Outcasts Need Jesus

Sermon from CCM Fallowfield

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LISTEN

This sermon was preached by Andy Wisdom at CCM Fallowfield on Sunday 22nd September 2019 and was based on Mark 5:1-20.

SERIES

 

This message was part of the ‘Who needs Jesus?’ series, preached at Christ Church Manchester’s church in Fallowfield in autumn 2019. The full series included the following sermons:

 

BIBLE VERSES

This sermon was based on Mark 5:1-20.

Jesus Heals a Man with a Demon

1 They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes.[a] 2 And when Jesus[b] 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[c] 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[d] 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.

KEY POINTS

Question: As a Church Community, how do we love people whose needs we don’t know how to address?

The ‘Man From the Tombs’ has Four Needs

  • Physical need — he has super-human strength and is dangerous, so has been excluded from his community and forced to live like a criminal or animal (vv. 3-5).
  • Emotional need — he has an identity crisis. The use of ‘I’ and ‘we’ is so confused in his language that he and the evil spirit(s) in him have become almost indistinguishable from one another.
  • Social need — he has been pushed away from his community and forced to live among the dead (v. 3a).
  • Spiritual need — he is impure according to Jewish law, for 100 reasons. He’s a gentile, he lives among the dead, lives near pigs… etc. He’s spiritually ‘impure’.

 

Jesus Addresses all Four Needs (and Shows us How to do the Same)

  • Physical need — Jesus enables the man to return to society, he is no longer a danger to others. His restored dignity is symbolised by his putting on clothes (v. 15a).
  • Can you help somebody get their dignity back?
  • Emotional need — The man’s identity is restored. We don’t know his name, but he certainly isn’t the ‘Gerasene demoniac’ anymore. Fyodor Dostoyevsky said “to love someone means to see him as God intended him to be”.
  • Can you help somebody realise their identity in Christ?
  • Social need — Jesus’ healing of the man allows him to return to the community which ostracised him. When the man asks to go with Jesus, he says no. This would defeat part of the purpose of the man’s healing!
  • Can you help somebody get involved in the church community?
  • Spiritual need — Jesus casts the evil spirit(s) out of the man. The man’s encounter with Jesus changes his entire life.
  • Can you help somebody encounter Jesus?

MORE SERMONS

 

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