SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/30/2021 9:18 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
Intro to “Which Way to Heaven?”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
7:13-14
Message of the verses: “13 “Enter through
the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to
destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 14 “For the gate is small
and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
This
is the appeal that Jesus gives right after the verse that we call the “Golden
Rule.” This appeal that Jesus is giving
is one that He has been moving through the whole sermon. Here is the call that He gives to decide now
about becoming a citizen of God’s kingdom and also inheriting eternal life, or
to choose to remain a citizen of this fallen world and receiving
damnation.
This
morning I was putting one of my older SD’s onto my other blog. It was about sexual morality and the point of
it that I was trying to make was that God has the right to give His rules and
regulations to His people because no matter what you look at around you it was
all created by God, nothing in the night skies was not created by God, nothing
we see in the day time was not created by God and therefore He has the right to
rule over His creation. One day
everything that we view will be gone as God will actually “un-create”
everything that He created with the exception of mankind. Some will go to live with Him in the new
heaven and new earth and the new Jerusalem, and some will go into hell, and
that is what Jesus is talking about in this section of Scripture that we will
look at over the next several days.
People make the mistake that they think that they own something, but
like I told a man I used to work with a very long time ago when he was telling
me that he had paid off his home and it was his. I simply asked him whose would it be a
hundred years from now?
We
will conclude this shorter SD, because it is Saturday, with a quote from
MacArthur’s commentary: “Jesus has been
giving God’s standards throughout the sermon, standards that are holy and
perfect and that are diametrically opposed to the self-righteous,
self-sufficient, and hypocritical standards of man—typified by those of the
scribes and Pharisees. He has shown what
His kingdom is like and what its people are like—and are not like. Now He presents the choice of entering the
kingdom or not. Here the Lord focuses on
the inevitable decision that every person must make, the crossroads where he
must decide on the ‘gate’ he will enter and the ‘way’ he will go.
“Our
lives are filled with decisions—what to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to
do, what to say, what to buy, whom to marry, what career to follow, and on and
on. Many decisions are trivial and
insignificant, and some are essential and life-changing. The most critical of all is our decision
about Jesus Christ and His kingdom. That
is the ultimate choice that determines our eternal destiny. It is that decision that Jesus here calls men
to make.”
I
totally agree with this quotation, and it is one of the purposes of the time
that I spend each day trying to get the Word out so people who do not know the
Lord Jesus Christ will come to know Him, and people who do know Him will
continue to grow in Him. There is
nothing more important than that.
1/30/2021 9:55 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment