After all these years I can still say that I am in awe of the message of the Gospel, not just any Gospel, but the Gospel as Jesus and his disciples preached it. That message in it's unadulterated and and unaltered form is the message for life. And that life is not in the words printed in ink and on a surface of paper or now in digitized version. Like Jesus told the Pharisee's and Saducees, the life they searched for was not in the scriptures of the Law they has religiously studied and carried out, but the true life was in Jesus himself. And that enraged them because they could not get their minds around what was in front of their eyes. The Law and the Prophets had come to life. All embodied in Christ, the Messiah. What we have now is a record in ink and in binary a written testimony of what God wanted to leave behind for all those who would not see their Lord face to face but believe instead on the record of witnesses that had gone before them. "For is it written blessed are those who have not seen but believe...." and we are they. I am one. The Gospel was meant to reveal forever the true nature of our God. That the kingdom of God has come near. For the Gospel to come near to us who were unbelievers, something had to change. We had to first repent of our own nature, trust that we were indeed born into a world of darkness and that darkness was in us. Can you see it? A Holy and just God came, in form just like us and took from us the darkness deep within and made it "white as snow" no longer scarlet. The Gospel changed the world and it was meant too. The words themselves of the Gospel have no effect unless the heart is willing and tilled up for the preparation of a new life and the seed to be started.
All of the daily misery, the striving, the poverty, and the oppressive Roman rule made for fertile ground for the Gospel to spread. And spread it did. Paul's life was indeed that life that produced a hundred fold. Today we have a distorted version of Westernized Christianity and can easily hop to and fro searching for the kind of word we want to hear. And that is dangerous. Dangerous because we limit the true nature and power of the Gospel and we do not release the Holy Spirit to do the work within our midst. What did James say Religion was? "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this; to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
Did Jesus institute programs? Did he institute Religion or Religious activity? Aside from healing, teaching, rebuking, and preaching, what did he do? He took captivity captive. Inother words he took away from Satan that which was not his.......US.
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