The following sermon was delivered by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on February 7, 1982. The title is, With the Holy Spirit and with Power, and the scripture reference is Mark chapter 1, verses 29 through 39. 

I'm reading from the first chapter, beginning at the 29th verse. Jesus left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law lay sick with a fever, and immediately they told him of her, and he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she served them.

That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons, and the whole city was gathered together about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him. And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.

And Simon and those who were with him pursued him, and they found him and said to him, Everyone is searching for you. And he said to them, Let us go on to the next towns that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out. And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

The Gospel of the Lord. Of the four gospel accounts that we have in our New Testament, the gospel according to Mark is by far the shortest. Most scholars are convinced that it is probably the earliest of the gospels as well.

Matthew and Luke draw heavily upon it in writing their own accounts. And yet for all that, I suspect that most Christians today are less familiar with this gospel than they are with the other three. I'm not sure why that is.

But I think that's so. And I'd like to challenge you to do something if you've never done it before in the light of that. Perhaps you'd like to get up a bit early one morning, or perhaps you'd just not watch one of your favorite television shows.

I'd like to challenge you this week to sit down and read the Gospel of Mark straight through. If you've never done that before, it will be a tremendous spiritual experience for you. It'll only take about 40 minutes, even if you're a slow reader.

There are only 16 chapters here. And I think it will hit you in a different way than it does when we take a sentence or a paragraph or a little bit out of context. Each passage, of course, is so rich that you could spend a very long while on it.

But there's another kind of impact to see the sweep of the gospel as a whole. And this, of course, would be true for the others as well. But perhaps in a special way, Mark's gospel will have an impact on you.

I suspect that if you accept my challenge, one thing that will strike you very, very hard, perhaps as never before, is the sense of the explosion of spiritual conflict surrounding Jesus. You see it from page one, it follows you straight through. This is not gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

This is Jesus in the midst of a whirlwind, in the midst of a volcano exploding. it's interesting to me that in the third world it appears that the gospel of Mark is the most well known and the most beloved of the four gospels it may be that because folks in other parts of our world are so much more engaged in spiritual conflict there's so much more at the cutting edge of some of the kinds of things that we see in this particular account I remember Bishop Joshua Bannett Chu, the Bishop of Singapore, saying some years ago that perhaps the contribution of the Third World Church will be the recovery of the sense of spiritual warfare. That we're not just playing mind games.

We're involved in deadly conflict. And of course that's there in the other Gospels as well. But Mark gets right to the point.

Mark cuts right through all the words and deals with the issues. And so you see it perhaps more sharply than elsewhere. Thirteen verses into the story.

Thirteen verses. And we find Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness and ministered to by angels. Twenty-five verses into the story.

And you find Jesus casting demons out in the middle of a worship service. Now, I'm not just sure what you expected this morning, but that's the sort of thing that happens when Jesus is on the move. Such of spiritual warfare surrounding Jesus.

Well before the first chapter is over, we see a full-orbed ministry sketched by Mark. And Jesus continues to exercise that ministry right through to the end of the story. It's not just Jesus the preacher.

But Jesus, I would characterize his ministry under three headings. Preaching is one of them, but only one. He came to preach, to declare the gospel of God, and in the passage before us he says, this is why I was sent.

You get a sense of urgency about it. People are thronging to hear him. The whole city is turning out.

Everybody is looking for you, says Peter. And Jesus says, yes, but I've got to keep moving. I'm going to all the towns and villages, throughout the whole Galilee, throughout all of Judea.

I was sent to declare the good news, the good things of God. I came to preach. But secondly, I came to heal.

I came to heal. I came to make broken bodies well again. And we see him doing that.

We see Jesus touching the lame and making them leap again. Touching the blind and restoring sight. The deaf and they hear.

The lepers and they're cleansed. Jesus came to preach and he came to heal. And thirdly, he came to deliver the oppressed from bondage to the evil one.

He came to exorcise. He came to drive out evil spirits. those who see Jesus only as a teacher or even primarily as a teacher I think maybe have missed the point he came to preach to be sure but he came also to practice what he preached he came to practice what he preached and the gospel the good news that he declared is that the power of God is set against the power of the evil one and as we see him moving through the Gospels, we see him exercising that power.

He's not just speaking about it, but it's attending his ministry. He came to exercise the power of God against the works of darkness, to set captives free, to liberate those who are oppressed. At another point, he puts it this way.

He says the world itself is like the household of a strong man. and I've come to tie that man up and plunder his household. So often folks today, if they believe in God at all, will say, well, the world belongs to God.

Not Jesus. He says the world was created by God, but the world has fallen under the power of the evil one. And he's like a strong man who holds it in his fist.

He won't let it go. It's under his dominion and I've come to tie him up and plunder his household. He came to plunder you out of the household of Satan.

He came to tie him up and steal you away from him. St. Paul put it this way in one of his speeches in the book of Acts. He said, God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.

He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil. for God was with him. Not just a speaker, not just a teacher or a preacher.

God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, so he went about liberating the oppressed. Perhaps you noticed, even in the passage last week, the one that comes immediately before this one, when the people start exclaiming, what is this? A new teaching?

What was the teaching that they were exclaiming about? It wasn't that they were so excited about what was coming out of Jesus' mouth as they were excited about what was coming out of other people around Him as He spoke. What is this? A new teaching?

With power He commands even the evil spirits and they obey Him. That was the new teaching. That He exercised power.

Spirits came out of people when he spoke. I want to put that over against a biblical understanding that you may or may not be aware of. Biblically, the human personality is composed of three parts, not two.

Today we usually speak of mind and body, not biblically. Biblically, there are three parts, body, soul, and spirit. I am a spirit.

I have a soul. I live in a body. My spirit is the part of me that is responsive to God's spirit when it's made regenerate by the Holy Ghost.

Or else it's dead and it needs to be made regenerate. It needs to be born again, as Jesus himself put it. My soul is the emotional aesthetic part of my personality.

My tastes, my likes, my dislikes, my moods for the most part are soulish. It's my feelings. And my body is the all too obvious physical part of me.

Body, soul, and spirit. All three. Now, they're related.

They're highly integrated with each other. But the point is, Jesus came to minister to all of me. Not just to my mind.

not just to my spirit he came to minister to all of me he came to minister to the whole man to the whole woman I might just say parenthetically and this is a parenthesis it's not the main point but I'll just mention in passing that it seems to me that far too many Christians let alone everybody else are living primarily on the soulish level on the soulish level we're making our decisions on the basis of feelings, on the basis of taste, rather than on the basis of truth and obedience. I would suspect that the great majority of Christians' religious sensibilities are primarily aesthetic. Primarily aesthetic.

What appeals to my taste? What I like? What is my habit, my training, what I've grown up with?

This is why when you begin messing around with the prayer book, you upset people. It's not because it's truth that's at stake. Taste is at stake.

We're operating on a soulish level, on a feeling level. And yet what we ought to be operating on is the spiritual level. And our soul ought to be subject to our spirit.

That's a parenthesis. Jesus Christ came to minister to the whole person, body, soul, and spirit. He saves my soul, he heals my body, and he liberates my spirit.

And so we see him not only preaching, but going about healing the sick, setting the possessed, the oppressed free. Peter's mother-in-law is sick. Jesus has just come from a tremendous preaching mission.

Comes into the house, they tell him she's sick. He goes over, takes her by the hand, lifts her up, and immediately she's well. Says the fever left her, and did you notice it?

She ministered to them. That's the purpose of healing. Did you know that?

When Jesus Christ makes someone well again, when Jesus Christ touches you in any area of your life, When He blesses you, it's that you might be a better servant. It's that you might be a better minister to others. He raised her up, the fever left her, and she served them.

Praise God, we're seeing more and more of this. That's been absent for so long in the church's life, and yet we're beginning to see it more and more. Some of you were here about three weeks ago on a Friday evening.

and God did a rather unusual thing, we typically have the opportunity at the end of every service for people to come forward just as we do on Sunday mornings. We don't make a great big deal out of it. But there's the opportunity at the end of the service for people to come to the communion rail and pray for themselves or for others, whatever the need might be.

And sometimes lovely things happen at that point. But about three weeks ago, in the middle of a service, which we thought we knew where it was going, as much as you ever know on a Friday evening. I had a talk, all planned, ready to teach, and God said very clearly, put that aside.

I want you to call the sick forward now, in the middle of the service, now. And we called, if there were any sick, to come forward. And a lady came up, she was there for the very first time, and she said, I have very severe cancer.

would you pray for me and we prayed for her and I got the word back just last week that when they did the exploratory afterward they found that the tumor which had been the size of a grapefruit was completely gone totally gone hallelujah I rejoice in that and we're seeing that more and more But of course immediately you say that it raises terrible nagging questions doesn't it? What about those who don't get healed? What about all those who have been prayed for and don't see immediate results?

How come some are healed and some aren't or some aren't immediately? How come sometimes it seems the most godly, the most righteous are not healed and sometimes folks who seem to have very little relationship with the Lord are? and how I wish I could answer those questions.

And I can't. How I wish I could reduce it to a formula. I've got no formula. I had the privilege of sitting under the ministry of Catherine Kuhlmann on several occasions in Pittsburgh.

She exercised the most powerful ministry of healing that I've ever seen. And every single time she spoke, she said, I have no formula. I can't tell you why.

Sometimes the sick come at great distance, great cost, great physical difficulty, great faith and they're not healed. And sometimes some stumble bum will come in off the street. He doesn't even know what he's coming into.

And God heals him. I don't know why. What I do know is that when God does not immediately heal, He will supply the strength, the grace to cope if you'll allow him to.

He'll turn that into good. He'll use it in your character and your personality if you allow him to. He'll use it in fact in ministry to others if you'll allow him to as he did in Johnny Erickson.

Quadriplegic. Totally unable to move from here down. Why didn't he heal her?

I don't know. But she refused to indulge herself in the sin of depression and feeling sorry for herself. And God's using it as He's used few people in this 20th century.

But we are seeing it. We are seeing it. He's not only using those times when people aren't healed, but praise God, He is healing.

He is healing. And I want to challenge you to believe Him more expectantly. if you've come this morning and you've got physical need to reach out to this Jesus who loves to heal the sick and see Him moving in power again.

This is the day of the latter rain. He's moving in power again. But He doesn't even stop there.

He's also setting captives free. He's also dealing with those whose lives are under the power of bondage. And I want to tell you that there are people in this parish, there are people undoubtedly in this congregation this morning, who are right now, if the truth be known, enslaved to the demon of drink, or to the demon of lust, Or to the demon of greed or whatever other friendly neighborhood demon has got you?

You may be able to fool others, but you know who I'm talking about. Jesus Christ comes not just to forgive us our sins. I say that very carefully.

Can there be anything greater than the forgiveness of sins which cost Him His life's blood on the cross? Yes, there can. He comes to deliver us from the evil one.

First step is repent and ask Him for forgiveness and turn from that thing. But the second step is believe Him to go deeper than your mind down into your soul, down into your spirit, down into yourself and set you free. And he's doing that today for those who will come to him.

See, we've got it all inside out. The world says that freedom is the right to do what I want to do. But Jesus says freedom is the power to do what God wants me to do.

And he comes to set the captive free. Jeremiah chapter 8, verse 11. in a scathing condemnation of the prophets of his day said they have healed the wound of my people slightly.

Have you ever seen somebody with a deep gash in his arm? The first thing you've got to do no matter how painful it is is dig it out. Clean out the dirt.

Or else it will scab over. It will heal. But deep down beneath the surface it is going to start festering.

And the end result will be poison. Jeremiah said they have healed the wound of my people. Slightly.

But Jesus Christ came to do a complete work. to dig down body, soul, spirit, and do the whole work. Let's believe Him for it and step into liberty this morning.

Let's bow our heads together. At even ere the sun was set, the sick, O Lord, around Thee lay. oh with what diverse pains they met oh with what joy they went away Lord Jesus Christ we would come to you this morning we're not interested in a superficial healing we want you to heal the whole man body soul and spirit We pray for those, Lord, who are in infirmity amongst us, that you would touch broken bodies and make them well again.

Lord, give to us the gift of faith to believe you for that. And for those, Lord, who are in bondage, this day we come against that bondage in the name of Jesus. we ask you to give us the will to repent and above and beyond our own will that you would cast out those evil spirits that hold your people captive we would believe you this day for liberty for your great namesake Amen