Deliverance
“When our Lord reads Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1-2), He declares its prophecy fulfilled: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, / Because He has anointed Me” (vs. 18). In other words, salvation has arrived, the year of the Lord’s favor (vs. 19). This fulfillment includes the preaching of good news to the destitute. This “good news” defines the nature of the salvation Christ brings to the world: a deliverance achieved in and through His Person and extended to the entire world through the Church.” (Dynamis 9/24/2020)
“The Gospel story of the Gadarene demoniac reveals our true need, which is deliverance from sin. Our real problem is not that we do not have enough money, or that we will never be celebrities, or that we are lonely. Our real problem is that we are twisted and broken inside, and our real name is legion. We may appear outwardly respectable, and may live functional lives, hiding our brokenness from the view of others, but in reality we live in the tombs of death like the poor wretch that met Christ by the shore. A moment’s honest introspection will reveal this. C. S. Lewis reported the same thing. In his book Surprised by Joy, he admitted to what he found the first time he looked inside himself: “For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.” (Fr. Lawrence Farley)
“Just as with the Gadarene demoniac, Christ desires to liberate us from the oppression that besets us. The question is not whether He can or will; the question is are we willing to welcome the Deliverer into our lives. The people who wished Him to go away were right in one respect. If we continue in the presence of Christ our lives will change. We must remember, it is the refusal to change we must fear, not the call to it. Often times we want God to remove the burdens of our lives without requiring any change in our hearts or behavior, when, in fact, it is those very changes that affect our release from that which presses upon us.” (Very Rev. Stephen Rogers)
“By continuing to refuse to accept their own sinfulness and need of repentance, even as they refused the Baptism of the Forerunner, the Pharisees and many of the Judeans following them cut themselves off from the New Covenant in Christ's Blood, and so fell under the judgment that came upon Judea in the latter half of the first century. They would not accept that Jesus was the Christ because they would not accept that they were fallen or in need of deliverance from the power of sin and death, seeing themselves as the innocent and righteous who needed deliverance from the wicked who surrounded them.” (Father Stephen De Young)
“We have a great need for deliverance but we usually do not understand, or do not rightly focus, on what we need to be delivered from. We tend to focus on wanting to be delivered from circumstance such as illness, financial crisis, and things like this that are tangible. However, what we really need to be delivered from is much deeper than tangible circumstance. We need to be delivered from our own sin. Therefore, our need for deliverance is really spiritual. We see this truth in the Scriptures. The Israelites were delivered from bondage from the Egyptians. This physical event was a foreshadowing of the spiritual bondage Christ would deliver us from. The people of His day didn’t recognize this, being focused on deliverance of physical bondage from the Romans, and thus missed their opportunity for salvation and came under judgment. Many of us are making that same mistake today.” (Sacramental Living Ministries)
“God doesn’t always deliver us from our troubles; sometimes He delivers us through them. That’s a hard truth for us to accept, but it represents a very real dynamic in God’s economy.” (NIV Men's Devotional Bible)
“God both permits storms and delivers us through them, so that we can see His protection more clearly.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Matthew 8:23-27)
“As far as the Lord is concerned, the time to stand is in the darkest moment. It is when everything seems hopeless, when there appears no way out, when God alone can deliver.” (David Wilkerson)
“So often our primary ambition is to escape pain or feel good or be delivered from a problem when instead we need to keep our focus on the big picture of what God is doing in our life and the lives of others through pain or problems. Our primary aim should be to glorify God, not be honored or to be healthy or to be happy.” (Anne Graham Lotz)
“Sometimes our blessings reach us through the trials they bring. Sometimes God delivers us out of all our trials. Sometimes He keeps us in trials so someone else can be delivered.” (Heather Whitestone McCallum)