Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Obadiah
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Luke 4:43
Jesus: No, I cannot stay. I need to preach the kingdom of God to other cities too. This is the purpose I was sent to fulfill.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
When I was growing up, we had tent revivals, camp meetings, Vacation Bible School, teen camp, childrens camp, all kinds of things that could get you a spiritual high. Remember those? Sometimes those announced two week tent revivals would really get going and suddenly we figure out we didn’t want them to stop, so we go for another week or two. People would run the aisles, pray at the altars, talk about the services during the day at work or at the grocery store. Every night the tent would be full. There would be lots of music and the sermon seldom lasted less than an hour. But no one left.
I’m afraid I haven’t seen one of those kind of revivals in a long time. We get too busy with life and now if we can get people to go to a weekend gathering, it’s like pulling teeth. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen hanky wavers and aisle runners, too. We’re afraid of what someone might think if we let our emotions get out of hand if God really blesses us in a service, I guess. It’s just not done. We’re too formal and we might scare away the visitors if they came to our churches and saw something like that, right?
I’m not sure what started me down that path except thinking about the circuit Jesus made as He taught and preached and healed. He never stayed in one place very long because He had a mission to complete. He also had to make sure His schedule put Him in Jerusalem three times a year for the feasts Moses told the Israelites to observe at the temple – Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. So Jesus had an agenda from His Father and it wasn’t to stay in one spot. He didn’t expect people to come to Him.
He set off to go to as many people as He could to share the message God gave Him that the kingdom of God was at hand. It was time to get right with God because you didn’t have much time left. It was time to make sure your relationship with Him was right. Judgment day was coming and it wasn’t that far away. He also preached about love, though. In fact, Jesus talked a lot more about love than He did about judgment and punishment., we just don’t remember those words as much because of the way we’re built and the world we live in. But Jesus gave us a message of love.
I read an article the other day by Arthur Blessitt. He did some homework on how far Jesus walked during His life. As you are probably aware, everyone walked everywhere. Not many people had horses or donkeys or carts to ride around in. The only time Jesus is recorded as riding anything, in fact, was when He rode the new colt into Jerusalem. So we can assume that everywhere else He went, He went on foot.
So Arthur Blessitt looked at all the scriptures and all the places Jesus traveled during those three years of His ministry and determined He walked 3,125 miles in those three years. But then he looked at all the other walked He would have done with His family on the way to Egypt and back to Nazareth. The trips to Jerusalem for the feasts three times a year and so forth.
Jesus walked 21, 525 miles according to Blessitt’s calculations. That almost all the way around the circumference of the earth! At an average of 20 miles a day, that means He spent at least 1, 076 days and nights on the road in His life. That’s almost three years of His life just walking.
Jesus traveled to get God’s message to everyone He could. The gospels record His three year ministry from the time He was baptized in the Jordan River, but I wonder how much of the time before that He share His story with anyone who would listen? How many people did He talk to about the scripture and His understanding of what they meant. Remember He confounded the scribes at the young age of twelve. I doubt if His confounding others stopped at that one event. He was about His heavenly Father’s business.
I expect Jesus took Deuteronomy 6:6–9 to heart and spoke about God’s word continuously to anyone who would listen. Remember those words that Moses gave the Israelites before he died? "Make the things I’m commanding you today part of who you are. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you’re sitting together in your home and when you’re walking together down the road. Make them the last thing you talk about before you go to bed and the first thing you talk about the next morning. Do whatever it takes to remember them: tie a reminder on your hand and bind a reminder on your forehead where you’ll see it all the time, such as on the doorpost where you cross the threshold or on the city gate.
I expect during every one of those 21, 525 miles Jesus walked, He was remembering the words of His Father. How do you spend your time walking every day?
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