Saturday, December 15, 2018

PT-4 "Salvation is from Sin" from Eph. 2:1-3


SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/15/2018 1:26 PM



My Worship Time                                                                  Focus:  PT-4 “Salvation is from Sin”



Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Eph. 2:1-3



            Message of the verses:  1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, 2  in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. 3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”



            We have been looking at the subject of what I have named as “Total Depravity.”  We will continue to look at this subject as we begin our Spiritual Diary for today.



            I want to begin with a quote from our Lord found in Luke 6:33 “"If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.”  Next Luke 11:13 “"If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?’”  A person who is not a believer can do humanly good things.  However as our Lord points out in these two passages the person is still a sinner, he is still evil by nature, the nature he was born with.  He is still operating on a motive less than that of glorifying God.  Remember what the first thing that all believers are to do, and that is to glorify God.  When we do things in our lives to bring glory to ourselves we are not doing what we should be doing, for in everything we do we should have the motive of glorifying God.  I am not saying that is easy to do, as we all, even though we are believers still have the old flesh to get in our way.  There is a story in the beginning of the last chapter of the book of Acts when Paul was on a boat that was shipwrecked on the Island of Malta, and we read what Luke reported happened to them once they got to the island:  “the natives showed us extraordinary kindness.”  First of all when the word “natives” is used my online Greek/English states that this word means that anyone who did not speak the Greek language would be called a native.  At any rate these people were very kind to all of the ones who shipwrecked on their island.  They were not believers in Jesus Christ, and yet to the best of their human nature they did good to the shipwrecked people.  Even after doing good to those who came from the boat, the people still remained superstitious pagans as seen in verse six:  “But they were expecting that he was about to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But after they had waited a long time and had seen nothing unusual happen to him, they changed their minds and began to say that he was a god.”  MacArthur writes “A sinner’s doing good is good, but it cannot change his nature or his basic sphere of existence, and it cannot reconcile him to God.”



            When you ask the question to any unbeliever about why God would accept him in heaven you most likely will get an answer that has to do with the good things that they do and perhaps even that their good works have out-weighed their bad works.  That is not the point at all.  The correct answer is that Jesus Christ took my place on the cross and I have accepted His forgiveness and no God looks at me as being perfect because I am no “in Christ.”  That is how God views believers, as He sees them as He sees His Son, Holy and perfect.



            Let us look at John 16:8-9 “8 ‘And He,[the Holy Spirit] when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment; 9  concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me;’”  MacArthur adds “That is the sin of separation, the sin that both causes and reflects man’s alienation from God.  It is the sin of not accepting God as God and Christ as Savior, the sin of rejection.”  This is not a particular acts or even statements of rejection, however it is the sphere of rejection in which the unsaved person exists that separates him from God.  He does this because he is spiritually “dead in trespasses and sins,” as seen in verse 1 of Ephesians two.  I want to quote another verse from John’s gospel, and this time the one who is talking is John the Baptist who says that there are only two kinds of people on this earth:  “"He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.’”



            I will not close this SD with a short quote from John MacArthur as he talks more about verse one of chapter two:  “n the state of spiritual death, the only walking, or living, a person can do is ‘according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.’  Kosmos (‘world’) does not here represent simply the physical creation but the world order, the world’s system of values and way of doing things—the world’s ‘course.’  And as Paul makes clear, the ‘course of this world’ follows the leadership and design of Satan, ‘the prince of the power of the air.’”



            In our next SD will continue looking at this thought of the “world system.”



Answer to yesterday’s Bible question:  “The valley of the shadow of death.”



Today’s Bible question:  “Who sent disciples to Jesus to ask who He was?”



Answer in our next SD.



12/15/2018 2:05 PM

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