When Pigs Fly Series

Let’s Get Engaged

Pt. 2 - When Pigs Fly

Video (It’s All About Me – available at Sermonspice.com)

Last week I began a series called “Let’s Get Engaged”. This series deals with the last step in the Passion Process which is to engage or get our hands out. We talked about assuming the position. In our mandate to get engaged, I mentioned to you that we have to fill our position. God is looking for us to stand in the gap, but too often we are out of position. Our position is to stand between the living and the dead and stop the plague. It is not to huddle up with the living and try to survive or to celebrate the fact that sin is killing those around us. We have a mandate to get out and to reach out.

Text: Mark 5:1-17

1And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes. 2And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, 3Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: 4Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. 5And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. 6But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, 7And cried with a loud voice, and 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. 8For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. 9And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. 10And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country. 11Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. 12And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. 13And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea. 14And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done. 15And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid. 16And they that saw it told them how it befell to him that was possessed with the devil, and also concerning the

swine. 17And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.

I want to continue the idea of Let’s Get Engaged by talking to you on the subject of “When Pigs Fly”.

This is a very familiar passage of Scripture. However, I want to look at it from a little different angle as it relates to us becoming engaged.

1. Jesus was willing to go places and deal with people that others would avoid.

The Gadarenes was a place that would have been unclean for Jews. Filled with tombs and pigs. It was part of the region actually shunned by Jews because of its condition and yet Jesus rather than taking the boat and landing in a more acceptable, clean location pulls up next to the cemetery and immediately deals with a man that no one else could or would deal with. Rather than run from him, ignore him, ridicule him, or berate him Jesus simply restores him.

That is our mandate. We must be willing to go where others are afraid or unwilling to go. We must be willing to touch people that others are unwilling to touch. We must be willing to love people that others are unwilling to love.

I don’t come into contact with anyone who looks or acts like this man. Really? You don’t have someone at your job who is ignored by everyone else. You don’t have someone in your neighborhood that no one else will talk to? You don’t have someone at your school who everyone else avoids at all cost? You don’t know someone who is uncontrollable and the punch line of every joke? You don’t know someone whose life doesn’t quite measure up to everyone else’s and therefore finds themselves considered a reject? They eat alone, they work alone, and they cry alone, they live alone.