SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/29/2019
9:31 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
Preparation: Strength in the Lord”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
6:10
Message of the
verses: “10
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.”
Paul writes about the spiritual
armor and it is to be used by believers, but the specifics that we will get
into as we begin to look at the different pieces of the armor. The point that I want to make here is that the
churches battle with Satan has already been won, and this happened at the cross
of Jesus Christ as He won the victory over the world the flesh and the Devil. Jesus destroyed Satan and his power of sin
and death as seen in Romans 5:18-21; 1 Corinthians 15:56-57; and Hebrews
2:14. So we should trust in Jesus Christ
as He initiates a victory over the worst that Satan has to offer and this is
guaranteed. John MacArthur writes “We
are in a war—a fierce and terrible war—but we have no reason to be afraid if we
are on the Lord’s side. Appropriation of
that ‘strength’ comes through the means of grace—prayer, knowledge of and
obedience to the Word, and faith in the promises of God.”
I
want to write what Paul wrote to Timothy in 2 Timothy 1:6-8; 2:1 in a moment
but the reason that Paul wrote this to Timothy is because he became fearful and
timid as he faced stronger temptations than he had expected and considerably
more opposition. “6 For this reason I
remind you to kindle afresh the gift of God which is in you through the laying
on of my hands. 7 For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power
and love and discipline. 8 Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our
Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel
according to the power of God.” “1 You
therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” In this last verse (2:1) Paul is telling
Timothy to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and this goes along
with our verse that we are looking at from Ephesians. Let me look ahead to the spiritual armor for
a moment and what I want to say is that there is only one offensive weapon in
all of the spiritual armor and in the end we are asked to pray, but I don’t
believe that this is a part of the armor.
My point is that all we as believers are to do is to put on these
defensive weapons of the Spiritual and trust that the Lord will do as He
promises to do, and that is to protect us from the onslaughts of the devil and
his hordes.
Don’t
forget that we are only talking about in these last two SD’s is the preparation
and not in the pieces of the armor which as stated we will get to later. John MacArthur has 50 rather small print
commentary on the rest of the book of Ephesians and most of it is about the
spiritual armor. I have to say that I am
looking forward to this study.
I
want to say one more thing and that is that we have been talking a great deal
about being filled with the Holy Spirit before we began to study about the
spiritual armor and I believe that we must be filled with the Holy Spirit all
of the time and as we begin to think about the battles that we go through from
time to time being filled with the Spirit of God is most important, even in the
preparation which consist of “Strength in the Lord.”
Today’s quotation from “Love in Action”
is comments on our verse from yesterday’s SD.
“God has called His people to practice
friend therapy. The New Testament tells
us to instruct and teach one another, admonish one another, stimulate one
another, build up one another, pray for one another, carry burdens for one
another, confess our sins to one another, submit to one another, help one
another physically and materially, and encourage one another. These commands have been given to all of
us. We need one another for
encouragement.”
9/29/2019 10:05 PM
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