Preparation for Humanitarian Distribution 1
Friday, June 24, 2016
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Meditation on Isaiah 58
By Dennis Edwards: YouTube Link
Today's meditation is on Isaiah 58. The chapter starts like this:
Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?[2]
The Lord says,
Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high. Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I have chosen?[3]
You see this is the fast instead of fasting, you know the church says lets take a fast and not eat and have just juices, we're going to really seek the Lord. But the Lord says here this is the fast I want you to do. So what, at the end of the week you'll feel so righteous that you've done some fasting? No, this is what the Lord wants you to do. It says,
Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?[4]
And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.[7]
So there we have a beautiful chapter from the book of Isaiah where we learn how God will answer our prayers. It is not the fast of denying ourselves food or drink that the Lord wants where we feel righteous about what we've done, and we think God has to answer our prayer because of something that we've done. Yes, there is something we can do, and that's to open up our lives upon others and help others. And that's where God promises to hear our prayers, when we get busy helping the oppressed, and feeding the poor, and taking care of those in need, even those in our own family. That's what God's going to bless. So if you want healing, you want answers to prayer? Get busy helping others, and you're putting yourself in position for God to answer your prayers. God bless you as you help others.
Notes:
[1] Isaiah 58:1-2
[2] ibid 3a
[3] ibid 3b-6a
[4] ibid 6-7
[5] ibid 8
[6] ibid 9-11
[7] ibid 12-14
Harvard scholar admits ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ is likely a forgery
By Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service, June 20, 2016
If “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” sounds a bit like something out of a Dan Brown novel or an episode of “The X-Files,” that’s because, the Harvard scholar who introduced it to the world now admits, it likely is a fake.
That admission by Karen L. King, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, comes after an investigation into the history of a papyrus fragment known as “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” published last week by The Atlantic.
“It appears now that all the material [owner Walter] Fritz gave to me concerning the provenance of the papyrus … were fabrications,” King told the Boston Globe.
Harvard Divinity School posted a statement Monday (June 20) on its website from dean David N. Hempton, saying the school is “grateful to the many scholars, scientists, technicians, and journalists who have devoted their expertise to understanding the background and meaning of the papyrus fragment.
The scrap of papyrus reads in Coptic, an Egyptian language: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife… .’” In total, it contains just 33 words across 14 lines.
King had presented her research into the papyrus in 2012 at a Coptic Studies conference held near the Vatican, touching off new debate about whether Jesus had been married, the role of women in the early church–and the authenticity of the papyrus fragment.
Expert papyrologists and scientific tests had concluded it was likely authentic, she said, though critics pointed out errors in Coptic grammar and similarities with the extrabiblical Gospel of Thomas. The Vatican called it a “clumsy fake.”
The fragment had been brought to her by an anonymous collector, she said. In her paper at the time, she said, “nothing is known about the circumstances of its original discovery or early ownership.”
But The Atlantic traced its ownership to a Florida man named William Fritz, who had spent years at Free University’s Egyptology institute in Berlin and studied Coptic.
Fritz told The Atlantic he did not forge the papyrus.
But his background, which includes making porn, among journalist Ariel Sabar’s other findings, “tips the balance towards forgery,” King told The Atlantic. But, she said, she would need either scientific proof or a confession to definitively declare it a forgery.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Meditation on Gospel of John Chapter 3
By Dennis Edwards: YouTube Link Good morning. I am going to start today's meditation walking along the river here. I just ran 5 kilometers. Now, I'm going to do a leisurely walk along the river. Today's meditation is going to be on John chapter 3 verses 1-8 and 16-21.
Now this meditation, this chapter in John we see Nicodemus, well let's just start the meditation.
There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou does, except God be with him.[1]
The first thing we see is that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Why? Because he is ashamed to be seen with Him, because he (Nicodemus) is a ruler of the Jews and an important person in the society, in the government, the religious government, the religious and secular government, because the Sanhedrin did both in the Jews. So they were both the religious and secular government. So he's afraid, he doesn't want to be seen with Jesus, because this guy is from a sect, a cult. There's been other guys before Him that claimed to be the Messiah and they all turned out to be false, you know. So here's another Messiah claiming, and He's got a group of followers and He's brainwashed them and they are all going around and He somehow manages to perform some miracles, and which Nicodemus admits, "as we know you are a teacher that nobody can do things that your doing except God be with Him." So he's a bit bewildered because on the one side, he doesn't want to be seen with Jesus, but on the other side, he wants to find out more information. What is it with this guy?
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.[2]
Nicodemus thinking in the natural says,
How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?[3]
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. that which is born of the flesh is flesh;[4]
Some people say that this means the water birth is referring to the flesh, when you're in your mother, you're in a water sack and the water breaks and out you come. Some theological professors say that this natural birth is related to the water birth and the second birth is of the birth of the Spirit.
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.[5]
which is when you have the spiritual rebirth, the spiritual experience, the awakening, which many people experience in their lives. If you haven't, then I would encourage you to seek for it. Jesus says,
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind blows where it lists, and thou hears the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it comes, and wither it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.[6]
Here's the most, one of the most famous verses in the Bible,
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, (Good Morning), that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved. He that believes on Him is not condemned: but he that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be manifest, that they are wrought in God.[7]
So the question is in this morning's meditation,.. Are we coming to the light? Are we coming to the light of God's Word? Are we coming to the light of God's Spirit?..that enlightens our heart, enlightens our mind and exposes our sin and causes us to call upon the Lord? because the Bible says he that calls upon the Lord, they that call upon the Lord shall be saved.[8]
Are you calling upon the Lord? Have you called upon the Lord? We all need to call upon the Lord. He is our salvation. He is our help and He wants to be with us. He wants to be with you. He wants to help you today. Call upon Him. Don't just come to Him by night. Don't be ashamed to be seen with Him. But be like Apostle Paul who said,
I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.[9]
Notes:
[1] John 3:1-2
[2] John 3:3
[3] John 3:4
[4] John 3:5-6a
[5] John 3:6b
[6] John 3:7-8
[7] John 3:16-21
[8] Romans 10:13
[9] Romans 1:16
Decades Later, Sickness Among Airmen After a Hydrogen Bomb Accident
Alarms sounded on United States Air Force bases in Spain and officers began packing all the low-ranking troops they could grab onto buses for a secret mission. There were cooks, grocery clerks and even musicians from the Air Force band.
It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares, a patchwork of small fields and tile-roofed white houses in an out-of-the-way corner of Spain’s rugged southern coast that had changed little since Roman times.
It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Force’s plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, “Don’t worry.”
“There was no talk about radiation or plutonium or anything else,” said Frank B. Thompson, a then 22-year-old trombone player who spent days searching contaminated fields without protective equipment or even a change of clothes. “They told us it was safe, and we were dumb enough, I guess, to believe them.”
Mr. Thompson, 72, now has cancer in his liver, a lung and a kidney. He pays $2,200 a month for treatment that would be free at a Veterans Affairs hospital if the Air Force recognized him as a victim of radiation. But for 50 years, the Air Force has maintained that there was no harmful radiation at the crash site. It says the danger of contamination was minimal and strict safety measures ensured that all of the 1,600 troops who cleaned it up were protected.
Interviews with dozens of men like Mr. Thompson and details from never before published declassified documents tell a different story. Radiation near the bombs was so high it sent the military’s monitoring equipment off the scales. Troops spent months shoveling toxic dust, wearing little more protection than cotton fatigues. And when tests taken during the cleanup suggested men had alarmingly high plutonium contamination, the Air Force threw out the results, calling them “clearly unrealistic.”
In the decades since, the Air Force has purposefully kept radiation test results out of the men’s medical files and resisted calls to retest them, even when the calls came from one of the Air Force’s own studies.
Many men say they are suffering with the crippling effects of plutonium poisoning. Of 40 veterans who helped with the cleanup who The New York Times identified, 21 had cancer. Nine had died from it. It is impossible to connect individual cancers to a single exposure to radiation. And no formal mortality study has ever been done to determine whether there is an elevated incidence of disease. The only evidence the men have to rely on are anecdotes of friends they watched wither away.
“John Young, dead of cancer … Dudley Easton, cancer … Furmanksi, cancer,” said Larry L. Slone, 76, in an interview, laboring through tremors caused by a neurological disorder.
At the crash site, Mr. Slone, a military police officer at the time, said he was given a plastic bag and told to pick up radioactive fragments with his bare hands. “A couple times they checked me with a Geiger counter and it went clear off the scale,” he said. “But they never took my name, never followed up with me.”
Monitoring of the village in Spain has also been haphazard, declassified documents show. The United States promised to pay for a public health program to monitor the long-term effects of radiation there, but for decades provided little funding. Until the 1980s, Spanish scientists often relied on broken and outdated equipment, and lacked the resources to follow up on potential ramifications, including leukemia deaths in children. Today, several fenced-off areas are still contaminated, and the long-term health effect on villagers is poorly understood.
Many of the Americans who cleaned up after the bombs are trying to get full health care coverage and disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs. But the department relies on Air Force records, and since the Air Force records say no one was harmed in Palomares, the agency rejects claims again and again.
The Air Force also denies any harm was done to 500 other veterans who cleaned up a nearly identical crash in Thule, Greenland, in 1968. Those veterans tried to sue the Defense Department in 1995, but the case was dismissed because federal law shields the military from negligence claims by troops. All of the named plaintiffs have since died of cancer.
The toxic aftermath of war is often vexing to untangle. Damage is hard to quantify and all but impossible to connect to later problems. Recognizing this, Congress has passed laws in the past to give automatic benefits to veterans of a few specific exposures–Agent Orange in Vietnam or the atomic tests in Nevada, among others. But no such law exists for the men who cleaned up Palomares.
If the men could prove they were harmed by radiation, they would have all costs for their associated medical care covered and would get a modest disability pension. But proof from a secret mission to clean up an invisible poison decades ago has proved elusive. So each time the men apply, the Air Force says they were not harmed and the department hands out denials.
“First they denied I was even there, then they denied there was any radiation,” said Ronald R. Howell, 71, who recently had a brain tumor removed. “I submit a claim, and they deny. I submit appeal, and they deny. Now I’m all out of appeals.” He sighed, then continued. “Pretty soon, we’ll all be dead and they will have succeeded at covering this whole thing up.”
A 23-year-old military police officer named John H. Garman arrived by helicopter at the crash site on Jan. 17, 1966, a few hours after the bombs blew.
“It was just chaos,” Mr. Garman, now 74, said in an interview at his home in Pahrump, Nev. “Wreckage was all over the village. A big part of the bomber had crashed down in the yard of the school.”
He was one of the first on the scene, and joined a half-dozen others to hunt for the four missing nuclear weapons. One bomb had thudded into a soft sandbank near the beach and crumpled but remained intact. Another had dropped into the ocean, where it was found unbroken two months later, after a frenzied hunt.
The other two hit hard and exploded, leaving house-size craters on either side of the village, according to a secret Atomic Energy Commission report that has since been declassified. Built-in safeguards prevented nuclear detonations, but explosives surrounding the radioactive cores blasted a fine dust of plutonium over a patchwork of houses and fields full of ripe, red tomatoes.
A throng of residents led Mr. Garman to the plutonium-covered craters, where they peered down at the shattered wreckage, not knowing what to do. “We didn’t have any radiation detectors yet, so we had no idea if we were in danger,” he said. “We just stood there looking down at the hole.”
Atomic Energy Commission scientists soon arrived and took Mr. Garman’s clothes because they were contaminated, he said, but told him he would be fine. Twelve years later, he got bladder cancer.
Plutonium does not emit the type of penetrating radiation often associated with nuclear blasts, which causes immediately obvious health effects, such as burns. It shoots off alpha particles that travel only a few inches and cannot penetrate the skin. Outside the body, scientists say, it is relatively harmless, but specks absorbed in the body, usually through inhaling dust, shoot off a continuous shower of radioactive particles thousands of times a minute, gradually exacting damage that can cause cancer and other diseases decades later. A microgram, or a millionth of a gram, in the body is considered potentially harmful. According to declassified Atomic Energy Commission reports, the bombs at Palomares released an estimated seven pounds–more than 3 billion micrograms.
The day after the crash, busloads of troops started arriving from United States bases, bringing radiation-detection equipment. William Jackson, a young Air Force lieutenant, helped with some of the first testing near the craters, using a hand-held alpha particle counter that could measure up to two million alpha particles per minute.
“Almost everywhere we pointed the machine it pegged at the highest reading,” he said. “But we were told that type of radiation would not penetrate the skin. We were told it was safe.”
The Pentagon focused on finding the bomb lost in the ocean and largely ignored the danger of loose plutonium, the Air Force personnel at the site said. Troops traipsed needlessly through highly contaminated tomato fields with no safety gear. Many came to gawk at the shattered bombs in the first few days. “Once I went to check on the G.I.s and found them dangling their legs into the crater,” Mr. Jackson said. “Just sitting there, eating their box lunches.”
Accounts of the crash became front-page news in Europe and the United States. American and Spanish officials immediately tried to cover up the accident and play down the risk. They blocked off the village and denied nuclear weapons or radiation were involved in the crash. When an American reporter spotted men wearing white coveralls, a military press officer told him, “Oh, they’re members of the postal detachment.”
Once existence of the bombs leaked, more than a month later, the United States admitted that one bomb, not two, had “cracked,” but had released only a “small amount of basically harmless radiation.”
Today the two exploded warheads would be known as dirty bombs, and would probably cause evacuations. At the time, in order to minimize the significance of the blast, the Air Force let villagers remain in place.
Officials invited the news media to witness Spain’s minister of information, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, and United States ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, splashing on a nearby beach to show the area was safe. Mr. Duke told reporters, “If this is radioactivity, I love it.”Fearing that the bombs could damage the tourism industry, Spain insisted the mess be cleaned up before summer.
Within days, troops were hacking down contaminated fields of tomato vines with machetes. Though scientists overseeing the cleanup knew plutonium dust posed the greatest danger, military commanders had the troops throw thousands of truckloads of vines into chipping machines, then burned much of the debris near the village.
Some men doing the dustiest work were given coveralls and paper surgical masks for safety, but a later report by the Defense Nuclear Agency said, “It is doubtful that the use of the surgical mask served more than a psychological barrier.”
“If it did something for your psychology to wear one, you were privileged to wear one,” the chief scientific adviser, Dr. Wright H. Langham, told Atomic Energy colleagues in a secret briefing afterward. “It wouldn’t do you any good in the way of protection, but if you felt better, we let you wear it.”
Commenting on safety at the cleanup, Dr. Langham, who is perhaps best known now for his role in secret experiments in which hospital patients in the United States were unwittingly injected with plutonium, told colleagues, “Most of the time it would hardly meet the standards of the health physics manuals.”
The Air Force bought tons of contaminated tomatoes from local fields that the Spanish public refused to eat. To assure the public there was no danger, commanders fed the tomatoes to the troops. Though the risk from eating plutonium is much lower than the risk from inhaling it, it is still not safe.
“Breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had them until we were sick of them,” said Wayne Hugart, 74, who was a military police officer at the site. “They kept saying there was nothing wrong with them.”
In all, the Air Force cut down 600 acres of crops and plowed under the contaminated dirt. Troops scooped up 5,300 barrels of soil from the most radioactive areas near the craters and loaded the barrels on ships to be buried in a secure nuclear waste storage site in South Carolina.
Spanish and American authorities assured villagers that they had nothing to fear. The villagers, accustomed to living in a dictatorship, did little to protest. “Even if some people here might have wanted to know more, Franco was in charge, so everybody was too scared to ask anything,” said Antonio Latorre, a villager who is now 78.
To assure villagers their homes were safe, the Air Force sent young airmen into local houses with hand-held radiation detectors. Peter M. Ricard, then a 20-year-old cook with no training on the equipment, remembers being told to perform scans of anything locals wanted, but to keep his detector turned off.
“We were just supposed to feign our readings so we didn’t cause turmoil with the natives,” he said in an interview. “I often think about that now. I wasn’t too smart back then. They say do it and you just say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
During the cleanup, a medical team gathered more than 1,500 urine samples from the cleanup crew to calculate how much plutonium they were absorbing. The higher the level in the samples, the greater the health hazard.
The records of those tests remain perhaps the most prominent artifact from the cleanup. They show about only 10 of the men absorbed more than the allowed safe dose, and the rest of the 1,500 responders were not harmed. The Air Force today relies on the results to argue that the men were never harmed by radiation. But the men who actually did the testing say the results are deeply flawed and are of little use in determining who was exposed.
“Did we follow protocol? Hell, no. We had neither the time nor the equipment,” said Victor B. Skaar, now 79, who worked on the testing team. The formula for determining the contamination level required collecting urine for 12 hours, but he said he was able to get only a single sample from many men. And others, he said, were never tested at all.
He sent samples to the Air Force’s chief of radiation testing, Dr. Lawrence T. Odland, who started seeing alarmingly high results. Dr. Odland decided the extreme levels did not indicate a true health threat, but were caused by plutonium loose in the camp that contaminated the men’s hands, their clothes and everything else. He threw out about 1,000 samples–67 percent of the results–including all samples from the first days after the blasts when exposure was probably highest.
Now 94 and living in a rambling Victorian house in Hillsboro, Ohio, where a photo from the Greenland crash hangs in his hall, Dr. Odland questioned his decision.
“We had no way of knowing what was from contamination and what was from inhalation,” he said. “Was the world ending or was everything fine? I just had to make a call.”
He said he never got accurate results for hundreds of men who may have been contaminated. In addition, he soon realized plutonium lodged in the lungs could not always be detected in veterans’ urine, and men with clean samples might still be contaminated.
Convinced that the urine samples were inadequate, Dr. Odland persuaded the Air Force in 1966 to set up a permanent “Plutonium Deposition Registry Board” to monitor the men for life.
Experts from the Air Force, Army, Navy, Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) and Atomic Energy Commission met to establish the program shortly after the cleanup. In welcoming remarks, the Air Force general in charge said the program was “essential” and following the men to their graves would provide “urgently needed data.”
The plan was to have Dr. Odland’s staff follow the men. Within months, though, he had hit a wall.
“He is not able to get the support from the Department of Defense to go after the remaining people or set up a real registry because of the sleeping-dog policy,” an Atomic Energy Commission memo from 1967 noted.
“The sleeping dog policy? It was to leave it alone. Let it lie. I didn’t agree. Hell no, I didn’t agree,” Dr. Odland said. “Everyone decided we should watch these guys, take care of them. And then from somewhere up high they decided it was better to get rid of it.”
The Air Force officially dismantled the program in 1968. The “permanent” board had met just once.
Troops started to get sick soon after the cleanup ended. Healthy men in their 20s were crippled by joint pain, headaches and weakness. Doctors said it was arthritis. A young military policeman was plagued by sinus swelling so acute that he would bang his head on the floor to distract himself from the pain. Doctors said it was allergies.
Several men got rashes or growths. An airman named Noris N. Paul had cysts severe enough that he spent six months in the hospital in 1967 getting skin grafts. He also became infertile.
“No one knew what was wrong with me,” Mr. Paul said.
A grocery supply clerk named Arthur Kindler, who had been so covered in plutonium while searching the tomato fields a few days after the blast that the Air Force made him wash off in the ocean and took his clothes, got testicular cancer and a rare lung infection that nearly killed him four years after the crash. In the years since, he has had cancer of his lymph nodes three times.
“It took me a long time to start to realize this maybe had to do with cleaning up the bombs,” Mr. Kindler, 74, said in an interview from his home in Tucson. “You have to understand, they told us everything was safe. We were young. We trusted them. Why would they lie?”
Mr. Kindler filed twice for help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. “They always denied me,” he said. “Eventually, I just gave up.”
The United States promised to pay for long-term monitoring of health in the village, but for decades it provided only about 15 percent of funding, with Spain paying the rest, according to a declassified Department of Energy summary. Broken air-monitoring stations went unfixed and equipment was often old and unreliable. In the early 1970s, an Atomic Energy Commission scientist noted, the Spanish field monitoring team consisted of a lone graduate student.
Reports of two children dying of leukemia during that time went uninvestigated. The lead Spanish scientist monitoring the population told American counterparts in a 1976 memo that, in light of the leukemia cases, Palomares needed “some kind of medical surveillance of the population to keep watch for diseases or deaths.” None was created.
In the late 1990s, after years of pressure from Spain, the United States agreed to increase funding. New surveys of the village found extensive contamination that had gone undetected, including some areas where radiation was 20 times the permissible level for inhabited areas. In 2004, Spain quietly fenced off the most contaminated land near the bomb craters.
Since then, Spain has urged the United States to finish cleaning the site.
About a fifth of the plutonium spread in 1966 is estimated to still contaminate the area. After years of pressure, the United States agreed in 2015 to clean up the remaining plutonium, but there is no approved plan or timetable.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Monday, June 20, 2016
Preaching the Gospel
Audio length: 8:41
Download Audio (7.9MB)
http://anchor.tfionline.com/post/preaching-gospel/
Some of Jesus’ last words before ascending into heaven were the mission statement for His disciples: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”1
Forty-three days earlier He had died on the cross, and after three days He had risen from the dead. The purpose of it all was so that humankind could have the opportunity to be forgiven for their sins, to be reconciled to God, and to have everlasting life. Jesus had fulfilled His mission on earth. His death and resurrection had made salvation possible. He had made it possible for us to live eternally with Him.
During the last years of His life, He had enacted a two-fold strategy: to preach the message of the kingdom and salvation, and to find a core group of people who would embrace His teachings and assist in spreading His message to others—in making disciples. Once He had imparted to His disciples all that was needed, He could leave and the Holy Spirit would then come and empower His disciples to take the message to all the world.
Jesus’ years of public ministry were spent preaching, teaching, and training. Sometime after having been baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, and after having fasted 40 days and 40 nights, Jesus went to live in Capernaum in the area of Galilee. From that point on He began, as Mark’s Gospel says, “proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’”2
Jesus made it clear that His preaching the gospel was one of the reasons He was on earth, when He said: “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.”3
Jesus was sent to preach the gospel, and He taught His disciples to do the same. “He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.”4Through His example He taught His disciples to do the same and gave them opportunities to experience preaching it themselves.
After His death and resurrection, Jesus said to them: “As the Father has sent Me, even so I am sending you.”5 And right before ascending into heaven, He declared: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”6 Within days the Holy Spirit fell and the early disciples were powerfully preaching the gospel in Jerusalem, and in time throughout Israel, outside of Israel, and in all the world.
It’s through preaching the gospel that Christianity spreads. It’s through witnessing that the gift of salvation that Jesus died to bring is given to others. If the first disciples hadn’t preached the gospel and taught others to do the same, then the gospel would have ceased to be known. God has given us something so great, so eternally life changing, it’s our responsibility, as disciples, to share it with others, to give them the same opportunity.
The gospel is preached through the words disciples speak, through the lives they lead,and through the manifestation of God’s Spirit within them.
Part of preaching the gospel is living your life in such a manner that people see the light of God in you—the concern you have, the joy, the integrity, the manifestation of God and His love in you, His Spirit dwelling within you. You have the light of life—Jesus—within you, and if you live your faith, then your life will be seen as light-giving. Then when people see you and what you do, they will see and feel the Spirit of God.
We are asked by the Lord to live in a manner that communicates Him to others, not only in words, but in deeds and truth. Words are important, of course, as through your words you will explain salvation and tell about Jesus’ love; but your deeds, your good works, your example, the love and kindness you show people, your concern for them, all of this will show that the words you speak about Jesus are true, because those you are speaking with will feel Him emanating from you.
Disciples are called to be prepared to witness, pray for, and minister to whoever God brings across their path. 2 Timothy 4:2 expresses this concept quite well with the words “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season.” The phrase “in season and out of season” is translated in some Bible versions as persist in it whether convenient or not; keep at it in opportune times and in untimely situations; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. There’s no telling when you will cross paths with someone who needs God’s message, and when you do, as a disciple, you should be ready to share God’s truth with them.
Jesus was ready to meet the need no matter what the circumstances. He was faced with a multitude of different situations in which He needed to take action immediately—to witness, to love, to win, to heal, to forgive, to do a miracle. He rose to the occasion in every instance.
Some examples of this are the woman of Samaria,7 the wedding at Cana,8 the woman caught in adultery,9 the rich young ruler,10 Zacchaeus,11 Pilate,12 and the thief on the cross.13 Jesus was ready in season and out. He was there for whoever the Father brought across His path.
Jesus reached out to those He was aiming to help—the sinners who needed salvation. Those He met and ate with were not always those considered righteous or the folks who were “living right.” He was willing to minister to those whom others rejected—the hated tax collectors, the sinners, the unclean and unworthy. He was criticized when He connected with those who were on the margins of society, but He made it clear how important every soul is, no matter what their circumstances.
Every person is valuable to God. He wants everyone to receive salvation, and He rejoices when they do. God is no respecter of persons. Everyone, no matter what their status, is a sinner before Him and in need of His love and redemption. A Christian’s job is to preach the gospel to everyone, especially to those whom He brings across our paths.
Being prepared to share the gospel with the people in your path means not limiting those you witness to, or teach, or disciple, to only those whom you may be accustomed to or comfortable with. Reaching the economically lower, middle and upper strata of society is important to the Lord. He can make a disciple out of anyone who has a changed heart, learns to love Him, and wants to serve Him. Whoever God brings across your path, whoever He calls you to reach, is who you should witness and minister to. Be instant in season and out of season.
Preaching was something Jesus taught His disciples to do, and it was the commission, the mission statement, that He left them with. Disciples today have the same commission. We are to let our light shine, and minister to those God brings across our path.
Originally published January 2012. Adapted and republished June 2016.
Read by Jerry Paladino.
1 Mark 16:15 NAU.
2 Mark 1:14–15.
3 Luke 4:43.
4 Luke 9:2 NKJV.
5 John 20:21–22.
6 Acts 1:8.
7 John 4:7.
8 John 2:1–11.
9 John 8:3–11.
10 Matthew 19:16–22.
11 Luke 19:1–10.
12 Luke 23:1–4.
13 Luke 23:39–43.
