SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/4/2017
8:05 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Stephen’s
Character
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 6:8
Message of the
verse: “8 And Stephen, full of grace
and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people.”
When we look back at verse five-b we read “they chose
Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit,” and now in verse eight we
see Stephen was full of grace and power.
John MacArthur writes “full both there and in verse 8 translates pleres, which means ‘to be filled up.’” From this we know that Stephen was totally in
controlled by faith, the Holy Spirit, grace, and power. When we get to chapter seven and the sermon
that he gives to the Sanhedrin it will reveal the content of his faith, and it
will also show us that Stephen knew his Bible very well and by knowing his
Bible Stephen knew that God controlled history, and therefore was confident
that God was in control of his life too.
What Paul wrote in Romans 14:8 was surely true of Stephen “for if we
live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore
whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
John MacArthur adds “Stephen saw Jesus as the fulfillment of the
messianic prophecy (7:52) and believed He had risen and been exalted to the
right hand of the Father (7:55-56). His
confident trust in Jesus’ care for him allowed him to face death calmly
(7:59-60). Finally, he believed in the
Holy Spirit (7:51).”
I suppose as we look at Stephen and the fact that he was
full of faith, can we as believers in Jesus Christ be like him or are we like
the father of the demon-possessed man from Mark 9:24 who cried out “"I do
believe; help my unbelief."” Many
believers today trust God for their eternal destiny; however they find it difficult
to trust Him with the concerns of their everyday life. Stephen on the other hand trusted God fully
and so he concentrated on doing what the Lord wanted him to do. The consequences he ran into he left in the
hands of God.
We next look at the fact that Stephen was full of the
Holy Spirit, something that all believers have the privilege of as we see in
Ephesians 5:18 “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be
filled with the Spirit.” Now what does
being filled with the Holy Spirit mean? “It
means to obey fully what His will is which is true of Stephen. He believed God and therefore he submitted to
the leading of the empowering, purifying Holy Spirit. MacArthur writes that these “two realities
epitomize the strength of the Christian life.
In the words of the beloved hymn:
‘Trust and obey,
For there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus,
But to trust and obey.’”
In our next SD we will look at a third spiritual reality
that flows from trust and obedience and that characterized Stephen had
grace.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: I have to go back
and look at some things that I wrote earlier in this SD which spoke of Stephen
trusting God, not only for eternal life, but for what happens in his everyday
walk with the Lord and this is something that I don’t do as well as I should,
and so that means I need to do it more and do it better.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the Lord for the events that will go on
today in my life that what I do will bring glory to the Lord.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Barnabas” (Acts 15:37).
Today’s Bible
question: “Which book shed light upon
the conditions in which the Jews lived in the Persian Empire?”
Answer in our next SD.
11/4/2017 8:45 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment