than staying here. Verse 38. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him. But Jesus sent him away, saying, return to your home and declare, how much God has done for you. And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him. Jesus doesn’t go to the town because he doesn’t need to.

[00:21:42] He’s done the one thing that will have greater impact in that community than anything else. He sends one guy. One guy. Go tell the people all that God has done for you. That’s it. That’s it. That’s all you had to do. And then he’s back on the boat. This this one guy, clothed and in his right mind, is going to lay the groundwork for the gospel to spread like wildfire across the region. Now. The guy didn’t want to go and do this. He wanted to stay with Jesus. And if Jesus had restored my life the way he restored this guy’s life after such a dramatic turnaround, I can see why. Right? I would want to go with Jesus too, at this point. All of us probably would. But Jesus tells him that his restoration is now his witness to the saving power of God. He’s telling him that his healing was for him, but it was not just for him. The healing is for you. But it’s not just for you. It’s for the entire surrounding community. This guy just became the most famous evangelist among the Gerasenes, because he has gone from being the man controlled by demons to the man transformed by the Lord. And it says that he went through the city telling people how much Jesus had done for him. See, Jesus doesn’t need to stay and teach. People can see who he is through his work in the life of the one man who is now making Jesus famous.

[00:23:19] Oh, there are two very simple truths that I want you to take away this morning. To very, very simple truths that you take as you head out into the community. As we all disperse from here and head out into Rochester, the greater Rochester area. And this week, two very simple truths that I want you to take with you. The first is that there is no one beyond the reach of Jesus restoring power. There is no one beyond the reach of Jesus restoring power. Do you still have that person in mind? I ask you to think of. Are you thinking of that person in your life who appears to be very, very far from the Lord there? Their addictions, their choices, habits, attitude, behavior they all make them in your mind, a very unlikely candidate for the gospel. I know, I get it. I see that way too. I got people in my life like that too. One of my friends is an HIV positive homosexual man who does tarot card readings online. I got another friend who loves communism, practices universalism, and despises Calvinists. I’m not sure he knows that I am one, but. In my mind, from my perspective, from the way I see right from me, just me, from my perspective, these people are very far from the Lord, maybe in ways that they will never be reached. This is far too much godlessness to remove.

[00:24:49] Too many layers of that to remove. Their worldviews are far too thick with anti-Christ ideas and values to ever be penetrated by the truth of the gospel. But my view has no authority. No authority. God’s word has authority. I have to say, based on the passage today and dozens of passages we find throughout Scripture, that Jesus delights in transforming the hearts of those who are utterly opposed to the Lord. And so the friends in my life and in yours who are the furthest from Jesus? Maybe those who the Lord will delight to transform for his glory. I’m not suggesting that everyone who is far from the Lord is possessed by demons. My thinking is that that is fairly rare, though I wouldn’t rule it out. I’m suggesting that this example of the man with the legion of demons, who is now clothed and in his right mind, is proof that our friends and our neighbors, neighbors, and the troubled people who are in our lives can be made whole and new by the saving power of Christ. Which leads to the second thing I want to share. As we close and that’s that. There’s no better evangelist than the one who testifies to the power of Jesus in his or her life. There’s no greater evangelist. The reason Jesus delights in transforming lives is to add those people to the team of people who will testify to his glory. That’s why you’re added.

[00:26:24] We need to start seeing differently as a church. When a person seems far from the Lord. That’s not a reason to stop evangelizing evangelizing. It’s it’s a reason to share Christ all the more with them. When the gospel takes hold in a person’s heart, it brings freedom. It brings release from the chains of sin. And those of us who have experienced that are now able to go and to share that experience and share that gospel and share that Christ with those who are still constrained by sin and testify to what the Lord has done in us. See, we tend in the church to concentrate on talking about the places where in our lives, where we’re doing very well. We tend to to show people our our victories, we what we what we should want. However, what we need to show are the places where Christ is victorious over our struggles and our failures and our brokenness. Because that’s what a hurting world needs. That’s what they need to see and hear in us. They don’t need to hear about good people. They need to hear about a powerful, transformative God who has worked a miracle of salvation in our lives. And that’s going to require us to talk about our sin. That’s going to mean talking about the ways that we were in the wrong mind, so that we can testify to the goodness of a Savior who brought us into our right mind. And I’m not just talking about those those people with dramatic conversion stories.

[00:28:03] Okay. Those so-called powerful testimonies. You know what I’m talking about. They got a powerful testimony. Now, this is a difficult point to make after having just read the story of the Gerasene demoniac, because that is actually a fairly dramatic story. But the truth is, if your life has been transformed by Christ in heart, mind, soul, strength, you, you have been radically changed to right down to the root of who you are. God sends all sorts of people testifying to all sorts of transformation in the world. Maybe you didn’t live naked in a graveyard for any length of time. Here’s hoping you didn’t. Hope that’s not your story. But you you can speak to God’s work in healing your marriage and changing your your selfish aspirations for life, or moving you away from worldly thinking. You know, I love the former gang member turned Christian pastor testimony just as much as the next guy. But you know what? I don’t struggle with the desire or temptation to join a gang. We need to hear the testimonies of the ways God has transformed lustful thoughts, raging tempers, anxiety and depression. Church. All of us are sent, all of us are sent to tell the people in our community about Jesus and all that Jesus has done through the power of the gospel for us. Church. Let’s testify to the world the goodness of God. Let’s not shrink back from our call to be part of that mission. Let’s pray.