SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/8/2022 9:23 AM
My Worship Time Focus: “More Things
Learned from Jesus’ Ministry at Decapolis”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matt. 15:29-39
Message of the
verses: As I have already mentioned
that these verses were on my Spiritual Diaries for a week or so and that is why
I am not quoting them here as I try very hard to finish up this section.
We begin today with a fourth thing learned from our Lord’s
ministry at Decapolis, and that is that this story teaches the necessity of
relying on divine resources. We are like
the disciples in that we are most usable to the Lord when we acknowledge our
own lack of resources and turn to Him.
MacArthur writes “Whatever we may have in ourselves is never enough to
meet the needs of others or to accomplish anything for God. Jesus did not command the apostles to be His ‘witness
both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even the remotest part of
the earth’ until He had first promised, ‘You shall receive power when the Holy
Spirit has come upon you’ (Acts 1:8). ‘Every
good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the
Father of lights,’ James says (James 1:17).”
MacArthur then gives this example from his own life: “I was once asked to visit an elderly lady
who was dying and did not know Christ.
She was frail and sick, and I did not want to upset her; yet I knew that
above everything else she needed Christ.
All the way over there I prayed that God would help me know what to say
and how to say it, but as I neared her apartment door, I became more and more
uneasy. When one of her friends let me
in and I walked over to her bed, the first things she said was, ‘Before you say
anything, I just want to tell you that yesterday my sister led me to Christ.’ After a time of reading some psalms and
prayer, I said, ‘You don’t need to fear death anymore’’ to which she replied, ‘Fear
death? I don’t fear death at all.’ By the time our visit was over, I felt she
had ministered to me more than I had to her.
I had been totally inadequate to meet her needs, but as I went in
dependence on our gracious Lord, I found He had already preceded me and made
full provision.”
Now we move onto number five as we learn from this story
that God’s resources are never diminished, much less exhausted, because He has
an infinite capacity to create as we saw two times in feeding first the 5000,
and second feeding the 4000 with only a few fish and a small amount of bread,
but the truth is that He did not need the seven loaves and few fish in order to
feed the multitude. Think about how the
Lord feed the children of Israel while on their journey to the Promised Land by
using manna. There is a Hebrew word that shows how the Lord made the heavens
and the earth out of nothing and although I probably don’t know how to spell it
I will try: Ex Nihilo. Something out of
nothing.
Sixth,
we learn about the servant’s usefulness.
We certainly know that the Lord is able to do His work without us, but
He chooses to do it through us. Jesus
did not need the disciples to help to distribute the food any more than He
needed the seven loaves and the fish to make the food. Jesus could have done in an instant what I probably
took several hours to complete using the disciples to pass out the food that He
continued to create. MacArthur adds “But
in His infinite wisdom and mercy, God chooses to use human instruments to do
His divine work of carrying the gospel to the world and of ministering to its
needs. In submissively serving others in
our Lord’s name and power, we learn to serve Him—in preparation for serving Him
for all eternity in dimensions we cannot now conceive.
Number seven we learn that God gives liberally, in “good
measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” (Luke 6:38), as we have
already seen. Everyone on the
mountainside ate until he was completely satisfied. There was even more than enough, so that seven
large baskets remaining for themselves.
Eight: We learn
about spiritual investment. When the
disciples gave all that they had to Jesus and then helped Him give it away to
others, they had seven full baskets remaining for themselves. “He who sows sparingly shall also reap
sparingly, and he who sows bountifully shall also reap bountifully” (2 Cor.
9:6).
The ninth and overarching lesson is the limitless
compassion of Jesus Christ. He has
compassion for all our needs—eternal, lifetime, and daily. He has compassion on Jews and on Gentiles, on
the severely afflicted and the merely hungry.
Following the example of our Lord, we are to “do good to all men, and
especially to those who are of the household of the faith” (Gal. 6:10). Our compassion is not measured by our
feelings but by our giving.
MacArthur concludes this section, which is actually the
last section in his second book on Matthew’s commentary with a story about when
he was small and visiting a friend of his family, but you really don’t see this
unless you listen to his sermon on this section of Scripture.
He writes “John Wanamaker, founder of the famous Philadelphia
department store that bears his name, was a devoted Christian. On a trip to China to observe Christian
mission work there, he came across a small village where a group of Christians
had begun building a church but lacked money to complete it. In a nearby field he noticed the strange
sight of a boy yoked together with an ox as they together pulled a plow held by
his father. Mr. Wanamaker’s guide
explained that the boy had promised his father, ‘If you will sell one of the
oxen and give the money for the building of the church, I will take the ox’s
place pulling the plow.’ Mr. Wanamaker
is said to have fallen to his knees and said, ‘Lord, let me be hitched to a
plow that I may know the joy of sacrificial giving.’”
The truth is that John Wanamaker had given a great deal
of money to missionary work, but after seeing this young boy doing what he was
doing it seems that it struck a new cord in his life.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: Trusting the Lord
to use me in doing things that I certainly am not able to do in my life with my
resources.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Be willing to be like the boy in this story
if that is what the Lord wants me to be.
8/8/2022 10:15 AM
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