Hearing is easy. Believing often takes time, but it is not hard once you understand what truth is. Confessing Christ when it comes from the heart, as it should, and through the lips, is more difficult, but achieved without too much effort in our common age. Being baptized is the easiest of all and someone will do that for you as you let it happen. It is that other part of salvation that is hard.
Peter told the first believers, “Repent and be baptized everyone one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
Repentance is the most difficult without a doubt. A life, once lived, creates a person. Who that person is, how they dress, speak, act, the profession they choose, the spouse, hobbies, neighborhood, how their children are raised, and so much more are a product of the life of a person and the choices they make. Repentance can mean changing every one of those aspects and possibly so much more. Repentance may mean going back to face everyone who you have ever loved and cared about and having to change who you are in their minds, whether for what they think is good or bad. Repentance is the change God would require of all of us and for some it is the one thing keeping us from God, regardless of how much we believe.
Difficulties are hardly worse than a couple of men possessed with a legion of demons, at least 2,000 from Luke 8:26-39 (Note: Luke focuses on only one of the men). The man from the land of the Gerasenes, whom Luke focuses on, had been the local crazy man. He howled at night and chose to live in the graveyard. He would attack people who came close. He would run around naked and cut himself with rocks. There were times when the townspeople would try to capture and bind him, but the demons inside his body gave him unnatural strength, and he would break the bonds and run off into the desert.
Jesus is barely off the boat from the Sea of Galilee when this man (and the demons) find Jesus and an exchange between them begins as Jesus is casting them out. They beg to go into the pigs, and Jesus allows it. The pigs, under the influence of the demons, all run into the sea, drowning themselves.
The people of the town and of the countryside are all summoned to see what had happened, and they found the man clothed and in his right mind now that Jesus had healed him. Between their fear, and likely the economic ramifications of losing so many livestock, the people to ask Jesus to leave, and Jesus does so.
Although the sins were not his, the man realizes that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He realizes that Jesus has redeemed his soul and asks Jesus to allow his company as they leave this place. His life had been in shambles. Everyone knew who he was before and had grown to fear him. The people of the area were shocked when they found him sitting at Jesus’ feet clothed and in his right mind. They remembered being attacked, seeing his nakedness, and him howling at the moon. It is likely they had told their children never to go near him, and imaginations had grown fantastic stories in their young minds. He had no life here. He knew that the future would be dim because, despite his repentance, the world would not let him forget the time he had all those demons. He would have to pay some price for the sins the demons committed in his body.
We are the same. Jesus redeems us, but the sins we committed — although forgotten by God and in our past never to be reawakened — are brought to memory constantly by the world. The world will attempt to allow those proverbial demons back in to let them frolic and play defying God and His grace. We want to just go and be with Jesus, following Him and sitting at His feet for all eternity, but we cannot yet. This man could not either for the same reason: he and we are given a mission by Jesus: “Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you” (Luke 8:39).
Jesus tells this man to face the world. To face whatever prejudices may be against him. To go back into the world who knew him before his transformation and defy its evil attempts to lead him back to the demons.
Jesus tells us to face the world. To face whatever prejudices may be against us. To go back into the world who knew each of us before our transformation through repentance and defy its evil attempts to lead us back into sin.
He never claims it is easy to do. But He does the heavy lifting. The man could not save himself from the onslaught of the demons. Only Jesus could do that. We can never redeem our soul from the condemnation of sin we all bear. Only Jesus can do that. So, the “hard part” is ours to bear for a little while that we might sit at His feet as Christians, studying and learning, and following Him in spirit until we can be with Him throughout all eternity.
Lance Byers