SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/5/2017
10:47 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
Intro to Colossians 1:12-14
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
1:12-14
Message of the
verses: “12 giving thanks to the
Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in
Light. 13 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to
the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness
of sins.”
These verses constitute more of Paul’s prayer that he
prayed for the Colossian church. John
MacArthur entitles this third chapter in his commentary on Colossians “Paul
Prays for the Colossians—part 2: What
Makes Christians Most Thankful.”
Hopefully we will get the answer to this question as we look at this
section from Colossians.
I think that I mentioned in my Spiritual Diary for John
gospel a couple of days ago that as I begin a new program in the morning to
read through the Bible in 2017 I received a Bible edited by John MacArthur
which has the verses to read each day in order to finish the Bible in a year,
and it also has a devotional for each day of the year. A couple days ago the devotional was on
blessed and how we bless God and also how He blesses us. MacArthur writes in the devotional for Jan. 3
“When we bless God, it is with words of praise; when He blesses us, it is with
deeds of kindness.” He explains that the
word in the Greek for blessed is eulogeo
from where we get our English word eulogy, so when we bless God we do it with
words of praise and thanksgiving similar to when a person eulogizes someone who
has died saying something good about the person. I bring this up because as we look at Paul’s
prayer we can see that it is a model prayer for all believers, not just those
in the Colossian church. This model
prayer has similarities with Paul’s prayers in some of his other letters. One of the things that Paul always did or
mostly did was give thanks in them, something that I have decided that I need
to do a better job of. The model prayer
that I use is a bit different than those others use as the first thing that I
do when I pray is to ask the Lord to search my heart to see if there is any
unconfessed sin in it as I use Psalm 139:23-24, and then if the Holy Spirit
convicts me I use 1 John 1:9 to receive the forgiveness from God through Jesus
Christ. After that I praise the Lord for
His attributes, put on my spiritual armor and then continue on praying about
things that I want to pray about. The reason
that I ask for God to search my heart is because once I confess any sin then my
conscience is clear and I can then move onto the rest of my prayer.
It is important for us to give thanks to the Lord for the
deeds of kindness that He bestows on us every day. Unfortunately this is not the case for many
believers as we only want to receive and not thank the Lord for what He has
done for us, which for believers is sending His Son to die in our place. “The leech has two daughters,
"Give," "Give." There are three things that will not be
satisfied, Four that will not say, "Enough’ (Proverbs 30:15).” We need to
make sure that are prayer life is not like the two leech sisters, give and
give. We will continue to look at this
introduction in our next SD.
1/5/2017 11:09 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment