SERMON TITLE: Perfect Deliverance for Imperfect Faith
SCRIPTURE: Mark 9:14-29 (ESV)
SPEAKER: Adam Borsay
DATE: 8-2-26 PM
Take notes here
It is so wonderful to be back here at On Target for our fourth annual Outdoor Communion Service. A huge thank you to Steve Scott and his team who help make tonight so wonderful. For those who aren’t completely sure who this handsome and still very young man is, I am Adam Borsay, the Youth Director at Gateway Church. Most of my work is trying to keep dozens of teenagers focused and they thought I would make a great fit to try to keep all of you focused when we are sitting outside on a beautiful day.
The great English poet, William Ernest Henley wrote the words "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." from his most famous poem Invictus. The poem itself is all about the power of human resilience in the face of adversity, that it is on our shoulders to make the best of it no matter what we face. The idea that we ourselves have the power to fix that which hurts us. Many modern historians and sociologists look at this work as one of the defining conceptual ideals that shaped much of the modern world. Rugged individualism, self-reliance, personal responsibility and our own human resilience. Much of the self-help gurus that proliferate the internet borrow from this rich vein of stoic personal fortitude.
But I would like to disagree with our dear friend William and his influential words. The more we have pursued self-reliance to achieve what we desire the farther and farther we have become from that which our heart yearns for. We have not successfully delivered ourselves from our trials to greater peace and comfort. Actually, by all metrics we are a more depressed, anxious and put upon generation than any previously. And the one right before this one was the worst and the one before was as well and so on.
This evening I want us to say, “what if William Ernest Henley isn’t right about who really is the captain capable of delivering us from our suffering?” That it is not us at all. And that perhaps the more you try to convince yourself that you can be the one to solve it the farther you are from solving it at all.
If you have your Bibles with you, and sadly there are no screens so you can’t cheat, so if you don’t have one with you look over your neighbors shoulder, turn with me to Mark 9 verses 14-29
14 And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. 15 And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. 16 And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” 17 And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. 18 And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” 19 And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” 20 And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21 And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. 22 And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” 23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” 25 And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” 26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. 28 And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite pastors comes from RC Sproul who said, “A text without a context is a pretext to a prooftext”. Meaning that to truly understand a text one must be able to place it appropriately within its surrounding and shaping texts. When we read the Bible today we have it all broken up into verses and chapters and subtitles. But just so we are clear, Mark and the other human authors did not number their sentences when they were writing. We can sometimes slip into a habit of breaking up what we read and study in ways that are artificial to the author's intention.
Our passage for this evening is actually book ended by two very important and famous moments in the ministry of Jesus. First is Mark 9:2-13. Let me read the first part...
2 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. 5 And Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 6 For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” 8 And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.
This is what we know as the Transfiguration. Where Peter, James, and John see Jesus transformed and the very voice of God the Father announcing who Jesus was, his very Son.
And then in Mark 9:30-32 we see this powerful prophecy from Jesus.
30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, 31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” 32 But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him.
So here is the context that these immediate bookends give us. That Jesus is the very Son of God, the Messiah, and that he has come to fulfill the messianic prophecy and will defeat death. And right in the middle of these two powerful testimonies of who Jesus is we have this event with the boy possessed by a demon. It is not just a good Rabbi, a holy man named Jesus who comes face to face with the oppression of the enemy, but the Messiah, the Son of God incarnate, God the Son made flesh.
One of my favorite wasting time hobbies is listening to fanfiction mashups of famous characters put in unusual settings. There is a whole collection of these on YouTube that just suck me in. The general idea is you take a character like Superman, and instead of a normal Superman story, you place Superman in the Star Wars universe. How is Superman going to interact with Darth Vader and the Jedis? How do his powers and his character impact the way he moves through this new world?
But in a way that is how I see these bookends. We are shown clearly who Jesus is. The Messiah, the Son of God, the defeater of death. And now he is dropped into a new circumstance. A crowd gathered to witness what is going to happen to this young boy who is so afflicted by the possession of a demon that it is all his long suffering father can do to keep him alive while the demon strives to kill him. The crowd is arguing with the disciples, the disciples have apparently been failing to deliver this boy from this oppression and in comes Jesus. What will the Messiah do now? The crowd literally runs to him to see.
As we go into this passage, we are going to see that we are truly not the masters of our own fate and captains of our soul. We have found that we are truly wholly inadequate to address that which afflicts us, we are powerless to deliver ourselves from our circumstances.
And that the first thing we see here is that
The heart of our problems is sin
The story is all an outflow of a physical demonstration of the fallenness of our humanity. Demonic possession. What could be a more poignant picture of the collective consequences of sin. In verse 21 when Jesus asks how long the boy has been suffering the father answers that it has been since childhood. From a very young age, probably as far back as the father remembers this boy has been oppressed in a radical way by our enemy.
In Genesis chapter 3:15 we see
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
So while there is no evidence that the boy or his father did something specific to invite in demon possession, we know that due to sin, all of humanity will suffer in conflict with our enemy Satan. We have an inherited sin nature from the first Adam that persists and manifests in a myriad of ways.
And the consequences of sin reverberates outwards into our lives and communities. In our Mark passage, verse 19, we see Jesus bemoaning the faithlessness of the people. He sees the situation they are in, and he doesn’t say, “oh this stinks I can’t believe this is happening to all your wonderful and Godly people”. In response to the suffering and their failures at addressing the problem he complains, “how long must I bear with you???” So the community is impacted by the general consequence of sin, the war with our enemy, the possession of the young boy, and they respond with faithlessness.
As the messiah comes upon this scene he speaks directly to what is the root cause of everything that is happening and is loudly manifesting itself in the failures and arguments of the crowds. The sinful lack of faith and trust in God. Romans 14:23 says "For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin." John Calvin said it this way, "All sin has its origin in a heart of unbelief toward God."
Our problem is not something external to ourselves. It is that at our very heart our issue is that we are so fickle and faithless.
And if our issue is us and our sin, we have to acknowledge that truth that
We cannot fix our problems
Contrary to what the self-help gurus try to sell us, we don’t solve our ultimate problem by trying a bit harder, or developing a few more skills. One of my favorite idioms is “Rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic.” It means, you might be able to make things look a bit nice right now, but in light of what is really happening, do you seriously think it makes any impact on the outcome you are facing?
In the story we find two groups that have failed at solving the problem. People who have clearly been trying to address the surface of the situation. One group is the scribes. Now I don’t need to tell you too much about them, plenty of sermons have been preached about these white washed tombs. But we are told in verse 14 they are standing around the disciples and arguing with them. Now I want us to imagine what has been going on. We know the disciples have tried (and failed) to deliver the boy, and the scribes are not shown trying something, they instead are just standing around and arm chair quarterbacking what the disciples have been doing. And collectively these two groups of arguers are not even over with the boy trying to even help anymore. All the great learned wisdom these men have and when it comes time to put up or shut up they are simply criticizing and disagreeing with the disciples. Their advice isn’t solving anything.
Then we have the disciples. These men who have been travelling and learning from Jesus. And yet they have failed. And we see exactly why they failed later on in the passage. In verse 29 Jesus says, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
So why were the disciples ineffective? They were trying to do things on their own. Which seems crazy on the surface. Why would these men who have been learning at the feet of the Messiah try to accomplish this within their own power? Perhaps we see this reason just a few chapters earlier in Mark 6
7 And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— 9 but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.[b] 10 And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.
The disciples had previously, under instruction and authority from Jesus, gone out and done exactly the thing that they were now seemingly incapable of doing. A connection between these passages that theologians have made is that the disciples had first gone under the authority and trust in the power of Jesus and seen great success. Possibly they began to think and feel like “hey, we got the hang of this, we know how to do this on our own now.” And at a future moment, where Jesus had not instructed them to do something specific, without seeking God in humility and trust in the power of God alone, they decided to show how powerful they were now that they had a few successes under their belts.
This is a spiritual reality for us far too often. We intellectually know that God is the one who empowers and enables us to have fruitfulness in the spheres of life he calls us towards. And at first we pray over the new job, the new responsibility or new relationship. We say God please help me. And then we get comfortable, we begin to assume that sure God gave us the head start but now we got the hang of it and we can take off the training wheels of Jesus and just go out on our own. It reminds me of the time years ago when my youngest, Milleigh was barely out of the toddler stage, she was trying to carry a glass of milk across the kitchen and I stepped in to take it and carry it the rest of the way. She was quite indignant and shielded the cup from my reach and said “I can do it”. Before I could protest she turned and promptly tripped and flung the full glass of milk across the room. She knew she could walk, she knew she could carry her cup, why did she need her dad? How many times have my fellow parents been left in wide eyed disbelief as our children make a horrible mess because they refused to listen to us.
In all of this there is only one person who is really honest with the situation. The father. He cries out, I believe, help me with my unbelief. He understands in a way that these other two groups have not grasped. He knows that his only hope is to call out to Christ.
Because finally we see in this passage that
Christ alone has the power to deliver you
When Jesus tells the disciples that they can’t get out this demon without prayer. Did you notice something? Jesus didn’t pray before he quickly, to avoid the press of the rushing crowd, just speaks his rebuke and casts out the demon. If they need to pray, why doesn’t he? Because he is God the Son made flesh. He has the power over death itself. Which in the immediate following passage we read where he tells his disciples that not only will he die, but he will rise again. In John chapter 10 verse 18 he says this about it.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.
In our Mark passage the phrase “he lifted him up and he arose” is a common resurrection phraseology indicating Jesus' authority over death and in John we see Jesus once again confirm his power over even his own death. The power of death, the ultimate consequence of sin, has no power over Jesus. He instead has power over sin and death. And as we already looked at, this story is placed directly between two stories that show that he is God and that he has the power over death. The delivering and “lifting up” of this boy is also unique in that all other deliverance stories in the Gospels we never see the delivered person “laying as if dead” and needing to be “resurrected” by Jesus.
As this whole community is struggling with the consequences of sin the Messiah comes to them and delivers from sin and its consequences, death.
See, we are not truly the masters of our fates and captains of our souls. Sin and its myriad of consequences, including that last and final enemy, death, are not that which you can be delivered from by trying harder or getting more knowledge and skills. Until we cry out to the Messiah we are lost.
The sweet and tender heart of Jesus is shown here, in my opinion, in something else he DOESN’T say. When the father first says the phrase “if you can”, Jesus rebukes him for his doubt. But then in a desperate heart cry of “help me with my unbelief”, Jesus doesn’t continue to talk to him about whether or not he should stop questioning Jesus’ ability, he says, ““You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” And catch that powerful picture of what our Savior ultimately does. He isn’t just fixing the problem a little bit for now, rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. He says, “and never enter him again.” When Jesus delivers you, you are delivered perfectly and permanently. You and I might make some window dressing improvements on our own issues. But only the true Deliverer can once and for all save his people for himself and by himself.
So what should we make of this for ourselves? First, for all of us where we too often fail is as the disciples did. We get comfortable with comfortable Christianity. We do what we know, and we do it well, so we stop turning to God to be the true power that only comes from Christ. Operating with the form and not the power. Truly seek God out in all that you do. And if this is something that you can honestly say you are doing well, I encourage you to publicly model this in your life to younger Christians. If you are working in the cafe on Sunday, pray before you start with your fellow servants, pray with the other greeters, pray before the Life Group you are leading. Seek out the power of Christ in all that you do. There are no small tasks that we do not still need to come to God in prayer for.
If you are here today not sure what you believe about God or Christianity. I want to encourage and challenge you. There is a living Savior who can once and for all deliver you from the power of sin and death. So much of the world is telling you that one more self-help book, or counselor, or life change, and then you will finally be free and at peace. You might love the words that say you alone are the master of your fate. But you are not. And here is the beautiful thing about Jesus. You don’t need 100% perfect belief for him to come to you when you call. You, like this embattled father, can say, help me with my unbelief, and Jesus will respond. Scripture tells us that ALL who call upon the name of the Lord WILL be saved. It doesn’t say all who got all their ducks in a row and have satisfactorily answered all their intellectual questions and then make a public declaration of affirmation of belief will be saved. It simply says all who call. If right now the Holy Spirit is working on your heart and telling you to stop pretending you are the captain of your soul, respond in faith.
Stories, news, and resources for things happening at Gateway Church.
%20(1).png)
