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During this season of Lent, we are engaged in a short series entitled A Day In the Life of Jesus. We're focusing on brief but powerful vignettes in the Gospels in order to gain a realistic, behind-the-scenes take on a typical day in the life of Jesus. Today we turn to the second of a series of miracles in the Gospel of Mark. This is the day that Jesus met not only a demon but a legion of demons. And therefore, this episode provides us with what is perhaps the most detailed and the most vivid of what we might call an exorcism.

Last week we explored the day that Jesus calmed the sea, and I reminded you that throughout the Bible, the sea represents the forces of chaos, the forces of darkness that threaten human life. But Jesus reveals himself to be the Lord over all creation, and he could subdue the forces of nature with merely the word from his mouth.

And now, Mark deliberately places this miracle after that one. He places them side-by-side, back-to-back, and that's intentional. Mark is deliberately trying to make it clear that Jesus has the power not only to calm the forces of chaos that might be raging out there in the world but also to calm the forces of chaos that are raging in here, within the human person. So, during our time together today, as we turn to Mark 5, I'd like us to consider what this passage can tell us about 1) the reality of evil, 2) the authority of Jesus, and 3) the polarity of the gospel.

¹They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. ²And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. ³He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, ⁴for 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. ⁵Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. ⁶And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. ⁷And 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.” ⁸For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” ⁹And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” ¹⁰And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. ¹¹Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, ¹²and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” ¹³So 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. 

¹⁴The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country. And people came to see what it was that had happened. ¹⁵And 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. ¹⁶And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs. ¹⁷And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. ¹⁸As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. ¹⁹And 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.” ²⁰And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.

Mark 5:1-20

The Reality of Evil

First, let's consider what this passage can tell us about the reality of evil. Mark tells us that Jesus takes a boat to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, to the country of the Gerasenes, located on the southeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee in what we now know as Syria or parts of Jordan (also known as the Decapolis, meaning the ten cities). What's important for our purposes is that this has always been Gentile rather than Jewish territory. And by the time of Jesus, this particular part of the world was under heavy occupation by the hated and despised Romans. The Romans had sent in their legions of soldiers to crush anyone who stood in their way. Now, the number of soldiers contained within a legion could vary over time, but usually it was about five or 6,000 soldiers. 

Immediately, Jesus is confronted by a man who is possessed by not just one demon, but by many demons. And when asked his name, he says his name is Legion, "for there are many of us." The man is described in rather dramatic terms, intended to emphasize multiple layers of uncleanness. He's unclean culturally, socially, ritually. First of all, he's a Gentile. Secondly, he's living in a land where people were raising pigs, which were considered to be unclean and unfit for a Jewish person to eat. He's also socially isolated. He's wandering around naked among the tombs outside of the city limits. And contact with the dead, contact with corpses and with graves, was also understood to contaminate a person. 

So this man was as unclean as you could possibly be. He sought shelter among the tombs because he could no longer find a place among his people. He seems to possess extraordinary strength; no one could bind him, not even with chains and shackles. And he's known for shouting and crying out, making incomprehensible noises, and then cutting himself to pieces with stones. 

But what's strange is that the demon recognizes Jesus and calls him by name. He cries out with a loud voice, "What do you have to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me." So, what are we supposed to make of all of this? This has to be one of the strangest episodes in all of the Gospels. 

Writing in the mid-20th century, the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann said that we live in a modern world; we can't use electricity and advanced technology and modern medicine and still believe in a spirit world with demons and angels. Therefore, he suggested that what we need to do as modern people is demythologize the Bible. We have to strip the Bible of its mythological elements in order to get down to the kernel of existential or religious truth. But there are a number of problems with trying to demythologize the Bible. So let me suggest a couple of the typical ways in which people might try to do that, and the problems with each of them.

First of all, as a contemporary New Yorker, you might say, "Well, it's simply irrational and illogical to believe in spirits or in demons." But let me gently push back and ask, is it? Is it irrational? Is it illogical? Increasingly, more and more people are turning away from the cold rationality of modernity. An increasing number of people recognize that this world in which we live is a strange and mysterious place. There's more to reality, we sense, than what we can see and touch — more than what we can measure or weigh.

Many of us have had numinous experiences that we just can't explain. Some of you have shared them with me. You have sensed a presence in your life, or you have felt a hand of protection. And therefore many of us are more open to the possibility of a supernatural realm. Maybe there really is a power, a mind, a love, a person behind the universe that we can't detect with our five senses. The point is that if it's possible that there could be a supremely good supernatural being, well why not supernatural evil as well? It's not necessarily illogical or irrational that there might be a supernatural reality beyond what we can detect with our five senses.

Others might say, "Belief in demons is not so much irrational as it is primitive. It makes sense that ancient people believed in demons, and the difference is simply that we know so much more now about how the world actually works. What they called being afflicted by a demon we now understand is nothing more than a psychological condition.” And I have to admit, when I was growing up and was first exposed to the New Testament, this is generally how I tended to interpret things. But we need to be careful here or else we're going to make a serious mistake. 

What I later realized is that the Bible actually distinguishes between being afflicted by a demon and suffering from some kind of physical or mental illness. For example, consider Matthew 4:24. Matthew writes, "So his [Jesus'] fame spread throughout all of Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them." Do you realize what Matthew's telling us here? On the one hand, he's making a distinction between being physically sick and being afflicted with a demon. He talks about being afflicted with various diseases and pains and being paralyzed, but not only that, he also makes a distinction between being afflicted by a demon and suffering from a psychological illness.

Now here the word is translated as "seizures," but in Greek that's not actually the word that Matthew's using. What he's describing is someone who might be suffering from a psychological illness. Literally, in the Greek, he says that there are those who are afflicted by demons and those who are "moonstruck." The way that word was translated in Old English was those who suffered from lunacy, because the word luna in Latin means “moon.”

Lunacy was a general, nonspecific term that was used in the ancient world to describe those who were suffering from some kind of lunacy, some kind of insanity. Now, that's not a word that we would use today; “lunacy” or “ insanity” sounds pejorative. But the idea here is that people understood in the ancient world that people may not be in their right mind. They wondered if perhaps it was associated with the various phases of the moon. So if someone was not in their right mind, they called them being “moonstruck.” But the point is that if you're suffering from a mental illness, from seizures or convulsions, that's different, according to Matthew, than being afflicted by a demon. 

So the point is that ancient people had a category for mental, psychological illness that was different from being oppressed by a demon, because ancient people understood as well as we do that human beings are complex. We're united wholes. We are embodied souls and ensouled bodies, and it's not so easy to pick apart which part of us is being affected. We well know that sometimes our illnesses are strictly physical, but we also know that there's something called psychosomatic illnesses. We know that there's a relationship between the various aspects of who we are, and they can be combined in a variety of different ways. So it's not so easy to pull apart what's physical, what's mental, what's psychological, and what's spiritual. We as human beings are all of one piece, and all these various things can be combined in a variety of different ways.

So in an attempt to demythologize the Bible, some might say believing in spirits, believing in demons is irrational. Others might say it's primitive. But still more might say it's excessive. Because when you turn to the New Testament, it just seems like demons are everywhere. They're on every page. It's excessive, and it's hard to understand because it's so far outside of our own personal experience. 

It's true that there are some people who insist that they see demons lurking underneath every rock, and I'll be the first among those who are a little suspicious of that. But just because some make too much of spiritual warfare doesn't mean that there aren't malevolent evil forces out there at work in our world. But how do we account for this? Because it is true that when you read through the Old Testament there isn't much word about demons or spirits, but then suddenly you turn to the New Testament and they're everywhere. How do we account for that? 

Let me give you one very good reason why demons might be so prevalent within the New Testament in particular. It’s because the very presence of Jesus draws them out. See, when Jesus begins his public ministry, he announces that the kingdom of God is coming, and it's the very presence of Jesus that draws out these spiritual forces. It's not until Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom that it seems like all the furniture starts flying around the room. Because as the kingdom moves forward, as the kingdom advances, the forces of evil push back. They're attracted to Jesus like a magnet, and so it's the mere presence of Jesus that provokes this reaction. And I think that helps explain why dark forces of evil are real but relatively rare in our personal experience. 

So taken together, I would suggest that it's not irrational, it's not primitive, and it's not excessive to affirm the reality of dark powers. But if they are real, they are relatively rare. And if so, then what protection do we have against their influence? Well, the answer is not a technique. The answer is not a ritual. No, the answer is a person.

The Authority of Jesus

So let's turn from the reality of evil to the authority of Jesus. Demonic spiritual beings can really do some damage, but ultimately they are powerless against Jesus. First, let's consider the damage that these malevolent dark forces can do at the individual level and then at the corporate level. 

Some English translations, including the translation here in the ESV, use the term "demon-possessed," but that's actually not a very good term because, in the Greek, the way in which this man is being described is more general. The word is more general. So rather than saying that he is demon-possessed, it might be more accurate to say that he is demonized. And that's important, because what we're describing here is not someone who's wholly possessed by a demon but rather someone who's being afflicted, oppressed, harassed, or simply has a demon.

What we see here very clearly through the story is what evil is after. This demon's goal, and the goal of all the dark forces in the world, is to distort and to destroy the image of God in us. What evil is seeking to do is to dehumanize us, to disintegrate our humanity. The social isolation, the nakedness, the inarticulate outbursts, the cutting, they all show that evil seeks to disintegrate what God makes whole: our humanity, our identity, our bodies, our relationships, our community, creation itself.

Evil can not only do real damage to us as individuals, but evil can also do real damage to us corporately. What do I mean by that? In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes that our real struggle is not against flesh and blood. Our struggle is not against other human beings, the human being that is opposed to us, that's standing right in front of us. No, the real struggle is against what he calls the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers over this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. And what he's saying is that there is a spiritual reality beyond the world that we can see, and this dark spiritual reality animates human systems. And that explains why the destruction and evil that we witness — not only in our individual lives but within our broader society — is greater than the sum of the parts. We see inside human systems destruction that is far out of proportion with any one person or any one poor choice.

Why might that be? Well, the allusion here to Roman legions might actually provide us with a clue. Because as we look at the political regimes of human history, as we look down through the centuries — Egypt under Pharaoh, Rome under Caesar, Nazi Germany under the Führer — we see that the cruelty and brutality they inflict is greater than the sum of the parts of the actual individuals involved at the top of that system. Empires, regimes, movements, they seem to take over large swaths of the population, leading people to believe lies and to commit atrocities. There's more evil in the system than within the individual people involved.

And this is what led Hannah Arendt to describe the evil in the system as “the banality of evil.” What she meant is that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil. Now, specifically she was referring to the case of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was one of the chief orchestrators of the Holocaust, and after World War II, he escaped capture and fled to Argentina. But eventually, they caught up with him in 1961, and they brought him back to Israel to try him for war crimes. And Hannah Arendt watched the trial and then wrote about it, and she coined this term “the banality of evil.” And what she realized is that Adolf Eichmann was not some horrific monster when you met him. He came across as a mundane bureaucrat. She described him as being terrifyingly normal. 

And that's the banality of evil. Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil. Because, at least what they said is, they carried out these horrific acts not because they were driven by ideological beliefs or personal malice. What they said was, "Well, we were just doing our jobs," or "We were just following orders." Or in Eichmann's case, he said he just wanted to advance his career, and that's why he could be so thoughtless, so callous about what he was actually engaged in. But how does this happen? It happens slowly, gradually, imperceptibly. I mean, no one wakes up one morning and says, "I want to be complicit in evil." But you see, we open ourselves up to it, and then evil takes on a life of its own. 

I think that we need to be very, very careful about this, especially when it comes to our own political moment. Because if you say that you don't just disagree with people on the other side but you hate them, you don't recognize their humanity, you call them evil, if you treat politics as a zero-sum game and you're willing to do whatever it takes to win, and you're willing to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing, well then you may just be lulled into a system of evil that is greater than the sum of the parts. And I see some of this happening in corners on the left and in corners on the right. Bitterness, anger, and pride left unchecked create an opening, and therefore we have to be on our guard.

It's true, of course, that most of us are not going to ever experience evil this dramatically, as this man does in this episode. But we need to be realistic about the fact that the same forces of evil are at work within our world, quietly behind the scenes. And when we open ourselves up to the influence of evil, we're making ourselves vulnerable. And how do we do that? When we say we want more. When we say we want something more than God himself. When we say we want more money, more sex, more power, more knowledge, more pleasure, more recognition, more control, and we're willing to do anything — we're willing to do whatever it takes, whatever the cost — to get what we want, then we're opening ourselves up and making ourselves vulnerable.

Remember the legend of Dr. Faust? What does Dr. Faust do? He makes a pact with the devil in order to achieve unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. And there are derivative ways in which we too can end up making pacts. Let's use the example of Adolf Eichmann. What did he want? All he wanted to do was advance his career. Well, if you say all you want to do is advance in your career more than anything else — more than your relationship with God, more than your relationship with other people, because that's the key to your happiness, that's the key to your flourishing — then you're making a pact. 

And at first, like this man, you'll experience strength. You'll experience power. You'll be more driven, more zealous than anybody else. You'll stand out, you'll get the raise, you'll get the promotion, you'll get the title, you'll make partner, you'll see your name in lights. But at the same time, you'll also be enslaved, and increasingly over time. You'll be a slave to your desire.

As a result of that, you may be willing to walk all over people to get what you want. You may be willing to cut ethical corners. Evil promises power, but as for this man so tragically for all of us, it delivers slavery. What starts out as strength ends up with chains. So evil is greater than the sum of the parts. It can be true in an individual person's life, and it can be true in large-scale human systems. But my main point is that these dark powers do not stand a chance against Jesus. 

See, good and evil are not two equal but opposite forces that are locked in eternal battle. No, evil is actually nothing in itself. Evil is simply the lack of goodness. It's the privation of the good. Evil, therefore, is just a parasite. It has no power of its own. And that's why evil must submit to the authority of Jesus. That's why, if you are a Christian, you have absolutely nothing to fear. Evil may be able to harass you, rattle your chain a little bit, mess with you, mess with your life, but evil can never truly get a hold of you, because if you have the spirit of Jesus dwelling within you, the power of him is greater than the power that is in the world.

So notice, when this demon meets Jesus, Jesus doesn't have to use some complicated ritual or elaborate technique to get rid of him. We do have accounts of other exorcisms in the ancient world, especially in ancient Egyptian literature, and in almost all of those cases, when someone is trying to drive out an evil spirit, there is a ritual, there is a technique, and always they have to call upon some higher power, almost like this demon is adjuring God to make sure that Jesus doesn't torment him. Everyone would call upon some higher power to demand that that evil spirit come out. But notice with Jesus: no ritual, no technique, and he doesn't have to appeal to a higher power. Why? Because he is the higher power. He doesn't even adjure his Father in heaven. All he has to do is say the word, "Come out," and the demon has to obey. There's no way to resist.

The Polarity of the Gospel

So let's turn from the reality of evil and the authority of Jesus to the polarity of the gospel. This episode shows that the gospel of Jesus will polarize you. It won't allow you to stay where you are. You can't stay in the middle. You can't claim neutrality. You can't ride the fence. You've got to make a decision. It's going to polarize you. It's going to push you in one direction or another. It forces you to make a choice.

First of all, what I want you to realize is that even demons have good theology. So good theology is not enough. Even demons have good theology, because the demons know: 1) the truth of Jesus, 2) the time of Jesus, and 3) the triumph of Jesus.

The Truth of Jesus

Demons know the truth because they know the truth of who Jesus is. When the demon cries out, he recognizes Jesus not only as the promised Messiah of God's people, which could have been a human figure. No, he recognizes him for who he really is: the Son of the Most High God. He understands Jesus' true divine identity.

Here's why this is important. Some people, if you asked them "Do you believe in God?" would say, "Yes, I believe in God." But just because you can give intellectual assent to God's existence doesn't make you a Christian. If you say, "Well, I believe in God," a demon would say, "So what? So do I." James 2:19 says, "Even demons believe and shudder." So if you say, "I believe in God," good, that makes you qualified to at least be a demon. 

But see, to be a Christian means that you do not merely give intellectual assent to God's existence. Saving faith is not simply having good theology. Demons understand the truth of who God is. They're not ignorant of the truth; the problem is that they hate the truth. And therefore, to be a Christian means that you don't just know the truth, you don't just believe in God, but you love him, you listen to him, you obey him, you follow him.

The Time of Jesus

Demons know the truth of Jesus, but they also know the time of Jesus, meaning they know when judgment is coming. Here the demon says, "I beg you, do not torment me." But in Matthew's account of the very same episode, the demon asks, "Have you come to torment us before the time?" You see, the demon knows that there is a time when Jesus will fully and finally deal with evil, but the time has not yet come. And that's why, when the demon gives his name, Legion, he begs Jesus not to send them out of the country, but instead he asks that Jesus would send them into the pigs: "Permit us to go into the pigs."

This is the part of the story that leaves us scratching our heads. What is this about? If this story wasn't already weird, what's with the pigs? Well, we can't get into all the details, but what is clear here is that the time of the ultimate judgment has not yet come. Jesus is not going to completely eradicate evil yet, but one day he will. And so in the meantime, evil is allowed to run amuck for a bit, but Jesus is putting limits on it. And he says, "No human hosts. You can continue to run amuck, but you're not going to harass this man anymore." And he gives them permission to enter the pigs.

But when they do, when the demons enter the pigs, this reveals what's really going on, because first of all, it shows us the number of demons: so many that they enter as many as 2000 pigs. But it also shows us evil's true intent. What is this demon really after? Total, utter destruction. Because as soon as those demons enter the pigs, they rush down a steep bank into the sea and drown. And that's what demons are always seeking to do. Regardless of who they're harassing, they're seeking utter destruction — to deface, to destroy God's image in us. 

The Triumph of Jesus

This whole encounter then, as the evil is being thrown into the heart of the sea, is meant to give us a picture and a promise of what God ultimately is going to do about evil. Jesus is going to triumph over it, and the demons know that. The demons know that Jesus will triumph over them. They can never win. All they can do is buy themselves a little time.

Now given our modern sensibilities, still we get a little hung up on the pigs. We say, "What about the poor little pigs?" But the herdsmen who owned them wouldn't have looked at the story that way. They would've said, "What about all our money?" That was their livelihood. That was all their wealth that Jesus just drowned in the sea. So what about that?

This man's healing comes at a considerable cost to the herdsmen. And it's true; that loss is real. But what it shows us is Jesus' commitment to us. It shows us that Jesus refuses to put a price tag on a human life, and he's so committed to you that he'll do whatever it takes. He'll make any sacrifice in order to rescue you, to bring you the healing and the wholeness that you also need.

So this episode ends up with a pair of contrasts: people begging Jesus to leave, and this man begging to be able to stay with Jesus. At the end of the story, you have this man: previously naked, but now clothed; previously roaming, but now seated; once all alone, but now together with others; once completely out of his mind, but now in his right mind; once deeply agitated by the presence of Jesus, but now sitting at Jesus' feet.

This power encounter, therefore, has a polarizing effect. You can't remain neutral. You can't ride the fence. You have to make a choice. Are you for Jesus or against him? The herdsmen don't want anything to do with Jesus. They're like the disciples in the previous miracle that we read last week. The disciples are more afraid after Jesus calms the sea with a mere word from his mouth than they were when they were in the boat and they thought they were about to drown. And likewise, these herdsmen are more afraid of Jesus than they were by this demonized man. Now that Jesus simply says the word and he is clothed, seated, and in his right mind, they can't handle it, and they beg Jesus to leave their region.

But this man, when he sees Jesus get in the boat in order to leave, begs that Jesus might let him stay with him. But instead, Jesus sends him on a mission. And he says, "No, you can't come with me. Instead, you have to go back to your people. You have to go back to your home and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how the Lord has had mercy on you." And he does. He goes back to the people from whom he had been previously estranged, and he doesn't just preach what the Lord had done for him; he preaches what Jesus had done for him. Now we know the Apostle Paul famously as the apostle to the Gentiles, but in fact, this unnamed man becomes the first apostle to the Gentiles — the first one to preach Jesus to those outside of Israel.

See, the gospel has a polarizing effect, and the question therefore is, how will you respond? And we only get two options: We either join Jesus in his mission, or we send him away. So which one will it be for you? The herdsmen were right. The full and final victory over evil comes at considerable cost and not at all in the way that we might expect. The people in Jesus' day hated Rome more than anything else in this world, and they called those legions of soldiers that were occupying their land “unclean pigs.” Some of these legions even carried the symbol of a boar on their standard. They were unclean pigs, unclean Gentiles.

And what did the people of Jesus' day want? Well, they remembered the ways in which God had once come to the deliverance of his people when they were living under horrific evil conditions, enslaved in Egypt, and God delivered them by leading his people through the Red Sea on dry land. But what happened to Pharaoh's armies? The legions of armies were washed away by the waves and drowned in the sea. And that's what people wanted Jesus to do: to raise a sword, to smite down the evildoers, to take those legions of Roman soldiers, to push them back into the sea and to drown them out forever.

But Jesus refuses to take up a sword against Rome. Because if he did, what difference would it really make? Maybe he would win a little political liberation for some people that would last a little while. But then what? Jesus understood that the legions that are causing the most problems are not out there in the world. No, the legions that cause the most problems in our lives are the ones in our own hearts. Solzhenitsyn rightly said that the line dividing good and evil doesn't fall out there in the world. No, the line between good and evil passes right through every human heart.

Jesus understood that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. And there's only one way to destroy spiritual evil. That's why, as the story continues, we soon discover the time, the promised time, when Jesus will defeat evil. It comes at considerable cost, and not at all in the way that we expect.

The moment that Jesus disarms the rulers and the authorities is when he swaps places with this demonized man. Jesus conquers evil when we find him stripped naked outside of the city among the tombs, crying out with loud cries, bleeding because he has been cut to pieces through a Roman form of torture. But you see, this is the only way to defeat a demon, and that's how true healing comes. Because the only way to destroy evil without destroying you and me was to allow all the evil in this world to come crashing down upon himself and to undo it by willingly giving himself up for us. He allows evil to do its worst, because it's only by his wounds that we are healed.

Therefore, as we come to this table, we come remembering what it is that he has done for us in order to defeat evil. And as we do, see how much Jesus loves you. Jesus was willing to allow himself to be stripped naked, cast out of the city, to become unclean, and to be pulverized, to be crushed to pieces, so that you and I might be forgiven, healed, restored. And that's what loosens the allure of all the other things that might compete for our hearts and enables us to remain true to him.

Therefore, remember who the real enemy is. The struggle is not against flesh and blood. We are in the midst of a war. We're living in a time of war: political wars at home, military wars abroad. But the real struggle is not against flesh-and-blood human beings. No, the real struggle is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Jesus refused to single out one people group as being evil, and he knew that the only way to truly overcome evil was with good. And so it is for us. When we receive his healing and his wholeness, we're called to implement the victory that he's achieved for us through his cross, and therefore he invites us to join him in his mission.

Do you realize that it really doesn't matter how messed up or broken you think you are? Look at this demonized man, harassed by not just one or two, but a whole legion of demons. That's never going to be you. But if he could use this man, he can use you. So it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you've done, and it does not matter what has been done to you. Jesus is calling you to make a choice: for him or against him? If you're for him, then he's going to send you back to your own people, to your own home, so that you might preach Jesus and explain all that he has done for you, the mercy that he's had upon you. And then the people in your life? They too will marvel.

Let me pray for us. 

Father God, we thank you that Jesus has disarmed the rulers and the authorities, that he has conquered over them through his cross. We thank you for his triumph, and now we pray that we might receive it. And as you make us whole, as you make us complete, as you bring healing into our lives, we pray that you would show us how we can implement the victory that you have achieved for us by your grace, so that we might point those around us to the truth of who you are and what you've done. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.