SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/17/2017
10:41 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 Intro to Colossians 3:5-9a
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
3:5-9a
Message of the
verses: “5 Therefore consider the
members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil
desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. 6 For it is because of these
things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, 7 and in
them you also once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you also, put them all aside:
anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. 9 Do not lie
to one another,”
We begin this SD with a quote from John MacArthur who
wrote this right after the quote we read from Puritan Richard Baxter we used in
our last SD.
“To be a Christian is to
die to self, to ambition, to ego, and to pride.
It is to bow in humble submission to Christ’s lordship. It is to obey the Lord’s command expressed in
Luke 9:23: ‘If anyone whishes to come
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow
Me. It is to follow the example of Paul
himself, who told the Corinthians, ‘I die daily’ (1 Cor. 15:31).”
When we look at verse five and the words “consider…as
dead” we find a term in the Greek, nekroo
which means to kill or to put to death, and so this is a radical message from
Paul here stating we are to make a decisive resolution to put to death, that is
bringing the flesh under subjection to the Spirit-filled new disposition.
Paul, like Jesus in Matthew 5:29-30 and also 18:8 is not
talking physically to kill or cut off certain parts of the body as in the case
of our Lord’s statement, but he is speaking as Christ was in a spiritual nature
as Paul wrote about in Romans 8:13 “for if you are living according to the
flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of
the body, you will live.”
Paul makes it clear in Romans 7:14-25 that the battle
with sin is common to every believer as even Paul had trouble with it. Things like doing things I don’t want to do,
and not doing things I want to do is a part of this section in Romans and it is
all about the believers struggle with sin.
Once a person becomes a believer his desire is to live a godly life
following the Lord, while the flesh still desires to do what it had always done
when the person was not a believer and that is why we are to, by the help of
the Holy Spirit put to death the deeds of the flesh.
We hope to finish this introduction in our next
SD.
4/17/2017 11:00 PM
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