SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/9/2017
12:28 PM
My Worship Time Focus: Intro to
John 16:1-11
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: John 16:1-11
Message of the
verses: “1 "These things I have
spoken to you so that you may be kept from stumbling. 2 “They will make you
outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you
to think that he is offering service to God. 3 “These things they will do
because they have not known the Father or Me. 4 “But these things I have spoken
to you, so that when their hour comes, you may remember that I told you of
them. These things I did not say to you at the beginning, because I was with
you. 5 “But now I am going to Him who sent Me; and none of you asks Me, ’Where
are You going?’ 6 “But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has
filled your heart. 7 "But I tell
you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away,
the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. 8 "And He, when He comes, will convict the
world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment; 9 concerning sin, because they do not believe
in Me; 10 and concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you no
longer see Me; 11 and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has
been judged.”
As I listened to a sermon on verses 1-7 this morning the
subject of love and hate came up and I would like to take a moment to explain
what I heard. We remember that in the 13th
chapter of John’s gospel that Jesus and His disciples were eating the “Last
Supper” and then after that Judas left because he went to betray Jesus. After that Jesus began to tell the remaining
disciples many promises that were going to be given to them and then all of a
sudden in chapter fifteen and verse eighteen we read “"If the world hates
you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.” The words of Jesus to His disciples go from
love to hate, hate that the world has for Him and also will have for all true
believers and we continue to look at this in chapter sixteen. Now the reason that Jesus first gave the
promises to His disciples and to us is because of the hatred that the world
will have for true believers, and all you have to do is see what the Muslims
are doing to people around the world in the name of their god to understand that
this hatred is real, so the point is to remember the promises that Jesus is
giving to His flowers.
Now with that said I want to say that this introduction
will probably take more than one SD to complete, but that is no problem as we
want to understand what we will be looking at as we look at the first eleven
verses in John 16.
As mentioned the first disciples of Jesus who became His
apostles were not going to be treated well, and this first wave of persecution
came from the Jews. John MacArthur
writes “A brief survey of ancient Christian tradition reveals that Peter,
Andrew, and James the son of Alphaeus were all crucified; Bartholomew was
whipped to death and then crucified; James the son of Zebedee was beheaded, as
was Paul; Thomas was stabbed with spears; Mark was dragged to death through the
streets of Alexandria; and James the half brother of Jesus was stoned by order
of the Sanhedrin. Philip was also stoned
to death. Others, including Matthew,
Simon the Zealot, Thaddeus, Timothy, and Stephen, were all killed for their
unwavering commitment to the Lord. As
Clement of Rome, a contemporary of the apostles who died around A. D. 100
observed, ‘Through envy and jealousy, the greatest and most righteous pillars
[of the church] have been persecuted and put to death’ (First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, 5).”
The next wave of persecution came through the Romans,
under the Roman emperors of the first three centuries as thousands of believers
were killed for their faith in Jesus Christ.
When we were studying the book of Revelation, the first part of it where
Jesus writes to the churches we meet a man named Polycarp who was and bishop of
Smyrna and I wrote a few pages about how he was killed for the cause of
Christ. If you want to read what was
written about Polycarp go back to January 24, 2015 and you can look at what was
a very interesting quote about Polycarp.
During the Protestant Reformation the persecution of the
true church again reached a fever pitch once again. These were the days when the Roman Catholic
Church put to death more than fifty million ‘heretics’ between A. D. 606 which
was the birth of the papacy and the mid 1800’s
as seen in a book by John Dowling (History
of Romanism) which was actually written in 1845. It was also during this time that Martian
Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door at the Castle Church in Wittenberg
Germany which took place 500 years ago this coming October 31, 1517.
We will look at more of the history of persecution to
true believers in our next SD as this was all prophesized by Jesus in our
verses we are looking at from John chapter 16.
Answer from yesterday’s
Bible question: “Joppa” (Acts. 9:36).
Today’s Bible
question: “What king of Babylon
conquere3d Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah?”
Answer in our next SD.
1/9/2017 1:01 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment