Beyond Help
Mark 5:1-20

No one could bind him. No one could subdue him. I assume that at some point someone had actually tried to help him, but no one could. Now he was that guy – the freak in the cemetery crying out and cutting himself, hounded by demons, longing to feel something real.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We overdrink and overmedicate to quiet the thoughts driving us mad, yet long to feel something real. You can hear this raw reality in Johnny Cash’s aging voice as he sang:

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real*

Like the freak in the cemetery, we are beyond help. No one can do anything. Except Jesus.

Jesus is not frightened by you or the demons that haunt you. The crying and cutting will not drive him away. He loves you. He came for you. He was cut for you. By his stripes you are healed.

Run to Jesus. Fall before him. Find him to be the only thing that’s really real.

*From “Hurt” as sung by Johnny Cash on the album “American IV: The Man Comes Around”