Christ Lutheran Church

PASTOR’S BLOG:

Pastor Kuenzel

When the saints go marching in…

Saints are for watching, not worshiping.  We can admire their faith and actions of love, but we don’t worship them because they are also sinners, like us.  We emulate them, but we never pray to them because that is pointless- there is only one mediator between God and man, and that is Christ Jesus. This series is about some of the “saints” around Jesus when He was on the earth. One by one, let’s look at what we know about these legendary figures from Scripture (absolutely reliable) and church traditions (probably true, but perhaps embellished).

Apostle blog 2:

James, sometimes called the greater to differentiate him from 2 other disciples named James in the early church, was the fisherman brother of John who was with Jesus from the beginning. We run into this James again and again in the Gospels with our Lord, usually at His side. We might think he was being groomed by Jesus for leadership in the early Church after Pentecost. If so, it was a short term in office; he was the first apostle reported to be killed- beheaded by order of King Herod Agrippa I in Jerusalem in 44 AD. That was just 15 years after Jesus’ death, not a long missionary life at all.

During those years, he would have surely been overshadowed by Peter and Paul;  yet tradition says he  made it all the way to Spain where he evangelized extensively, likely being the first to preach the Gospel in those lands.  Such a journey, often on foot, would have taken years  for the travel in those days, considered to be the “other end of the earth” from Jerusalem.

James teaches us that it’s important to prepare well; but then it is just as important to make good use of the time we have, because we never know how long that will be. He shows us that great effort is sometimes required to fulfill our mission for Christ, and that we need to be ready to make that effort. That reminds us of one other thing; that we must always be preparing someone to take over when we are gone- because that day always comes.