July 26, 2026 | Go Home: A Lost Cause Finds Mercy

It's always such a delight for me to be here together with all of you and to open up God's word together.

And this morning, as we open up God's word, we want to remember that what we are reading today is not a parable.

We're not supposed to go to Mark 5 and say, okay, where is the nice lesson that I can pull out of this story?

No.

We go to Mark 5 this morning and we meet a real demon-possessed man who is really healed.

We're reading history.

And it's important to remember that we're reading history because the same God who healed this broken man then is still working and saving now.

And all these interesting events from a demon-possessed man to falling pigs to healing, all of this points to one thing.

And it will be our anthem for the time together today.

It's that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

And that matters today because Jesus Christ is still Lord.

When we look around, we see wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes.

And we've got to be reminded from the word today that Jesus Christ is Lord.

When we look around and see darkness in the world and darkness in our own lives, we got to be reminded by this Jesus, who looks darkness in the face and doesn't flinch.

We want to be comforted by Christ, who is not afraid or shaken when he comes face to face with evil.

We need the foundation of our lives to be that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And the setting of our story today is in the Garrisons.

Now, the Garressenes is not Israelite land, so this is a part of the nations.

This is Gentile land.

And that's important to remember throughout the time together this morning.

And because it's Gentile land, the way that Jesus interacts, it's gonna be a little bit different, and we're gonna see that here.

And this comes on the heels of Jesus having just rebuked the waves and they listened.

We now come to another situation that is seemingly out of control with this demon-possessed man.

And Jesus asserts and displays his lordship.

Again, we are in Gentile land as we go to verse two.

When he, that is Jesus, got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met him, and he had his dwelling among the tombs, and no one was able to bind him anymore, even with a chain.

I've never been on a cruise ship, but I imagine that they are pretty nice.

And when they go to a place, I've often seen that the cruise ships stop in the more palatable parts of a city.

They go to the nice part where you can just step off, take out your phone, and do the little tap-to-pay to buy ancient souvenirs that are a thousand years old.

And oftentimes the places where these cruise ships stop, they've got nice high walls so that you can effectively be shielded from the less palatable parts of the city.

Well, Jesus this morning is not sailing on a Royal Caribbean cruise because right when he gets out of the boat, darkness sprints at the light of the world.

No fences, no barriers.

Jesus steps out and darkness meets him.

And it's not just any type of darkness.

This isn't a random guy, this is a gravely unclean man.

Numbers 19, 16 says that if someone even touches a grave, he's unclean.

And this man, he's living among them.

He's living among the tombs, and this gravely unclean man is now running headlong at Jesus.

That's the picture.

Jesus steps out, no fences, no barriers, darkness starts sprinting at him.

That's the picture of what is happening, and we're going to learn more about who this guy is in verse 4.

Look at verse 4.

This man 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.

Constantly, night and day, he was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains, and gashing himself with stones.

You notice how we don't know the name of this guy in the story?

We actually don't find out his name throughout the entire 20 verses.

All that we know about this man is his current life situation.

We don't know his name or his family or his background, because where he is at right now has taken over everything that was a part of his life.

He is the demon-possessed man who lives among the tombs.

And verse 4 tells us that he had often been bound.

So this is not a new problem, but something that has probably been going on for a long time now.

They have tried not only to get him to be subdued, they're trying to get him out of sight, out of mind.

Because if anyone had been written off as a lost cause, it'd be this guy.

Does anyone in here know of some lost causes?

They might be in your family, estranged, not anywhere near to being restrained or stopped.

And sometimes the temptation is to just think, hey, out of sight, out of mind is the best place for those kind of people.

There was a UGOV poll that found that nearly 38% of Americans had at least one immediate family member that they were no longer in contact with.

Lost cause?

Do you remember the words of Christ as he says, I came to seek and save the lost?

Lost causes are the Lord's specialty.

Lost causes are his specialty.

And it's interesting to note that in Mark 6, the very next chapter, Jesus is going to feed the 5,000.

But for today, heroes narrowed his scope to one.

One lost sheep.

One lost cause.

The people of the land and the garrisons around this lost cause had done all they could in their own power to stop him, but he didn't need to be stopped.

He needed to be healed.

Continue on to verse six.

Seeing Jesus from a distance, he ran up and bowed down.

He ran up and bowed down.

The man who could not be bound bowed down.

The man who could not be bound by men bowed down to God.

At the slightest glimpse of Jesus, this unclean man ran.

He didn't go back into the tombs from shame, because even the demons weren't strong enough to stop this man from running to Christ.

Isn't that a great comfort?

Even the demons can't make him run further back into the tombs because at the slightest glimpse of grace, this man is running.

The demons can't force him back.

And the interesting thing is that ironically the demons here are forced to bow with him.

We know from the scripture that every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And this story is about many important truths today, but primarily that Jesus Christ is Lord.

As the demons of hell encounter the Lord, the first place they go is the ground, because they know under whose feet they exist.

And we shouldn't forget that the best and brightest of the devils still quake at the feet of Christ.

And it's now at the feet of Christ that we hear our first dialogue of the passage today.

Look at what happens now in verse seven.

And shouting 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.

For he had been saying to him, Come out of the man, you unclean spirit.

The demons know exactly who or they are speaking with because even the demons believe and shudder.

So when the demons encounter Christ, they are not trying to debate the sonship of God.

They plainly acknowledge that.

The demons aren't trying to do some YouTube apologetics of saying, okay, you are not really a member of the Trinity.

No, the demons know exactly who they're dealing with.

A.W.

Tozer says that the devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.

We know that it's not enough to just know who Jesus is because clearly the demons do.

Little side note the difference between a demon and a disciple doesn't have to do with bending the knee because both of them do it.

It's that a demon bows in justice and a disciple bows in joy.

A demon bows because he has to, a disciple bows because he gets to.

It's not enough to just know who Jesus is.

A disciple bows in joy.

So the demons here know who has come to the Garrisons this day.

They know who has come to the man who nobody else would come to.

The demons have been found out.

They've been exposed.

And do you see their posture?

Look at their posture.

They are imploring by God.

The demons are begging from defeat.

The demons are begging because they know that they have lost.

The demons very clearly know about the Matthew 25, 41, eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

The demons know that they have lost.

And you know, sometimes what happens to us is we can forget that they've lost.

We can be quick to forget that evil will not win.

Brothers and sisters, we are not fighting for victory.

We are fighting from victory.

We have already won because of what Christ has done on the cross.

And the demons on the other side of the equation, they already know it is game over, and they're just trying to buy as much time as they can.

They beg from defeat.

When Jesus looks evil in the face here, he doesn't flinch because the darkness flees, the waves bow down, and demons tremble.

It's all because Jesus is Lord.

This summer I had the opportunity to spend some time overseas, and it was a blessing to see what the Lord is doing.

And yet at the same time, there is a lot of need.

There's a lot of need in our own community, and there's a lot of need once you step across the ocean and you see people who are lost without the gospel.

And even in the midst of that need, there were these encouraging, encouraging slivers of divine hope.

And for one of the weeks that I was over there, I was in Eastern Europe and I was spending time with this brother in Christ.

And this brother in Christ is the pastor of a church, and we shared a lot in common.

He was my age, he was single, and he had all these sweet older ladies trying to set him up on dates.

And so it was good to spend this week with him and to see how he operated in his own community.

And this was a brother who came out of Islam and now was preaching to the people who watched him grow up.

They watched his life, they knew what he had been through, and they knew what he had done.

And he was recounting to me a time where he was standing in front of a crowd and he was preaching from Isaiah 53.

Now, the crowd that started to gather around him was not taking too kindly to the words that he was saying.

And just to give you an idea of one of the members of that crowd, one of the people who was there was a member of ISIS, and the temperature in the room can go down when those kind of moments are there.

And he's preaching and he's showing how Isaiah 53 actually points toward Jesus.

That is the one that that passage is about.

It is pointing toward someone who is going to come and he's going to defeat death by taking on sin and dying.

And this brother continues to breach, and the crowd continues to gather and they're breathing out threats, and they are very angry at him and upset.

And I asked him, How did you feel?

And he even said his legs were shaking, he was nervous.

But you know what?

He knew who is Lord.

He knew who's Lord.

He knew who was in charge.

And so, even as he was preaching and he was nervous, he knows that the demons are subject to Christ.

He knows that the darkness will not have the final say.

And so that brother continues to preach.

And he continues to be bold even to this day.

And knowing that Jesus is Lord ought to change how we move as sojourners and exiles through this earth, knowing that even the demons are subject to him should change how we wake up in the morning and we live our daily lives.

As we are bold and as we trust in God, we know that with full assurance, evil will not win.

This is why I love what Paul says in Romans 16, verse 20.

Romans 16:20

Paul says this the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.

In this passage, we're seeing the demons go at the feet of Christ.

And you know what Paul says?

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.

Your feet.

Then is the strength of the spirit that's working in our lives now.

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.

Jesus commands at the end of verse 8 to come out of the man, you unclean spirit, and he asks him a question in verse 9.

And he was asking him, What is your name?

And he said to him, My name is Legion, for we are many.

And you've probably heard the word legion before and know that it's about 6,000 soldiers, and we don't know if that's the exact number of demons that were in this man, but we know that the demons self-proclaim, we are many.

We are many.

See how Jesus doesn't step back.

Notice how Jesus doesn't falter.

Notice how Jesus doesn't get overcome by the statement that the demons are many.

Jesus is Lord.

Jesus won't back down.

And Jesus commands, and they listen.

And an interesting sequence now takes place at the end of verse 10 and into verse 11.

And he began to implore him earnestly not to send them out of the country.

Now there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby in the mountain, and the demons implored him, saying, Send us into the swine so that we may enter them.

Jesus gave them permission.

And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and about two thousand of them, and they were drowned in the sea.

Alright, what in the world is going on with these swine?

You can feel free to just find my dad after the service and just ask him.

He'll have the right answer.

He'd love to talk about it.

So we've got these swine, these pigs, and the demons clearly want to go somewhere, and they're saying, hey, what about those pigs right there?

Now let's think about this city, the Garrisons, just for a moment.

This is a place where they know that there is a crazy tomb-dwelling man, okay?

The people of the city know that there's the crazy man, he lives alone.

We tried to stop him a lot of times, and it just didn't work.

Now, imagine if one day this crazy man comes back into the city square with chains dragging behind him, and he just says, Surprise, I'm better.

Do you think people are gonna believe him?

And even if they did, they might wonder, okay, if there were really demons in that guy, where did those demons go?

Or are they gonna come for me or for my family?

Sending the demons into the pigs was a very physical and public demonstration of divine power so that the people would know that the kingdom had come.

It was physical and public.

In this way that Jesus healed, the whole event could not be written off as the man just getting over it.

He wasn't finally just coming to his senses because 2,000 pigs fell off a cliff to their death as a direct result of his healing.

It was physical and public.

Later on in this chapter, you probably have heard of the woman who had the discharge of blood who was healed by Christ, right?

So you know how that actually happens.

That healing happens very much in public.

It's a very private matter, and yet that healing happens out in public.

The reason for that is that the woman's shame all happened out in public.

They all knew that she was unclean out in public, so the healing really needed to happen out in public, so everybody knew that the kingdom had come upon this place.

In a very similar way, that the healing of this demon-possessed man had to happen out in the open for everybody to see, so that there could be no more doubt.

The kingdom had come.

In this way that Jesus healed, the community are not left to wonder.

Are the demons in that man still on the loose?

They don't have to worry about that.

None of those questions are asked because the pigs plunged into the sea.

First John 3 8 said that the Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil.

And in this Gentile territory, the kingdom had come.

The Son of God appeared.

And with this incredible demonstration of divine power, how will the people respond?

I would hope to imagine that they would say, Okay, there is a man who is able to do these great and mighty works.

We should listen to him.

But what do they do instead?

Look with me at verse 14.

Their herdsmen ran away and reported it in the city and in the country.

And the people came to see what it was that had happened.

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

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

Those who had seen it described to them how it happened to the demon-possessed man and all about the slime.

And they began to implore him to leave.

Yeah, there was a guy named Jesus, and he went to that guy, the crazy one, and he told the demons to come out.

And the demons listened to the guy named Jesus.

Imagine how it would have been to receive that news.

Everybody would have known who the crazy guy was out there.

And to hear that there was someone who came to that guy, not to try a new sort of Teflon chain, but to heal him.

That's what they heard.

He was not subdued, he was not stopped, he was not chained, but he was healed.

The lost cause was lost no more, and this should have been a momentous cause for celebration.

But as we just saw, the people began to implore him to leave.

There are many countries and cities around the world where they want the king and the kingdom gone, and they are willing to do anything.

And I'm sure we've heard about many brothers and sisters in Christ who have been killed or imprisoned for the sake of this great king.

Even just last year it was reported that around 4,800 Christians were killed for their faith.

And that math works out to a brother or sister in Christ getting killed about every two hours.

It's heavy, it's weighty.

The world will do whatever it can to try to snuff out any little piece of the king and his kingdom because they want their own.

And in the same way that these people here in the land are imploring Jesus to leave, we know that there are many places today and many people that implore Jesus to leave.

And I've been in some of these places and I've seen the efforts that people go to to try to get rid of the king.

But you know what?

Even when they try to get rid of the king, they're still left with people like this guy.

Even when you try to destroy churches, burn this, or get rid of that, you're still left with people who have been touched by Jesus.

And this is why it's really important because what we see is that even though all these things are trying to work against the king in the kingdom, Jesus is still Lord.

And even while the nations rage and the people's plot in vain against the Christ, these same people can't explain away a transformed life.

Even if these people are trying to get the Savior out of their land, they are stuck with the truth of a man who is sitting clothed and in his right mind.

The world will try all they can to destroy the kingdom, but they can't explain away those who were blind, but now they see, those who were lame but now they walk, those who were addicted but now clean, and moral and now pure, dead and now alive.

The world can try all they can, but they're still stuck with people who've been touched by the saving hand of Christ.

And why does this matter?

Because Jesus is about to leave the garrisons, but this brother?

He's supposed to stay.

Jesus has left this earth, but we're still here.

Even when they try to send the Savior away, those who have been touched and healed and saved by the Savior are here to stay.

The kingdom will advance because the king is still on the throne, and he's working in our lives to advance the kingdom.

And here's where I really want you to see what Jesus does as he now interacts directly, face to face with this healed man.

Look at what happens.

The man has an interesting request in verse 18.

As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed was imploring him that he might accompany him.

And he did not let him.

But he said to him, Go home to your people and report to them what great things the Lord has done for you and how he had mercy on you.

Understandably so, the healed man wants to go be with Jesus.

This is the man who just changed everything about his life, so we can understand why he wants to go and follow Jesus wherever Jesus would go.

But Jesus does something interesting instead.

He puts him on a fast track to preach in ministry.

This man is skipping college, seminary, ordination, because Jesus said, Go.

I didn't get the fast pass, so I'm going back to seminary in two weeks.

But this guy, he gets told, go, you, go, yes, you.

This is not the moment where Jesus looks at his roster and says, Wow, we definitely need a substitute for this guy.

No.

Jesus says, You go home.

Go home to your people.

Go home to the people who are kicking me out of their land.

Go home to the people who just lost their livelihood because of what your healing did.

Go home to those people.

Some other translations simply say, Go home to your friends.

We never learn the name of this man, but he is going home to people who will absolutely know exactly who he is.

It's like when the estranged family member comes home after a decade of no contact and the heart just drops.

Going home is not easy.

Jesus himself would have known what this man was walking into.

Jesus had family members that thought that he was crazy, and even Jesus himself said, a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown.

Jesus knew that going home and preaching was not easy.

But even so, Jesus called the lost cause to go to the people that thought he could never get better.

And you know what this means?

This means that one of the first witnesses to the nations was a freshly healed, formerly possessed man whose last known address was the cemetery.

That's one of the first witnesses to the nations.

This guy.

Again, Jesus didn't look at his roster and say, we need a sub in ASAP.

Jesus didn't even wait for him to have a well-thought-out theology of the end times, not pre-mill, post-mill.

He doesn't have to have an opinion on speaking in tongues.

No, he's got about as much theology as the dying thief on the cross.

But he has met Christ, and that changes everything.

So Jesus says to him, Go.

Most churches wouldn't let this man serve on a greeting team, and he's supposed to go to the pulpit and he's supposed to tell them what Christ has done.

He's supposed to say what great things the Lord has done for him and how the Lord has had mercy on him.

Jesus is gracious to the man for his first sermon.

It's just a two-point sermon, God's work and God's mercy.

And the hard part though is that he's supposed to do it at home.

I know that most people in here this morning were not born on the back nine of Diamante.

So when we say go home, it's probably not right around the corner.

And as we just talked about, going home is not easy.

When you hear go home, that might not evoke great feelings inside of you.

I know that home is supposed to be where the heart is, but for many, home is where the hurt is.

And if you've experienced some of that, you know the pain of even just thinking about it, thinking about home, thinking about neighbors and friends from years or decades ago.

Maybe you're thinking of conversations that went terribly wrong.

Those moments that were just never supposed to happen.

And I want you to bear in mind that this, going home, is what the freshly healed man is being called to do.

He's supposed to go to the people who have seen him at his worst.

And he's supposed to say, There is a God.

And I know this because his mercy touched me.

Now, personally, for you, have you ever noticed that it's easier to talk about your past life to people that you've never met before?

I mean, seriously, to talk to people who you didn't sin with, or those who didn't see you do X, Y, or Z.

It's hard to talk to people who have seen you at your worst.

And this uncomfortably common phenomenon is something that author Eugene Peterson captured well in writing.

Listen to what he says.

Those who know us best are often the least equipped to hear us most deeply, because they are constantly translating our present truth back into the vocabulary of our past weaknesses.

Do you get that?

Family and friends might be resistant to hearing the truth from us because they are constantly seeing us through the filter in the lens of who we used to be.

And the temptation then is to just avoid talking to those people entirely.

Go meet new people.

It's difficult when we have familiarity.

Am I alone in this?

Maybe you've experienced that too.

Now I remember reading this exact passage, Mark 5, a couple of years ago when I was finishing up my Bible school over in Albania.

And it was such a delightful time being in that Bible school and having the desire to go and tell people about Jesus who I had never met.

But then I read this passage and I started to feel convicted.

How am I going to go tell people about Jesus that I've never met when I haven't told people about Jesus that I already know?

I was trying to find every reason why I would not go home and tell the people who have actually seen me mess up I didn't want to do that.

It's uncomfortable.

But that's exactly what this man had to do.

And I remember the burden on my heart was so much that I picked up the phone and I started calling people from back in college because go home.

Tell what the Lord has done for you.

And so I started calling some of these friends and I didn't know how they would receive it.

And I just started to tell them about what God had done in my life, what Christ had done on the cross.

And it was uncomfortable at times.

I remember one of my friends in particular thought I was being very foolish and being unwise.

And the others just kind of nodded along through some of the uncomfortability.

But you know what?

I've believed that God can work and stuff like that.

I still pray for those people at home to this day.

And it just reminded me that going home is hard.

And because of that, and because of this passage, I began to realize that what can happen is that we believe in a gospel of grace, but we might tend to evangelize like a gospel of works.

Here's what I mean.

We might go to people that we've never met and we're able to show our mostly nice and tidy lives and be able to say, hey, this is what grace means.

But it's a different story entirely.

When you go to people who know that you have no good in you, when you go to people who have seen you mess up, who've seen you on your worst day, there's no hiding there.

When you go to those kind of people and you're able to say, Jesus saved me, that's powerful.

Because they know that you've got no good in you.

You've got nowhere to hide.

You have no face or mask to try and put on.

They know who you are.

And even if they don't like what you have to say and doubt that you can actually be changed, they're stuck with the truth of a person who has been touched by Christ.

That points to a gospel of grace.

And that's why Jesus came to die.

Jesus came to die, not so that people can put on a face or a mask or act like, hey, I haven't really messed up, but Jesus died for the lost causes who have no hope.

Jesus died for the people who cannot hide anymore.

And it's interesting that the Son of God was willing to suffer reproach in his own hometown.

Even more than that, Jesus was willing to suffer immensely in the world that was created through him, for he came to his own, and his own received him not.

And growing up, Jesus would have been seen by everybody in the community, year after year, working in the carpenter shop.

They knew every manner of his way of life.

They would have seen Jesus grow up, and then he began his ministry, and he's bringing the broken near to him, and he's laying his hands on them.

He's saying, Let the little children come to me.

He is tenderly leading his disciples.

The people around Jesus would have seen his life.

And they would have seen that there was not even a fraction of a moment where he did anything wrong.

There was not a moment in Christ's life where he ever sinned.

And they killed him.

He died for what we did.

And when we go to those people who have seen what we did, how much more will that point to Christ's work on the cross?

When we go to the people who have seen everything about our way of life, and we're just saying, hey, this is what Christ has done.

How much more will that point to a gospel of grace?

We need to reach out to people that we don't know absolutely.

Many of you in here are powerful at evangelism.

Keep doing that.

Keep doing that with people that you don't know.

But let us not forget about the people that we do know from the past, from before.

Jesus knew the unique opportunity that this healed man possessed in going home.

And you might have a unique opportunity with the people that you know to let them know that there is a God, that he is full of mercy, and that you know this because his mercy touched you.

Let's finish up now in verse 20.

And he, that is the demon-possessed man, went away and began to proclaim in the capitalist what great things Jesus had done for him.

And everyone was amazed.

We never find out his name or what happens next, only that he preaches and people are amazed.

The Lordship of Jesus begins to be known through the lips of the tomb-dwelling demoniac.

Even as they pushed Jesus away, the healed man was here to stay.

And the gospel began to go forth among the nations.

My heart and my prayer for VBC, it's always a delight to be here with you all, and my prayer for you all is that you would be a bold witness for the lordship of Jesus here in Hot Springs Village.

That you would be a bold witness for the lordship of Christ as you send out people well among the nations.

And my heart also for VBC is that the deep roots that are in this room right here, back to places like Colorado, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, wherever those roots might be, that there might be a strong witness in VBC nationwide, back to those roots that you have, that you might be bold to those people who are at your home.

And my hope also for this church, this body of believers, is that those who feel like a lost cause would find a home here.

That those who don't know where else to turn, they don't want to put on a mask, they don't want to hide, they want to find a home.

That VBC would be a home of people who were once lost, but now found, once blind, but now see.

And even if that task does feel daunting, we remember our anthem of the morning that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The gates of hell will not prevail against our endeavor as the Church of Christ.

The kingdom will come, and the king will be known.