Today, I am reading and commenting on  Mark 6-7.

So, today as I was reading Mark’s account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand I was struck by something that has never crossed my mind, something that I have never heard anyone comment on.  After the Twelve returned from the preaching mission on which Jesus had sent them, He had them get in a boat to go to somewhere remote for them to have time to debrief.  However, people saw them going and got there ahead of them.  Now this is the interesting part, the crowd sat and listened as Jesus taught, for hours.  They may have followed Him there because of the miracles He and His disciples had performed, but they sat and listened to Him for a long period of time, such a long period of time that the disciples became concerned about their need to eat (and perhaps from the disciples’ desire to eat as well).  The people may have come to see Jesus perform miracles, but they stayed to hear Him teach.  In between Mark’s account of Jesus sending the Twelve out to preach and his account of this feeding, he wrote about Herod executing John the Baptist.  I thought to myself, why did he do that?  Then it occurred to me, none of the accounts we have mention John the Baptist performing miracles, but they do talk about people coming out in droves to hear him preach the repentance of sin.  Which brings me to this, if we want to reach people we need to preach the unvarnished word of God.  We don’t need to smooth off the edges so as not to offend anyone.  We don’t need to soften it to avoid causing someone pain.  Sometimes people need to be offended, or to suffer pain in order to heal.  Jesus spoke the word of God without fear of what His listeners would think, and they came from miles to hear Him speak.  He didn’t need any gimmicks to reach people.  He didn’t need to make it a carnival to get them to come.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.