Having problems with message search?
During my quiet time on Tuesday, I read a passage from the Gospel of Mark. What's interesting about the Gospel of Mark is that it tends to include less details than the other gospels. The main advantage with that is that I can read about several events in Jesus' life in one sitting, and if I look carefully, I might see some significance of a certain sequence of events that I might not have seen if I'd just read one piece at a time. The passage of Scripture that I read was from Mark 4:30-41 to Mark 5:1-20. In those verses, Jesus told the parable of the mustard seed, got in a boat with his disciples, sailed across a lake, calmed a storm, got to the other side, healed a demon-possessed man, sent the demons into a herd of pigs, got back in the boat, and went back across the lake. Each one of these events contains a potential lesson, but this time, I focused mainly on Jesus' encounter with the demon-possessed man.
What struck me when reading it in this context was that the demon-possessed man was the only person that Jesus interacted with while he was on that side of the lake. And it had to have been a big lake to cross, if it took all night and a storm created waves big enough to crash over the boat. So the demon-possessed man was clearly what he went there for. His mission did have what we might perceive as some negative side effects. When he cast out the demons from the man and sent them into the herd of pigs, causing about 2,000 pigs to run and jump off a cliff and into a lake, the locals got pretty upset with him. Not only did those pigs probably cost a lot of money, but the people were pretty scared when they saw the crazy dude not acting crazy, and they must've wondered what else Jesus might've been capable of. So they kicked him out of their region. Jesus' last command to the formerly possessed guy was, "Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you." Then the guy does so, and the people were amazed. This was the one thing Jesus had set out to accomplish over there, and he wasn't worried one bit about the negative publicity that resulted from it. Rather, the people that the man ended up witnessing to were the ones that Jesus had intended to reach all along.
A lot of times, when God gives us a mission, even with a clear path as to how to accomplish it, we tend to worry about whom we might offend in the process, and we end up being less effective because we strayed from how God wanted us to do things. But if we follow Jesus' example, the only thing we need to be concerned with is the one thing that God has sent us to do, because that one thing is what's going to bring glory to God. Just like the mustard seed in that parable, it may be the smallest seed you plant, but it grows and becomes the largest of all the plants.
What struck me when reading it in this context was that the demon-possessed man was the only person that Jesus interacted with while he was on that side of the lake. And it had to have been a big lake to cross, if it took all night and a storm created waves big enough to crash over the boat. So the demon-possessed man was clearly what he went there for. His mission did have what we might perceive as some negative side effects. When he cast out the demons from the man and sent them into the herd of pigs, causing about 2,000 pigs to run and jump off a cliff and into a lake, the locals got pretty upset with him. Not only did those pigs probably cost a lot of money, but the people were pretty scared when they saw the crazy dude not acting crazy, and they must've wondered what else Jesus might've been capable of. So they kicked him out of their region. Jesus' last command to the formerly possessed guy was, "Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you." Then the guy does so, and the people were amazed. This was the one thing Jesus had set out to accomplish over there, and he wasn't worried one bit about the negative publicity that resulted from it. Rather, the people that the man ended up witnessing to were the ones that Jesus had intended to reach all along.
A lot of times, when God gives us a mission, even with a clear path as to how to accomplish it, we tend to worry about whom we might offend in the process, and we end up being less effective because we strayed from how God wanted us to do things. But if we follow Jesus' example, the only thing we need to be concerned with is the one thing that God has sent us to do, because that one thing is what's going to bring glory to God. Just like the mustard seed in that parable, it may be the smallest seed you plant, but it grows and becomes the largest of all the plants.
--Wayne
=================================================
http://celebok.livejournal.com/
http://www.myspace.com/celebok
http://celebok.livejournal.com/
http://www.myspace.com/celebok
=================================================
Offline 
Send Email