Posts in Jews
Story 33: The Messiah's Preaching in Galilee Begins: Will the People Hear His Call?

As the Lord travelled to Galilee to begin His ministry there, He stopped for several days in Samaria. The people there had responded to His message of freedom and transformation with great faithfulness. Then the Lord journeyed to Cana.

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Story 34: Options for Response: Throw Truth off a Cliff (or lose your soul trying...)

As Jesus made His way through Galilee to tell the people of the region the Good News of the Kingdom of God, He traveled to His home town of Nazareth. They had waited for so many years through history for the Kingdom of God to come.

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Story 36: Signs of the End of Suffering: The One with Healing in His Hands

In the early days of Christ’s ministry, He spent His days preaching and teaching in the northern region of the nation of Israel around the Sea of Galilee. One day while Jesus was in Capernaum, He went for a walk along the edge of the water.

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Story 38: The Healing Power of Jesus

As Jesus and His disciples were traveling to the cities and towns around Galilee, the Lord continued to do His work of teaching and miraculous healing. Crowds came from all over to follow this wildly popular young preacher.

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Story 39: Forgiveness

The times that Christ lived in were very different times from our own. There were no news cameras or newspapers. It wasn’t possible to take a picture with a cell phone and post it on the internet.

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Story 40: Tell Me Who the Real Sinners Are

Jesus was out once again walking along the shore of the sea. What a beautiful view with the yellow, rolling hills that molded themselves around the blue, shimmering waters of Galilee. It was probably some time in the fall, but the nation of Israel is in a land where the weather is mild, even in the middle of winter.

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Story 42: The Man at the Pool

Another feast of the Jews had come, and so Jesus travelled down to Jerusalem to worship His Father at the Temple. Jerusalem was surrounded by high, protective walls that had been built hundreds of years before.

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Story 43: The Right Side of Belief Part 1: Hearing what He really said

The book of John was the last of the three Gospels to be written. At the end of his book, John tells the reason he wrote his Gospel. It was so that, “…you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name’”

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Story 44: The Right Side of Belief Part 2: Hearing what He really said

Listening can be a dangerous thing.Often, we can have so many thoughts in our head…so many assumptions about ourselves and others and the way the world works…that even when we do listen, we only hear what makes it through the grid of our own mental noise.

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Story 45: Hearts Grow Harder Still

After His great confrontation with the religious leaders in Jerusalem (see Story 44), Jesus made the journey with His disciples back home to Galilee.One day, Jesus and His disciples were going for a walk through the grain fields of the countryside.

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Story 46: A Day in the Life: The Crowds Come

One of the ways a writer expresses what is important is by using a lot of repetition. You can tell what is important to them by the subjects that they bring up the most often and by what themes get the most volume in their writings.

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Story 47: The Choosing of the Twelve

Jesus was doing massive amounts of healing and preaching to the multitudes. The Jews from Galilee and Judea that came to Him early on in His ministry were being joined by Gentiles from cities hundreds of miles away.

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Story 48: The Sermon on the Mount: AKA "Marching Orders"

There are few sections of the Bible that are read and celebrated as much as the Sermon on the Mount. It is found in chapters five through seven in the book of Matthew. It contains some of the most beautiful ideals ever written down by a human hand.

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Story 51: On Meekness, Mercy, and the Hunger

Crowds upon crowds of people had come from all over the nation of Israel and the surrounding countries to see Jesus, the popular young preacher who performed amazing miracles and taught about God in a radical new way.

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Story 52: On Purity and Grace

As Jesus taught about those who would be blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven, the next thing he said was, “‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’” What does it mean to see God? And for that matter, what does it mean to be pure in heart?

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Story 58: The Intoxicating Beauty of Romantic Love and It's Dangers in a Fallen World

Jesus was teaching the Sermon on the Mount. He explained what it means to be a member of God’s Kingdom. The key is found in qualities of the heart such as purity, mercy, and meekness. These rich inner qualities will show outwardly in the way Christ’s followers respond to life.

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Story 60: The Route to Revolution: Through the Heart of Every Man

The next Kingdom ideal that the Lord explained to for His disciples in the Sermon on the Mount was about taking oaths.

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Story 61: Social Justice in the Kingdom of God

The next thing Jesus tackled in His Sermon on the Mount was a law that Moses gave in the book of Deuteronomy. It said: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” I've know some people to find this repulsive and brutal, but my guess is that they hadn't thought it through very deeply.

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Story 62: Who Do You Love? Part I

As Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount, He proclaimed six different ways that the Jewish leaders of His time had distorted and misused the high and holy Law of the Old Testament. In His protection against the rages of evil in this world, God gave commands against murder, adultery, and divorce so that sin would be restrained.

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Story 74: The Outsider Enters In

Matthew wrote the Sermon on the Mount to show us all the things Jesus taught as He went about the countryside in Galilee. It gives us the big picture of what He said about life in the Kingdom of Heaven. Many of those ideas are also told in the book of Luke, but they are scattered throughout his book as Luke showed how Jesus was teaching those things along the way.

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