18 While walking by the
Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and
Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 19 And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 And
going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee
and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending
their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
23 And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. 24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them. 25 And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
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Well sisters, I'm set to trying again to keep up with my blog. I got a little discouraged and just got lazy. I hope you all are still up for this. If at any point you would rather not get notifications for these posts please feel free to ask me to take you off it if you can't do so yourself. I won't be offended.
Also, I made the blog public so that you don't have to log in to view it because some of you were having trouble viewing the blog. I don't really want this to be public though so please don't share the link around. If things get out of hand I'll just make it private again but it will be a bit of a nuisance.
For today's post I need to go back to Matthew 4 and do the part that I accidentally skipped last time. From the first paragraph of the quoted passage above I'm always surprised by how it says that Simon and Andrew immediately left their nets to follow Jesus. I wonder what that actually looked like. May we drop everything to follow him too.
In the second paragraph, it's interesting to note that Jesus is preaching the gospel of the kingdom. What is the gospel? Is it the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus or is it more or other than that? It doesn't seem that Jesus was preaching what is commonly called "the gospel." What was he preaching? I have an understanding of this but it would nice to hear what some of you have to say first.
As a side note on the last paragraph, wouldn't have been amazing to have been able to witness all those miracles first hand? What a privilege the disciples had!
