SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/9/2023 9:18 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-5 “The Response of The Lord”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
22:37-40
Message of the verses: “37 And He said to
him, Have love for the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest rule. 39 And a second like it
is this, Have love for your neighbor as for yourself. 40 On these two rules all
the law and the prophets are based” (BBE).
We continue to talk about love, and above all, the
one who truly loves God is the one who truly obeys God. Like Paul, he knows his love is imperfect and
his obedience is imperfect, but he presses “on in order that [he] may lay hold
of that for which also [he] was laid hold by Christ Jesus,” pressing “on toward the goal for the prize of
the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:12, 14).
I have to say that I am not a perfectionist, but
when it comes to my study of the Word of God, and wanting to do the best that I
can for the cause of Christ, like the paragraph above I do not always do it and
that causes me to become upset, but being reminded of the things in that first
paragraph brings new light to me realizing that Paul also struggled, but kept
going forward.
MacArthur
writes “To say that Jesus died for man’s sin is to say that He died for man’s
hatred of God, which is the essence of all sin.
Christ died for man’s lack of love for God. And just as He offers forgiveness for past
lack of love for God, Christ also provides for future love for God. The great Forgiver is also the great Enabler,
because through Christ, “the love of God has been poured out within our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Rom. 5:5).
“Even before Christ came to earth, God’s way was the
way of love, which was the way of obedience.
The Jews of Jesus’ day should have been convicted of their lovelessness
and their disobedience, because the Old Testament was clear—and nowhere more
clear than in the Shema—that the person without obedience for God was without
love for God and was therefore without God Himself.”
We
move on in our passage and begin to talk about what Jesus said after He said
that you should love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind. Jesus did the
Pharisees one better as He added the second as well: You shall love your
neighbor as yourself. We can see that the same virtue of love is seen in both
of these commandments. The command for
genuine love of God, Jesus declared, is next followed in importance by the
command for a love of your neighbor hat is of the same order as the love you
already have for yourself.
It is no secret that when one goes over the gospels
that they find out that the Pharisees had no love for God and the certainly had
no love for their neighbors, that is made very clear. Jesus will remind the multitudes a short while
later, the scribes and Pharisees “tie up heavy loads, and lay them on men’s
shoulders; but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a
finger (Matt. 23:4). I don’t think that
this describes a person as loving their neighbor, but it does remind me of what
is going on in our government today.
MacArthur adds “Like the mercenary Sadducees who extorted the Temple
worshipers in the selling of sacrifices and exchanging of money, the scribes
and Pharisees also abused and made religious merchandise of their fellow Jews.”
I
am not sure if we will finish up this section in tomorrow’s SD, because of it
being Sunday or not, but this section is packed full of very important things
that all need to learn and to follow.
9/9/2023 9:48 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment