SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/18/2016 9:50 PM
My Worship Time Focus: Faith’s Object
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Colossians 1:3-4a
Message of the verses: “3 We give thanks to God, the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in
Christ Jesus”
Now we have
been looking at the main point of “The Gospel Truth is Received by Faith” for
three days now and we have one more sub-point from this main point entitled “Faith’s
Object.”
Now we
mentioned in one of these SD’s in this section about faith in driving your care
on a road that you have never driven on before, trusting that the road will not
lead you to fall off of it into a pit of something like that and so the faith
that you have is in those who built and designed the road, but when we talk
about Biblical faith we also have to have an object that we are trusting in and
that is what we will be looking at this evening.
I am sure
that you have figured out that the object of our saving faith has to be Jesus
Christ. MacArthur writes “The
relationship of faith to Jesus Christ is expressed in the New Testament by
various Greek prepositions. Acts 16:31 (‘They
said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your
household."’) uses the word eis,
which suggests resting on a foundation.
In Acts 20:21, etis is used,
with the meaning of ‘to find a dwelling place in,’ ‘to go into,’ ‘to abide in,’
or ‘to find a home.’ Here ‘in’
translates en and has the connotation
of coming to a place of security and anchor.
With Christ as its object, or faith is as secure as a house on a solid
foundation, or a boat safely at anchor.”
As stated in our last SD these things may be elementary but it is good
to look back at them to reinforce our trust in what the Bible has to say about
our salvation, and the security of it.
John MacArthur
in his sermon on this subject and also in his commentary retells a story that Charles
H. Spurgeon told about two men that were in a boat which was caught in some
very dangerous rapids that were heading for a waterfalls. There were some men
on shore who saw their peril and threw some ropes to the men. One man decided to grab onto the rope, the
other decided to grab onto a large floating log that was going down the
river. The man who had the rope was
pulled to shore safely, the man on the log went over the falls and was never
seen again. The man with the rope
represents saving faith, while the man on the log represents good works. MacArthur concludes “Good works apart from
true faith, represented in the story by the log, leads only to ruin.”
12/18/2016 10:15 PM
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