EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/30/2024 7:35 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The Certainty of Sin”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 1:6,
8, 10
Message of the verses: “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth;…If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us….If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.”
I
want to begin by quoting the last short paragraph from my last SD: “Now in the next SD
I will again pick up on what the apostle John faced, as he faced a similar situation
in writing to his audience.”
The
things that the OT prophets faced the apostle John faced in a similar situation
in the churches to whom he wrote this letter to. The things that were flooding into Ephesus
and other cities and churches of Asia Minor were deceitful, sin-denying false
teachers. MacArthur writes “In addition
to the heresies of Docetism (that claimed that Christ’s ‘divine spirit’ descended
upon the human Jesus at His baptism but departed just prior to His
crucifixion), John had to contend with Greek philosophical dualism (the basis
of Gnosticism)—a view that denied the reality of sin and evil. Those who held to this mystical, elitist
philosophy argued the spiritual was always good and the physical was always
bad; they therefore created an artificial dichotomy between the spiritual realm
and the physical world—contending that spiritual realities were all that
mattered, and that what was done in the flesh (including sin) was a
nonissue. As John encountered this
heresy, he had to unmask those who denied sin’s existence and thereby
sidestepped their own responsibility for it and its consequences.” I mentioned at the beginning of this study
that it is important to study the letter to the Colossians because similar
things are going on in the church today.
I
want to now look at how John divided those who claimed to be in the fellowship
but rejected the truth into three similar but also distinct categories: 1)
those in darkness, 2) those in
deception, and 3) those who defame God.
MacArthur writes about these: “All
three groups of people either willfully rejected or completely ignored the
reality that true believers and sin are incompatible. “How shall we who died to sin still live in
it?” (Rom. 6:2). Later in that chapter
he added, ‘But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became
obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed,
and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness’ (vv. 17-18;
cf. Eph. 2:1-5). By refusing to repent,
these sin-denying false professors revealed that they were outside of God’s
plan of salvation, which begins with election (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 1:4, 11);
includes redemption (1 Cor. 1:30; Gal. 3:13; Heb 9:12), sanctification (1 Cor.
6:11, Eph. 5:26-27; Phil. 2:12-13), and spiritual growth (John 16:13; 17:17;
cf. 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Tim. 3:15); and culminates with glorification (2 Cor.
3:18; 2 Thess. 2:14; 2 Tim. 2:10).”
Lord
willing in the next SD we will look at “Those in Darkness (1 John 1:6).
8/30/2024 7:59 PM
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