"Valuing Pigs Over People"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that.

Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio. And now, let's get to the Word of God. This morning, as we look into the Bible, we're going to find that our passage is all about the importance of people. And I hope that God's going to challenge us to take a hard look at our own lives, to take a hard look at how we treat and honor people. And I'm trusting God that maybe as a result of your being here this morning, you'll walk out saying, gosh, I see things just a little bit differently than I saw them when I walked in.

Let's look together. Luke chapter 8, I'm in verse 26. And they sailed to the region of the Gerizines which is across the lake from Galilee. You remember now when we left off last time, Jesus and the disciples were in the boat and they were in the middle of that big storm and Jesus called the storm out in the middle of the Sea of Galilee.

Well, now they've landed on the other side. And they've landed on the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee. It's a Gentile region and that explains why they're raising pigs.

I mean, no Jewish person would raise pigs. Now, verse 27. When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town.

For a long time, this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house but had lived out in the tombs. As we move through Luke's gospel here, we find just recently that Jesus has been demonstrating his power. First, he demonstrated his power over sickness. Back in Luke chapter 7, he healed the Centurion servant of sickness. Then he demonstrated his power over death. You remember he went to a little village called Nain and there was a widow's son there who was dead and he raised that boy from the dead. Then he demonstrated his power over the forces of this world and the forces of the universe right here in Luke 8 by stealing that horrible hurricane out on the Sea of Galilee.

Now, Jesus is about to demonstrate his power over the devil and over his kingdom of demons because this man comes to him, the Bible says, possessed by demons. Now, you say, Lon, wait a minute. Hold on just a second.

Time out. Wait. You know, the devil is just a symbol, right? I mean, the devil is just a symbol for evil. The devil is just kind of a Christian symbol for human suffering. Isn't that right? The devil is just kind of a Christian symbol for all the bad karma that's in the world.

Isn't that true? Well, the answer is no and not the way the Bible presents the devil. The Bible teaches us that the devil or Satan, as he's alternately called in the Bible, is a real being, that he is a real angelic being.

He was an angel who revolted against God back before the world began and the demons were his fellow angels who followed him in this revolt. As a result of the revolt, God threw them all out of heaven, but they're still on the loose. When the end of the age comes, Jesus Christ is going to grab hold of the devil, grab hold of his demons, bind them and cast them forever into a place the Bible calls the abyss, A-B-Y-S-S. Revelation chapter 20 says it's a place where the devil will be tormented along with the demons day and night forever and ever.

So this is their final destination. Now that, folks, is the fastest course in biblical demonology you will ever get, about a minute and a half, but that's what the Bible teaches. Well, do you believe that that could happen today to people? Well, I believe it can happen today to Christians because we have the Spirit of God inside of us and are sealed by him, but can it happen to people who aren't Christians? Yes, I do. Or if you go to parts of Africa or the third world, there are people there who are involved in voodoo and witchcraft and all kinds of demon stuff that in any culture the enemy will figure out the most effective tool to use to shape values to go his way.

You travel the world and you'll find out this is a very real problem in many places in our world. Could this man be full of demons? You bet. Now, what happened? Well, look, verse 28. And when he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice. What do you want with me, Jesus, son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me. And Matthew's gospel says, don't torture me before the time.

You say, what time? Well, the time when at the very end, when Jesus has already told them they're going to go into the abyss, they said, don't do that to us yet. For Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized this man. And though he had been chained hand and foot and kept under guard, that's what the townspeople did to keep this guy under control.

But it didn't do any good. The Bible says he'd broken those chains and gone out and lived in the tombs. Jesus asked the demon, what is your name? And the demon said, My name is Legion. A Roman legion was over 6800 Roman soldiers. And so by saying legion, he meant there's a lot of us in here. Legion, he said, because many demons had gone into this man. And they, the demons, begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the, look, see it, the abyss.

That's where they're headed eventually. They said, don't do it to us now. Now, there's two things I want you to notice here that are very interesting. First of all, what the demons said and second of all, what the demons did. First of all, what did they say?

They said, What do you want with us? Verse 28. Jesus, you son of the most high God. Isn't it interesting that the disciples were in the boat just a few minutes ago saying, Who is this man that even the wind and the sea obey him?

And as soon as they land, they get a guy full of demons come in to answer their question. Nobody could keep this guy under control. They chained him up. They put him up to the wall. They wrapped him up in rope. They guarded him. They locked him in his house. The guy was completely out of control.

He was completely unable to be subdued. In fact, in Matthew's Gospel, it says that the man was so violent that nobody could even pass by where he was living. He would come out and assault them and beat them up. But would you notice what he did when Jesus came? The Bible says that he came to Jesus and fell at his feet, begging him not to send them to the abyss.

Isn't it interesting no human power or authority could tame these demons? But as soon as they saw Jesus, they fell at his feet, acknowledging he had absolute authority over what happened to them. Verse 32. And a large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and the demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs.

And he gave them permission. And when the demons came out of the man, they went in the pigs. And the pigs rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and the whole herd was drowned. Now, how many pigs were there here? Mark chapter 5 says there were about 2,000 pigs, and all of them drowned. Now, that represented an enormous financial loss to whoever owned those pigs. You say, well, who owned them? Well, we don't know for certain, but I think they were probably owned by the whole town because in a minute we're going to find the herdsman went, not to tell some person your pigs are drowned, but to tell the whole town the pigs are gone.

That explains what happens next, because it says in verse 34, when those attending the pigs saw what happened. For the first time, we find out there was an audience. There were some people watching all of this going on. When they saw what happened, they ran off and reported it to the town and the countryside. Can you imagine now? They come running into town. And the people went out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom all the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed, now he'd never been dressed before, and in his right mind, and they were afraid.

And those who had seen it told all the townspeople how the demon-possessed man had been cured. Now, let's stop for a moment and think. If you were part of that crowd that went down there, what would your response have been to all this? I mean, how would you feel?

Here he is, legion, sitting there, fine. All you pigs are floating out there in the sea, and they're saying, Jesus, this guy right here, he's the one that did it. Now, what would your response be? Well, you know, your response would depend on your value system. Think what you've got here. You've got a single human being whose life was an absolute disaster zone, who suddenly is in his right mind and he's healthy and he's healed and he's made well, and you've got 2,000 pigs representing an awful lot of money floating out in the Sea of Galilee, dead.

Your response or my response would depend upon which of those we value more. And these people reveal their value system real quick. Look at this, verse 37. It says that all the people of the region of the Gerizines asked Jesus to leave.

Why? Well, look what it says here. It says because they were afraid. Afraid of what? Were they afraid Jesus was going to hurt them?

No, I don't think so. Were they afraid that he was going to come in and do something nasty to all the people in town? No, not after he'd taken this demoniac and made him. Well, why would they be afraid of that? What were they afraid of? I'll tell you what they were afraid of. They were afraid they were going to lose more pigs. That's what they were afraid of. They'd already lost 2,000 pigs. They'd already had an enormous financial loss and they didn't want any more.

This is what they were afraid of. And would you look what Jesus did? Verse 37, it says, So he got into the boat and he left. And the man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him. Jesus said to him, No, I'm sorry, you cannot go.

You say, Lon, why would he say that to him? Jesus said to him, No, you cannot come. But Jesus sent him away and said, You go home and tell how much God has done for you. So he was going, but he still left Legion there because he wanted Legion to keep trying to reach these people for Christ. And so the Bible says this man went away and told everybody in town how much Jesus had done for him. Now, let me stop and say here that if you're here this morning and you've never embraced Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior, maybe a friend brought you here this morning or a relative brought you here or some neighbor or a husband or wife brought you here. You don't even know why you're here, but you're here and you've never made a personal decision to trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior. Can I ask you to pay careful attention to what just happened here? When these townspeople asked Jesus to leave, he did.

Would you notice that? Jesus never pushed himself on these people and he won't push himself on you. Jesus honored their freewill choice. And, you know, as far as the Bible tells us, Jesus never came back to this place again. This was his one and only visit.

This was their one and only opportunity to have him right there. Could I say to you that every time Jesus Christ offers himself to a person and they decline, they have done exactly what these townspeople did? They have basically said to Jesus, Go away.

We're not prepared to pay the cost. Please go away. That's what you're saying. And, you know, maybe you've had Jesus Christ offered to you by people many times. Maybe your wife's been offering you Jesus Christ for years or your husband. Maybe your parents have been offering Jesus Christ to you if you're a young person or your children have been offering him to you if you're a parent. And I'll tell you this morning, if you're here, I'm offering Jesus Christ to you.

My dear friend, be careful about telling Jesus Christ to go away because he will. But the results will be eternally tragic. Something for you to think about. And that's the end of our passage this morning. But it leads us who are Christians here this morning to ask the question. So what?

Right. What difference does this make? Now, let me see if I can bring it all around and answer it.

A little bit of time I got left. You know, there's some great lessons here. One of them is that this is a great reminder about the fact that Jesus Christ has power over the greatest forces of evil in this universe. And that as his children, by faith in Jesus Christ, we are never at the mercy of the devil. We have no reason to fear because Jesus Christ is in absolute control and authority over the devil.

And there's not a thing for us to worry about. And there's a great lesson here about that. But that's not what I want us to focus on. What I want us to focus on this morning is the value system of these townsfolk. What strikes you most about their value system? What strikes me is that these people were pig-centered, not people-centered. I mean, look, when they showed up where Jesus was, what impressed them most was not that this poor, tormented man had been healed, had been restored. What bothered them the most was that their pigs were gone. Did it ever occur to you that maybe there were other sick people in their town? That maybe there were some other demonized people in their town? Did it ever occur to you that maybe they should have been concerned about all these other people's lives right there that were hurting and suffering and being tormented? And that they should have invited Jesus Christ to come into town and do for these other people all the things that he had done for Legion out there in the tombs?

They didn't do that. All they were worried about is how many more pigs they might lose. The bottom line is these people valued pigs more than they valued people. Now, how does the attitude of Almighty God compare with this? Jesus said in John chapter 14, the person that's seen me has seen the Father. In other words, see Jesus's heart on any subject.

You've seen the heart of God. So let's look and see how did Jesus Christ value people? If we can answer that, we can answer how God values people. How did Jesus Christ value people? Friends, he valued people more than anything else in the universe. He valued people more than his own comfort.

So how do you know that? Well, because Philippians chapter 2 says that he didn't regard the comforts and the prerogatives that he had in heaven something to be grabbed ahold of. But rather he was willing to let go of those things because of the value he placed on us. And he was willing to come to earth and do something for us that we could not do for ourselves but that we desperately needed done.

That every one of us needed our sins paid for but there was no way we could pay for them ourselves and we desperately needed somebody to pay for them for us. And Jesus said, I'm willing to give up my comforts, I'm willing to give up my prerogatives because I value those people more than my comforts and my prerogatives and I'm going to earth to do for them what they can't do for themselves. Jesus valued us more than even his own life.

Every time we look at a cross, it ought to remind us, it ought to be like a neon sign just flashing out to us. Every time we look at a cross, God loves people. The Bible says no greater love, no greater value could anybody place on another person than this, that he would give up his life for that person.

And you know, that's the way Jesus Christ wants our value system to read. We have a little saying in our family, it's called people are more important. People are more important than what? People are more important than anything. We try to teach this to our children, people are more important. You say, have they gotten it yet? No, but we're working on it. And I don't know if you agree with that, I hope you do. Are people more important than money and material wealth? I hope so.

People are more important. My wife and I were riding home from a visit to her parents, my in-laws, this is about a year ago, and so we started talking. And one of the subjects that came up was about a little family heirloom that my wife's folks had had. And I don't know how your families work, but you know, as parents start getting up in age, heirlooms start getting divided and handed out. And this heirloom had just kind of trickled its way over to one of the other children, you know, kind of like by osmosis. You know how that happens sometimes in a family? And you just kind of notice it's not here anymore at the parent's home, it suddenly moved over to one of the other homes. But nobody ever said anything about it moving.

Or would anybody else like it to osmose their way instead of the other way? You know what I'm trying to say? So we were having a little discussion about this because it irritated us. And the more we talked about it, the more it irritated us. And so we stopped for a second and we're just riding in silence. And God gave me the ability at that moment to step back for just a second and evaluate.

And I said to Brenda, I said, you know, let's stop for just a second and evaluate. Is this thing really worth damaging our relationship with family? I mean, really, I mean, if we put up a big stink and maybe if we actually got it by putting up a big stink, would it be worth the people damage we'd have to do to get it? Would it be worth the messages about the value of people we'd be sending out? I mean, what are we going to do with it if we get it anyway? Brenda, it's going to sit up on our shelf for 40 years until our kids fight about who gets it. And we both sat there and looked at each other and said, no, it's not worth it.

It's not worth it. People and family are more important than things. But, you know, you have to be reminded of that because you get out there in the heat of battle and you forget this.

The heat of battle is good at making you forget this. So let me ask you a question this morning as we conclude. My question for you is, what pigs have you been valuing in your life above people? Where are the places in your life where you will step on people to enlarge your herd of pigs? Maybe with your career.

Would you do it there? Or maybe with some achievement or some goal that you've had all your life and you've made up your mind, you're getting there no matter who you have to step on. Where is it that there's some pig in your life that's more important than people where you've decided you'll step on people to get a bigger herd? Vince Lombardi, who was maybe, I don't know, one of the greatest coaches of all time in football. He had a motto.

He used to say this. Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.

Now, I have an enormous respect for Vince Lombardi, but I'd like to respectfully say he's wrong. Winning is not the only thing. Winning is not even the most important thing.

People are the most important thing. Jesus Christ did not die for football. Jesus Christ did not die for your career. Jesus Christ did not die so you could fulfill some lifelong ambition that you have.

And Jesus Christ did not die so you could amass all the material wealth you ever wanted. Jesus Christ died for people. This is how Jesus Christ wants us to see life in this world, that people are more important. We have 10 ministry values that shape our ministry. The first one is people matter to God and to us. And by saying that first, what we're trying to say is that more than any other value, we want this one to shape our ministry. Nothing is more important than helping people.

Nothing is more important than caring for people. Seeing people come to know Jesus Christ in a real and personal way. Seeing the power of God transform people's lives. Seeing people's lives reclaimed as this demoniac's life was reclaimed. This must be the driving passion and piston of this church.

Nothing else. I was at a social not too long ago with one of the groups in our church and it was kind of like a Q&A type thing. And one of the people sitting out there said to me, I got a question. My question is, what is the best part about being the pastor of McLean Bible Church? And what is the worst part?

That's a pretty interesting question, isn't it? What do you hate the worst about being a pastor? Want to hear what I said? The worst part about being a pastor is church politics. I hate church politics.

I despise them. You know the best part about being a pastor? What do you think the answer is?

You know what I said? The best part about being a pastor is seeing people's lives changed by the power of Jesus Christ. Seeing people's lives that were a wreck, reclaimed and delivered and made whole by Jesus Christ touching their life.

That's the best part of this. And friends, when it comes to us as Christians making an impact on that world out there, let me tell you something. What that world out there needs is not another televangelist. Do you agree with that? What they need out there is not another faith healer and what they need out there is not another Christian celebrity.

What that world needs and will make a difference out there is everyday Christians like you and me who are willing to put people first in our lives and show the love of Christ to people even above our own comfort, our own welfare and our own desires. Look, we can't compete with that world out there when it comes to technology. They're way ahead of us. We can't pull in every sharp and new thing that's going on and be ahead of them.

We can't compete with them on any of those bases. But the one thing we've got that the rest of the world cannot offer people is the love of Jesus Christ expressed through the lives of the people who believe in him. That's what we've got.

And if we're going to change that world, that's the only way we're going to do it in the 90s. And I hope that God will challenge your heart and challenge my heart and make us change the way we see the world and people as a result of being here this morning. Let's bow together and pray. Heavenly Father, sometimes the Word of God confronts us.

Sometimes it rebukes us because we need it, because we've gotten out of step with you and we've lost touch with your values that should be our values as Christians. And I thank you this morning for doing that very thing for us. Lord, you know, it's so easy in the heat of battle to lose sight of this very important truth that people are more important. But I pray, Father, that you would bring us back to that value this morning and help us live it. Lord, I want to pray for someone who may be here that has never trusted you as their personal Lord and Savior, that you would use the story that we saw this morning to remind them how dangerous it is to tell you to go away and leave them alone. And I pray if there are people here who've been offered you, even if they're not sure that they are ready to take you yet, at least, Lord, may they be willing to say, Jesus, I'm not sure I'm ready to take you, but please don't go away. Keep working with me.

Keep talking to me. And for those of us who are Christians, Lord, may you make this church and us as individual Christians effective in reaching and making an impact on this community for Christ more than any other reason because we are willing to go out and put people first and show them the love of Jesus Christ. Give us the power to live differently, Lord, if we become convinced that we need to. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. For more, call us at 866-788-7770. And if you will join us next time when Lon seeks to answer one of life's most important questions, so what?