SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/10/2016
10:51 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 Trust God’s Word (The Victory)
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Habakkuk
2:4-5
Message of
the verses: “4 “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within
him; But the righteous will live by his
faith. 5 "Furthermore, wine
betrays the haughty man, So that he does not stay at home. He enlarges his
appetite like Sheol, And he is like death, never satisfied. He also gathers to
himself all nations And collects to himself all peoples.”
Before we get started in looking at our focus which
on the “victory” I want to just take another look at verse four and how it is
constructed. We see two different kinds
of people in this verse, the proud one and Habakkuk says that the proud one’s
soul is not right within him, and we have mentioned the great problem that there
is in the world because of pride. The
other type of person in this verse is described as the righteous and the
righteous one deals rightly with any pride he has and his life is controlled by
his faith, and faith has to have an object, and that object is the Lord.
We will look at the righteous one who not only is
known by his faith, but faith gives him victory. Ephesians 2:8-9 are very familiar verses and
in them Paul tells us how we have been saved and it is by faith through grace,
and this is how we are to walk for Colossians 2:6 tells us Therefore as you have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,” and so we received Christ by
faith and that is how we are to walk as we go back to our verse in Habakkuk
(2:4). Now let us look at 1 John 5:4 “For
whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world-our
faith.” Notice the highlighted
part of this verse. Faith is so very important in our walk with the Lord, faith
that it was Christ who saved us and faith that the Lord will keep us saved, and
faith that we will obey what the Lord wants us to do as we walk with Him. Dr. Wiersbe writes “Faith is a lifestyle that
is just the opposite of being ‘puffed up’ and depending on your own
resources. Habakkuk knew the difficult
times were coming to the people of Judah, and their only resource was to trust
God’s Word and rest in His will.”
“By faith” is found twenty times in the book of
Hebrews, and when we look at chapter eleven we see in many of those times as
this chapter is called “the faith chapter.”
Dr. Wiersbe writes “To live by faith means to believe God’s Word and
obey it no matter how we feel, what we see, or what the consequences may be.” As one takes a look at chapter eleven of
Hebrew they will see that this is illustrated as the writer goes through
different OT characters showing how they trusted the Word of the Lord in their
lives, and even though many of the OT saints were killed for their faith they
still obeyed God. Now all of the OT
saints were killed for their faith, and Hebrews 11 writes also of them, people
like Abraham, Moses, Able, and Noah. It
is best to read this chapter to see it for yourself.
Dr. Wiersbe concludes by writing “It has well been
said that faith is not believing in spite of evidence; it’s obeying in spite of
consequence, resting on God’s faithfulness.”
2/10/2016 11:12 PM
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