SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/4/2022 10:50 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Power of Faith”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
17:19-21
Message of the verses: “19 Then the
disciples came to Jesus privately and said, "Why could we not cast it
out?" 20 And He said to them, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly
I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this
mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it shall move; and nothing shall be
impossible to you. 21 “But this kind does not go out except by prayer and
fasting.’”
I think that perhaps as we look at
these verses that we will learn some things that we did not know before, at
least I did when I listened to MacArthur’s sermon on this entire section we
have been looking at from Matthew 17:14-21.
I believe that Jesus healed many
more people than the gospel records show us, and the ones that we do read about
have special meaning for us. We have
talked about how we are coming to the end of our Lord’s ministry on earth as we
see even in this chapter and it was the Lord’s desire to spend much time with
His disciples in order to train them when He would not be with them. In this section we know that the Lord was up
on the mountain with three of His disciples when the nine other disciples were
confronted with this man who had a demon possessed son, so Jesus was not with
them. Yet we also know that there were
times when Jesus sent His disciples out to minister about the kingdom of God
and He gave them power against demons, and even one time He told them that He
saw Satan fall as they were ministering, and now the disciples want to know why
they could not cast out the demon that was in this boy when Jesus was not with
them. This is the question that these
verses address and I believe that the highlighted portion above gives us the
answer, but understanding this answer is what we have to do, and what I hope to
do as we look at these verses.
It is clear that Jesus’ purpose in
the miracle of healing this boy went beyond the healing, although this was very
important, especially to the boy and his father. This healing also brought glory to God as all
of His healings did. But for the
disciples the important lesson of the even was yet to be learned, learned for
them as well as for us.
Now because they could not cast this
demon out of the boy it is no surprise that the disciples wanted to talk to
Jesus privately, in the house as Mark tells us in 9:28 “When He came into the house, His disciples began
questioning Him privately, "Why could we not drive it out?’” It is no
doubt that the disciples were embarrassed that they could not do this and
wanted to know why. They may have
wondered why Jesus could do this in only a word, but they spent a lot of time
trying and failed to do it. They may
have asked Jesus something like “You commissioned and empowered us to heal and
to cast out demons, and we have been successful before. Why did we fail this time?” I think that it is good for the disciples to
realize that they failed and wanted to learn why they had failed, and they were
going to the right Person to find out why.
MacArthur adds “They probably invoked the Lord’s name, commanded the
demon to leave, and awaited his departure.
But this time nothing happened.”
I
am going to stop here and we will begin to look at the reason why they failed
in our next SD. I don’t want to start
something I don’t have time to finish.
11/4/2022 11:11 AM
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