SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/7/2021 9:29 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Andrew”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 2:10b
Message of the
verses: “and
Andrew his brother; and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother;”
In
today’s SD we begin to look at Andrew, who is Simon Peter’s brother, and
suppose that is how people will remember Andrew being the brother of the leader
of all the apostles. Andrew’s name means
“manly.” Andrew, like his brother came
from Bethsaida as seen in John 1:44, and was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. Let us look at John 1:35-37 to show that
Andrew was a godly man even before meeting Jesus. “35 Again the next day John was standing with
two of his disciples, 36 and he looked at Jesus as He walked, and said,
"Behold, the Lamb of God!"37 The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed
Jesus.” What was the first thing
that Andrew did after his encounter with Jesus?
Well he did like many new believers do and that is to go and find a
friend, or in this case his brother to tell him about Jesus. I have to admit that this is what I did after
I first became a believer, but unfortunately the results were much different
than that of Andrew and Peter. According
to Mark 1:29 Peter and Andrew lived together.
Now
after Andrew’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, however, Andrew had returned
to his fishing, however a while later, as Jesus was “walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon who
was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they
were fishermen. And He said to them, ‘follow
Me, and I will make you fishers of men’” (Matthew 4:18-19). This is the time when Jesus actually called
the two men into discipleship training, something that we have been looking at
for a fairly long time now. It was at
this time that Andrew, Peter, James and John became Jesus’ most intimate
friends. MacArthur adds “But though he
was greatly respected by his fellow disciples and is always spoken of favorably
in the few accounts in which he is mentioned, Andrew was apparently never quite
as close to the Lord as the other three and is usually referred to as Peter’s
brother.”
Here
is a record of the times and places where Andrew is mentioned. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and
Luke) we only find his name mentioned in the names of the disciples. He is only mentioned in three accounts in
John’s gospel and that is where most of the information about him is found, so that
is where we can get to know Andrew better.
The
first thing we see as we have already looked at from John’s gospel is that Andrew
was a disciple of John the Baptist as seen in John 1:37-42. It is good to mention again that as soon as
Andrew meets Jesus that he wanted to tell others about him, and so he told his
brother Peter.
Second,
and this will be where we will stop today, John tells us of Andrew’s
involvement in Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand on the far side of the Sea
of Galilee. We see in that passage that
Philip expressed bewilderment at the question that Jesus asked about where they
would get enough food to feed so many.
This is where we see Andrew again as he comes to Jesus to tell Him about
the lad who had brought his lunch with him, five barley loaves and two fish. We have to believe that Andrew was puzzled about
the question Jesus asked but at least he did something about it, and gave Jesus
something that He could work with. The
barley loaves were like a kind of biscuits or perhaps a large cracker. These were eaten with some kind of a pickled
fish as they was how they were preserved so that they could be eaten without
being spoiled. MacArthur concludes “Andrew’s
bringing the boy to Jesus suggests that he believed his Master could somehow
make more of this small amount of food.”
At the time of the feeding of the five thousand there were a number of
other things that happened making this perhaps one of the longest days of Jesus’
time in His ministry, up to this time. The
disciples had just returned from a missionary trip and Jesus wanted to take
them on a little R&R. Jesus had just
learned about the death of John the Baptist, and then instead of R&R a
large crowd appeared as they were heading to Jerusalem for one of the feast
days. I have wondered that after all of
the miracles that the disciples had just done on the missionary trip and also
remembering that earlier Jesus had turned water into wine why they were slow in
thinking that Jesus could do another miracle to feed this very large crowd. I suppose that I have to also look at the
times when my faith in the Lord is not what it should be to understand why they
missed this opportunity.
8/7/2021 10:03 AM
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