Yesterday you were asked to spend some time reading the stories of Jesus’ earliest followers. These stories are recorded in Mark 5:1-20; John 4:1-39, and Luke 10:1-12, 17-20.
If you took the stories of these people—the Gerasene demoniac, the Samaritan woman, and the 70 whose names we do not know—and added them to the stories of all the other people who first followed Jesus, you would get a very interesting picture of what God thinks it takes to be an evangelist (or a missionary, or a minister, or a disciple, or whatever fancy word you want to put in here to describe you and your call to be a part of what God is up to in the world).
It takes:
• Having an encounter with Jesus during which he does something to you: heals you, or forgives you, or challenges you, or questions you, or calls you, or sends you or whatever and
• Doing or saying something to somebody else about it.
Yep. It’s as simple as that.
Jesus, thank you for showing me the way to share the good news with the world.
Today we remember Mary, mother of our Lord. This message was adapted from “Act Boldly for Mission” by Kelly Fryer that appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of Lutheran Woman Today (now Gather) magazine