How the Son of the Most High God Changes Us
QUOTES FOR REFLECTION
“When you try your best but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”
~“Fix You” by Cold Play
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
~William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), writer
“The first link between my soul and Christ is not my goodness but my badness; not my merit but my misery; not my riches but my need.”
“If you are to go to Christ, do not put on your good doings and feelings, or you will get nothing; go in your sins…. Your ruin is your argument for mercy; your poverty is your plea for heavenly alms; and your need is the motive for heavenly goodness. Go as you are, and let your miseries plead for you.”
~Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), British preacher
“…Mark is making it clear that Jesus did not come just to give his gifts. He came to give himself.”
~Michael Card, songwriter and musical artist
“All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters ‘this cosmos’…to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty—wherein neither sin nor death had any place.”
~David Bentley Hart, philosopher, theologian and writer
“Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise,
but the companion of fools will suffer harm.”
~Proverbs 13:20 (ESV)
SERMON PASSAGE
Mark 5:1-20 (ESV)
1 They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. 2 And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. 3 He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, 4 for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. 6 And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. 7 And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” 8 For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9 And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” 10 And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. 11 Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, 12 and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” 13 So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea.
14 The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country. And people came to see what it was that had happened. 15 And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. 16 And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs. 17 And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. 18 As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. 19 And he did not permit him but said to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” 20 And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.