Jesus begins his Ministry 1

By Barry Fike

Text:  Matt. 4:12-17; Mk. 1:14, 15; Luke 4:14, 15

              Hearing the report that John has been arrested, Jesus goes into the area of Galilee.  Leaving Nazareth he goes and stays at Capernaum which will become his home base for the rest of his three year ministry.  All of this fulfilled prophecy found in Isaiah 9:1, 2.   From that time on, according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus began to preach saying, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  What does that mean? 

              Interestingly enough, John the Baptist was preaching, in Matthew 3, that the kingdom of heaven had arrived.   For John (go back to the blog on John the Baptist 3), the one who announces the breaker or ha poretz, has come to break down the wall, and those who struggle to get into the kingdom of heaven are working hard to get to it.  The concept of repentance is the same between both John and Jesus.  So is the concept of the Kingdom of heaven; yet, many today translate this to mean the church when nothing is further from the truth.  It certainly can refer to the church, but in Jesus day and time what was he referring to? 

               It all begins with this question: Who and what is kingdom?  Where is kingdom?  The kingdom of heaven is in you.  Is that right?  Is that what the word says?  Who is the kingdom?  You are.  What is the kingdom?  It’s what you are.  The kingdom of heaven is the rule and reign of God that each one of us decide will rule and reign or not. Who else is in you?  The Bible says, Christ in you, the hope of glory.  Who else is in you?  The Bible says, do you now know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit that is in you?  But you’re not your own, you were bought with a price.  Therefore, glorify God in your body.  It’s no coincidence that all of these terms are used and they all refer to the individual over whom God is ruling. 

               Christ in you the hope of glory?  What does that mean?  I can understand that only when I understand who he is.  God.  So if Christ is in me then who is in me?  God.  Eph. 3:16, “May he grant you out of the rich treasury of his glory to be strengthened and reinforced with mighty power in the inner man by the Holy Spirit himself indwelling your innermost being and personality.  May Christ through faith actually dwell, settle down and abide and make his permanent home in your heart.  May you be rooted deeply in love and found securely in love that you may have the power and be strong to apprehend and grasp with all of the saints what is the breath and the length and the depth of it. May you really come to know practically through experience for yourself the love of Christ which far surpasses mere knowledge.  That you may be filled through all your being unto all the fullness of God.  That is, may you have the richest measure of the divine presence and become a body holy filled and flooded with God himself.”  

               That’s the capacity that the man of God has.  With Christ in you becoming a body holy filled and flooded with God himself.  You say, that’s wonderful, but unless you know who God is you haven’t got the faintest idea as to the real implication of that.  We know who Jesus Christ is, he’s God.  But who, and what is God?  Who is it that’s in me? God.  I have the capacity to be a body holy, filled and flooded with God.  But who’s God.  What is God?  If I ask you to tell me in one word the word that best describes the essence of God.  That is, what he is, we’re not talking about a characteristic of deity but essence.  Love is not the answer.  Spirit is not the answer.  The essence of deity what is it?  Power.  What is another word for power in English?…energy.  God is energy, pure unadulterated energy.  That’s the reason that we call him omnipotent.  It’s not that energy is God, but God is energy, power.  You want to want to know what kind of energy?  What kind of power?  The Bible says that my faith we understand that the totality of the universe as we now see it was created ex nihilo out of nothing simply by the word that went forth out of his mouth.  Let there be light and there was light.  Pure unadulterated energy.  I made a study a little while ago on the subject of energy.  There are two different kinds of energy.  One kind is called potential.  If you hunt with a bow you understand that you can have a compound bow with a 55 pound draw, and when you put an arrow in it and you pull back to draw and it breaks over you’ve got 55 pounds of stored energy.  That arrow isn’t going to go anywhere or do anything, and not going to hurt anything, until I let it go, but when I let it go and that bow flips that arrow out, and it strikes the target heat is generated, energy is created and the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy and kinetic energy is both creative and restorative and that’s the difference between a miracle and healing.  Energy is both creative and restorative.  It will create and it will restore.  That’s the difference between miracle (creative) and a healing (restorative).  Who is it that in us?  Christ in us the hope of glory.  Who is Christ?  God.  We have the capacity to become a body wholly filled and flooded with God himself, and he has given us his holy spirit, his power to empower us to do the work to which kingdom was commissioned.  His Holy Spirit is within us which means that all of the manifestations of the spirit should be flowing in us and through us to minister life and health to the body.

               That was the prayer that Jesus had for the lost sheep of Israel, and the way that his ministry began was with the proclamation, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand