PT-4 "False Leaders Are Cursed For Their Exclusion" (Matt. 23:13)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/18/2023 7:51 AM

 

My Worship Time                       Focus:  “PT-4 "False Leaders Are Cursed For Their Exclusion"

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                    Reference:  Matthew 23:13

 

            Message of the verse:  “13 "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from men; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.”

 

            I’m afraid that this SD will be rather short as my sister, Kathy, is having surgery to repair broken bones in her foot and I have to be there to support her.

 

            We begin with a quote from MacArthur’s commentary:  “It is painful to consider—and was immeasurably more painful for Jesus to consider—the countless thousands who have been shut off from His kingdom by Israel’s false religious leaders.  IN his parallel passage Luke reports Jesus as saying ‘Woe to your lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in your hindered” (Luke 11:52).’

 

            “The false leaders took away the key of knowledge by misinterpreting the Word of God, by denying the Messiah, by denying the need for repentance, and by denying salvation by grace.  Their work-righteous system had no place for the gospel of grace, which is the only way into the kingdom.  By drawing people away from Jesus Christ, those leaders thwarted their salvation and confirmed their damnation.

 

            “That is why the greatest battle in the world is not against communism or humanism or secularism or social injustice.  The greatest battle by far is the battle for men’s souls, a battle which could be lost even if somehow all those other battles were won.  The great challenge of the church in our day is to clearly and boldly articulate God’s truth and just as clearly and boldly to expose Satan’s falsehoods.  The great need of the world today is to turn from its falsehoods and to hear and heed God’s truth and be saved.”

 

            This last paragraph that I quoted from MacArthur’s commentary is telling of the great truth of how a person is to come into the salvation that God has provided through Jesus Christ, and as he said this is the most important truth that a person can find out, and that is that one cannot be saved by listening to the false leaders of that day or any other day since the Lord paid for the sins of the world as He died in their place.  Just confess that you are a sinner, that you were born a sinner, and that you sin because you were born a sinner, and then accept what Christ did on the cross as He took the wrath of God on those three dark hours while on the cross, and then said after that that when He did that it was finished.  Yes it was finished and all one has to do is that they can do nothing but accept His forgiveness and invite Him into your heart and then you will be saved.

 

10/18/2023 8:11 AM