How to Be Hopeful in Dark Places | Matthew 8:28-34 | Pastor Blake Hardcastle

Blake Hardcastle, Equipping Pastor
Grand Parkway Baptist Church


How to Be Hopeful in Dark Places
Matthew 8:28-34


1. Behold, Jesus has authority over darkness v.28-31

• What is demon possession?
• Does possession happen today?

2. Behold, Deliverance is always possible with Jesus v. 32-33 

Colossians 1:13 He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

• What word do you need Jesus to say to you?

3. Ask Jesus to stay v. 34

”He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” Jim Elliot 


Mental Worship

1. What feels dark in your life lately?
2. What word do you need Jesus to say to bring relief from your darkness?
3. Where is God inviting you to share in the cost for someone to get freedom?
4. What does it look like when you hold God at arm’s length?
5. If you knew God would eventually permit it and bless it, what would you beg him for? 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The condemning part is you can know who Jesus is, and you can still be his enemy. You can know who he is, and you can still be in the kingdom of darkness. The demons are lost. There's no salvation for demons. What has to be the difference is you must experience him making you alive where you trust him as Savior and you trust him as Lord.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

This podcast is brought to you by Grand Parquet Baptist Church, helping people to know, enjoy, and glorify God. For more information about Grand Parkway, visit our website at grandparkway.org.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Father, the battle is yours. And what you said to Israel a long time ago is no less true for us. The Lord will fight for you. You have only to keep silent. And so the battle's yours. We don't have to do the fighting. We have to just do the watching. We just have to do the cheering. We just have to do the receiving. So, Lord, help us on the inside to take a step back from the front lines of the battle and just watch you take a step forward. And to watch you subdue everything that's against your kingdom. And let the kingdom of light advance over the kingdom of darkness. And so we just say yes. The battle is yours. Fight, Lord, for your name, which always ends up being for our good. Amen. Please be seated. I'm glad you're here this morning. We're picking up in our series in Matthew. And so here at Grand Parkway, we like to take a long walk through a book and just kind of every passage by passage, we just walk through it and teach what the Bible says. It's called expository preaching. And so this morning I want to talk to you about how to be hopeful in dark places. Now, this is, I'm gonna do warning, this is kind of a weird, freaky text. Um, but it the overarching is when there's dark places, how do I be hopeful in that? And there's lots of dark places. In this text, uh, demon possession is a darkness going on. But it's not just limited to that. Uh a wayward child in a destructive lifestyle, that's a dark place for them and for the parent. Uh a cycle of addiction, that's a dark place. That's a hard place. Uh people who are cruel to you, that's a dark place. Uh dishonesty at work, that's that's a dark experience. Hard diagnosis. Anytime there's life transition, that's a dark place. That feels uh out of sorts and in uh unsecure. Every time our bodies betray us, or a good desire that just stays, it seems like it just stays unfulfilled. That can feel like a dark place. And so the Bible tells us that all these things, this is what it feels like to be in the valley of the shadow of death, that it feels like I'm not gonna make it through this. This is gonna consume me, this is gonna win. And I've come to the end of my ability to fight. So this passage uh will reassure us that we can be hopeful in dark places because Jesus has authority over them. In fact, uh God likes to work in the dark places, He moves toward them, He doesn't put them off like that'll be a Tuesday problem. He sees darkness, like, oh, darkness. There's somewhere that needs me. And all the things that we are afraid of in the dark, all those things are afraid of him. So we can have lots of hope in dark places. Let me read the text. Matthew 8, 28 to 34 in your Bible. Uh, if if you don't have one, they'll be on the screen behind me. And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, and so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them, and the demons begged him, saying, If you cast us out, send us away into that herd of pigs. And he said to them, Go. So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. And the herdsmen fled, going into the city, and they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region. Did you feel a roller coaster? How did you feel like, oh no, it's don't go in there. You like you yell at the TV, no, don't go in the dark place. And then something miraculous happens. And then people say, Yeah, no, thanks. We're not interested in the miraculous. We're gonna make three observations from the text, and they kind of come in these three places where Matthew is leading us, the reader, but this phrase, behold. So we'll join in the first one. And the first point is this uh we can have hope in the dark places if we remember who the boss is. If we remember who's in charge of all places. This is verse 29. The demons, they reach, they speak through these men, and they they end up asking three questions. And all three questions indicate Jesus has authority over them. He's the boss over them. And so the first two questions are basically uh, hey, what are you doing here? What's gonna happen to us? Uh now they're not picking a fight. They're not saying, oh, hey, you pulled that boat up on the wrong shore, buddy. Yeah. We're about to beat you up and take your boat. They're not saying that. What they're doing is they're they're negotiating their surrender. They're trying to negotiate the terms and back up out of this thing because here's come someone up on the shore that they have never experienced. It's not like any person from the town that can't go here anymore. You know that that this this these tombs are on lockdown. No one can go down that road anymore. No one can uh visit their uh loved ones that no one can bury anybody there anymore. It's shut down. It's it's the place you tell little kids about to scare them to obey you. That's that's what this thing's become. And so they're negotiating a retreat, and and they say something that is so profoundly true and also condemning at the same time. They say, Oh, son of God. The demons have a sense they know who Jesus is. That oh, this is the eternal one, God's Son, that's now come in flesh. And so the condemning part is you can know who Jesus is, and you can still be his enemy. You can know who he is, and you can still be in the kingdom of darkness. The demons are lost, there's no salvation for demons. What has to be the difference is you must experience him making you alive, where you trust him as savior and you trust him as Lord. Verse 29, that they say, you come before the time. This little phrase time, this is what we talked about before. There's Kairos and Kronos, this is time's filling up. And they're basically saying, hey, it's it's not time yet for for we know what's coming, torment. We know you will rule and subdue over all your enemies, but it's not time that it's kind of like they're saying, hey, we reserve this pickleball court. We we have till two o'clock, it's 1.15. What are you doing here? Hey, well, hold on. Don't you gonna kick us out? I thought we had more time here. So they asked them this third question. And the third question, it seems like it's a question that's repeated. And the text says they're they beg Jesus. Are you picked up on how strange this is? That the demons are making a request, and Jesus, in a few words, is about to fulfill this request? How weird is this? And so the demons are begging, and they say, uh, you we basically we are subject to you. We have to do what you say. We can't just do whatever we want. And so, whatever you allow is what can happen. Will you allow us to go into these pigs and not send us to wait for torment? Will you not cast us out of the of the earth where we have to wait? Will you send us that somehow demons want to be in a body? Send us to the pigs, and so uh let me ask this question. Do you do as much begging of Jesus as the demons do? I mean, do you beg him for anything? Is there anything that that I Lord? I know this is not sinful. I know this would accord with with your with the scripture. And my body, I'm not letting go of this. I just I can't stop wanting this. Have you just given up? Or do you continue to entreat him, continue to ask him? Do the demons outbeg you is really the question here. Uh we have the parable of the persistent widow. This is in Luke 18, and and the whole the title is persistent. The whole point is for us to persist in praying. Not that our persistence yanks God's arm behind his back, but there's some sense in we give up too easily sometimes. Or what we're really doing is we don't give up on God, we give up on what he said. And so I my my hope begins to shrink down to this small little thing, and my expectation begins to shriek down because I just I would rather not have much hope than have my hopes be dashed. And God says, I'm inviting you to a dangerous openness to hope where my where I'm your only answer, and you can expect me to come through. If the demons outbeg you, you've you've shrunken your hope too much. What is something that if you knew God would eventually grant it or bless it, you would not stop asking Him. You would not stop begging. What's something that, God, if I knew you would eventually allow this, you would eventually bless this, I would I would not cease in begging you. I'd not cease coming for you every day and saying, Lord, would this be the today? Is there something? Now you should have a few questions in your brain. You should be thinking a couple things like, uh, so what is this demon possession, by the way? I want to, this doesn't come up very often. Um demon possession is this it's an individual who's controlled by the presence of an evil spirit or spirits. It's physical, it's cognitive, it's mental, it is torment. It's not a good thing. Uh often there's superhuman strength. In the case of these guys, uh, another text in Mark says that they couldn't be bound with chains. Super strength. Uh, it's almost always self-harm. Sometimes they're mute. It's always isolating, it's always horrible. Uh no one has ever said or will say, Oh, guess what? Finally, I got my demon, and life, man, is finally turned around for me. No, that's never happened. And also this, uh, a believer, someone who's come to faith in Christ, someone who's who God has made alive, they cannot be possessed by a demon. That cannot happen. The believer has the Holy Spirit in them. It'd be like if someone wants to break into a property and steal something and mess it up, but they know on the other side of the fence is a lion that is fast and hungry and will maul and tear and consume them. They're not breaking in. They might throw a rock or two at the fence, but they're not gonna do that. A believer cannot, so you if you're like, uh-oh, you can be un uh oh, because a believer cannot be possessed by a demon. And maybe thinking, okay, does this happen today? Uh the fact that you would think that question probably reveals how uncommon this kind of possession is. We see, as it very little in the Old Testament, and then after Acts, it's just not there much. In the Gospels, there seems to be a big upturning, uprising of this possession. And it probably is a response to God the Son, is now in flesh, incarnate, at the pickleball court, and there's a big uprising about this. And so um, in other cultures, typically Eastern culture, so Indonesia, the Philippines, some parts of Africa, this seems to be more present than in the West. And some of its cultural differences where uh the enemy's primary tactic is to make someone afraid. And so they would be afraid to turn to God because they're not sure he has the power. Where in the West, the tactic of the enemy seems to be more to make you semi-satisfied to where you don't turn to God, not because you're afraid, because you don't feel like you need him. You feel like you'll be able to figure it out yourself just around the corner, or you have enough. And so you have this super small life instead of the big grand life God's invited you to. Here's the point of it when he's the boss. All darkness that we would ever experience, he's authoritative over it all. Any darkness, not just demons, anywhere where the kingdom of darkness is some scratching or throwing rocks or foothold, and and all the things we mentioned before, uh loved ones locked in sin. That's a form of darkness. He has authority over it. And so this means if he has authority over it, we can have hope because he has the ability to deliver. This is our second point. Second, behold. Deliverance is always possible with Jesus. In the text, Jesus just says one word. He just says go, which is strange. So the demons are asking him, and he seems to say, okay. Yeah, go. And they can't do anything until he, with his authority, allows it. Uh now the in the text, the pigs they they startle, they bolt, uh, they stampede. Uh somehow, what's left the men has now come on the animals. And they don't want it on them. They are trying to run away from this. And they can't. And so they keep running to the edge of where they're at, and the edge where they're at is the edge of this steep cliff. And the text said they go down the cliff into the water. Now it's trying to wash this stuff off us. And you can't run away from or wash off darkness in your life. You need someone who has authority over it to free you from it. And so the pigs enter the water, and they keep thrashing about, and it and it ends with the text says they drowned. And so now just picture in your mind, you've got this bay, and it's got several hundred pigs in it, and none of them, none of them are salvageable. Some are floating, some have sunk, they're all dead. And you right now are likely thinking one of two things. Uh you could be thinking, oh no. The pigs, how horrible, how awful. They were probably screaming uh and and whining and squealing the whole way down through what a drowning, what a horrible death, and all of them at once. This is terrible. Why would Jesus sentence these pigs to die such a cruel, just inhumane way? Or you might be thinking, did you see that? Those guys are free. That's amazing. Did you see what it took to free them? No wonder we were scared to death of them. Whatever came off them killed all these pigs. Whatever camp you're in, oh no, the pigs, or oh yay, the guys, might indicate how your heart's postured to when God brings a kingdom of light against the kingdom of darkness. It might be indicate how how do you experience the deliverance of Jesus in your life? Do you feel like it you're it's costing more than you're getting? Here's the thing. People being free, sometimes God will invite you to have a share in that cost. Here's one way it can look like here. Uh let's say you have a job and you've got PTO. Hey, that's great. I'll take my pay time off from my job and I'll rest and recover from, you know, my job stuff wears me out. And then someone asks you, you know what? You'd be a great chaperone on our student ministry camp. Okay, why do I do that? Well, I mean, you probably got to ask off work. And so you put your paperwork and you submit your PTO from this work to do another kind of work. And it's surprisingly exhausting. You thought, I mean, how hard can this be? You know, I'll sleep in the bunkhouse, and we got I see the schedule. They got, I don't have to do a lot of talking. And somehow at night you're like, can I go back to work? This is, I'm bored out. And yet God's saying, I want to invite you to have a little share in the cost because I want these teens to be free. I want you to come have a little cost in that. Not that your PTO pays for their freedom. He said, I want to invite you to the front row. And not every time, but sometimes the front row involves a little cost. Are you willing to absorb the cost so someone can experience freedom? This is languaged this way in Colossians 1.13. I want you to see this on the screen behind me. Paul writes, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son. This is what God does when he rescues someone. The kingdom of light comes, the kingdom of his son comes and it moves into where the dark places. And sometimes that will cost you something. If you value people or value their freedom in Christ, then you won't whine when the pigs die, or when a promotion is in jeopardy, or when personal space is infringed upon, or your schedule gets messed up, or all the things that may be like, oh, these this is where I find ease and I find comfort and I find control. When that begins to get sideways and wonky and tippy, sometimes God's inviting you. I want you to invite you to get a front row to God to me rescuing people. The thing is, the more you do this, the more it doesn't seem like it costs. The more you get a front row to seeing God set some people free, the more you do the math, and and the cost is down here. And the what I got is gains is up here. I promise you. I promise you. If you let yourself free in the kingdom, whatever God asks you to give back to him, because he's the one who gave it to you in the first place, whatever he asks you, hey, I how would you have steward this this way? It will never outweigh what he says. This is what you get in return. This is what you experience in return. You will always feel like, I've got a coupon. I'm getting a two for one. This is better than I could have planned my own. Back to the text. I want you to see that Jesus frees the men with a single word. He says the word go and the men are free. Let's just put aside the demons and the pigs. The men are free. What word do you need Jesus to say over you today? What word do you need him to say that would be a source of freedom for you? Some of you might need him to say the word free. That there's some cycle of trap or addiction or you become kind of a slave to people's approval or people's acceptance. And if he were to say free, that would unlock something for you. Maybe you need him to say the word heal, that something has gotten broken and has been broke for a long time in a relationship, a significant one, and you've just gotten used to it not working. Or maybe your body's become broken. And if he were to say the word heal, and those would bind up, and instead of being a source of pain and weakness, it would be a source of strength for you. Some of you might need him to say the word start. I need you to say the word start and make something happen in my job. I need you to say something to start and make something happen in a relationship. I need you to say start because things are stalled. Maybe you need him to say rest over you. Your heart is anxious, your mind is worried. Seniors are over here. When I was doing college ministry, the people who we would see the most for counseling, brand new freshmen, and people who are almost ready to graduate. But that transition time, the unknown of what's going to happen, am I going to be okay? It starts to spin us up on the inside. And maybe God needs to say rest. Something I said earlier about hope has gotten real small. You become just a person of small hope, small expectations of God. You're going to think, you know, I think I'm, it's all gonna, the big lottery is gonna come at the end in heaven. And I'm just not gonna, it's not gonna be much now. You you you've acclimatized yourself to a view of God where He's pretty small and pretty tame. If you ask me, well I asked me. Blake, what word do you need? What word do you want him to say? Uh this is the word I want him to say. I want him to say the word watch. And what I mean by that, we kind of sung something earlier. I want him to say watch. And so the the redneck translation is here, hold this, hold my drink, watch me. Watch me do something. Uh we're in a a season of darkness uh physically. Uh you know, when when you've uh when you've reached your uh out of pocket and your deductible by April, uh you know you're in some physical darkness. I want you to say, hey, watch. Here, you hold this and you just watch me. We've got some transition with our kids, and it's not bad, it's just important. And we've got aging parents where you're about to crest the hill of parenting our parents. And I just want Jesus to say, uh, I want to say watch. It's like, okay, all right. I'll worry less and watch. Everyone in here who's come to faith in Christ, who who, and by that we mean he's done something where he made what was dead in you alive. He has said the word live over you, and you came to life. You didn't say live, you didn't say live, Blake, and Blake lived. He said that. And those in the room who you don't you don't know Jesus yet in a saving way, I pray today is the day he says live. And something changes, something breaks, and darkness gets infringed upon by light. We sometimes sing this song where the refrain is, the enemy thought he had me. But Jesus said one word. That's right. Mine. She's mine, he's mine. If he has said mine over you, you can have hope in dark places. It doesn't mean you get to bypass around them, it just means he says, Hey, I'm going, I'm taking you through this. You're with me. I'm with you. We can have hope in the darkness because when he speaks, it changes everything. Here's a third behold we see in the text. And that is uh we we will have peace, we will have hope in dark places if we ask Jesus to stay. Ask him to stay? That sounds weird. Uh yeah, this is a weird text. And let's go to the verse 34. This is the saddest part of the text. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus. And we're maybe thinking, oh, they're about to say, Whoo, thank you. Yes, we miss these guys. We've not seen them in a while. Thank you. This is amazing. Hey, uh, get the palm branches. Let's do that Hosanna thing. They don't do any of that. They come out and they begged him. Same, same words with the demons did. The demons beg him, hey, let us go here. They beg him, how about you go? Can you feel how sad this is? This is so sad in the text. They don't say, Man, this road has been closed forever. And now it's open. They don't say, I you I used to hear all these scary stories about this place, and now we can come. They say go. The men, the demon-possessed men, they go free. And the town, they go deeper into captivity. So the one who could do the miraculous, the one who could free them from all darkness, they say, no thanks. They see Jesus as a threat, they don't see him as freedom. And I'll tell you, if you want to keep your kingdom, the kingdom of put your name there, he is a threat to that. If you want that, I just want a small world where the glory is my glory. Oh, he's a big threat to that. You're experiencing him correctly. He's a threat to that. But the threat is to a smallness. The threat isn't to flourishing. In fact, he's the doorway to that. And so let me ask you this. Are you asking God to stay at arm's length in some way? Are you asking him, yeah, yeah, thanks for all this stuff, but uh just stay right there. You can just you can just park it. I I'll take care of this part. I'm good. No, thank you. If you see him as a threat to your lifestyle, you're missing out on the freedom he offers. And here's and here's the saddest thing. You will be friendly with Jesus, but you'll never be intimate. That is far sadder than this text. For you to be friendly with him, I might even say, maybe you're even saved. But you're not intimate. Just hold him at arm's length. Can you can you see and feel what you could be missing out on? If you're only able to see, this is what I lose by following him, this is what I let this is what I is threatening, or I could lose by letting him close to me, versus this is what I gain. You've seen it wrong. You're seeing the pigs over the people. I want to quote this and then and then we'll begin to end. This is missionary Jim Elliott. Uh he wrote this not long before he died for the sake of the gospel. He said, He's no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. The one who who gives up what this is never mine anyway, to gain what this will never be taken. That's not foolish, that's actually wise living. The fool does the inverted, misses out, and just holds on to something small. People are more important in this text, they're more important than the pigs, they're more important than the promotions, they're more important to whatever smallness that's become comfortable because it feels like you can control it. Now, now, why didn't you say this? Don't misunderstand the text. Don't don't think that Jesus was uh controlled by the townspeople. They said, whoa, you need to leave. And don't misunderstand. Jesus said, Oh, I mean, I really want to stay, I wish. But they said we gotta go, so we gotta go, guys. He he is not controlled by us. Sometimes he will let us have our way, even if it's self-destructive. Sometimes he'll say, Oh, you want me to stay out here? Okay, I'll stay out here. In fact, if you could hurry it up and just depend so fully on your own strength and let it fail you, and then you'd let me in quicker. But but I can wait you out. I can wait until you cannot hold your arm up anymore because you're not sufficient to sustain your life. You can you're not sufficient to deal with the darkness that that's around you and that's in you. So asking Jesus to stay, it's it's asking him to save you. If you've asked him that, you've said, I want you to stay. I want you, I want you in close. It's asking him to rescue you and asking him to rescue you his way. It's not saying, hey, I've got the best ideas, God. You might want to write these down. It is asking him, I want Jesus, no, my arms are down. You you come. Your ideas are better than mine. I surrender. And he isn't just mosey up, okay. He comes and bear hugs you. Oh, good, those arms are down. Now my arms are gonna do something. Now you're gonna get what you were made to always experience. So the point of this darkness has no power over you if Jesus is with you, because darkness has no power over him. Darkness is not win, you doesn't get the final word if Jesus is with you. Because he's the boss of it. And so you can have hope. Whatever valley of the shadow of darkness you're in, you can have hope. Because life has endless possibilities if Jesus is with you. Sometimes we have to name what feels dark. And the naming of it is the way we put our arms down. Sometimes we do it before we can begin to have hope. Things maybe we've been ignoring or just say that's just the way it is. Sometimes we have to name them. Yeah, this feels dark to me, Lord. And so what we like to do, we like to preach through the scripture, let it speak for itself and to us, and then we want to consider. We don't just want to walk out of here and forget. And so Clyde's gonna come and play, and we're gonna just have a moment and ask the Holy Spirit to bring up in me what I need to feel, bring up in me what I think about, bring up in me uh what you want to do in me. And so, Father, we we pray that. Holy Spirit, we pray. Would you just lay on us, land on us for a little bit? Shove our arms down and get in close to our face and say, This is the dark I want to deal with. Yes, Lord. Oh, amen to all that. Break every stronghold. Expose and cast out every darkness. The name of Jesus, it is the power, the authority. We thank you. That's reality. We want you to make it our experience. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

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