Monday, February 11, 2019

PT-1 "Loves Abundance" (Eph. 3:17b-19a)


SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/11/2019 8:33 AM



My Worship Time                                                                       Focus:  PT-1 “Loves Abundance”



Bible Reading & Meditation                                           Reference:  Ephesians 3:17b-19a



            Message of the verses:  and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge,”



            We have been studying about being made strong inwardly by God’s Spirit and this will lead to Christ being at home in our hearts, which will then lead to love that is incomprehensible.  MacArthur writes “The result of our yielding to the Spirit’s power and submitting to Christ’s lordship in our hearts is ‘love.’  When Christ settles down in our lives He begins to display His own love in us and through us.  When He freely indwells our hearts, we become rooted and ‘grounded in love,’ that is, settled on a strong foundation of love.”



            In John’s gospel chapter 13 and verse 34 we read “A new commandment I give you that you love one another, even as I have loved you.”  Peter writes “Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart (1 Pet. 1:22).  We realize, especially from our study in Ephesians, that it is the great desire of God that His children sincerely and fully love each other, in the same way that He loves us, and that is unconditional.  When we look at the fruit of the Spirit found in Galatians 5:22-23 we find that love is listed first, and then the rest of the fruit is then listed.  Think of the fruit of the Spirit as an orange and when one thinks of an orange they perhaps think of all the different aspects as a part of the orange, like the outer skin, and then the other parts under that like the white part and then the different slices that are found under the skin.  However all is actually an orange, and so when we look at the fruit of the Spirit it is only one fruit and not the fruits of the spirit with love at the beginning, and then we find joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control and they are essentially subcategories of love.



            I have a little book written by David Jeremiah entitled “Love in Action,” and what my plans are is to quote different sections of this book once we run out of quotes and the verses that go along with the quotes.  At the beginning of this little book we see a quote from C. Neil Strait which reads “Love is the one ingredient of which our world never tires and of which there is never an abundance.  The world will never outgrow its need for love.”



            I will close this rather short SD with a quote from this little book:  Agape is love that comes from a God who is love.  It is love lavished upon others without a thought of whether they are worthy to receive it.  It is this kind of love that is to characterize the Christian.  This is totally selfless love that comes from God.  Agape is te power that moves us to respond to someone’s needs with no expectation of reward.  At least fifty-five times in the New Testament we are commanded to love.  It is one of Scripture’s most repeated, inescapable directives for the believer.  It touches us in all of our relationships and affects us in each of the many roles we play as parents, spouses, children, friends, and fellow believers.  It even defines the way we are to respond to our enemies.” 



            I think this quote goes well with what we are now studying from Ephesians.



Quote for Today:  “If thou thinkest twice, before thou speakest once, thou wilt speak twice the better for it.”  (William Penn)



Scripture verse that goes along with this quote in our next SD.



2/11/2019 8:59 AM



           

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