649 Go, Preach and Heal - Matthew 10:7-8

Do you ever think that some of the things in the Bible are pointed at the super spiritual people and they don't apply to you? Let's talk about a key passage today in this particular idea

Hi, I'm Mike Henry with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me on the Follower of One Podcast. I'm grateful that you listened to this. If this is your first time, this will be a stretch. But if you listen to our daily devotions, This is in line with many of the things that we talk about, how we are all called to be missionaries in our every day.

Today, I'm reading Matthew 10:7-8, and the passage reads "and as you go preach saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand heal, the sick raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give." Once again, that's Matthew 10:7-8, and I'm specifically reading from the New American Standard translation of the Bible.

So in this section of scripture, Jesus is sending out the 12 disciples into the countryside. He sends them to the Jews, not to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but just to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It says in the previous verse, and the passage immediately following this is a clear instruction for how missionaries should raise their support and how this should go about living. And so there are many people who think about this passage as applying only to those disciples who are sent by Jesus.

But I want to point out a few things about this passage and how it applies to all of us. Beginning in verse seven, it says, "and as you go," interestingly, the Greek word translated "as you go" in this passage is the same Greek word in Matthew 28, what is called the great commission where it says "go therefore and make disciples."

And that is considered to be a universal command. "As you go" is a universal statement about all of us. It's we are all going, we are Jesus's people. As we follow Him in our daily life and go through our lives as we go, Jesus is not excluding anyone. He's using the disciples as an example.

Now the next word is preach and many of us are not preaching. Jesus has challenging the disciples to go and tell other people that the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Notice that they're not being told to tell other people that they need to trust Jesus to get to Heaven. They're just making a statement, that the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

How does that apply to us today? Well, I don't believe that we should go and preach every chance we get. Everybody's not looking to be preached, to the people that we work with don't want to have religion forced down their throat or introduced into every conversation. But as we live following Jesus, our life proclaims, that the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

And then when they ask us. Why are you doing this? We should clearly state that we do this because we belong to the kingdom of Heaven. We follow Jesus. That's our challenge for today, is to remember that the message for all of us is to go preach and heal. And we'll talk about heal in the next episode. And then we may take one or two more episodes to talk about this passage.

As we go today, we proclaim the kingdom of Heaven. Let's live like we belong in the Kingdom and other people will ask us, why are you doing this? And we'll get a chance to share and talk a little bit why we're different.

Thanks for being a marketplace minister. Thanks for joining us as we discover together how God would have us live our faith in the workplace. Your life matters and your choices that you make as a follower of Jesus matter. So let's follow Jesus today. Thanks for being a marketplace minister. And if you get a chance to join us, as we all discover this together in our online community called Follower of One, you can find out more at https://community.followerofone.org

Thanks very much.