SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/24/2021 8:56 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “God’s
Promise to His Children Demands It”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
7:7-8
Message of the
verses: “We are talking about the
fact that Jesus gives three reasons for obeying the command to love others as
ourselves, and we are continuing to look at the first reason in today’s SD.
As we look through the Scriptures we will see that God
gives us many principles, but He does not give specific methods or rules for
every conceivable situation. One thing
is that situations keep changing and vary greatly from age to age and also from
person to person. If there were given
specific rules for every circumstance it would require a giant library of
volumes. More importantly that this is
God’s desire that we rely on Him directly.
God wants us more to be in His Word, and without being in His Word we
cannot pray wisely or rightly.
There is more that He desires beyond being in His Word as
He wants us to be in fellowship with Him as our Father. God’s Word is perfect and infallible, but we
also need His Spirit to interpret and illumine in order to encourage and to
strengthen us. God does not want us to
have all the answers in our hip pocket.
The Bible is a limitless store of divine truth, which a lifetime of the
most faithful and diligent study will not exhaust. Apart for God Himself we cannot even start to
fathom its depths or even mine its riches.
In God’s Word He gives enough truth for us to be responsible, but enough
mystery for us to be dependent. He gives
us His Word not only to direct our lives but to also draw our lives to Him.
MacArthur writes “Here Jesus says, in effect, ‘If you
want wisdom to know how to help a sinning brother and how to discern falsehood
and apostasy, go to your heavenly Father.
‘Ask, seek,’ and ‘knock’ at the doors of heaven, and you will receive,
find and have the door opened.”
There are some people who believe that verses 7 and 8 are
not a blank check for just anyone to present to God. The first thing is that the promises are
addressed only to believers. A large
mass of unbelievers, which includes some of the scribes and Pharisees, no doubt
were in the multitude on the side of the mountain that day. Now as we been going through the sermon we
have seen that when the scribes and Pharisees were talked about by our Lord
they were called hypocrites, false prophets, insincere followers, and all other
unbelievers in the third person—as if none of them were the direct target of
His words. One other occasion as in Matthew 23 the Lord addresses such persons
directly; but during this message all of His references to them are indirect. He gives this sermon to His disciples as seen
in 5:1-2, with the crowd listening in.
Kind of like the old party lines of the telephone where you could listen
to your neighbors talk to their friends.
As stated Jesus would call the scribes and the Pharisees out for what
they were, as they certainly were not believers but though they were.
We conclude this SD with another quotation from John
MacArthur as this has been a very long day for me, but it was my desire to do
this SD.
“Everyone’ refers to those who belong to the heavenly
Father. Those who are not God’s children
cannot come to Him as their Father. The
two overriding relationships focused on in the book of Matthew are those of God’s
kingdom and God’s family. The kingdom
concept deals with rule, and the family concept deals with relationship. In the Sermon on the Mount the primary focus
is on God’s family, and we see repeated references to God as heavenly Father
(v. 11; cf. 5:16, 45, 48; 6:4, 8-9, 26, 32) and to fellow believers as brothers
(5:22-24; 7:3-5).
“The two greatest realities of Christian truth are that
God is our Father and Christians are our brothers. Believers are the family of God. Paul speaks of the church as the ‘household
of the faith’ (Gal. 6:10) and as ‘God’s household’ (Eph. 2:19). John repeatedly speaks of God as our Father
(1 John 1:2-3, 2:1, 13; 3:1; 4:14; etc.) and of believers as His children (1
John 3:10, 5:2) and as each other’s brothers (1 John 2:9-11; 3:10-12; 4:20;
etc.).” There are more points to be made
here but Lord willing, we will cover them tomorrow.
1/24/2021 9:30 PM
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