SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/14/2016 9:42 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Comfort Comes from trusting Christ’s Person”
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 14:7-11
Message of the verses: “7 “If you had known Me, you would have known
My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him." 8 Philip said
to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." 9 Jesus said
to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know
Me, Philip? He who has
seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ’Show us the Father’? 10 “Do
you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words
that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding
in Me does His works. 11 “Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is
in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves.”
We looked
at Philips statement in our last SD and not today we want to look at what Jesus
replies to him, and to the rest of His disciples. Jesus begins by asking Philip and the rest of
the disciples a question about whether or not they had been listening to His
teaching since they had been with Him, and this was a rebuke that came from the
lips of Jesus to all of them, not just Philip, for none of them understood this
truth. We mentioned in our last SD about
the plural form of the word you indicating that Jesus was speaking to all of
His disciples and the same is seen in this question Jesus asks. Now Jesus goes on to reiterate the truth of
who He is and I have to say that anyone who has a problem in believing that
Jesus is God incarnate must have missed reading this statement that He tells
His disciples “He who has seen Me has seen the Father, how can you say show us
the Father.”
I can
understand how an unbeliever does not understand this foundational truth of who
Jesus really is, but for those who have walked with Jesus for any length of
time, like His disciples had, and been taught this truth is hard for me to
understand how it can be missed. When I
became a believer I was not taught this truth for when a person who leads you
to the Lord says to you a few years later that he is not into that anymore you
have to realize that you were not going to be taught all the truth about who
Jesus really is. If not for the grace of
God and a desire that He put into me through His Holy Spirit I could have gone
in many wrong directions, but God prompted me to keep studying which is a joy
to my heart to do so and so it did not take too long being a believer that God
had shown me through His Word this basic truth of the deity of Jesus Christ, as
He is more than Man, He is the God/Man.
Knowing that my Savior is Man gives me comfort for He has been through
what I go through and therefore knows how to comfort me as I go through
different problems in my life, so if He was just God and not man He would not
totally understand the problems His children go through and therefore could not
be a sympathetic High Priest which the author of Hebrews teaches us.
We not move
on to look at verse ten where Jesus asks another question “Do you not believe
that I am in the Father?” and then in verse eleven He states “Believe Me that I
am in the Father and the Father is in Me.”
Jesus is giving a command in verse eleven as this is not optional for
them, or us to believe. John MacArthur
writes that this “suggests the cure for the disciples’ confusion and
turmoil. Faith is not only the means of
appropriating salvation…it is also the very essence of sustaining the Christian
life (Acts 6:5; 11:24; 2 Cor. 5:7; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 6:16; 1 Thess. 5:8; 1 Tim.
4:12; 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22; Heb. 13:7).”
He goes on
to write “But the Christian faith is neither a blind, irrational, ‘leap in the
dark’ nor a vague, mystical faith in faith itself. It rests on the solid ground of overwhelming
evidence. Jesus shored up the disciples’
sagging faith by reminding them first of His ‘words,’ which He did not speak on
His own initiative, but through the abiding power of the Father. John the Baptist testified or Christ, ‘For He
whom God has sent speaks the words of God’ (John 3:34). Jesus declared in John 7:16, ‘My teaching is
not Mine, but His who sent Me.’ He
added, ‘For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who
sent me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak.’” There are times in the Gospels that when
people heard Jesus speak, like at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount
that they were utterly amazed at what He said and then said that “never has a
man spoke like this Man.”
Faith was
not only based on the Words that Jesus spoke, but on the works that He did, the
miracles that He performed. ““Believe Me
that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of
the works themselves.” As we have been
studying the gospel of John for almost a year we have learned that John calls
the miracles that he writes about that Jesus did as signs: “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in
Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.” (John 2:11)
John mentions seven of these miracles and the reason that he mentions
them is given in the key verses that we have been looking at, the reason for
the gospel of John: “30 Therefore many
other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are
not written in this book; 31 but
these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I suppose that there are times when reading
God’s Word that I am hard on some of the characters that we find in His Word,
like His disciples that we read about in this section which Jesus seemed to be
hard on, and yet I know that there are times when I read over and over things
from His Word and miss the truth of it until one day the Spirit of God opens my
eyes to see that truth that I have missed, and I have to believe that there is
a reason I have missed it up until that time, and a reason what He aluminates
it at a certain time in my life.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Trust the Lord to teach me
the truths of Scripture when I am ready to understand them.
Memory verse for this week (again) (Romans 6:16) “16 Do you
not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience,
you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either sin resulting in death, or of
obedience resulting in righteousness.”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Joseph” (Matthew 2:13-14).
Today’s Bible question:
“According to Luke, what is death?”
Answer in our next SD.
11/14/2016 10:32 AM
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