SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/12/2023 8:13 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
Response to Jesus”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
19:20-22
Message of the verses: “20 The young man said
to Him, "All these things I have kept; what am I still lacking?" 21 Jesus
said to him, "If you wish to be complete, go and sell your
possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow Me." 22 But when the young man heard this statement, he
went away grieved; for he was one who owned much property.”
I mentioned in our last SD that the young ruler was
lacking something in his heart and that is why he had come to Jesus and we see
that question in the last part of verse twenty what am I still lacking?" What
is this man implying with this question?
Perhaps he thought that there were some commandments that he had not
heard about or perhaps that something in addition to keeping the law was
required to obtain eternal life. The one
important thing that did not occur to him was that he fell short in obedience
to any part of God’s known law. He did
this because his outward, humanly observed life was “full of dead men’s bones and
all uncleanness” as seen in Matthew 23:7.
This is something that he would not admit of himself that is that lust
is a form of adultery, that hate is a form of murder, or that swearing by
anything in heaven or on earth is a form of taking the Lord’s name in vain as
seen in Matthew 5:22, 28, 34-35. And one
more thing that had certainly never occurred to him was that “whoever keeps the
whole law and yet stumbles in one point…has become guilty of all” which comes
from the pen of James 2:10.
He
is in the same boat as most of his Jewish contemporaries failed to see that the
Mosaic commands were not given as means for humanly achieving God’s standard of
righteousness but were given as pictures of His righteousness. The Law of God was also given to show men how
far away they were in trying to keep it on their own. Paul writes about this in the book of Romans “Rom.
5:20 The Law came in so that the transgression
would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” MacArthur adds “Obedience to the law is
always imperfect because the human heart is imperfect.”
I
will conclude this short SD on the first day of Daylight Savings time with a
quote from John MacArthur: “One of sins greatest
curses is the spiritual and moral blindness it produces. It would not seem to require special
revelation from God for men to realize that even the commandments concerning
their relationship to other men are impossible to keep perfectly. What truly honest person would claim he has
never total a single falsehood of any sort, never coveted anything that belongs
to someone else, and always treated his parents with respect and honor—much less
that he had always loved his neighbors as much as he loved himself? But one of Satan’s chief strategies is to
blind sinners to their sin; and because pride is at the heart of all sin, there
is a natural inclination toward self-deceit.
And nothing is more effective in producing self-deceit than works-righteousness,
which is the basis of every man-made religion, including the God-given but
humanly corrupted religion of the first-century Judaism.”
3/12/2023 8:41 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment