(Click. This is the story that this lesson is teaching on.)
Growth takes time. It doesn't happen overnight.
We have a microwave mentality, but growth is more like cooking with a Crock Pot.
Limitations on our growth... We have ambitions to be a certain size, but there are predetermined heights that every plant will reach.
We would like to grow larger than what we have been determined to grow (ambition), but sometimes we don't grow in the ways we want to and we blame it on others. Therefore, the problem might be you, and not the community around you.
"Ambition tempts us to forsake the mundane for the sake of unlimited growth-- or, at least new opportunities.We are so easily unimpressed by the ordinary, longing for the feeling of excitement that comes with a new task to take up, new people to engage, new challenges to face. The repetition of the daily grind wears on us, tempting us to think that nothing ever changes unless we break out of our routine and change the conditions of our everyday life." --Jonathan Wilson, Wisdom of Stability
Establish deep roots in a Biblical community.
Every time we are living in sin, we are isolated from our spiritual community.
"Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation." --Deitrich Bonheoffer, Life Together
The people, when they realized what Jesus had done, were AFRAID. What?!
Mark 5:15
The guy with the Legion? He is at peace. He's just sitting there with God. His shame has been covered.
Verse 18
Jesus tells him to go and tell the people what the Lord has done for him.
He WANTED to follow Jesus and escape the people who had known him...
Okay, so this very well may be true, and may have been part of his motivation. But I don't think you can assume this from the text. Since he is changed, I don't believe he would want to go with Jesus only to escape. He simply says that he wants to go with the disciples- well, everybody wanted to follow Jesus. Why would you not want to follow the amazing man that just rescued you from a life of demon possession? He changed his ENTIRE LIFE. Obviously he wanted to go with him.
Verse 19
"Go home to your own people"
The people that would benefit most from this story are the people who know his past and his shame. They needed to know how much the Lord had done for the man. And that's good; you are supposed to celebrate what the Lord has done.
HOWEVER
If the people in the town didn't want Jesus to stay, they obviously didn't recognize that He was the Son of God. Were they even a Christian community? Were they religious? We don't know. They kicked Jesus out. Therefore, we don't know that the man was part of a Biblical community. In fact, there's a high possibility that he wasn't. If the people were afraid and didn't understand what had happened, I would venture to say that they didn't believe in Jesus and His actions. If this is the case, this has not a lot to do with Biblical community. Jesus would have asked the man to return to his town to spread the things the Lord has done for him, not for his own benefit but for the benefit of the people. He wanted him to be a witness. If the town had been God-fearing, the man might have been able to go with the disciples, but he was more needed in his own town where the people did not have their trust in God.
He is assuming too much from the passage. Reading it in quite a different way than I would have.
We are called to share the Gospel in the community immediately around us, where we are rooted.
^I do agree with this. I think some churches have become too missions-based, and they've stopped focusing on the growth of the members.
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