SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/13/2021 9:37 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “John”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt. 10:2b
Message of the
verse: “and
Andrew his brother; and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother;”
We begin this SD with a quote from
John MacArthur’s commentary: “Throughout
his life, John remained uncompromising in doctrine and in standards of
morality, but the Holy Spirit developed in him an unparalleled capacity for
love, so much so that he is often called the apostle of love. It is apparent
from his epistles that he did not slip into the foolish and tolerant
sentimentality that often masquerades as love.
During the rest of his life, which lasted until near the turn of the second
century, he lost none of his intolerance for falsehood and immorality. Love without certain standards or strong
convictions is as much as a spiritual disaster as zeal without sensitivity. The Lord knew that, as far as the human
author was concerned, the apostle who became the most powerful advocate of love
would have to be a man who was also uncompromising of truth. Otherwise his love would take him down the
road of destructive sentimentalism that is traveled by so many in the name of
Christ.
“In his five New Testament books,
John uses forms of the word love
eighty times and witnesses or is synonyms some seventy times. He was always a witness to the truth and ever
a teacher of love. Truth guarded his
love, and love surrounded his truth.”
We can see as an example from his
gospel letter that he was a discoverer of truth, as he was the first to recognize
the Lord on the shore of Galilee and was also the first disciple to see the
risen Christ. It was to him that the
Lord entrusted what is seen in the writings of the book of Revelation, telling
its readers first of all about the risen Christ and His appearance in chapter
one, and then telling things about the church age as seen in chapters 2-3. Telling about what heaven looks like as
Christ is seated on the throne, and telling of Christ getting the title deed of
planet earth and opening the scroll seen in chapter five, and then telling
about the last seven years of what will happen on earth during the last week of
Daniel’s prophecy found in Daniel nine.
John goes through this in chapters 6-19 when in the last part of chapter
19 he tells of the Lord’s coming again to planet earth to end the greatest war
that ever happened on planet earth. He
then tells about what will happen after Jesus returns and rules planet earth
from David’s throne in Jerusalem for 1000 years, then about the new heaven and
new earth along with the judgment of all unbelievers, and then how believers
will live in eternity as he concludes the book by saying “Come Lord Jesus.”
In John’s three epistles we see that
John’s love was controlled by God’s truth, in which his exhortations for love
are always balanced by commands for truth and righteousness. Here he denounced the Antichrist and those
who sided with him. He rebuked the
unloving and the disobedient. It was
John that Jesus inspired to record His most sobering distinction between the
saved and the unsaved, as he declared that the one is the child of God and the
other the child of Satan as seen in John 8:41-44. We see again and again John’s appealing to
various witnesses to the truth he taught.
He spoke of the witness of John the Baptist as seen in John 1:7-8; and
3:26, the witness of the miracles as seen in John 3:36, the witness of the
apostles in 15:27, the witness of the Father in 5:37, of the Son in 18:37, and
the Holy Spirit and the water and blood in 1 John 5:8.
8/13/2021 10:03
AM
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