Crossing Boundaries

All right, well, like I said, we are in week 15 in Mark. We are going to be here until the summer. And then we'll take. We're going to be doing the psalms, some of the Psalms, obviously, not 150 of them in the summer. We'll be doing that for a couple weeks, but then we're actually planning on taking four weeks to talk third way. We're going to be kind of teaching on that and what, what does that mean and why and all the things that come with it. So. But we'll be in Mark for now and then, then in the fall, we'll kick it back off again after the summer, and that'll take us to Christmas, believe it or not. And then I believe that next year in 27, we're going to go through Genesis, which I'm excited about as well. Anyways, let's go. We don't have time for that. I don't know why I'm doing that. We got about 20 minutes here. So here we go. It's hard to recap 14 weeks. And so I just want to get into Mark and what is his big question that what he's kind of trying to do with his readers is to say who, who is this guy? Who is this guy that they call Jesus the Savior, the Christ, the Messiah? Who is he? What does he mean to me? What does he mean to us? And so let's look at this. And so going back just a verse one, I think I've read this every week in Mark of that in the beginning of the good news about Jesus. Good news is where we get the word gospel, that this is the gospel. This is the good news, and it's about Jesus. It's not Mark's gospel. It's not Luke's gospel. It is the gospel about Jesus. Jesus is the gospel, the Messiah, the Savior, the anointed one, the Son of God. And so going back to who is he? We've seen this already in just four chapters, as now we kick off the fifth. We're going to see that he has authority in teaching that he gets. And he starts teaching in front of people, even the religious leaders that the people are going to say, whoa, what kind of authority is this? Because he's not even taking his authority from the scriptures or from. Or from the religious leaders of the day. He's saying, I am the authority on this. I was actually there when it was written. And so people are like, well, how can he claim this kind of authority? He claims authority over demons and the demonic, which we'll see again today that he's confronted with that. And we'll look at that authority to forgive sins. This is another thing that he says, hey, is it easier for me to heal someone or to forgive their sins? How about I just do both? And if I can physically heal someone, maybe you will believe that I have power over their sins. And then the fourth one in is authority over nature, which we looked at last time, the end of Mark, chapter four, where he calms a storm. And up to this point, Jesus has crossed every boundary that we most likely, if we put ourselves in these situations, would have avoided. It's what C.S. lewis called chronological snobbery, right? It's when we put ourselves into something in a situation in the past and go, oh, I never would have acted that way. I beg to differ. Right, Beg to differ. Different words there. I guess we could defer as well. But anyways, here's the point, right? He's crossed these boundaries. He's touched the unclean and made them clean rather than him becoming unclean. He forgives the unforgivable that he has sinners. Like this demographic of people labeled as sinners and tax collectors, and he eats with them. He crosses cultural and religious boundaries in doing that and calling tax collectors to be his disciples, he defies religious gatekeepers, and he calms chaos with a word, as we looked at last week, just as he calms the storm. So this morning's sermon, just crossing boundaries, mark 51 through 20. And today we're gonna see that there's a man again, that he's gonna cross boundaries to find him and to save this lost sheep. So let's look at this idea of crossing boundaries again, context. They were almost. They almost drowned, right? They were in the Sea of Galilee, coming to their side. The storm comes up and. And they're like, jesus, don't you care? We're about to die? And he calms the storm. And then it says they were more afraid of Jesus than they were of the storm, right? There's something about the holiness, the power of who Jesus is that's more terrifying than the thing that nature can throw at them. And we're gonna see almost the exact same wording here in this passage. The disciples just witnessed Jesus rebuke a storm like it was a disobedient dog, right? And he just says, knock it off. Calm it down. And then it obeys. So it says, they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Geraseans. All right, what in the world is this? If we look At a map of the Bible, we're like, yeah, maps. I love maps. Geography. This is typically what we see. You have got the Mediterranean Sea on the right, and you've got the Dead Sea at the bottom. The Jordan river goes up to the Sea of Galilee. That's kind of what we're. We typically see. But if we zoom in on the Sea of Galilee, so that's that big sea, the lake, kind of in the middle there. Galilee, where Jesus is from, Nazareth, that purple area is Samaria. Might be familiar with some stories there. The Good Samaritan, that's where he would have been from. Kind of half breeds of Jewish and gentile. But then this story is gonna take place in that southern portion there called the Decapolis, which just means 10 cities. And so Jesus is gonna be by the lake in gentile territory, and people who are not Jewish, he goes across the lake and he says, we're gonna. I'm gonna tell people who I am that have no connection with this God of Israel, that I'm gonna show who I am, and I am here to set people free. So the second point here is that the strong man enters when Jesus had stepped out of the boat. Immediately there met with the word, immediately, Mark's favorite word. There met him out in the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit. And he lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he'd 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. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains, he was crying out and cutting himself with stones. The people had done everything in their power to try to subdue this man, this problem. This guy tried to bind him, try to chain him up. But the key phrase here is that they did everything in their power to try to subdue him. But if we go back to Mark, chapter three, we see that Jesus starts talking about the strong man. And Jesus, we're not gonna go back and recap that whole sermon. But he basically says, I'm the stronger man. All right? The devil and his demons are powerful. They're very strong. But now I'm here. And so the religious leaders accused Jesus. You're casting out demons in the name of a. Demons. You were a demon. You're doing it in the name of demons. Jesus says, that doesn't even logically make sense. Why would. If I'm on Team Devil, why would I cast out demons? Team Devil, A House divided cannot stand. And then he uses this phrase, no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods. Unless he first binds the strong man, then indeed he can plunder his house. Jesus says, I'm going into the strong man's house and I'm binding that ancient serpent, the devil, and I'm going to bind him so that he no longer has power to deceive the nations. And I'm going to set people free. He says, I'm now here. A stronger man has come. So we go on and we see greater is he. And he saw Jesus. That is this man with the demon saw Jesus from afar, and he ran and he fell down before him. That's very strong language there. That literally is like almost in a worship prostrate, on his knees, bowing down before Jesus and cries out with a loud voice, what have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most High God, I adjure you by God, do not torment me. If you remember, in other situations when Jesus has come face to face with the demon and then he casts them out, he says something to them. He says, don't tell anyone what just happened. He doesn't do that here, right? This demon. Cause again, the demons that are out there, the previous demons, like, he's the Messiah. And he's like, shut your mouth. Because I don't want that getting out. Yet people want to kill me in a Jewish circle if they find out that I am claiming to be the son of God. But now that we're in a gentile context, he doesn't tell them to shut up. He's like, yep, there it is. This is who I am. And he cries out, actually a very gentile phrase of the son of the most High God. That was a way for the Jews to separate themselves from any other deity, that this is the most high God. And even the demons make the same use the same phraseology. I adjure you by God, do not torment me. Right? He cowers in fear in front of his creator, just like the storm. He responds the same way that the storm does, that when demon meets divine, there's absolutely no contest whatsoever. For he was saying to him, that is Jesus, come out of the man, you unclean spirit. And Jesus asked him, what is your name? And he replied, my name is legion, for we are many. A legion in the Roman military was 5600. We don't know exactly what it was. We'll see that there was 2,000 pigs. Was it 2,000? It was thousands either way, thousands Too many of Demons being in somebody. And his name is Legion, for we are many. And even that word Legion just invokes a military way of thinking. But in John chapter first, John chapter four, verse four, we read that greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world. And we're gonna see that in place here, that there is, I believe, a demonic world and a demonic realm. And yet the One who came, the One who sets us free, is still in the business of setting people free. That we don't need to fear this, that the stronger one now lives in me, and that is Jesus. Maybe I read this last time when we were talking about demons. Let me recap or just read this again from CS Lewis from the Screwtape Letters. It's kind of in his prologue, if you will. This paragraph says there are two and equal opposite errors in which our race can fall about devils. One is to disbelieve their existence and the other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. And so this is real. I do believe in the demonic, and yet I don't fear the demonic in that sense because of who Jesus is. Moving on here. What's with the pigs? It's a good question. What's going on with all the pigs? And he, that is the demon possessed man of the demons, begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. There's a lot of ink that I was reading this week on this. What in the world is going on? Nobody knows in that sense, but the idea is that they felt maybe that in the Decapolis, in that gentile land, that the demons, the demonic, had a foothold. They felt it was a stronghold. And they said, we feel safe here, away from who you are, away from Jesus. So please just let us stay here. This is where we feel safe and we don't feel tormented. So that could be the case. It says now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. And they begged him, saying, send us to the pigs and let us enter them. So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs. And the herd numbered about 2,000, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drown in the sea. Just want to make a few maybe observations and maybe a couple of questions that pop up from. From this. The first maybe observation is that Jesus broke chains that no one else could. Right? That might have been a little obvious by the way I was worried at the beginning, right, that. That this. That people had tried to bind him, people had tried to chain him up and they couldn't. He was breaking the chains. But now the demons are the ones that need to be broken and no one could do it. No one could figure it out. And that Jesus shows up and he sets them free. And so I think it begs the question, just practically applicationally, what chains do you need to show or do you need to give Jesus? But I just think of us bound and chained and saying, jesus, this is what I have. This is my thing. These are my. My handcuffs that are holding me back. And I see that maybe I've noticed it or somebody else has pointed it out to me, and I need freedom. This could be a cultural chains. And I wrote this sermon even before the events of this weekend. But it could be just, I need to control a situation, even culturally. Could be pride, it could be tribalism, productivity, even looking at politics as a mean of salvation. Maybe not just culturally, but individually, we might feel shame, like, this is my thing and I've been carrying this weight, this burden. Jesus says, I can set you free of that. I've got some secret sin that if Jesus really found out or if he exposed it, it would just be so bad, he wouldn't want me. He wouldn't want to touch me. Maybe it's just unforgiveness towards somebody. That's one thing. And we've brought this up before, but the silver rule, which is often confused as the golden rule, is that you do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You do something nice to people because that's what you would want them to do to you. That's the silver rule. The golden rule, which Jesus teaches us is that you do unto your enemies, right? You love your enemies. That we don't just ignore them and shun them and shame them. We build a hospital for them. That is the golden rule that Jesus sets up. So whatever the enemy is in your mind, Jesus says you love them. That's radical. That's setting people free. And he says that we need to do the same. It could be identity labels of maybe our past or our failures, maybe even my family story, where I came from. No, you don't. You don't get it. You don't know who I am. You don't know what's been done to me. You don't know the things that I've done. All of these restraining. But Jesus is here to fully restore these things bind. They chain us But Jesus is here to set us free. So what have been some ways, maybe we've tried to break those chains on our own, but there's a lot of different things that we could fill in the blank here and maybe something might pop into your mind. And I pray that the Spirit would do that and convict and get us to repent of those things. Because it could be law. It might even be thinking more laws, right? Whether it's culturally or personally that I just need to add more law and then I'll just be a good person. It just doesn't work that way. I need Jesus. I need repentance. I need to turn, I need to go to Jesus. I need to be set free from those things. It could just be licentiousness. It could just be. I've tried working on this thing, I've tried fixing it, and it just hasn't worked. And so what's the point of fighting it anymore? That's a chain that, that, that holds us back, that, that keeps us down. So let's, let's keep moving here. What, what, what? What? Why were the pigs there? Let me read again. This is, I've been quoting this guy, James Edwards throughout Mark. And so we're back. He's, he's, he's back here. If the swineherds were supplying the Roman legions with pork, he goes on, and he talks a lot about that Romans, their army would have, on a big day or before battles, would have had pork. Then the raising of unclean food, which is pork for the detested Roman occupation, was doubly offensive. Thus Jesus meets with the man with an unclean spirit living among unclean tombs, surrounded by a people employed in unclean occupations, all in an unclean gentile territory. That's why I titled the sermon Crossing Boundaries. This is who Jesus is. And you could probably take that phrase that Edwards writes there and make it about yourself. Change the adjectives and the verbs and the nouns to make it about you and your situation. Jesus is the one who crosses boundaries to enter into your space and to set us free. One of the questions that at least I think about often when this comes up when I read this passage is what about the compensation for the pigs? Does anyone ever have that thought when you're reading this? Okay, he just took away who knows how many people's livelihood. What are they gonna do for a job? And it's just not said. There's just nothing. And I think that Mark is trying to make a point with this, right? He's emphasizing something that he says versus what he doesn't say in the blank space. And so I think one of the big things that he tells us, that tells us about Jesus is that one person is worth more than thousands of pigs, right? I think that might be the obvious thing, but it is that that compared to one person and their redemption, right, the herds and their value and what it might even do to the economics of the area pale in comparison to the person, right? This is. This is an outcast. He's living in the tombs. He's. They're trying to chain him up. They don't want anything to do with him. And Jesus says, that person is far more valuable than your economy and your pigs. He doesn't throw them into the sea because they're unclean and because there's something about pigs Jesus doesn't like. That's not the case. We read that in Acts. But what is important is the person. There are times in your life that you might not feel that you are worthy or worth anything. And Jesus enters in and he demonstrates, no, know you are because I say you are, because you are created in the image of God, Period. I. I love you. And I. I'm going to die for you and forgive you of your sins. The second one point maybe that we can infer on this is that you can't be too far removed from Jesus for him to set you free. We say this a lot, but he sees you. Jesus sees you. He sees your situation. He sees what you're going through. Might not feel it, might not feel like it all the time. He sees you. I've realized as I look at this now that I talk about movies made in the 90s too much, but super culturally relevant. This is the Fugitive. Has everyone seen this movie? Last week was Hoosiers. Only one person had seen that movie. Did anyone watch Hoosiers after last week? Oh, no. Okay, Harrison Ford. The Fugitive. We don't have time for this. Why do I do this? The Fugitive, 1993. Here's the point. He's a fugitive. Know what that is? He's running away from the law. He's falsely accused of murdering his wife. He didn't do it. He was the man with the one arm, one armed man. Spoiler alert. You know that. You know that. You know that right away in the movie, they don't leave you hanging. He's running from the police. He's running from the marshal. And Jones is the marshal. There's this scene where he's in this runoff thing for a dam and some, you know, water's coming out, whatever. Anyways, he's standing there and Kimmel, Richard Kimmel is Harrison Ford's character. And he says, I didn't kill my wife. And there's just this line where the US Marshal standing there, he's got a gun pointed at him. And the US Marshal just says, I don't care, right? He's saying, I don't care if you killed her or you didn't. My job is to come get you. All analogies break down. But the only time that you are ever going to hear Jesus tell you that he doesn't care is in regard to your past sins. He cares about them enough because he came to this earth to die for them. He cares in that sense, but he's already paid for it. It's like we are in this gutter looking at Jesus saying, you don't want me. You don't want me to come with you. I'm a sinner. And Jesus says, I know, I don't care. I already paid for that. Come with me. And instead of a marshal putting the cuffs on the fugitive, he takes the cuffs off and he sets us free. The fifth point more afraid. I say part two because of last week. It's almost the same language. The herdsmen fled and told to the city and the country. And the people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus and saw the demon possessed man, the one who had the legion sitting there clothed and is in his right mind. And they were afraid, just like the storm that these witnesses that see Jesus do something that only God can do. It freaks them out. It terrorizes them. It makes them afraid. It makes them more afraid of. Of the good thing or who Jesus is rather than the demon possessed man. They're more afraid of the one who set them free than they were of the legion. That's power. He's able to set us free. They come face to face with something only God could have done. Creation out of chaos. I think there are some of us who might need that in our own lives this morning. That we need to give our chaos of our own lives to Jesus. He loves calming the storm. He loves setting us free. And in the end here I mentioned this, but just for time, I'm going to skip down to verse 19. And he did not permit him, who said to him, go home to your friends and tell them how he wanted to join. He wanted to be a disciple. He says, no, go home and tell your friends right now, I'm telling you, tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how much he had mercy on you. And he went away and began to proclaim the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And everyone marveled. I think here you can see that you can take Jesus away physically out of a region, and yet you can't take away his impact. And this has been true for thousands of years that people have been trying to destroy the name of Jesus and it just doesn't happen. It started 2000 years ago on a cross that the Romans tried to crucify Jesus and completely obliterate him from the history books. And yet he's the most popular human being who's ever lived. You can take Jesus away, but you cannot take away his impact. Should we be worried about demons and devils in our society? I already kind of touched on this, and I just want to quote Martin Luther in his book Table Talk. It was compiled post humusly. Humously. Is that the right word? Hu? After he died, they. They put this book together. They found it under some boards. Doesn't matter. Goodness. All right, here's the point. Let me read this. It's a powerful quote. I'm going to end on this, and then we'll just have a time of communion together. Let me read this. The devil cannot but be our enemy, since we are against him with God's word wherewith we destroy his kingdom. He is a prince and a God of the world, and he has greater power than all the kings, potentates, and princes upon earth. Wherefore he would be revenge of us and assault us without ceasing. As we both see and feel. We have against the devil a great advantage. Powerful, wicked, and cunning as he is, he cannot hurt us, since it is not against him we have sinned, but against God. Therefore we have nothing to do with that arch enemy. But we confess and say, against the Lord have we sinned, etc. We know through God's grace that we have a gracious God and a merciful Father in heaven, whose wrath against us, Christ Jesus, our only Lord and Savior, has now appeased with his precious blood. Now, for as much as through Christ we have remission of sins and peace with God, so must the envious devil be content to let us alone in peace, so that henceforward he can neither abrade nor, nor hit us in the teeth concerning our sins against God's laws. For Christ has canceled and torn in pieces the handwriting of our consciences, which was a witness against us, and nailed the same to the cross. To God be everlasting honor, praise and Glory in Christ Jesus for the same. Amen. How do we respond in this, as we look at gospel application, I think we see in this, in this passage there's four different ways that people might respond to this. One is just awe. Right? Right. Wow. Would you, would you look at that? Would you see what Jesus just did? Wow, man. He just calmed a storm. Now he's setting this guy free. Isn't that cool? He's powerful. There's some awe there as we read eyewitness accounts, maybe specifically from Peter. There's also then some fear that might be here, like these individuals who like us, that maybe when we see God, we get a glimpse of who God really is and it scares us. There's some fear involved. Then there's those that have faith, like this man who is possessed by demons that is set free. And he believes so much that he wants to become a fully devoted follower of Jesus and actually become like a disciple and travel with him. And Jesus says, not yet. We're not ready for this whole gentile thing to be in our camp yet. Go and tell others about me. You have. But then there's some resistance. It might be people who saw this individual, might be those of us who have seen God work in our lives or maybe even worked in a spouse's life or worked in our friends or our neighbors lives. And we say, wow, God is doing something. I don't know, I don't have words. I can't explain it, but I just don't think I can fully do this. I can't follow after Jesus. So what I would say as we look at this passage, that Jesus is here to set us free. We quoted every week from Ephesians 53, that you've been set free to be free, you don't need to be bound anymore by the law, by licentiousness, by death and the pains of this earth, that we can be set free from that if we have faith and we come to Jesus with open hands and say, I bring nothing to the table. And so there are those of us who are just in our own hearts that are wrestling with things. And I hope that the Spirit did more than I could ever possibly do with words and just convict. And as we take communion, that we would just use as a time to repent, to worship God, to praise him and thank him for that, that he is a God who sets the captive free, whatever way that we feel captive, that he came to set us free. And as we are about to take those elements, the, the, the cracker that represents his body that's broken for us, the juice that represents his blood that is shed for us. That thing in me that I think, no, I'm unworthy, that we would just hear the voice of Jesus saying in a positive way, I, I don't care, I don't care about that. I paid for that. It is finished. Do you remember when I cried that out on the cross? It's done, it's paid for. All you have to do is have faith in me and respond in that faith. And so if you're a follower of Jesus, I would love for you to take these elements. That we would take our chaos, we would take our insecurities, we take our fears right now, and we would give it to Jesus that he sets us free. So if you're a follower of Jesus, you can take these elements with us. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church. But if you say yes, I've bent the need of King Jesus, I would love for you to take these elements with us. There's a gluten free option on my left, your right, if that is a dietary restriction. Let me pray. And the worship team's going to come back up and they're going to sing two songs in closing. So feel free to stand and worship or to grab those elements as you see fit. And then we will close after those two songs. Let me pray. Father, thank you for this passage. We had no idea what was going to happen in any, any given day. And yet this is a passage that you had for us this morning. That as we look to who you are, that Jesus displays who he is, his heart. For those who seem to be unreachable, the unworthy, the unloved, the outcast of society, those that people have tried to help and they just can't help, but Jesus shows up. So, God, I pray that would be true about our culture, our cities, our state. It'd also be true about our own hearts. It'd be true about our church as well. That you would give us unity moving forward and that you would just be honored and glorified, that we would worship you and love you and praise you because you are a God who sets us free. And it's the name of Jesus that I pray. Amen.