SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/17/2021 10:37 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “A Central Objective”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 10:5b-6
Message of
the verses “"Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not
enter any city of the Samaritans; 6 but rather go to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel.”
We will begin by looking at a second
reasons that Jesus sent the apostles to preach first to Jews because they were
barely up to the task of witnessing effectively to their own people—much less
of witnessing to Gentiles and Samaritans, whose cultures and ways they little
understood and greatly despised. Even
after the church began in Acts chapter two at Pentecost, Peter was not convinced the gospel was for Gentiles, it took
time all the way to the tenth chapter before Peter would go and talk to Gentiles,
and that took place only after a miracle from the Spirit of God. Peter still had some issues even after the
miracle which Paul speaks of in Galatians 2:12-13.
God would raise up Paul to be the apostles to the
Gentiles and this began in the 13th chapter of Acts.
Third, Jesus probably restricted the apostles’ first
ministry to the Jews for the practical reason that the Twelve needed a special
point of attract, a limited and familiar field in which they could concentrate
their fledgling efforts. An unfocused
ministry is a shallow ministry. The effective
worker for Jesus Christ puts his primary energy and effort into the task the
Lord has assigned him. He is concerned
for all of the Lord’s work, but he does not try to do it all himself.
As we look at our Lord’s ministry while on earth we find
it was limited. He did not travel
outside Palestine, and His ministry to Gentiles and Samaritans was incidental
when compared to His ministry to the Jews.
He did not have preaching missions in Gentile territory, and He
ministered to Samaritans only as He passed through their land while traveling
between the Jewish regions of Judea and Galilee. All of His public teaching and preaching and
the vast majority of His miraculous works were done among the Jews. To the Canaanite woman from the district of
Tyre and Sidon, Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel” (Matt 15:24). As already pointed
out, His personal ministry to others besides Jews and His commands to take the
gospel into all the world show that “only to…Israel” referred to the primary
objective of His work at that time. The
gospel was not generally taken to non-Jews until it was first fully presented
to God’s chosen people (cf. Rom. 1:16).
9/17/2021 10:59 PM
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