SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/22/2020 9:20 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Deliverance”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 5:29-30
Message of the verses: “29 "If your right
eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for
you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be
thrown into hell. 30 “If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and
throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your
body, than for your whole body to go into hell.”
As
we begin this SD I find a sentence written by John MacArthur that really speaks
to my heart and hopefully to those who will read it: “Obviously getting rid of harmful influences
will not change a corrupt heart into a pure heart.” Again I go back to the late Warren Wiersbe’s
comment “The heart of the problem is the problem with the heart.” The scribes and the Pharisees were doing
things outwardly but their hearts were as Jesus stated later on like “dead man’s
bones.”
The
outward act of adultery reflects a heart that is already adulterous, the
outward act of forsaking whatever is harmful reflects a heart that hungers and
thirsts for righteousness, so the outward act is effect protection, because it
comes from a heart that seeks to do God’s will instead of its own.
Now
we move to another quotation from MacArthur’s commentary: “Like Origen, Saint Anthony sought to escape
immorality and lust by separating himself from the rest of society. He became a hermit in the Egyptian desert,
where he lived in poverty and deprivation for thirty-six years. Yet by his own testimony he was never freed
in all that time from the cares and temptations he sought to escape. Because his heart was still in the world he could
not escape the world, and he quickly discovered that Satan, the god of this
world, had no difficulty finding him in the desert (William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew; 2 vols.
[Philadelphia: Westminster 1956],
1:46-47).”
Once
again we see that Jesus is setting forth the impossible standards of His
kingdom which is total righteousness. As
always, the impossibility that he is setting forth has really a twofold
purpose. First to make men and women
despair of their own righteousness, in order to seek His righteousness. The Lord Jesus’ remedy for a wicked heart is
to have a new heart, and His answer for helplessness is His sufficiency.
As
we come to the end of this SD I want to quote a story found in MacArthur’s
commentary. “The story is told that
during the Civil War a beautiful, highly educated, and popular young woman fell
into prostitution. By the time she was
twenty-two years old, she was friendless, broken, and lay dying in a hospital
in Cincinnati. Just before she died on a
cold winter day she wrote a poem lamenting her life. The poem was published in a newspaper the
next day and soon drew the sympathetic attention of thousands across the
country. The poem ended with the lines:
Fainting,
freezing, dying alone,
too wicked
for prayer,
Too weak
for a moan to be heard
in the
streets of the crazy town
Gone mad
in the joy
of snow
coming down.
To lie,
and to die,
in my
terrible woe, with a bed and a shroud
of the
beautiful snow.
Sometime later a verse was added by
another pen.
Helpless
and frail as the trampled snow,
Sinner despair
not, Christ stoopeth low
To
rescue the soul that is lost in its sin
And
raise it to life and enjoyment again.
Groaning,
bleeding, dying for thee,
The
Crucified hung, made a curse on the tree.
His
accents of mercy fall soft on thine ear.
Is there
mercy for me? Will He heed my prayer?
O God! In
the stream that for sinners doth flow,
Wash me
and I shall be whiter than snow.
(A. Nainsmith, 1200 Notes, Quotes, and Anecdotes
[Chicago: Moody, 1962, p. 184)
We
conclude by stating that many men and many women got to hell forever because of
the deception of what we shall call self-righteous religion. There is an illusion that is damning, and
that illusion is that sin is only an external issue.
8/22/2020 9:50 AM
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