SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/19/2023 8:22 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-5 "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 want to continue quoting from John MacArthur’s
commentary as what he has written will help us better understand this passage
that we have been looking at for the last four days.
“When men’s eternal souls are at
stake, the church cannot be passive and indifferent. Nor can it hide behind false humility that
fears being judgmental or behind false love that fears offending. Christ was
supremely humble, yet He never withheld a warning that might save His hearers
from hell. And He had nothing but
intense anger for those who by their false teachings led men away from God and
directly toward hell.
“Nowhere is the Pharisee’s hardness
of heart more graphically portrayed than in the account of the blind man Jesus
healed on the Sabbath. When the healed
man was brought to the Pharisees and they heard he had been healed on the
Sabbath, their sole concern was for Jesus’ breaking one of their Sabbath
traditions (John 9:16). The fact that
this man who had lived all his life in blindness and despair had now been given
sight was of no consequence to them. Nor
was the fact that Jesus had obviously performed the healing by divine power of
any consequence to them. They were
utterly devoid of compassion and blind to the truth. They were indifferent to the confirmation by
the man’s parents that their son was indeed born blind (v. 20) and impervious
to the man’s own astute arguments about the divine source of his healing (vv.
30-22). The factualness of His healing
was not a consideration to them. They
had made up their minds that Jesus was not the Christ (v. 22), and no evidence
to the contrary carried any weight with them.
In this one incident that Pharisees conclusively demonstrated their
rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, their rejection of His divine nature and
power, and their contempt for His divine grace and for the souls of men.
“When the church began to move with
great force after Pentecost, proclaiming Christ’s power to save men’s souls and
demonstrating His power to heal men’s bodies, the Jewish religious leaders
again demonstrated their hardness of heart. ‘What shall we do with these men?’ they
said of Peter and John after the healing of the lame man outside the
Temple. ‘For the fact that a noteworthly
miracle has taken place through them is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem,
and we cannot deny it. But in order that
it may not spread any further among the people, let us warn them to speak no
more to any man in this name’ (Acts 4:16-17). In their minds, neither then power the
apostles manifested nor the truth they proclaimed was of any relevance. They themselves had rejected the kingdom and,
just as during Jesus’ ministry, they were determined to prevent other from
entering.
“Paul reminded the Thessalonian believers that they
suffered persecution at the hands of their own unbelieving countrymen just as
the believing Jews in Judea had suffered at the hands of theirs. Those Jewish leaders ‘both killed the Lord
Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out.
They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, hindering us from
speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved; with the result that they
always fill up the measure of their sins” (1 Thess. 2:14-16).
“Some years ago, a young man called and informed me
that he was planning to leave our church and join Mormonism, two workers from
which were going to visit him again shortly.
I immediately drove to his house and confronted him with the extreme
peril of what he was about to do. I told
him that if he was not a true Christian, they would damn his soul by leading
him away from Christ and that if he were a Christian they would make a shambles
of his spiritual life. When the workers arrived I refused to discuss doctrine
with them but rather in the spirit of Matthew 23 presented the gospel of Christ
and denounced the unbiblical and damning errors that their sect taught. However, the young man fell into the cult and
was not able to escape for a number of years.
“Every not-Christian religion is a
works-righteous religion, and works righteousness in inherently a mortal enmity
with the gospel of God’s grace. By their
very nature such belief such systems exclude people from God’s kingdom.”
The things that I have just quoted
from MacArthur’s commentary is a warning to all who have been influenced by any
of the false cults and false teachers today.
I do not think that I want to give the names of those false leaders and
cults that are prevalent in the world today, but the one thing that I want to
do again is to give the truth of the gospel, which will save men’s souls from
the damnation of hell. The truth is that
after Adam and Eve fell into sin after the devil gave out the “LIE” as seen in
the third chapter of Genesis that all of those who are not the sons and daughters
of Adam and Eve are born into sin, all of us were born with that sin nature and
the only way to be saved from sin and the sin nature is to realize that they
are born sinners and can do nothing about it on their own. I have a tract that comes from a man named
Rev. John Linton who was a preacher in Toronto, Canada. It is an older tract that he wrote entitled “The
Battle of the Ages. The reason that I
know it is an older tract is that it only cost ten cents. At the end of this tract he gives out the
gospel, and I want to quote the last part of it as I close this Spiritual
Diary.
“My brother, the Battle of Calvary was your battle
and mine. It was for you the Warrior
Christ bowed His head in death. That
cross is our hope, that defeat is our victory, that death is our life. It is possible that after than awful conflict
for your sake you have not thanked Him for it?
It is possible that you have dared to affront God by refusing and
despising such love? I do not condemn
you, but if you are unsaved I tremble because you are bringing condemnation upon
yourself. If you do not let Christ on
the cross carry away your sins, your sins will carry you away.”
It is my hope and my prayer that all
who read this who are not true believes will bow your heads in prayer and
accept what Christ has done for you on the cross as He paid for your sins, and
so talk to the Lord and confess that you were born a sinner and that you sin
because of that, and then ask God through the work that was done for you at the
cross accept Jesus into your heart and tell Him that it is your desire to be
saved through what He did for you on the cross, as in those three dark hours
when He was on the cross God the Father took out on Jesus the penalty of sin
and by faith you can have the forgiveness of your sin and become a child of
God. This is the most important thing that anyone will ever do in their life.
If it is your desire to do this you
can just write to me on the blog that this will be on and I will rejoice with
you and pray that the Lord will then cause you to grow as you study God’s Word.
10/19/2023
9:09 AM
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