SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/7/2022 11:13 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The Receptive Hearer”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 13:23
Message of the verse: “23 “And the one on
whom seed was sown on the
good
soil, this is the man who hears the
word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit, and brings forth, some a
hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.’
Let us look again at verse eight: 8 "And others fell on the good soil, and
*yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.” Now we mentioned earlier that the average
yield ratio of grain crops in Palestine was less than eight to one. Therefore even the least productive of thirty
to one was almost four times the average yield. MacArthur writes “It is not
that a believer produces a hundred, sixty, or thirty times the amount of fruit
at all. Jesus simply used these figures
to represent the great productivity He gives to the faithful proclamation of
His Word. That is the point of the
entire parable: true believers produce fruit.
“To
His witnesses Jesus is saying, ‘Go and preach, and realize as you go that some
people will reject your message outright.
Because they want nothing to do with God, Satan will not allow the
gospel to have any impact on them whatsoever.
Others will seem to accept it gradly but will soon fall away, because
they only had a superficial religious experience and were not born again. These are the ones who live by the flesh,
whose lives are controlled by emotion, feeling, and sentiment. Others will seem to accept the gospel while
holding on to the old life and its ways; and their faith will also prove vain
and will eventually disappear as it is chocked out by the world. But others will truly believe. In humility they will confess and repent of
their sins, look to Me for help, and be given new life. You will know these true believers from the
others by the evidence of fruit in their lives’”
Another
thing that Jesus is saying to His witnesses is that they should not lose
heart. It is only God alone who can plow
up the heart that is hard and resistant.
In God’s sovereign will He gives the shallow heart depth, and the
cluttered heart cleansing, we in our own strength cannot do anything like this,
but we can yield to the Holy Spirit to work a work in our lives for the cause
of Christ. I continue to mention
Ephesians 2:10 to show that the Lord guarantees that His faithful witnesses
will produce fruit and will do so abundantly.
MacArthur adds “It is impossible for a faithful sower of the Word to
fail, because the Lord of the harvest will not permit it. So we anticipate the wrong and the right
responses. What marvelous help insight
for those who sow!”
The
Lord is teaching us that His people, the ones who truly belong to Him can and
should be a witness for Him. The responsibility
of the one who sows the gospel in His name not to produce the seed, the soil,
or the fruit as his only responsibility is to faithfully spread the seed as far
and wide as he is able. So what happens
is when they fall on the good soil, the seeds that a little child throws here
and there as he follows his father through the field will produce faithful
plants just as genuine and productive as those the experienced father plants. The untrained Christian who will faithfully
scatter his few seeds will produce a greater harvest than the most learned and
experienced believer who never bothers to sow at all, so the point is to sow
the seed and leave the results to the Lord for He is the only One who can save
a person, all we can do is to sow the seed.
We
are now at the end of the 33rd chapter of MacArthur’s second
commentary on the gospel of Matthew, we are now in our 29th month of
studying this wonderful gospel. I don’t
think that we will get through the gospel of Matthew for another 29 months, but
we will plug on, and expect the Holy Spirit to continue to bless this
study. We will conclude this section and
chapter with the following quote from John MacArthur. “To those who are considering His claims or
have made a perfunctory decision for Him, Jesus gives an appeal to think about
the kind of soil that represents their heart.
If it is hard-packed and beaten down by continual neglect of God, or
perhaps even by conscious opposition, He calls that person to allow His Spirit
to break up the ground and make it receptive to His Word. If the soil of his heart is shallow and
superficial, He calls that person to allow the Spirit to remove the rocky
resistance that lies beneath the surface of his seeming acceptance of the
gospel and give him true faith. If the
soil of his heart is infested with the weedy cares and concerns of the world,
He asks that person to allow the Spirit to cleanse him of his worldliness and
to receive Him with no reservations or competing loyalties.”
Readers
think about this last quotation from John MacArthur and if a decision is needed
for Christ make that decision and by doing that you will change your eternal destination.
4/7/2022
11:46 AM
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