Luke 6:13-16 And when it was day, he called to him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles;… Two pairs of brothers. Significant and suggestive that twice in the small number of the twelve it should have happened that the natural tie of brotherhood was emphasized by a common call to the new life, and a common work in the same service. The world is covered with a network of brotherhoods. This network of brotherhoods, like every evident fact of life, sets us to ask three questions — 1. What is its immediate cause? The cause of this interwoven network, this reticulation of life with life, is the whole system of nature by which each human being takes its start from another human being, and is kept, for a time at least, in associations of company and dependence with the being from whom it sprang, and with the other beings who have the same source with it. 2. What is the direct result of such relationships? They are full of mutual helpfulness and pleasure. 3. What is the final reason of this relationship? Here the answer is not so entirely clear and certain. But as we watch and think it seems to me that we are at least led to wonder whether one final cause or purpose of this interlacing of life with life, by natural and indissoluble kinships, may not be just this, the providing, as it were, of open communications, of a system of shafts or channels piercing this human mass in every direction, crossing and recrossing one another, through which those higher influences, which ought to reach every corner and every individual of the great structural humanity, may be freely carried everywhere, and no most remote or insignificant atom of the mass be totally and necessarily untouched. And if we look at Christ's larger method, at the way in which His work went on after it had gone beyond that earliest stage among his personal kindred, the same thing still appears. His truth ran abroad in the channels which were made by the natural relations of mankind. (Phillips Brooks, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles; |
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