SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/30/2019
1:27 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “Equipping”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Eph. 4:12
Message of the verse: “12 for the
equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body
of Christ;”
I
mentioned in our last SD as we looked at the introduction to what John
MacArthur entitles “Building the Body of Christ” which covers Ephesians 4:12-16,
that we would be looking at three different main point and that there would be
different sub-points under these three main points. We begin today with the main point entitled “The
Progression of God’s Pattern,” and will be looking at the first comments on the
sub-point “Equipping.” MacArthur writes “In
the simplest possible terms Paul here sets forth God’s progressive plan for His
church: equipping to service to building
up.” Here you have the three sub-points
that we will be looking at under this first main point.
In
our last SD’s before looking directly at the explanation of the pastor-teacher
we looked at the fact that Christ was the One who gave gifts to the church, and
mentioned that the first gift that He gave was the apostles along with the
prophets who worked along with the apostles.
We also mentioned that once those apostles and prophets died that this
gift would not be replaced by anyone under that category of gifts. In other words there are no more apostles or
prophets alive today and have not been since the last one, the apostle John
died in the late 90’s AD. The apostles
were the ones that Jesus Christ taught as they walked with Him after He chose
them at the beginning of His ministry, and He chose them to actually build the
church. Really there is no need to
mention that Judas was not a believer and therefore had nothing to do with the
building of the church since he killed himself right after the crucifixion of
Christ. One of the duties of these
Apostles and prophets was to begin different church plants, and then once these
churches were established they went into the church to choose leaders called as
we looked at in our last SD’s Elders, Pastor-teachers, Bishops, and even
deacons to aid the pastor-teachers. This
is how the church was to continue to grow as the Apostles began the churches
with the helping of the Holy Spirit, and then chose spiritual leaders to take
over the work, and then they would do the same thing as like in the case of the
Antioch church, send out missionaries to continue to plant and grow churches so
that they could do the same.
Last
week at the church that I attend our Pastor was not preaching and so we had
another man who is a Pastor but works at a mission agency preach, and what he
talked about has a lot to do with what we are learning here in this section of
Ephesians 4:12-16. He began his sermon
by reading from the gospel of Matthew 9:35-10:2 and then later on brought in a
few verses from the 4th chapter of John. He entitled his message “Just Ask” and I will
talk about this title in a moment. One
of the things that he talked about was the “Moravian Church,” and he asked if anyone had ever heard of this
church. Only a few had, and I was not
one of them. He went into the history of
this church and later stated that there would probably be no one in attendance
in our service today had it not been for the Moravian church. This church was persecuted very early on and
had to move to what is now modern day Germany. Early on in the church’s history they began
to choose 24 men and 24 women to pray around the clock that the Lord of the
Harvest would send out laborers. This went
on for one hundred years, and God answered their prayers in a wonderful
way. You see when we look at this
passage from Matthew and then John we see something that I had not seen before,
and that is we are to “Just Ask,” just ask the Lord of the harvest to send out
laborers into the fields that, as Jesus stated, were white with harvest.
I
will include a website here in order for anyone who wants to read about the
history of the Moravian Church https://www.moravian.org/2018/07/a-brief-history-of-the-moravian-church/
When
we just ask the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers He will do that as
seen in this history of this wonderful church.
We
will continue looking at Ephesians 4:12 in our next SD.
Scripture that goes along with our
quotation from yesterday: Psalm 139:10 “Your
hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.”
3/30/2019 2:07 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment