SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/9/2021 10:29 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Differences”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: “Matt.
7:24-27
Message of the verses: “24 “Therefore
everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a
wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 “And the rain fell, and the floods
came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did
not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. 26 “Everyone who hears these
words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built
his house on the sand. 27 “The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds
blew and slammed against that house; and it fell — and great was its
fall.’”
In
our rather short SD from yesterday we looked at a few similar things between
these two builders and now today begin to look at the differences between the
two, and as we mentioned in our last SD there is a great spiritual lesson as to
why Jesus told these parables or stories to the crowd that He was preaching to.
The
differences between the two builders and the two houses that they built were
not noticeable from looking at the outside of their houses. But they were immeasurably more important
that the similarities. There is a key to understanding here and that one does “act
upon” God’s Word which is obedience and the other “does not act upon” His Word
which is disobedience. One of the
builders was suing the divine specifications, while the other uses his
own. This story reminds me of Cain and
Able, two sons of Adam and Eve as Able followed God’s plan for offering a
sacrifice, while Cain used what he thought was right in offering a sacrifice to
the Lord.
So
what is the most visible or should I say invisible differences between these
two builders? Well the answer is the
foundation that they laid. We see that
the “wise man…built his house upon the rock,” whereas the “foolish man…built
his house upon the sand.”
John
MacArthur writes “Petra (‘rock’) does
not mean a stone or even a boulder, but a great outcropping of rock, a large
expanse of bedrock. It is solid, stable,
and unmovable. ‘Sand,’ by contrast, is
loose, unstable, and extremely movable.
The land agents selling lots on the sand are the false prophets Jesus
had just warned about (vv. 15-20).”
In
our earlier SD’s especially from this Sermon on the Mount we have seen the
falseness of the scribes and the Pharisees and how they had a complex and
involved set of religious traditions which they regarded as having great value
before God. However all of their
traditions were external, superficial, and unstable, like the sand that Jesus
is talking about that the foolish man built his house upon. The scribes and Pharisees were shifting sand,
composed entirely of the opinions, speculations, and standards of men. The ones who created and followed them took
no account of obedience to God’s Word, purity of the heart, spirituality of the
soul or even integrity of behavior. They
had one concern and that was for their appearance, and the compelling desire to
be seen and to be honored by men as Jesus spoke about in Matt. 6:2.
We
will conclude this SD with a quotation from Arthur Pink who says of such
people,
“They bring their bodies to
the house of prayer but not their souls; they worship with their mouths, but
not ‘in spirit and truth.’ They are
sticklers for immersion or early morning communion, yet take no thought about
keeping precepts of Christ. Multitudes
of professing Christians abstain from external acts of violence, yet hesitate
not to rob their neighbors of good name by spreading evil reports against
them. They contribute regularly to the ‘pastor’s
salary,’ but shrink not from misrepresenting their goods and cheating their
customers, persuading themselves that ‘business is business.’ They have more regard for the laws of man
than those of God, for His fear is not before their eyes.”
3/9/2021 10:55 AM
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