SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/4/2020 8:10 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-4 “Loving
Your Enemies”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:44a
Message of the verse: “44 “But I say to
you, love your enemies,”
It
is my desire to finish this section this evening and then we can move onto our
next section “Pray For Your Persecutors.”
John MacArthur gives an example of something that happened in the year
1567 in the nation of Spain. It has to
do with a man appointed as governor of the lower part of the nation whose name
was Duke and his rule was called the reign of terror, and his council was
called the Bloody Council, and the reason was that this man hated protestants
and killed as many of them as he could.
The story goes about a Protestant man escaping from his captivity in
winter. A soldier was chastening him
when the man came to cross a lake that had thin ice on it. The escaped man made it across the ice, but
the soldier did not make it and so the man went after the soldier who was
chastening him and saved his life. He
said that the love or Christ constrained him to do it. He does not tell what happened to the man
after saving the soldier.
The
following is another story from MacArthur’s commentary: “The Scottish Reformer George Wishart, a
contemporary and friend of John Knox, was sentenced to die as a heretic. Because the executioner knew of Wishart’s
selfless ministering to hundreds of people who were dying of the plague, he
hesitated carrying out the sentence. When
Wishart saw the expression of remorse on the executioner’s face, he went over
and kissed him on the cheek, saying, ‘Sir may that be a token that I forgive
you” (John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
ed. W. Grinton Berry [Grand Rapids: Baker,
1978, p. 252).
So
far living in the United States of America many of the enemies we run into do
not want to take our lives, for they may be those people who are mean,
impatient, judgmental, self-righteous, and spiteful—or just happen to disagree
with us. We have the same thing to do for them and that is love them, a
prayerful kind of love.
I
have finally begin to do some of my walking in my office on my treadmill and
thus am able to listen to some of the sermons that John MacArthur preached on
this chapter of Matthew back in 1978. I
have to admit that I am struggling with the true meaning of loving my enemies
and the Lord seems to open my eyes to the meaning of this section of loving my
enemies. It has to come from the life of
Jesus Christ as Jesus never got angry except when He cleansed the temple two
times. The reason He got angry then was
because people were doing something against His Father by making His Temple a
den of thieves. We can see this in the
OT too as we have mentioned it in earlier SD’s.
I know in my heart that God hates abortion and so I am looking at what
my reaction to those who are committing this sin against the Lord. I decided to write a story on Facebook as it
surely seemed that the Lord was working in my heart to do so and the bottom
line of the story was that all those who are voting for Democrats will have to
answer some day to the Lord for being a part of the murder of millions of
unborn babies. There are two parties and
one is against abortion and the other is for it so all believers and
unbelievers have a choice. If you don’t
vote at all you are still in the same boat.
10/4/2020 8:35 PM
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