Your Remarkable Story

Read Mark 5:1-20
¹ They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. ² And when Jesus 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 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 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.

“Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” My story does not seem nearly as dramatic or remarkable as the miraculous deliverance and healing Jesus provided for this man. My story seems uneventful and uninteresting, certainly not something to write about. Maybe you feel the same way about your story.

The Holy Spirit would direct our attention to see with eyes of faith how remarkable our story actually is, because of how dire our situation was. Apart from Christ we might as well wander amongst the graves because we were “dead men walking.” We were bound and imprisoned by the power of Satan, from whose torturous hold we could not free ourselves. We were lost to our sin. Paul reminds us that God, “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14). This is why many theologians over the centuries have referenced baptism as a sort of exorcism, “a ‘new birth’ through which we, being freed from the devil’s tyranny and loosed from sin, death, and hell, become children of life, heirs of all God’s possessions, God’s own children, and brothers and sisters of Christ.”¹

It isn’t that our story is not dramatic or remarkable, it is that we forget how dramatic and remarkable it is. We forget how much the Lord has done for us. Jesus tells us, “go to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.”