The reader of the Gospels will himself be the judge of what he reads. All he is asked to keep is an open mind, and not to pre-judge before reading them carefully. As he reads, he can ask himself whether these words are the words of simple, straight-forward men describing events that they witnessed.

 “COME AND SEE”

John, who is the writer of one of the Gospel accounts, describes his first meeting with Christ. One day, as he was walking along with a friend, someone pointed out Christ to them.

Then (in John’s own words), “They followed Jesus. Turning and seeing them following Him, Jesus asked, What do you want? Master, they said, Where do you live? He said to them, come and see. So they went and saw where He lived, and they stayed with Him all the rest of the day, from about the tenth hour onwards” (John 1, 37-39).

We can take as our motto in these pages those simple words of Jesus, which are really an invitation to us to : “come and see.” We shall just take some incidents and some words of Jesus Himself from the pages of the Gospels. We shall come and see. We shall quietly follow His invitation.

We can see only very few events here. But if you have a Bible or a copy of the Gospels, you can read for yourself all the events recorded. Many people find rich and satisfying food for the daily meditation in taking a page or a small section of the Gospels and reading quietly. You can read quietly with a prayerful question in your mind : Is there a message for me and my life in these lines? Is God speaking to me in these words?

FORGETTING SELF

Our pilgrimage through these pages up to this point has shown that all man’s troubles, all evil come from his worship of self.

The younger son followed the desire of his own self, and brought ruin on himself. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, refused to recognize that everything they had-even their own selves-come from God. They followed self and they brought ruin on themselves and on their children.

I can go further and stop for a moment to reflect on some evil deed that has been done to me by someone else. I see at once that the one who wronged me has thought only of his own self.

If I have the courage to look into my own heart and examine some evil deed that I have done in my own life, here, too, it is clear that it happened because I worshipped my own self, because I was selfish.

Evil and sin are worship of self to the contempt of God. Christ came to conquer sin, to deliver sinful man, to deliver you and me from the slavery of sin, from the chains of self and selfishness. And so we shall find unselfishness in His every act and word. We shall find His teaching us to forget self and so escape from the slavery of selfishness - which is what sin is.