SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/25/2020
11:05 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-2
“The Necessity for Spiritual Hunger”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:6
Message of the
verse: “6 “Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
I have heard it said that you cannot
live too long without food and only three days without water. I remember reading a book about fasting when
I was about to fast and the author stated that the longest that he had ever
conducted a fast was for 90 days. I know
that may seem impossible to you, but after studying a bit about fasting I truly
believe that if that person had a lot of fat on their body that they could go
that long without food, but they surely drank water as most fast need to drink
water. I truly believe that when Jesus
fasted 40 days in the wilderness that He did drink water, otherwise He would
have had to use His Godly powers to keep Himself alive. The point in all of this is that human beings
need both food and water to survive and Jesus’ analogy demonstrates that ‘righteousness’
is not an optional spiritual supplement but a spiritual necessity. MacArthur adds “We can no more live
spiritually without righteousness than we can live physically without food and
water.”
In MacArthur’s commentary he talks
about different famines that have taken place from the time of Joseph in Egypt
all the way to the famines that have taken place more recently in Africa. Throughout the course of history there have
been tens of millions of people who have died as a result of famine or other
diseases that are related to malnutrition.
The point is that a starving person has a single, all consuming passion
for food and water and nothing else has the slightest attraction or appeal;
nothing can even get his attention.
Again the spiritual meaning of this
truth about physical issues is that those who are without God’s righteousness
are starved for spiritual life. I can
remember when I first became a believer while on a vacation in Florida that the
first thing that I did was to go out and to buy a Bible. I chose the “Living Bible” and it cost me
$6.95 back in January of 1974. I went to
a Sunday school class with my friend and wanted to take the lesson papers home
with me so that I could study them. I
had been lost and now God saved me and I wanted to know much about what had
happened to me. I had been listening to
sermons on tape and that is what the Lord used to bring me to salvation, as
these sermons were from the Word of God the only thing that a person has to
have in order to be saved, for that is the only place where this truth is
found. I remember looking at astrology
books on my layover at the Atlanta airport wondering if this would satisfy me,
and then a young couple came up to me to tell me about what the Bible had to
say about the Lord and about the end times.
I did not care at that time although I remembered their conversation and
still do today. I was interested in
things like the prodigal son was into, the pods that he was feeding the pigs,
things like “weed” and other things that I will not mention, but they were all “pods.” We will conclude this rather short SD from another
quote from John MacArthur: “Like the
prodigal son, they will eat pigs’ food, because they have nothing else. ‘Why,’ God asks, ‘do you spend money for what
is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?’ (Isa. 55:2).
The reason is that men have forsaken God, ‘the fountain of living
waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water’
(Jer. 2:13). Though God has crested men
with a need for Himself, they try to satisfy that need through lifeless gods of
their own making.”
4/25/2020 11:32
AM
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