Words of Jesus Podcast - A Different Outcome Is Possible

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

The reward of no effort is atrophy.  This is true physically, mentally and spiritually.  The result of effort in exercise is strength; in relationships is sustainability; and in obedience is regeneration.  We must strive to achieve the promises offered by God. The opportunity is not something we can earn but our effort is required to bring the promises to completion. Actions and inaction bring consequences. Jesus asked this question, "Why do you call me LORD and not do what I say?" Jesus did his part to open the door; we must do our part by entering in. Spiritual victories in daily life require change.***Ch. 32 - JESUS HEALS A GADARENEJESUS AND HIS disciples came to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the country of the Gadarenes. As soon as Jesus was on the shore a man came to meet him, one who had been possessed of devils for a long time. He wore no clothes, and abode in no house, but in the tombs. No one could bind this man, not even with chains. It had often been tried, but he had broken the chains. No man could tame him. He spent his time both night and day in the mountains and tombs --crying loudly, and madly cutting himself with stones. When he saw Jesus he ran and fell down before him, and in a loud voice said: "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not." Jesus spoke, saying: "Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit." Then, to the man, Jesus said: "What is thy name?" The man answered: "My name is Legion; for we are many." And he asked Jesus not to send them out of the country. Near by a large herd of swine was feeding. The unclean spirits beseeched Jesus, saying: "Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them." Jesus gave them permission; the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the entire herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea and drowned. The herdsmen fled and told what they had seen. Many came to see Jesus and found the demoniac, clothed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus. Those who had seen Jesus drive the unclean spirits from the man told the latest arrivals how the man had been cleansed and made sane. The Gadarenes were afraid and asked Jesus to leave their country. He started to enter his boat, when the man who had been cleansed of the unclean spirits asked to go with him. Jesus would not permit it, but said to the man, "Go hove to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." He who was healed departed and told in Decapolis the great things Jesus had done for him. All men marveled.***Scriptures: Matthew 8:28-34; Mark 5:1; Luke 8:26-39

Think Red Ink Ministries presents the Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris. Hello my friends and welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series. I'm Don Harris, your very, very happy and satisfied host. I'm doing what I love to do, which is to wade through the red ink in the scriptures and hear what Jesus had to say. Today we're starting in chapter 32 of the Words of Jesus book. And this is when Jesus heals the Gadarene. Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the country of the Gadarenes.

Now we just got done talking about their trip, you remember. This was when the storm occurred that Jesus actually calmed. And as soon as Jesus was on the shore, a man came to meet him, one who had been possessed of devils for a long time. He wore no clothes and abode in no house, but in the tombs. No one could bind this man. No, not with chains. It had often been tried,

but he had broken the chains, and no man could tame him. He spent his time both night and day in the mountains and the tombs, crying loudly and madly, cutting himself with stones. When he saw Jesus, he ran and fell down before him. And in a loud voice he said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus,

thou Son of the Most High God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not. Jesus spoke, saying, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. Then Jesus said, What is thy name? The man answered, My name is Legion, for we are many. Odd answer, isn't it? And he asked Jesus not to send him out of the country. Nearby, a large herd of swine was feeding.

Send us into the swine that we may enter into them. Jesus gave them permission. The unclean spirits entered into the swine, and the entire herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea and drowned. The herdsmen fled and told what had been seen. Many came to Jesus and found the demoniac clothed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus. Those who had seen Jesus drive the unclean spirits from the man told the latest arrivals

how the man had been cleansed and made sane. The Gadarenes were afraid and asked Jesus to leave their country. He started to enter into his boat. Then the man who had been cleansed of the unclean spirit asked to go with him. Jesus would not permit it, but said to the man, go home to thy friends and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee and hath had compassion on thee. And he who

was cleansed departed and told in Decapolis the great things that Jesus had done for him, and all men marveled. This is a wonderful story that is hardly even understandable by 21st century Christians. As you know, I don't give a lot of credence to the devil in our day, I don't give a lot of credence to the devil in our day I don't think that he is as

active and certainly not in the life of Christian people as people like to make him out to be. I don't praise him, I don't talk about the things that he does Well that's the way we praise God, isn't it? And so when we do take our time and effort to talk about what the devil's doing, I consider it to be praise. And when we do what he tells us to do, I consider that to be worship. Those two things I will not give him. And so I may have a little different take on this than

most people do. I happen to believe that when Jesus sent out the 70 and gave them power over all unclean spirits, I think that, and them having returned and said to him, even the devils are subject to us in thy name, Jesus made a statement that I think should not be disregarded. And that was when he says I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Jesus had indeed

conquered the demonization of mankind. I don't think that we experience this today. I know. I've heard the stories. I know what many of you are thinking right now. But in a lot of cases these stories are they're not provable stories. They're not things that well, frankly, that Christians have any business even talking about or saying.

We really shouldn't do that. There is nothing, I can think of nothing worse to say to a person who is mentally disorganized, who has trouble putting together coherent thoughts, who has a putting together coherent thoughts, who has a mental disorder, or a person who has perhaps epileptic seizures or things that are physically wrong with them, I can't think of any worse thing to do

than to tell that person that they have a devil. I don't know how that's even helpful. Especially when you don't have the ability to give him any help whatsoever. Oh you can pray over him. You can talk him into speaking in tongues or you can talk him into confessing that he's better. I guess I know all the tricks. And so being raised in and preaching in and starting out, actually my ministry started out in the

Pentecostal churches. I just know too much. I know too much about what's said in the pastor's chambers. I know too much about what is said by a bunch of preachers that are sitting around the table at Denny's. I know too much about what is said by a bunch of preachers that are sitting around the table at Denny's. I know too much. I've heard too much to believe it all. I just can't. I won't. And so therefore, I think that here's that thing again that keeps popping up, is the honesty of Christians. I'm going to tell you, if the Lord God pointed out somebody in a crowd and said that man has a demon, I'm the guy who's going to believe that.

I'm not saying that they don't exist. I'm just saying that a lot of times we make assumptions that just exacerbate the problem. They don't fix anything. There are people who have spent their entire lives running from preacher to preacher, church to church, looking for somebody to cast a demon out of them that, friend, it just doesn't exist. You just need to get a hold of yourself. You need to start thinking, quit being so blasted selfish

and quit thinking that the world revolves around you and take control of your thoughts. Hey, you know what? Here's the idea. Why don't you become a Christian? I have never, ever met anybody that is convinced that they have a demon or they're obsessed with talking about demons and talking about supernatural things and pictures that fall off the wall and chairs that fly and all the rest of this stuff. I have never met

somebody like that who has any desire whatsoever of giving clothes to somebody who doesn't have anything to wear. Or making sure that a person has a place to sleep at night in the cold. Or making sure that the hungry people have something to eat. I've never met that. Have you? I would love to hear an example of it, but I haven't ever met one. Everyone that I've ever met in that situation is selfish and narrow-minded

and they will not have anything except their own way. You want to call that a demon? They call everything demons nowadays. Demons of overeating and demons of smoking and demons of cussing and demons of whatever. You've got a spirit of just fill in the blank. Whatever your problem happens to be, you've got a spirit that needs to be cast out.

I'm sorry, friend. I don't get it. You need to know that I've had experience with this. You have somebody in the congregation that supposedly has a demon, and you go and lay hands on them, and they writhe, and they foam, and they carry on, and they shout, and they holler, and they crawl on the floor, and they do all the circus acts. And, well, I mean, really, what is the difference and then when you can find time

away from the crowds away from the church away from all the notoriety and you have a talk with that person you find out this person is just absolutely possessed with himself there's not an unselfish bone in their body and I'm thinking that you know friend this is not there's not an unselfish bone in their body. And I'm thinking that, you know, friend, this is not a demon. This is just you, unwilling, or perhaps in some cases, unable to control yourself.

What in the world is going on? I'll tell you something else that's invariable. As far as my experience is concerned, that's the only thing I can talk about, you understand. I'm not about to sit here and preach something as being true because it's somebody else's experience. My experience has been that people in that condition are usually grown-up children who've not been parented well. Somebody never stopped them.

I mean, next time your kid goes into a big, long crying jag at Safeway, you ought to think about these things. Somebody has to stop them. Preferably, it's them. Secondarily, it's you. And if you want to get into tertiary means of control, that's called the police department and big iron bars and jails and mental institutions and drugs, mind-altering,

psychotropic drugs. That's where these things go. There are people who believe that anybody who is mentally ill is demon-possessed. I don't believe that at all. You don't believe in mental illness? You don't think that it's actually real? You don't think that somebody who's lived their own way and done their own thing, invented reality in their own mind, and perhaps become possessed with a particular, maybe possessed isn't the word

we should use today, but they become obsessed with watching a particular movie or they become Star Trek fans or you know, they're just, I'm not picking on Star Trek but to constantly deal in fantasy have you ever seen somebody, say a wife that's been confronted with the fact that her husband is cheating on her and she just refuses to believe it? You better be careful of that sister. You better deal in reality.

To the best of your ability, accept things in your life that are not the way you like them to be. But to retreat off into your own mind. Children do this. Abused children do this. They retreat off into their own mind. Look, I'm sorry that they do that, but they do. And they need to be trained differently. They need to understand that there are certain things that are real and there are certain things that are not real. And if you don't get this under control, if you don't learn to control this now,

where is this going to lead? Well, I'll tell you where it leads. It leads to drug abuse. It leads to substance abuse. It leads to multiple marriages. It leads to children that are either aborted or put up for adoption or they never see their parents again. They become a drag on the community around them, a drag on their friends,

because nobody has ever grabbed these people by the shoulders and said, shape up! Have you done everything you know to do to make your life better? I don't believe that. And the other thing that is a characteristic of these kind of people are their filthiness and their nastiness that they live in day to day. It doesn't seem to

bother them at all. You know, it might be time just to pick up the living room. You might be depressed because your windows are dirty, sister. You can't look through that filthy glass every day and have a good outlook on life. It's impossible. I mean, some guys have to deal with depression. I know why you're dealing with depression. Because you never learned to manage your money. You never learned to manage your life. You never learned to manage your wife. You never conquered anything in your whole life. You quit every opportunity you got. You did what was fun. You didn't do what was responsible.

And now you're depressed. Gee, I wonder how that happened. Oh, you've got a demon. Oh, we can fix that. Just come and we'll pray for you and you can pretend that you're vomiting or whatever else you want to do. But you know what?

It's coming back. It's coming back until you make a change. Friends, whatever happened to just good old-fashioned repentance? Whatever happened to people falling on their face before God and saying, I'm a mess. I need help. I need help. Can you help me? The answer is yes. I can help you. You know, cry out to God and look for Him to do something in your life you're going to be light years ahead of people that are just on prozac does anybody get better

on that and then and then you take into account some of the churches that are just stymied by these problems they do not know what to do with that person in their, or persons in their congregation that have these problems. They don't know what to do with them. So what do they do? They send them to the world for help. This is so unnecessary. Do you even realize how many Christian pastors are going to kill themselves this year?

Do you realize how big this problem is? The depression, the anxiety that people, the preachers and church leadership lives under day to day. There's got to be a reason for that. There's got to be something that's missing here. Is the power of God sufficient or is it not? Look, most of this, it has to do with us applying whatever power, whatever abilities we have in wrong areas. We try to take our own strength and create more spiritual beings of ourselves.

How are you going to do that? Are you really going to take something that was conceived and started in the Spirit, which is your salvation, and be perfected by the flesh? Paul asked that question. Is that what you're going to do? You're going to use your fleshly power to you're going to be determined. You're going to have a strong will. You're going to have people admire your willpower to not do whatever it is that you feel like is the wrong thing to do or to do whatever it is you feel is the right thing to do. There will be people that will listen to this

message and others like it that are determined to make a change in their life. And they might go to church. They might go down to the flop house down there and cook for some of the people that are hungry. Or they might work in Meals on Wheels. They might be a pink lady at the hospital trying to make their life better. But friend, what you're going to find is you're painting

a house that's falling. It might look good for a while, but it's not going to stand. We need to be fixed from the inside out. A lot of times the repairs that need to be done on the inside of us cannot be done because we have been so irresponsible up until this point that we don't even understand the Lord assigning us responsibility. We didn't listen to our dad when he assigned us responsibility.

We balked when our school teacher gave us responsibility. We rebelled when our mother told us that this is the way things are going to have to be in this house and as long as you're under my roof speech, we all had those, right? And we balk and we complain and we rebel and then we've lived a life of rebellion so long that if God says something to us that we don't like, we simply ignore it. Then if we've been playing with the idea that reality

doesn't mean anything, that's your truth, this is my truth, that's your reality, this is my reality. They want to believe that the stories that they make up in their own mind, the life that they make up in their own mind is real and what they see out here is not. And people who, you take that and mix it with what we were talking about previously, you've got a life that is so incredibly messed up, not even God can fix it.

Because look, it's not my plan, it was His. His plan was to get the gospel into your ears. If you have filtered everything that came through your ears by your own understanding all your life, you're going to have real difficulty understanding the Lord. Extreme difficulty understanding Him. And certainly difficult trying to apply what He has to say to our lives. We cannot continue this. We just simply cannot

continue to live like this and expect to get by. So what do we do from here? My advice? Fall on your face before God. He's not going to ignore you. Fall on your face before God. Ask Him what to do. Get away from men's counsel.

Get away from church counsel. I don't know what you can trust. I don't know where to send you other than to the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus made a promise one time. He said maybe I shouldn't have called it a promise. He made a statement. And he says, I'll tell you something about me and who I am. I am a rock.

I am a huge rock. An adamant stone. Now let me tell you the two characteristics or at least the two possibilities of you encountering this stone. There's two ways you can encounter this. There's two ways you can encounter me. You want to encounter Christ? There's two ways to do it.

One of them is the preferable way, the way that he has told us all along that is contained in all of his words from deny me to follow me and just about everything he has to say to us involves this primary step. That we should fall upon that stone. Now anybody who falls on me, he says, will be broken.

Now that doesn't sound like it's going to be very pleasant. And it isn't very pleasant. But I assure you there are people out there that call themselves Christians that cannot even hark to the time that that ever happened to them. That they got so far down or their life got to be such a mess that they actually had to come and fall upon this adamant stone and be broken. But friend, it requires

that we be broken. But friend, it requires that we be broken. Salvation requires that you be broken. You want to know the second way to encounter this stone? This is not a way that you want to do it. He says, anybody who falls on this stone will be broken, but upon whomsoever it may fall, it'll grind him to powder. You might think, well, that's not very nice.

Oh, yeah, it's nice. It's nice. He didn't have to tell us the first way, but he did. He didn't come to destroy the world. He came to save it. He didn't come to destroy you. He came to save you. And you know, a lot of times I think that we have in mind that whatever God has in store for us, it's going to be miraculous. There's going to be little bluebirds tweeting. There's going to be not a cloud in the sky. And it's going to be miraculous. There's going to be little bluebirds tweeting. There's going to be not a cloud in the sky.

And it's going to be a wonderful experience. I'm going to feel all twitterpated and goose bumpy. And I'm going to be happy. And I'm going to have a stupid grin on my face the rest of my life. Because I've encountered Jesus. That's not what he said. You give me a man. And I'll tell you what,

we had a man visit here for Tabernacles one year whose life was a shambles. But you know what he did? He fell on Christ. When he got up, he wasn't necessarily smiling. He wasn't necessarily happy. He wasn't necessarily happy. He might have had a black eye, a broken arm. But he fell, and he fell hard.

But man, oh man, what a difference in his life. You're talking about being loosed from drugs instantaneously to i mean to to to walk away from that situation with hope that life can be different do you know when somebody is really down and out when there's nothing under their butt but concrete it's over for them when they're in that situation do you know why change means so much to them because Because any change is better than what I have now. I'm wondering sometimes if that's not a prerequisite. Jesus said that there is such a man that comes into the kingdom of God and repents. And he says, you need to know that when a man does come and says, you know, I want to make a change.

He falls on that stone and man does come and says, you know, I want to make a change, he falls on that stone, and he does want to repent, he wants to make a change, he says all the angels in heaven are happy that this has happened to just one person. More so, now listen to this, more so than a hundred who need no repentance. Friend, I know that goes against a lot of modern theology, but there are people out there that don't need repentance.

I've known people like that, perhaps you have, that just don't have that propensity for sin like old Don's got. You know, just tell me the wrong way, warn me not to go there, and then go do something else for a minute because I'm going to walk down that road and just see what's down there. I don't know what that is. Some people don't have it. I do. So I don't understand the one who doesn't need repentance, but there is such a person that needs it they need repentance they need change it's time to stop what you're doing and do something else my advice to you is fall on that adamant stone fall on christ and if if if his words beat you up

you know just smile and take it just smile and take it somebody's going words beat you up, you know, just smile and take it. Just smile and take it. Somebody's going to beat you up. Somebody's going to do it. It might be your enemy. It might be the police department. It might be the medical industry. They might take your mind with psychotropic drugs.

Somebody's going to ruin you. Somebody's going to take advantage of you. Somebody's going to rip you limb from limb and throw you out to the birds. It's going to happen. You don't think your life is just going to get worse and worse and worse. And then one day you're going to wake up in heaven, do you? Oh, one day it'll be worth it all. You know what? There's no guarantee it's going to be worth it all. You might lose everything you have and your soul too. So if you've got to be broken, if you've got to be beaten up, can I recommend somebody? Let the words of Jesus Christ find their way into your heart and into your life, into your brain.

Make these decisions with good logic and good common sense and make a change in your life. Watch what happens. It's going to be wonderful. It's time for us to go already. All right, friend. Until I see you again, think red ink, okay?

Bye-bye. You've been listening to Don C. Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Email don at thinkredink.com. That's thinkredc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you