SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/5/2024 7:30 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Intro to Matthew 26:31-35”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt. 26:31-35
Message of the verses: “31 Then Jesus said to them, "You will all fall away
because of Me this night, for it is written, ‘I WILL STRIKE DOWN THE SHEPHERD,
AND THE SHEEP OF THE FLOCK SHALL BE SCATTERED.’ 32 "But after I have been
raised, I will go ahead of you to Galilee." 33 But Peter said to Him,
"Even though all may fall away because of You, I will never fall
away." 34 Jesus said to him, "Truly I say to you that this very
night, before a rooster crows, you will deny Me three times." 35 Peter said
to Him, "Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You." All
the disciples said the same thing too.”
The first thing that I want to say about these
verses is that I listened to John MacArthur’s sermon on these verses yesterday
and all I can say is that I am looking forward to studying these verses even
further than what I learned from His sermon.
One
of the things that we will be looking at in this section is pride, humility,
relying on one’s self, and relying on the Lord through His Spirit. How to really become strong in the Lord and
means it will take a change in order to do that. A person has to truly realize that they are weak. Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians: “Therefore
I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with
persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor.
12:10).
In
this section the disciples thought that they would be strong enough to face
what the Lord was about to go through, and even though the focus is on Peter’s
statement all of the disciples fled away as we will see, and Jesus knew exactly
that they would do this as He knows everything including what is going on in my
life with some struggles that I am going through and have gone through for many,
many years.
Now
because it is Sunday morning and I usually write shorter SD’s on Sunday
mornings I will quote some of what MacArthur wrote in his introduction to what
he calls “Helping the Impotent Disciples.”
“As
much as Christians might like to think of themselves as being spiritually
strong, those who are mature know from experience as well as from Scripture
that in themselves they are weak. They
would like to think they could never deny the Lord, contradict His Word, or be
ashamed to be called by His name. But
they know that every believer succumbs to those things from time to time. They find themselves in an environment of
unrighteousness but do nothing to
correct it. They have an opportunity to
speak for Christ but say nothing. They
need to be bold for the cause of Christ but instead are timid.
“When
I was you I often thought of what I might do if the Lord sent me to a place of
difficult service where I faced the choice of being obedient to Him or risking
death. I had read many stories of
Christians who were martyred rather than renounce their Lord and I wanted to
believe I would have such devotion. But
I always had doubts, because I knew that in situations far less threatening
than martyrdom I had failed to be as faithful as I should have been.
“We
look back to the apostles as model believers, as men of supreme faith who
unflinchingly endured every hardship and persecution for the Lord. But it was not until after Pentecost that
they did indeed become such men. On the
last night of Jesus’ earthly life, contrary to their self-confident assertions
of loyalty and bravery, they demonstrated anything but faith and heroism. They discovered, along with everyone who
reads and records of Scripture, that, in themselves, they were fearful,
cowardly, and impotent.”
5/5/2024 7:56 AM
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