Demonic Presence, Demonized Person, Demented Pigs & Dominion Power Demonstrated.  That about explains the wild scene that unfolds "Immediately" upon the beaching of the boat in the land of the Gadarines.

Pastor Ray Pritchard summarized the text well when he said,  "Three worlds meet in this strange story: the underworld of evil spirits, the visible world of human experience, and the upper world of divine control."  

Listen & hear this history as you almost never do...in context.  What does the seed parables & a local hurricane of Mark 4 have to do with a wild gentile filled with demons in Mark 5?  Only everything.

The disciples had seen it all by now...or so they thought.  Jesus was about to reveal his identity by exercising His authority over wind and waves.  These good Jewish men knew the reality of Psalm 107:23-32 - the Sailor's Psalm.  Only God creates and calms storms. This has much to say to us today as we too must learn via experience just who Jesus really is.

Waiting is hard.  Growth happens over years not minutes.  "The days are long but the years are short" is one of my wife's favorite sayings. The same is true in the Kingdom of God.  Growth is mysterious but it does happen.  Listen and be encouraged.

On the heels of the paradigm parable of the soils, Jesus launches into a series of short principle packed parables.  Today we look at the first two - the Purpose principle & the Proportion Principle.  These instill confidence & inspire an all in commitment.  

The seed is the same and it works.  The obvious variable in Jesus' Paradigm Parable is the Soil which represents our hearts and lives.  There are two ways to hear.  Heeding is Hearing.  Our lives, hearts, souls are the soil and we need to pay close attention to what is going on there.  In this part 2 of the Parable series, Pastor Paul pushes the practical in a call for good soil maintenance.

Listen...You hear that?  Jesus makes a major shift in his teaching ministry as he presses deeper into the second year of his public ministry.  He transitions to teaching via 'Parables' but the reason should be frightening to all of us.  He begins and ends his primary paradigm parable with the command to "Listen".   Maybe we should.

We are prone to forget.  Jesus gave us a memorial meal to help us remember the dual quality of our salvation.  It took his body & his blood to bring an end to our old man & pay the price for our sin.

Have you ever been misunderstood by the people closest to you?  Well, you're in good company...so was Jesus.  In today's text we'll see Jesus attacked for his sanity by his family and his spirituality by the Scribes.  His answer is both brilliant & beneficial.  

There are two people in the Kingdom, the King & the Dom & we're not the King.  Baptism is a swearing a allegiance to King Jesus and it really matters

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. - Robert Lewis Stephenson.  Words matter because they have consequences.

The common assertion that we, even as believers, are all "sinners," is not to be found anywhere in the Bible as the term is never used in reference to a believer. In searching the Scriptures, we discover that the term is not defined as is generally supposed, i.e., anyone who commits a sin is a "sinner." What we do find is that God has drawn a clear line of distinction between "saint" and "sinner," believer and unbeliever, the regenerate and unregenerate, the righteous and the wicked, and this distinction is directly related to the conduct and practice of our daily lives.