Services | Frightened by Jesus

Bulletin

Hymn # 499 “When Morning Comes”

SCRIPTURE READING – Psalm 145:1 - 7
Giving of Selves and Our Offerings
OFFERTORY PRAYER
OFFERTORY MUSIC – Pru Hungate

Praise and Worship
“Endless Light”
“At the Cross/Love Ran Red”
“This Is Amazing Grace”

Proclamation of the Word
Message by Pastor Joe
“Frightened by Jesus”


“Let it Begin”

Sermon Notes
Mark 4:35 & 36 Jesus and disciples travel by boat
Mark 4:37 A storm hits and the boat is taking on water
Mark 4:38 Disciples awaken Jesus out of sleep “don’t You care?”
Mark 4:39 Jesus rebukes the wind and tells the sea to be still and they obey
Mark 4:40 Jesus rebukes the disciples for no faith
Mark 4:41 The disciples became afraid
Mark 5:1 – 5 They reach the other side of the sea and they encounter a demon possessed man
Mark 5:6 – 12 Jesus interacts with the demon and casts the demon out of the man and they enter a herd of swine
Mark 5:13 The herd runs into the sea and drown
Mark 5:14 – 17 People from the region come to find out what happened, they become frightened of Jesus and want Him to leave
Mark 5:18 – 20 As Jesus is leaving the man wants to go with Him, but Jesus tells him to go home and report what happened to him, and he does

---

Scritpures

---

Transcript of Service

We talk about Him being a friend,

but yet we don't read how it is to be His friend.

We talk about His love and His forgiveness, and yet it seems that people think that He tolerates anything and everything.

However, we're going to take a look at two incidents in Jesus' ministry

where people come with a very different opinion of just exactly who Jesus is.

So if you have your Bibles, and you should, turn to the Gospel of Matthew—I'm sorry, Matthew. Mark—it's not as if we haven't been doing this for a while— Gospel of Mark chapter 4, starting with verse 35.

So, since I messed up, Mark chapter 4, starting with verse 35.

So it says this, "And on that day when evening came, He said to them, "Let us go over to the other side."

Leaving the crowd, they took Him along with them in the boat, just as He was, and other boats were with Him."

Now, I want you to notice something here.

Jesus is leaving this area because we have seen previously that the crowds are pressing in, and so much so that He and the disciples aren't able to eat and to rest, and so He's going over to a Gentile area to get away so that they might have rest and probably be able to teach the disciples. And it says, "There are other boats with Him," which means other people are planning to disrupt His plans, because they're going to go over to the other side as well.

"And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat, so that so much that the boat was already filling up." It's taking on water.

It's at a—if you will. And these are fishermen who are in the boat. So they're used to dealing with some storms, and they're used to dealing with how to handle storms. It's not like they're novices like me. They have prior experience, if you will. But the boat's filling up.

And Jesus Himself was in the stern asleep on a cushion, and they woke Him.

You see, Jesus is fully God and fully human, which means He was probably very tired.

So He's taking this opportunity to sleep.

And because of the concern of the disciples, they decide to wake Him up.

But I think it's interesting what they say to Him when they wake Him up. So they woke Him up and said to Him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Now, this is kind of like how we are, and when we are in difficulty, we ask God, "Don't you care?"

Because obviously, if you cared, I wouldn't be in this predicament.

So they're saying, "Why don't you care?"

Well, let me—it's why I tell you to make sure you have the Bible, because what I'm about to say is not in the Bible.

So my response would have been, "I used to care a little more, but since you woke me, not as much."

Okay, because you've just interrupted a really good sleep. And I could see if—and then He'd go back to sleep, and then down the road, the boat sinks, the disciples are bobbing up and down, and Jesus is above the water, floating on the cushion, because He's in control, and He's unaffected by the storm. But that's not what He does. So let's return to what the Bible actually says.

And He got up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Hush, be still."

And the wind died down, and it became perfectly calm.

So first Jesus does is He responds to their request.

You would have thought what they should have said, rather than, "Do you care?" They could have at least said, "Can you help us bail out the water to keep the boat from sinking?" Or, because He's the teacher, "What, Jesus, can you do, and what should we do in following what you tell us to do?" They should be like, "He should be the captain of the boat. What do we do?" But instead they ask, "Well, do you care?" Rather than, "Help us get out of this predicament, or show us whatever."

So Jesus rebukes the wind, and it obeys.

He tells the sea to be calm, and it does.

Now, I'm going to go a little bit ahead. When they cross over to the other side, there aren't other boats to get there.

Maybe, just maybe, the storm was not to cause fear and trembling of the disciples, but to keep the rest of the people from bothering Jesus on the other side,

so that they would turn back, and He would do what He originally planned, because they were trying to follow Him. So maybe, when we face the storms of our life, it may not be because God is trying to put us in fear,

but that we might be having a chance to be alone with the Lord.

Because oftentimes, we benefit much more by that lone time with God than in the storm.

And He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?"

So in essence, He rebukes the storm, and now He's rebuking the disciples, saying, "You still don't have any faith?

Where have I been? What have I been doing? I've been healing people. I've been raising the dead. I've been casting out demons. I've been doing all sorts of things, and still you seem to have no faith. Lord, do you care as opposed to, "Lord, please do something to help us in this predicament?"

And again, I encourage us when we're in that storm, rather than to tell Jesus how He should fix our problem,

we should say, "What is it, Lord, you want to do, and what is it you want me to do?"

Not, "Do you care?"

Or maybe it's because, "Show me, Lord, is this storm because I've made bad decisions, or it's because you want me to be alone with you?"

So He rebukes the storm, it answers. He rebukes the disciples, and unfortunately this will not be the only time He asks about their faith.

And then notice, "And they became very much afraid."

They were afraid of the storm. They're more afraid of Jesus. "And said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?"

If they had not gone through this storm, they would not have seen the power and authority of Jesus to rebuke even the storm.

So again, sometimes in the storm of our lives, maybe it's an opportunity for us to see the power and authority of Jesus to calm the storm in our life.

But notice, these are His followers. These are the ones who said, "We believe." These are the ones who have observed Him doing the things. These are the ones who are going to confess that not only is He the Son of Man, He is God.

And notice, they have become very much afraid.

Sometimes the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

And there are sins. There will be this sense in society that God is just our best buddy.

No, He's holy. He's awesome. He's high and lifted up. And while He tells us that we can be His friend, He tells us how to be His friend. We're not just His friend because we say we're His friend. But we should take a healthy—not a fear of the sense of afraid in the sense of, "Oh, He's going to stick it to me." But to understand exactly who He is, the Son of the living God.

And has power and authority even over nature.

And they came to the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gethseirahrines. So they arrived. Now, notice, they didn't have any faith. Jesus said, "We're going to go to the other side." He didn't say, "We're going to sink in the middle."

So when God says something, that means He's going to do something. So they should have had the faith that we're going to get there because Jesus didn't say, "Let's get out of a boat on the water." Then all bets are off. You don't know what's going to happen. But when He says, "Let's go to the other side," that means we're going to get to the other side.

And when He got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met Him.

Again, Jesus' plan was to have rest and relaxation and teach the disciples.

But this unclean spirit who's living basically in a graveyard decides to meet Him.

And He had this dwelling, and He had this dwelling among the tombs, and no one was able to bind Him anymore, even with a chain.

So this demon or demons that He possessed gave Him great strength. And people who tried to bind Him and keep Him out of their area couldn't because He would just break the chains.

Because He had often been bound with shackles and chains, and the chains had been torn apart by Him, and the shackles broken in pieces, and no one was strong enough to subdue Him.

Because unfortunately, even though His demon possessed, He has, if you will, supernatural powers.

And constantly night and day, He was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains and gashing Himself with stones. You see, this demon was not a friend to this man.

It caused him to scream out.

So I'm sure there's some internal emotional aspect that's happening that He's screaming in both probably emotional terror and physical terror, and He's hurting Himself. He's gashing Himself with stones.

There was a movie out about a demon-possessed man.

If you've seen it, you kind of get an idea of what it's like, and if you haven't, you can ask me afterwards, and I'll recommend the movie to you. Seeing Jesus from a distance, He ran up and bowed down before Him. So here's this demon-possessed man who comes and kneels before Jesus.

Kneeling oftentimes indicates worship, but that may not necessarily be. It may be simply respect, but He does bow before Him because, let's face it, even though the Scripture says, "Every knee will bow, and every tongue confesses Jesus as Lord to the glory of the Father." And shouting with a loud voice.

Again, He's kneeling now, but He's seeking to intimidate, because if I speak loud enough, you're going to be intimidated by what I say. So I'm going to yell at you.

And so He shouts with a loud voice. He said, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore you by God, do not torment me." Now, it is interesting why He says what He says.

First, He acknowledges Jesus is the Son of the Most High. So this demon-possessed person recognizes Jesus because they probably met before.

Before they got kicked out of heaven.

He recognizes Him. Now, some say, and I somewhat am sympathetic. I haven't decided yet. Some say that the reason this demon says Jesus, Son of the Most High, is that there's this thought that if you proclaim somebody's name, that you somehow have power over them. And the reason why I tend to think that now is that there seems to be a lot of people, well, not a lot, several people in various churches who wanted to make Jesus's name magical.

I speak Jesus's name over you. What does that mean?

Somehow you're impelling Jesus to do something. So there seem some that the name has this magical thing. And so it's possible that He's recognizing, He's trying to intimidate Jesus and get some kind of control over Him.

But He's not that bright because He can't. Because as Revelation will say, one angel will cast Satan in hell.

So He says who Jesus is, acknowledges who Jesus is, gives Him the title that is accurate. And then it says, I implore I beg you by God. Isn't that interesting?

A demon imploring in the name of God.

You would have thought that I implore you by Satan or I implore you by my master or implore you by the agency and hierarchy of my kingdom to do this thing. But He implores them by God.

Do not torment.

For He had been saying to Him, Come out of the man, you unclean spirit. So Jesus is exercising His authority and saying, Come out of the man.

So the demon, as he's in the process of leaving the man, He's saying, Don't torment me.

And so He's going to give Him Jesus an option.

And He was asking Him, What is your name?

And He said to Him, My name is Legion, for we are many.

Now in a Roman Legion, a full Roman Legion that didn't have any absence or other men was about six thousand strong. Now, sometimes a Legion may not be a full six thousand strength, but that was the ideal situation. So He's saying, My name is Legion because there's a lot of us here. There's thousands of us, which is amazing when you consider how did this man become possessed by so many demons.

I want to stop there. When I was in college, I took a New Testament course in a college and it wasn't a religious college. It was a secular college. And I took this New Testament and the teacher professor was a believer.

I won't tell you what denomination he was, but he was a believer. And one of the things that we were to do in this course was to read the gospel of Mark.

And it kind of came to this. And his statement was, and again, he is a believer, religious person. And he goes, I don't believe in demon possession. I think the demons are alcoholism, addiction, poverty.

And I'm looking and I go, alcoholism, addiction and poverty didn't give this guy supernatural strength.

Also, all of his problems don't seem to be because of alcoholism, addiction or poverty.

And if it were, Jesus would simply say, you're free from your addiction.

Here's 20 to Nerei live in peace.

But he doesn't because demons do in fact exist. Well, why is it that we don't see them so much in our present day? I think there's two reasons. The biggest reason is, is that when Jesus came to minister, there was an obvious spiritual battle happening.

And Satan was trying to fight what God's plan was for Jesus's ministry.

So he was marshalling his assets, if you will, to fight the battle. And so he was placing his assets, the demons, in contravention of what God was trying to do.

And so therefore, when you have big battles, you have lots of armies.

But I think that's one reason. I think the second reason is I don't think we have a clue sometimes when there are demons around us.

Sometimes we just think it's evil. Sometimes we just don't understand.

So I think sometimes things happen in a spiritual order because the scriptures tell us we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but spiritual wickedness in high places. It's still here.

We just seem to fight each other rather than the right enemy.

So we have this man who's got a lot of demons in him and he began to implore him earnestly not to send him out of the country. So he's going, don't send me anywhere.

I don't want to I don't want to go to Hades or wherever it is waiting for the final victory. I don't want to do that. Do something other than that.

Now, there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby on the mountain.

Again, this is a Gentile community. So hogs, swine, pigs were a profitable business because you could sell it to the Romans, you could whatever. So there was a large herd.

And the demon implored him saying, send us,

not send poverty, not send alcoholism, not send addiction, send us into the swine so that we may enter them. You see, this legion isn't happy just being out and about. He needs to occupy some space, some living creature.

So his second choice over a man are grown pigs.

And Jesus gave him them permission and coming out the unclean spirits entered the swine.

You would think that would be the end of the story, but it's not because apparently swine are better or smarter than people.

Because the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them, and they were drowned in the sea.

Death for a swine seemed more preferable than being occupied by a demon.

And notice there were two thousand swine, which meant there were a lot of demon.

It wasn't like half the herd went down the entire herd and they drowned.

And their herdsmen ran away and reported in the city and in the country. Now, I'm sure these herdsmen weren't the owners.

They were hired laborers.

If you just lost your herd of two thousand pigs, you wouldn't want to take the blame for it.

Because I don't know if you have a paycheck big enough to offset the owner who just lost two thousand pigs.

So they immediately go and report it saying, "It wasn't us. We were watching the pigs great. We were doing our job." Then all of a sudden they all started running down and drowned themselves.

And the people came to see what was that had happened. So they start to investigate.

Are these guys telling us the truth? What's happening?

And they came to Jesus and observed the man who had been demon-possessed sitting down clothed and in his right mind.

There was a definite change in this individual. He went from living in tombs, screaming and shouting and breaking his shackles and his change and hurting himself,

to being clothed, sitting and in his right mind, his correct mind.

The very man who had had the legion and they became frightened.

You see, the disciples were afraid because they saw the power and authority of Jesus because he was able to speak to the wind and the sea and it obeyed.

And Jesus spoke with power and authority over the demons and they obeyed. And because of that, and this man went from being demon-possessed to being fine, to being okay.

Their responses frightening. They were scared. Rather than rejoicing that the man was made well, they were scared of what Jesus had done.

Which is not unlike many people. They don't want to change their lives. They're afraid of Jesus because Jesus will make them live a life that they don't want. They want to live a life they want. So they want no part of him.

So we can kind of understand because we're afraid that Jesus will make us live a more miserable life. Yet the truth is there is true joy in following the Lord.

Those who had seen it described to them how it had happened to the demon-possessed man and all about this wine. So they gave them a full accounting. This is what happened to try to placate the fear of Jesus.

And notice what the word says.

And they began to implore him to leave their region.

Just like the demon-possessed man implored, begged Jesus not to send him out of the country or to torment him, but to place him in this wine. They're begging Jesus to leave.

Here's this man who's now well.

But they're afraid of who Jesus is.

I find it interesting when people will talk about, "Well, when my time comes and I'm before God,

I'll just tell him all the good things that I did, and he'll let me in."

These people were afraid of God in a human form.

Wait till you go to the Great White Throne of Judgment, and God sitting on his throne with the smoke

filling the tabernacle and the robe and all the angels saying, "Holy, holy, holy."

And you go, "I'm going to speak up." No, you ain't. God's going to say, "You're not in the Book of Life. These are the things you did. Here's the judgment.

And the only thing you're going to be able to say is, "Yes, Lord."

You won't be able to speak.

You will be more frightened than these people. You will be more afraid than the disciples were.

Because who God is will be fully revealed.

We see Jesus as the Son of God because by faith we see Jesus as the Son of God. But there will come a day when we will see him as he truly is.

Yes, he's a friend.

Yes, he's loving and forgiving and merciful, but he is holy. And as the Scripture says, the only thing of the attributes of God that is repeated is holiness. You are holy, holy, holy. He is separated, separated, separated.

And that holiness will always come through.

The end of the story, the man who had been demon possessed desires to follow Jesus,

which is the correct response to what Jesus does to heal you from whatever afflicts you.

Instead of being afraid, he wants to follow.

But Jesus says, "No, I don't want you to follow. I want you to go to your home and tell what God has done for you."

And you know what he does? He does it.

He becomes a witness in the ten city region, the acopolis of the Gentiles, what God had done in his life.

So he becomes a witness of what God is doing while Jesus continues his ministry to the Jew first and to the Gentile.

But notice he doesn't reject the Gentile. He just says, "It's not your time to follow me in my ministry, but I want you to be a witness of what God has done for you."

Which again, your witness is different than my witness, which is different than another person's witness.

Your witness is what has God done for you.

Now, unfortunately, when it comes to witnessing, this guy had a great testimony, we would say. He could appear at church at a revival and say, "I once was demon possessed by a legion of demons, and Jesus cast them out in the swine, and now I am whole and heal and see me, and praise God." Everybody goes, "What a wonderful testimony."

Then another person would say, "I was a demon possessed, but I had a problem with alcohol, and for 20 years it ruined my life, but then Jesus came and saved me, and now I am grateful, and everybody is wonderful. What a testimony."

Let me tell you the greatest testimony I've ever heard.

When I was a young child, I believed that God existed, that Jesus sent to die from my sins.

Even though at that time I was fairly innocent, I understood I was the person and that I was the sinner because I told a few lies that I got that I... whatever. But I followed Jesus from a very early age until now.

Now, most people say, "Well, that's a boring testimony. That's a great testimony. I'm an ex nothing."

Some of the times you hear these testimonies and you think they're sad that they're still not living the life that they used to live.

As opposed to the one who said, "I'm an ex nothing and I've enjoyed being with Jesus every step of the way."

So whatever it is, your testimony, whether you're an alcoholic, whether you're an ex nothing, whether you just lived a regular life and then saw the light and became a follower, those are your testimony.

God didn't ask you to give the demon-possessed man's testimony or anybody else's testimony. He said, "Be a witness to what God has done for you."

Because what God has done for us, we may not have been so impacted by demon possession, but all of us are sinners.

Saved by grace. That's a great testimony.

I used to be a sinner, still struggling, try to do the right things and I don't always do the right things and sometimes I do the wrong things, but I'm not trying to do the wrong things. I'm struggling with it, but praise God, He loves me anyway. He forgives me as I have forgiven others.

And someday, I'll be just like Him. That's a testimony.

And so whatever God has placed, whatever the storm is, whatever the obstacle, whatever the problem is, let that situation be so that you might say, even in that situation, "God came and rescued me and changed me and let it begin now."