Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Today on Light on the Hill, find deliverance in Christ. There is no deliverance outside of Christ. You'll never find deliverance outside of him. Each and every single one of you are in need of deliverance in one way or another, or you have already received deliverance, or maybe there's a little bit of both.

In this room represents a series of different addictions, bad habits, crazy behaviors, actions of disobedience. And God says, "I want to deliver you from all of those things. I want to take all of those things away from you." But it's going to require you putting your faith and trust in me, and it's going to require you obeying me.

Guest (Male): Welcome again to Light on the Hill, our weekend edition. If you're a believer living to honor God, you can be sure that demons are gunning for you. But greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. As we open Mark chapter 5, Pastor James Kaddis will show us there is only deliverance in Christ, and we won't survive in the spiritual world if we don't do it God's way. We'll start with verse 13.

James Kaddis: You do things God's way, you get God's protection. You don't do things God's way, you open yourself up to a lot and a lot of bad. So look at this. This is very important. Verse 13: "And forthwith," that means quickly, "Jesus gave them leave." In other words, go, you can go do it.

And the unclean spirits went out and entered into the swine. I think Jesus knew what they would do. I think Jesus knew what was going to happen next. And the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and they were about 2,000 and were choked in the sea. So if you assume that a single demon entered into each and every single one of those pigs, there's at least 2,000 demons that was inside that man.

That left from that man, ran into that herd of pigs, and those pigs killed themselves. By the way, we could spend a lot of time studying the behaviors of demons and looking at this as a prime indicator as to what demons tend to do. I think a lot of the suicidal ideation that we've seen over the years has come from demonic possession. I can tell you that right now.

I remember on multiple occasions doing the youth crisis hotline and people calling in with suicidal ideation. And when you would talk to some of these people, you knew you weren't talking to them. You knew you were talking to demons. You just knew it. And on a lot of levels, you would spend a lot of time begging the Lord to have mercy on the person.

Once they had a moment of sanity, it was like, "This is your only option. God has delivered you from this possession. Now you have to put your faith and trust in Him. You have to ask Him to come into your life. It's that simple. You don't have any other way out." I think that there's something to be said about this. I think Jesus knew that the pigs would die, and I think that Jesus didn't have a problem with the fact that the pigs would die.

I think that these men made their livings, these men chose to make their livelihood by dishonoring God and doing something that God did not want them to do. I think it's hilarious, by the way. Many, many years ago when I was in my early 20s, very, very early 20s, when I started doing a lot of very active investing, I remember the guy that I started doing some transactions with.

He was another pastor. He got very angry with me, and this was sort of the beginning of the end of our relationship, when I refused to sign a document. By the way, this is for those of you guys that know finance and stuff. This was in the days where stated income was the thing. You never had to give a paycheck stub if you wanted a loan. You could just simply walk up and say, "I make this much money."

You didn't even say that. You go to the loan people, and they would basically make up whatever they needed to get you the loan so long as you could pay the bills. And this was the stated income days. He came to me with a document because I found this out later. When the loan officer said that I needed to sign the document, he knew that I would probably have a difficult time signing it as it was.

So he told the loan officer that he would come to me and that he would make an appeal and talk some sense into me. Now, the issue was had I signed the document, nobody would have been affected by it, but it would have been me lying, and it would have been the difference between us saving $60,000 or paying $60,000 in the transaction. It's money that you don't really see until the end of the sale, but you guys kind of get the idea.

And so he was so angry with me because I would not lie on the loan doc. He was super angry! My statement back to him was, "Who are you expecting to bless us? Were you expecting God to bless us when we did this, or were you expecting your own wiles to bless you? And I'm telling you that because you're not that smart of a guy. You're just not."

"What you're doing isn't illegal. You're not going to land yourself in jail by doing this. But you definitely have to answer to God. So are you going to actually lie like that? Are you going to walk in that way just so that you can save some money?" I have enough faith and trust in God to know that He'll provide for me doing it the honest way. So no, I'm not doing it.

Oh, that was such a bad situation. By the way, the good news about that whole thing is it worked out in ways I never thought possible. God really, truly did absolutely bless us. Not him, but blessed me on a lot of levels in that situation. The point is this: when you do things God's way, you get God's blessings. When you don't do things God's way, you receive, you welcome the trouble that comes, the folly that comes from your sin. It's a really important picture to draw from here.

And this is not like these people didn't know this, folks. When Moses left them, just before he left them and Joshua was about to take over, he told them in Deuteronomy 28. He said if you'll obey the Lord your God, and for 14 verses, he says, "Blessed will you be in the country, blessed will you be in the city, blessed will you be in this area, blessed will you be in that area."

And then when he gets to verse 15, he says if you will disobey the Lord your God, if you will not listen to Him, if you will not obey His statues, then he goes on with, "Cursed be you in the country, cursed be you in the city, cursed be your wife, cursed be your daddy, cursed be your mommy." It's amazing how astoundingly articulate he is in describing how you'll be cursed.

Some people will actually say that in that section of Deuteronomy, he's actually describing part of what they saw in the Holocaust. It's that prophetic. But he says for the first 14 verses, you'll be blessed, you'll be blessed, you'll be blessed. After verse 15, it goes on for another 50 verses of the curses that you'll get if you don't obey the Lord your God.

The Gadarenes heard that. They were there for that. They heard the warning. They knew exactly what was going to happen. Here you go, 1,400 years later, continued to walk in their disobedience. And now they're at where they're at. But look what happens after this. It gets even more interesting.

Verse 14: "And 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. And 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." There has to be a little bit of fear in that.

You've known this man a good portion of your whole life as being the most feared subject in your midst. He's picking people up, throwing them around. He can't be detained. He can't be handcuffed. Nothing! He's cutting himself. He's completely abnormal. He looks crazy, he acts crazy because he is crazy. And now you see him sitting in his right mind, clothed, and all good?

"And they saw that it told them how it befell to him that was possessed with the devil and also concerning the swine. And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts. And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him." Okay, let me stop for a second.

Do you realize how absolutely blind to the spiritual world these men actually were? They see that this man who had demons in him was freed from the demons, and the demons destroyed the swine. And the fear that they felt was very likely not related to the power of God that they witnessed, but it was likely related to the livelihood that was destroyed and threatened.

They didn't want Jesus around. Bye-bye! But the demon-possessed man wants to go with Jesus. He wants to follow Him. I don't blame him. I bet there's a couple of reasons why he wants to follow Jesus. The first and foremost, the biggest reason is I think he's fearful that these demons would come back.

I think obviously the second part was he saw the power of Him and was grateful to Him. He wanted to follow Him. That makes sense. But look what Jesus tells him: "Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but said unto him, 'Go home to thy friends and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee and hath had compassion upon thee.'"

And he departed and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him, and all men did marvel. They were shocked, they were blown away. I think it's interesting. There's an element to this spiritual war that is very difficult to describe to people because we're the type of people that don't think in terms of reciprocals.

We don't think in terms of, "You did this for me, and now I owe you or I'm indebted to you." We typically don't think that way. As a matter of fact, we have adapted to worldly terminology that takes away gratitude from our own hearts. I hear this a lot: "Pay it forward." Pay it forward is such a broken secular humanistic way of thinking.

Because pay it forward simply means in many ways that you're not walking out of gratitude in some respects. It's an expectation of a social obligation that doesn't come from a place of understanding or recognizing what's happened to you. Pay it forward means I've been blessed with this material gain, and I'm going to give you some of it.

The Christ-centered way is, "I've been blessed with this, let me tell you how it happened." Big difference. If I pay forward to you something that's consumable, it's gone the moment it's consumed. But if I declare to you how it is that I have been kept from going hungry for so long, I stand the chance of giving to you what I have, thus bringing you into a better place.

Jesus is immediately seeking to teach this man how to remove from himself the action that would seek to secure his benefit and to instead walk sacrificially as a result of the blessing that's been given to him. This is a hard principle to talk to people about because this is contrary to human nature.

Human nature says if I get given a million dollars, then I better take that million dollars and store it somewhere where nobody can get it, nobody can find it, and I better not even tell anybody that I have it. The side that's contrary to human nature says God's blessed me with a whole bunch, now I need to seek Him to find out what He wants me to do with it that I could tell other people about the person who gave it to me.

It's a way different way of thinking. Why? Because one is self-centered, self-focused, self-serving. And the other one requires not just self-denial and sacrificial living, it requires putting your faith and trust in the person who instructed you to live the new way. I'm going to venture to say that it doesn't take a lot of faith after being demon-possessed for most of your life walking around with Jesus and hanging out with Him.

He in essence becomes your insurance policy in a way, if that makes any kind of sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of faith to say, "Okay, you've given me freedom, now I'm going to go do something I've never done before. And I'm going to go around and I'm going to put myself out there and I'm going to tell everybody about the wonderful thing that you've done." Here's what we learn.

Number one, there is no deliverance outside of Christ. You'll never find deliverance outside of Him. Each and every single one of you are in need of deliverance in one way or another, or you have already received deliverance, or maybe there's a little bit of both. In this room represents a series of different addictions, bad habits, crazy behaviors, actions of disobedience.

And God says, "I want to deliver you from all of those things. I want to take all of those things away from you." But it's going to require you putting your faith and trust in me, and it's going to require you obeying me. But the next step in navigating through the warfare that you cannot see and the world that you cannot perceive is in taking the victory that God has given you and using it for His glory as you step forward.

It's not just enough to say, "God, you've done this for me and I'm thankful." You now have to say, "God, you've done this for me and I'm thankful, what do you want me to do with it? What's the next step? How do you want me to live? What do you want me to do?" I'm going to close with one quick story.

I don't think I've ever told anybody about this. I've told some people parts of this story, and I think maybe I've talked to you guys about this a little bit because some of it kind of requires me to tell you something about my thought life that I haven't really told anyone. At the time that I lived closer to the church, I would very rarely take my car to the church. I almost always took my mobility scooter.

So I'd wake up in the morning, scoot my mobility scooter down here—this is before I had children and that kind of thing. And I would put in my workday and then I would cruise back home. I found myself oftentimes finished at work and it would be relatively late. So sometimes I'd be coming home at 9:30, 10:00 at night after a service or something like that.

I remember this one Thursday night. It was relatively late. We had finished up. Nicole had just left. I think they were doing something in children's ministry, one of the decorations in the building. This was probably five years ago. I told my wife, "Okay, I'll see you at home in a few minutes." And so I had left maybe about 30 minutes after she had gone.

I remember going down 29th street down here. Getting to the street before you get to Cherry, going south on that street. As I went south on that street, I saw the silhouette of a man who had these big dreads. He was a relatively larger man. Not round-large like me, but yoked, kind of a tough guy. There was just something about what I was looking at that mesmerized me a little bit.

So I stopped my scooter and I just looked. I turned my little headlights off and I just looked. Probably within about two or three seconds of looking at him, and his back is to me—and he's probably in the middle of the Best Buy parking lot, so he's easily 300 or 400 feet away from me—it's 10:00, 10:30, it's late. There's nobody around.

Two seconds later, I know, I discern it, I can tell he's demon-possessed. Mind you, this is eerie, and this has happened to me many times before. The moment I discern he's demon-possessed, the very second I discern, he literally turns around and just locks it on me. I can't see his face, thank God, but I know that he's turning around and he's just locking in on me.

I cannot tell you, I have worked at the police department where I was literally 50 feet away from an active shooting. I could hear bullets probably 30 feet above my head, and it did not affect me as dramatically as this one did. It was scary. I remember one time being at the gas station with one of the guys that I used to ride with at the police department.

We could see muzzle flashes across the street from these guys that were shooting it out with each other, and that didn't scare me. I didn't have enough time to think about it. This one scared me. I was overwhelmed with fear. And the thought in my mind was like, "Okay, Lord, Lord, what do I do? What do I do?" I just want to take off. I just want to leave. And the Lord just tells me, "Pray."

So I start praying, and he runs off. I don't think anything of it. Sunday night, we've got a service a little bit later again. It was a later night. This time I'm like, "I ain't going down that same way. Heck no!" So I go down this other street. I turn around and sure enough, at the top of the hill, I see the same guy. He doesn't bother me this time.

He doesn't look like he's anything, then a few seconds later, the feeling and then same thing. I'm like, "No! This is bad. I'm not doing this." I do what I feel like God let me do. I pray, and I move on. He's not feeling very good. I forget about it. A few weeks go by, nothing happens. Same kind of situation. Thursday night, I believe it is.

I'm on my way home, and I see the guy who was tucked behind the bus stop. I see him and at that time, God just told me—and I'm telling you, it was so scary—God told me, "Go up to him and tell him Jesus loves you, and then that's it." So I do, and it was nothing. It was like I was talking to anybody else. It wasn't all that big of a deal.

I'm thinking, "Okay, I'm over it. It's not a big deal." The next time happens, this is probably two weeks later, I decide to go back down that street leading up to the same place where I saw him at first. And I don't see him this time. He's blended in the dark. Normally I can see silhouettes and stuff, and I'm just cruising up. My dog is freaking out. I'm thinking he's got to poop or something, he doesn't want to move.

I'm like, "Come on, let's go, you dumb dog!" So I'm beginning to drag him in a way. Finally I have to pick him up and put him in between my legs because he doesn't want to move forward. I'm like, "That was dumb, whatever." I keep going forward and I am startled, absolutely startled by this guy yelling and screaming at me, telling me, "Leave me alone!"

I'm realizing what's going on. Spiritual thing. I told myself I would never drive my mobility scooter again home from church. I would always drive my car. So the next week goes by and the Lord tells me, "You're taking your mobility scooter to work." I knew what was going to happen. I kid you not, I knew what was going to happen.

I go home that night, I don't see him. I never saw him again. But I learned something that night. God showed it to me very vividly, very powerfully, and that was this: you are helpless in the invisible world without me. So you need to do two things if you want to remain victorious in that world. You need to obey me, and you need to trust me.

I don't know how many of us are doing that on a regular basis. I honestly don't know. I don't know how much we are spending time obeying God and trusting God. I think if we were doing it as much as God would call us to do, we would be living different lives, a lot of us.

The one thing that I will never forget about that moment—and every time I read stories like this in the Bible, it reminds me of it—God made it very clear to me. I don't survive in this world if I don't do it His way. And let me make one more quick statement about this. It's not about being good one day and hoping that that goodness will last you through the rest of the week. It's about being obedient always and trusting that God will carry you through it no matter what happens.

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis, and on the weekends, we're going through the Gospel of Mark together. Listen to this study and more at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James Kaddis's teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at onepace.com. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts, too.

When you have a moment today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives, and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what He's doing. There's a place to contact us at the website, lightonthehillradio.com.

If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there's also a place to make a secure donation at lightonthehillradio.com. Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you see current events through a biblical worldview. Look for those at jameskaddis.com. Now with these concluding thoughts and a closing prayer, here's Pastor James.

James Kaddis: Folks, we are living in a world that you cannot see. I'm begging you, prepare yourself for that world actively. Live the way God has called you to live, that your effectiveness in Him might grow and that the victories that He's promised you will happen because you didn't forfeit them. Amen?

Father in Heaven, we thank you, Lord, for your word. We thank you for the insight that we gain from it, the lessons that we gain from it. Your word is faithful and You're good, and Lord, Your word is true. There's just no other way around it, Lord.

We thank you for your word. Help us to live according to it and to walk in obedience, trusting in You, knowing, Lord, that You're faithful. So Lord, we love You, we thank You, we look to You, and we ask these things in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Guest (Male): More from the Book of Mark is coming up next weekend on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This program is listener-supported and brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.