SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/13/2023 9:54 AM
My Worship Time
Focus:
PT-1 “The Authority of Discipline”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
18:18-20
Message of the verses: “18 Truly, I say to
you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19 Again I say to you, if two of you
agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father
in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among
them.’”
The first thing that I want to say about these three
verses is that what I write about them may be different that what anyone has
previously learned about them, as when I listened to the sermon from MacArthur
I truly learned some things that I did not know before.
When
we see our Lord begin to say something that He really wanted His disciples to
listen to, and for that matter us too, He begins with Truly, I say to you.” Sometimes He even says truly two times, but
only once here. “This phrase that He is
saying should always be noted with special care, because it introduces a
teaching of unusual importance” writes MacArthur.
We
have been talking about discipline for some time now and we know that the work
of discipline should be undertaken with the greatest care, as it is very
important. If it is done in the wrong
way or in the wrong spirit, something we also have been talking about, it can
do great damage by fostering self-righteousness and also legalism, in the same
way it can cause damage if not done at all which allows sin’s influence to
spread like leaven. A while back in our
study of Matthew we learned that “leaven” is not always written about as
something that is sinful, but sometimes it is very useful. Jesus uses the word leaven once in chapter
thirteen and three times in chapter sixteen.
John MacArthur writes “Jesus’ promises in verses 18 and
19 have suffered serious misinterpretation throughout the history of the
church, the most extreme being the Roman Catholic doctrine that the church has
the divine authority to forgive sin.
Many charismatics use these promises—along with others, such as those of
Matthew 7:7 and 21:22—to claim from God every imaginable blessing and privilege
just for the asking.
“But in light of the context of what Jesus had just said,
in the light of common rabbinical expressions of that day, and in light of the
grammatical construction of the text, it is clear that He was not teaching that
God’s power can be bent to men’s will.
He was not saying that men can force heaven to do things. Quite to the
contrary, His promise was that when His people bend their wills to His, He will
endorse and empower their act of obedience.
Jesus was here continuing His instruction about church
discipline. He was not speaking about
petitioning God for special blessing or privileges, and even less was He
teaching that the church or any of its leaders has power to absolve the sins of
its members. He was declaring that the
church has a divine mandate to discipline its members when they refuse to
repent.”
I
have learned from my study that the rabbis sometimes spoke of a principle of
action as being bound in heaven or loosed in heaven to indicate, respectively,
that it was forbidden or permitted in light of God’s revealed Word. In the time when our Lord was teaching this a
Jew would have understood that Jesus did not mean that men could bend heaven’s
will to their own but that God (here called heaven, a common Jewish substitute
for God’s covenant name, Yahweh, or Jehovah) had an expressed principle with
which the church must conform.
In
our next SD I want to look at what MacArthur has to say about how these verses
are grammatically constructed, which is always very important to understand.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: There was a time in my early walk with the
Lord that I thought that I could actually demand things from Him to do for me,
but that time has passed since I know that my role is to do the things that God
desires for me to do for the cause of Christ.
My
Steps of Faith for Today: I want God’s
will for my life to be my will for my life, and as I study His Word and yield
to His plan then I believe that the Lord will show me His will for my
life. “For we are His workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in
them.”
1/13/2023 10:24 AM
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