Right Mind - Bible Baptist Church

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Look at Mark 5:15. A right mind is what we’re discussing tonight. The emphasis is on how a deranged man came to be in his right mind.

In Mark 5, Luke 8, and Matthew 8 we have one of the most dramatic accounts of devil possession in all the Bible. This man’s case is hopeless. All attempts at restraint for his safety and the safety of others have been woefully unsuccessful. This man has become a social outcast because he is violent, unpredictable, unruly, and aggressive. His personality, his goals, his desires, have all been made subject to the spiritual parasites that live in him.

Is this a spiritual problem or a mental problem? Yes, both. As are spiritual problems. This spiritual problem is parasitic, as opposed to intrinsic. It didn’t come from the man, it’s a devil that found a host.

His condition reveals man’s weakness (vss 1-5)

Weakness to overcome devils in his own power
- His spirit is unclean as opposed to God’s Holy Spirit.
- His morbid fascination with death.
- Strength – He breaks the chains when people have locked him up. So he is fierce, wild, and savage. (Drugs can have similar effects.) There is no psychosis that explains supernatural strength.
- He identifies himself as many devils.
- He didn’t sleep much because night and day he’s awake. He’s an insomniac.
- He cries a lot, typical of depression and mania.
- He cuts himself; he’s into self-mutilation.
- He is afraid of the Son of God.
Weakness because man doesn’t know what he’s dealing with
- Western medicine is focused on classifying and compartmentalizing. The word for that is taxonomy. The center of psychology in the western world is the individual. The individual is the focus in western medicine. All things can be reduced to a material, chemical explanation.
- There is no theology of medicine at Harvard or University of Texas. Devils don’t exist according to western medicine.
  - Western psychologists might say he has Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities). Interestingly enough multiple personalities do not really exist in eastern cultures. In fact, Americans account for 4-5% of the world’s population but account for ⅔ of the world’s Multiple Personality cases. That’s an interesting statistic because it says some psychosis are cultural. They aren’t human conditions, they are mental problems that exist in a specific culture.
  - Psychology, psychiatry, as an American practice was and are born out of Darwin’s ideas of evolution. William James, Carl Jung, Freud, Pavlov, Skinner, Rogers, Erikson, these fathers of psychology based their ideas on materialistic foundations. Today’s thought leaders in psychology like neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Peter Singer,
  - Eastern philosophy of the mind is more holistic. It says the center is the universe and nature. And what is really important is your relationship to nature and the universe. They’d say depression is the opposite of happiness and must exist because there is a yin and yang.
  - “In fact, we might say that in Buddhist understanding, there really are no such things as “demons.” There are only powers, energies, and deities to be worked with… They are troublesome but not catastrophic. They are obstacles to be overcome through ritual action, offerings of appeasement, and meditative detachment.”
Neither one of these approaches to psychology is biblical. It’s man taking a shot in the dark at what he thinks is happening.
These materialistic thoughts infect us
- We don’t have this perspective of spiritual life and that’s why we struggle with the significance of the Bible, prayer, public ministry, witnessing to others, assembling together, etc. (Watch this in your children)
- My prayerlessness is a symptom of my faithlessness. My real belief is materialistic, therefore I don’t have any motivation to pray like I should.
- My indifference to assembling together with fellow believers is a symptom of my unbelief. My real belief is in what I can physically get out of something, therefore I don’t see benefit in assembling with fellow believers.

Christ’s presence reveals his authority (vss 6-14)

Devils instantly recognize Jesus and beg him not to torment them before their time.
But the LORD Jesus Christ powerfully subdues the devils and frees the man

Compassion of the LORD changes the man’s condition (vss 15-20)

Notice the power of God’s words to change the man’s condition
Man has no power to change the condition of the man, so he attempts to put restraints on him. Physical restraints, chemical restraints, whatever the case is because there is no authority or power to change the actual condition of the man.
This man went from living in a cemetery, cutting himself, crying regularly, and with no hope until he met Jesus Christ.
A psychiatrist might have been able to prescribe enough medicines to sedate this man and limit the unruliness of the devils, but he can’t prescribe hope. He won’t make the devils leave, he might destroy more of the man in order to limit the devils
Right mind is the result of the deliverance. 2 Timothy 1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
The man goes from devil possessed to evangelist!