012912  THE QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK
(“There was a man with an unclean spirit who cried out: ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are—the Holy One of God..’”
  Jesus rebuked him: ‘Quiet! Come out of him!’.”)
Mark 1: 23-24

            We have never experienced anything like the scene that is depicted in the Gospel of Mark.  What did that unclean spirit make the man do?  How did the unclean spirit manifest itself?  How much of the man’s life had slipped out of his own control?  Does this kind of thing still go on?  I believe it does but we don’t name it as such.  Look at how all kinds of people get hooked on things—booze, drugs, smoking (legal and illegal), sex, shopping, hoarding, lying, stealing, cheating overeating and on and on.  While we like to think that we are in control of our lives there are any number of places where we are not in control.  Notice, in this instance the spirit is not specifically described as evil but rather as unclean.  Its presence has the effect of polluting the person’s life.  There is a lot of this going on today.
            Jesus is not at all put off by this unclean spirit.  He knows he has mastery of it.  He knows that the spirit must obey him even if it hates to obey him.  Jesus’ power is the greater power.  So, why then do we so often fail to take advantage of this power offered to us?  Why don’t we simply ask the Lord to do for us what he did for that man?  I remember the Friday after Thanksgiving 1985.  I knelt in my room and asked God to take away my addiction to alcohol because it had finally gotten clear in my mind that I could not stop and that I would not stop even if it destroyed me.  It was too powerful for me.  But I held onto the conviction that this compulsion was not more powerful than Jesus Christ.  I prayed and called out for deliverance.  From that moment my drinking days were over.  This was not in ancient Israel two thousand years ago.  This was in Philadelphia at the end of the twentieth century.  It often enough gets down to a matter of faith and a matter of acknowledging the truth. I can’t do this: God will.  And then believing it.  Is there any reason why each of us cannot do this in the area in our lives which needs it?  That is the question of the week.