Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Here's the thing about spiritual warfare that most people will never understand or recognize because they can't get there. And that is the one who successfully navigates in the spiritual realm will always be the one who understands when humility is to be used and it's to be used all the time.

You don't know what you don't know, but the question is, are you aware of the fact that you don't know what you don't know? Are you aware of the fact that there are things going on in the realm that you cannot see so effectively and so astoundingly enough that you're willing to actually recognize the deficiency and rely upon somebody that you know for a fact can see it clearly?

James Kaddis: I have found that peace only comes from you. I have found that joy only comes from you. Cause all I need is you.

James Kaddis: If you want a good picture of what spiritual warfare is all about and the way to spiritual victory, keep listening to Light on the Hill. Today, Pastor James Kaddis finishes Mark chapter 7. We'll hear how Jesus heals a deaf and mute man in just a moment, but first, we're introduced to a Syrophoenicia woman with a little daughter who is demon-possessed. Pastor James observes the humility and faith in this woman that's truly admirable. We need both in the spiritual war we fight every day.

James Kaddis: Look at the extraordinary response that the Syrophoenicia woman makes. By the way, the deployment of the term little dogs by Jesus was designed to create a loving intimation with the woman that he was addressing so that the woman that he was addressing would not be so taken off guard by what he was saying, yet at the same time, while the Jews who were looking at him with disrepute would have enough information to pick up on what was being said.

It's a pretty genius move. He was getting their attention so that they could see exactly what was happening between them. We're going to find out by the way, why this is such a big deal. Look at her response in verse 28. And she answered and said unto him, "Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs."

Okay, did you just notice what she just did? I need you guys all to understand this because this is so critical if you're ever going to learn what spiritual warfare is all about and what real spiritual victory looks like. I want you to understand that her response was not, "I'm not a dog, how dare you?" Her response was not, "What kind of a pig would make a reference like that? I came to you in my most desperate moment. How dare you, you racist, you bigot?"

That's not what she said. What she actually said was something that I thought was pretty remarkable. She literally by her response offered no debate or argument as into whether or not she could be metaphorically referred to as a little dog. As a matter of fact, she not only conceded to that point, but she actually embraced it.

And she said, "Yes, but even in the humble position that I'm in, I know that the leftovers that came from the scraps of the table would be enough to transform the life of my daughter." Think about that for a minute. If I were a betting man, I would bet my whole life on the fact that if more people had a deeper understanding of the dynamic that was going on here, they would not only become spiritual monsters, warriors. They would actually live lives that were a whole lot more rewarding to them than the lives that they currently live.

Why? This required the woman to do several things that the average everyday world refuses to do because they're too spiritually blind to understand it. She was willing to humble herself. She was willing to know when she can't know what she doesn't know.

She was willing to say, "I know who I am, I know what I am, and I know what's great in front of me." She was willing to allow herself to exercise what may be one of the most remarkable pictures of discipline ever seen in the Bible for the sake of her daughter.

She refrained from engaging with Jesus on the merits of the metaphor because she clearly under her disciplined way of thinking agreed with the use of the metaphor. She didn't debate it. Jesus's response should not surprise anybody because what the woman said and did was so astounding that it warranted the response that Jesus brought.

Look what Jesus said. He said unto her, "For this saying, go thy way, the devil is gone out of thy daughter." What a powerful, powerful response.

James Kaddis: Here's the thing about spiritual warfare that most people will never understand or recognize because they can't get there. And that is the one who successfully navigates in the spiritual realm will always be the one who understands when humility is to be used and it's to be used all the time.

You don't know what you don't know, but the question is, are you aware of the fact that you don't know what you don't know? Are you aware of the fact that there are things going on in the realm that you cannot see so effectively and so astoundingly enough that you're willing to actually recognize the deficiency and rely upon somebody that you know for a fact can see it clearly?

That's a big question to be asking, right? That's like a, it's a mindset question. Because if I'm in a place where I recognize that I have this unique inability to do something, then it's behooving of me to find someone that has that ability and rest in them to navigate through the problem that I can't. That's what real humility does.

Funny thing about that is, I believe for anybody to be successful in their walk with God, they have to be reduced to that level of humility. And unfortunately, I think an overwhelming amount of people, especially those in spiritual leadership, have to be broken and reduced to that humility by force in some cases or by difficult circumstances, basically by breaking before they actually come to that conclusion naturally.

I would venture to say that the woman who came to the conclusion that she came to, probably came to that conclusion as a result of the fact that she had been beat up a good portion of her life. She had probably been driven to a place of such utter desperation that she had no problem conceding to the statement that Jesus was making. And the statement that Jesus was making was designed to basically throw back into the face of the hypocritical Pharisees who actually believed that they were the people that deserved all of the attention, the worship, all of the honor because of who they thought they were.

When in reality, Jesus says, "I'm going to give respect to the one who society regards as nothing but is actually spectacularly important because they allowed me to be the one that would solve the problem that they had in their life." Very interesting place to be in. The question that I would ask us all is, do we have that humility? Can we find it? Can we bring ourselves to a place where we're just simply willing to say, "God, I'm incapable of all of these things, but I'm leaning on you to give me the ability so that I might be able to instinctually respond in a way that glorifies you."

And by the way, I should just probably note this. The best way to instinctually respond in a way that glorifies God is by actually doing the thing that this woman did. And that is put your faith and trust in him to navigate through an area that you have no control, awareness, or aptitude towards. It's the ability for you to just be able to say, "God, I am not capable of navigating this. I have no tools in this arena outside of my dependence upon you, so I trust you for it."

I know that the little crumbs that I eat below the table will be far greater than any meal the world can ever provide for me. In other words, what this woman was willing to say, because she really believed it, is that she was willing to sit down as a little puppy under a table where food is being fed to children. That's the metaphor. Where food is being fed to children than sitting at a seven-course meal with the most elite people in the world that have no acclimation towards the things of God. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be a crumb eater under God's table all day every day.

Why? Because when you begin to think at that level, you also begin to understand bigger and more significant principles that actually go with you all the days of your life. By the way, guys, I can't emphasize this enough. This is a great case to bring to the table to help people understand that God's view concerning our lives and the way we should live, and God's teaching concerning the healing that he can bring to the table, also provides for us very practical instruction on how we are supposed to conduct our everyday lives.

The things that we're supposed to do in all the things that we do: our business, our education, our families, our managing our assets, whatever it is. All of these practical truths get handed to us from the scriptures, but we have to be willing to eat as little puppies at the table, the children's table for that matter, of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. I think that's an extraordinary picture that this woman is actually creating. The picture that this woman is creating is, "I will take whatever it is you can give me because I know what you're going to give me will be the thing that works and I don't care what the world's perception is of it."

I don't know about you guys, but I absolutely love that. And notice this verse 30, it says, "And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out and her daughter laid upon the bed." What an extraordinary picture. Why is it an extraordinary picture? Because she trusted God enough to say, "Okay, I'm out of here." I bet you she was so excited to get back home. I bet you anything she, every moment that she spent thinking about getting one step closer to home. I bet you it was a long trip back in her mind emotionally.

She must have been so excited, almost like a kid getting ready to unwrap a present on Christmas morning if you know what I mean. She must have been so excited to see what the result was. Extraordinary woman of faith. Extraordinary lady. Pretty amazing. I think there's a heavy lesson that can be learned from this.

I think there can be something that can be drawn from this that I think is so incredibly, so incredibly important. And by the way, it goes hand in hand with the next story we're about to read. And this one goes a little faster because it's so obvious on its face once you understand the picture here. But look at this, verse 31. And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee. So now he's coming back, right? Through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. And they bring unto him one that was deaf. And he had an impediment in his speech and they besought him to put his hand upon him.

By the way, it is interesting. Obviously, if you have a problem hearing, then often times your speech will be accompanied with some level of an impediment. It's very rare when you see somebody who has never had the ability to hear, who can actually speak as though they have their hearing restored to them because it's a weird brain thing, you know? If you can't hear yourself talking, it's very difficult to structure the words that you think you need to say, even though you've never heard those words. It's kind of an interesting picture as it to how that works. It's kind of like the same effect that happens if maybe you don't have a singing voice.

And you put on a set of headphones that are they're fully submersive, and so you're listening to the song, and all of a sudden you feel compelled to sing along with the song and and in your head you think your voice sounds spectacularly important like you're hitting like the eighth harmonic, you know, and like you're you're doing like, you know, you're adding a you know, a seventh part to a sixth part harmony and it just sounds crazy. Really good in your mind because that's what you think you're hearing. But then you take the headphones off and and people are just literally wanting to kill you because their nerves are about to break. Because when you think you're going, you're like that. It's a there's a big difference, right? It's the same thing.

People who have a difficult time being able to hear or don't have any hearing capacity, will often times struggle with their speech. As a matter of fact, it's really interesting when as a the Chief Information Officer of a local municipal police department here around town, the one thing that we had to always overcome with our officers was to teach them how to be able to communicate on their radios in loud environments. And it was a very difficult thing to do because what would happen is you'd have these guys coming in and and where it really manifested itself is when things got really hard, like uh like for example, um in LA County, we had to, we ran into this all the time when they got the new radios.

A deputy, when a deputy gets in big trouble, and um he wants everybody to hear what he's actually saying, with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department the way that it works, and every department has a similar set of rules. But in LA County, it's it's kind of interesting because LA County has a very intricate system of frequencies. To be specific, it's something like around 25 frequencies. And um when when an officer, when a deputy in LA County refers to a dispatcher, they refer to them as SRC. It's an interesting term that they use. But anyway, when they want to give traffic to the dispatcher, the dispatcher has the responsibility of actually uh closing off what they're saying to everybody else so that everybody else that's listening understands that the traffic is normal.

So let's just say I were to get on my radio right now and I were to ask the dispatcher to run a license plate. The dispatcher would uh push a button on that frequency that closed the frequency so that all the other deputies that are listening are hearing this. They don't hear the person's voice. There's a beep that basically tells all the deputies, "Hey, there's traffic going on." That's kind of how it works. Okay? So what would happen was, um the deputies were so used to communicating that way where they would speak, nobody else could hear them, that when they had an emergency situation and they ended up telling the dispatcher 1033. That meant, "Clear the air, we got an emergency." The dispatcher opens up county-wide pretty much so that every deputy could hear them.

And in the loudest of environments, what the deputies would do is they would think they had to scream in order to overcome the the inability that they had to hear their own voice. And what it would do with the rest of the of the radio system is it would create this massive resonance that kept anybody from hearing their traffic because they were yelling so loud. So we had to for years sit down and develop these tools where we taught the deputies and the officers for that matter, how to speak with low calm voices even in the midst of very difficult situations. You're in a foot pursuit, you're chasing somebody, something's going on, you're in a loud environment, you're in a carnival and you need help, but you can't even hear your own voice. You have to learn how to trust your voice and the technology to pick up your voice so that people can hear you that are not in the lousy environment or the loud environment.

So we would teach these deputies to say, very quietly, "Hey, I need help. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Now, of course, most of the time they couldn't do that because all the adrenaline and everything else that was going on. By the way, believe it or not, the way that we solved the problem, at least for our local municipal department, the way we solve the problem, and they eventually did it county-wide and now LA does it, and a bunch of other people, is they got earpieces for all these deputies now. So now they've got their speaker mics, but there's earpieces in their ears. And with all the noise, now there's not a big problem anymore because they're hearing their voice so clearly, and everything's being drowned out that they can hear everything, there's no problem.

It's the same issue here. If you can't hear your own voice, you are going to when you speak, you are going to speak in some form or another that's actually distorted. And so the people that can hear and actually know exactly what you're saying, they're not going to be able to discern you because you're not using the feedback that your brain is supposed to be receiving to shape the quality of your voice. That's why so many people call me deaf because of the fact that I'm so loud. You know, it's interesting, but that just is a natural way my voice works.

So this was somebody who could not hear, and they also had an extraordinarily difficult time being able to speak. Kind of an interesting dynamic that's being drawn up here. So, look what it goes on to say. Verse 33, "And he took him aside from the multitude and put his fingers into his ears and he spit and touched his tongue." I forgot what the term was as kids if you did that. What was it called? It was called a a wed willy. That's right. This is the wed willys are in the Bible. Okay?

But that's kind of what what Jesus did. By the way, I just got, I want to make this comment. A lot of these numbskulls who continue to do this word faith nonsense that they do, you will see them do stuff like this, you know? Spit in people's ears, touch the it's ridiculous. They have no concept of what's actually happening here. Okay? here's here's one question, just a quick yes or no. Did Jesus really need to put spit anywhere near a person's ear or do anything like that in order to heal the person? No. Okay, thank you.

It was widely symbolic. It was widely to create an understanding that there is in essence a point of contact that they can associate the moment of healing with. You understand? So if I'm the person who's deaf and I'm the person who can't hear, of course it's going to make sense for me to physically contact the person so that they can understand what's actually happening in that moment. That's what Jesus is doing here.

They're seeking out for him to lay hands on this person and Jesus is doing exactly that. Okay? So he took him aside from the multitude, he did that. Verse 34, "And looking up to heaven, he sighed and saith unto him, 'Ephphatha.'" That is, "Be opened." By the way, it's interesting. It's a it's a similar this is a transliteration because in Arabic and in Hebrew, we say very close to the same thing, we say iftah. So it's a very very similar word, but basically what he's saying is he's saying, "Open." In other words, "Open up his his mouth, open up his ears." It's very powerful by the way.

"And straight away his ears were opened and the string of his tongue was loose and he spoke plain." What a spectacular picture, isn't it? What what what such a remarkable picture that the the God of heaven can just look up and say, "Open up," and then it just happens. There's something to be said about that. We'll talk about it in just a minute.

James Kaddis: Thank you for joining us today for Light on the Hill. What you just heard is one part of a study in Mark's Gospel from Pastor James Kaddis. You can hear it again at lightonthehillradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Not long ago, Pastor James released his new book on the first half of Revelation. It's entitled "The Last Book." He points out that Revelation isn't a book of fear, but rather a book of hope. Pastor James will help you understand the world we live in and current events through a biblical lens, preparing your heart for what lies ahead. Get a copy by going to lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon.

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James Kaddis: Pastor James, on the subject of spiritual warfare, there's been a lot of talk about UFOs and aliens in recent months. What do you think is the biblical perspective on this? Could some of these possible sightings be demons?

James Kaddis: Well, Jane, listen, that's not the the totality of the matter, uh, but it is certainly a possibility. Um, I do believe that for the most part, many of these things that people continue to go back and forth concerning could very well be demons creating deceptive mechanisms. However, it's important to note that there's a lot of technology that the government utilizes right now that we haven't had exposure to and some of it could be that. The whole point behind it is, it is in essence the combination of fallen man uh continuing to utilize tools and devices for destruction, while at the same time the enemy who continues to take advantage of the type of issues fallen man gives themselves to, and yes, can utilize his lieutenants, can utilize demons to deceive them.

So I think it's a correlation of uh a series of these different things working together all at once. And I think it's a very nuanced answer that has to come to a very complicated question. But undoubtedly, we can see demons that will give us the impression that there is something out there. They do do that. They're deceivers. That's what they do. So that is well within the realm of possibility and probably covering a majority of the things that people claim to see or have seen.

James Kaddis: Thanks, Pastor James. Now let's finish up our message. Again, we're in Mark chapter 7.

James Kaddis: Verse 35. "And straight away his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plain. And he charged them that they should tell no man, but the more he charged them, so much more a great deal they published it and were beyond measure astonished, saying, 'He hath done all things well. He maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.'" I think it's so hilarious.

How God has done so many great things for us, yet in this society, we're so scared to tell people about it because we're fearful of the persecution that would come as a result. Yet in a world where people were actually being killed for declaring that Jesus is the Son of God, these people were willing to do it even when the Lord himself told them not to do it.

Like, think about it. God tells us on a day-to-day basis to go tell people about his goodness, and we don't. And yet this man was told by the Lord, "Don't tell anybody," and he could not contain himself. He had to tell people about what happened to him. Isn't that a funny contrast that exists there? I'll tell you why it's so funny.

It's funny because he, unlike most people, understood what it felt like to walk with a certain disability that was so debilitating, it kept him from participating in everyday life. When Jesus healed the very areas that he needed to effectively communicate with anybody in his life, what would you expect for him to be the first thing to say?

I think that's the most hilarious part about the life that we live today. We give our faith to Christ. We trust him. We say, "Lord, we welcome you in our hearts." And he does this radical, immense, incredible, powerful transformation. He works on us spiritually from the inside out and transforms us in ways we never thought we could ever humanly be transformed. Ever.

And yet that seems to be the part of our life that we want to be the least active in. It seems to be the part of our lives that we don't even want to exercise. Tell me if that makes sense. Just explain to me how that even works. It's all surrounding the issue that we've been talking about from the beginning, and it's spiritual warfare. Right? More from the book of Mark coming up next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This listener-supported program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.

James Kaddis: I have found that peace only comes from you. I have found that joy only comes from you. Because all I need is you.